After Dark

by Beverly Barton

  The moment he saw the shadowy figure moving toward the boathouse, he knew who it was. She hadn’t been able to stay away any more than he had. They had both been drawn back to the place where they’d spent so many happy hours. By the river. Fishing from the pier. Private moments inside the boathouse.

  “I thought you’d come here,” he said.

  “Johnny Mack?”

  The voice of the past. The voice he had never been able to get out of his head. Lane’s sweet, rich, honey-coated Alabama drawl.

  “Over here.” He stepped out from beneath a sheltering willow and allowed the moon’s glow to spotlight him.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  “I could ask you the same question.”

  “I had to get out of the house,” she admitted. “Your showing up out of the blue the way you did…Why didn’t you just stay away? The last thing my son needs right now is to have to deal with you.”

  “Somebody thought your son needed me.”

  Lane hesitated on the pier at the edge of the boathouse, half in shadows. “Lillie Mae sent you the note.”

  “Ah…makes sense.” He walked toward Lane slowly, giving her time to meet him halfway.

  He could sense her uncertainty, could feel her fear. What was she afraid of? Surely not of him. He paused and waited, allowing her to step out of the murky, blue-black shadows. When she did, he sucked in a deep breath. Up at the house an hour ago, he had realized that Lane had grown up to be a beautiful woman. But in the brightly lit foyer, with Lillie Mae and the boy close by, he hadn’t allowed himself to appreciate that loveliness. But now, alone together, with only the sticky summer breeze and the swaying willows as witnesses, he drank his fill of her.

  He remembered her curly brown hair being waist-length and how sometimes when he had thought of her, he fantasied about that glorious mane of hair. But she had not only cut her hair so that the tips barely touched her shoulders, but she had lightened it to a dark blond. The slight plumpness which had plagued her from childhood through adolescence had melted away into mature, feminine curves. And those luminous blue eyes, which had once been so filled with life and love, were now hooded and wary and staring at him pleadingly.

  “I told you that you didn’t have to be afraid of me,” he said. “I didn’t come back to Noble’s Crossing to hurt you, to cause problems for you.”

  She took another tentative step toward him. “Why did you come back? Why after all these years would you care about…about me or anyone else in Noble’s Crossing?”

  “I owe you my life. Of course I care about you, about the fact that you’re the prime suspect in Kent’s murder.” Raking his hand across his mouth as if to wipe away a bitter taste, Johnny Mack glared at Lane. “Why the hell did you marry Kent Graham?”

  Lane’s chest rose and fell with each labored breath she took. Thrusting out her chin, she looked directly at Johnny Mack. “I married him so that I could adopt Will.”

  Anger and pain blended with love and strength, wrapping the combined emotions around her words. She had made a declaration, her statement seeming to dare him to question her motivation. But it was more what she had not said than what she had that ripped at Johnny Mack’s guts. Although she hadn’t spoken the accusation aloud, he had heard it in the tone of her voice. If you had taken me with you, I never would have married Kent. Or was he wrong? Had he heard what he wanted to hear, assumed what he wanted to believe?

  “I hired a private investigator to dig up information on Will,” Johnny Mack told her. “I know that his birth certificate—his original birth certificate—states that Sharon Hickman was his mother and Kent Graham was his father.”

  Lane’s eyes opened wide. Her lips parted slightly on an indrawn breath. “How is it possible that your investigator got hold of a copy of Will’s original birth certificate?”

  “Don’t you know by now that if you’ve got enough money, you can buy just about anything you want?” Enjoying the shocked look on Lane’s face made him feel like a real bastard. But he couldn’t help wondering just how much more pleasure he would feel when he saw the reaction of people he hated—people like Miss Edith!

  “And do you have a great deal of money?” Lane asked.

  “Enough to get whatever I want.” That was a laugh. Yeah, he could have anything money could buy. And there had been a time when that would have been enough for him, when it had been all he wanted. But in the past few years, he had come to realize there were a few things all the money in the world couldn’t buy.

  “And just what do you want, Johnny Mack?”

  “The truth,” he said. “Is Will Kent’s son or is he mine?”

  Lane lowered her lashes and averted her gaze. “Will is my son! He’s been mine since the first moment I held him.”

  She was like a tigress, claws extended, teeth bared, ready to strike out at any threat to her cub. Johnny Mack had never known a mother’s love, never felt sheltered and protected by the woman who had given birth to him. In an odd sort of way, he envied Will Graham. What would he give to have a woman like Lane love him half that much?

  “I know he’s yours. I’m not disputing your claim on him. I just want to know—no, I need to know—the truth. Is Will my son?”

  Lane wrapped her arms around her body, clasping her elbows. “What possible difference could it make to you after all this time? For all you knew, you could have left behind half a dozen women pregnant with your baby. You didn’t care then. Why should you care now?”

  This wasn’t the Lane he had known. Sweet. Gentle. Innocent. There had been no anger, no hatred in that girl. But hatred radiated from this woman. A hatred focused directly at him.

  Damn but the truth hurt. Hurt like hell. Lane was right. Despite using condoms as a general rule, he still could have left behind more than one pregnant woman that summer. And even if he had known he’d gotten some girl pregnant, he would have left Noble’s Crossing anyway. He had been running for his life back then. Staying in this town would have meant signing his own death warrant.

  “Even if I’d cared, I could hardly have stayed on,” he said. “You know as well as I do that when I hightailed it out of town, quite a few people thought I was dead.”

  “In all the years since you left, you never wrote. You never called. When you said goodbye to me at the bus station in Decatur, you cut all your ties to me and to Noble’s Crossing.”

  “And if I had called?” he asked.

  “You didn’t.”

  “But if I had, would you have told me about marrying Kent? About adopting Will?”

  “There is no point in playing ‘what if,’ is there? Lillie Mae thought she was doing the right thing by sending you that note, but she was wrong. There’s nothing you can do for me. And if you think I’ll let you hurt Will any more than he’s already been hurt, then you’d better—”

  “I’m not here to hurt Will.” Johnny Mack grabbed Lane’s hands, which she had knotted into tight fists. Her arms went stiff, her body rigid at the touch of his flesh against hers. “Why do you hate me so much?”

  He stroked the underside of her wrist with his thumb. She shivered. He released her immediately, realizing she was not only completely aware of him as a man, but that she was also just a little bit afraid of him, too. God, she was the one person in this town he didn’t want to fear him!

  “Tell me the truth,” he said. “Don’t I deserve even that much?”

  She turned her back on him, as if looking at him was too painful. In a quiet, but amazingly strong voice, she said, “Sharon came to me after you’d left town. She told me she was pregnant and that you were the father.”

  Johnny Mack felt as if a hard fist had just punched him in the gut and knocked all the air out of him. Will was his son. Sometime during that long, hot summer fifteen years ago, he had gotten Sharon pregnant. Maybe a condom had leaked. Maybe he had forgotten to use one. Damn, he couldn’t remember every time he’d screwed Sharon that July. Back then, he had spent more time humping every
willing female than he had doing anything else. But he’d always kept a pack of condoms handy.

  “Why did she come to you? You two weren’t exactly best friends.” Johnny Mack shifted his weight from one foot to the other as he tried to rein in the anger boiling inside him.

  “She wanted to borrow money from me for an abortion.”

  “Hmph! Sounds like Sharon. She wouldn’t have wanted to be saddled with a kid. So, why didn’t you loan her the money? It doesn’t make any sense to me why you’d ruin your life by marrying Kent and raising Sharon’s child.”

  Lane closed her eyes as if trying to blot out some horrible memory. Reflected moonlight caught in the teardrops trickling down her cheeks.

  “Lane?”

  He closed the distance between them, but when he reached for her, she sidestepped him and stood rigidly at his side, her stance daring him to touch her. Lane possessed a solitary strength, as if during the past fifteen years, she had learned that she could rely on no one except herself. He could see that strength in her cold eyes, in her tightly coiled body, in the aura of self-assurance that surrounded her. This woman wasn’t the girl he had known. She was as much a stranger to him as he was to her.

  “I made a deal with Sharon.” Lane swallowed, clearing her throat. “If she wouldn’t get an abortion, I’d adopt her baby.”

  “And she agreed, knowing you were just a nineteen-year-old kid yourself?”

  “We—we concocted a plan,” Lane explained. “Sharon had been sleeping with Kent, after you left town, after she suspected she was already pregnant. We thought that if she told him the child was his, he might believe her. And if I agreed to marry him and adopt his child, then—”

  “Then he’d want the kid for sure, if you were part of the bargain!” Johnny Mack slammed one big fist in the palm of his other hand. The slap reverberated in the nighttime stillness. “Damn! But why? Why marry a man you’d refused to marry a dozen times over just to keep Sharon from aborting her baby?”

  Lane swiped the tears from her cheeks. “He was your baby. All that I had left of you. I wouldn’t allow anyone to harm him! Not then and not now.”

  Figuratively brought to his knees by her admission, humbled to the point of wanting to prostrate himself in front of her, Johnny Mack remained silent. His throat closed tightly. He’d known Lane had had a crush on him for years before he’d left town, but he’d had no idea the depth of her feelings for him. She was probably the only woman in his entire life who had ever loved him. And loved him so unselfishly.

  He wanted to reach out and take her into his arms, to hold and comfort her, to thank her for such a precious gift. But he could tell by her wary stance that she didn’t want him to touch her. She had loved him fifteen years ago, loved him enough to make a tremendous sacrifice for his child, but how did she feel about him now? How much had the passing of fifteen years, marriage to Kent and a lifetime of lies changed Lane? She probably hated him now. If she did, he couldn’t blame her.

  “I was very foolish back then, wasn’t I? I’ve grown up a lot since then. I’ve learned a great deal about love. What it is and what it isn’t.” Her voice softened and trailed off quietly. “I was so infatuated with you.” Sucking in air, she tilted back her head and stared up at the starry sky. “Will is the only thing that matters to me now. I would do anything to protect him.”

  “Even murder Kent?”

  The moment he saw the hurt look in her eyes, the silent gasp form on her lips, he wished back the words. But it was too late. Just as it was too late to go back fifteen years and change the past. All he could do now was accept the blame for what he had done—for all the harm he had caused. He had known, somewhere in the darkest, most private recesses of his soul, that the day of reckoning would come. Sooner or later, a man always paid for his sins.

  “Yes, even murder Kent,” she admitted.

  Her voice was so whispery quiet that he barely heard her over the drumming roar of his own heartbeat.

  “Do you have a good lawyer?” He broke off a willow limb and began stripping the leaves, avoiding eye contact with Lane.

  “James Ware has been handling everything for me.”

  “Kent’s stepfather?”

  “After James Ware, Sr.’s, death, James, Jr., became my father’s lawyer as well as the Graham family lawyer,” Lane said. “He doesn’t think there’s enough evidence for a grand jury to indict me, but then James isn’t a criminal lawyer. If I’m indicted, I’ll hire someone else. An expert.”

  Johnny Mack tossed the bare willow branch into the Chickasaw River and watched it float away downstream. “I can afford to hire you the best criminal defense attorney in the South. One phone call from me and Quinn Cortez will be on the next plane to Alabama.”

  “You must be very, very rich, Johnny Mack, if you can pay Mr. Cortez’s fees.” Lane nodded toward the path that spiraled along the riverbank. “Let’s walk. I’m too jittery to just stand here.”

  He fell into step beside her and noticed that their bodies formed a connected shadow. One tall. One short. Side by side, joined together without physically touching.

  “Want to tell me what happened?” he asked. “I’m here, Lane, because I want to help you. I want to try to make things right, if I can.”

  Her brittle laughter tore at his gut, like the talons of a falcon ripping apart its prey. Without saying a word, she had told him that he was offering too little, too late.

  “Will hiring Quinn Cortez to defend me ease your conscience?”

  She knew him too well. Even after all these years, she could still see inside his soul. Lane had been the only person who had ever been able to see past his cocky, bad boy exterior. The only woman who had ever cared enough to search for the good in him.

  “Yeah, it would be a start. After all, you know better than anyone that I did a lot of damage before I left this town. I have to start somewhere to make it up to you…and to Will for—”

  “He doesn’t want to have anything to do with you.”

  “What?” Johnny Mack stopped dead still. “Are you saying he knows that I’m his father?”

  Lane halted and turned to face Johnny Mack. “Yes, he knows. And I’m afraid that, right now, he hates you.”

  “Did you tell him about me?”

  “No, but I wish I had.” She keened softly, as if trying to ward off some impending disaster. “Kent told him. And he didn’t do it kindly. He took out all his anger and hate on Will.”

  “That bastard!”

  “Kent was a bastard all right. He enjoyed hurting Will because he was yours. And he enjoyed hurting me because…Kent Graham wasn’t a very nice man.”

  Saying that Kent wasn’t a very nice man was a gross understatement. It was like saying Alaska was cool in the winter. “How did Kent find out I was Will’s father?” He grabbed Lane’s shoulders, but stopped himself just short of shaking her.

  “Sharon wrote a deathbed confession.” Lane’s forced smile hardened her face. “She told Kent eveything. How we had duped him, making him believe Will was his. Sharon was doing some conscience easing of her own.” Lane pummeled her fists against Johnny Mack’s chest. “That stupid, stupid woman! All she’d cared about was money. But when she found out she was dying, her conscience started bothering her. She never thought about what the truth would do to Will. Not once did she put her child’s welfare first.”

  He manacled Lane’s wrists in one hand, halting her pounding assault. She glared at him with pure loathing. Like a blinding flash, a cold, bitter truth hit Johnny Mack. “How much did you pay Sharon?”

  “What?”

  Gripping one shoulder, he shook Lane. Gently but forcefully. “Tell me the truth. How much did you pay Sharon for my son?”

  “Oh!” Her mouth formed an astonished oval. Tears glistened in her eyes. “Fifty thousand dollars. I asked Daddy to give it to me for a wedding present.”

  “She sold you her baby.” Johnny Mack released Lane. Anger exploded inside him like bottle rockets on the Fourth of J
uly. He needed something to hit. A punching bag. Kent Graham. Buddy Lawler. “Why didn’t Lillie Mae tell me about Will? She’s known where I was for nearly ten years now.”

  “I have no idea why she didn’t tell you about Will or why she never told me that she knew where you were. But I assume Lillie Mae did what she thought was best for Will, just as I did. When you left, you swore you’d never come back. You washed your hands of Noble’s Crossing and everyone in it. We got along just fine without you. We didn’t need you.”

  “But you need me now, don’t you? At least Lillie Mae thinks so.”

  “She’s afraid that I might be indicted for Kent’s murder, and if I’m—”

  “You will not be convicted of killing Kent, even if you did murder the son of a bitch.” Johnny Mack gripped Lane’s chin between his thumb and forefinger. “Do you hear me? Quinn Cortez has never lost a case. And I’m calling him tonight.”

  Lane stood on the porch and watched Johnny Mack get in his car and back out of the driveway. He was coming to lunch tomorrow to meet his son. He had invited himself, showing her that a part of the brash, unmannerly boy he had once been still existed somewhere inside him. All her protests had fallen on deaf ears. Short of calling the police when he showed up tomorrow, she didn’t know how to stop him. And at this point, involving the local authorities wasn’t an option.

  Like a hurricane wind, Johnny Mack had stormed back into her life, wanting, needing and demanding. And making promises. In the past he had never made promises to her, and yet he had broken her heart all the same.

  I want to meet Will…I’ll call Quinn Cortez and have him on standby, ready to take the next plane to Alabama when we need him…. You won’t be convicted of Kent’s murder, even if you did murder the son of a bitch…. I’d never hurt you, Lane. I’d never hurt you….