Almost Perfect

by Marilyn Tracy

  Thunk.

  “Pete?”

  Her urgent whispering of his name was instinctive.

  It had been over a year since a man shared her bed. It had been her entire lifetime since she’d felt the luxury of waking someone to help her.

  Though he’d been fast asleep only seconds before, seemingly oblivious to the strange noise, she felt him stiffen into wakefulness.

  “What is it?” he asked, suddenly and seemingly wholly aware. His arm across her thighs tightened protectively.

  Thunk.

  “Damn,” he muttered, rolling off the bed in a swift, controlled rise. With a fluid, slightly frightening speed, he yanked on his pants, waiting for him on the corner chair. He’d scarcely finished zipping his jeans before he gripped his .45. He crooked his arm upward, elbow tight against his right side, the muzzle of the gun inches from his face and pointing at the ceiling.

  “Stay here,” he murmured before rounding the bedroom door as if anticipating surprising someone in the hallway.

  Thunk.

  For a frozen moment, Carolyn stayed put, naked and stunned, doing exactly as Pete had commanded. But suddenly she thought of him facing whatever waited for him downstairs, pictured him facing that nameless something alone, and she sprang from the bed as if catapulted from it.

  She flew down the hallway and the stairs, through the silent living and dining rooms and into the lighted kitchen before she so much as considered that naked and unarmed was highly unlikely to be providing Pete any assistance.

  She froze on the doorstep, taking in the sight of Pete hunkered down by the back door, head tilted sideways, .45 lax on his leg, doing nothing more dangerous than feeding Ralphette, the barnyard cat.

  He glanced up at her. His hair was disheveled and his torso and feet bare. He smiled that lopsided, endearing smile of his. “I forgot to feed her tonight,” he said. “She was pulling at the screen door with her paws.”

  When she didn’t say anything, he looked back down at Ralphette. “Poor thing,” he said, and stroked the animal.

  Carolyn watched a softening transform Pete’s face. He was all tough guy—strong, powerful, wholly and utterly male, completely and thoroughly in command of a situation—and yet he seemed childlike while dealing with Ralphette.

  “Go on up,” he said, gesturing toward the stairs. “I’ll be right there.”

  Carolyn didn’t move, she could only stare at him.

  “Go on,” he said. “I’ve got everything under control.”

  This was a phrase Craig had used a thousand times, a line he used when nothing had been in control. With a slightly dazed sensation, she realized this man, this stranger from the desert, was speaking nothing but the absolute truth...he did have everything under control. Why? Did years in prison hone the senses? Did they make a man focus on what really mattered in life?

  She’d helped parolees adapt to life on the outside. Pete made her feel she was the one who needed to learn how to accept life, to take pleasure in the little things like fixing a door, petting a barn cat.

  “The Wannamachers somehow believed they could use this property without repercussions,” she said. “Craig let them, didn’t he? That’s what those canceled checks were all about.”

  Pete’s hand stilled on Ralphette’s back. “We don’t know that for sure.”

  “We...meaning you and me or ‘we’ meaning you and someone else?”

  He still didn’t look at her, and his hand remained motionless on Ralphette’s back. “You... me. And an old friend of mine, Alec MacLaine.”

  Of the MacLaine place. Sammie Jo would be pleased to discover he’d apparently had that couple’s permission to camp out on their property.

  “Those checks were for two thousand dollars each,” she said. “And there seemed to be a ton of them.” She tried imagining what an extra two thousand dollars a month would have meant to them in her old life in Dallas. But she failed, because she’d never so much as guessed that kind of extra money could have been in their lives. Where had Craig spent it, what had he done with it? How could she have lived with him and not known about two extra thousand dollars monthly? How could he have let her clip coupons, pinch pennies, and let her constantly struggle against a seeming tidal wave of bills that so easily engulfed their monthly income.

  And if he’d lied about that, kept such a monumental thing from her... what else had he lied about? What other nightmares waited out there for her to stumble across?

  “He was leasing the property to them, wasn’t he? That’s why they think the land is theirs, isn’t it?”

  When he still didn’t answer, she jumped a track and asked him, in a total non sequitur, “When did you find out Craig was involved? Before you came here or after?”

  He looked up at that. “After,” he said. “Where are you going with this?”

  “I need to know,” she said.

  Pete stared up at the lovely, naked woman standing in the kitchen light. She looked like an angel, he thought, and felt a sharp twinge of longing in his loins. And how could he answer her? Was this to be the moment of truth, a sharing of his past while petting a cat in the middle of the night on a dying ranch in the heart of West Texas?

  She sagged against the doorjamb, relief etching every line of her shoulders, her glorious body. “I don’t know what I was thinking,” she admitted candidly. “I guess I was wondering what else Craig didn’t tell me.”

  Ralphette meowed and Pete let her back outside. He stayed well out of range of the opened door, and away from the window on the back of the door. This time he latched the screen door before closing the heavier, windowed back door. He threw the dead bolt on the door for a second time that night and the clack sounded oddly final and somehow reassuring.

  “I can see why castles used to have moats,” Carolyn said sleepily.

  So could Pete. They had them to keep their women safe inside. He wished they had a moat right now. With a Wannamacher-eating dragon patrolling the waters. He grinned at his own fancy.

  “What?”

  “I was populating your moat,” he said, reaching for her, drawing her chilled, naked form to his torso. He’d thought he couldn’t love her more deeply than he had earlier, but found he was wrong. Every time he held her, every kiss she pressed against his chest made his feelings for her swell even more.

  She nuzzled his chest with a soft moan, her hands wrapping around his waist. Then, her odd mood jumping to yet another thought, a different plane, she asked, “Were you ever married, Pete?”

  “No.”

  “That’s too bad,” she murmured.

  He smiled against her cheek. “Why’s that?”

  “You make a woman feel safe.”

  His arms tightened around her. “I want to keep you safe,” he said. He drew a deep breath. “Carolyn...?”

  “Mmm?”

  “I was in prison for a reason.”

  Amazing him, she half chuckled. “I should think that was probably a given.”

  He smiled. “You’re right. But it wasn’t for the reason you think.” When she didn’t speak, he continued, “I’m with the FBI; Carolyn. I was in prison on assignment.” There. He’d said it. He’d finally told her the truth.

  Carolyn had been so prepared to hear something else that his words didn’t sink in for a moment and when they did, they made no sense.

  “You’re with...the FBI,” she repeated. She didn’t move away from him, but she felt as if she did. She stood within his arms trying to make sense of the past few days, her fears, her doubts...and his lies...and she felt she stood on the other side of a great chasm, seeing him from miles away.

  “I’ve been with the bureau for fifteen years.”

  “I see,” she lied, feeling the chasm widening. “And prison...?”

  “We needed a man inside to gather all sorts of information. Crimes in progress, drug routes, things of that nature.”

  “And you were that man.”

  “Yes.”

  “Ten years?”
r />   “Yes.”

  “Are there undercover FBI agents in every prison?”

  “No. Of course not. But some pens have a higher number of what we call high-yield criminals. See, the bureau always knew an informant on the inside was a dicey customer at best. The information was sketchy, expensive, and too often led to the exposure and subsequent death of the informant.”

  She just stared at him, as if he were babbling in another language. He explained, “But a man on the inside, a salaried—with hazardous duty bonuses—agent who acted as a prisoner without hope of parole, that person could be invaluable to the bureau, gaining reliable information.”

  “And you accepted this assignment for ten years?”

  Pete’s lips twisted in the bitter smile she’d come to know and had so thoroughly misunderstood. “I was thirty-four years old.”

  “That’s a reason?” she asked, staring up at him as if she’d never seen him before this moment.

  Pete felt his breath catch in his throat. The look in her eyes frightened him a little because he couldn’t read her. He had the feeling he’d just skated onto very thin ice indeed.

  “The reason?” she reminded him.

  He offered, “My salary was almost quadrupled.” It came out as a question.

  “You voluntarily went into prison as an informant...for money?” Her tone implied she’d never heard the word before, but suspected it might be a dirty one.

  “It was more than that, though I’m not ashamed of that aspect. It was an experimental program. I volunteered for it, Carolyn. It was new. It was unique. I didn’t have family like most of the agents. And something about it suited some need in me to understand how criminals really thought, really operated without cops around, without interviews and two-way mirrors.”

  “And you found out?” she asked.

  “In spades,” he answered, letting her know by his clenched jaw how much he’d truly discovered.

  “And did you gain a lot of information?”

  “Yes,” he said, remembering finding would-be wifekiller Bill Winslow’s wacko journal detailing exactly what he planned to do to his former wife as soon as he was released from prison. The FBI had rushed to Kelsey Winslow’s rescue, saving her again from her murdering husband. He’d managed to avert other crimes, other killings.

  He couldn’t begin to guess what she was thinking, she was so still. “And after a while, I suppose it became habit. It was my job and a life of sorts.”

  “Did you ever leave the prison...?”

  He sighed. “Yeah. They vacationed me to the Seychelles a couple of times. But it felt odd being outside in all that sunshine and water. You get used to life on the inside.”

  She nodded and he remembered her former profession. “You know the scenario. Pretty soon, I think I didn’t feel all that much difference between me and my fellow inmates. Ten years had gone by and I didn’t have anywhere else to go, nowhere else to call home.”

  Carolyn did pull away then and lifted her eyes to meet his questioning gaze. “And the tattoo?”

  He held out his arm. “My only protection inside. One of these automatically makes you somebody to stay clear of. Don’t pick a fight with that guy—he’ll kill you. It worked. It was a matter of wear the tattoo or fight every man there at some point.” He gave the ghost of a chuckle, then he seemed to see that she was anything but amused. “Carolyn—”

  “Did you think it was funny to let me believe you’d killed someone?”

  The smile was wholly erased from his lips. He paled a little, but when he spoke, his voice was low and steady. “I did kill someone, Carolyn.”

  “What?” She seemed to be spinning and spiraling in a universe with no gravity. This was all too much information, too fast. And all on the heels of realizing that her husband had lied to her for years.

  “It was in self-defense and the guy had murdered four people before he landed in the pen. But I did kill him with my own bare hands. That was it for me. I had to get out. I couldn’t see nay difference between them and me any longer.”

  His eyes never wavered from hers. She’d been right when she’d wondered what something as dark as taking the life of a fellow human being would do to a soul. It would scar that person forever. She could see the effects of that scarring in Pete’s eyes.

  “You could have told me all this before,” she said calmly, but inside she felt an icy wind blowing through her veins, across her heart. How ridiculous she’d been that morning to pour her heart out to him. How foolish to reach the decision that she might be able to deal with his past. She hadn’t known a tenth of his past.

  “You’re right,” he said in that odd way he had of seeming to answer her very thoughts. “I’m sorry, Carolyn.” “Why didn’t you? Tell me, I mean.”

  He had the grace to look away. “I’m not really sure,” he said. “All those years on the inside, I think I really began to feel more like one of them than one of the guys in the white hats. Things like decency and integrity didn’t even have a frame of reference for me anymore. Then I met you...”

  “And...?”

  “You were everything prison wasn’t. You’re clean, fresh. Sane. And so damned honest it takes my breath away.”

  “So it seemed like a good time to lie to me?”

  “You needed my help. Mine. I didn’t want to be Mr. FBI for a while. Just an ordinary Joe from nowhere. I wanted you to trust me, to have faith in me without a single reason for it other than you just instinctively felt it.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know, Carolyn. I honestly don’t know. But I craved it.”

  “What you did was unfair, Pete.”

  “I know,” he said, turning to face her. She could see that he did understand that he’d been unfair to her, but she could also tell that he didn’t seem to realize how much it hurt her that he’d allowed her to give herself so thoroughly while he’d been lying to her.

  “Did you know about the Wannamachers before I asked you to come here?”

  He frowned. “What? No. I was out on Alec’s place because I needed some space. And because he’d suspected something might be going on out there. When he and Cait bought the place last year, he heard small planes at night. Too many of them. And he put two and two together and hoped he’d come up with forty-four. But now we know he was right.”

  And for some unknown reason, not from anything in his words or any message on his face, Carolyn was suddenly and embarrassingly aware of her nudity. And realized it was because in the nanosecond between accepting her dawning love for this man and understanding that he’d lied to her, she no longer felt safe. She didn’t feel safe at all. She felt adrift on a sea of nuances, lies, and his terribly unfair treatment of her.

  “You wanted my unconditional trust,” she said, ignoring his last words. “Is that right?”

  “Don’t hate me for that, Carolyn.”

  “Hate?” How could he use such a word? But then how could he have lied to her? She shook her head. “But my unconditional trust was what you wanted?”

  “Yes.”

  “But wanting that, you didn’t trust me enough to even tell me what you do for a living, that you were in prison on an assignment.”

  “Carolyn—”

  “That flays me to the very quick,” she said slowly, carefully, needing him to understand. Really understand. “I can’t believe you would let me say those things this morning, make love to me tonight, and all the while you were lying to me.”

  “I wasn’t lying, Carolyn. I just wasn’t telling you everything.”

  “That’s splitting hairs and you know it.”

  He pulled his lips in against his teeth then released them with a small sigh. “What are you really saying, Carolyn?”

  “I think I’m telling you to go straight to hell,” she said, turning on her bare heel and leaving the kitchen before the threatening storm inside her broke. This would be no mere leaking of a few sad tears, this would be a torrential flood.

  “Carolyn!” h
e called after her, and wrapped his large hand around her arm.

  “Don’t...touch...me,” she said, not looking at him, hurt beyond thought. And yet she wanted to beg him to draw her into his arms and hold her tightly, lovingly, to turn back the clock and tell her the truth from the beginning. Would that have changed things?

  He’d lied to her.

  “Carolyn...please listen,” he said, not obeying her stricken command. Instead he tried pivoting her to face him. She averted her face.

  “Please. Let me go,” she said. She was holding the hurricane within but only by the merest thread. If he didn’t let her go now...she would be lost. “Please.”

  He turned loose of her arms and she fought against sinking to the floor. She managed to get around him and left the kitchen, needing to be away from him for a moment, needing to be dressed, needing to feel safe again.

  She wanted to be in Lubbock with her daughters, crying her heart out on Taylor’s shoulder. She had to run, to escape, to be away from the ranch where Craig had betrayed her.

  And to be away from Pete who had done the same thing.

  Tears started to spill from her eyes as she entered her bedroom and saw the tangle of sheets on the bed, the apple cores on the nightstand. Yes, she’d certainly had a taste of knowledge this night and too much knowledge was a tragic and painful thing.

  Pete stood in the dim light at the base of the stairs, aching to go up, to follow her, to try to explain the depths of his feelings for her, the confusion that had roiled within him when he first met her.

  His involvement with the FBI only took part of the stain of prison life from his soul. The realities of living with a thousand other men—hardened criminals, murderers, rapists, every possible miscreant known to humankind—had left its searing mark on him. Until he held Carolyn in his arms that first time, he’d believed that mark was permanently, indelibly, etched on his heart, as well as carved into his forearm.

  He was less the agent than the murderer she believed him to be.