Almost Perfect

by Marilyn Tracy

  And then she’d kissed him.

  And he’d felt hope again.

  And now, just when that hope had blossomed to promise, when she’d essentially outlined a possible future for the two of them, accepted him at raw face value as a man she could trust, he’d stolen the dream from both of them. Stolen it, not because he told the truth, but because he’d told it too late.

  Her phone rang and he heard her pick up the extension upstairs and mumble into the receiver. A few moments later she came to the top of the stairs and looked down at him. She was fully dressed, including shoes. But it wasn’t the fact that she’d covered her body, hiding it from him, that cut him so. It was her extreme pallor, the bleak, frightened look in her eyes. The evidence of hastily dried tears on her cheeks.

  Most of all, it was the stilled, wounded expression of a creature who is sure she will be hurt again.

  “Carolyn—”

  “That was Bubba Wannamacher,” she said flatly. “He asked if I liked their message.”

  Pete flinched at the dull note in her voice, the flat sound signifying she was being pushed beyond the limits of her endurance. “What else did he say?” he asked gently.

  “He said they want use of their property by tomorrow afternoon. That they want us all out of here before then. He seemed to know the girls were already gone. And he knew we’d been loading the trailer. You were right, they were watching us.”

  Something crossed her face, something causing her to feel despair or pain.

  “Did he threaten you?”

  “He just said I’d already had one loss in the family, that I’d be wise not to push for a second.” She finished on a small sob.

  Pete rushed the stairs and was beside her in three bounds. He reached for her but she pulled back, holding her hand up to stop him.

  “Don’t. Please. I don’t think I can take it. I feel too confused. I’m not sure what to think let alone feel.”

  “I love you, Carolyn,” he said, blurting out the second, more important truth, feeling as if the words were torn from him, wrenched from his heart. And praying this truth, a far more vital truth than what he did to earn a living, wasn’t too late, too little.

  Her eyes lifted to his in swift negation.

  “It’s true,” he said, and knew nothing had ever been more honest, more right.

  She shook her head slowly, her eyes filling with tears. “How can you say that to me, Pete? You hid your entire life from me. You lied to me.” Her tears spilled free and she made no effort to stem them. “You wanted the sun, moon and stars from me and gave me crumbs in return. Crumbs.”

  The salty waterfall of tears washed her pale face with luminescence. She closed her eyes and tilted her head back a little. The tiny moan that escaped her broke his heart.

  “Oh, I never wanted to hurt you, Carolyn. Never.”

  She drew a ragged breath. “Don’t you see? You made me search the very depths of my soul to know if I could be with you honestly and without recrimination for whatever you might have done. You made me question every precept of human nature that I hold dear...when all of that was unnecessary, because you were lying to me. You hadn’t killed someone to land in prison, you hadn’t gone astray in some horrible way and paid a terrible price. Slowly, agonizingly paying off a debt to society. You were on an assignment.”

  “Carolyn—”

  “The fact that you knew what I was going through, that you knew I would feel safe if you’d told me what you did for a living, and you still put me through that...I’ve been on a roller coaster ride, not knowing what to think, what to do. How could I justify having a murderer around my daughters, and then I’d see you with them and wonder if I was insane for trusting you more than hard cold facts. Damn you, Pete.”

  “Carolyn. Oh, God, Carolyn—”

  “I’m doing as Bubba and Jimmy want. They can have the place. I don’t care anymore. Craig rented them his birthright, never telling me about letting them use it, never letting me know that if something happened to him, drug dealers would be after us, after his own wife and children. For all I know, Craig was in with them all the way, was part of their circle. Maybe it wasn’t an accident that killed him in Dallas, maybe he was murdered because of what was going on here at the ranch.”

  “You can’t start questioning that, Carolyn. You’ll just tear yourself to pieces.”

  “I’m already torn to bits,” she retorted, lowering her head, opening her eyes. “I’ve been betrayed by my husband and—”

  “Don’t say it, Carolyn. Don’t even think it. You weren’t betrayed by me,” he said more hotly than he should have, but unable to withstand the sight of her crying, the knowledge of what she was thinking about him.

  He felt a fiery lick of anger strike his chest and he wrestled with the urge to tell her she was making too much of his confession, too much of his lack of total honesty. Hell, he’d told her he loved her. He was there for her now. That had to count for something, didn’t it?

  “What should I think, then, Pete?” she asked. “What do you call making someone go down on their knees, bend every rule held sacred in a life, only to tell that person later, it had just been an exercise to see if you could pull it off?”

  Her words doused his anger with icy water. Dear God, he hadn’t done that to her, had he? In his selfish need for her faith, her trust, by not telling her the truth about himself, he’d made a mockery of the very thing he’d craved.

  He reached out for her then, holding her arms lightly.

  “Carolyn...please look at me, Carolyn.” She stood in his grasp without moving, her face turned away from him, her body limp and utterly distanced.

  “I’m sorry,” he said slowly, deeply. “I’m more sorry for this than I can ever say. I don’t have any excuses. The only thing I can tell you is, I never, ever, thought of it that way. Not one single glimmer of such a thought.”

  She looked at him dully, then closed her beautiful eyes. Shutting him out. Slamming a door on the future, on them.

  Oh, what had he done? What terrible, terrible thing had he done?

  Chapter 13

  Pete dressed hurriedly, not watching as Carolyn threw items into a suitcase. He couldn’t seem to think, couldn’t feel. One moment he’d felt more alive than ever before and the next, numb, cold. Lost.

  And it was his own doing.

  I’m doing as Bubba and Jimmy want. They can have the place. I don’t care anymore.

  He ground his teeth at the thought. She didn’t care anymore because of him. Because he’d lied to her, because he’d made her grapple with issues for no reason at all other than his own desperate—selfish—need for unconditional trust. Because he’d told her the truth too late for it to be anything but damaging.

  He’d been right when he’d pictured her hiding her grief and fear from the rest of the world. She’d done exactly that. And suspecting what she was like...knowing it, he hadn’t told her that he was with the FBI, capable of helping her like no one else, that he had backup help at his disposal merely by dialing the telephone. He’d let her believe him to be a cold-blooded killer and waited to see if she would still want him.

  Sure, he’d told her to call the FBI. Any field office would have found, after some digging around, instructions to patch her call through to Alec. And with his go-ahead she’d have found out the truth about him, that he was the F. Peter Jackson who had staged the big prison rights riot a few years ago. And she’d have found out that he was an inside man for the FBI.

  But she hadn’t called. And he’d reveled in her not doing so because he’d wanted her—needed her—to rely on him just for himself, as if he really were that murderer she suspected him of being. How sick was that, he thought. No wonder she’d damned him, told him to go to hell. No wonder she’d been so hurt. And no wonder at all that she couldn’t so much as look at him now.

  She’d given him every vestige of herself and he’d wanted even more. He’d wanted the impossible. And he’d blown his whole universe to the far wind
s.

  He may have just blown every good thing in his life, but he was damned if he’d be a factor in her leaving her home. He was double damned if he’d let a couple of rough-andtumble thugs and a drug dealer drive her away. Not while he was alive to stop them. That much, at least, he could do for her. Small reparation, perhaps, but one that came from his profession, his training. And one that came from his heart.

  She didn’t look at him as he moved to the doorway. He hesitated in the threshold, his hand against the doorjamb. “I really am sorry, Carolyn.”

  She glanced at him, then went back to her packing. “Years ago, when I was still a kid, my mom told me to stop saying ‘I’m sorry’ over every little thing I did. I was sorry if the sky was cloudy, sorry if the wind was blowing.”

  “This isn’t a little thing,” Pete said, feeling the knife blades of her words. He realized there was so much he didn’t know...and so much he’d instinctively known and cast aside.

  “No, it’s not a little thing. It’s a very, very big thing, Pete. It probably sounds ridiculous that I could accept the fact that you might have killed someone and am caviling at a lie...but that lie makes everything we did together seem a lie, too.”

  “What can I say, Carolyn? How can I fix this?”

  She sat down on the edge of the bed, not contemplatively, but as if every nuance of her energy drained suddenly, totally. “Some things can’t be fixed, Pete.” She looked at him through pools of tears in her blue eyes. “Now I’m sorry.”

  He had to close his own eyes against the sharp, agonizing pain that ripped through him at her words. He pushed himself from the doorjamb, fighting the rock-hard need to go to her, drag her into his arms and demand that she take the words back, that she understand he’d blundered but that he loved her. Loved her.

  He found himself downstairs in the dimly lit living room, staring at the photographs on her wall. Carolyn...Carolyn, he called silently, anguished by the loss he felt, by the raw need for her, sickened by the intensity of the pain rippling through him. Through her.

  He whirled away from the photographs, from the smiling faces, and grabbed up the phone receiver. His hands were shaking as he pressed Alec MacLaine’s home phone number. He grinned bitterly as he realized it was shortly after five in the morning in Washington.

  “This better be really good,” Alec growled into the phone by way of hello.

  “It’s Pete. You got a scrambler handy?”

  “Yeah, hang on.”

  The phone gave the shrill whine of protest that initiating a scrambling device always made.

  “All set,” Alec said, coming back on.

  “The deal’s going down anytime after tomorrow afternoon.”

  “We’re ready for you. You want us in place first or in for the reception afterward?”

  “I want these bastards nailed. Being here first might scare them off,” Pete said. “They were fairly graphic in their description of what would happen if we called the state troopers.”

  “Going in for mop-up is riskier.”

  “I know. But it’s important to get them all.”

  “The widow and kids off the place?”

  “The kids are.”

  “The lady wouldn’t budge?”

  “Sort of,” Pete said. He could still hear the pain in her voice as she said she was giving in to Bubba and Jimmy’s demands.

  “Are you having trouble with her?”

  That was the understatement of the century, Pete thought, but added another lie to his seemingly endless string. “Nothing I can’t handle.”

  “It’d be better if she were gone,” Alec said, not knowing that she already was, in the only way that really counted.

  “Who will I be contacting?” Pete asked.

  “Our guy in Lubbock is Tom Adams. He’s a good agent. Tough. Clean. Bit of a wild card. He’ll be working with a Texas Ranger. Steve Kessler. Adams says he’s one of the best in the business.”

  “Good enough. And fliers?”

  “Four helicopters from Cannon Air Force Base over in Clovis, New Mexico. They’re fueled up and ready to go. They promise they can be on-site in less than thirty minutes from your call to Adams and Kessler. And they’ll each be carrying five of our boys. That ought to be enough to round up a few desert rats.”

  “Good work, MacLaine.”

  “By the way, I checked out your Canadian connection. The firm exists, all right, Canadian Chemical Concerns. And it’s legit. Up to a point.”

  “Up to the point of what’s going on in the basement chem labs?”

  “You got it. If this deal really does go down, and we manage to nab them at your end, your discovery of those canceled checks is going to put the capper on the case. We’ll be able to nail down the lid on Canadian Chemical.”

  “Any word on who my Canadian friend might be?”

  “We’ve got him narrowed down to two possibilities: Eric Thorteneaux or a runner by the name of Chet Dubois. Both of them hang out in Santa Fe during the winter months. Play the jet-set, trust-fund-baby routine. Thorteneaux usually runs the western distribution and Dubois makes the eastern connections. They’ve been tagged for a long time, but we wanted the drop location.”

  “I think you’ve got it.”

  “And the source, if we’re lucky. Ditto on the good work, Jackson.”

  Yeah, he’d done some really good work around the Leary place, he thought. He’d managed to break Carolyn’s heart and his own in the process. He should get a medal or two for that.

  And yet, he recognized that making arrangements for a raid on the men who had been hassling her made him feel as if some of the numbness could be alleviated from his body. The need for action, for resolution, steadied him somewhat.

  “What are you going to do about the widow?” Alec asked. Pete found he didn’t care for the tag. Carolyn epitomized beauty, grace...love.

  “I’m going to keep her with me,” he said. An hour ago, he’d hoped that might be forever.

  “Can she shoot?”

  “The broad side of the barn,” Pete said, remembering the hole in the barn, the first time he’d wrapped his arms around her. Only a few days ago, he thought, recalling how nervous he’d been to touch her, how skittish she’d been when he had.

  Alec chuckled. “Well, just make sure she doesn’t shoot you.”

  “Oh, she wants to right about now.”

  “Those years in prison make you rusty in the charm department?”

  “Hell, I was never any good at charm. I always manage to stick my foot in it,” Pete said, unaware he had an audience.

  Carolyn leaned against the stairwell and listened unabashedly. This was her property, after all. Her crisis. Her trouble. Even if he’d come into it at her request, gotten beaten as a rough message to her, even if he’d made her feel she’d gone to heaven and back. Even if he’d lied to her.

  Since she could only hear Pete’s side of the conversation, she had to imagine the other caller’s phrases. But she was able to make some fairly good guesses as to the content of the other side of the conversation.

  Pete chuckled, ruefully, Carolyn thought. “Can you do me another favor, Alec? We sent Carolyn’s daughters with her sister-in-law and her kids to Lubbock for a few days. They’re staying at the Holiday Inn there...no, I don’t know if there’s more than one...yeah. Right. Around-the-clock, okay?... Thanks, I owe you...yeah. Little, eight and ten. Just buttons...no, she’s a widow, too. State trooper in the line of duty...yeah, she’s okay...let me know, all right?”

  Carolyn closed her eyes. Knowing that Pete was apparently arranging for around-the-clock protection for her daughters and the rest of her family took some of the chill from her heart. And he was obviously setting up some scheme whereby they could catch Bubba, Jimmy and the mysterious Canadian fellow in the proverbial act of distributing drugs.

  She’d told him she didn’t care anymore. Hearing him rallying his army on her behalf made her feel as if she’d said the words only to hurt him. And perhaps that was
true. She’d been so hurt herself that staying on the ranch was a matter of supreme indifference. At that moment.

  At this moment, hearing him making arrangements with another agent—FBI, she thought incredulously—she wondered how she could even have considered departing, walking away from her home, her ranch. And for the first time since she’d moved in, she felt it was hers. Not Craig’s, not Craig’s daddy’s. It was hers. The Leary place, a small farm-ranch peopled with the next generation of Learys.

  And, only this morning, she’d considered, with Pete.

  “Okay then. Cross your fingers...oh, and kiss Cait for me, will you?” Pete fell silent, listening for a while, then chuckled aloud. Carolyn felt an irrational stab of jealousy. Who was Cait?

  “You think so? I’d say that’s about as remote a possibility as finding little green men on Mars.” He chuckled again. And the laugh wasn’t rueful this time, it was rough and bitter. “I’ll let you know if it ever happens.”

  Pete hung up the phone without saying goodbye and turned. Carolyn hadn’t meant him to find her eavesdropping, but he’d rung off so abruptly, she’d been caught at the impolite observance.

  The smile faded from his lips. “Are you all right?” he asked.

  She knew the question went far deeper than the words implied. She tried telling herself that he wasn’t a stranger, that the truth he’d withheld hadn’t turned him into another man, that he was same man who had held her in his arms, had loved her with such incredible passion, that he was still Pete Jackson. The man who worried about her, her feelings, her emotions, her needs.

  He was also the man who had deliberately let her believe he was a cold-blooded killer. A man who had lied to her.

  “Fine,” she lied back. “I’m just fine.”

  “Did you hear everything?”

  “No,” she said, meaning she couldn’t possibly have heard it all.

  “I was checking in with Alec,” he said. His voice was low, more clipped than usual, as if he were desperately holding a tight rein on his words. “We’ve set up a raid for tomorrow night. Let’s just hope it’s scheduled for then and not four days from now. I’ll be the one signaling them in.”