by B. J Daniels
He peered into what had once been the dining room, the floor creaking under his weight. There were old clothes and books and newspapers and magazines piled in a corner. He dug a newspaper out of one pile and looked at the date. Newer than 1971.
He thought he heard a car engine. But knew it wasn’t the van. He’d taken the key. And even if Amanda had another set, she wouldn’t leave without the ledger in his pocket.
He moved deeper into the house where the shadows hunkered, dark and cold in corners. Something moved off to his right, making him jump. A rat scampered from a pile of clothing, disappearing around the corner into the next room.
As he climbed the rickety stairs to the second floor, he asked himself what he was looking for. Hadn’t he seen enough of this place? He stopped in one of the old bedrooms. A rusted metal box spring mattress leaned against one wall, a pair of once blue curtains fluttered at the broken window, on the floor was a book with a watermarked brown cover.
He bent down to pick it up. An old Hardy Boy’s mystery, one he’d read as a boy, The Secret of the Old Mill. The pages smelled of mildew and dust as he flipped it open, trying to remember the story, trying to think of anything but the reason he was here.
Inside the cover of the book was stamped Red River Community Library. He flipped to the back and pulled out the library card. The book was long overdue. Thirty years worth. But he could still read the name of the person who’d checked it out. Marie McCall. His adoptive mother.
The wooden steps of the stairs creaked. He froze, listening. Another step creaked and another. Goose bumps skittering over his skin like a spider’s legs. Someone was coming up the stairs.
“Amanda?”
No answer.
“Amanda?” he called a little louder as he moved back toward the stairs. Suddenly he wished he hadn’t left her alone in the van. Not after everything they’d learned here.
He dropped the book and drew the weapon he’d taken from Amanda yesterday. Slowly, he crept down the hall toward the stairs. As he came to the corner, he heard the stairs at the top creak and saw a shadow spill across the landing floor. Not Amanda. Too tall and broad for her.
“Hello?” came a male voice, one he recognized just in time.
Hurriedly, he shoved the gun back into the waistband of his jeans and covered it with his shirt just as Sheriff Wilson topped the stairs.
“Ya know ya’ll are trespassing?” the sheriff asked with obvious irritation.
“Just having a look around,” Jesse said.
The sheriff nodded. “I heard you’ve been just looking around and asking a lot of questions, upsetting a lot of people.”
Jesse wanted to take this conversation outside into the sunlight, away from this house and everything in it, especially that presence that he’d felt, a presence like an albatross around his neck.
He did wonder, though, just who he’d been upsetting and why.
“Who are you and what business brings you to Red River?” Wilson demanded.
Jesse thought about telling the sheriff that he was a cop out of Dallas up here investigating the mob. But how would he explain Amanda? The last thing he wanted was the sheriff to know who she was. If the cop didn’t already.
“Sheriff, I just learned that I might have been that mystery baby that was found around here thirty years ago.” Jesse suspected he wasn’t telling the sheriff anything he didn’t already know. “I just want to find out who I am.”
“No one around here knows. Or cares,” the sheriff said with a coldness that surprised Jesse.
“My mother had to be one of the local girls—”
The sheriff was shaking his head. “Whoever left that baby wasn’t from around here.”
“How do you know that?” Jesse asked.
“You’ll just have to take my word for it.” The sheriff moved toward him, his hand on the butt of his weapon, a steely hardness in his eyes that made Jesse want to retreat a step.
“Jesse?” Amanda called from the floor below.
“Honey, I’m up here. I’ll be right down,” Jesse called out quickly. “My fiancée and I are on our way to get married in Oklahoma,” he improvised and hoped Amanda went for it. “Her mama lives up there,” he said loud enough he thought Amanda would hear.
He moved to get past the sheriff, but Wilson was a big man, thick through the chest with a head like a block of wood. The cop didn’t budge and for a moment Jesse feared he wasn’t going to.
“Jesse?” Amanda called again, definite concern in her voice.
“Up here, honey,” he called again. “Stay there, I’m coming down. Those stairs are dangerous.” He looked at the sheriff. “I thought it was important that I find out about myself before I got married,” he said.
“Let me give you a little advice,” the sheriff said quietly. “Some things are best left alone.”
Jesse nodded. “I’m beginning to think you might be right about that.”
“You can take it to the bank,” the sheriff said and seemed relieved Jesse was seeing it his way. He stepped aside and let Jesse descend the steps to where Amanda waited, looking scared. She’d changed into other clothing from the back of the van. She now wore a silk shirt, slacks, sandals.
Jesse reached for her, realizing the sheriff was right behind him and could hear anything he said.
“Sorry, honey, I just got to looking around and lost track of time.” He pulled Amanda into his arms. She came easily as if he’d held her like this a hundred times. “I guess we’d better get going if we hope to make your mama’s before dark.” He let go of her and stepped back, meeting her gaze.
“Where’d you say you were going in Oklahoma?” Sheriff Wilson asked Amanda.
“Lawton,” she answered without hesitation, before shifting her gaze back to Jesse. “And we’re going to be late, thanks to you. You know Mama’s making dinner for us.”
He put his arm around her shoulders and pulled her close, grateful she was such a quick study. “The last thing I want is to make your mama mad at me,” he said with a laugh. Then he sobered as he glanced around the farmhouse. “Nothing here, anyway.” Nothing but ghosts.
The sheriff settled his ham-size fists on his hips. “Glad to hear you’re not planning to stay around,” he said pointedly. “I assume you won’t be coming back to Red River?”
Jesse shook his head. “We thought we’d honeymoon up north somewhere. Maybe Montana.”
Sheriff Wilson nodded, his look colder than the inside of the old house as he walked past Jesse, headed for the door. “A good place for your kind.”
Jesse felt a chill soul deep. His kind. “And what kind would that be, Sheriff?” he asked the cop’s broad back.
But Sheriff Wilson either didn’t hear, or didn’t care to answer.
“Bastard,” Amanda swore under her breath at the sheriff’s retreating back.
Jesse walked her to the van without a word, opened the door for her, then climbed into the driver’s seat. Sheriff Wilson stood by his car, watching them, waiting for them to leave.
“What the hell was that about?” Jesse demanded, looking over at Amanda. She had angry tears in her eyes.
“He thinks you’re the son of a mobster,” she said. She looked over at him. “Don’t you see? My father was here asking about the baby. The sheriff thinks you’re J. B. Crowe’s son.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Jesse swore as he turned the van around and headed down the rutted path to the two-lane county road.
“I can see it in your face,” Amanda said, her emotions raw and too close to the surface. Her chest ached from trying to hold back the well of feeling inside her. She wanted to strike out. Not at the sheriff. She’d met enough people like him in her life that she didn’t care what he thought of her and her “kind.” But Jesse—
“You’re scared to death you might be the spawn of a mobster,” she said, daring him to disagree.
He glanced over at her as he turned toward Red River and accelerated. The Texas sun-baked red dust kicked
up behind the van, dark as a thunder-head.
Jesse’s knuckles were white on the steering wheel, his jaw set in granite. She saw him glance in his rearview mirror, but she didn’t need to turn to feel the sheriff’s scornful gaze. She’d seen enough of them in her life.
“Frightening, isn’t it,” she said, her voice breaking. “After all the contempt you’ve had for me since the day you went to work for my father, just to think that you might have the same tainted blood as me.”
He hit the brakes. The van went into a skid, coming to a stop in a cloud of red dust.
Before she could take a breath, he grabbed her and jerked her around to face him, his eyes dark with emotion. “You think I don’t want to be related to you because of your genes?” he demanded loudly.
“Isn’t that your greatest fear?” she cried, grabbing a handful of his shirt.
He let out a low growl, anger making his eyes as black as obsidian and just as bright. “Oh, yeah, that’s a fear all right. I sure as hell don’t want to be related to you. But not for the reasons you think.”
She could see the pain in his eyes, his desire for her, his fear that she might always be forbidden to him. What surprised her was her own fear. She clung to his shirt, desperately wanting to tell him that he wasn’t the only one hurting by this news.
He pushed her away from him before she could release her hold on his shirt. She heard the fabric tear and him let out a curse. Something fell out of his shirt pocket, making a slight tinkling sound as it dropped to the floor.
She watched him pick up the gold chain. It glistened for a moment in the sunlight. Long enough for her to see what dangled from the chain. She gasped at the sight of the unique-shaped heart, one she’d seen before.
He looked over at her. “What?” he demanded, sounding scared. “You recognize it?”
“My father has the other piece of the heart.”
He stared at her, all his fears exploding like a bomb inside his head. “Your father has the other piece?”
She nodded. “He had the hearts made. There are only two like them in the world. They were made to fit together to form one heart. One perfect heart.”
He barely heard her words, only the meaning behind them. His mother had put the gold heart in his blanket the night he was born and written a hurried note, hoping someone would find him. His father must have been the one who had left him in the box beside the road. The same man who had the matching gold heart.
“Then your father—”
She shook her head. “The heart belonged to my father’s best friend.” She seemed to pause as if for effect. “My father had the heart made for Billy Kincaid and the woman he was in love with.”
“Billy Kincaid,” he echoed.
“The Governor’s little brother.”
“The one who died,” Jesse said.
She nodded. “When I was a little girl, I found a box with some old things in it. I was taken with the funny-shaped heart and my father told me the story.”
They both turned at the sound of the vehicle coming up the road behind them. In the distance, the sun shimmered off the sheriff’s car.
“Drive,” she ordered. “We don’t want another run-in with him.”
Jesse couldn’t have agreed more but he also desperately needed to know about the heart. He pulled back onto the road, his hands shaking. He wasn’t J.B.’s son. He wasn’t related to Amanda. Was she as relieved as he was? He glanced over at her.
She smiled and nodded. “I assume we are both relieved for the same reason.”
“Both?”
She grinned. “Both.”
“I also assume you want to hear about the heart first?” she asked.
“First?”
She laughed. “First.” She glanced behind them. He followed her gaze. The sheriff’s car had disappeared in their dust. “My father knew a jeweler and had the hearts made as a present for Billy and his girlfriend. He didn’t want any others ever made like them so my father talked the jeweler into promising he never would. It was a promise I am sure the jeweler kept,” she said knowingly.
Jesse had to agree.
“Billy and his girlfriend each wore one. The idea was that they would put the hearts together when they got married and he would put the one heart on her during the ceremony.”
“But then Billy got killed.”
She nodded. “Obviously before they could get married.”
He drove through Red River almost without noticing and took the two-lane south, not sure where he was going, just far from the small Texas town.
“Who was the girlfriend?” he asked, holding his breath.
“My father never told me. I got the feeling that Billy had kept the romance quiet for some reason. I’m not even sure my father knew her well.”
Was it possible J.B. hadn’t known the girl was pregnant with Billy’s son? He felt the skin on his neck prickle. The day J.B. had hired him—Jesse hadn’t thought anything about it at the time. But J.B. had seemed in shock. Of course he would have been shocked; he’d believed his daughter had almost been killed by a hit-and-run driver.
But Jesse remembered now the way J.B. had stared at him. Almost as if the man had seen a ghost.
Ahead Jesse could see the outline of the town on the horizon. He’d be glad when it was in his rearview mirror.
“I know this sounds nuts, but I think your father recognized me that first day I went to work for him,” Jesse said. “I think that’s why he hired me, no questions asked. Why he left on a business trip the next day. He came to Red River. Started asking questions about me.”
“That would explain the warm reception we’ve gotten here. I’m sure having a well-known mobster show up in town ruffled a few feathers, especially all the times my father’s picture has been in the paper for one criminal investigation or another,” she said.
He nodded. It would also explain J.B.’s fingerprints on the photocopy of the newspaper clipping. “Maybe he didn’t know I existed until a couple of weeks ago. Or maybe he’s the one who dumped the box beside the road for Billy, just assuming I would die.”
“No,” Amanda said with more force than he’d expected. “My father loved Billy like a brother. If he’d known about you, there isn’t any way he would have allowed anything to happen to you, believe me. I know my father. He would have raised you himself.”
He did believe her. “We have to find my mother,” he said and looked over at her.
She nodded. “Jesse, I did lie about one thing.”
The expression on her face almost made him drive off the road.
“I lied when I said I felt nothing but contempt for you.” Leaning toward him, she put her hand on his thigh.
This time he did drive off the road. “Amanda?” He got the van under control again. “I’m a cop,” he reminded her.
“And probably a Kincaid,” she said. “And I’m a mobster’s daughter. Nothing’s really changed, has it?”
He shook his head. She was still dangerous and he still wanted her, wanted her more than he could have believed possible. “Nothing at all,” he said and took the next side road down into the lush thick trees beside the river.
* * *
HER FINGERS trembled as she began to unbutton his shirt the moment he stopped the van beside the river.
“Amanda?”
“I need you, Jesse. I need you to hold me. To make love to me.”
She touched a finger to his lips and shook her head. She knew all the reasons they shouldn’t make love and one very good reason they should. As she slipped each button free, she exposed more of his muscular chest, his broad shoulders. Dark hair formed a V like an arrow to the waistband of his jeans. Desire stole through her, leaving a trail of heat to her center.
She wanted this man. Wanted his arms around her. Wanted to feel his bare skin pressed to hers. Wanted him in a primitive, carnal way, to possess and be possessed. And had for a long time.
That in itself scared her. She had never let any man close to her
. Certainly not Gage, even though he’d fathered her baby.
With Jesse, it would be total surrender.
He looked at her as if afraid to touch her for fear of what they would do together, both wanting the same thing, both fearing it.
She leaned over and kissed him, her lips barely brushing his. “I think there’s a blanket in the back,” she whispered.
The river lapped at the shore under a canopy of green leaves. He spread the blanket on the grass. Water pooled next to the bank. He looked at her, the desire in his gaze almost as pleasurable as the anticipation of his touch.
He reached out to undo the top button on her shirt, his fingers grazing her skin. His eyes never left hers as he undid the next button, then the next.
Her heart pounded as he slipped the shirt from her shoulders and let it drop to the blanket, then slipped off one strap of her bra, then the other. Her nipples pressed hard and insistent against the thin cloth. She reached behind to unhook the bra. It fell to the blanket.
* * *
JESSE MOANED at the sight of her round, full breasts dappled in sunlight. She stepped to him and pulled his shirt off. He hesitated only a moment before he drew her to him, skin to skin, wrapping his arms around her, holding her. He told himself this wasn’t happening. He’d wanted it too badly. He could feel her heart, its emphatic beat keeping time with his own. He looked down at her. And wondered why she was giving herself to him.
Not for the reason he would have hoped, that much he knew. But did it matter?
She leaned up to kiss him, her kiss heated. She pulled away to shuck off the rest of her clothing, seemingly as anxious to make love to him as he was to her.
He watched her, enthralled, completely captivated as she stripped, then dove into the pool of water, droplets momentarily suspended in the air around her, her skin silky as the water that rippled over it.
“Are you joining me?” she called.
He took off his clothes, the ledger falling from his pocket onto the blanket. Then he followed her into the water.
The pool was waist deep, the water wonderfully cool, the bottom a fine sand. He moved to her, pulling her into his arms, feeling her nakedness against his own. He dropped his mouth to hers. Her lips parted, welcoming him, as her body pressed to his and he enveloped her, the way the water enveloped them both.
