by Diana Palmer
“We noticed.”
She sniffed and opened her eyes. She straightened. “Never again. I’m going to see to it that the child has everything he needs, and Joceline, too. And Jon should marry her, at once!”
“Cammy, you’re forgetting one little complication.”
“What?”
“Jon doesn’t know that Markie is his child.”
Cammy sat down in a chair. Hard.
Kilraven noted the silence on the other end of the phone. “Joceline won’t tell him. She’s still afraid he won’t believe it. The child has A positive blood type, so does Jon. A DNA test would be conclusive.”
“We’d have to make Joceline do it. She wouldn’t. She’s stubborn, like me.”
Kilraven chuckled. “Yes.”
Cammy drew a breath. “Well, you’ll have to tell him.”
“Oh, no. I’m not telling him.”
“Then I will.”
“You can’t, either. Now don’t go trying to manage things again. Look how you’ve already messed up.”
She bit her lip. “Jon’s furious at me. I deserve it, but I’m so scared. I didn’t want to leave him alone at a time like this. I shouldn’t have upset him.” She didn’t add that she had another reason for feeling very guilty about the way they’d parted. It would be devastating. She felt sick inside. She still wasn’t sure she was doing the right thing.
“He’ll cool off. I’ll go see him, if you like.”
“Would you?” she asked hopefully. “It would ease my mind. You can tell him how sorry I am, and that I took Joceline and the boy home from the hospital.”
“I’ll tell him. You know Jon. He just has to cool off.”
She hesitated again. “I have high blood pressure. If it kills me, what will the two of you do? At least you have Winnie. Jon has nobody. Well, he has a child and a woman who loves him, but he doesn’t know. What if I die?”
“You won’t die. Didn’t the doctor give you medicine?”
She fiddled with her lap. “Yes.”
“Then take it, Cammy. You have a grandson, and another one almost ready to make an appearance.”
“Yes.” She brightened.
“You can’t die yet.”
She drew in another breath. She couldn’t say anything, but maybe, just maybe, she could prepare them. “I feel it, you know. I have this awful cold sense that something terrible is going to happen. I had it before the shooting, but it didn’t go away. Listen, I love you very, very much. I love your brother. You tell him. If anything happens…”
“Nothing’s going to happen!”
She sighed. “You’re sure?”
She sounded so worried. “I know these feelings of yours sometimes pay off,” he replied. “But you’re not on the spot with this one. You’re going to live a long time.”
She stared at an odd shadow on the wall. So soon? She gripped the phone, hard. “Of course I am.”
“Now stop worrying and…Cammy? Cammy!”
There had been a sound. A gunshot. Two gunshots. Then a final, horrible one. Kilraven left the phone line open, grabbed a spare cell phone he always carried and started punching in numbers. His hands were shaking.
A homicide detective outside, Rick Marquez in fact, told Kilraven at the door of Cammy’s hotel room that they’d found Cammy Blackhawk on the sofa, sitting up, stone dead, with bullet wounds in her chest and stomach. The phone was in her lap. Evidence teams were all over the room, photographers, the coroner’s assistant, the coroner’s investigator and homicide detectives. Outside, a reporter was trying his best to gain entrance, to no avail.
Kilraven absolutely wasn’t allowed inside. Rick Marquez embraced him tightly, feeling the other man’s resistance at first and then helpless shudders as the reality hit him.
“It’s all right,” Rick said gently. “It’s all right. You’ll snap back and do what you have to do.”
“I’ll find the man who did this. I’ll hunt him to the ends of the earth,” Kilraven said harshly as he drew away, a little flushed.
“We’ll find him,” Rick said. “I’ve got every law enforcement agency in town on alert and looking for the shooter.”
“Harold Monroe made the threats against my family.”
“Yes, and he’s out on bond, I’ll give you that. But you know Monroe screws up everything he does,” Rick reminded him grimly. “Odd thing about him knowing where the murder weapon was in your family’s case. That was a professional hit. Very clean. Very structured. Not a hair out of place. The guy knew what he was doing. That just doesn’t seem like goof-up Harold Monroe to me.”
Kilraven didn’t reply. He was too shocked and hurt. He swallowed. He and Cammy had their differences, but he’d always loved her. How was he going to tell Jon? And was Cammy likely to be the only casualty?
“I’ve got someone watching your wife,” Rick said somberly. “Rourke’s got a man on Joceline and her son. We’re even watching you, Kilraven,” he added. “Whoever did this, and I’m not convinced it’s Monroe, is dealing out revenge. It could be Jay Copper. Even in jail, he can call for help. We’ll check everyone who’s phoned him or seen him, or Harold Monroe, since their arrests. We’ll find the perp.”
“Find him in time, won’t you?” Kilraven asked. “First my wife and child, then my brother, now my mother…” He turned away. “Damn him!”
“I know how you feel,” Rick said.
Kilraven turned back to him, narrow-eyed.
“Okay, I don’t,” Rick conceded. “I really don’t. But I promise you, on my mother’s soul, I will find the killer.”
Kilraven softened, just a little. “Watch your own back. You’ve been targeted in the past, too, and so has my wife’s mother.”
“My best detective colleague, Gail Rogers,” Rick agreed. He smiled. “You should tell your brother. There’s a reporter outside. He’ll have it on the wire in no time. No way should Jon see this on CNN.” Kilraven nodded.
Marquez watched him go with great misgivings. Marquez had been maneuvered into doing something he wasn’t sure about, on the word of a man he really shouldn’t even have trusted. But the Blackhawks trusted him. And some traps required strong bait. He hoped his health insurance would cover the damage when certain facts were known.
Kilraven flew up to Oklahoma on the jet and phoned to have Sloane Callum meet him at the airstrip, but it was one of the hands who showed up.
“Sloane’s really sorry, he got drunk and locked himself in his room,” the cowboy said with a grimace. “He doesn’t drink, you know. But he said we all slip sometimes.”
“I guess.” Kilraven didn’t say anything more. He didn’t even tell the man why he’d rushed home.
He walked into Jon’s bedroom, grim and dreading the conversation. Jon looked sick and weak, and pale, and he was still smarting from Joceline’s abrupt departure on his mother’s orders.
“Cammy and I had a row,” he told Kilraven. “Did she send you to try to make it up?”
Kilraven went and sat down on the bed next to his brother. It was going to be so much harder because of the argument. “I have some news. It’s not good.”
Jon studied him. “Not like you to beat around the bush,” he said with a faint smile. His expression froze. “Not Joceline or the boy?”
He shook his head. “No. Not them.” It was so hard. He remembered his wife and child, the way they looked. He remembered Jon, in the emergency room. This was…
“Cammy. Cammy?”
Kilraven closed his eyes.
Jon was speechless. He just looked at his older brother with shock and disbelief.
“She was talking to me on the phone. There were three shots.”
Jon couldn’t wrap his mind around it. His mother was dead. Jay Copper had been arrested for conspiracy in the murder of Mac’s wife and child, and Harold Monroe had been charged with helping kill Monica and Melly Kilraven. Now Monroe had targeted Jon’s family for revenge. The bastard had killed Cammy, had killed his mother, the one person they’
d never expected to need protection!
“No!” he ground out.
Kilraven gathered the younger man carefully against his broad chest and wrapped him up as tight as he dared. “No!” Jon groaned in anguish, and his eyes grew wet against his brother’s broad shoulder.
Two brothers, closer in grief than ever before, were silent and still for a very long time.
“We had men watching everybody,” Kilraven said a few minutes later. “Everybody except Cammy. God knows why, it never occurred to me that he’d try for her. Why? She never hurt a soul!”
“She was part of my family,” Jon replied coldly. “Family is a big thing to Jay Copper. He killed a young underage girl to protect his own illegitimate son, the senator, remember? Monroe may only be his nephew by marriage, but you remember Jay Copper’s sister committed suicide when Bart Hancock was briefly charged with participating in the murders.”
“Monroe may be out on bail, but we’ll tie him to this as well as to Melly’s murder. He’ll do hard time, even if he doesn’t get the damned needle!” Kilraven replied. “He won’t get out of this with a team of lawyers. It’s a done deal. He cooked himself with his own big mouth and he was taped,” he added. “One of the detectives had an inmate wired with a promise of a deal with the D.A.—everybody wanted the man who put the hit on my daughter, even the inmate who volunteered to get the evidence. The inmate had a daughter of his own about the same age.”
“Does Monroe have kids?” Jon asked bitterly.
“No, it’s just him and his wife. He had a father who was in jail for a murder years ago, at least, that’s what we heard, but we didn’t check back that far.”
“How is the senator’s brother, Hank Sanders, tied into this?” he asked, naming a former decorated SEAL team member, who’d help them save Kilraven and the woman who was now his wife.
“He isn’t. Jay Copper had two sisters. One had Bart Hancock, the other had Harold Monroe’s wife. The sisters are both dead. Bart Hancock’s mother died when her son’s involvement in the murder of your family came out.”
“Sad. For her, not for her son.”
“Yes.”
Kilraven turned back to Jon. “We need to get you out of here, now.”
“We have to plan a funeral,” the younger man said grimly.
“We do, but we’re having it in San Antonio. It was where Cammy lived for many years. She’d be…happier there, anyway, near us.”
“I’d rather bury her in Jacobsville,” Jon said surprisingly. “Don’t ask me why. It just seems more her sort of place than an impersonal city cemetery.”
Kilraven nodded. “Yes. It does.”
There was a tap on the door. Sloane Callum peered around it. “Sorry to hear about Mrs. Blackhawk,” he said somberly. “We had our differences but she was a good person. And sorry I was under the weather. I won’t take another drink, I swear!”
“Everybody slips once in a while,” Jon replied. “It’s all right.”
“I can put on more men to watch out for you,” Callum said.
“No need. I’m going back to San Antonio with my brother,” Jon said. “We have to see to arrangements about Cammy. We’re going to bury her in Jacobsville.”
“You’re leaving?” Callum looked worried. “You’d be safer here, boss, I’d never let nobody hurt you…!”
“I know that. Thanks. But I’m going to do what I have to.”
Callum hesitated. “Okay, then.” He seemed deep in thought. “Well, sorry again.”
“Thanks.”
Callum left the room.
“He watches me like a hawk,” Jon said. “He’s a better watchdog than the German shepherds are.”
“I guess he feels he owes it to us,” Kilraven replied. “Better get moving.”
Jon got out of bed, a little wobbly. “Yes.” The shock was starting to wear off and he felt a cold, sharp pain that was unrelated to his wound. “I yelled at her, before…”
“She had this feeling,” Kilraven said at once. “She was talking about having high blood pressure and taking meds for it, then she said to tell you that she loved you, loved us, very much. I was just thinking how odd that was to say when I heard the shots.”
Jon’s teeth clenched. “Thanks. It makes it a little easier.”
“I don’t know how the killer knew where to find her, unless he’s watching us,” Kilraven said suddenly.
“Time for a little detective work, I think,” Jon replied. “We need some answers, quickly.”
“I couldn’t agree more. In fact, you work for one of the best agencies in the world, and I’m sure at least one agent has free time and would be willing to ferret out a few facts on the recent movements of anybody who’s related to Jay Copper!”
12
Jon called Joceline with the news the minute he was settled into his San Antonio apartment. He barely got the first words out when she asked where he was and hung up.
Markie was in school, with one of Rourke’s men watching him. Joceline had to argue her way out of her apartment and, in the end, accept a ride from her own unfamiliar watchdog just to get to Jon’s apartment. But she made it.
She walked in when he opened the door, closed it behind her, locked it and went right into his arms.
He held her close, rocked her, buried his face in her warm throat.
“I know, you’re a big tough guy,” she said, her voice muffled by his shoulder. “But losing a parent hurts. There’s nothing wrong with grief.”
“No.” His mouth burrowed into her warm throat, opened, pressed hard. “Joceline…!”
His hands went under her blouse, up to the fastening of her bra. She didn’t protest, not even when he removed every inch of clothing from her pretty body and started kissing his way down it.
He couldn’t lift her; the wound was too fresh. But he tugged her into the bedroom, closed the door, smoothed her down on the bed and stripped off his pajamas without a second thought.
She opened her arms to him, welcoming, comforting, and let him pin her to the bed with his weight.
“I shouldn’t,” he began.
She pulled his mouth down to hers and held it there, shifting to make way for his long legs and the sudden, sweet thrust of him inside her.
He gasped at the sensation he’d never felt. At least, he didn’t think he’d felt it. But the rhythm of his body on hers was oddly familiar, like the sound of her soft gasps of pleasure as he shifted and twisted.
He lifted his head and looked down at her, saw the hard, dusky pink tips of her breasts, the shivering of her body, the wide-eyed fascination of her eyes as she looked down to where they were joined.
He lifted his hips to let her watch. He watched, too. It was the most intense sensation, like plunging into molten heat, sheathing himself in the moist darkness of her with a slow, steady rhythm.
He groaned, shocked, as pleasure shuddered through him in slow waves every time he moved.
She watched his face, fascinated. She was feeling those sensations, too. It was nothing like the quick, almost frantic pace of the first time. It was glorious. She lifted, moaning as it increased the pleasure they were sharing.
He whispered to her, shocking things, loving things, smiling at her reactions, her responses. His hand slid under her hips and moved them to his rhythm. He was aware of pain from the wound, discomfort in other areas, but the delicious pleasure dwarfed them.
He closed his eyes, shuddering, as it became suddenly urgent. He pushed down hard, deep, pinning her wrists, looking straight into her wide, helpless eyes as he buffeted her with his weight.
“It’s coming,” he whispered hoarsely. “It’s coming…!”
“Jon,” she cried out, arching. “Oh, Jon…!”
He ground down into her, clenching his teeth, driving for satisfaction, frantic for release. “I’m sorry, it’s too quick…!”
“No…it’s…not!” she bit off. She matched his rhythm with quick, sharp movements of her hips, shifting so that he was there, right there,
right there…!
He heard her hoarse cry, followed by a moan so descriptive of what he was feeling that he moaned with her, shuddering with each penetration as the joy rose to such heights that he felt himself explode inside her.
He arched over her, his face contorted, shuddering, shuddering. He thought it would never end. He said so.
But finally, inevitably, his damp body collapsed on hers and they lay together, still intimately locked, intimately close, with their heartbeats shaking the bed.
He stretched, wincing, and lifted his head to look at her. “Joceline,” he whispered. “Why does this seem familiar?”
She hesitated. Her heart was still pounding, and she was too emotionally spent to guard her expression.
“I have had sex, haven’t I?” he asked gently. “I had it with you.”
She swallowed, hard. She wanted to deny it, but he looked at her as if he already knew the truth. And he did. He was making mental notations, doing sums, finding answers to questions he’d never asked.
His lips parted on a rush of breath. “Markie. He’s mine. He’s my son!”
She bit down on her lower lip. “I didn’t think you’d believe me, that anyone would believe me,” she whispered tearfully. “You didn’t know me. I could have been after you for your wealth, your position…” She closed her eyes. “I didn’t know what to do.”
“So you had my child, thinking I wouldn’t want him or you.” He bent and crushed his mouth down on hers. “You fool,” he whispered. “You sweet little fool…oh, God!” he groaned as his movements brought the heat and urgency back. “I can’t stop. I don’t want to stop…!”
“It’s all right,” she whispered, lifting to the harsh, deep thrust of his body. “I don’t, either.” She arched up to the mouth closing on her breasts with aching delight. “I love you…so much!”
It was like pulling a trigger. There was no stopping then. He groaned as he drove into her, drowning in the joy of being loved and wanted. His mouth ground into hers as the rhythm grew faster and more urgent.
“Dear…God, it’s…like dying…!” he groaned hoarsely as he shuddered again and again. “So sweet!”
