Turquoise Guardian

by Jenna Kernan

  “Will I have to go back to Lilac?” she asked.

  He pressed his enticing mouth together and shook his head.

  “I doubt it.”

  “I’m a suspect, right?”

  “Did you do anything wrong?” he asked.

  “I did not. But they asked me about organizations called BEAR and WOLF.”

  Carter set aside his noodle dish.

  “Do you know them?” she asked.

  “One of them.” He looked worried. “WOLF stands for the Warriors Of Land Forever. They’d be interested in a pit mine. That group damages property, spiking trees marked for logging. That kind of thing. Might attack anything that invades wild places.”

  That didn’t sound good.

  “What about BEAR?”

  “Never heard of them.” He returned his attention to his plate, but he seemed distracted now.

  “They knew I’d been at a PAN protest.” She ate more of the jasmine rice and mixed veggies, having already devoured all the chicken. “Should I be worried?”

  He didn’t say no. She set aside her plate, her appetite spoiled. He offered her some of his, and she declined.

  “Should I ask for a lawyer?” she asked, already wondering where and how to locate someone.

  “You haven’t been arrested or charged. You’re in custody as a witness. Right now you just need to rest and eat.” He motioned to her half-eaten supper.

  She nodded her acceptance.

  Rose stepped into the doorway. “Everything come out all right?”

  “Like having a butler,” she murmured in Apache.

  “Until you try to leave,” said Carter.

  “You two need anything else?” asked the agent.

  “Books,” said Amber.

  “Music,” said Carter.

  Rose nodded, reversed course and disappeared through the doorway.

  “Would they tell us if they caught them?” she asked.

  Carter finished his meal and sat back. “Yes. I think they would.”

  “So they haven’t even caught the shooter. It’s been days.”

  “They will. FBI. State police, sheriffs and local police are all on it.”

  “What if they don’t?”

  He gave her a long look, and she wondered if he understood. She was the target. What if they couldn’t find the men trying to kill her?

  “I can’t stay here forever.”

  “Be patient. We both need some rest. Tomorrow things will be better.”

  * * *

  CARTER WISHED AMBER would eat a little more. He also wished there was more he could do to assure her, but honestly he could not fathom how the gunman had evaded the police this long.

  He found himself staring at her mouth, recalling their kiss, and had to shake himself back to attention.

  He ignored the thrumming need that she stirred inside him as he collected the leftovers. They both carried the packaging out to the kitchen and returned to the living area couch.

  Sated by food, a more insistent hunger continued to gnaw at him.

  “Want to watch TV?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “I’m afraid of the scroll bar. I don’t want to see the body count or, worse, video footage of the Lilac Mine.”

  Their gazes met, and the pulsing ache that had been in his chest moved south.

  “You’re staring at me.” She used one finger to trace the outline of the scar on her lip. “It’s this, isn’t it?”

  “I’ll admit being attracted to your mouth forever, but I was wondering about that scar. You had it when you visited me when I was recuperating. But not before that. What happened?”

  She flushed, her gaze dropped to her lap, and she closed her eyes. “Finally the right question,” she whispered.

  “What?”

  “You didn’t ask me how I cut it or what I did. You asked me what happened.”

  “Yes.”

  Amber pressed her lips together, making the scar turn from pink to white.

  “My dad did this the day he disowned me.”

  Fury surged. Her father did that? He shook his head, wanting to deny it, knowing he couldn’t. It took a moment to find his voice; he was so stunned at her revelation.

  “He told me you left.”

  “I know. What I never understood was why you believed him.”

  He tried to catch up.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I did. I went to you the minute I found out about the credit fraud, and you told me that everything I owned was his.”

  He had said that, hadn’t he?

  “Then you told me to go home and that you’d take care of everything.”

  “I would have,” he said.

  “No. Some things you can’t fix. Sometimes you just have to listen and believe that the one you love knows what she is talking about.”

  “But you...” He checked himself at the narrowing of her eyes. He had been about to say that she had broken the engagement and follow that by reminding her that she had left them all. But he saw something in that cold, impassive stare, some warning that he was about to make another mistake. He couldn’t afford to lose her again.

  “Nine years. You’ve been gone nine years.”

  “Yes.”

  “And I never understood why.”

  “So ask me.”

  Now his eyes narrowed. “I did ask you.”

  “No, you asked me why I rescinded my membership in the tribe. Why I broke our engagement and why I left you.” She fingered the scar. “You asked me why I did things. You never asked me what happened. Not once.”

  “I know what happened.”

  “Do you? Or do you only know one side of a story?”

  Her father’s side. Now he understood what she meant. Her father had come to him first. Explained things, and he had accepted Manny Kitcheyan’s word out of respect. Had that tainted his objectivity? For a minute it felt like his first jump from an airplane, as the world rushed closer and his stomach pressed up where his lungs should be. Had he done that to her?

  He sat back on the couch, his hand pressed over his mouth as he stared. Finally he dragged his hand away and squeeze it into a fist.

  “Amber, are you telling me you left because I asked the wrong question?”

  “Yes.”

  He shifted to face her and hesitated. “What happened, Amber?”

  Amber moved to sit beside Carter on the couch. He knew that what she was about to say was important and so he struggled to listen. But inside his head a voice was screaming, the wrong question. All this time and she left because I asked the wrong question.

  He kept his face impassive, but inside a tempest swirled. He feared the power of the storm. She folded an ankle under her thigh and turned so that she sat sideways to face him.

  “My father was there before me. Wasn’t he?”

  Carter nodded, not trusting his voice.

  “I’m sure he told you I was making a big thing out of nothing.”

  “It was just a truck, Amber.”

  “No. Not just.”

  His impulse was to remind her that he had offered to pay for the damned thing, but instead, he kept his mouth shut. Her father’s new red truck. The one that overextended the family budget and triggered the fight between him and Amber. He recalled the day she’d come to him and said she wanted to get married right that very minute. He had laughed, not realizing how serious she had been. He’d tried to send her home to apologize, to finish high school and start community college. When he told her he’d already given her father the signing bonus she went crazy and said she was going to the police.

  He recalled exactly what he had said then. As long as we’re engaged, I am a part of this fami
ly.

  She had removed his ring, held it out to him. “I won’t marry you.”

  “Don’t be silly. You’re not serious.”

  “Will you change your mind about the signing bonus?” she asked.

  He narrowed his eyes. “No.”

  She offered his ring.

  “This is childish, Amber.”

  “Childish?” She offered the ring. “Take it.”

  “No.”

  Carter swallowed, met her steady gaze. “Was it because I called you childish?”

  “Partly. You wouldn’t listen. Had already made up your mind what to do without consulting me. I could see it then. Going from my father’s control to yours. You even said to me that I would be theirs until we married, and then I’d be yours.”

  He blinked at her. “So what did your father do that was so terrible?”

  She pressed her lips together, making the scar turn from pink to white.

  “My dad did this the day I left. Threw a beer bottle at me.”

  A cold knife blade of dread pierced his heart. He gently held her chin, turning her head from side to side as he looked at the tiny white crescent. Now he recognized the pressure cut of her tooth where it had sliced through the soft tissue of her upper lip.

  “I didn’t know he hit you,” said Carter.

  “He never did. And this was the only time he did something like this. But what else he did was worse.”

  Carter released her jaw and braced for the truth that he would not even consider when he was a young man.

  “Tell me,” he said.

  And she did. She told him about the debt her father accumulated by gambling and buying things they did not need. About how, with her parents’ credit in shambles, he had turned to his daughters’ and stolen their identity.

  “It was nearly seventy thousand dollars when I found out.”

  When she had gone to him about the money for the truck, she should have made him understand. Or was it that he should have listened instead of dismissing her concerns?

  “He stole from me and Kay and Ellie. Ellie was eleven years old, and he charged thirteen thousand dollars in her name.”

  “You should have told me.”

  “I told you. I said he stole from us. That he had credit cards in our names. You told me to go back home and smooth things over, apologize and let you handle it. You patted me on the head. I had to go to the tribal police. Do you know what they said?”

  He shook his head.

  “Two choices. Either I accepted the debt as my own, or I filed charges against my father for identity theft. Then they would press charges, and he would be arrested and serve jail time.”

  “Or declare bankruptcy?”

  “Seventeen-year-olds can’t do that. I am still angry at my father, but he is my father. I could not have him arrested, embarrassed before everyone he knows. So I shut down all lines of credit. A man in Darabee with credit counseling helped me. But I couldn’t restructure the debt until I was eighteen, and no one would give me a loan.”

  “You took this all on yourself?” Carter’s stomach ached from the thought of her carrying this burden. Her eyes showed the betrayal she felt from her father, from him.

  “Yes. Eventually it went to debt collectors. That’s why I don’t carry a mobile phone. They call all the time, and they are so terrible. I’ve been settling the balances bit by bit. But when my dad learned what I did—” she tapped her upper lip “—he gave me this and threw me out.”

  “You should have...” He stopped. She had come to him, twice. He’d sent her back home.

  “I wish you had told me what he did.”

  “I didn’t know how bad it was yet. Then you went to basic, and I got a bill from a credit card company. This had been going on for years.”

  “I didn’t understand.”

  “I don’t know if this makes any sense, but I wanted to protect my father, and I wanted to protect you.”

  “I loved you then, Amber. I would have done anything for you.”

  “Except what I needed most. I wasn’t a child, then, and I wasn’t willing to be a wife of a man who treated me like one.”

  “I tried to solve it.”

  “I never asked you to. But I did ask you to listen. To trust me. Believe that if I said it was important, then it was important.”

  He met her gaze, seeing the glimmer of eyes filling with tears. They fell from her lower lids, dropping all the way to her lap.

  He took her hand and squeezed. “Amber, please... I’m so sorry.”

  She smiled as the tears continued to fall. “I’m so glad.”

  He had another apology to make. Amber had come back to see him once, when he’d been home recovering from his injuries. She’d met him on his parents’ porch on a sunny August day when his arm was still bandaged.

  “Amber, about that day in August when you came to see me.”

  She drew her hand away and used it to wiped at her eyes, which filled up almost instantly.

  “Yeager had been captured. They took him in May. We got notification of a proof of life video that December. It was terrible. We all felt so guilty for leaving him.”

  “You couldn’t get to him,” she said.

  He made a face. “Anyway, Jack was a tribal police patrolman then. He told me you relinquished your membership, and it made me so mad. But now...” Now he wasn’t certain. He no longer trusted what he had heard.

  He stared at her, so familiar and yet now a stranger. She was so beautiful, even in grief. Had he misjudged her twice? “Amber, what happened?”

  “My dad again. I didn’t even know until you told me. I thought it was a mistake. But when I went home, my mother admitted what he had done, withdrawn his oldest child from our tribe. He did that on the day he disowned me.”

  “You didn’t leave?”

  She shook her head. “They’re my people.”

  Her father had stolen her identity in more ways than one.

  “We have to fix this,” he said.

  “Why? I’m going to be in protective custody.”

  “That’s temporary,” he said.

  She drew a long breath. “Maybe.”

  Carter stood. “I have to call Jack.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Carter had to speak to the FBI before using his mobile, but they allowed him to call his brother. It was a sharp reminder of what he’d be facing when he went with Amber tomorrow. He’d be cut off from his family and his tribe. But Amber’s safety now seemed more important than all that.

  He asked his brother to look into the tribe’s policy for reestablishing membership because he thought he’d seen something on their website about minor children. His brother promised to check.

  Jack relayed some news about the case. The shooter and driver were still at large, but they now knew how the inside man had gained access to the Lilac administration building.

  “I want to see you tomorrow morning,” said Jack.

  Carter knew it might be his last contact with anyone in his family until after the killers were apprehended. He thought about his mom and dad and brothers all at that dinner the night the tribe had kept them safe. His throat constricted.

  “Yeah. I’d like that.”

  “I’ll bring you some of your stuff. See you tomorrow, brother.”

  Carter gave the phone to Agent Rose and returned to Amber, finding her staring blankly at the television which was still off. He had the job of telling Amber that the inside man had used a stolen security key card from one of the Lilac Mine employees to gain access to her building. She stared at him wide-eyed as he told her of the development in the case.

  “But how did he get Ann-Marie’s card?” Her hands went to her mouth, and she spoke from behind them. “Sh
e’s not involved in this. Is she?”

  “She didn’t do anything wrong,” he said.

  Amber blew out a breath, and he hated that he had to tell her the rest.

  “But whoever stole her card also killed her.”

  Her eyes filled with tears as she shook her head in denial. “Killed her? But...but he didn’t need to kill her. He could have just tied her up or...” The sobs stopped the rest.

  Carter pulled her close.

  Amber met his gaze as she struggled to speak past the flood of tears. “She saw his face. Just like us.”

  Now her hands covered her eyes as she rocked back and forth against him.

  Carter drew her into his lap, and her tears soaked the collar of his shirt.

  “I’ll keep you safe, Amber. I swear I will.”

  She clung, and he stroked her head and rubbed her back. At last, her tears stopped, and her breathing changed. He rocked her like a child as she fell asleep and then gently carried her to bed. She woke as he tucked her legs beneath the coverlet.

  “What time is it?” she asked.

  “After midnight.”

  “Tomorrow already,” she muttered.

  “Yes.”

  “Taking us tomorrow.” Her words were slurred as she fought the sleep that held her.

  He stood over her for a moment, wishing he could stay with her.

  “Carter?”

  “Yes?”

  She pushed over on the mattress and lay an open hand beside her. Amber’s eyes remained half closed as she cast him a sultry look. But it was exhaustion, he knew. Not flirtation, so he reined in his roaring need.

  “Could you hold me for a while?”

  Carter hesitated at her request. “I don’t think that’s such a great idea.”

  “Just a few minutes. Please?”

  She didn’t want him in the way he wanted her. But perhaps she forgave him for not understanding how to correctly honor a wife. He sat on the edge of her bed.

  “I’m here,” he said.

  He glanced at the open door and the light spilling across the industrial carpet. Then he thought of the agents in the other room.