Forbidden

by Tori Carrington

The resident left them to find their own way out. Leah watched over her shoulder as her father’s bed was wheeled out and taken in the opposite direction.

  “Oh, God, Sami,” she whispered, looking at her watch as Rachel led the way back out into the lobby. “I forgot about Sami.”

  FOR THE FIRST TIME IN A LONG TIME J.T. wished he had a car instead of a motorcycle. He parked the Harley across the street from Ottawa Hills Elementary School, watching as children in green, blue and white uniforms filed out of the three-story brick building. When Leah had called him fifteen minutes ago saying her father had been rushed to the hospital, and that she hadn’t been able to get in touch with her ex-husband, he’d instantly agreed to pick up her eleven-year-old daughter from school and bring her to the hospital.

  He’d washed up as best he could, given the limited time he’d had, and changed his T-shirt, but his jeans bore smears of wood stain and his fingernails looked like he’d spent an hour digging through the dirt.

  He pushed his longish hair from his face and scanned the cookie-cutter kids, looking for the little girl with the light brown hair he’d only seen up close once.

  There. There she was. She was walking from the double doors with her backpack slung over her shoulder talking to two other girls flanking her. He didn’t think waving to her would be such a good idea so he headed in her direction, determining to meet her halfway up the school walk.

  “Hello, Sami,” he said, smiling at her and the two girls she was with.

  She squinted up at him against the sun, her eyes wary.

  One of her friends elbowed her. “Who’s that?” she asked in a disapproving tone.

  “He’s the plumber,” Sami said with disdain.

  “I’m J. T. West,” he said, extending his hand to her. “Nice to make your acquaintance.”

  The two little girls shook his hand and told them their names were Courtney and Heather. Then they giggled and hurried away.

  “What are you doing here?” Sami asked stonily, clutching her backpack more tightly.

  “Your grandfather’s taken ill, Sami. Your mom asked if I would drive you to the hospital.”

  He narrowed his eyes, watching as the eleven-year-old started backing away from him. “You’re lying.”

  He tried to keep his face neutral. “I wish I were, Sami.”

  Her gaze passed him to the bike parked on the street.

  “You’re going to take me on that?”

  J.T. gave in to the threatening grimace. “That’s all I have.”

  He noticed the way the other students and their parents were beginning to look at them and knew an urgency to get out of there as quickly as possible.

  “Look, call your mom if you want,” he said, holding out his cell phone.

  Sami started shaking her head and backing away more quickly toward the school building. “I don’t believe you.”

  She turned and started running toward the building. J.T. easily caught up and grasped her schoolbag, knowing it was a mistake the instant his fingers touched Leah’s daughter.

  “Help! Help! He’s trying to kidnap me!”

  15

  LEAH KNEW A FEAR so encompassing she was surprised she could still function.

  Her hand shook as she held her cell phone to her ear, standing in the middle of the emergency waiting room with no concept of time or space. “What?” The word exited her mouth as little more than a whisper.

  Her ex-husband’s voice traveled over the air-waves, strong and determined. “I said someone tried to kidnap our daughter. Where are you?”

  Leah didn’t so much sit in the hard plastic chair as she did collapse into it. “Where is she?”

  Rachel stared at her. “What is it, Leah? What’s wrong?”

  She ignored her sister who had sat down next to her, clutching her arm.

  Dan said, “Sami’s in the car with me now. We’ve just left the school. Where are you?”

  “I’m at the hospital,” she told him, then briefly outlined her father’s situation, her mind swimming with everything that had transpired that day. “What happened with Sami? Who tried to kidnap her? Where?”

  Dan sighed heavily into her ear as if he couldn’t be bothered with the details. “Suffice it to say they caught the guy.”

  “Where?” Leah demanded, dread coating her insides like so much tar.

  It couldn’t be…Sami wouldn’t accuse…

  “Outside the school,” Dan said.

  It could and Sami had.

  Leah leaned forward, afraid she was going to hyperventilate. “Let me talk to her.”

  There was a pause, then Dan said, “She’s not up to talking right now, Lee. She’s pretty shaken up.”

  “Put her on the phone,” Leah stood firm.

  Long moments later she head Sami’s voice. “Mom?”

  “What happened?”

  Leah was half afraid the connection had cut off or that her daughter had handed the phone back to her father. “That plumber guy tried to kidnap me.”

  Oh God, oh God, oh God…

  Leah rocked back and forth in the unaccommodating chair. This wasn’t happening. It wasn’t possible this was happening.

  “I was really scared, Mom. I mean—”

  “Hand the phone back to your father,” she whispered.

  “But Mom—”

  “Just do as I say, Sami.”

  A moment later Dan’s irritated voice sounded in her ear.

  She asked, “Where have they taken him?”

  A pause.

  “Where?” she nearly shouted again.

  “What are you talking about? To jail, I suspect. But what’s—”

  “Find out where and meet me there,” she told him. “It shouldn’t be too difficult for you since most of your clients come from there.”

  “What’s the matter with you, Leah? I’ve never heard you—”

  “Just do it!”

  She pressed the disconnect button, her hand shaking so violently she nearly dropped the phone.

  “Leah? Damn it, tell me what’s going on,” Rachel demanded, grasping her arm tightly.

  “J.T.’s been arrested.”

  J.T. ACCEPTED IT AS A GIVEN. Women were destined to be his downfall.

  He closed his eyes, visually blocking out the holding cell surrounding him, as he ticked off in his head the women he’d known. There was the woman who had made him fall in love with her during that perfect summer so long ago. The woman who had drawn him into her sad web and whose death had stamped him with the label murderer. Now there was the woman—the girl—who’d pinned him for a crime he hadn’t committed because she was upset with her mother and the world in general.

  J.T. leaned against the wall in the corner of the holding cell. He had his legs crossed at the ankles and his hands in his pockets, but the relaxed stance was deceptive because his blood pumped through his body in triple time.

  One minute he’d been doing Leah a favor by picking up her daughter. The next he was being restrained by school security guards, then passed on to police officers to be booked and shoved into a jail cell.

  Kidnapping. He’d been arrested for attempted kidnapping.

  He tugged his right hand out of his pocket and rubbed the back of his neck, recalling Sami’s tearful face and her screams for someone to help her when he’d reached for her to stop her from running away from him. His first concern had been for her. It had ripped his heart out to see her so upset and know that he was the cause of it, however unjustified.

  But when the guards had subdued him and J.T. had calmly asked Sami to verify his story that he was a friend of her mother, the eleven-year-old had lifted her chin defiantly and told the officers that he was a complete stranger and that he had tried to kidnap her.

  J.T.’s mind went numb at the idea.

  Now it was only a matter of time before the Ottawa Hills Police Department matched one J. T. West, attempted kidnapper, with Joshua Thomas Westwood, wanted murderer.

  On a seat nearby, some poor Joe
slept off his drug of choice, an occasional snore that sounded remarkably like a death rattle punctuating the overall silence of the room.

  J.T. found it ironic that he’d been talking about turning himself in just two days ago. Finally facing what he’d been running from for so long. Wanting to work toward proving his innocence.

  Somehow he’d never seen everything going down like this.

  Leah…

  His stomach clenched at the thought of her reaction when she heard the news. First she had her father’s health scare to contend with. Now she had to face that her daughter was responsible for putting him behind bars…perhaps for life. He grimaced. If he was lucky. If he wasn’t faced with execution by lethal injection when they transferred him back to Arizona.

  The wild card in the entire situation was how quickly he would be sprung. The longer he stayed penned up, the more likely it became that the police would link him to his past.

  LEAH WASN’T HAVING MUCH LUCK with the desk sergeant at the police station. Somewhere in the back of her mind she knew it didn’t help that she looked like hell and that her movements were frantic, her demeanor panicky. All she could think about was that somewhere in the low building J.T. was locked up and she was responsible for it, no matter how indirectly.

  “You’ve got to listen to me,” she pleaded, her hands white where she had them pressed against the desk. “J. T. West is innocent. My daughter made a mistake.” Her words were falling on deaf ears. “If you don’t believe me, call the school principal. I contacted her ahead of time to inform the school I was having a friend pick up my daughter—”

  “Leah?”

  She swung around to face her ex-husband. She instantly relaxed even though his stony expression sent uneasiness swimming through her bloodstream. “Oh, thank God, you’re here.” She looked around him to where Sami was trying her best to look invisible.

  Leah grabbed her daughter by the shoulder and brought her to stand in front of her. “What were you thinking?”

  Dan placed his hands on Sami’s slender shoulders. “No, Leah, I think the question here is what were you thinking?”

  Leah slowly rose, meeting her ex-husband’s steady gaze. “Excuse me?”

  A muscle ticked in Dan’s jaw. “You sent a complete stranger to pick up our daughter. What would you have her think?”

  So Sami had told her father the truth. At least she wasn’t sticking to her kidnapper story. But that didn’t make the current situation any more bearable. J.T. was sitting in a jail cell, his very life on the line.

  She looked into her ex-husband’s irate face, anger beginning to replace her former panic. “J. T. West is not a stranger. Not to me, not to our daughter. And Sami’s well aware of that.”

  Dan blinked at her, then looked at their daughter. “Is that true, Sami?”

  For a moment Leah was afraid her daughter would play dumb. That she would claim she’d been momentarily confused, hadn’t immediately recognized him, something to make the situation easier on her. Then her face fell and she dropped her gaze. “He’s the man I told you about, Daddy. The one who came over and fixed our washing machine.”

  Leah stared at her husband hopefully, watching as disappointment flickered over his features. “Now, can you please do something about getting J.T. out of here?” she asked.

  “WEST!”

  J.T. squinted at the officer unlocking the cell door with a clank of metal against metal.

  “Charges have been dropped. You’re free to go.”

  Free to go…

  The words emerged so far from the ones he had expected to hear that for a moment he couldn’t move. Then he was striding toward the door with purpose. The sooner he was out of the station the better. He didn’t know why they hadn’t discovered his secret, but he wasn’t waiting around to find out.

  LEAH WAS LONG PAST READY to jump out of her skin, her legs beginning to ache from all the pacing she’d done in the past few hours. Dan had explained the situation to the desk sergeant, who unsurprisingly knew Dan’s name, and then another officer was called to release J.T.

  She caught sight of her daughter who was sitting on a chair set against the far wall. The bow that had held her light brown hair had come loose and strands hung in front of her sulky face.

  Leah took her thumbnail out from between her teeth and moved to stand in front of Dan. “I want you to take Sami home with you tonight.”

  Her daughter’s gaze flew to her, but Leah refused to meet it, incapable of civilly addressing her daughter in that one moment.

  “Can’t do it, Lee,” Dan said, his expression having returned to stony after arranging to have J.T. released. Apparently he was waiting around to see this “friend” of hers that their daughter disliked so much. “I’m neck deep in this murder case right now. It was all I could do to get the judge to call a recess until tomorrow morning so I could pick up Sami at the school.”

  “I don’t care what you have going on, Dan. I don’t think it’s a good idea for Sami to be anywhere near me right now. Rearrange your schedule. Take her to your parents. I don’t care. Just be a goddamn parent for once instead of relying on me to take up the slack.”

  He blinked at her, wariness in his eyes.

  Leah was distantly aware of how cold her words sounded, but she couldn’t help herself. She could take her daughter’s indifference and all around bad behavior when it was directed toward her, but what she had done to J.T….

  She shuddered as she thought of the chain of events Sami could have set off with her little stunt.

  She would deal with her daughter tomorrow, when she had a clearer head. Right now she needed to focus on J.T. To see if there was some way to undo the damage that had been done.

  Dan gave Leah one last look then glanced at their daughter. “Let’s go, Sami.”

  The girl slowly got up and took her father’s hand, both of them staring at Leah as if she were the enemy.

  “You and me,” she said to her daughter, “we’re going to have a long talk when you get home. And need I say that it’s not going to be pretty?”

  Sami didn’t reveal if she’d heard her one way or the other as Dan turned and they walked toward the door.

  There was movement behind her. Leah turned to find J.T. striding toward her looking better than any man had a right to.

  Her stomach bottomed out as she flung herself into his arms, holding him tight.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he said evenly, his hands fiercely holding her to his side.

  HE WAS LEAVING HER AGAIN….

  Leah knew J.T. was right. It was only a matter of time before the authorities came knocking at her door looking for him.

  But she couldn’t bear the thought of being without him. And as irrational as the emotion was, she couldn’t help feeling that he was leaving her all over again.

  Dusk was settling over the impossibly flat farmland surrounding them, the empty two-lane road seeming to point like an arrow away from her. After picking him up at the station, she’d taken him to retrieve his bike, then together they had gone to the house where he had just finished up his work so he could collect his duffel and sleeping bags. It chilled Leah to the core to know that this was how he’d lived his life for the past ten years. That all he had to his name could be strapped to the back of his bike.

  He had followed her home and together they had ridden to the same spot where they had made love that first time since he’d come back into her life. She wasn’t wearing his leather coat this time, but her own windbreaker. And the spring air seemed to chill her to the bone where she sat on the bike next to where he stood.

  “Where will you go?” she whispered, breathing in his profile as he considered the road to the west.

  He slowly moved his gaze to her face. “Phoenix.”

  She shuddered and shoved her hands deeper into her pockets. What ifs piled up in her mind like unwanted pages from a newspaper. What if the authorities were waiting for him to come back and arrested him on sight? What if he wasn�
�t able to prove his innocence? What if the true killer caught up with him first and got rid of him, too?

  She shuddered so violently she nearly slipped from the bike.

  J.T.’s fingers cupped her chin. She tried to fight him as he lifted her face to look into his.

  “Take me with you,” she whispered fervently.

  She thought of her father in the hospital—she’d called Rachel to find out that he’d come through surgery okay and was now in Recovery. She thought of her daughter who, it appeared, would stop at nothing to prevent Leah from moving on with her life. She thought of her business plans and her sister and her house.

  And knew in that one moment that she would give it all up to be by J.T.’s side.

  He gave her a smile, one full of grief and sadness and admiration. “I can’t do that, Leah.”

  Her chest tightened with emotion. “Yes, you can. Just let me stop by the house and pack a few things. I have money, too. We can just ride off into the sunset and never look back.”

  “And Sami?” he murmured.

  Leah gazed at the smears of red and purple on the horizon. “Her father can look after her.”

  He turned her face back to his. “Could you really live without knowing how your daughter was doing? Without being a part of her life?”

  The swirling emotions in her stomach balled up into her throat on a sob. No, she couldn’t. No matter what her daughter had done, how awful she had been, she couldn’t just leave her behind.

  “I want you to promise me that you’ll follow up with the police on that break-in,” J.T. said quietly. “If anything happens out of the ordinary, call 911 immediately.”

  She stared at him, unable to compute that he was worried about her when he had so much to be worried about for himself.

  “I’ll be back, Leah,” he said quietly.

  She wildly searched his face, wanting so badly to believe him but afraid to.

  He bent to kiss her, his mouth hot and gentle and so full of love the tears burning the back of her eyelids ran down her cheeks unchecked.

  “How can I believe that?” she whispered. “If you’re not able to clear your name, how do I know you won’t stay away in some outdated chivalrous manner to protect me? What if you go to prison? How will I know?”