by Diana Palmer
He paused at the door of his pickup truck and looked down at her. “I like kids,” he said.
“So do I,” she replied seriously, and without joking. “I’ve just never had the opportunity to become a parent.”
“You don’t have to be married to have kids,” he pointed out.
She gave him a harsh glare. “I am the product of generations of Baptist ministers,” she told him. “My father was the only one of five brothers who went into business instead. You try having a modern attitude with a mother who taught Sunday School and uncles who spent their lives counseling young women whose lives were destroyed by unexpected pregnancies.”
“I guess it would be rough,” he said.
She smiled. “You grew up with parents who were free thinkers, didn’t you?” she asked, curious.
He grimaced. He put her into the truck and got in beside her before he answered. “My father is an agnostic. He doesn’t believe in anything except the power of the almighty dollar. My mother is just like him. They wanted me to associate with the right people and help them do it. I stayed with a friend’s parents for a while and all but got adopted by them—he was a mechanic and they had a small ranch. I helped in the mechanic’s shop. Then I went into the service, came back and tried to work things out with my real parents, but it wasn’t possible. I ran away from home, fresh out of the Army Rangers.”
“You were overseas during the Bosnia conflict, weren’t you?” she asked.
He snapped his seat belt a little violently. “I was a desk clerk,” he said with disgust. “I washed out of combat training. I couldn’t make the grade. I ended up back in the regular Army doing clerical jobs. I never even saw combat. Not in the Army,” he added.
“Oh.”
“I left home, came down here to become a cowboy barely knowing a cow from a bull. The friends that I lived with had a small ranch, but I mostly stayed in town, working at the shop. We went out to the ranch on weekends, and I wasn’t keen on livestock back then. Mr. Parks took me on anyway. He knew all along that I had no experience, but he put me to work with an old veteran cowhand named Cal Lucas who taught me everything I know about cattle.”
She grinned. “It took guts to do that.”
He laughed. “I guess so. I bluffed a lot, although I am a good mechanic. Then I got in with this Sunday merc crew and went down to Africa with them one week on a so-called training mission. All we did was talk to some guys in a village about their problems with foreign relief shipments. But before we could do anything, we ran afoul of government troops and got sent home.” He sighed. “I bragged about how much I’d learned, what a great merc I was.” He glanced at her as they drove toward San Antonio, but she wasn’t reacting critically. Much the reverse. He relaxed a little. “Then one of the drug lords came storming up to Mr. Parks’s house with his men and I got a dose of reality—an automatic in my face. Mr. Parks jerked two combat knives out of his sleeves and threw them at the two men who were holding me. Put them both down in a heartbeat.” He shook his head, still breathless at the memory. “I never saw anything like it, before or since. I thought he was just a rancher. Turns out he went with Micah Steele and Eb Scott on real merc missions overseas. He listened to me brag and watched me strut, and never said a word. I’d never have known, if the drug dealers hadn’t attacked. We got in a firefight with them later.”
“We heard about that, even up in San Antonio,” she said.
He nodded. “It got around. Mr. Parks and Eb Scott and Micah Steele got together to take out a drug distribution center near Mr. Parks’s property. I swallowed my pride and asked to go along. They let me.” He sighed. “I grew up in the space of an hour. I saw men shot and killed, I had my life saved by Mr. Parks again in the process. Afterward, I never bragged or strutted again. Mr. Parks said he was proud of me.” He flushed a little. “If my father had been like him, I guess I’d still be at home. He’s a real man, Mr. Parks. I’ve never known a better one.”
“He likes you, too.”
He laughed self-consciously. “He does. He’s offered me a few acres of land and some cattle, if I’d like to start my own herd. I’m thinking about it. I love ranching. I think I’m getting good at it.”
“So we’d live on a cattle ranch.” She pursed her lips mischievously. “I guess I could learn to help with branding. I mean, we wouldn’t want our kids to think their mother was a sissy, would we?” she asked, laughing.
Harley gave her a sideways glance and grinned. She really was fun to be with. He thought he might take her by the ranch one day while she was still in Jacobsville and introduce her to Mr. Parks. He was sure Mr. Parks would like her.
Five
The restaurant Harley took Alice to was a very nice one, with uniformed waiters and chandeliers.
“Oh, Harley, this wasn’t necessary,” she said quickly, flushing. “A hamburger would have been fine!”
He smiled. “We all got a Christmas bonus from Mr. Parks,” he explained. “I don’t drink or smoke or gamble, so I can afford a few luxuries from time to time.”
“You don’t have any vices? Wow. Now I really think we should set the date.” She glanced at him under her lashes. “I don’t drink, smoke or gamble, either,” she added hopefully.
He nodded. “We’ll be known as the most prudish couple in Jacobsville.”
“Kilraven’s prudish, too,” she pointed out.
“Yes, but he won’t be living in Jacobsville much longer. He’s been reassigned, we’re hearing. After all, he’s really a fed.”
She studied the menu. “I’ll bet he could be a heartbreaker with a little practice.”
“He’s breaking Winnie Sinclair’s heart, anyway, by leaving,” Harley said, repeating the latest gossip. “She’s really got a case on him. But he thinks she’s too young.”
“He’s only in his thirties,” she pointed out.
“Yes, but Winnie’s the same age as her brother’s new wife,” he replied. “Boone Sinclair thought Keely Welsh was too young for him, too.”
“But he gave in, in the end. You know, the Ballenger brothers in Jacobsville both married younger women. They’ve been happy together, all these years.”
“Yes, they have.”
The waiter came and took their orders. Alice had a shrimp cocktail and a large salad with coffee. Harley gave her a curious look.
“Aren’t you hungry?” he asked.
She laughed. “I told you in Jacobsville, I love salads,” she confessed. “I mostly eat them at every meal.” She indicated her slender body. “I guess that’s how I keep the weight off.”
“I can eat as much as I like. I run it all off,” he replied. “Working cattle is not for the faint of heart or the out-of-condition rancher.”
She grinned. “I believe it.” She smiled at the waiter as he deposited coffee in their china cups and left. “Why did you want to be a cowboy?” she asked him.
“I loved old Western movies on satellite,” he said simply. “Gary Cooper and John Wayne and Randolph Scott. I dreamed of living on a cattle ranch and having animals around. I don’t even mind washing Bob when she gets dirty, or Puppy Dog.”
“What’s Puppy Dog’s name?” she asked.
“Puppy Dog.”
She gave him an odd look. “Who’s on first, what’s on second, I don’t know’s on third?”
“I don’t give a damn’s our shortstop?” he finished the old Abbott and Costello comedy routine. He laughed. “No, it’s not like that. His name really is Puppy Dog. We have a guy in town, Tom Walker. He had an outlandish dog named Moose that saved his daughter from a rattlesnake. Moose sired a litter of puppies. Moose is dead now, but Puppy Dog, who was one of his offspring, went to live with Lisa Monroe, before she married my boss. She called him Puppy Dog and figured it was as good a name as any. With a girl dog named Bob, my boss could hardly disagree,” he added on a chuckle.
“I see.”
“Do you like animals?”
“I love them,” she said. “But I can’t have
animals in the apartment building where I live. I had cats and dogs and even a parrot when I lived at home.”
“Do you have family?”
She shook her head. “My dad was the only one left. He died a few months ago. I have uncles, but we’re not close.”
“Did you love your parents?”
She smiled warmly. “Very much. My dad was a banker. We went fishing together on weekends. My mother was a housewife who never wanted to run a corporation or be a professional. She just wanted a houseful of kids, but I was the only child she was able to have. She spoiled me rotten. Dad tried to counterbalance her.” She sipped coffee. “I miss them both. I wish I’d had brothers or sisters.” She looked at him. “Do you have siblings?”
“I had a sister,” he said quietly.
“Had?”
He nodded. He fingered his coffee cup. “She died when she was seven years old.”
She hesitated. He looked as if this was a really bad memory. “How?”
He smiled sadly. “My father backed over her on his way down the driveway, in a hurry to get to a meeting.”
She grimaced. “Poor man.”
He cocked his head and studied her. “Why do you say that?”
“We had a little girl in for autopsy, about two years ago,” she began. “Her dad was hysterical. Said the television fell over on her.” She lifted her eyes. “You know, we don’t just take someone’s word for how an accident happens, even if we believe it. We run tests to check out the explanation and make sure it’s feasible. Well, we pushed over a television of the same size as the one in the dad’s apartment. Sure enough, it did catastrophic damage to a dummy.” She shook her head. “Poor man went crazy. I mean, he really lost the will to live. His wife had died. The child was all he had left. He locked himself in the bathroom with a shotgun one night and pulled the trigger with his toe.” She made a harsh sound. “Not the sort of autopsy you want to try to sleep after.”
He was frowning.
“Sorry,” she said, wincing. “I tend to talk shop. I know it’s sickening, and here we are in a nice restaurant and all, and I did pour a glass of tea on a guy this week for doing the same thing to me…”
“I was thinking about the father,” he said, smiling to relieve her tension. “I was sixteen when it happened. I grieved for her, of course, but my life was baseball and girls and video games and hamburgers. I never considered how my father might have felt. He seemed to just get on with his life afterward. So did my mother.”
“Lots of people may seem to get over their grief. They don’t.”
He was more thoughtful than ever. “My mother had been a…lawyer,” he said after a slight hesitation that Alice didn’t notice. “She was very correct and proper. After my sister died, she changed. Cocktail parties, the right friends, the best house, the fanciest furniture…she went right off the deep end.”
“You didn’t connect it?”
He grimaced. “That was when I ran away from home and went to live with the mechanic and his wife,” he confessed. “It was my senior year of high school. I graduated soon after, went into the Army and served for two years. When I got out, I went home. But I only stayed for a couple of weeks. My parents were total strangers. I didn’t even know them anymore.”
“That’s sad. Do you have any contact with them?”
He shook his head. “I just left. They never even looked for me.”
She slid her hand impulsively over his. His fingers turned and enveloped hers. His light blue eyes searched her darker ones curiously. “I never thought of crime scene investigators as having feelings,” he said. “I thought you had to be pretty cold-blooded to do that sort of thing.”
She smiled. “I’m the last hope of the doomed,” she said. “The conscience of the murdered. The flickering candle of the soul of the deceased. I do my job so that murderers don’t flourish, so that killers don’t escape justice. I think of my job as a holy grail,” she said solemnly. “I hide my feelings. But I still have them. It hurts to see a life extinguished. Any life. But especially a child’s.”
His eyes began to twinkle with affection. “Alice, you’re one of a kind.”
“Oh, I do hope so,” she said after a minute. “Because if there was another one of me, I might lose my job. Not many people would give twenty-four hours a day to the work.” She hesitated and grinned. “Well, not all the time, obviously. Just occasionally, I get taken out by handsome, dashing men.”
He laughed. “Thanks.”
“Actually I mean it. I’m not shrewd enough to lie well.”
The waiter came and poured more coffee and took their orders for dessert. When they were eating it, Alice frowned thoughtfully.
“It bothers me.”
“What does?” he asked.
“The car. Why would a man steal a car from an upstanding, religious woman and then get killed?”
“He didn’t know he was going to get killed.”
She forked a piece of cheesecake and looked at it. “What if he had a criminal record? What if he got involved with her and wanted to change, to start over? What if he had something on his conscience and he wanted to spill the beans?” She looked up. “And somebody involved knew it and had to stop him?”
“That’s a lot of if’s,” he pointed out.
She nodded. “Yes, it is. We still don’t know who the car was driven by, and the woman’s story that it was stolen is just a little thin.” She put the fork down. “I want to talk to her. But I don’t know how to go about it. She works for a dangerous politician, I’m told. The feds have backed off. I won’t do myself any favors if I charge in and start interrogating the senator’s employee.”
He studied her. “Let me see if I can find a way. I used to know my way around political circles. Maybe I can help.”
She laughed. “You know a U.S. senator?” she teased.
He pursed his lips. “Maybe I know somebody who’s related to one,” he corrected.
“It would really help me a lot, if I could get to her before the feds do. I think she might tell me more than she’d tell a no-nonsense man.”
“Give me until tomorrow. I’ll think of something.”
She smiled. “You’re a doll.”
He chuckled. “So are you.”
She flushed. “Thanks.”
They exchanged a long, soulful glance, only interrupted by the arrival of the waiter to ask if they wanted anything else and present the check. Alice’s heart was doing double-time on the way out of the restaurant.
Harley walked her to the door of the motel. “I had a good time,” he told her. “The best I’ve had in years.”
She looked up, smiling. “Me, too. I turn off most men. The job, you know. I do work with people who aren’t breathing.”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said.
She felt the same tension that was visible in his tall, muscular body. He moved a step closer. She met him halfway.
He bent and drew his mouth softly over hers. When she didn’t object, his arms went around her and pulled her close. He smiled as he increased the gentle pressure of his lips and felt hers tremble just a little before they relaxed and answered the pressure.
His body was already taut with desire, but it was too soon for a heated interlude. He didn’t want to rush her. She was the most fascinating woman he’d ever known. He had to go slow.
He drew back after a minute and his hands tightened on her arms. “Suppose we take in another movie next week?” he asked.
She brightened. “A whole movie?”
He laughed softly. “At least.”
“I’d like that.”
“We’ll try another restaurant. Just to sample the ones that are available until we find one we approve of,” he teased.
“What a lovely idea! We can write reviews and put them online, too.”
He pursed his lips. “What an entertaining thought.”
“Nice reviews,” she said, divining his mischievous thoughts.
“Spoilsport.”
>
He winked at her, and she blushed.
“Don’t forget,” she said. “About finding me a way to interview that woman, okay?”
“Okay,” he said. “Good night.”
“Good night.”
She stood, sighing, as he walked back to his truck. But when he got inside and started it, he didn’t drive away. She realized belatedly that he was waiting until she went inside and locked the door. She laughed and waved. She liked that streak of protectiveness in him. It might not be modern, but it certainly made her feel cherished. She slept like a charm.
The next morning, he called her on his cell phone before she left the motel. “I’ve got us invited to a cocktail party tonight,” he told her. “A fundraiser for the senator.”
“Us? But we can’t contribute to that sort of thing! Can we?” she added.
“We don’t have to. We’re representing a contributor who’s out of the country,” he added with a chuckle. “Do you have a nice cocktail dress?”
“I do, but it’s in San Antonio, in my apartment.”
“No worries. You can go up and get it and I’ll pick you up there at six.”
“Fantastic! I’ll wear something nice and I won’t burp the theme songs to any television shows,” she promised.
“Oh, that’s good to know,” he teased. “Got to get back to work. I told Mr. Parks I had to go to San Antonio this afternoon, so he’s giving me a half day off. I didn’t tell him why I needed the vacation time, but I think he suspects something.”
“Don’t mention this to anybody else, okay?” she asked. “If Jon Blackhawk or Kilraven find out, my goose will be cooked.”
“I won’t tell a soul.”
“See you later. I owe you one, Harley.”
“Yes,” he drawled softly. “You do, don’t you? I’ll phone you later and get directions to your apartment.”
“Okay.”
She laughed and hung up.
The senator lived in a mansion. It was two stories high, with columns, and it had a front porch bigger than Alice’s whole apartment. Lights burned in every room, and in the gloomy, rainy night, it looked welcoming and beautiful.
