Truly, Madly, Dangerously

by Linda Winstead Jones

  “Son of a bitch,” she said softly. “Now they’re shooting at us.”

  Chapter 11

  The official take on the shooting was that a hunter had been off his mark. Way, way off his mark. The bullet in the seat of Truman’s borrowed truck came from a rifle, and it had missed both of them by mere inches.

  It had been an exciting weekend all the way around. On Sunday, a fisherman had found Conrad Hudson’s wallet and favorite baseball cap—both of them soaked and muddy—near an isolated launch used by local fishermen. Evans was going to arrange for the lake to be dragged, no small feat, since Miranda Lake was a good-sized body of water.

  A gardening glove that appeared to be a match to the one found in Truman’s pickup truck had been found near Jason Davenport’s body. That fact was supposed to be confidential, but in a small town like Garth nothing stayed confidential very long. One of the deputies who knew and liked Truman called to give him a head’s-up.

  Evans looked at Sadie a little differently upon hearing the news about the close call. More thoughtfully, perhaps. But he apparently couldn’t decide if the shooting was deliberate or a stunt she and Truman put together to make it look as though she was in danger. If he was smart, he would also be questioning the ease and convenience of finding those gloves that pointed to Sadie. She was smarter than that, and while he might not know whether or not she was capable of murder, he must certainly realize that she wasn’t stupid.

  Sadie knew one thing for sure. It was no longer safe for her to live with Lillian and Jennifer. What if the next time a bullet was fired at the apartment over the motel office? Or into the café when it was filled with customers? She couldn’t stay in Truman’s room, either. She didn’t want to make him a target. It appeared that at this point everyone who came within spitting distance of her was in danger.

  “They’re keeping both trucks, but I have my cabin back.” Truman jangled the keys at Sadie as he climbed into the passenger seat of her Toyota.

  “Good,” she said lightly as she sat behind the wheel. “You can go home.”

  “You’re coming with me.”

  Her heart lurched, just a little. She wanted to do just that, more than anything. “That’s not a good idea. I need to rent a house, or something, just for a few days. I don’t mind being on my own,” she said too quickly, “and I’m sure that arrangement would be safer for everyone.”

  Truman reached across and cupped the back of her head, then pulled her slightly toward him. She loved the way his hand felt on her head, the way his eyes softened and flashed and hinted at the fire within.

  “Let’s get this over with once and for all, sugar lips,” he said in a terse voice. “I don’t care what you want, I’m sticking to you like glue until this is over. I’m not going away, I’m not burying my head in the sand, I’m not running off just because things have gotten a little hairy. Got it?”

  Her voice was small and oddly relieved when she answered, “Got it.”

  “You don’t decide what’s best for me, you don’t worry about what’s safest for me, you don’t try to push me away. Cut it out.”

  “Okay.”

  “You’re not doing this alone.”

  Sadie didn’t mean to cry. She never cried! But tears slipped down her cheeks, not because she was scared or angry, but because for the first time in her life she really and truly felt that she was not alone.

  “Don’t cry.” Truman wiped away her tears with a gentle hand. “I’ll take you home and I’ll feed you, and then I’ll get you naked and make you forget what a terrible day it’s been.”

  She managed a small smile. “It hasn’t all been terrible.”

  “No, it hasn’t.”

  Sadie had been shot at before. A single off-the-mark bullet wouldn’t bring tears to her eyes. She’d been in trouble before. More than once. A sticky situation she knew she’d eventually work her way out of would certainly not make her cry.

  It was Truman, she knew that. He was more than a friend, he was more than a lover, he was more than good back-up.

  “I’m glad you’re here.” She leaned in and kissed him, hungry for that simple touch and the warmth that spread through her body.

  “Me, too,” he said, his lips soft against hers.

  She let him kiss her, for a moment, and then she pulled slightly away. “How can you say that? I’m a walking disaster area. Two, possibly three people are dead. Two trucks, both of them yours, have been impounded. Last time I talked to Aunt Lillian, she was in tears.” She didn’t tell him why. Not yet. Like it or not, she was going to have to tell him soon. “I wanted to help Kathy, and instead I pushed too hard and drove her away. People are talking, and I really don’t care what they say about me, but damn it, I do care what they say about you. Face it, Truman, since I’ve come home everything I’ve touched has turned to crap.”

  “Not everything,” he said, his voice husky and promising.

  After a quick trip to the motel in order to pack her clothes, Sadie said goodbye to Lillian and Jennifer. She didn’t tell them that she’d been shot at—though they were bound to hear about the incident sooner or later—or explain that she needed to stay away from her family so none of the danger she had found here would touch them. If she’d been leaving with anyone other than Truman, Lillian probably would’ve tied Sadie down to keep her at the motel.

  But Lillian liked Truman. More, she liked the idea of Truman and Sadie together.

  Truman did everything he’d promised. Confiscating her car keys—an entirely macho move she actually let him get away with—he took her home. He fed her. He ran a warm bath and stripped off her clothes and when she was settled in the big bathtub he joined her in the water.

  How quickly she had gotten accustomed to this. Truman’s body against hers, his hands on her skin, the bone-deep feeling that she wasn’t alone anymore. She leaned against his chest, and his arms wrapped loosely around her.

  It was nice. All of it. The touching, the sense of belonging, the down-deep sense of home she’d felt since walking into this cabin. No, the sense of home that had scared her since she’d first laid eyes on Truman’s face.

  “Tell me what you want,” she whispered. It was easiest to ask this way, when she could feel him but could not see his face.

  His hands skimmed down her body and came to rest between her thighs. Large and callused and very talented, they began to caress and arouse. “You know what I want.”

  She laughed. “No, that’s not what I mean.”

  “No?”

  “I’m trying to have a serious conversation here, and you’re distracting me.” He stroked a bit harder and her body responded in a way he could not mistake. She lurched a little and her breath caught in her throat. “Not what do you want now, right this minute, but…what do you want from your life?”

  His hands came back up to caress her wet, soapy breasts. “That does sound like a serious question.”

  “It is. I think I know, but…” What if she was wrong?

  It was a moment before Truman answered. “I don’t think about what I want much anymore.”

  “Why not?”

  Again there was a pause, as if he were carefully considering his answer. “Because when I blew out my knee I discovered that plans don’t mean anything. You have to take life as it comes and make the best of it.”

  “Very philosophical of you, McCain.”

  “Realistic,” he said, and then he rested his mouth on her shoulder. The lips moved, very gently. His tongue tasted and teased.

  His hands slipped down to her belly, and rested there. “What about you? What do you want?”

  “I don’t know,” she whispered.

  “You must want something.”

  A shudder worked down her spine as the truth hit her. “No, I don’t want anything, not anymore.” She’d been hiding in her work, afraid even to consider what might be waiting for her down the line. Did she expect to be working for Benning when she was fifty? Sixty? Did she even plan, deep in her heart, th
at she’d live that long? “I don’t have any plans at all.”

  “Maybe we can work on that.”

  “Maybe.”

  One hand parted her thighs and touched her where she had already begun to throb for him. He stroked, and kissed the back of her neck, and trailed the tip of his tongue over her shoulder. This time she didn’t tell him to stop; she didn’t want him to stop.

  What did she want? Simple. She wanted this. Truman and this cabin by the water and his hands and his laugh and the way he looked at her. She wanted to be able to tell him that she loved him, to know that she did love him, and she wanted to hear him say those words to her. She wanted not to be afraid to tell him what she felt. Her body arched up to meet his stroke. So close…

  “No,” she whispered as she moved away and turned to face him.

  “No?” He leaned back in the tub, aroused and content and sexy as hell. “Again with the no?”

  “Not without you. Not this time.”

  Truman reached for her and she slithered against his wet chest and kissed him, while she wrapped her legs around his hips. Her body wanted to join with his now, wanted to rise up and slide down and take him in fast and hard.

  But she wasn’t yet sure that she wanted babies named Garfield or Cleveland. She wasn’t even sure that she’d ever make a decent mother.

  She didn’t know that she’d ever be the woman who could love a man enough—and trust that love enough—to look him in the eye and give herself over to him, with her heart and her soul as well as her body.

  So she stroked Truman’s arousal with the palm of her hand, and kissed him so deeply she forgot where and who she was. Their tongues danced and they swayed together so that water billowed over the edge and splashed on the floor. It would be so easy to take him into her body here and now…

  They stood, stepped from the tub, and headed for the bed and the drawer where the condoms were stored. Water rolled off their bodies and onto the hardwood floor and the rug and each other, and when they fell onto the bed and Truman reached for the drawer Sadie laughed lightly and stroked him one more time.

  Quickly sheathed and still dripping wet, Truman hovered over her. “What do you want, Sadie?”

  This time she didn’t hesitate to answer. “I want you.”

  “Don’t you have any ice cream?” Sadie asked.

  Truman laughed. “You already ate it all.”

  She closed the freezer, reached into the cabinet at the right of the fridge and grabbed a bag of cookies, and walked into the great room, where Truman sat on the couch half-dressed.

  She was half-dressed, herself. His shirt was longer than some dresses she owned.

  He waited on the sofa; she grabbed her notebook and pen off the counter and sat in a fat chair.

  Truman lifted his eyebrows. “We’re here to work, McCain,” she said, popping a cookie into her mouth and poising her pen over the notebook. “We need a little distance.”

  He stretched out on the couch, long and hard and oh, beautiful. “You’d better come over here. I think best when I’m…”

  “You do not,” she interrupted before he could say more, laughing. “Cookie?” she offered him one, and when he sat up with a sigh she tossed it to him. He caught the cookie easily.

  “Jason’s drug connections,” she said as she made a notation at the top of the page.

  “Possible, but all we have is Bradley Johnson’s word. There’s not that much drug activity in this county. A couple of small meth labs, some kids caught with marijuana. That’s it. Even if Jason was involved, where’s the motive for murder?”

  “Think Evans will follow up on it?”

  “Yeah, I just don’t think he’ll find anything.”

  Sadie tapped her pen against the paper. “What about personal stuff? Surely Jason has an old girlfriend who would make a decent suspect.”

  “Not that I know of. Evans is looking into that, I’m sure.”

  Sadie tucked her legs beneath her and took another cookie from the bag. She drew a cartoony fish next to Jason’s name. It didn’t help.

  “Hearn,” Truman prompted. “It started with him.”

  Taking a deep breath, Sadie wrote Aidan Hearn half way down the page. “What about his wife? I hear she’s…”

  “She didn’t do it,” Truman said before Sadie could say more.

  “How can you be so sure? And do you realize, Truman McCain, that you defended her much more quickly than you defended me when Evans showed up accusing me of murder?”

  He remained calm. “She’s afraid of being alone. It’s the reason she didn’t leave him years ago. Hearn treated her like dirt on the bottom of his shoe, and she stuck with him. Unless there’s a powerful motive I know nothing about, she didn’t do it.”

  “Fine, but I’m not taking her name off the list until we have better proof than your gut instinct.”

  “My gut instinct is pretty good, most days.”

  She glanced at Truman, and caught him smiling at her. “I imagine it is.”

  “My money is on the other woman.”

  Sadie’s heart leapt. She was going to have to tell him, and now was apparently the time. “Until a number of months ago, my aunt Lillian was seeing Hearn,” she said.

  She waited for him to jump off the couch, horrified at the revelation. Instead he gave her a calm, cool, “Yeah, but we know she didn’t do it.”

  Sadie’s spine straightened and she leaned toward the couch. “You knew?”

  “Yeah. It wasn’t exactly common knowledge, but it wasn’t quite the secret Miz Lillian and Hearn thought it to be, either. This is a small town, Sadie. Nothing goes completely unnoticed.”

  “Does Evans know?”

  “Probably not.”

  She relaxed. “You didn’t tell him.”

  “He didn’t ask.” Truman shrugged his shoulders. “Besides, it was over almost a year ago. We need to concentrate on who he might’ve been seeing now.”

  “Like bubblehead Rhea.”

  “Yep.”

  Sadie carefully wrote “Rhea” on the page. Beside it, she drew a garishly high-heeled shoe and a fat pair of lips.

  “Does Jen know?” she asked softly, her gaze on the paper.

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

  If Jen had found out about the affair, even well after the fact, would she have reacted violently? She couldn’t bring herself to write her cousin’s name on the page.

  Truman asked for another cookie, and Sadie tossed it to him. “Either a woman he was involved with killed him,” he said, “or he was involved in something we don’t know about, or a serial killer coming through town just happened to pick on him.”

  Sadie’s head popped up.

  “I was just kidding about that last one.”

  “I didn’t even think…”

  Something about the expression on her face or the tone of her voice made Truman sit straighter and take notice. “Sadie? What is it?”

  “Kathy.”

  “The waitress?”

  Sadie set her notebook aside. “She said she was abused by her stepfather. If that’s true, and from the way she told the story I believe it is, then she could very well have a serious mental problem, especially where older men are concerned.”

  “Hearn picks her up or they know one another somehow. She goes to his room, he makes a move, she kills him, either in cold blood or flashing back to what happened to her in the past.”

  Sadie sat back and drew in her legs. “Yeah. But that doesn’t account for Jason or the missing Conrad. Unless they somehow both threatened her. I just don’t know. And why would she go to so much trouble to pin the murder on me?” She’d tried to befriend the girl, she’d done her best to help. “I just wanted to help her.”

  “No good deed goes unpunished, or so they say,” Truman reached for the phone on the end table. “Given Kathy’s past and her sudden disappearance, I think Evans might want to hear this tonight.”

  Sadie nodded and wrapped her arms around herself,
suddenly cold. Logic or not, she couldn’t see Kathy Carson—or whoever she was—killing anyone…but then, she’d already confessed to one murder—that of her stepfather. Was she replaying that night? Killing men who touched her again and again.

  “Yeah. I don’t think he’d appreciate it if we waited until morning.”

  The earlier phone conversation with Evans—where he’d shared Sadie’s suspicions about the girl who’d worked at the motel a few days and then disappeared—stayed on Truman’s mind long into the night, but that wasn’t what kept him awake. One way or another, the murder would be solved. Sadie would be cleared, and all the talk she worried about would died down. Some things wouldn’t go away so easily.

  A tumble or two with Sadie was one thing, but he had a feeling this relationship was turning into something more.

  Relationship. Scary word for a man who had decided years ago that in the long run, women simply weren’t worth the trouble.

  He hadn’t been serious about a woman since his divorce. It was easier that way. Sex was available without the forever after, and that was all he wanted or needed. He had even avoided anything resembling a regular sexual relationship, because he didn’t want any woman thinking he could give more than he was willing to offer.

  Which wasn’t much.

  Whenever anyone asked, he told people that Diana hadn’t been fond of the small-town life, that she wanted the money and fame that came with being married to a star quarterback. That’s what he’d told Sadie, when she’d asked. That’s what he’d told everyone.

  But the truth of the matter was, his marriage had begun falling apart long before the tackle that had ruined his knee and ended his career. Diana had never been happy. She’d always wanted more. More attention, more money. More men.

  He’d been such a putz. Until he’d been confronted with the truth with his own eyes, he’d actually believed that his wife loved him.

  Casual relationships that didn’t last were fine, but he’d given up on anything more a long time ago, and until now he had never considered taking that chance again. Sadie made him think about taking that chance, and he wasn’t sure he would thank her for that, when this was all over.