TAMING KNOX (Gray Wolf Security, Texas Book 3)

by Glenna Sinclair

  “You have to start the water. I can’t do it by myself.”

  “Okay.”

  I sat on the edge of the tub and turned the water on, adjusting it until it felt like I’d found the right temp. Stevie leaned over me and ran her fingers under the facet.

  “Hotter. Shawna always made it hotter.”

  “But I’m not Shawna.”

  “That’s the way I want it.”

  “Okay.” I turned the hot water just a hair, increasing the heat by maybe a degree.

  Stevie stuck her fingers in it again and nodded. “Better,” she said.

  We waited in silence while the tub filled. I looked at her, at the haunting gray eyes that were clearly her inheritance from her father and the deep, golden hair that must have come from her mother. She was going to be a knockout when she was older. And Mattie…she was as dark as her sister was pale. Mattie’s hair was so black it was almost blue, and her eyes were a deep, rich brown with just a hint of green in them. And her skin was a lovely shade of bronze, the kind of color that women lay on beaches and in tanning salons trying in vain to achieve.

  Two beautiful girls. But so different…

  “Daddy gets mad when those people come to the door.”

  “Hmmm?” I looked up at Stevie. “What people?”

  “Those people.” She gestured toward what must have been to her a representative of the front of the house. “They come all the time now that Mommy’s in heaven.”

  “Yeah?”

  “And Daddy gets mad, going off by himself instead of coming up to say goodnight.”

  “I’m sure he’ll come say goodnight.”

  “No, he won’t. He gets mad and he goes away.”

  I nodded because I couldn’t think of words that might be adequate.

  The tub was full. I turned off the water and watched as Stevie, very independently, climbed into the water and began to wash herself with the liquid soap that was sitting in a little basket hanging over the side of the tub. I offered to help, but she clearly wasn’t interested. Watching her, I remembered a set of photographs my sister sent to me last Christmas. Two blond-haired girls and a little boy with flaming red hair not unlike mine. My twin nieces—they must be two now—and my nephew—the three year old. I’d only glanced at the photos briefly before shoving them into a drawer. The one that burned itself on my memory was the family photograph, the one that not only pictured the three kids, but my sister and her husband.

  I hadn’t set eyes on Sherilynn in more than five years. My little sister, she was three years younger than me. She was like this puppy dog, always following me around. When I went to work for the mayor, she would show up on his doorstep every morning to walk with me to school and walk me home every afternoon. She was inconsolable when I told her I’d joined the Marines. She said she’d never survive without me.

  She survived just fine. In fact, she found consolation in the arms of my childhood sweetheart, the boy I’d been in love with since I was in fifth grade. We were supposed to get married, Drake and I. I was going to the Marines and he was going to finish college, then we were going to get married and start out lives together with all the advantages that those things could offer us. He would graduate and go to law school. I would finish my commitment to the Marines and then settle into the role of wife and mother. It was a perfect life.

  It was the life she was living.

  Stevie slapped my hand away when I tried to help her wash her hair. I hoped my sister’s brats were as unpleasant to her as this one was being to me.

  “Do you read a story before you go to sleep?” I asked.

  “Daddy does. I want Daddy to do it.”

  I grabbed a towel and held it up for her. “Well, then, I guess we’ll just get you dressed and put you to bed.”

  “You have to comb my hair and put it in a braid or it’ll get all tangled.”

  “I can do that.”

  Stevie went into the nursery and dressed in a cute little pink nightgown that had flowers all over it, then came back into the bathroom and perched on the edge of the counter. I carefully combed her hair, remembering how sensitive Sherilynn’s scalp had always been. I wondered if her little girls screamed the way she had when I combed her hair.

  Her hair twisted into a single, long plait, Stevie admired herself in the mirror, her eyes bright until she caught me watching her. Then the light disappeared and she abruptly headed off to bed. She wouldn’t let me tuck her in. She turned her back to me and refused to even acknowledge me, even when I leaned over her and whispered goodnight in her ear.

  I couldn’t hardly blame the kid. I’d rather have my father tuck me in when I was a kid, too.

  I paused at the crib to check on Mattie, then headed out, leaving the door cracked so the hall light would keep the room from total darkness. Then I went downstairs, wondering where Dunlap had gone. Almost immediately as I rounded the landing, I saw him in the kitchen, his dinner forgotten on the island. He was sitting at the breakfast nook, a bottle of expensive scotch on the table in front of him.

  The dim light coming in through the windows behind him backlit him, creating something of an aura around him. It showed of his build, the hills and valleys of his muscles and the lean line of his body. The highlights in his hair were almost glowing, but his face was in darkness, hiding his penetrating gray eyes and his scruff-covered jaw. His shoulders were slumped. He seemed low.

  Emotions were something I didn’t do. I seriously thought about turning and going back up those stairs.

  “The kids are in bed.”

  He grunted, but didn’t bother to look at me.

  “Should I leave you alone?” I asked, again my thoughts on turning and going back upstairs.

  “Why don’t you grab a glass and come join me.”

  I hesitated. Another of the new rules was that an operative shouldn’t drink while on the job. But, again, that meant a case where someone was in danger. As far as I knew, the only danger here was a kid having a temper tantrum.

  I crossed to the counter and grabbed a couple of glasses from a high cabinet, just above where the plates were kept. I kicked off my sandals and curled up on the bench across from Dunlap and watched him serve very generous helpings of the scotch.

  “Bad news?” I asked, flicking my nail against the legal papers he’d left sitting out on the table.

  He shrugged. “Papers delivered by a court server are never good news.”

  “True.”

  I lifted my glass to his and he touched it lightly in a simple toast. I watched him take a long swallow of the liquor, draining nearly half the glass in that one attempt. I sipped mine, enjoying the flavor of the expensive stuff.

  “My mother-in-law,” he said. He studied my face over his glass. “I’m sure she mentioned it to you when she hired your security firm, but she thinks I killed my wife.”

  “Is that what those are about?”

  He shook his head. “She can’t prove it. Even the coroner insists that it’s not possible for me to have killed Colby. But she won’t let it rest. She’s convinced that I’m a murderer and, therefore, shouldn’t have custody of my kids. We fought in court for months over both girls. The judge, the day before the Fourth of July, ruled that she had no standing. So I guess she’s decided to take another tactic.”

  “What’s that?”

  He shoved the papers across the table at me. “She’s saying that because Mattie isn’t my biological child, I shouldn’t have the right to keep custody of her.”

  My eyes cut sharply over him. I was a little surprised by the matter of fact way he renounced his genetic connection to his youngest daughter. But I could only guess that it hadn’t been much of a surprise when the baby was born with such dark features. Yet…I think most men would have lived in denial a bit more than that.

  “Don’t looked so shocked,” he said, taking another swallow of his drink. “Colby was a lot of things, but faithful wasn’t one of them.”

  “Do you think Julep has a case?�
�

  He snorted. “If that was an issue, it would have come up in the prior case. I initiated the process of adopting Mattie when she was just a fetus. Colby and I signed off on it when she was two weeks old. There’s nothing Julep can do about it now.”

  “Does she know that?”

  He shrugged, pouring himself more scotch. “Julep and Colby were the kind of mother and daughter who thought they had this amazing, close relationship. But in truth, there were always a lot of secrets between them. That was one.”

  He topped off my drink, too, even though I’d only had the one sip. I drank a little more, trying to gage his mood. I had more questions, but I didn’t want to piss the guy off. He was well on his way to being drunk, and I didn’t know him well enough to know what kind of a drunk he was.

  “I’m guessing your marriage was a rocky one?”

  He laughed. It was a deep, raucous laugh, but there was no humor to it.

  “Colby and I were deeply in love when we first met. The first three years of our marriage? We couldn’t get enough of each other. We were together constantly, always making all these plans, always touching, hardly ever getting out of bed. But then…” He shook his head. “Colby was not the maternal type. I knew that when we first got together. But I thought a baby would make our marriage perfect. I talked her into it, and she was absolutely miserable from the moment Stevie was conceived. I knew it was an absolute mistake when Stevie was born and the doctor set her on Colby’s chest, and Colby’s reaction was to demand they take that filthy beast off of her.”

  I had to admit to a little shock at hearing that. I couldn’t imagine any woman having such an immediate aversion to her own child. But there was still no humor in him.

  “She hated being a mother; she hated having Stevie around. Whenever she cried, she’d just roll over and press her pillows to her ears. All the childcare fell to me and that took up more of my time than she could stand. Colby complained constantly that I had no time for her. She hired a nanny without telling me and we fought. She moved to her mother’s for a short time, so disillusioned with me and what I’d done to our family by insisting she give birth to our child. And when she came back, she was drinking and going out at odd hours. She wouldn’t even look at Stevie, let alone take even the slightest interest in her.”

  He took another long drink of his scotch, staring into the depths of the amber liquid when he set his glass down again.

  “We should have split up then. We talked about it. But Colby insisted on trying to keep things together for reasons I will never understand. And then she got pregnant with Mattie.”

  He ran his fingers around the rim of his glass, the wheels of the past clearly turning in his head. He wouldn’t look at me. He just stared at the glass, at the liquid inside of it.

  “I insisted that we get help. We began marriage counseling, and it worked for a while. But then she stopped going. I was ready to leave then, had a place picked out and everything. But then about a week after Mattie was born, she told me that she’d been going to therapy and she thought she knew what was wrong with her. She said she wanted to try to make things work. I even went with her to the therapist once.” He shook his head. “That was an hour I can never undo, information I can never un-hear. If Julep thinks I’m a monster, she should look in the mirror.”

  “Julep?”

  “Julep. Her husband. Some of the men who’ve come and gone since his death.” He sighed heavily. “It wasn’t a picnic over at that house, that’s for sure.”

  I sat back and studied him, studied the grief and overwhelming sadness that seemed to be rolling off of him in waves. I remembered the night we spent together—the Fourth of July—how he would touch me with this tenderness that most guys never bothered with. I’d walked a winding road that took me to dark places, a road that was occasionally dangerous and always lonely. I’d never been touched the way he touched me. I’d never felt the kind of gentle he offered. It was a night I wasn’t soon to forget—even if I’d never found myself walking back into his life.

  It made me wonder how broken the woman he married really was to turn her back on that kind of tenderness, that kind of love.

  “How did she die?” I asked quietly, almost wishing I didn’t need to ask.

  He lifted his drink, but he didn’t take from it. He stared into its depths again, as though all the answers were right there in the glass.

  “I had to go out of town on business. Normally I would take the girls with me and Colby would go to her mother’s. I thought that time was the same. I took Stevie and Mattie and Shawna, packed them up and flew to Vegas for three days. I talked to Colby on the phone once and she seemed good. She’d been sober since she got pregnant with Mattie and she was working hard at her therapy. She was almost happy for the first time in years. I was looking forward to coming home, looking forward to spending a few days with her like we used to do.”

  He shook his head, setting the glass down, his shoulders slumped like the burden of the memory was just too much for him.

  “We got home late in the evening. I sent Shawna upstairs with the girls and called Julep’s house to let Colby know we were back. The housekeeper told me she hadn’t stayed over there this time. That she hadn’t been to Julep’s in weeks. I went upstairs, to our bedroom, and there were definite signs Colby had been here. The bed was unmade. There were clothes scattered on the floor. I knew she was here, somewhere.

  “I worried that she might have slipped and she might have gone out to party or something. I ran down the stairs and searched the house. There were dishes in the sink, glasses on the counter—but not wine glasses. Juice glasses. And then I went outside…”

  He finished his drink then, the horror of what he’d found clear on his face.

  “She was in the hot tub, face down. There was a gash on her forehead from where she’d fallen and hit her head on the edge of tub. And her skin was so pale…waxy.”

  He shuddered a little. “That’s a sight I never want to see again.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He didn’t seem to hear me. He lifted the scotch bottle to pour more into his glass, but then he stopped, setting it back down when his hand shook too much to keep it steady.

  I’d seen death in my time in the military. And the CIA. I only spent a few years with the CIA, but it was long enough to see things that I would never forget. Horrible things. I could imagine what it was like for him, finding his wife like that.

  “I screamed and Shawna heard me. She came running downstairs and that cleared my head a little. I didn’t want Stevie seeing her mother like that. I called the police and sent Shawna back upstairs. They came and took her to the hospital even though it was pretty obvious that she was gone. I followed, hope bubbling inside of me despite logic. It wasn’t until the ER doc came out and told me they’d pronounced her that I thought to call Julep. That’s one of her many reasons to believe I had something to do with it. She claims that if I was innocent, I would have called her the moment I found Colby.”

  “That’s crap.”

  He snorted again. “It is. All her theories are crap, but you can hardly blame her. Colby was her only child.”

  I almost couldn’t believe what I was hearing. This man, who’d been unfairly accused by his mother-in-law, was actually defending her actions. What kind of a person does that?

  Not the kind of man I’d made a habit of surrounding myself with.

  “The coroner found high levels of alcohol and Oxy in her system. He said that she was drunk, and when she tried to get out of the hot tub, the alcohol mixed with the heat caused her to become lightheaded. She fell, hit her head hard enough to cause a concussion, and that led to her drowning.”

  “But she was sober.”

  He nodded, watching his finger run along the rim of his glass. “She was sober. Something must have set her off that night, something big enough to send her back into her cups.”

  “Do you know what?”

  He shook his head. “I talked to h
er the night before. She sounded happy, content. She said she was staying in, watching movies and anxiously awaiting our return. She said that she wanted to talk to me about something, but that it could keep until we got home.”

  He pushed his glass away and stood, a little rocky on his feet, dragging the fingers of both hands through his hair. There was a weariness about him that made me ache. I stood, too, moving close to him to help in case he fell over or something. But he seemed to be in control.

  “I should go up,” he said, his eyes moving over me slowly. “I’ll have to go see my lawyer early in the morning to get this cleared up.”

  “Try to sleep well.”

  He touched my face, his palm wide and warm against my cheek. For a second I leaned into him, loving the feel of his touch. In another life, I could see myself falling for a man like him. I’d once loved a man very much like him. And that’s why I couldn’t do it again.

  I turned my head, kissed the center of his palm. Then I stepped back

  “Goodnight, Dunlap.”

  He nodded, not looking me in the eye as he walked away.

  How could it hurt this much? I barely knew the man, but something inside of me shattered as I watched him disappear up the stairs.

  I shook myself, cleaning up the mess in the kitchen before slipping out the back door. I tugged my cell phone from my pocket and dialed a familiar number, reminding myself once again that I was working a case, not hanging out with a lover.

  “David? Just a quick report. Mrs. Montgomery just served Mr. Spencer with custody papers on the youngest child, Mattie, based on the fact that Mattie isn’t biologically his. Thought you should know.”

  I hung up, sliding the phone back into my pocket as I walked slowly around the hot tub. It was covered, a simple wood box that seemed completely innocuous. I didn’t know much about hot tubs. I knew they were a hell of a lot of fun at parties, but that was about it.

  I knelt beside the controls, looking at the thermostat. It was set fairly high—one hundred twenty degrees Fahrenheit. That seemed awfully hot. I turned the dial, but there was something wrong with it. It didn’t want to move.