Moonglow, Texas

by Mary McBride

  “Quit it, Molly. You’re a grown woman. A professor. Just take what we did for what it was. Two people having a little roll in the hay. Nothing more.”

  Despite the harsh tone and the cruel words, she didn’t believe him. Whether it was denial or some sort of intuition, Molly wasn’t sure. She only knew that her instincts were right. Dan cared for her, too, and just as deeply, only something wouldn’t allow him to admit it.

  “Is it because of the differences between us?” she asked. “Because of the disparity in our careers?”

  He let out a coarse laugh. “What? You think it would bother me that you’ve got academic degrees up the wazoo, including a Ph.D. in finance and a promising career on Wall Street while all I’ve got is a toolbox and a maxed-out MasterCard?” He ripped his fingers through his hair. “Why, hell, Molly, I never gave that a thought. It never entered my mind.”

  “How did you know that?” She felt her throat constrict.

  “How did I know what?”

  “About my degrees. About Wall Street.”

  “You told me,” he said with a shrug. “That’s how.”

  “No, I didn’t.” Suddenly the air in the kitchen seemed warmer, nearly stifling, and Molly found it difficult to breathe. She was sure she hadn’t told him that much about her former life. She hadn’t told anybody during this past secretive year. They’d warned her not to say a word.

  Dan, she decided, was looking positively shady, as if he knew even more than he’d let slip. Had he gone through some of her hidden papers or other personal effects? she wondered. When? Why?

  “Yes, you did, Molly,” he said now, then shrugged again and gave her one of his mind-altering grins. “Hell, maybe not. I don’t know. Maybe I’m just psychic. Miss Hannah used to read palms. Maybe I inherited it from her.”

  “Yeah, that’s probably it.” She turned back to the sink, applying knife to onion again, unable to look at Dan and sort out her fears at the same time. She needed to think.

  “Mind if I use your phone while you’re fixing the eggs?” Dan asked.

  “No. Not at all. Help yourself.”

  Think, she ordered herself. It wasn’t such an easy task when all the blood seemed to have drained from her head.

  Dan punched in the number of the Houston office. It was going on one o’clock now, but he knew there was always a skeleton crew on duty, maybe even more during this computer crisis.

  Bobby wasn’t in.

  “Could you speak up, sir?” the agent on the other end of the line asked him. “I’m having a hard time hearing you.”

  “Look,” Dan whispered into the mouthpiece. “Let me have Bobby Hayes’s home number, will you? This is important.” Bobby and Eileen and the kids had moved sometime in the past year from their town house to a pretty, two-hundred-acre spread west of the city. Dan couldn’t remember their new unlisted number, if he’d ever known it.

  “I’m afraid I can’t do that, sir.”

  “Hey, buddy, this is…”

  Instead of finishing the sentence, Dan slammed the receiver down. He’d call Bobby tomorrow. Ten or twelve hours wouldn’t make all that much difference. Even twenty-four. He could hold it together for Molly’s sake that long. Assuming he didn’t make any more stupid mistakes like that remark about Wall Street and her degrees.

  He sauntered back into the kitchen, prepared to tell her more lies when what he really wanted to tell her was the truth, that if it was possible to fall in love in a week, that was just what he’d done, and that he was going to miss her for the rest of his life.

  On the counter, the chopping board was piled with neat little mounds of diced onion and green peppers. A dozen eggs sat untouched in their cardboard carton. Water plipped into the bucket under the sink. The back door was open.

  And Molly was nowhere to be seen.

  Molly sniffed, then stepped inside the Airstream. Apparently during her last visit there she’d been wearing a good deal of perfume or else had been too lost in the throes of lust to notice the unpleasant odor of the trailer. It struck her as a locker-room blend of beer, dirty socks and who knew what else.

  She was snooping. If Dan knew the facts of her life, she’d decided to find out some facts about his. She didn’t even know what she was hunting for, but she knew she had to hunt quickly, before he got off the phone. Sleuth that she wasn’t, she had no idea where to begin.

  It was almost too dark to see anything. Not wanting to turn on a light, Molly reached for the cord of the venetian blinds on the window and adjusted the slats until stripes of moonlight fell across the dark interior. Now that she could see, her gaze skimmed across a row of books on a shelf beside Dan’s bed.

  Mystery. Mystery. Histories of the American Revolution and the Civil War and Vietnam. Drugs in America. Drugs in Central America. Terrorism. Terrorism today. Terrorism tomorrow. More terrorism. Dan’s taste in reading had a decidedly violent bent, Molly thought.

  While she was trying to make some sense of that, her gaze strayed to the locked drawer near the air mattress, the drawer from which Dan had retrieved the little square packet the night before when they’d made love.

  He had rummaged around on the floor, she remembered, for the key. Doing the same, she found it quickly enough under a loose piece of carpet, inserted it in the little round lock and turned it, then eased out the drawer a few tentative inches. With no interior lights, it wasn’t easy to see, but there was enough illumination to distinguish, just to the right of more foil packets, the metal butt and trigger of a very lethal-looking handgun.

  A gun! Molly inhaled a sharp gasp and shut the drawer just as the door of the trailer opened behind her. She whirled around to see Dan standing there, looking less than pleased and more than a little suspicious. Almost dangerous. Definitely dangerous. Her heart started pumping harder.

  “Find what you were looking for, Molly?” he asked, coming toward her. Before she could answer, he reached down to lock the drawer and then pocketed the key in his jeans.

  “I wasn’t…” She swallowed audibly. “I didn’t…” She swallowed again, then blurted, “You’ve got a gun, Dan.”

  “Yeah. I’ve got a gun. Me and just about every other guy in Texas.” He crossed his arms. “So what? No big deal.”

  “Well, no big deal except every other guy in Texas usually has his gun mounted across the rear window of a pickup truck,” she said. “What in the world do you need that nasty-looking weapon for?”

  He arched an eyebrow while one side of his mouth quirked up. “To protect my valuables?”

  Molly, less fearful of him now, gave the interior of the Airstream a cool once-over. “Valuables. Right. Try again, Dan.”

  That half grin revved to full throttle as he shrugged and turned up his hands. “To defend myself from wild, insatiable women in the middle of the night?”

  In spite of herself, Molly laughed. That was probably true, she thought, remembering Linda Watson’s recent nocturnal visit, not to mention her own fairly wild and insatiable behavior the night before. The mere memory of their lovemaking was enough to raise her temperature one or two degrees.

  As if he sensed the sudden, sultry increase, Dan cocked his head. “That wouldn’t be why you’re out here, would it? Feeling a little wild and insatiable, Molly? Huh?”

  “Well, I…”

  She was embarrassed to admit that she was, but it struck her as a far better excuse for her presence in his trailer than snooping.

  “Maybe,” she said, putting a bit of velvet in her voice, then passing the tip of her tongue across her lips for emphasis. There was nothing contrived, however, about the heat spiraling through her or the ache of desire deep inside. It didn’t seem to matter that she didn’t trust this man. She wanted him all the same.

  “Maybe,” he echoed softly as he closed the distance between them and drew her against him. “Maybe we should do something about that.”

  When his mouth came down on hers, wild and insatiable didn’t even begin to describe how Molly felt. Every
thought in her head disappeared, and every caution in her heart gave way as her senses surrendered to Dan’s kiss, to the slow, warm pleasures of his lips and his tongue and his teeth.

  Somewhere on the edge of her consciousness, there was an insistent ringing. It took a moment to clear her head enough to realize it wasn’t the sound of her own blood singing in her veins, but the telephone in her house across the yard.

  “The phone,” she murmured against Dan’s mouth.

  His response was somewhere between a growl and a groan of pleasure.

  “I should probably answer it,” she said without much conviction as the phone kept ringing, now on its fifteenth or twentieth ring. “This late at night, you never know. It could be important.”

  “As important as this?” His hand slid around her back, and with a single, expert flick, he undid the clasp of her bra. “Or this?” The hand curved beneath her breast while his lips trailed down her neck, her collarbone, her eager flesh.

  Molly’s head lolled back. Her eyes sank closed as pleasure coursed through her. “No,” she whispered. “Nothing’s as important as this.”

  Even in the haze of passion, Dan knew damn well who was on the other end of that urgently ringing phone. Bobby. They’d IDed Dan’s earlier call in the Marshals office and then alerted the boss immediately.

  Tomorrow would be soon enough to take himself off this assignment, to walk away from Molly, who was all warm and willing, wild and insatiable and perfect in his arms.

  Stupid. He’d only meant to distract her from the discovery of the gun, to deflect her curiosity with a kiss or two. He should have known he couldn’t stop once he’d had even the smallest taste of her. Thank God he still had the presence of mind to retrieve the key from his jeans, unlock the drawer and fumble for some protection. As he did, he was relieved to know that his U.S. Marshals ID and badge were still stashed well back in the drawer, out of Molly’s sight when she’d looked inside.

  It would hurt her less in the long run to think she’d been abandoned by some jerkwater handyman than a misfit, over-the-edge officer of the law.

  For now, though, he couldn’t get enough of her. She was wild and insatiable, as if she knew—as he did— this would be their last time. Almost insatiable. Her body was so perfectly familiar in spite of their short time together that he knew just where to touch her, exactly how to play her—slow, fast, hard, then harder— to bring forth every keening, resonant chord of her climax. And his own.

  They fell asleep, satiated, spent, their limbs tangled and their separate breaths blending as one being. Dan’s last thought was that he’d never come this close to heaven again, no matter how long he lived. Funny, finding heaven here in Moonglow.

  Hours later, when Dan woke to stripes of sunlight coming through the trailer’s blinds and the sound of the door quietly clicking closed, it took him only a blink to realize that Molly was headed into the house, no doubt to finish preparing their interrupted omelette, but only after she consulted the ID box on the phone for last night’s unanswered call. Bobby’s call—he was certain of that—with the Houston area code prominently displayed on the box.

  By the time he’d dressed and sprinted across the yard and into the house, she was standing just where he’d anticipated, frowning at the phone.

  “What’s up?” he asked, glancing over her shoulder at the number just before Molly hit the erase button.

  “Nothing,” she said.

  “Who called?”

  She shrugged. “I dunno. Wrong number, I guess.”

  What he guessed was that she knew damned well the call was from the Marshals office in Houston, but there was no way she was going to share that information with her handyman. What she didn’t know, though, was that the call was meant for him, not her.

  “Are you hungry?” she asked, attempting to change the subject.

  “Famished.”

  Once Molly was in the kitchen, Dan punched in the numbers he knew by heart, asked the operator for Bobby, then waited, silently rehearsing his exit lines. The minute he heard Bobby’s voice, however, that brass-tacks, we’ve-got-trouble tone, Dan sensed that his own agenda had suddenly been blown to smithereens.

  “We’ve got a line on that hacker,” Bobby said without preamble.

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “If we’re right, it looks like those upstate New York boys might have patched together their old network.”

  Dan’s heart skipped a beat before it froze completely. “Upstate New York? What do you mean? Not Kathryn Claiborn’s…?”

  “Maybe.” Bobby cut him off. “Maybe not. This guy we’ve got in custody up in Albany isn’t the most reliable son of a bitch ever to come down the pike. If he’s just blowing smoke, we’ll know soon enough.”

  Dan mouthed a deep curse into the receiver while his gut corkscrewed and his mouth went dry and every nerve in his body snapped, not with the old adrenaline that said he was ready for anything, but with the fear that signaled he wasn’t, he couldn’t, he—

  “I need backup, Bobby.”

  “Whoa now, amigo.” The voice on the other end of the line dropped to a low and unyielding tone. “We’re still pretty short-handed. What you need to do is keep your eyes open and the Claiborn woman’s head down. You hear what I’m telling you, Dan?”

  He muttered a grudging “I hear you.”

  “All right, then. I’ll keep you apprised.”

  Bobby hung up, and Dan stood there listening to dead air for the longest while, trying to breathe, trying to disregard the images of death that preyed on his brain, trying to figure out how he was going to keep Molly alive, if it came to that.

  “You’ve hardly touched your omelette,” Molly said, mopping up the last of hers with a wedge of toast, thinking that she’d been so hungry this morning that even the rubbery eggs with the desiccated onions and peppers had tasted divine.

  One of these days she’d get the hang of cooking on this electric stove with its temperamental burners. It was probably too late to add that to her list of things that needed to be fixed. As if Dan could.

  He sat across the table from her, looking tired, disheveled and even a little glum. The tired part didn’t surprise her because neither of them had slept all that much the night before. And in his tattered jeans and rumpled Hawaiian shirts, he was disheveled more often than not. But glum?

  In spite of being tired, Molly felt so incredibly alive and vibrant she could hardly sit still. Even knowing the U.S. Marshals Service in Houston had been trying to contact her last night didn’t cast too much of a pall over her current mood. Those “check up on the witness” calls came occasionally. Last night’s was probably from some deputy working late and looking to keep busy.

  She’d even managed to convince herself that the gun locked in Dan’s drawer posed no threat to her at all. The weapon was just what he had claimed—it was for his own protection. And Dan Shackelford, she decided, was exactly what he was billed as—a traveling handy-man and the greatest kisser north of the Rio Grande. Maybe even north of Antarctica. She felt her lips slide into a silly, smitten kind of smile that she was helpless to conceal.

  “So, what are the plans for today?” she asked, fairly sure that he wouldn’t say he was leaving. How could he after last night?

  He put down his fork on the barely touched plate of eggs and toast. “I thought we might try to scare up a decent plumber,” he said with a slight nod toward the leaky sink. “Either that or try to find a bigger bucket.”

  Molly laughed, scooping up his plate and carrying it to the sink. “I never thought I’d hear you admit defeat.”

  “I just know my limitations.”

  There was nothing flippant in his tone. In fact, it struck Molly as completely serious, perhaps even a little sad. It matched the expression on his face. As irritated as she’d been with his earlier devil-may-care attitude, she suddenly longed to see it reappear.

  “Hey.” She sauntered toward him across the warped linoleum floor that he still hadn’t gotten aro
und to fixing, then nudged his arms aside so she could sit on his lap. “I haven’t noticed any limitations. None of any importance, anyway.”

  Instead of smiling, he frowned all the more.

  “Dan? What’s the matter? I know there’s something troubling you. It’s practically written on your face.” She traced a finger across his forehead, down one cheek, along his angular jaw.

  “Oh, yeah?” He avoided her eyes as he spoke. “What does it say? Here lies Danny Shackelford. He used to be good?”

  “You are good. My God, Dan, you…”

  His lips slid sideways in disgust as he brushed her hand away from his face. “I’m not talking about bed, Molly.”

  “Neither am I,” she shot back. “You’re a good person. You’re warm and you’re witty and you’re smart as a whip when you aren’t trying to disguise it behind that good ol’ boy demeanor. Who cares whether or not you can fix a showerhead or repair a leaky pipe or wallpaper a room? None of that’s important. What’s important is…”

  Molly stopped, the words I love you teetering on her tongue like a first-time, frightened diver on the high board. She cleared her throat, dragged in a deep breath, then let it out with a frustrated “I don’t know. Maybe you’re just in the wrong line of work. Did you ever think of that?”

  “Frequently,” he snapped.

  “Well?”

  “Well, what?”

  “What are you going to do about it?”

  “This.” Without warning, he separated his legs, thus eliminating the lap on which Molly was perched, but caught her before she slipped through. “First things first, Professor. Let’s go find us an honest-to-God, card-carrying plumber. I need to go out to the trailer for a minute, so I’ll meet you at the car.”

  In the trailer, Dan checked the clip in his gun before settling it in the waistband of his jeans, against the small of his back. On the off chance that it would be necessary, he jammed his Marshals badge and ID in his pocket. That left just a few lonely little square packets in the drawer. He swore softly as he closed it.