Lone Rider Bodyguard

by Harper Allen

  His change of subject was briskly abrupt, but probably that was for the best, she thought. Out of some sense of responsibility for her and the baby he’d helped deliver, Tye Adams had appointed himself her temporary protector, but that was as far as their relationship could go. From the start she’d known they came from two different worlds and although some part of her had fleetingly yearned to fit into his, she was too much Lacey Bird’s granddaughter ever to attempt to be something she wasn’t.

  She had no idea why he’d kissed her. She frowned at the platter of ham and reached for the carving knife beside it before answering his question.

  “I’ve never known who they are. As for what they want, the man who tried to kill me tonight said it was payback.” Carefully she concentrated on evening up the hacked surface of the meat and cutting two perfect slices. “After he was killed the police told me Frank hadn’t been a photojournalist like he’d always said, but a gambler and a small-time scam artist whose real name was probably Jerry Corning—although he’d used so many different aliases over the years they weren’t even sure of that. I guess one of his scams backfired on him in the end. Obviously not all of his marks were as gullible as I was.”

  On her last sentence her voice wavered and to her chagrin the knife slipped in her hand, almost nicking her. Immediately Tye took the implement.

  “Forget the damned cooking, I’ll rustle us up something.” Briskly he opened one of the lower cupboards and pulled out a cast-iron frypan. “I did KP duty here in my day, and while I never was the cook Jess or Connor was, I was a hell of a lot better than Riggs.”

  He shot her a glance. “That’s right, honey. I was one of Del’s hell-raisers when I was a teen. I think that might have had something to do with Bannerman’s attitude tonight, since during our year at the ranch the four of us weren’t exactly popular with him.”

  The man was impossible to read, Susannah thought helplessly. He had the good looks of a movie star, but from what he’d said he’d built up a business providing physical security for celebrities instead of becoming one himself. The privileged aura he unconsciously projected could only have come from a background of money and power so well entrenched he’d grown up taking it for granted, and yet apparently he’d come close to throwing it all away when he’d been younger.

  Earlier tonight he’d been put into the position of having to kill a killer. If he felt any regret for taking a life, whatever the circumstances, he’d given no sign. But just now he’d brought up the subject of his past for the sole reason, she suspected, of distracting her from her own unhappy memories.

  She smiled shakily at him. “I think my sympathies are with Sheriff Bannerman. You and your bad-boy friends must have torn up the county. No, Tye—” Firmly she took the pan from him. “I’d rather have something to do while I’m telling you my story, and kitchen work’s always been more of a comfort than a chore for me. Besides, that ham needs red-eye gravy, and I’ll bet a dollar a Californian like you doesn’t know the first thing about making it.”

  “You’d win that dollar.” A corner of his mouth lifted. “All right, Suze, you get to cook. Do you trust me to get Dan the Man into something a little more like a real bed?”

  “Dan the—” A few minutes ago she hadn’t imagined she would be capable of laughing, but the sound bubbling up from her throat definitely was a laugh, Susannah realized. And although she’d even had foolish, first-mama nerves when Greta had asked once or twice if she could put Danny to bed, for some reason she had no qualms about Tye’s competence in tucking her baby in. Well, almost no qualms, she admitted.

  “Line the dresser drawer with something padded,” she said as he lifted the carry-cot and its tiny occupant from the table. “And Tye—he likes his blanket up to his chest, no farther. But don’t cover his hands, because then he’ll wake up for sure and start fretting—”

  “Wonder where he gets that from?” His question was accompanied by the slightest of smiles. “Hey, lady—don’t forget I was the first one to hold the little guy. As I recall, I didn’t give you any static when you asked me to hand him over for a while.”

  “That’s true.” A second soft bubble of laughter rose up in her. With exaggerated deliberation, she turned away, reaching for the bowl of eggs as she slid the pan on the burner.

  “Suze?”

  At the unexpectedly tentative note in his voice her pose of unconcern fled. Glancing quickly at him, she saw that he’d paused in the doorway. His gaze met hers, the humor that had lit his eyes only a moment ago no longer in evidence.

  “Were you very much in love with him?” he asked softly. Even as the words left his lips he frowned impatiently. “Sorry, stupid question. Of course you were—the man was your husband, for God’s sake.” He turned toward the hall, but before he could take a second step, Susannah spoke, her own tone as low as his had been.

  “Yes, Frank Barrett was my husband. And twelve hours after I became his wife I was a widow.”

  Blindly she extracted an egg from the bowl, finding its cool, spherical surface somehow comforting.

  “He was killed the morning after our wedding night, while I was out walking along the beach wondering if there was any way I could undo the mistake I’d made in marrying him.”

  Chapter Four

  “For a while after Granny Lacey died I felt like I’d been cast adrift. She’d been my anchor all my life, and suddenly she was gone. I think Frank sensed that.”

  Neatly, Susannah laid her knife and fork at the edge of her plate and pressed a corner of the red-and-white checked napkin to her lips. Across the table from her Tye took a last mouthful of ham. “More coffee?” she asked, half rising from her chair.

  But already he was up, and waving her back into her seat. “I’ll get it. Did the police ever catch the hit-and-run driver who killed her?”

  “No.”

  Falling silent as he hefted the blue-enamelled coffeepot from the stove, she allowed herself to watch him through her lashes. For all his height and breadth there was an easy grace to the most casual of his movements, but it was a controlled grace, as if on some level he held himself ready to react instantaneously to any given situation. He’d changed out of the begrimed T-shirt into a faded chambray shirt. The garment was obviously work attire, Susannah conceded, but even coming upon him dressed the way he was and pumping gas at a service station there was no way anyone would mistake Tyler Adams for hired labor.

  It wasn’t the first time since Frank’s death she’d had to relate the facts of her brief marriage and sudden widowhood, and she’d grown to dread the shocked sympathy and carefully phrased condolences that invariably resulted. She hadn’t wanted that from Tye—hadn’t wanted, even for a moment, to mislead him as to how it had really been. After telling him what she’d never told anyone else she’d looked down at the egg in her hand, half surprised to see it was still intact. His response had been immediate.

  “The guilt’s been the hardest to bear, right?” he’d said shortly. “Been there, done that, Suze. Let’s put this talk off until you get some hot coffee and food inside you. All things considered it’s been a crappy night all around for you and the way I acted a while ago was part of that, I’m sure.”

  He’d understood up to a point, she thought now. But that point had stopped short of realizing that for the few moments he’d held her in his arms the rest of what had happened tonight had faded from her consciousness. He certainly couldn’t suspect that if he’d held her for a single second longer, Frank Barrett’s widow and little Daniel Tyler’s mother might not only have given in to temptation, as he’d suggested, but would have done her level best to tempt him.

  Which would have been about as out of place as a mule trying to outpace Dan Patch, she chastised herself mentally. Thank the Lord you didn’t totally forget yourself with the man.

  “Did the authorities say anything that made you think they suspected—” Stopping in midsentence, Tye refilled her coffee cup and then his before he sat down. He caught her inquirin
g glance and shook his head dismissively. “I’m jumping the gun here. You said your grandmother had been your anchor. What happened to your parents?”

  “By the time I was five they were both dead,” she said simply. “Granny Lacey never liked to talk about it much, and about all she’d ever say was that my mama might have lived if she’d had a stronger heart, but that she never would have been the same after. My grandmother’s sister died of a fever, so I guess having her daughter-in-law go the same way hit her hard.”

  She took a sip of her coffee. “Hit my daddy hard, too, from all accounts,” she added softly. “I don’t remember much about that time, but I recall the last time I saw him. I think it must have been a few months after Mama passed away, because Granny Lacey was living with us and looking after me. Daddy came into my bedroom to hear me say my prayers, and he asked me to say one specially for him. I felt his hand on my head just as I was finishing, but by the time I got off my knees and hopped into bed he’d gone. He was killed in a car accident that night, and within a week Granny Lacey had packed up everything we owned and she and I left Fox Hollow for good.”

  “Tough for her, with a granddaughter to care for and raise all by herself,” Tye commented. Susannah looked up in surprise.

  “She never felt she was carrying the burden alone—just like I know I’m not raising Danny all by myself.” She saw belated comprehension touch his features, followed almost immediately by discomfort, and she shot him a mischievous smile. “Don’t worry, I won’t start leaving religious tracts around for you to read, Tye. But even though I haven’t been back for sixteen years I’ll always be a Fox Hollow girl, and folks in Fox Hollow are pretty rock solid in the Word.”

  “I don’t believe in much of anything,” he said dryly. “But we’re straying from the subject. Lacey Bird took her granddaughter and moved to New Jersey, of all places? That jalopy you were driving had Garden State plates,” he added.

  “Goodness, that wasn’t the first place we lived after pulling up stakes.” Frowning, Susannah spread out the fingers of one hand and started ticking them off. “I started school in Ohio, I remember, and I got to grade four before Granny Lacey was asked by a women’s center in Indiana to give midwifery training there. For a time she worked with a group of Amish midwives in Pennsylvania and then I think we moved to upper New York—no—” she corrected herself thoughtfully “—we stayed in Kentucky that summer. I was old enough to take a part-time job at the Dairy Queen and start helping with the money. We never had much but we always got by.”

  “On delivering babies.” There was a slightly skeptical note in his voice. She didn’t take offense.

  “On delivering babies, on taking in sewing, on the waitressing jobs I got when I finished my schooling,” she agreed. “I made good grades but I wasn’t scholarship material so college wasn’t an option, and although Granny said we could manage some kind of training for me if I wanted, I liked working in restaurants. I liked it that people came in hungry and left full. Does that sound foolish?”

  “No.” A corner of Tye’s mouth quirked upward. “But it’s a different attitude from the one I’m used to hearing. Most of my clients are on a permanent diet. Why did you end up in New Jersey?”

  “Granny Lacey felt she’d been called to go there.” On the heels of his diet remark as it was, her answer came out more snappishly than she’d intended. She went on less briskly. “Five months after we moved to Atlantic City she was walking home one night from the bus stop after delivering a baby. A car mounted the curb and struck her, killing her instantly. I still hadn’t really gotten over her death when Frank started coming into the diner where I worked and asking me out.”

  Tye seemed to pick his next words with care. “From what you said earlier I get the impression it wasn’t love at first sight on your part, Suze.”

  “So why did I go out with him, you mean?” She looked down at her hands. “I was lonely. And Frank made me laugh.”

  She glanced swiftly up at him, but his face was impassive. “I’d been on church outings with groups and there’d been a pastor’s son who’d accompanied me to an organ recital once, but I’d never really dated before. Heavens, it wasn’t until I was nineteen that I bought my first lip gloss, and although she didn’t say anything I could tell Granny Lacey considered it pretty racy on my part. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I had an old-fashioned upbringing. I’m not sorry I did, but maybe it didn’t equip me that well when I suddenly found myself on my own. He was in his thirties and good-looking. I—I was flattered by his interest in me.”

  “And he told you he was what—a photojournalist? You believed him?” The note of skepticism was back in his voice. This time it stung.

  “He said he was a freelancer travelling around looking for interesting stories, which explained why he lived out of motels instead of having a permanent place of his own. Yes, I believed him. Since the police later told me he was a con man, I figure I wasn’t the first person to have been taken in by Frank Barrett or Jerry Corning or whatever his name originally was. That doesn’t make me stupid, Tye.”

  She took a deep breath. “I found out he’d lied to me about a lot of things, but in his own way Frank cared for me—cared enough to ask me to marry him. He said he wanted a family, and I wanted that, too. So I accepted his proposal, and I married him, and if anyone cheated anyone I was the one who cheated him. Deep down he wasn’t a bad man, Tye. He deserved better from his wife.”

  “You said the morning after your wedding night you left him sleeping and went for a walk along the beach.” Across the table from her, he leaned back in his chair and folded his arms over his chest. “When you got back to the hotel what had you decided to tell him?”

  Susannah blinked. “Why, nothing, of course. What could I say—that I’d changed my mind? We’d exchanged vows. I was a married woman. The only right thing for me to do was to make the best marriage I could with…” Her words trailed off. Her gaze searched his face. “I can’t let myself off that lightly, Tye. Yes, I would have stayed with him if he’d lived. But marriage is supposed to be more than just a contract.”

  “Is it?” As if prompted by a sudden restlessness, abruptly he pushed his chair back and stood. “As far as I’m concerned, that’s all it is. I should know, since I grew up with Marvin Adams for a father.”

  He shrugged down at her. “Believe me, if you were a Hollywood spouse you would have heard of him. Hell, you’d probably have his card tucked safely away somewhere just in case you ever needed it. Greatest divorce attorney in California, bar none, and when the matrimonial home, the ski lodge in Aspen, and the residuals from the television series are put on the chopping block to be divided, no one ever says anything about fifty percent of the love, honey.”

  He exhaled impatiently. “But hey, that’s just my take on it. Let’s get back to your story—you returned to the hotel that morning and found someone had whacked your new husband, right?”

  His tone was as harsh as his phrasing, and shocked, Susannah stared at him. “Sounds to me like you’ve got issues with your daddy, Tye,” she said evenly. “That’s no reason to make light of murder. My husband’s life was taken. The baby we’d made the night before never had a chance to know his father. I got back to the hotel and found someone had shot Frank through the heart while he was still lying in our marriage bed.”

  She got stiffly to her feet. Needing something to do with her shaking hands, she gathered up their plates and walked by him to the sink. “The police were already there. After I identified Frank’s body they took me down to the precinct and asked me if I knew anyone who held a grudge against him or if he had any enemies, but of course I couldn’t tell them much and I got the feeling they were just going through the motions anyway. It was only at his funeral a few days later I found out why. One of the detectives assigned to the case met me as I was leaving the cemetery and told me he thought I should know what they’d discovered about Frank—that he wasn’t what he’d said he was, wasn’t even who he’d s
aid he was. He’d been in prison up until a month before I’d met him, serving a sentence for fraud.”

  Carefully she stacked the plates in the sink. She turned to him. “I could remember that about Danny Tye’s daddy and talk about him getting whacked. Or I could remember the kindnesses he showed me, the fact that he arranged to have a preacher marry us because he knew how much it meant to me, the way he sometimes looked at me when he spoke about having a family of our own someday. I think he wanted to be the man he told me he was. I think if he’d lived he might have become that man. But someone took that away from him, Tye. Someone murdered him. And then they came after me.”

  She’d thought of him as an angel, albeit a fallen one, Susannah thought unhappily. She’d wondered at one point if he was the devil. If she was just now finding out that Tye Adams was a mere mortal it was her own fault. He dealt with violence on a daily basis. It had to have hardened him.

  “Where does Del keep his dish soap?” she asked, attempting to even out the emotion in her tone. “Might as well wash these before my little mister wakes up and starts fretting for his first meal of the—”

  “You’re disappointed in me. I’m disappointed in myself.” Even as he spoke Tye’s hands were on her shoulders, gently turning her from the sink to face him. A muscle moved in his jaw. “The latter’s nothing new, but for some reason I’m finding the first one harder to take than I would have thought. You’re right, Suze—a man’s life was snuffed out, and brutally. I apologize for the way I spoke.”

  “It wasn’t just one man’s life.”

  She could either look into his face or straight ahead at the solid wall of his chest. But the top two buttons of the chambray shirt were unfastened, revealing a smooth golden-tan slice of skin only inches from her, and at the sight of that smooth skin, all at once she had an overwhelming and totally unprecedented impulse to lean forward and touch the tip of her tongue to it. Susannah’s face flamed as she jerked her gaze upward. She went on hurriedly, wanting—no, needing—to put some space between them as soon as she could.