The Man from Texas

by Rebecca York

  But no such luck. The interior was crammed with neat stacks of bills, hundreds being the smallest denomination. Each stack was held together with a rubber band.

  Hannah reached out and picked up a stack from the first row, riffling through the bills and whistling.

  “What do you do with a fistful of thousand-dollar bills?” she asked.

  “Take them to a bank, look innocent and ask for something smaller. Then get the hell out of town.”

  “Kind of inconvenient.”

  “I’ve managed okay.”

  “Very well, I’d say.”

  He pulled out a stack of hundreds, counted out fifty of them, then added five thousand-dollar bills and set it on the table for her.

  “Got a brown paper bag where I can stash them?” she quipped.

  He laughed. “No. But I can make a quick trip to the grocery store later.”

  “That’s okay.” She folded the cash and stuffed it into her purse, then asked, “Did this place come with Wi-Fi, by any chance?”

  “Yeah. Nothing but the best when you’re spending some other hombre’s money.”

  “I’d like to borrow it to check out a theory that’s rolling around in my mind.”

  The way she said it made his stomach tighten. “Don’t you want to rest—what with your head injury and all the excitement today?”

  “I feel fine and I want to work.”

  Figuring it was useless to argue, he took the suitcase upstairs again and brought down the laptop. After handing it to her, he started to sit down.

  “Uh, uh, I work better alone,” she said.

  He wanted to tell her that if she was doing research on him she could damn well let him watch. Instead he wheeled and went upstairs, where he lay on the bed with his hands behind his head. But he was too restless to simply lie there.

  One of the reasons he’d hired her was her flair for mining gold in a pile of rubble. He ached to see what she was doing.

  Instead, he sat up, unzipped a small suitcase and got out the dossier he’d assembled on Hannah Dawson. Besides the background information he’d dug up on her personal life, he knew a lot about her professionally, too. Probably she wouldn’t like to know how much he’d found out about her. But he would never have hired her if he hadn’t checked her out first.

  He knew she’d gotten a degree in American Studies from the University of Maryland, then entered the police academy. Like all cops, she’d spent her rookie year in the patrol division where she’d drawn the attention of the detective supervisors. They’d used her initially for incidental undercover ops—street-level drug buys, prostitution-john stings, gambling busts, situations where a young, attractive, fresh face would be successful.

  Then she’d graduated to long-term temporary assignments, where she’d continued to excel. The attention from the bosses hadn’t made her real popular with the other rookies, but she’d made a few good friends in the department. Like Calvin Rollins, the guy who’d come running over to warn her about the Wexler murder.

  Then an opening came up in the detective division, and she’d been put through the selection process, just like everyone else. But he got the feeling it was just a political paperwork drill. She’d been the obvious choice to fill the slot. So, she’d been twenty-six when she’d been promoted to detective.

  She was pretty young, both in chronological years and by street-experience standards, but she’d been one of the stellar young troopers who are highly motivated, unusually intelligent and exceptionally dedicated.

  That was what had attracted him to her in the first place.

  Now his mind drifted beyond the facts—to deeper speculations about young dedicated cops like Hannah. He suspected that some jerk of a boss had pushed Hannah Dawson hard, or let her push herself too hard. That had set her up for a fall precipitated by the emotionally traumatic event of watching an eighteen-year-old bleed out on the street. Yeah, a scene like that would have a far greater impact on someone like her than your average patrol cop.

  He looked toward the door. Hannah had told him not to bother her, but he suddenly couldn’t cope with the notion that she was down in the living room doing the same thing he was doing up here—prying into his personal life.

  Or trying to.

  Too antsy to stay where he was, he put her file back into the suitcase then moved quietly down the steps, thinking that he might have a chance to read her expression before she spotted him. When he was far enough down the stairs, he ducked his head and looked into the living room. Hannah had kicked off her shoes and moved to the couch.

  Apparently she’d been too tired to work after all, because her eyes were closed and her head rested on the pillow that she’d propped against one of the sofa arms. She looked so young, so vulnerable.

  Her chest rose and fell in the rhythm of sleep, and he thought he should tiptoe back up the stairs and let her get some rest. Then he saw that she’d fallen asleep with the laptop on her rib cage. It was moving slowly up and down with the rise and fall of her chest as she breathed. But it had drifted to the right—ready to tumble onto the floor in the next few seconds.

  He came down the rest of the steps in one fluid motion, rounded the coffee table and caught the two-thousand-dollar machine as it was about to fall onto the floor.

  As his hand touched her chest, her eyes snapped open and focused on him.

  “What?” she asked breathlessly.

  “The computer,” he said, lifting it out of the way and setting it on the table, his eyes never leaving her.

  In that unguarded moment of first waking, she looked like a lost child. Last night, somebody had tried to strangle her. Today, one of her best friends had been gunned down in his own garage.

  Luke had sworn he wasn’t going to get personal again. It was too dangerous—for both of them. But the bruised look around her eyes drew her toward him. He leaned forward, feeling her breath warm and sweet against his face. Unable to resist, he brushed his lips against hers, ready to draw back.

  But her hands came up and fixed on his shoulders, holding him where he was.

  “Luke, I need to…feel like I haven’t made a mess out of my life.”

  The bleak tone of her voice tore at him. “You haven’t.”

  “But—”

  He silenced her with the touch of his lips to hers again, this time increasing the pressure, increasing his own need for more.

  Her mouth opened under his, and he was intoxicated by the taste of her, the texture, the sweetness.

  Perhaps he needed the same thing that she did. Certainly he’d made some kind of mess of his life. He didn’t know precisely what; he only knew that it didn’t matter as long as he could hold her in his arms and kiss her.

  Delicately, his tongue investigated the softness along the insides of her lips, stroking the sensitive tissue, making little sounds rise in her throat, sounds that sent the blood rushing hotly in his veins.

  He angled his head, melded his mouth to hers and kissed her for a long time, his tongue prowling possessively over her teeth and upper lip, even as he told himself that was all he intended to do. But as the kisses became deeper, more intimate, a kind of desperation took hold of him.

  He yearned for more. He had known that all along.

  Lifting his mouth from hers, he kissed the line of her jaw, working his way downward to the slender column of her neck, the vee at the top of her shirt, kissing her there, then opening more buttons so he could press his face to the sides of her breasts, turning his head first one way and then the other to gather in as much of her sweetness as he could.

  “That’s so good,” she gasped out.

  So good. But not enough. Not nearly enough. He wanted to be inside her. Deep, deep inside. But first he wanted her as hot and needy as he felt.

  Her bra was a wisp of stretchy fabric. He pushed it out of the way, then covered the small mounds of her breasts with his hands, molding her exquisite softness to his touch, the contrast with her pebble-hard nipples driving him close to ins
anity.

  He sought those small peaks with his thumb and finger, watching her face, seeing how much she liked what he was doing.

  “Don’t stop,” she moaned, her eyes closing as she arched into the caress, then pulled him onto the sofa with her. His body covered hers, their legs tangling on the cushions, his erection pressing against her leg. She squirmed under him, making the position more intimate.

  Her breathing accelerated. Her hips rocked against him. And she spoke a man’s name.

  Only it wasn’t his name. It was Gary. And the erotic spell was shattered.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Hannah knew the moment the word was out of her mouth that she had done something beyond terrible.

  Gary. She had called him Gary. God, no!

  Luke pushed himself up, vaulted to his feet and stood staring down at her, the shock in his eyes so palpable that she wanted to turn her face toward the soft cushions and hide.

  Even in her dazed state, she didn’t allow herself to take the coward’s way out. Instead, she kept her gaze trained on the man standing in front of her looking so hurt and confused that she felt her heart turn over.

  “Gary?” he said, his voice icy.

  All at once she realized that she was lying there with her shirt unbuttoned and her bra around her neck. Turning her face away, she pulled her clothing back into place and refastened her buttons.

  When she looked up again, he was seated on the coffee table, his knees practically touching hers.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered, feeling as if she’d lost her center of gravity.

  “Not good enough.”

  Her head jerked toward him. “What do you expect me to say?”

  “I expect you to tell me why you were making love with me and called out another man’s name.”

  She didn’t want to talk about it, but she supposed she owed Luke that much honesty. “Because that’s what we used to do,” she whispered.

  “You mean he’s the only guy you can imagine making love to and I’m just a substitute?”

  Unable to keep her eyes on him, she looked down at her hands. “No, that’s not what I mean at all. I knew it was you kissing me, touching me. I wanted it to be you. Then I got lost…” She let the sentence trail off and started over again. “I used to come home from the precinct feeling burned-out and raw. And he’d make me forget about how awful it was dealing with murderers and drug dealers and burglars all day.”

  “Your Mr. Nice-Guy Gary would take you to bed so he could help you deal with the tension of being a cop?”

  She felt her face grow hot. “That’s a crude way to put it.”

  “How would you put it?”

  “We cared about each other.”

  “You and Gary Flynn?”

  Her eyes widened. “You know his name! What business do you have prying into my private life?”

  “It would have been stupid of me not to do a background check on you before I hired you.”

  She folded her arms protectively across her chest. “Did your background check include digging into my sex life?”

  “I didn’t dig into your sex life. All I knew was that you worked with a senior detective named Gary Flynn. I didn’t know he was bedding you, too, until you told me!”

  She felt her insides go hollow, but she managed to keep her voice steady. “It was an adult relationship.”

  “Was he married?”

  “How dare you! He was…separated. Well, he told me he was divorced. He did get divorced.”

  “You’re twenty-eight and he’s what—close to fifty? I’d say he was taking advantage of you, darlin’.”

  “I don’t have to listen to any more of this.”

  “Fine.” He stood and paced from one end of the room to the other.

  She remained sitting with her jaw clenched, watching him wear a trail in the carpet. Finally he stopped and looked at his watch—then turned on the large-screen television set that dominated one wall of the living room.

  “What are you going to do, find a wrestling match or something?”

  “I’m going to watch the news.”

  The program hadn’t started yet, but after five minutes, she was treated to a quick promo: “Shots were exchanged in a downtown Baltimore garage this afternoon. Police are looking for a man and woman seen leaving the vicinity in a blue Ford.”

  Suddenly cold all over, Hannah stared at the screen as a commercial for cat food came on. “They were talking about us.”

  “No kidding. The cops must have talked to that guy I saw coming in just as we were going out.”

  “We have to report what happened, tell the police someone was shooting at us. That we—that you—didn’t fire any shots.”

  “I don’t think so,” he drawled, the tone lazy but the words edged.

  “Why not?”

  “When you’re up to your neck in manure, you don’t open your mouth.”

  She nodded tightly, taking his meaning. When the news came on, she leaned forward, listening for the lead story. It was the shoot-out at the garage across from 43 Light Street.

  As a Baltimore police officer, she’d been involved in many cases that had made the news. But she’d always been on the other side of the fence, gauging the content for what it gave away. Now as she listened, she had another agenda—evaluating whether the report was going to lead the authorities to her and Luke.

  The station had sent a camera crew and a reporter to the garage. First there was a voice-over as the camera panned the parking spaces. They saw Luke’s car on the screen.

  “Where did you get your license plates?” she asked in a strained voice.

  “From a used-car lot.”

  Nodding, she turned her attention to the screen again—to a brief interview with the man who had seen them leave. He’d made the car, but his descriptions of the occupants left a lot to be desired. Hannah was a young woman with dark hair. Luke was tall and thin and also dark-haired.

  They both sat through the five-thirty news, then the six o’clock, switching stations. But there was nothing more. At least nothing more that had been made public.

  “I can phone Cal Rollins,” she said. “He’ll tell me if he’s heard anything.”

  “Darlin’, I think you don’t want to give the police any clues to the identity of the woman in the garage.”

  “Then what are we going to do?”

  He sighed. “I hired you to help me. Now I’ve got you in a heap of trouble. Until we unravel the Luke Pritchard puzzle, I think we’d better get out of town.”

  “Can I suggest a location?” she asked, anxious to keep him from going back to the previous discussion.

  “Okay.”

  “Pritchard, Texas.”

  His eyes widened. “What? Where did you come up with that name?”

  “A map of Texas on the computer. The population’s a little over two thousand. I’m betting that’s where you’re from.”

  “Pritchard, Texas,” he repeated, rolling his tongue around the word. “How, uh, did you think to focus there?”

  “I’m a P.I. I was a police detective. I look for clues.”

  “Such as?”

  “There’s your accent. It’s Southern. And the expressions you use. They’re rural, homey.”

  “The South is a big place.”

  “Well, it’s easy to narrow it to the Southwest. You speak Spanish. You can describe some cornmeal stuff I never heard of. You put hot sauce on your omelette. You told me you remember the desert and some plant called creosote bushes.” She paused, knowing he wasn’t going to like hearing about the last part. “And there’s that snatch of your boyhood that we got when Kathryn hypnotized you.”

  His face turned ashen, but she continued in a low voice. “Your father called your mother a wetback. That’s someone who crosses the Rio Grande from Mexico.”

  “So what?” he snapped. “I don’t think my childhood is the place to start.”

  “It’s the only place we have to start,” she argued. “You d
id pick the name Pritchard. And there is a Pritchard, Texas, pretty close to the border, between Del Rio and Big Bend. You’re drawing a blank on your recent past. If we go to Pritchard, maybe we’ll meet someone who knows you.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “What do you mean, you’ll think about it? That’s your best option.”

  “I’ll think about it,” he repeated. This time, instead of pacing the living room, he walked out the front door. Not a good idea if the police were looking for them, she thought.

  But she didn’t run after him to say so. Instead, she sat on the sofa, thinking.

  She’d been numb for months, and she knew the numbness was a defense mechanism. Now she was feeling things again. Too bad the major emotions were pain and chagrin.

  When he didn’t come back after fifteen minutes, she got up and wandered into the kitchen.

  Like the rest of the apartment, it was well furnished with quality accessories. And she could see from the half-full dishwasher that Luke had been cooking for himself. In the refrigerator were corn tortillas, sour cream and piquante sauce, and he’d stocked one cabinet with canned beans and chilies and other foods that supported her hypothesis about his background.

  She hadn’t done much cooking in the past few months, but maybe it would take her mind off the recent incident on the couch, she thought as she rummaged beside the stove and found a skillet. However, as she chopped onions and added ground beef, she couldn’t stop herself from imagining how he must have felt when she said Gary’s name.

  She’d been writhing under him, for goodness’ sake. She’d known it was Luke. She’d wanted it to be Luke. But somehow she’d flashed back to the way it had been with Gary. Because she’d been using Luke the way she’d used her previous lover. As a way to let off steam. She’d told herself she loved Gary. She’d realized after they broke up that it wasn’t true.

  Trying to cut off the painful thoughts, she stirred beans and piquante sauce into the pan and let them simmer. Then she layered the filling in a baking dish, alternating it with tortillas. The casserole had been in the oven for about twenty minutes when she heard the front door open.