by Diana Palmer
She averted her eyes to the windshield. “You, too, I guess?” she asked, and could have cursed herself for that involuntary question.
“Me, too,” he said at once. “I don’t want some fatal disease or a chronic condition doctors still can’t cure.”
“That doesn’t stop a lot of men.”
He was still watching her. He noticed the twinge of color on her high cheekbones. “You don’t even date, do you?”
She thought about denying it, but there was really no point. “Not much,” she said frankly, meeting his eyes. “I still don’t have a clue about how men think, and I don’t want to be accused of—teasing.” She bit off the word as if it tasted bad.
He averted his face. His jaw clenched as his own words came back to haunt him.
“Surely you remember?” She clutched her purse. “You were eloquent about women who—how did you put it?—led men on and wouldn’t deliver.”
He grimaced. There was an audible sigh as he curled one big hand around the steering wheel and stared out the windshield. “I guess I was. I was shocked. Furious. All those years, I thought I was right when I helped get that boy off. To be confronted with positive proof that you were the real victim was painful.” He slanted the hat back over his eyes, as if to hide them from her. “But I had no right to say those things to you, or to leave without a word, after we’d been going together for months.”
“We never went together,” she said in a monotone. “You took me out places. That’s all it was.”
“Until that last date, maybe.” His jaw clenched again with emotion. “I don’t like being wrong.”
“Most of us make mistakes as we go along. Not you, of course,” she added with veiled sarcasm. “You never make mistakes, do you, Brannon? People are good or bad. No gray areas. No intangibles.”
“I’ve been in law enforcement since I was eighteen,” he said curtly. “The law is the law. You either break it or you don’t.”
She sighed. “Yes. I guess you’re right. I’d better go in. I’ll phone you tomorrow afternoon.”
“I’ll be out most of the day,” he said tersely.
“Then I’ll leave you a message, Brannon,” she said sweetly, opening the door.
He turned his head and looked at her, saw the lines in her face, the dark circles under her eyes, the weariness. “Get some rest.”
“I’m fine.” She closed the door firmly, turned and went into the hotel. The doorman grinned at her and rushed to open the door. She didn’t look back.
Brannon pulled out into the street with mixed emotions. He remembered the feel and taste of her in his arms. They were old memories but they were vivid when he was with her. He wondered if she remembered the magic they’d shared that one evening, before their lives were torn apart a second time. He’d never been able to get past it. Other women were good companions, but Josette was under his skin.
He thought about his father, about the misery the man had caused him and his mother with his incessant raving, his constant criticisms, his demands for perfection, even when he was sober. He’d grown up hating his father for being so inflexible, so judgmental and righteous. Abuse can come in many forms, and one of the worst was verbal. Only now did it dawn on him that he was becoming like his father. He did, as Josette had accused, see things only in black and white. He didn’t allow for gray areas. There was only the law.
As he drove back to his own apartment, he considered that. His painful childhood was something he felt comfortable discussing with Josette, but he’d never talked about it to his own sister. Gretchen had been treated gently, cared for, loved by Marc and their mother. She had little memory of their father’s brutality, because he was drinking regularly and had calmed down somewhat by the time Gretchen was old enough to be aware of his problems. He’d died while she was in grammar school. But Brannon’s memories were much more painful. In many ways, they’d shaped him into the man he’d become.
On the other hand, Josette was better able to understand that sort of pain, because she’d experienced it in her own life. They shared a history of turmoil and unrest. A lot of her problems were probably his fault. But circumstances had been unkind to both of them.
Inside her hotel room, Josette was thinking the same thing. She felt drained from the conversation, from the long day, from the case, from the past—she was simply exhausted.
She had room service send supper to her room, which took up most of the rest of the daylight. After she leisurely ate her meal, she took a bath and wrapped up in her chenille robe, her long hair dripping around her shoulders in a wavy golden curtain until she wrapped a towel tightly around her head to absorb the moisture. She sat on the bed to go over her case notes.
The file on Dale Jennings was thick, and references to Jake Marsh turned up every few pages. She couldn’t forget that Dale had helped one of Marsh’s friends get a job working in Bib Webb’s campaign. There had to be something to that.
She’d taken a lot of time gathering this much evidence and printing it out. She didn’t want even one loose end that she didn’t tie up. Furthermore, she was going to share it with the police and the district attorney’s office, so they had access to everything she’d dug up.
The most noticeable thing about the file was the lack of anything that pointed to that missing piece of evidence Dale had held on to. There was no mention of a safety-deposit box, or a key. There was nothing to point to a hiding place.
She remembered what Brannon had said, about the transfer to a state prison, and her eyes narrowed in thought. Perhaps if Phil Douglas, back at the office in Austin, could find a starting point, he could turn up something besides the name of the person who’d gotten Dale out of federal prison. She made a note on the canary legal pad to that effect.
When she finished, she put the file along with the legal pad and pen on the bedside table and propped herself against the headboard with both plump pillows. She wasn’t really sleepy, and her mind was whirring around so fast that she couldn’t hold a single thought in it. She turned on the television, but there wasn’t anything interesting on, except the weekly political faux pas. In an election year, one-upmanship on the nightly news was definitely the thing.
She turned off the television in disgust. What was there to do in a hotel miles from her apartment? She missed Barnes, her cat. Usually he slept curled up next to her on the bedcover.
She wondered if Brannon had a cat these days. He used to have a mangy old yellow tomcat that slept on the kitchen floor at night. It had been Gretchen’s pet, but Brannon had fed it, and when nobody was looking, he played with it. He called it John, after the fictional John Reid, the original “Lone Ranger” of television legend. He’d always wanted to be a Texas Ranger, Gretchen had told her once. He knew the tiniest details about the first Rangers. He’d worked hard at law enforcement, just to have a shot at a job with the exclusive law enforcement group. It was a difficult job to get, too. There were only fifteen Ranger sergeants in Company D, Brannon’s company, that operated out of San Antonio, and they had to cover forty-one counties. They worked with many other law enforcement agencies to solve crimes, because their authority was literally borderless—a Ranger could go anywhere in Texas to assist in criminal investigation, and infrequently even went overseas in such endeavors.
Gretchen had wondered if Brannon’s infatuation with law enforcement had been because of his father. As a young boy, Marc felt he had no power at all. He was at the mercy of a verbally abusive father, and Marc was the only protection his mother and Gretchen had. While old man Brannon might not beat his son, he was apparently good at mental cruelty, which was, in its own way, equally destroying to a young ego.
She remembered how often Brannon went out of his way when he was on the Jacobsville police force to keep young offenders on the right track. He was a caring man. And he liked cats. She smiled, thinking sadly of poor Barnes, sitting in the vet’s boarding room while she was away.
She knew Brannon had good horses and beef cattle at his
Jacobsville ranch, the one that his manager kept solvent for him. He was an expert horseman, another Ranger skill that he’d mastered long before he pinned that star on his shirt. He could spin a lariat, bulldog, ride bareback—do most anything that equestrian skill demanded. She remembered horseback rides with him in San Antonio during those wonderful, idyllic days before Henry Garner’s murder. She liked to ride, too.
Her mind, oblivious to the present as she wandered through happier times, was intent on the good memories. It was so intent on them that she forgot her wet hair was still done up in a towel. She was about to cut out the bedside lamp when a sharp knock came at her door.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Josette got out of bed and padded to the door in her bare feet, keenly aware that she was wearing nothing but a robe over bare skin. She hesitated, remembering all the reasons she shouldn’t open that door. Her purse with the stun gun was halfway across the room, and she didn’t have a firearm. For all she knew, the murderer could be on the other side of the door.
Her heart pounded. Her mouth was dry. The knock came again, far more insistent. She went close and looked out through the peephole. It was Brannon, disheveled and dusty, with a cut beside his firm, chiseled mouth.
With a sigh of relief, she opened the door at once and let him in. “What in the world happened to you?” she exclaimed.
He wiped the cut beside his mouth. “I got jumped at my apartment as I was getting out of the truck,” he said, traces of anger still evident in his deep voice. “I didn’t know if they had a double header in mind, so I came to check on you.”
“You could have phoned,” she pointed out.
“A lot of good that would have done if they’d already managed to get into the room,” he said sarcastically.
The concern, which was obviously genuine, made her feel warm inside. She stared at his face. She winced as she reached up to trace beside the cut. “Well, at least they didn’t seem to do any permanent damage to you. How many were there?”
“Two.”
“Recognize them?”
He shook his head. “Too dark, and they were wearing face masks.”
“Why would they jump you?” she wondered aloud.
“At a guess, it was a warning that we’re getting too close to something they want to stay hidden,” he told her. His eyes narrowed. “Wet hair?”
She nodded. “I was going over my notes before I dried it. I forgot all about it,” she added with a sheepish smile, as she recalled where her mind was when she was about to turn out the light.
He went and put on the chain latch and made sure the door was locked before he sailed his Stetson into the chair next to it. Then he caught her hand and pulled her into the bathroom.
She didn’t need to ask why. He stood patiently while she got a washcloth and soaped it, reaching up to clean the wound on his face. He’d been in a fight with a suspect while they were dating. She’d patched him up then, too, flattered and secretly amused that he came to her for bandaging that he could easily have done himself.
“We don’t even have an antiseptic or a bandage,” she murmured as she bathed the cut.
“I’ll get one when I get home. Thanks.”
He washed his hands and his face before he wiped them on a towel and turned toward her, reaching for the towel wrapped around her head. “What are you doing?” she protested.
He wrangled the towel off her hair and plugged in the hair dryer that came with the room. “Nice thing about hotels these days,” he murmured, “they furnish everything you need to travel in style. Stand still.”
He’d let her clean him up. So she let him dry her hair. It was odd, the feeling of nurturing it fostered in her. Of course, Brannon had always been special to her. That never changed. The feel of his big fingers in her hair was hypnotic, soothing. The nearness of his lean, fit body was disturbing. It had been a long time since she’d been this close to Brannon. She remembered the feel of those hands on bare skin, the faint spicy scent that clung to him, the fresh odor of the soap he used. He was familiar to her as no other man had ever been. She closed her eyes and let the memories wash over her of the last time they’d been close, before he’d walked out of her life.
She’d genuinely believed that he was intensely serious about her in those days. Brannon had never been a ladies’ man. He didn’t notch his bedpost. He was somber, and quietly deliberative about things, and he was decidedly old-fashioned in his attitudes. He had a tender side, but it was shown rarely, and only to people he trusted. But Josette hadn’t understood how hard it was for him to trust. Her judgment had been faulty there. His loyalty to an old friend superseded his trust in a woman he didn’t know intimately.
She had to remember that, and hold on to her pride. It was hard, standing so close to him that she could feel the warmth of his body. She wanted so badly to press herself into his arms and forget the past. The comfort of those strong arms had been the crowning glory of her life during those sweet months they’d gone together in her last year of college.
“You seem to shrink every time I see you,” he murmured, noticing the disparity in their heights.
“I wear two-inch heels to work,” she replied.
“So do I,” he murmured dryly.
She looked down involuntarily and noted the riding heels on those hand-tooled cowboy boots he wore. She chuckled softly. “I guess so. But you’re still wearing them. I’m not.”
He ruffled her hair as the warm air blew it up in wafts of pure gold. “I always loved long hair,” he mused.
“You could let yours grow,” she pointed out.
“It’s not the same.” He turned her so that he could dry the back. Over her head, he met her eyes in the mirror. “I still remember you at fifteen,” he said quietly. “You don’t look much older, now.”
Her face flamed. “That isn’t a memory I like,” she said, averting her eyes.
“Did I ever tell you that just before the rape trial, I’d just seen a man go to prison for a rape he didn’t commit?” he asked out of the blue. “What?”
“He was a nice, clean-cut young man who worked in an office and had a new assistant who seemed to dote on him. One day she went home from work and called the police and told them he raped her.”
“Did he?”
“No. She wanted his job. She got it, too. He went to jail.”
“But that’s so unfair!”
“It was. He would have stayed there, too, but she made the mistake of bragging to a friend about her crafty promotion, and he went to the police. There was a new trial and he testified. The young man was cleared and she was fired. But he was never the same again. He said he couldn’t ever trust another woman.”
“I guess not.” She sighed, meeting Brannon’s pale eyes in the mirror. “No wonder you didn’t believe me that night. Some people are worse than snakes, aren’t they, Brannon?”
“You never use my first name anymore,” he said quietly. “Why?”
“We’re business colleagues,” she said, avoiding his piercing gaze. “I want to keep things at a professional level.”
“Most co-workers are on a first name basis these days.”
Her face was stiff. She felt him let go of her hair and she pulled away, running her fingers nervously through the silky length of it. “Thanks.”
He turned off the dryer and laid it aside. Before she could move, he had two great handfuls of that golden wealth and was lifting it to his mouth. His eyes closed, brows drawn down over his eyes as if he were in pain.
She was uneasy. She caught his hands, as if to remove them, but they turned and caught hers instead, leading them to his shirt. She felt the metal badge on the left pocket cold against her fingers, smelled the scent of her own shampoo and his cologne mingle.
“I was wrong about you. So wrong. I couldn’t even apologize,” he said as he bent. “Maybe I’m more like my father than I realized, Josie…”
The sound went into her mouth as his lips covered it gently. There in the silence of t
he room, she felt the heat and power of him as his arms enfolded her against the length of his powerful body and held her there.
She should struggle. It would be more dignified than moaning under the warm, sweet crush of his lips. Her hands clenched his shirt, still crisp and clean-smelling despite the long day and the fight he’d been in. Pictures ran through her mind of Brannon in an alley with a bullet in him, like poor Dale. Her arms went under his and around him and she moaned again, frightened of what she imagined.
He bent suddenly, lifting her into his arms. With his mouth still covering hers, he carried her to the first of the two double beds and sank into its softness with her under him.
“No,” she whispered breathlessly.
“Yes.” He kissed her again, his arms making a cage around her. “I know what you are,” he breathed into her mouth. “We both know I couldn’t seduce you if I wanted to, so relax.”
It was disturbing that he knew, or thought he knew, such intimate things about her. “You aren’t supposed to know that,” she whispered shakily.
He smiled against her mouth. “I know everything about you. I always have.” He brushed the hair back from her face and lay propped on one elbow, just looking into her soft eyes. “I hated the FBI,” he murmured in a deep, intimate tone.
Her eyebrows lifted. “Then why did you stay with it for two years?”
He shrugged. His fingers touched her softly swollen mouth. “I thought I could leave Texas and get rid of the bad memories. But they followed me.”
“Memories are portable,” she agreed.
He sighed, brushing her hair back from her face. “You look tired.”
“I am,” she said, aware of that gentle, caressing hand at her throat, tangling in the softness of her hair. “I’d been putting in twelve-hour days lately on a new project Simon had initiated, to put information on state felony cases into a central database.”
“I thought you weren’t a computer whiz,” he mused, smiling.
