Flirting with Disaster & Fanning the Flames

by Victoria Dahl

  He shook his head and got back to the new shift schedule that Mary had written up. He added one more pass of the K-9 units through the parking lot just before court was scheduled to dismiss. Stevenson might not be going for a big statement like a courthouse explosion. He might just be targeting the single car of someone on the prosecution team.

  He sent the schedule to his team leaders and answered his ringing cell phone.

  “Marshal Tom Duncan?” The man’s voice was unfamiliar.

  “Yes,” he said impatiently.

  “This is Agent Gates with the FBI.”

  “Good,” Tom said. “I know we don’t have proof that they’ve transported explosives across state lines, but I appreciate that you’re willing to weigh in. Your team deals with terroristic threats a lot more often than—”

  “I’m sorry. I’m not clear on what you’re talking about.”

  Tom frowned and grabbed a pen and a pad of paper. “I’m sorry. Did you say Agent Gates?”

  “Yes, I’m with the Chicago office.”

  The pen pressed into the paper and left a dark blot of ink that looked startlingly blue to Tom’s eyes. “Chicago?”

  “I got a hit that you accessed information about Malcolm Pozniak, and I was wondering why a US marshal stationed in Wyoming would access an old Chicago case.”

  Tom hesitated. There’d been a flag on the Pozniak file that information was not to be shared with any nonfederal agencies, with extra caution to be exercised with the Chicago PD. Apparently, the FBI was still taking that seriously. Tom was, too. And something about this call bothered him.

  “Pozniak is a fugitive in a federal case,” Tom said carefully. “He falls under the purview of the marshal service.”

  “He does,” Agent Gates said. He waited, likely trying to give Tom the chance to say more. Tom declined. Gates finally gave in. “Do you have any information about Malcolm Pozniak or his whereabouts?”

  “I do not.” That was an honest answer, so he invested all his conviction in those words, hoping the lies that followed wouldn’t be noticeable. “I’m sorry to raise any excitement. My territory covers a lot of isolated places. The kinds of places where fugitives like to hole up and stay. If you could access my online activities, you’d find I scan a lot of old cases, just to keep faces in the forefront. I never know which bar or feed store I’ll walk into and find myself face-to-face with an old felon.”

  A long silence followed. There was no way for Gates to dispute this. He didn’t have access to Tom’s online activity, and they both knew it. “So you haven’t seen someone who fits Pozniak’s description?”

  “Seventy-year-old white male who looks like he’s seen too much life? We got a lot of those in Wyoming. But I’m afraid I can’t help you with this one.”

  Another pause. “All right. What about the daughter?”

  “The daughter?”

  “Beth Pozniak.”

  His heart thumped loudly, echoing in his ears. “I didn’t see her on the list of federal fugitives. She’s only a person of interest, if I recall.”

  “You accessed her file.”

  Tom forced an impatient laugh. “I may have followed a link. I looked at a few cases last night. That one seemed unlikely to be resolved. Guy’s probably dead by now.”

  “Yeah.” The agent went quiet for another moment before he sighed. “Well, shit. It would’ve been nice if you’d spotted him. This damn case has been on my desk for a dozen years now. I inherited it from a guy who keeled over in his office chair, and I’m thinking I’ll carry it to my grave, too.”

  “I’m impressed you’re still working it so hard.”

  “Pozniak killed a fellow cop. You know these cop-killer files are never really closed. Listen...” The guy paused as if he were thinking, but Tom recognized it as a ploy to establish intimacy. “There hasn’t been a blip from Pozniak in over ten years. Like you said, he’s probably dead. Seventy years old, and he ate a typical Chicago cop’s diet for thirty-five of those. Heart attack. Stroke. Something got him.”

  Tom nodded and made a noncommittal sound.

  “I’d like this off my desk, Marshal. And bringing in a guy like this wouldn’t be bad for you, either.”

  “Hey, I wouldn’t object,” Tom said, trying to sound casual instead of tense. “I’m happy to help any way I can.”

  “All right. But listen. There’s a flag on the account. The problems with the Chicago PD are obvious, but there were some...let’s just call them internal problems here at the bureau. So if there’s anything going on in Wyoming, anything at all...” He waited again. Tom waited, too.

  “I see you’re working this judge’s case,” Gates finally said. “Maybe Pozniak hooked up with that antigovernment outfit. Maybe that’s something you don’t want to share yet. Maybe you haven’t confirmed it. But if you find anything at all, get in touch with me. I’ll check it out personally.”

  “I’ll help in any way I can,” Tom repeated before hanging up. He meant it, but Agent Gates wasn’t the one Tom wanted to help.

  Beth Pozniak was Isabelle West now, and apparently, Tom was the only person who knew that. He’d just lied to a fellow federal officer, at least by omission, and it didn’t feel right. But Tom was so fucked up about Isabelle that he didn’t know if it was the lying that had felt wrong or something else. He needed time to think, and he didn’t have time right now. Not for this.

  But thoughts of Isabelle followed him out of the makeshift marshal’s office and into the entryway of the courthouse. She followed him as he checked in with Hannity and then with Mary and the guards stationed at the front doors. Court was in session, and he wouldn’t disturb it, but Isabelle followed him as he checked that the side doors were still securely bolted.

  She’d lied to him about everything. And she needed help. The question was, what would he do to help her?

  Things would be simpler if he hadn’t become personally invested. Things would be way simpler if he hadn’t had sex with her. But things weren’t simple now.

  He couldn’t do the right thing and inform his chief, put a call in to the FBI and bring her in for questioning. He wasn’t willing to just cross his fingers and let the wheels of justice turn. Isabelle hadn’t been a criminal when she’d run, so he needed to find out what she’d been running from before he threw her back into it.

  But it was more than that. Way more than just finding out the truth. He’d started hoping his attraction to her had led his instincts astray. That there was no past, no mystery, no problem to solve. Because he wanted to keep seeing her, damn it. He wanted to accept her invitation to come over again and then persuade her to issue another and another. He liked her. And he wanted her. And that was a rare enough combination that he’d needed there to be no story here.

  But now that there was, he had to do more than find out the truth. He had to help her, get her free of this mess and do it with enough skill that she’d forgive his dishonesty.

  Tom knew that you had to help people in trouble even if they wound up hating you for it. But Isabelle hating him would be a damn high price to bear.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  SHE HADN’T LOVED a man since Patrick Kerrigan.

  She’d loved their bodies. And their laughter. And sometimes their voices or their minds or just the way they moved. At the very least, she’d liked a couple of them very much. But she hadn’t loved them, really, the way you might show all of yourself to someone else and pray it could be enough. She hadn’t been able to.

  She didn’t love Tom, either. She hadn’t known him long enough to love him, and it was impossible anyway. But there was something there. Some comfort and maybe even trust.

  She’d gone to sleep perfectly happy the night before. More than happy. Deeply satisfied and physically spent and smiling stupidly into the darkness.

  But Isabelle’s mind had worked while she’d slept, and she’d awoken feeling as if she weighed a thousand pounds. She was afraid.

  There was the easy fear of him being a marshal
, of course, but that wasn’t what was sitting on her chest when she opened her eyes. It was the terrible gravity of realizing that she could love him.

  He was smart, and cute, and he laughed at himself and worried about other people and worked hard at his job. He treated women like equals, a rare quality among the law-enforcement men she’d known. He made her laugh. He held his own.

  All of those were lovely traits, and all relatively harmless. Until you factored in the way he kissed and fucked and tasted.

  She wanted more of that. Much more. And that was what scared her. The deep, greedy joy of that.

  If he wasn’t a marshal, it might have been okay. He lived six hours away. They could get close enough to have a relationship, but not so close that he’d start pressing about her past. He could see her when he was in town. She could go to Cheyenne anytime she missed him.

  She could have someone. Someone to notice when she was down. Someone to tell her that her new haircut was pretty. Someone to touch her when she felt lonely.

  Isabelle rubbed a hand over her face, trying to wipe away the thoughts. She didn’t need any of that. She couldn’t have any of that. Not with Tom Duncan.

  By the time Isabelle got out of bed, Sophie and Lauren were long gone. They were both used to rising at a scheduled hour. Isabelle woke when she wanted to. Sometimes early to catch the light. Sometimes late when her commissions were in and she could stay up until 2:00 a.m. painting what she wanted.

  Today she went through the motions, making a big pot of coffee and nibbling on a piece of cherry pie for breakfast and trying to pretend her heart was as hard as it had always been.

  But even that was a lie. Her heart had once been as soft as jelly and about that smart, too. She’d loved Patrick and trusted him implicitly, and he’d waited until her lowest moment and then dealt the killing blow.

  She’d been so stunned by her father’s arrest and the initial wave of charges that she hadn’t quite noticed Patrick pulling away. She’d been too consumed with panic. A month later, he’d still been awkward and distant, but that had been her fault, hadn’t it? She was the one with the criminal father. Worse yet was that her father’s captain was Patrick’s dad, and now Captain Kerrigan was under scrutiny, too.

  She’d felt so awful about that. Captain Kerrigan hadn’t even been her father’s direct supervisor, but her engagement to Patrick Kerrigan had likely drawn the attention of the FBI. That was what Patrick had claimed, anyway. That was what he’d yelled at her one night when she’d complained that he was being cold.

  If she’d been the woman she was today, she would have told him to stuff it. She’d have told him she was the one living this nightmare, not him.

  But she’d still been that stupid girl, so she’d felt guilty and tried to make it up to him any way she could. She’d stuffed down her own grief and terror to sneak into his apartment for sex. Still, he’d always made her leave in the middle of the night. “You don’t want the press reporting on this, do you?” he’d asked.

  She’d acquiesced every time, when all she’d really wanted was to stay and feel safe and know that someone was there while she slept.

  He’d finally told her the truth, four months later. That her family name was going to affect his career. That he hated her for dragging him down. That he’d waited this long to end it only because his dad had asked him to keep an eye on her after her father had skipped town. Patrick had dumped her, and she’d still loved him. He’d had to push her away in disgust when she’d tried to hug him.

  The two men in her life who were supposed to protect her, her father and her future husband... They’d both walked away.

  Isabelle protected herself now. She’d done a good job of it, yet somehow her defenses were slipping.

  She opened the doors to her studio and let the smell of paint wash over her. The weight that had settled over her lifted a little. It wanted to lift, because it wasn’t really fear. It was hope.

  Useless hope. Tom Duncan was a US marshal, and if she trusted him with her heart and body on some primal level she couldn’t understand, it meant nothing because she couldn’t trust him with the truth.

  Isabelle tried to shake off her sorry thoughts and get to work. She could normally lose herself easily in painting, but she kept thinking of Tom. She created the latissimus dorsi on the white canvas, building it out of reds and creams and blues and yellows, drawing out each individual muscle fiber until it became a human back. But then it was Tom’s back, stretching and moving as he held his weight off her body and fucked her.

  Most people would find that morbid. Tom would find it morbid. That she could perfectly picture the way the naked muscles of his back would contract and relax as he made love to her. But she thought it was beautiful. She wanted to trace those muscles, follow the muted lines of them along his skin, knowing exactly what they looked like beneath it. How could they not be beautiful when they’d let him do what he’d done to her?

  She stepped a few feet away to get a better look at the picture, realizing that she’d painted way more than she’d planned. A glance at the clock made her chin jerk back in surprise. It was nearly 4:00 p.m. She’d been painting for over five hours.

  Maybe Tom was good for her. She smiled at the thought, surprising herself so much that she pressed a hand to her mouth to hide it.

  She couldn’t love him. For so many reasons. Or maybe she could love him a little despite them. Maybe she could trust herself to know another person now, to see who he really was. Maybe she could trust herself to recklessly love him just a tiny bit, even if she couldn’t ask him to stay. And maybe she’d have to sleep with him again to find out.

  This time when she smiled, she didn’t cover it. Instead, she started on the left gluteus maximus and pictured Tom’s ass tightening.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  TOM STARED AT the text from Isabelle, willing it to go away so he could practice some self-control. He’d hoped she wouldn’t get in touch. The sex had been casual. She’d made that clear.

  But then she’d texted him, asking if he planned to stop by, and the push-pull of it had nearly snapped him in two.

  His body was shouting yes. Screaming it, really. Yes, stop by. Drop everything and go over now. Tell this judge and this trial to fuck off. What you really need is that again.

  If he’d been eighteen years old, he might have imitated the Road Runner in his eagerness to indulge in a second round. A dust cloud would have poofed up around his feet.

  But he had a little more control now. The bigger problem was that his brain was telling him to hightail it over there, too. To press her a little. See where she was tender. Find out if he could discover that weak point in her defenses and get her to let him in.

  His body agreed, because his body still had all the nuance of that eighteen-year-old boy.

  But his conscience...that was a trickier beast. His conscience told him he was an asshole. That he never should have touched her in the first place, not while he was checking up on her.

  Despite that, he hadn’t had the strength to say no. So he’d given her an out instead.

  I’d like to, but I’m not sure when I’ll get out of here. It could be late.

  She’d say no. Or blow him off. That was what he’d told himself. She was a beautiful woman who liked to be alone; she didn’t need a half-assed offer of sex from a guy who’d leave town in a week. He was nothing to her. Last night had meant nothing.

  But then she wrote back.

  Late is fine with me. Just let me know if you’re up for company.

  Oh, shit. Even two hours later, he could still feel the way his baser instincts had surged to life with a rough jolt.

  If you’re up for company, she’d said. If. Which was how he found himself in his car at 8:00 p.m. staring at her texts and unsuccessfully trying to curb his need.

  He opened the text box.

  Just wrapped up the last meeting. Are you still up?

  “Please don’t be up,” he said out loud, even as every nerve in
his body prayed for the opposite.

  He waited for a few moments, aware that his was the last car in the courthouse lot and pretending that meant he was good at his job. He was good, after all. Everything was in place for the protective duty tonight. The morning schedule was set up, starting with a 6:00 a.m. sweep of the courthouse and the highway leading to it. He was done. Even the boss needed dinner and sleep. Or something better.

  His phone chimed. He cursed. His heart raced as he dared to look.

  It’s 8:00 p.m. Of course I’m still up, silly. Come check my perimeter?

  “Damn it,” he said, the words rough with strained laughter.

  She wasn’t who she said she was, but she was exactly who he’d suspected. She wasn’t a criminal. Not really. She was a woman on the run from trouble.

  He could just tell her the truth. He could confess. Beg for her forgiveness and tell her he was here to help.

  But she’d run not just from bad guys, but from the cops, as well. The FBI had tagged her as a person of interest. She’d probably helped her father hide. And if she’d been paying taxes this whole time, then she’d stolen someone else’s identity to do it.

  Even with all that playing through his head, he started his car and hit the highway toward her place.

  He needed time to review the details. He needed time to think. He wouldn’t be able to think when he was near her. But in the end, he drove straight past the turnoff to the judge’s and headed to Isabelle’s place because she’d asked him to.

  She answered the door with a big smile that would’ve been marred by the streak of green paint along her cheek if he hadn’t found the paint adorable.

  “You’ve been plying your ghastly trade, I see,” he said.

  She looked down at the spatter of white paint on her black sweater. “I have. But no cadavers were harmed in the process, I promise.” She’d been premed in college before she’d dropped out after her father had fled prosecution during her senior year. These were things he should have found out during casual conversation. Instead, he’d found them in the FBI file.