The Lawman's Last Stand

by Vickie Taylor

  “You mean his anger.”

  “Cheese?” Margo offered her a slice of cheddar. Gigi shook her head and reached inside the refrigerator for a bagel.

  “I don’t think what you’re seeing is anger.”

  “Then it’s a pretty good imitation,” Gigi retorted.

  Margo smiled. “Granted, his reaction to you is quite…volatile. But I’ve known Shane a long time. I’ve seen him angry, and I’ve seen him hurt. But what I see in him now is more than either. It’s deeper.”

  Gigi ran her thumbnail down an old scar in the butcher-block tabletop. How was it that she was the one someone was trying to kill, the one unjustly accused of more than one crime, and yet she felt guilty for making him miserable? “He won’t even consider the possibility that he might be wrong about me.”

  “Maybe he’s afraid to. Strip away that surface layer of anger and he might have to face up to the emotions underneath.” Margo took a bite of cheese and chewed, making time for Gigi to consider her comment.

  Gigi looked up speculatively. “What emotions?”

  “Why don’t you ask him?”

  “Do I look like a masochist? I have no desire for another run-in with him.”

  Margo shot her a knowing look. “That’s why you’re wandering around a dark house all alone looking for him.”

  “I’m not looking for him. I—” Fire swept over Gigi’s face as the truth hit her. Margo was right. She hadn’t come to the kitchen because she was hungry. She had been looking for Shane. Hoping to bump into him in a darkened corridor where he couldn’t read from her expression what he’d done to her, how he’d devastated her. And what would she do if she’d found him? Talk to him? Yell at him? Hit him again? Hang on to him and beg him not to let her go?

  “It doesn’t matter,” Gigi said flatly. “He obviously doesn’t want to be found.”

  Mustering her tattered dignity, Gigi took her untouched bagel and dragged herself to the kitchen door, where she stopped and looked back. Margo was studying her, her head slightly tilted as if trying to solve some intricate puzzle. “What would you have told him, if you had found him?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.” Gigi shrugged, embarrassed. “Maybe that I’m afraid, too.”

  Margo went quiet, looking toward the end of the kitchen, near the pantry, like she was expecting something important to happen. When it didn’t, she turned back to Gigi, her eyes dark with disappointment and compassion. “Don’t you worry about finding him,” she said, her voice oddly fierce. “If he has any sense—and I know he does, somewhere in that thick head of his—he’ll quit hiding in the shadows and come to find you.”

  Wishing she could believe that, Gigi trudged out the door.

  Hearing her padded footsteps disappear down the hall, Shane stepped out of the pantry and slouched against the wall, the crackers Margo had sent him into the storage room to get still trapped in his clenched fist.

  “What was that about?” he asked.

  “Just trying to get a little insight about her. Thought it might help us figure her out.”

  “What’s to figure out? She’s lying to protect her father.”

  “You watched her interview today with the New York D.A.”

  He’d watched all right. He’d never studied a human being so closely in his whole life. He’d absorbed every flick of her eyelashes, lived for every shortened breath as a question took her by surprise, died for every nervous clasp of her hands as she gathered herself for an answer. Through the whole interview, he hadn’t seen a single sign that she was lying. And that bothered him. He couldn’t see it anymore. After eight years in the DEA, he could pick a liar out of a crowded bar without hearing a word the person said, just by watching body language. He could feel it.

  But not with Gigi. Too many other feelings got in the way.

  “Surely you must have some doubts,” Margo said.

  “I have plenty of doubts. Mostly about myself.”

  “Maybe that’s because you’ve gone too long without looking inside yourself—facing up to what’s really bothering you.”

  “And what would that be, Dr. Maitland?”

  “I don’t know. But I think she does. Maybe you should ask her.”

  “You’re meddling, Margo.” His hand tightened around the crackers he still held.

  “No, dear. I’m simply having a late-night snack.” Her voice was patronizingly patient. But when she raised her eyes to him, he saw past her patience. She was furious.

  Margo had never had much tolerance for cowardice.

  “If I’d been meddling,” she said tightly, “I would have sent her into the pantry for the crackers—” she pried the wadded column of cellophane from Shane’s clenched hand and sighed “—before you crushed them to dust.”

  Dust motes tickled the inside of Shane’s nose and irritated his eyes as he crawled through the attic toward the little octagon window nestled under the roof peak. It hadn’t taken Gigi long to find the one chink in Shelton House’s armor. The ornamental window was the only one in the house not nailed shut.

  Gigi straddled the top of a dormer overlooking the courtyard. Her knees were drawn up to her chest and the moonlight glowed off her pale cheeks. He didn’t remember her being so pale. Was it just a trick of the light, or had she really become so porcelain, so fragile, in the last two days?

  “What do you want, Shane?” she said without turning her head, as if she had some sixth sense that told her he was near.

  He levered his body through the small opening, holding the two bottles of beer he’d pilfered from the kitchen out in front of him. “It’s warm out. I brought you something cool.”

  “How thoughtful of you,” she said dryly.

  “Mind if I join you?”

  “Why? Did you think up a few more crimes to accuse me of? A few new ways to humiliate me?”

  Shane paused, balancing on the dormer slope and leaning one palm against the house’s crumbling stucco facade. “I guess I was pretty rough on you, huh?”

  “Is that some sort of half-baked apology?”

  “Would you accept it if it was?”

  “No.”

  “I didn’t think so.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “I couldn’t stay away.” That much was true. It would have been easy to claim that Margo had shamed him into it. But he would have come looking for her tonight in any case. Because, torture that it was to be with her, staying away was worse.

  He took a swig of beer. “I want to know what you’re afraid of.”

  “What?”

  “You said you were afraid. I want to know what you’re afraid of.”

  He steeled his heart against the reflection of the stars in her wide eyes as she turned her head. It reminded him too much of seeing the stars in her eyes another night.

  “You heard?” she said.

  He nodded. “So can I sit, or not?”

  She sighed heavily. “Suit yourself. But I’m warning you. One wisecrack and you’re going to be picking thorns out of your hide for a week.”

  He peered over the edge of the roof to the tangled rose garden two stories below. “I’ll try to restrain myself.”

  He settled his back against the crumbling stucco and stretched his legs across the red tiles in front of him while Gigi ignored him, staring across the moon-swept desert. Below them, Bald Billy and Jeff walked toward the back gate. Gigi’s back stiffened.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “Change of shift. They’re working two days on, two days off. They’re just meeting the new guys at the gate to make sure everything is kosher before they let them in.”

  She relaxed gradually. “So, were you hoping I’d confess all my sins to Margo while you listened in?”

  “No, I was hoping you wouldn’t confess all of mine.”

  Her head tipped back and the moonlight illuminated the fragile column of her throat. “I think Margo has already figured out that we weren’t playing Parcheesi while we waited for her up at the lake house.�
��

  “I’m sure she has. But those aren’t the sins I was talking about.”

  “What could I possibly tell her that would embarrass you more than a blow-by-blow, pardon the pun, account of our sex-capades?”

  “The things I said to you after she showed up.” Shane hadn’t slept much since then. A pair of wounded blue eyes as he’d shamed her—shamed himself—haunted his dreams. It had gotten so he didn’t even want to close his own eyes, for fear of seeing her tortured face. He took another long drink, then finished, “She would pin my ears to the side of my head for good if she’d heard. She doesn’t put up with crudeness. Or intimidation tactics.”

  He picked at the beer label with his thumbnail, glancing at her sideways. The silence was deafening. “In case you didn’t notice, that was a half-baked apology.”

  She unwound one arm from around her legs and snatched the second beer bottle from his hand. “Accepted,” she said sharply, then took a long swig. When she lowered the bottle, she kept her chin angled to the stars and said, “I don’t suppose this means you believe me.”

  “I’d like to. But the facts are stacked against you.”

  “And the facts are all you care about, right? Never mind what your gut is telling you. What your instincts say. What you feel. Or maybe that’s the problem.” She drank from her bottle. “You don’t feel anything anymore.”

  He frowned, rubbing the condensation from the bottom of the bottle onto his jeans. “Trusting my feelings has gotten me in trouble before.”

  “Lucia,” she said matter-of-factly. “She might be in prison, but she’s never very far away from you, is she?”

  Shane didn’t answer; he didn’t have to.

  Gigi rolled her eyes. “Tell me Shane, was she in bed with us, too?”

  “If I’d been thinking about her, we wouldn’t have been in bed.”

  “I’m not her,” Gigi insisted.

  “But I’m still me.” Shane stared down at his empty bottle, wishing he had another. Several more. Enough to get ripping drunk. Then he could blame his rolling stomach on something besides uncertainty. “And John Ferrar is still your father.”

  “No, he is not!” she blurted, then reared back as if she’d surprised even herself with her outburst.

  Despite the warm Arizona night air, Shane’s blood turned cold. He stood at the window, feeling off-kilter by a lot more than the slope of the roof he stood on. “What?”

  “He hasn’t been my father since I was eight years old.”

  “When your mother died?”

  “After she died, he didn’t want me anymore. I might as well have died, too. He shipped me off to boarding school before the sod had taken root on her grave. No matter how hard I tried to make him love me—no matter how many riding trophies I won or scholastic honors I earned—it was like I didn’t exist for him. So you see, that loyalty you’re so sure is driving me to let him get away with murder—it doesn’t exist. I owe John Ferrar nothing—least of all, loyalty.”

  Shane hesitated, trying to sort out fact from wishful thinking. “You were at his house that night.”

  “After vet school, I tried to get to know him again. I insisted on a regular dinner date. So the first Sunday of every month, we would sit at opposite ends of a long table and eat in silence until he’d finally look up at me and ask me if I’ve done something different with my hair. I’d tell him I haven’t changed it since I was sixteen, and then he’d find some ex cuse to retire into his study and work. I’d have a cup of coffee in the kitchen with Carmella, his cook, and then I’d leave. That’s what family was like in the Ferrar house, Shane. It’s not like the movies.”

  He tried to understand. He tried to put himself in her place—to have a father who didn’t want her. He tried to imagine what she would feel. And he failed.

  It was all so foreign to him. Something so far beyond his comprehension that struggling to make himself understand it only reminded him how incapable he was of ever understanding.

  He’d never felt the bond of blood to blood.

  She cared for the old man, whether she admitted it or not. He could still hear it in her voice, see it in her eyes. When she said his name, he looked at her and saw the eight-year-old girl she must have been, grieving over the loss of her mother and trying desperately to earn her father’s love.

  Maybe she was still trying to earn his love.

  “You tried to make it right with him,” he said coarsely. “You must feel something for him.”

  Sadness filled her eyes, as if she realized he’d struggled mightily and lost. “I do. I feel sorry for him. Almost as sorry as I’m beginning to feel for you.”

  Her words cleaved his heart with surgical precision. He’d had some tough breaks in life, but he’d never asked for anyone’s pity. Didn’t want it.

  But if she was telling the truth…

  If she hadn’t known her father was a suspect when she left New York, if John Ferrar or others unknown were really trying to kill her, then he hoped to God that when they tried again, they got him instead. Because if Gigi was telling the truth, then what Shane had done, the way he had treated her, was worse than pitiable.

  It was unforgivable.

  “Don’t waste your energy feeling sorry for me,” he said, turning his back on Gigi to duck through the window. “I don’t deserve it.”

  In the hallway at the bottom of the attic stairs, he stopped. Oliver’s high-pitched whine reached him through the floorboards. The dog was downstairs, and agitated.

  The foldaway stairs behind him creaked. “Shh.” He held his arm out to stop Gigi from passing by. Oliver’s whines persisted, along with a scratching sound like he was clawing at a door or window.

  “What is it?” Tension twanged in her voice.

  “I don’t know. But I don’t think he’s just asking to go outside.”

  They crept down the stairs and found the dog at a darkened service entrance. Shane restrained Oliver with a hand on his collar, and drew his gun. “Go back to your room.”

  She grabbed a handful of his shirt. “No way.”

  “Don’t argue with me,” he snarled.

  “I’m safer with you.”

  There wasn’t time to debate. Oliver growled, low and deep. Shane opened the door silently and slid into the darkness with Gigi attached to his back. Oliver followed soundlessly on their heels, as if he understood the need for stealth.

  Skirting along the shrub bed next to the front portico, Shane checked the drive. No sign of Jeff, Billy or the relief agents. The hair on the back of his neck stood.

  He held the gun in front of him, two-handed but lowered, raising it only as he swiveled around the corner of the house. Nothing. But Oliver caught a scent and trotted across the yard.

  Reluctantly, Shane followed. He didn’t like being in the open with Gigi exposed in the bright light of the moon. He hurried across the lawn and caught up to Oliver near the front gates. The dog jumped up on the wall, growled and let out a plaintive woof. Shane tracked the broken ivy stems up and over the wall. Someone had breached the grounds.

  He turned to shuttle Gigi back to the house and get a search started when a fireball lit the night sky. A heartbeat later the sound—a deafening blast—reached him. Instinctively he threw himself toward Gigi, propelling them both to the ground just as the shock wave rolled over them. Heat and miniscule bits of brick and wood and glass pelted his back, stinging like a thousand tiny pinpricks. He curled himself around Gigi, covering her body with his and wrapping his arms around her head. Oliver cowered at his feet.

  He was still trying to hold Gigi down when she shoved him back, sitting and staring at the inferno that used to be Shelton House with wide eyes. The whole north wing—the wing where she had taken a room—was engulfed in flames.

  A tremor racked her body. “Oh, my God. Jeff? Billy?”

  “They were still outside.”

  Her tremor escalated to a full-bodied shake. “Margo?”

  He ran his hands over her shoulders as if
warming her from a chill. “She left before I came upstairs. I watched her car drive out myself. She wasn’t in there. Nobody was.”

  Gigi reached out to stroke the dog’s head. This time her hand didn’t shake. “Thanks to Oliver. If he hadn’t warned us—”

  She didn’t finish her sentence. There was no need. They both knew they would have been killed if it hadn’t been for one stray mutt.

  Gigi struggled to her feet, visibly gathering her composure. Shane tried to wrap his arms around her, to pull her back into the shadows near the wall, but she pulled away from him. Flames reflected in her eyes and the sizzle of destruction filled the air. Acrid smoke burned the linings of his nostrils.

  “So much for your theory about my father trying to get me away from you. That explosion was supposed to kill us both.” She coughed, choked on the smoke swarming around them now, then raised her watery gaze to his. “So how does that fit into your sense of family values, huh?”

  Chapter 11

  “It’s true, isn’t it?” she asked. “My own father is trying to kill me.”

  Gigi stood in front of him shaking and shivering and biting her lip, and everything Shane knew or didn’t know or thought he’d ever known about family or loyalty or right or wrong crumbled under the force of her quaking. Only two clear thoughts formed in his mind.

  The first was that John Ferrar had better hope that when Shane caught up to him, they weren’t alone, because a man who would kill his own daughter was a freak of nature and didn’t deserve to live.

  And the second was that he had to get his arms around Gigi, right now.

  She resisted, first by holding her body rigid then by jerking her hands up and beating on his back. Her fists pummeled his shoulders. “Damn! Damn! Damn him! Damn you! Damn you both!”

  He held her as close as he dared, afraid she might shatter if he held her too tight. Afraid she might shatter if he didn’t.

  She dampened his shoulder with warm, wet tears, grinding her cheek against his shirt, and breathed in ragged, heaving gulps.