Passion to Protect

by Colleen Thompson

  “And Kenzie? How is...?” He paused to catch his breath. “How’s her asthma?”

  “She’s much better now. Em’s with her and Cody. They’re both under observation.” Her voice broke as she bent to wrap her arms around him and touch her lips to his temple. “Thank you so much. It’s horrible enough, facing what happened to my father. But if my kids hadn’t made it, there’s no way I could have—you risked everything to save all our lives, Jake, and I swear to you, I’ll never forget it.”

  As she pulled back, he raised his untethered hand to brush away her tears. “I only wish... I’m sorry. So sorry about your dad.”

  “They found...they got my father out of there, too.” She pressed her trembling lips together as she fought for control. When she could speak again, she said, “I told the sheriff about seeing him out there.”

  “Your ex-husband?” he asked carefully.

  She nodded, her eyes stricken. “Sheriff Wallace says that Mac escaped.”

  “He was in prison?” Jake asked.

  “Yes. They sentenced him to twenty years in a penitentiary in Nevada for attempted murder.”

  “Whose?”

  Shaking her head, she said, “Let’s just say I picked the wrong man, as wrong as you can possibly get.”

  “It was you, wasn’t it?” he guessed. “The bastard tried to kill you. Why am I just now hearing about this?”

  “He did,” she said. “Fortunately the media doesn’t consider domestic violence cases nearly as interesting as celebrities with roaming hands. And I begged my dad to keep it quiet. I couldn’t stand the thought of being stared at, whispered about and pitied for my mistakes,” she said, “especially since it’s everyone else who’s suffered for my mistake. My children and my father. You.” Gingerly, she touched his cheek, beneath his injured eye.

  “There was a fight,” Jake admitted, gritting his teeth as he remembered, “but a face-full of bear spray settled it. Liane, I don’t see how he could’ve possibly gotten out of there alive, blinded the way he was. I gave him the chance to come out with me, but he seemed a lot more interested in taking off my head.”

  “If he died out there, I can’t be sorry, not after what he did.”

  Jake nodded, his stomach spasming as he remembered the shock of finding Deke’s corpse.

  She put down the water and hugged herself. He ached to gather her into his arms and say something to ease her pain. But she turned from him, just out of his reach. And no wonder, when the man she had once fully trusted had repaid her faith with a bullet.

  “You’d think a man who’d just broken out of prison—” he reached for the cup again to soothe the sting of his throat “—would have sense enough to stay as far away from you as possible. After all, isn’t that the first place the authorities would come looking?”

  “If they had, my father might still be alive.” Shaking her head, she blinked back tears. “I do know the old Mac would have been smart enough to stay miles away from any place he might be recognized. But then, the old Mac never would have hit me, either, much less...”

  Jake couldn’t stop himself from asking, “How’d a woman like you ever end up with that loser?” Why him and not me?

  Her gaze drifted away, a blush deepening her color. “You have to understand, he was so different when I met him. He was always so considerate—he seemed to live to make me happy. He moved in fast, maybe too fast, but he kept telling me he’d waited all his life to meet me and he didn’t want to waste a minute.”

  “Sounds controlling to me.”

  “That’s what Dad kept saying, but I wouldn’t hear it. I was too busy pinching myself, thinking I was dreaming that such a handsome and successful man would want to marry a girl just out of school.”

  Her father had told him that she had picked a rich guy. Despite what they’d just gone through, the memory of their history rose like a wall of ice between them, cold and slick and insurmountable. He might always care for her, but he would never forget how it had felt to be told she had to see what else was out there. Who else, she might as well have said. “And Mac was older, too, right?”

  “Twelve years.” She sighed, then shook her head. “I’d just taken my first job in Vegas, my dream job, or so I thought. It was so exciting, but I was alone there. I didn’t know a soul.”

  That was your choice, he thought, but he restrained himself from speaking. I would have given anything if you’d reached out to me.

  Even after she had told him not to wait for her, he had written to let her know that he was still here if she changed her mind. That he would be waiting for her to get her need to travel and explore out of her system.

  With his grandmother’s health failing, he’d been forced to stick close to home, taking distance learning and extension courses in his spare time as she practiced Russian with him. He’d never for a moment regretted the years he had spent caring for the sweet babushka who’d taken him in after his mom’s death. Her house was the only place he’d ever felt at home.

  He’d only regretted that Liane had never offered so much as a glimmer of hope that she intended to return, leaving him to turn to a string of short-term, strictly physical affairs to ease his disappointment. Neither they nor his career had ever eased the hollow ache she’d left.

  “If it makes you feel any better,” she said, “I’ll admit it. I was stupid. I got caught up in the fantasy and let him sweep me off my feet. He seemed so charming and sophisticated—everything I thought I wanted.”

  He swallowed back his bitterness, reminding himself that he’d been the one to ask her for an explanation.

  She shook her head, her blue eyes misting. “At first things seemed so right, but after we married, I began to see how vulnerable he was behind the facade. He was always under so much pressure to perform—these crazy quotas from his boss, new young brokers always snapping at his heels. And he was out at all hours, being wined and dined by financial-products salespeople, all of them users bent on promoting their own agenda.” She closed her eyes, and her voice grew strangely detached. “It sounds crazy now, but I felt sorry for him. I tried and tried to help him, even after I found out about the drugs.”

  “Drugs?”

  “Cocaine, for certain, and heaven knows what else,” she confirmed. “In the space of a few months his personality changed completely. He started muttering to himself, and sometimes he stayed out all night. Other times he’d pace for hours on end, then scream at the kids for making noise, and me for letting them.”

  “Did he hurt the kids?” Anger twisted his insides at the thought.

  “Never physically,” she said. “I always managed to distract him.”

  “So he took it out on you instead?”

  “Not at first. But after his old firm accused him of embezzling over two-and-a-half million dollars, he came completely unglued.”

  Jake couldn’t help but ask, “Did he do it?”

  “Even now, I don’t know.” She shrugged and shook her head. “He was so adamant in his denials, so freaked over what everyone was saying about him. We had FBI and Securities Exchange Commission agents on our doorstep. I should have left him then, but it felt like my family was under attack, and it was a sickness, what those drugs did. I couldn’t kick him when he was down like that.” She hung her head, her color rising. “I just wanted to believe everything would be better, he would get clean and get better, and I’d have my husband back again as soon as they figured out it was all a huge mistake.”

  Feeling the shame that radiated from her, he instinctively sought to ease it. “It’s only natural to want to circle the wagons in a crisis.”

  “They never did find a trace of the money, and later on the whole firm ended up in serious trouble,” she said. “But at that time Mac was paranoid that someone was out to destroy him. After he was fired, he drove away his friends, and then he co
nvinced himself that I was spying on him, reporting his activities to his former boss, the government and heaven knows who else.”

  “You should’ve called your father. He would’ve come for you.” I would have.

  But that would be easy to say now, in hindsight. The truth was, after the way she’d left him, he would have been more likely to give her the number of a domestic violence hotline and then hang up. After all, she was the one who had insisted he move on and make his own life.

  But even as he thought it, he knew he was lying to himself. If she’d picked up the phone, he would have dropped everything, done anything, to help her. To earn the chance to someday stake his claim.

  “Maybe I wasn’t ready to admit Dad was right about my marriage,” she confessed, the words flat and lifeless. Broken. “Or that I’d stayed even after things got physical. I still kept thinking I could help him. I imagined I could save him. Stupid, huh?”

  “You’re not a stupid woman, Liane,” Jake said, but her voice overrode his.

  “Finally he really hurt me—broke my jaw and swore he’d kill me if I ever left him. He was so out of control, I was scared to death we’d all end up one of those awful stories on the news. So first chance I got, I took the kids and sneaked out.”

  “But Cody and Kenzie are his kids, too. How could he—”

  “Before he got sick, they were. He was a good father back then, before... But later he accused me...he said I was making Cody afraid of him and Kenzie wasn’t even his—just because she has my blue eyes and his boss had blue eyes, too.”

  “He really is nuts.” Jake reached for her hand and squeezed it. “I would never believe for a moment that you’re the cheating kind.”

  In fact, she’d been the honest kind back when both of them were eighteen. The kind who’d thought a clean break the fairer option before she went off to college.

  It had been the right thing, the moral thing, to do. He understood that suddenly. So why had it taken so many years for him to see it, and to see that he had scared her off with all his foolish talk of starting his own—their own—family right out of high school?

  “Thank you, Jake,” she said. “And you’re right. I could never respect myself if... I could never...”

  Divorced or not, she still hasn’t broken free, he thought, since he’d never heard about her looking twice at any man since her return home. But considering the hell she’d been through, it was no wonder she retreated whenever a man came near. Even the first man she had ever loved.

  Now, with her father gone, he wondered if it was even possible that she could ever learn to trust again? And was he willing to risk his heart again to try to teach her?

  * * *

  “It wasn’t my daddy who hurt Grandpa,” Cody said stubbornly. He thought his voice sounded funny behind the oxygen mask.

  His mom was sitting on the bed beside him, holding Kenzie, who had gone all stiff and quiet when Sheriff Wallace started asking questions. A few minutes earlier his mom had told them what Cody knew already. That Grandpa wasn’t just hurt, he wasn’t ever coming back.

  Cody closed his eyes, remembering how Grandpa had gotten down from Waco to get rid of a stone that had gotten caught in Arrow’s shoe. Then Kenzie had starting whining about how she had to pee, and Grandpa had lifted them both down from their horses and told him to stand guard for her while she squatted behind a rock.

  She’d barely finished when Cody heard the angry voices, and then a gunshot. He’d peeked his head out and shouted, “Grandpa!”

  He’d been just in time to see the ketchup exploding from Grandpa’s throat. Just in time to see him fall and hear the gurgling sound he made. And then the man with the gun saw him over by the rock and shouted.

  “Hey!” he’d yelled. “Hold it!” Cody knew that tone. It was the voice from his old nightmares.

  “He’s not my real daddy,” Cody insisted, his fists balled tight. “He’s a bad man. A rotten, stinking no-good piece of horse poop. I hate his guts! I hate him!”

  Yelling made him start coughing again, and his mom leaned over and hugged him, patting his back until he finished.

  “You’re okay. It’s okay,” she said, kissing the top of his head. He squirmed away. He didn’t want Sheriff Wallace to think he was a baby.

  The sheriff gave his mom a look, and she nodded and sighed. “I know you want a different father, Cody,” she said. “A real dad—and you deserve one. But the sheriff needs to know, was the man you saw, the man with the gun with Grandpa, was it your—”

  “Was it this man?”

  The sheriff took a picture from his pocket, a picture of a man Cody remembered smashing down the door, then shooting Mom and almost making her die, too. And then he’d screamed at him and Kenzie to stop their damned sniveling.

  His heart filled up with hot hate, red and angry as the ketchup that he knew had really been blood. Even though he hadn’t gotten a good look at the man’s face, he knew the meanness in that voice, all right.

  So he sat up straight and pulled the mask off so the sheriff and his mom would hear him. “It was him, I know it. He was the man who killed my Grandpa, the man who wanted to kill us, too. And I hope he burns up out there. I hope he burns in—” He slanted a look toward Kenzie and knew he shouldn’t say the bad word in front of a first grader. So he spelled it for them instead, and his sister’s eyes went wide.

  * * *

  Several hours later Jake picked up the photo he’d selected from the array the sheriff had spread out before him. “You bastard,” he said flatly, glaring down at the squared jaw and narrow nose, the heavy brows and the resentful, dark eyes of the bastard who had nearly killed her. Relieved as he was that the doctor had pronounced him well enough to discontinue the supplemental oxygen, the situation still felt surreal, like something from a nightmare.

  “You know, Jake,” Harry told him, carefully changing the subject, “Deke thought the world of you. He always wished things had worked out between you and Liane. He would’ve been damned proud to claim you as his son.”

  The sheriff’s gaze slid away, and Jake had to take another drink of water from the cup beside him.

  “He would’ve been proud of the way you came through for her, too,” Harry went on. “Proud and grateful, especially considering—”

  “He was the best man I knew, and he would’ve told you—” Jake forced the words out through his tight throat “—to quit blaming yourself for not finding out about McCleary’s escape until after—”

  “I have plenty of reasons to blame myself, so there’s no need to try to make me feel any better. I don’t want to feel better right now. I damned well don’t deserve to.” Before Jake could think of what to say, Harry cleared his throat and went on. “I’ve recovered Deke’s gun from his mule, but what happened to that gun McCleary had? The rifle he shot at you with?”

  “I took it with me when I left him there, but I lost it later. Put it down when I went to pick up Cody, I guess, or...” Jake shook his head. “I don’t remember. Stupid thing for me to do. I’m sure you could’ve used it for the investigation.”

  “You had a few things on your mind, I imagine.”

  “One or two, I guess.” Jake shrugged. “But right now, all I care about is making sure the guy’s no longer a threat to Liane and her family.” He tapped his finger on the photo of McCleary’s face for emphasis.

  “That makes two of us,” said Harry. “Deke never liked the son of a bitch. Said he was all surface and no substance. Only made it worse when he took her off on some fancy cruise and married her without so much as a phone call.”

  Jake smiled, missing Deke and his old-fashioned ways. “I suppose he wanted Mac to ask him for her hand, not just take it.”

  “Damn straight he did,” the older man said. “And I’m sure he let Liane and Mac both know it every time they came to visit.”<
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  “Maybe that’s why Deke hardly saw them. And why she didn’t come home straight off, even after he tried to kill her.”

  “Once he figured out what was going on, Deke tried to convince her to let him come and get her. But she wanted to pull her own weight, not come crawling back. That’s why no one’s supposed to know about the shooting.”

  Jake found his fists clenching. “He shot her?”

  “I thought— I figured Deke had told you.”

  “Liane just mentioned that he’d tried to kill her, but she didn’t say what happened.”

  “After she filed for divorce, he tracked her down to a motel room where she was hiding out with the kids. Shot her and left her for dead, with both the kids scared out of their wits. Now, I ask you, what kind of an animal does a thing like that to his own family?”

  “Worse than an animal,” Jake said, thinking of the beautiful wife and gorgeous children Mac McCleary had betrayed. A family, thrown away. “I hope the bastard suffered when he died.”

  Harry nodded. “Soon as we recover a body, we’ll get working on an ID pronto, even if I have to light another fire under the medical examiner’s hind end.”

  “I just hope there is a body,” Jake said grimly. “Because the last thing Liane and those kids need to worry about is her father’s killer showing up.”

  Chapter 8

  The ungrateful bitch had imagined he meant to kill those two babies, even the son that anyone with eyes could see was his.

  The memory haunted Mac McCleary even more than the ghosts of those he’d actually killed. The half-deaf homeowner he and the other cons had surprised only hours after their escape had been ancient anyway, with a slew of prescription bottles all over his kitchen. Smash had probably done the sickly old man a favor bashing in his head before they’d given his car, credit cards and cell phone to the girls. And Deke had brought his own death on himself, first by stealing Mac’s money and then by reaching for his gun.