Jack Murray, Sheriff

by Janice Kay Johnson

  “Because I want them not to hate their father?”

  “Yup. Do you know how many parents use the kids as terrain on a battlefield?”

  Yes, she realized. That was exactly what Steph and Lauren had become to Ray. Not weapons, as she had earlier thought, but terrain: an advantage sometimes, a disadvantage sometimes. They could have been hills or trees or rivers in a faraway landscape of war.

  “Yes.” She closed her eyes briefly. “I swore I wouldn’t.”

  “That, Beth Sommers, is why I’d like to know you better. You have guts and heart. I’d be a fool not to notice.”

  His voice was rich, dark and unsettling. It excited a thrill in her belly she didn’t remember having felt in years. He wasn’t just attracted to her. He saw something unusual, something special in her. How could she resist?

  “Then,” she said on an indrawn breath, “I’d enjoy having dinner with you sometime. If you still want to take me.”

  His eyes darkened, though he didn’t move. “Oh, yeah. I’d still like to take you. So long as you aren’t agreeing because you think you owe me. Or because you’d be reluctant to call me again if you say no now, and you’re afraid you’ll need me.”

  “You said you’d come no matter what.” Beth squeezed her hands together before her. “You did today. You didn’t even hesitate.”

  “And I won’t next time.”

  She nodded. “So…no. That’s not why I’m agreeing.”

  He didn’t ask why, for which she was thankful. He, at least, had been able to answer. How could she have admitted, Because you make me feel safe?

  Gruffly, he said, “Name the day.”

  “Weeknights aren’t the greatest. Friday? I can get a baby-sitter.”

  “Friday at six, then.” He backed toward the front door, his dark eyes holding hers. “Do you like Italian?”

  A smile broke through Beth’s tension like a sunrise over the high desert ridges. Getting dressed up, flirting with a handsome man, dining out on something besides burgers and fries… Why, it might actually be fun.

  “I love Italian.”

  “Good.” He nodded and opened the front door. “Friday.”

  “Jack?”

  Filling the doorway, he glanced back. “Yeah?”

  “You will tell me who I remind you of, won’t you?”

  Another play of emotions on a face she’d have sworn was imperturbable intrigued her.

  “I shouldn’t have said that. I didn’t even realize…” His abrupt stop lent punctuation to his obvious discomfiture.

  “Neither of us is eighteen years old. I don’t mind hearing about an old girlfriend.” Did she?

  His brows lifted briefly. “Then I’ll tell you about Meg. And our son.”

  “Son…?”

  “Friday,” he promised, amusement lifting one corner of his mouth.

  Beth found herself smiling at the closed door. She felt suddenly young, fizzing with excitement. She’d lied to herself. He did make her feel safe, but that wasn’t the only reason she’d agreed to the date.

  Jack Murray was a sexy man whose warm gaze and husky voice reminded her that she was a woman. She wanted to remember. She wanted another chance at love and forever. Jack knew what she was, even admired her for being “gutsy.” To paraphrase him, she’d be a fool not to grab for a man who liked a strong woman, instead of feeling threatened by her as Ray had been.

  Now she had something to look forward to. She could focus on this Friday, and not the next one.

  When Ray was entitled to take his children again, and she would have to live with the fear that he wouldn’t bring them back.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  HE SHOULDN’T HAVE TOLD her she reminded him of Meg, Jack thought, casting a glance at Beth. She would have questions tonight, and what could he say? I haven’t yet found a woman who measured up to my teenage lover, but I’m thinking you might? Wouldn’t she figure he was looking for a stand-in?

  Hell, was he?

  Beth Sommers sat in the passenger seat of his Dodge 4×4, her hands neatly folded on her lap, her back so straight he wasn’t sure it was touching the seat. Her face in profile was fine-boned, delicate and coolly reserved. Did she wish she hadn’t agreed to this evening?

  “I’ve seen your baby-sitter before,” he said casually, stopped at a red light. “Isn’t she one of the Shaefer kids?”

  “Yes, that’s Tiffany. She says she lives a couple of doors down from you. I’m not sure which house is yours.”

  “Mine’s the glow-in-the-dark lime-green one.” Jack watched a beat-up VW bug sail across the intersection just as his own light turned and his foot moved to the gas. Seemed like everyone was pushing it these days. He ought to slap flashers on his roof and ticket the jackass, but he had a suspicion Beth wasn’t crazy about his profession. No point in rubbing her nose in it.

  For the first time, her face lit with amusement. “I know the house! It’s not lime-green. More of a…a sage-green. I like it with the white and cream.”

  “My son helped me paint last summer. The color looked okay on that little bitty paint chip. Came out brighter than I’d intended. Mrs. Finley next door told me I’d lowered everybody’s property values for a block around.”

  “Oh, pooh.” Beth scrunched up her nose. “Mrs. Finley’s house has been white with black trim for forty years. She has no imagination.”

  “Yours is white.”

  “Yes, but that’s because we haven’t painted since we bought the house four years ago. We’d talked about this summer, but…”

  A small thing like divorce had intervened, he read into her trailed-off explanation.

  “Next year,” she finished more strongly. “I’ve always wanted a yellow house. A sunny lemon with a white porch and eaves. What do you think?”

  “Sounds beautiful. Mrs. Finley will have a heart attack.”

  Traffic in Elk Springs was getting worse all the time. Though they were a month from the opening of ski season, when the population of Butte County came close to doubling, still traffic crept down Main Street as if this were downtown L.A. Not enough parking, he thought for the thousandth time. The boutiques and art galleries, the bookstore and espresso stands drew tourists who had to fight for street parking.

  This eastern Oregon town had been a sleepy ranching community when he was a boy; Jack’s father owned a furniture store. Those were the days before the mall, when the hardware store had been in the brick building right up ahead that had been gutted and now held small shops and a French restaurant. Jack skied himself, but he hadn’t minded the drive to Mount Bachelor. He sometimes regretted the new ski resort built just a few years before up on Juanita Butte outside town. Life would never be the same in Elk Springs, especially for the county sheriff, who had to find enough manpower and tax dollars to control crime.

  At Trattoria Ginelli’s, an Italian place new to Elk Springs just the previous fall, he and Beth were seated immediately at a small table nestled in the curve of a bay window overlooking the Deschutes River. In the fading light of dusk, the water was a deep purple, the overhanging willows indistinct, graceful silhouettes. The restaurant was lit by copper fixtures and candles in wall sconces instead of on the tables. Jack liked the warm, rustic atmosphere created by a floor tiled in terracotta and mismatched antique tables and chairs scattered in nooks and crannies created by folding screens. Perusing the menu, he and Beth chatted about Elk Springs and what the future might bring.

  “Ray and I moved here from Beaverton, over near Portland,” Beth said. “To us it felt as if Portland was just spilling over, and what had been a small town was getting too urban. Ray could work out of the eastern part of the state, and this looked like a great place to raise kids. We’d been keeping an eye out for the right kind of business for me, and the stationery store was up for sale. I haven’t regretted the move, even since the divorce. My parents are in Portland, but I’m just as happy to have a few hours’ drive between us. Visits are great, but…”

  He talked about his o
wn parents as he and Beth sipped wine and nibbled on bread. He had to admire Beth’s restraint. Their entrées came before she asked about Meg and Will.

  “How old is your son?” she asked casually, picking up her fork.

  “Nineteen,” Jack said, having trouble believing it himself. “Let me show you a picture.” He whipped out his wallet and passed over a snapshot taken on a camping trip that summer. Will was a good-looking kid, if Jack did say so himself. Jack was six foot two; his son had an inch on him now. Who knew if he was still growing?

  “Why…this could be a picture of you.” Beth looked up in astonishment. Her next words seemed to slip out. “He’s very handsome.”

  He gave a slow smile. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  Her cheeks grew pink, but she teased, “Of course, he is younger. Lots younger. No lines beside his eyes.” She pursed her lips and looked from him to the photo and back, her expression not quite as innocent as she imagined. “Isn’t it a shame that we can’t stay looking the way we did at nineteen forever.”

  “Okay. You’ve bruised my ego enough.” Laughing, Jack took the photo back and tucked it carefully into a plastic sleeve before restoring the wallet to his hip pocket.

  “What’s really a shame,” Beth said thoughtfully, “is that men age better than women. Why do you suppose that is?”

  “Lady—” he let his gaze caress her face “—if you’re an example of how women wear their years, I’d have to argue with your point.”

  She didn’t flatter easily. “I’m thirty-four. I look it.”

  “When I see a sexy young thing, I imagine Will turning to gawk. Women my son could date don’t interest me.”

  Now a smile blossomed. “You don’t hanker to convince your son that you can attract sexier young things than he can?”

  “Never crossed my mind.” He buttered a slab of Italian bread.

  Her smile faded; her gaze became grave. “Are you divorced from his mother?”

  Moment of truth. “No. We were never married. She took off when she was seventeen. I didn’t know she’d been pregnant until she came back to Elk Springs with a fourteen-year-old son,” he said baldly.

  Beth gaped. “She never told you?”

  “Meg had good reason.” More reason than he ever intended to tell anyone, much less this woman who needed to trust him. “Her father was abusive, and she was afraid of what he’d do to her when he found out. I think she was even more afraid of him taking her son from her.” Jack concentrated on tearing the bread in half. “I was a kid, too. I couldn’t have stood up to him.”

  “Well, of course you couldn’t, but…”

  “But what?”

  Not until he saw her shrink back did he realize how fierce his stare and voice were.

  “I’m sorry,” she said quietly, face remote again. “This is none of my business.”

  His jaw muscles clenched. Voice rough, he said, “No. I’m the one who’s sorry. I volunteered the story. I wanted to tell you about Meg and Will. I’m just having trouble dealing with the knowledge that I helped create a child, but I wasn’t man enough to protect him or his mother.”

  “From what you say, she wasn’t old enough to be a mother, either.”

  “Meg might have been seventeen, but she had the guts to take off on her own, and she made it. Somehow she raised a hell of a kid. She was stronger than I was.”

  “But you don’t know.” Beth studied him. “She didn’t give you the chance to find out.”

  Yes. God, yes, she had. But he couldn’t say so. He hated admitting even to himself what a gutless wonder he’d been. “Crawl,” Ed Patton had demanded, and he’d crawled. If he’d known Meg was pregnant, would anything have been any different? Jack wanted to think so, but he couldn’t be sure.

  Jack finished demolishing the bread. “I’d like to believe I would have grown up fast, the way Meg had to. But how the hell do I know? Teenage boys aren’t known for their maturity.”

  Those grave eyes were still fastened on him. “This Meg. You sound as if you…love her.” She said the last delicately, but with an air of discovery, as if she’d just realized something about him.

  He nipped that one in the bud. “No. We’ve become friends again, but love…” Jack shook his head. “Whatever spark we had was long gone. I was pretty steamed that she hadn’t told me about Will sometime in all those years, and we had to work that out. Meg married Scott McNeil, the general manager of the ski area. Nice guy. They’re crazy about each other.”

  Beth’s scrutiny continued, and he could hardly blame her. Men and women their age carried emotional baggage. That was expected. But she wouldn’t want to date a man who was still in love with the mother of his child.

  “I admire Meg,” he said, in the face of Beth’s doubtful silence. “I like her. Hell, she’s one of my deputies. I did love her, when we were seventeen, as much as a kid that age can really love a girl. But I gotta tell you, that was twenty years ago. People change.”

  “Yes.” Her smile was rueful, even apologetic. “Sadly enough, they do.”

  “Sadly isn’t the word I would have used.” He heard the momentary hard edge to his tone. He didn’t like the boy he’d been, although sometimes he wasn’t sure he liked the man he’d become because of that bitter day, either. Making sure his voice had become gentler, he said, “You’re thinking of your ex-husband.”

  Grief flitted across her face. “Both of us, maybe. We both changed. Maybe we each let the other one down.”

  Picturing the SOB smashing clay pots against her front door even when he knew damn well not just Beth but his children were on the other side of it, Jack had trouble feeling pity for Ray Sommers. But he understood what she was saying.

  “What do you think he wanted in a woman?”

  She played with her wineglass. “A traditional wife. Someone who would…support him. Admire him. Obey him, although he wasn’t a tyrant.” Her brow crinkled as she considered her words. “He just…needed to feel big. Once, when we were fighting, he said I made him feel small.” She looked almost pleadingly at Jack. “I didn’t on purpose. But he didn’t like me making more money than he did, or being too busy with the store to stay home days when he was between runs, or…or contradicting him with the girls. That’s what some of this is about. He didn’t want custody—couldn’t have it, since he’s on the road so much of the time—but he hates the fact that the visitation is laid out in the court order, that we’re not just going on trust.” She heaved a sigh. “The way he sees it, I’m still giving him orders.”

  “And a woman isn’t supposed to give the orders.”

  “Right.” Her mouth twisted into a semblance of a smile. “His parents are old-fashioned, his mom a housewife, and I was supposed to be like her, I guess.”

  “Were you like her?” Jack found he really wanted to know. It was easy to imagine her as a girl or young woman, slender, quick moving, dark hair glossy and her sparkling blue eyes unwary. In those days, her face would have glowed with innocence and her sweetness wouldn’t have been laced with regrets, disillusionment and hurt. She’d have been gentle, perhaps even timid, without the grit that brought her chin up in that distinctive gesture of strength and defiance that had resonated with him.

  At seventeen, Beth wouldn’t have been able to do what Meg had done for the child she carried. But then, Beth hadn’t been deserted by her mother when she was fourteen. She hadn’t had to protect her younger sisters from a cruel father. She hadn’t had to pretend she was clumsy to explain all her bruises and broken bones. She hadn’t yet been honed by fire.

  Meg had had to prove herself young. Beth’s turn came later, but she was measuring up in a way he admired just as much.

  In response to his question, Beth made an unhappy sound. “When Ray and I met, I was…unformed. I wasn’t anybody in particular. I still had to become somebody. Ray just didn’t realize that. He thought who he saw was who he got.”

  “Did you get who you saw?”

  “Well…more so. I ju
st didn’t know that wasn’t what I wanted. So you see, I hold some blame.”

  “In the failure of your marriage?” He tried to sound matter-of-fact. “Maybe. It takes two to tango. But in the aftermath?” Jack shook his head. “You aren’t the one throwing things or trying to scare him by letting him think he might never see his girls again. That’s low.”

  “Yes.” Beth’s mouth firmed. “Yes, it is. Ray and I may have misjudged each other, but I never would have married him if I’d seen his temper.” Her eyes were unfocused as she looked into the past. “He wasn’t an angry man. Not then. It…crept up on us both. The less compliant I was, the madder he got. Which brought out the stubborn streak in me he hadn’t known I had.” She grimaced. “A vicious circle. The sad story of a marriage.”

  “One I’ve heard plenty often.” Every cop dreaded domestic disturbance calls. Often neither party really wanted help. The vicious circle Beth described was like a whirlpool, sucking people down. Even the battered wives often wouldn’t reach for a buoy tossed to them. Jack didn’t get it, but he’d seen it plenty of times.

  “Have you ever been married?” Beth asked.

  “No. Just never happened.”

  “Not because of what you see on the job?”

  Surprised, he said, “I see good marriages, too. It’s tough for cops, but I know plenty who have supportive spouses. Meg is a deputy, for example. Her sister Renee is the police chief here in Elk Springs. They’re both happily married, far as I can see. My own parents don’t seem to have any regrets. So no. Like I said, things just never came together.”

  She nodded. “Are you sorry? You sound as though you’ve really enjoyed Will. You don’t wish you had other kids?”

  “Sometimes,” Jack admitted. “But, you know, Will is nineteen. Think how disconcerting it would be if he and I became fathers at the same time.”