Jack Murray, Sheriff

by Janice Kay Johnson

  Still one step down, Beth stopped. “Would you rather I went away?”

  “No.” He sounded hoarse. “You’d better come in before you freeze.”

  She didn’t move. “Was that Meg?”

  “Yeah.” Jack felt…dissociated. He didn’t care about Meg. Although he was mildly curious about one thing. “What did she say?”

  “Good for you.” One moment Beth was hesitating ten feet away, and the next she hurried past him as if plunging into the lion’s den.

  In a dream, Jack turned and shut the door. “That’s it? ‘Good for you?”’

  “Does she know who I am?”

  “Yep. Will told her all about you. Apparently she’s been in your store.”

  “Oh.” Beth shivered in his foyer, plucking at the fingers of her gloves without making any real effort to take them off. Her nose was as bright as Rudolph’s, but her cheeks were bluish-white.

  “Damn it, you are freezing,” Jack said harshly. “How long were you standing out there?”

  Another shiver racked her. “I wasn’t sure you’d want to see me.”

  He wanted desperately to take her in his arms. Caution held him back.

  “Why would you think that?”

  “I left messages.”

  “I haven’t heard them yet. Come on.” He reached for her zipper. “Let’s get you out of that coat. A cup of coffee will make you feel better.”

  She was clumsy getting her gloves off; he helped her out of her parka, trying not to touch her, however badly he wanted to. He had to put a hand on her back and propel her toward the kitchen. Jack poured a second cup of coffee. Her hands shook when she tried to lift the mug he put into them.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to get frostbite lurking outside.” Her smile was a pathetic excuse for the real thing.

  “You were afraid to come knock on the door?”

  Her eyes met his at last. “It’s hard, when you’ve hurt someone, to know if ‘I’m sorry’ is good enough. If it’s not…”

  He was afraid to hope. “The board of inquiry won’t come to a conclusion for a few days.” He still sounded harsh. Unfriendly.

  “I don’t care.” She briefly closed her eyes. “Jack, even if you won’t forgive me, I need you to know how sorry I am. I said things…” She looked at him again with naked honesty. “You are a brave, kind man. How could I question your integrity? You wouldn’t have shot Gary Hansen or anyone else unless you had to. I know that.”

  On a painful rush of relief, he took the mug from her unresisting hand and set it carefully on the counter, then wrapped his arms around her. “This morning was partly my fault. I was…hiding from you. I haven’t always been brave or kind. I didn’t want you to know that.”

  “I don’t believe you,” she mumbled against his shoulder.

  Jack breathed in the essence of her silky mass of dark hair. “Believe it.”

  Beth pulled back then. “Tell me,” she said. “But first, I need you to know that I love you. No matter what.”

  A sound came from his throat. It was an animal sound, half groan, half sob, that shocked him. “Say that again,” he said raggedly.

  “I love you,” she whispered.

  He snatched her back into his arms and kissed her with raw need. Her cold mouth warmed and softened, accepting his savage hunger and then responding with a certain fierce need of her own. Jack was lost in her, the softness of her skin and tangle of hair, her gasps, her remarkable blue eyes. He had her backed up against the cabinet, his hips rocking against her, his hands gripping her buttocks.

  “I want you. Now.”

  “Yes.” She yanked at his belt buckle. “Now.”

  They were both rasping for breath; his hands shook as he shucked as many of her clothes as he had the patience to remove. Her hands shook as she helped with his. He kept kissing her, his tongue plunging, his teeth grinding against her full, soft lips. Somehow he held on to his self-control just long enough to put on a condom.

  “Ooh!” she cried when he lifted her and thrust in one movement.

  He should have waited, Jack thought in agony. She was slick but too tight. He must be hurting her. But he couldn’t stop. He was blind with a need to claim her.

  “I’m…sorry,” he groaned.

  She bit his neck, teeth sharp. “If anybody’s sorry…”

  He thrust again, hard, deep, fast. Ecstasy. “Hurting you…”

  “No.” The face she lifted to his was transformed, radiant. “Never.”

  He swore and staggered, then backed her up to the smooth door of the refrigerator. She laughed and held on, her legs clasping around his waist.

  As he buried himself in her again, as deep as the fears he was determined to rout, she whispered, “I love you. I love you.”

  Her body convulsed. His convulsed, all to the mantra, “I love you.”

  He was saying it, too, he realized, as he carefully went to his knees and followed her down onto the hand-loomed cotton kitchen runner.

  She also had tears on her cheeks, he discovered, as he feathered kisses from her neck toward her mouth.

  “I did hurt you,” he said raggedly.

  “No.” Her mouth met his. “I’m crying from happiness.”

  “Don’t let yourself be too happy. There are things I have to tell you. Before I ask you to marry me.”

  “Yes!” Now she smothered his face with kisses. “I will marry you. No matter what.”

  He tried to pull back. “Listen to me first.”

  With sudden solemnity, Beth touched his cheek and gazed up at him, eyes so blue he felt himself falling in.

  “All right. Talk. But I warn you, I intend to marry you. If you mean it.”

  “Oh, yeah. I mean it.” Dread edged out his euphoria. She hadn’t met Johnny Murray yet, or the hard man he’d tried to become. The outside air had somehow stolen into the room, chilling his bare skin. “I can’t talk like this. Let’s get dressed.”

  Beth kept sneaking peeks at him as they silently put their clothes back on. She finger-combed her hair and then nodded gravely when he suggested going into the living room.

  There, Jack kept his distance, half-sitting on the arm of a chair facing Beth on one end of the couch.

  “My name wasn’t Jack when I grew up,” he began. “It was Johnny. Johnny Murray was a…” He stopped and briefly squeezed his eyes shut. “God. I have to quit pretending. I was a feckless, cocky kid, a jock who could have been better if I’d been willing to work out harder, a student body president, Meg Patton’s boyfriend. I thought someday I might become a biologist or a doctor or…” He grimaced. “I wasn’t all that serious about the future. Which may be one reason I was careless using condoms.”

  Beth only waited.

  He told her the story, then, as he had never told another soul. His humiliation, selfishness, terror. He spared Johnny Murray nothing. Himself nothing. He described the kid who decided to change his name and become a man, but thought the only way to do that was become like the man who had humiliated him. The rookie who saw his partner killed. The young cop who came home to Elk Springs, despising and fearing the police chief but trying to please him. Jack talked of sometimes subjugating his own sense of right or wrong to impress Meg Patton’s father, the one man who had seen him crawl. The one man who could, he believed, give him back his sense of self-worth.

  Jack told of the growing conflict between mentor and young cop, of his own attempts to become a better man. He talked until the grit in his voice seemed to scrape his throat raw. His terrible conflict when he met Will and found out that Meg had been pregnant that day shaped his story. As did his pride in his son.

  Beth’s blue eyes shimmered with tears that ran over. She made no move to dry them, only listened.

  Jack admitted to the shame he had tried to kill, to escape, to ignore. “In my gut, I’ve always believed I was a coward,” he finished. “My biggest mistakes were made trying to prove to the world that I wasn’t.”

  Voice fierce, Beth demanded, �
�Did you even hesitate last night? When he threatened to kill that girl?”

  “No.” Jack’s chest expanded with a huge breath. The easiest breath he’d drawn since he was sixteen. The constricting knot of guilt and shame was gone.

  “I doubt you were ever a coward.” With the back of her hand, Beth wiped her cheeks. “You were a kid. Imagine Will at that age. What would he have done?”

  “Not what I did.” He raked his fingers through his hair. “Will has more strength of character than I did. At the very least, he would have come to his mother or me.”

  “It’s not your fault that you didn’t feel you could go to your parents,” she said quietly.

  “They’re good people.”

  “But?”

  “My father was ashamed of me because somebody had beaten me up. Why hadn’t I given worse? he wanted to know.”

  “So you didn’t tell him who did it?”

  “How could I?” Jack rubbed his hands on his thighs. “They’d have had to know Meg’s father walked in and caught me with my pants down around my ankles.”

  “Oh, Jack.” She jumped up and came to him, sliding her arms around his neck. “Did you really think any of that would change my mind about you?”

  He framed her face with his hands and drank in the sight of her eyes, still shimmering, the delicate line of her cheeks, streaked with tears, the salty droplet clinging to her lip. “Yes.” He had to force the word out. “Yes, I did.”

  “I occasionally do dumb things,” she said tremulously, “but not usually the same ones twice. I know you, Sheriff Murray. Last night, Gary Hansen’s wife and that teenager were lucky to have you. Just as I’ve been lucky. Johnny Murray, Jack Murray…I’ll call you whatever you want. I love you.”

  Gritting his teeth against the tumult of emotion, he leaned his cheek against her hair, wrapped his arms around Beth and held her so tightly it must have hurt. She didn’t offer even a squeak of protest. Instead, she squeezed back.

  When he thought he could control his expression, he eased back reluctantly. She was crying anew. Gripping her hands, Jack dropped to one knee.

  “I’ve never done this before, but I hear kneeling is standard.”

  Beth gave a helpless laugh, then bit her lip.

  Jack said straight out, “I don’t want an answer tonight. You need to think, and talk to Stephanie and Lauren. But let me ask. Beth Sommers, will you marry me?”

  “You can ask only if I can answer.”

  “I want you to be ready.” Romantic posture or not, he sounded grim. “Don’t say yes if you don’t mean it.”

  “Oh, I mean it.” This smile was a caress not spoiled a whit by her having to sniff. “Even Lauren has agreed. Sheriff Murray is nice, she’s decided.”

  “Stephanie?”

  “I think Stephanie is half in love with you herself. She’s quite sure you’re everything heroic and manly. Having you as a stepfather would be very cool, in her opinion. Besides, she likes your house.”

  The first reluctant smile grew into a grin and then an exuberant laugh. “All right, then. I surrender. Will you marry me?”

  “Just try to get out of it.”

  He surged to his feet and bent his head, but her fingers stopped his mouth and her anxious eyes searched his.

  “Are you sure?” she asked.

  “This is my first proposal. Doesn’t that tell you this isn’t something I do lightly?”

  Darned if tears didn’t start falling again. “Why am I crying?” she wailed. “Oh, shoot. I have to blow my nose. What woman has to blow her nose in the middle of her marriage proposal?”

  “Probably anonymous thousands.” He tasted her tears and laughed. “Okay. Hold on. I’ll get you a tissue.”

  He brought a handful. She firmly blew a nose that became even redder. Balling up the tissue, Beth said, “You haven’t changed your mind?”

  Jack shook his head.

  “You know I put in long hours at the store.”

  “They’re probably nothing to the hours I put in.”

  “You don’t have to…well, exactly be a father. The girls do have one. But some effort in that direction would be welcome.”

  “My pleasure.”

  “Um… How would you feel about having a baby? Together?”

  He had a flash of seeing her pregnant, of him holding a newborn with a puckered, red face, of both of them swinging a laughing dark-haired toddler between them. The images took his breath away. He hadn’t even known this was something he wanted so badly.

  “You’d think about it?”

  “Think about it?” She kissed him. “I want your baby, Sheriff Murray.”

  Somehow his hands were under her turtleneck. “There’s no time like the present to get started, Ms. Sommers.”

  “No,” she agreed breathlessly. “We aren’t getting any younger.”

  Their kiss was tender, achingly slow, passion momentarily held in check but simmering in readiness. He ended it just for the pleasure of looking at her, of playing his thumbs over her swollen lips.

  Then it hit him. “Where are the girls?”

  “The girls?” She looked as dazed as he felt. “Oh. You mean, my… Um, Stephanie and Lauren.”

  “Right. Them.”

  “Tiffany is with them. I do have to go home, but not yet. You can walk me. Later.”

  “Later,” he echoed.

  And he did, in the cold night on sidewalks powdered with snow, Christmas only days away. Jack liked the idea that their child might already have been conceived, on this day begun in despair and ended in joy.

  ISBN: 978-1-4268-8664-5

  JACK MURRAY, SHERIFF

  Copyright © 2000 by Janice Kay Johnson.

  All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher, Harlequin Enterprises Limited, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.

  All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.

  This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

  ® and TM are trademarks of the publisher. Trademarks indicated with ® are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the Canadian Trade Marks Office and in other countries.

  Visit us at www.eHarlequin.com