“We can’t afford to lose him.”
“What we can’t afford, Fred, is an officer who isn’t dependable.”
“Because he hit a rough patch is no reason to threaten him with termination. We can’t all be as by-the-book as you are.”
“You’re skating near the edge, Fred. I know you didn’t think I deserved this job, but I’m your boss for another two years.”
“The people of this county didn’t elect you. The only reason you got the job was because the mayor decided we needed new blood in the department. Things were going okay before you came.”
Mandy felt her control slipping away and she didn’t like the sensation. She shouldn’t be at odds with her staff. Ken obviously didn’t feel he could confide in her. Fred, for all his faults, had more years on the force than she’d been alive and he didn’t think she could handle the job.
What is this about, God? What are you trying to tell me?
Rising, Mandy came around to the front of her desk. Crossing her arms, she settled her hip against it. “Let’s not quarrel, Fred. You have a point. Crime is up and I can’t get a handle on it.”
“Don’t try to placate me.”
“I’m not. I’m telling you I need your help. You’ve lived in Timber Wells a long time and I’ve been here less than a year, but we both have the best interest of this community at heart.”
The scowl stayed on his face. “If that’s true, you’ll lay off Ken.”
Donna came in as Fred walked out. She glanced from his ramrod straight back to Mandy. “What’s up with him?”
“You’ll have to ask him. What do you need, Donna?”
“I found the file you were looking for. The one about the murder that Judy Bowen supposedly witnessed in Kansas City.”
Mandy reached for it eagerly. “It’s about time.”
“Someone had misfiled it, but it wasn’t me. Unlike some people who work here, I know how to put things in alphabetical order.”
Mandy frowned as she opened the folder. “Is this it? Is this all they sent? This is only the responding officer’s report. Where are the forensic reports, the witness interviews?”
“Maybe there weren’t any.”
“I don’t believe that for a minute. It was a homicide. There has to be more.”
Donna threw up her hands. “I’ll check around. Maybe the rest of it got misplaced, too. It’s bad enough I have to do my own work. Now I’ve got to double check everyone else’s.”
“Let me know when you find it. If you don’t, have K.C. fax it all again.”
Ten minutes later, Mandy’s intercom came on. Donna said, “Sheriff, line one is Agent Riley of the KBI.”
Mandy leaned forward in her seat and pressed the button. “Hey, Jed. Tell me something good.”
“Sorry. I’m not going to be of help this time. No DNA, no prints on your meth lab timer.”
“Of course not,” she muttered as she clenched her teeth in frustration.
She was back to square one.
Garrett lifted the carrier from its car seat base and slipped it over his arm. He allowed himself a weary smile as he walked toward the house. Two days after the social worker’s visit, his son was home.
The late afternoon sun cast long shadows across the ranch yard. Pigeons swooped across the darkening sky through the open hayloft doors to land on the beams inside the old barn. Their gentle cooing mixed with the whispering of the wind, the bawling of cows in the pasture and the rising tide of cicada songs in the long grass.
It was the time of day Garrett loved best. It was good that this was the way his son should first see the ranch.
He glanced down at Colin. Of course, he was sleeping and didn’t see anything, but someday Garrett would tell him the story of how he arrived—in a secondhand car seat—in a used beat-up truck—on the prettiest evening of the year.
Wiley padded down from the front porch to meet them. The dog sniffed the air and began dancing in excited circles around Garrett’s boots.
At the porch steps, Garrett sat down with the carrier in his lap. “Be easy, Wiley.”
Wiley, his body quivering with barely contained eagerness, crept forward until his nose touched the baby sleeping in the infant seat. His tongue flicked out for a quick lick before Garrett could stop him.
Garrett pushed the dog’s muzzle aside. “No, don’t be kissing the baby. That’s a firm new rule. There’ll be no bending it.”
Wiley sat back on his haunches and tipped his head to one side as he regarded the new arrival.
“This is Colin,” Garrett said. “You’re gonna have to help me keep an eye on him.”
How pathetic was that? Asking a dog for parenting assistance.
Garrett would have laughed if the whole thing didn’t scare him half to death. Now that he had Colin to himself, he was tempted to drive back to the hospital and return the kid for a refund. Surely there was someone better suited to raising a baby than he was.
Maybe there was, but in his heart, Garrett knew he needed his son more than anyone in the world. There was no way he was giving up a part of himself.
“Besides, the medical center would probably keep the money I paid on your bill, anyway.” Garrett lifted the infant seat and carried his son into the house.
“This is it. This is home. I know it’s not much to look at, but it’ll be something special one day. We gonna do it together.”
In the corner of the living room, a large cardboard box rested against the wall. Garrett hadn’t had time to put the new crib together before he left for the hospital that morning. Hopefully, the crib would go together quickly and he’d have his son sleeping snuggly in it in no time.
He deposited the carrier on the sofa. Colin began to whimper. Wiley whined and barked at the sound. Garrett checked his watch. It wasn’t time for a feeding. Colin had a bottle before leaving the hospital only twenty minutes earlier.
Lifting the baby out of his seat, Garrett raised him to his shoulder and bounced him as he patted his back. “What’s wrong, little buddy?”
He tried to recall what the nurses had told him about crying. “Hungry, messy pants, tired, sick.”
The first two were easy enough to fix, but would he be able to tell if Colin was sick and not just fussy?
Garrett laid a hand on the baby’s forehead. He felt hot, but too hot? What was too hot for a baby?
Somewhere he had information about taking a temperature. The nurse had provided pages of printed instructions. He must have left them in the truck.
He returned Colin to his infant seat, but that made his crying skyrocket in volume. Wiley jumped onto the sofa beside the baby and began whining.
Red-faced with flailing arms and kicking feet, Colin Bowen was making his displeasure known in no uncertain terms.
“I’ll be back in a second, I promise.” Hurrying to the truck, Garrett returned with the pamphlets and quickly found the one on baby health and temperature taking. By the time Garrett managed to find a thermometer and get Colin undressed enough to put it under his arm, his nerves were about shot from the noise level.
To Garrett’s relief, his son’s temp was normal, but he continued to cry. Picking him up again didn’t help. Garrett paced the floor with him, feeling more inadequate than he’d ever felt in his life.
Mandy heard the baby crying the minute she killed the engine and opened the truck door. Lights blazed from every window on the ground floor of Garrett’s house.
It had been a long day, but she had to know that Colin was doing okay before she called it a night. From what she could hear, he wasn’t.
Mandy quickly climbed the porch steps. If Garrett was mistreating that child, she’d haul Colin out of his custody in a heartbeat.
At the front door, she raised her fist to knock, but stopped when she caught sight of Garrett through the bay window.
He had Colin up to his shoulder as he walked back and forth across the living room bouncing the baby. At the look of exhaustion on the man’s face, her anger faded. Apparently, Colin
was breaking in his father the hard way.
She knocked, then knocked a second time when it was clear Garrett couldn’t hear her over the crying. Finally, she opened the door and walked inside.
Wiley was huddled under the kitchen table with his head on his paws, a look of confusion on his face. Mandy walked through the archway that connected the kitchen to where Garrett was pacing. When his gaze lit on her, all she saw was relief. He didn’t even question why she was in his house.
“He won’t stop crying. I’ve done everything. I’ve fed him. I’ve changed him. I’ve been holding him for two hours. Why won’t he stop crying?”
Crossing the room, Mandy took the baby from him. Garrett sank into a chair beside the pieces of unassembled crib with a look of total dejection on his face.
Colin repeatedly rubbed his tear-stained face against her shoulder as he continued to cry. She said, “I think he’s just tired.”
“That makes two of us. I can’t get his bed put together because every time I put him back in his infant seat, he starts screaming again.”
“Then put a blanket on the floor for him.” She gestured toward a fleece throw on the corner of the sofa.
“I can do that?” His uncertain tone made her grin.
“Of course.”
Rising wearily, he spread the coverlet on the floor. Kneeling, Mandy laid Colin in the center. Still fussing, the baby worked himself into his favorite position. Mandy patted his back until his crying gave way to occasional sobs. Before long, he was sound asleep.
Garrett stared at her, a look of awe on his face. “I don’t believe it.”
“It’s a new place, new faces. He was exhausted, but he didn’t want to give in.”
Sinking onto the sofa, Garrett rested his elbows on his knees. “How do you know so much about kids?”
“I babysat for everyone on our block when I was in high school. The Pritchards, the O’Brians, the Dixons had four kids under four. I made three bucks an hour and learned you don’t give kids anything with sugar before you send them to bed and that sometimes they just need to cry themselves to sleep.”
“If I offer to double that salary for tonight will I be guilty of bribing an officer of the law?”
He’d actually made a joke. She smiled in return. “Six bucks an hour. That’s tempting. Lucky for you I left my handcuffs at the office.”
Garrett knew he’d been right. Her smile made her more than pretty. It made her downright beautiful.
Even the bruises on her face couldn’t detract from a beauty that was more than skin-deep. Her eyes sparkled in the lamplight. Her hair, loose about her shoulders, caught and reflected the light with a dozen subtle highlights, the same palette of colors the prairie wove into the grasses in the fall.
It wasn’t only that she was pretty. There was something special about her. Something that made him wish he knew about love and what it was like to be loved in return.
It was a foolish wish. Love was a thing that happened to ordinary people, not to the likes of him.
A faint blush tinted Mandy’s face. She dropped her gaze to the baby and Garrett realized he’d been staring. She softly began to run her fingers through Colin’s curls.
What would it be like to be touched so gently?
A longing, powerful in its intensity, caught and held him within its grasp. It stole his breath as he watched her hand feather through his son’s hair. In his whole life, he couldn’t remember anyone touching him with such kindness.
Wiley padded in from the kitchen and sat near Garrett’s boot. Yawning widely, the dog reminded Garrett of his own lack of sleep. He was bone-tired. Maybe that was why he was being so illogical.
He pushed up off the sofa. “I should get back to work on the crib before he wakes up again.”
Looking at the pieces spread around the room, she said, “It can’t be that hard. Where are the directions?”
“I can usually figure things out on my own.”
“If that isn’t just like a man!” She rose to her feet. “Let me see them. This will go faster if we both work on it. I don’t want Colin spending the night on the floor.”
It was plain she was used to bossing people around. Garrett picked up the booklet but didn’t give it to her. “I don’t need help.”
She held out her hand. “Put your wounded male ego aside and give me the instructions.”
He surrendered the papers. “Trust me, they don’t make sense.”
Leafing through the diagrams, she opened to a center page. “They do if you read the ones in English.”
“You’ll think it’s Japanese by step four.”
Thirty minutes later, Mandy was kneeling beside him, an edge of exasperation in her tone. “It says slot F goes into slot D, right? This is F. This is D. Why don’t they fit?”
Garrett sat back on his heels and tapped the handle of his screwdriver against his thigh. “Because we did something wrong.”
“We didn’t do anything wrong. We followed the directions exactly. I’m a college-educated woman, I should be able to put together a crib.”
“Then the directions are wrong.”
“That’s not likely.”
Wearily rising to his feet, he took a step back. “Then we’re overlooking something.”
She stood beside him, her hands fisted on her hips. “What?”
He studied the collection of parts on the floor. Realization dawned as he saw the tip on one wooden leg lying under the edge of the box. “Okay, I see it.”
“What? Where?”
He pulled the piece from the pile of parts. “This is part F. The one we have is part C.”
“Are you sure?” She snatched the instruction book from him and stared at the drawing. The pieces were similar, but he was right.
“Sometimes, it helps to take a step back and look at the whole picture,” he said with a small grin.
Mandy slanted a glance his way. It was good advice for more than crib assembly. Had she been letting her own guilt, fears and suspicions color her perception of the man? If she took a step back and looked at him anew, what would she see?
Besides an attractive man, she saw callused hands used to rough work. She saw a man who didn’t smile easily or trust easily. A man used to a solitary life, but who was willing to turn that life upside-down to take in a son he’d only just learned about.
There were a lot of things to like about Garrett Bowen, but one nagging question remained unanswered. His ex-wife, who may have known him better than anyone, didn’t want him raising their child. Why not?
What did Judy know, or fear, about Garrett that made her decide strangers were better suited to raise her child? Mandy liked answers, not questions.
Grabbing the right part, Garrett fitted the pieces together and grinned at her when they fit perfectly. “It should go faster now.”
Twenty minutes later they laid the bare mattress on the springs and stepped back. Mandy checked the front rail. It latched securely in each position and slid up and down easily. “It works.”
“We should test it before we put Colin in it.” Garrett’s eyes lit on Wiley sitting beside Colin on the blanket. He snapped his fingers and the dog hurried over, his tail wagging.
Garrett lifted him into the crib and pulled up the side. “He weighs more than Colin. If it holds him, it’ll hold the baby.”
Wiley clearly didn’t enjoy being locked in. Quick as a wink, he leaped to the top of the rail and jumped out. Scampering back to the blanket, he dropped to his belly beside his charge.
Mandy giggled. “Hopefully, it will be a while before Colin learns to do that.”
“No kidding.”
“Do you have sheets?”
“Yeah.” He left the room and returned with a pale blue fitted cotton sheet. Mandy was pleased to see he’d already washed it. It proved he’d made more than cursory preparations for Colin’s arrival.
As he covered the mattress, Mandy glanced down at Wiley. “What’s with that dog’s tail?”
�
�The vet said it healed wrong after it was broken.”
“How’d he break it?”
Garrett turned to face her. “I don’t know. It happened before I found him.”
She crouched beside the dog to scratch his head. “Poor boy. Where did you find him?”
“He was scavenging for scraps outside a sale barn in Tulsa. He looked kinda down on his luck. A couple of cowboys said he’d been hanging around for a few weeks. I gave him the rest of my cheeseburger and when I came out of the sale, he was waiting for me.”
At the mention of food, Mandy’s stomach growled loudly. She pressed a hand to her midsection. “A cheeseburger sounds good about now. I didn’t have lunch.”
Wiley exploded into the air, yipping wildly. Mandy jerked away in surprise, lost her balance and toppled backward.
“Wiley, quiet.” At the command from Garrett, the dog settled on his haunches, an eager expression remaining on his face. Colin fussed for a second, then went back to sleep.
Extending a hand, Garrett helped Mandy to her feet. He pulled her up easily, proving he was every bit as strong as he looked.
Unexpected warmth surged up her arm at his touch. Her eyes met his. Their gazes locked. An arc of awareness passed between them.
He felt it, too. She read it on his face before his odd blank look replaced it.
Mandy pulled her hand away. Just when she thought she was beginning to understand him, he retreated where she couldn’t follow.
“Sorry about the dog.” He spoke to a spot just over her head. “He goes nuts when he hears it’s mealtime. He didn’t mean any harm.”
She dusted off her jeans. “No harm done. I’ve got plenty of padding back there.”
His gaze shifted to her face. The hollow look in his eyes gradually faded.
Mandy held up one finger. “Agree with that statement and you’ll find yourself under arrest.”
A ghost of a smile lifted the corner of his mouth. “Then I’d better exercise my right to remain silent.”
“Excellent plan.”
An awkward moment filled the space between them. Mandy used it to glance at her watch. “I should get going. It’s getting late.”
“Let me put this little fellow in his new digs, and I’ll walk you out.”
Speed Trap Page 9
