One True Thing

by Marilyn Pappano

  “When my granddad was young, they did some logging out here,” he said, his voice quiet and breathless. “The road kept washing away with the rains, so they built this culvert, then built up the road over it. The logging ended decades ago and the road’s pretty much grown over, but this old tunnel will be here forever.”

  “Thank God,” she whispered, resting her head against his back.

  “I’m gonna put you out there—” he nodded to the clearing up ahead “—and leave a trail too obvious for Edmonds to miss, then I’ll be waiting for him.” He walked out of the tunnel, sloshed through the water where the creek widened, then onto the grass. With a grunt that sounded seriously relieved, he lowered her to the ground next to another of the ubiquitous boulders, then straightened, stretching his back.

  When she started to sit on the rock, he shook his head. “On the ground. I want you to be bait, not a sitting duck.”

  Sitting had never felt so good. Never mind that it was on the ground, that she was huddled next to a rock not quite big enough to hide her from the man intent on killing her, or that runoff was washing over and around her. Forget that she was cold, exhausted, hungry—what a time to think of that!—and hurting. What did it matter that she would be too scared to think straight if she wasn’t already too fatigued to think straight? She wasn’t running, climbing or falling, wasn’t demanding anything of her body except that it relax. She didn’t even have to hold her head up, because the rock she leaned against would do it for her.

  Jace crouched beside her, cupped her face in his hands and locked gazes with her. “What color are your eyes?”

  “Blue.”

  The corner of his mouth quirked in a smile. “Did I ever tell you I’ve always been a sucker for blue-eyed blondes?”

  She managed the tiny beginning of a smile, too. “My hair’s really brown.”

  “I like blue-eyed brunettes even better.” His thumb stroked lightly across the swelling where her cheek had come into contact with a tree root on her last fall. “Take the safety off on your gun and have it ready. If you get a can’t-miss chance to shoot Edmonds, do it, but don’t waste time trying to wound him. Go for the kill.”

  She nodded.

  “I love you.” Finally he gave her the kiss she’d anticipated from the moment he’d taken her face in his hands. By necessity, it wasn’t the most intense kiss he’d given her, but it very well might have been the sweetest.

  Then he left her alone.

  She removed the pistol from her pocket, thumbed the safety off, then hid it inside her jacket, her fingers wrapped tightly around the textured grips. It took one hell of a man to go from ordering her to shoot to kill one instant to saying I love you in the next—and one hell of a man to risk his life to save hers. Please, God, she prayed. Don’t let him lose his in the process.

  Jace climbed to the top of the hill on this side of the tunnel, taking care to flatten the weeds as much as possible. At the top, he dug his foot into the soft earth, leaving a long slide of mud showing, then continued the trail twenty yards back the way they’d come. Satisfied, he ducked into the woods on the far side of the clearing and started back down the slope.

  He intended to be in position just inside the tunnel when Edmonds spotted Cassidy and went after her. Jace had checked while he was leaving tracks, and though the rock concealed most of her, there was flash of hot pink visible above it—the hood of her jacket hanging down her back. Even if Edmonds could get a decent shot from up above, and Jace didn’t think he could, the bastard would be forced to climb down the hill to verify that it was her and not just the jacket left as a decoy.

  And Jace would be waiting.

  He was halfway down the hill when he saw a long muddy scrape—probably one of the hundred places where Cassidy had slipped, he thought, cursing himself again for not making sure she had on decent shoes. He stepped over the fresh mud, took two steps, then froze.

  He’d carried Cassidy down this hill on his back, and he hadn’t slipped.

  Edmonds had come this way.

  Heedless of the rocks and mud, he jumped from one unstable footing to another, landing with a splash in the creek at the bottom of the slope. Quietly he moved into the tunnel. It was long enough and tall enough to create some pretty good echoes, so he took care not to splash or stumble over the loose rocks on the tunnel floor. Ten feet from the open end, he stopped, took a couple deep breaths, then eased forward along the cold stone wall.

  A voice drifted on the rain, the same one that had yelled to Jennifer to come on out—God, had that been only minutes ago? Edmonds didn’t sound threatening—more chastising, actually, like a parent or teacher admonishing a child.

  “—know how much time and money I’ve spent looking for you?” he was asking mildly. “Every bit of free time, thousands of dollars.”

  “Which you got for murdering my husband,” Cassidy said belligerently.

  “Which I got for taking care of a problem.”

  “A problem? My God, you’re a cop! You don’t take care of problems by murdering people!”

  “I did what I had to do.”

  Jace took the final step, flattened against the wall, that brought them into sight. Cassidy still huddled next to the rock. There was no sign of her gun, but he knew she had it ready, out of sight, just in case he failed her.

  God help him, he couldn’t fail.

  Edmonds stood ten feet in front of her, his back to Jace. He was bigger, heavier and better armed—but no more desperate. He wanted Cassidy dead. Jace needed her alive.

  He stepped out of the tunnel, placing his foot carefully in the creek, checking for solid footing before he shifted his weight. He was seriously tempted to take aim and blow the guy away before Edmonds even knew he was there. After all, the bastard was a dirty cop. He’d killed an innocent man and two other cops. He was carrying a fully automatic submachine gun that could fire at a rate of eight hundred rounds per minute, which meant he could empty that fifteen-round magazine into Cassidy in little more than a second.

  But shooting a suspect in the back…Jace wasn’t sure he could do it.

  But what was the other option? Draw Edmonds’s attention to him? Give him a chance to drop the weapon and surrender? Hope that the realization that they weren’t alone, that there would be a witness to his crime, would deter him from shooting Cassidy?

  Rich yelled at me to get out, she’d told him in the middle of the night, and…Edmonds…shot him. The son of a bitch had known there was a witness that night three years ago, and he’d shot Rich anyway, right in front of his wife, and then shot at her. What would stop him from killing her now, then shooting at him?

  Jace took another cautious step, out of the creek and onto solid ground. He saw a flicker of awareness cross Cassidy’s face, though she didn’t risk so much as a glance in his direction. One more step put him three yards behind Edmonds. Don’t waste time trying to wound him, he’d advised Cassidy, but he didn’t take his own advice. He had a bigger caliber gun than she did, with a hell of a lot more knock-down power, and he had a specific target in mind.

  He extended his right arm, the .45 steady, cutting the distance between him and Edmonds by a third. He sighted in, then squeezed the trigger slowly. The explosive report seemed to echo around them, making Cassidy jump and gasp, but he didn’t flinch at the sound. Edmonds’s scream was another matter.

  The MP5 went flying, landing in a puddle of water fifteen feet away, as the impact of the bullet spun Edmonds around, then dropped him to the ground. Blood and bits of tissue and bone had sprayed over the ground. Not much left of what had, seconds before, been a man’s elbow. “You bastard!” he screamed, curling onto his left side and cradling his damaged arm to his chest. “You’ve ruined my arm!”

  Still holding the pistol, Jace bent and raised Edmonds’s jacket, jerked a pair of handcuffs from his belt, slapped one around his good wrist, then dragged him a few feet to secure the dangling end around a sturdy sapling. Next he located Edmonds’s key ring, including
the handcuff key, and slid it into his pocket. Ignoring Edmonds’s curses, he returned his pistol to the holster, crouched in front of Cassidy and reached inside her jacket, carefully loosening the .9 millimeter from her death grip, then putting it in his pocket, too. Once more, he cupped her face in his hands. “You okay?”

  Looking as if she might cry at any moment, she nodded.

  For a long time he studied her. She looked pretty beat up—bruised, bloodied, muddied…and more beautiful than he’d ever seen. He could have lost her forever this morning, and then how would he have survived? How could he ever live without her?

  He could. He was a strong man and could do damn near anything.

  But he didn’t want to.

  Gently he brushed her hair from her face, wiped a raindrop—or teardrop—from her cheek, then quietly, pleadingly, demanded, “Tell me one true thing.”

  Bit by bit the fear and the tears left her eyes. Her lip stopped quavering and the faint promise of a smile curved her mouth slightly. “I love you.” She kissed him then, long and deep and hungry, clinging to him, holding him tight. When she broke it off and looked up, the promise was made good with a dazzling smile lighting her face. “Now you tell me something, please.”

  “I love you.”

  She laid one hand against his cheek. “That’s sweet. But I had something else in mind.” She waited for his nod to go ahead before dryly asking her question.

  “How exactly do you define the difference between bait and a sitting duck?”

  Epilogue

  Former Deputy U.S. Marshal William Edmonds survived getting shot in the woods outside Buffalo Plains, though he lost the use of his right arm. At trial, he was convicted of the murders of Richard Addison and fellow marshals Jack Keaton and Marcus Hightower, as well as the attempted murders of Jennifer Addison and Jace Barnett, along with a number of other charges, including conspiracy. His sentence ensured he’d never be eligible for parole.

  Jace Barnett has gone back to being a cop again. The job had taken a lot from him, but it had also given in return. The skills he’d acquired in seventeen years as a police officer allowed him to save Jennifer’s life as well as his own. He currently works as chief criminal deputy for the Canyon County Sheriff’s Department, but doesn’t live for the job anymore. He’s got a life now and makes the most of it.

  Jennifer Addison is teaching fourth grade again. She writes on the side, makes frequent trips back home to Pennsylvania, goes fishing on Saturdays and most especially enjoys making love with her husband in the middle of Buffalo Lake on the hottest days of summer—

  “You can’t say that.”

  “Can’t say what?” She scanned the paragraphs on the computer screen. “Oh.” Paging up, she positioned the cursor and changed the opening line of the last paragraph. Jennifer Addison, who now goes by the name of Cassidy Barnett, is teaching fourth…

  “Not that,” Jace said with a snort, then pointed. “That.”

  “‘Most especially enjoys making love with her husband in the middle of Buffalo Lake on the hottest days of summer’?” She gazed up at him innocently. “What’s wrong with that? It’s true, isn’t it?”

  “Of course it’s true, but that isn’t the point.”

  “But you made me promise to always tell the truth. Remember? It was part of our wedding vows.” Sliding from the chair, she wrapped her arms around his neck and brushed her lips across his jaw. “I promised to love, honor and cherish and always tell the truth. And you promised to—”

  “Do things so wicked they would curl your hair.” He covered her mouth with his, sliding his tongue inside, leaving her naturally brown hair untouched but curling her toes and making her blood hot and body tremble.

  When he finally ended the kiss, she was too dazed to think, too weak to stand on her own. She leaned against him, breathing deeply of his oh, so familiar scent, thinking maybe the last pages of the book could wait until later. There was something so sweet about being at the lake, just the two of them, settled for a week in Junior Davison’s old cabin—their cabin for the past year, though she doubted folks would ever stop identifying it as Junior’s. This was where it had all started—and, in the woods outside, where it had all ended.

  But that wasn’t true. One part of her life had ended that rainy day. Another—the best part—had just begun. Love, marriage, babies when they were ready….

  Summer. Beginnings and endings.

  “It looks like you’re almost finished with the book,” Jace remarked as he nuzzled her ear.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Then what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Are you going to try to sell it?”

  “I don’t know.” She’d learned a lot about writing in the past year—not enough to know if her telling of the story of Rich’s life and death and her own years on the run was any good, but enough to know she liked doing it. She liked putting words on paper and making a story come alive. She especially liked happy endings.

  “If you do, you have to take out that part about the lake first. Your mom and dad would see it.”

  “They know we’re married,” she reminded him with a laugh.

  “My mom and dad would see it.”

  “They know we were having sex before we got married.”

  “We’d never be able to make love out on the lake again because everyone in Canyon County would be watching us every time we got near the boat.”

  “Well, since you put it that way…” Twisting in his arms, she bent to highlight, then delete the line in question, and then she kissed him. She didn’t succeed in making his hair curl, either, but there were some definite changes in his body.

  Taking his hand in hers, she started toward the bedroom, cool and quiet in the sunny afternoon. “I was thinking about starting another book, about a strong, brave, handsome hero and the woman who loves him. They’ll have problems, of course, but they’ll work through them and live happily-ever-after.”

  “Sounds like our kind of story,” he said as he pulled his T-shirt over his head and tossed it aside.

  She removed her own shirt, folded it and laid it on the chair near the window. His cutoffs dropped to the floor next to the T-shirt. Her shorts were folded and placed on top of her own shirt. His boxers landed half under the bed. She folded her lacy bra and panties, took one long, appreciative look at her husband stretched out on the bed and dropped them to the floor.

  “Our kind of story?” she echoed as she joined him. “Darlin’, it is our story. Happily-ever-after.”

  And that was the one, truest thing of all.

  ISBN: 978-1-4268-7396-6

  ONE TRUE THING

  Copyright © 2004 by Marilyn Pappano

  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 editorial office, Silhouette Books, 233 Broadway, New York, NY 10279 U.S.A.

  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.

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  * Southern Knights

  † Heartbreak Canyon

 

 

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