Confessions (24 page)

He imagined his lips following that slick, fragrant trail; he could hear the soft, ragged moans escape from between her ravished lips when he dipped his tongue into her moist, feminine heat. With no difficulty at all, Trace could picture her hot and hungry, her long legs wrapped around his waist as he pressed her back against the tile and…

Dangerous thinking, Callahan,
he warned himself even as he felt his body responding to the erotic fantasy. The
part of him that wanted to do the right thing tried to remember that the lady was in an emotionally vulnerable state.

But hell, it wasn't as if they hadn't been good together. And although he was not the kind of rogue alley cat his mother was always dragging home, neither would Trace ever profess to be a candidate for sainthood.

From her soft knowing smile, when he opened the sliding glass shower door, Trace knew Mariah had been expecting him. He took her in his arms, she lifted her face to his and they held each other so tight the cascading water couldn't come between them.

Lips clung. Greedy hands roamed over hot wet flesh. They became lost in a fragrant cloud of steam. Time faded. Yesterday spun away. Tomorrow was far away, out of sight, out of mind. There were no questions to be asked, no answers to be sought. There was only this suspended moment of sweet, sensual pleasure as they took each other into the mists.

 

Much, much later, they went downstairs and warmed up the Kung Pao shrimp, pork fried rice and Sesame chicken in the microwave, which they ate at the card table he was using as a kitchen table.

Since his sweatshirt had fallen to her thighs, Mariah had foregone putting on the oversize pants. Though she'd rolled up the sleeves, her slender body was engulfed. With her still damp hair hanging loose over her shoulders and a pair of fuzzy, too large ski socks on her feet, Trace thought she appeared guileless and unsophisticated.

Mariah found Trace's surroundings more than a little dreary. “Doesn't it depress you?” she asked, glancing around the barren room, mentally adding a few copper pans hanging from the wrought iron ceiling rack, a hutch
filled with colorful earthenware pottery against the far wall, and some undyed muslin curtains at the window.

“What?” He followed her gaze to the window. “The rain?”

“This house.”

“I haven't given it a lot of thought.” He shrugged and took a pull on his beer bottle. “It's cheap. Which is all I care about.”

He frowned and glanced around again in a way that made Mariah think it was the first time he'd actually looked at the room. “What's wrong with it?”

“Actually, it's a lovely house. It's just that it looks as if it's inhabited by hoboes.”

A frustrated Jessica had told him much the same thing when he'd turned down her invitation to go shopping for furniture. “I've been busy since coming to town.”

“I can certainly understand that. Whiskey River is infamous for its crime sprees.”

“Surely you didn't drive all the way over here in the rain to insult my housekeeping skills.”

“No.” She sighed. “I came over here because I needed company tonight. And you're the only person in town I know anymore.” That wasn't exactly true. There was her father. And Alan. And Freddi Palmer.

“What about your mother?” Trace asked carefully.

The last time he'd seen Maggie, she'd looked dangerously shell-shocked. Given what he knew about alcoholics, he'd have guessed that she'd been on the verge of a bender. He'd have also thought that Mariah would have wanted to stand guard to try to prevent that from happening.

Not that she could. Trace knew all too well the futility of keeping a drunk away from a bottle.

“Interested in comforting your first crush, Sheriff?”

He arched a brow at her sharp tone. What was it? Jealousy? Anger? “Would it bother you if I were?”

“Not at all. It would also be none of my business.” She angled her chin.

“As appealing as your mother still is, I'm more attracted to her daughter,” Trace said mildly. “I was only suggesting that given how she looked when she left my office, she probably shouldn't be alone tonight, either.”

“Maggie's not alone.” Remembering, she closed her eyes and turned away.

Wondering if the anger that had simmered between Mariah's parents could have actually flared into something else, Trace said, “Everyone has to deal with pain in his or her own way.”

“I know that!” Her head spun back toward him, her eyes hot and hurt. “But that doesn't make it any easier. Seeing your mother in bed with some hunk nearly a quarter of a century younger than her.”

His mind spun through a mental Rolodex. “Your mother was in bed with the chauffeur?”

“Not yet. But she was drunk and her blouse was unbuttoned, and the guy—who just happens, coincidentally, to be a would-be actor—was hanging all over her, so it doesn't take a Hollywood writer to create a final scene to that particular script.”

From what Matthew Swann had implied about his wife's behavior while she'd lived in Whiskey River, along with the mention of her picking up cowboys at Denim and Diamonds, Trace concluded that the scene was undoubtedly one both Laura and Mariah had witnessed before.

“I'm sorry,” he said, meaning it. Trace remembered all too well the first time he'd understood what his mother was doing with all those men behind the curtain in their rented room. At least Maggie was giving it away, he considered.

Mariah sighed. Then cursed. Then managed a wobbly smile. “I should be used to it,” she said quietly, confirming his earlier suspicions. “It's just that she's been doing so well lately…”

She didn't finish. There was no need. Proof again, Trace considered, that wealth couldn't buy freedom from pain.

Mariah braced her elbows on the table and rested her chin on her linked fingers. “At least I finally found out why she never returned to Whiskey River for the custody hearing.” Another sigh. “Maggie's version, anyway.”

Trace waited.

Mariah realized that her need to share the story with someone was one of the reasons she'd come running over here in the rain. She could count on one hand the people she trusted unconditionally. Trace Callahan was, she'd realized on the drive from the lodge, at the top of that very short list.

“She was out drinking one night with the ranch's very married foreman. They were driving home from Denim and Diamonds when the car hit a patch of ice and spun out of control. My mother was driving the car. The man died. My father used his influence to keep her from being arrested in exchange for her agreeing to give him sole custody of Laura and me. And never returning to Whiskey River again.”

Mariah closed her eyes and drew in a deep shuddering breath, remembering how her mother's story—told haltingly between bouts of copious weeping—had made her feel so conflicted. On the one hand, it had been a relief to learn that Maggie hadn't abandoned her daughters because of any lack of maternal love.

On the other hand—and there was
always
another hand, Mariah thought sadly—the thought of her mother's drinking being responsible for a man's death was horribly depressing.

“There's more. The foreman's name was Cole Garvey.”

“Clint's father.”

Immersed in her own pain, Mariah didn't notice that Trace failed to sound surprised. “One and the same.” She dragged her hands through her hair. “I knew Clint's father died when he was twelve. I just never knew how.”

They both fell silent, lost in their own thoughts. Trace finally understood why Matthew Swann's animosity toward Clint ran so deep.

“So,” Mariah said on a soft, rippling sigh, “it seems Maggie and Laura had more in common than either one of them ever would have believed.” Her eyes filled. “Maggie told me that she'd been planning to leave my father for Cole. And take Laura and me with her.”

How their lives would have been different, Mariah mused sadly. Perhaps not better. But for Laura, anyway, she doubt if things could have been any worse.

“Anyway, I had to be alone,” she told Trace. “Just for a little while, so I could try to sort things out.”

“That's understandable.”

When she opened her eyes and looked at him again, he viewed pain in the turquoise depths. “When I went back to Maggie's suite, to tell her that it was okay, that I understood the pressure she'd been under, I found her with her driver.”

Frustration. Anger. Loss. She'd felt them all in that single blinding moment. Her shoulders, engulfed in Trace's gray Dallas Police Department sweatshirt, slumped.

“So I came here.”

He ran his palm down her damp hair. “I'm glad you did.” And not just for the great shower sex.

When he took her hand, she let her fingers curl into his and felt warm and safe. “So am I.”

“There's something you should know. About Maggie.”

She shook her head. She couldn't think about her mother anymore tonight. Or, for that matter, Laura. For this one stolen night, she wanted to be selfish. She wanted to let Trace comfort her, she wanted him to help her forget all the painful problems she'd be forced to face along with the morning sun.

“I don't want to hear—”

“She wasn't driving.”

“Please, Trace, I really don't… What?” Her eyes widened as his words belatedly sunk in. “What did you say?”

“Maggie wasn't driving her car that night.”

M
ariah stared at Trace.

“How can you possibly know that? Maggie told me the records were sealed. It was part of the deal my father cut with the prosecutor.” A man who later, after a hefty campaign contribution from the Swann ranch, had been elected to the state legislature.

“The records
were
sealed. But I happen to have friends in high places.” He lifted their joined hands, brushed his lips against her knuckles and said, “They're in the other room.”

She walked with him, hand in hand, into his office, settling in a corner of the couch while he crossed to the desk and retrieved the manila file, which he handed to her.

“You got this from Jessica Ingersoll, didn't you?”

“I can't tell you that. But it does make interesting reading. Would you like an after-dinner drink?”

She stared down at the folder on her lap as if it were a diamondback rattler, poised to strike. “With the risk of sounding like Maggie, I have a feeling I might need one.”

She watched him pour the liquor into the glasses, ob
serving the way the crystal appeared even more delicate when held in his large hands.

He sat down beside her, shoulders and thighs touching. Mariah did not move away. Neither did he.

Stalling while she worked up her nerve to read the accident report, Mariah took a sip. The amber liquor flowed through her veins, warming her blood.

“This is good.” And expensive, she knew.

“It was a housewarming gift.”

“Ah.” That made sense, she decided. It also explained the Waterford, which she could not imagine Trace buying for himself. Another gift from Ms. Ingersoll. She wondered if they were still lovers, wondered if what she and Trace had shared gave her the right to ask.

Trace could guess what Mariah was thinking, but was unwilling to get into a discussion about his complicated, yet easy relationship with Jess. “Your mother deserves knowing the truth,” he said, tipping his head toward the folder. “After all these years.”

The accident report was written in curt, unimaginative police legalese. It had been snowing the night of the accident, a week before Christmas. The steep, curving road to the ranch, treacherous in the best of weather, had been icy.

Patrons of Denim and Diamonds, most of them none too sober themselves, disagreed on exactly when Maggie and Cole Garvey had arrived at the honky-tonk. The one thing they all agreed on was that the couple had been drinking for several hours before going out into that snowstorm. Two customers, who'd been arriving as the pair left, had also reported seeing Garvey climb into the driver's seat of Maggie's Mercedes sedan.

An assertion corroborated by the report written up by the DPS officer on the scene, who'd found the foreman's body lying in a snowbank a few feet away from the wreck
age. From what the investigating officer could determine the car had hit a patch of ice, the driver had overcorrected, sending it skidding off the road into the ditch, causing it to overturn.

Garvey, who hadn't been wearing his seat belt, had been thrown from the car and had broken his neck when his head had hit the unyielding trunk of a ponderosa pine tree. Death, the coroner had later ruled, had come instantly.

Maggie had been luckier. Even as drunk as she was, she'd managed to fasten her seat belt. The first patrolmen on the scene had found her, unconscious, not from any injuries, but from the alcohol she'd imbibed earlier.

As Mariah read the damning pages, Trace sipped his brandy and watched the color drain from her face.

“He lied,” she said flatly when she finally finished. She polished off her barely touched brandy in thirsty gulps, willing the alcohol to jolt her stunned mind back to life.

“Yes.” Trace put his glass on the pine coffee table, took her empty snifter and placed it beside his. Then he took hold of her hand. It was ice cold. He felt a need to warm it, and her. “It seems he did.”

“That son of a bitch.” Her words were angry, but her eyes were flat and drained of emotion. “His lies cost us our mother.”

“Perhaps he felt you'd be better off—safer—with him than living in California with Maggie,” Trace suggested, playing devil's advocate. He didn't point out that if Laura and Mariah had been in that car, they could have died as well.

“That's not the point, dammit!” Color rose again in her cheeks. Warmth flooded into her eyes, her hands. “He could have fought for custody on the grounds of Maggie's drinking. And won.

“But the underhanded methods he used, the way he
allowed her to think that she'd been the one driving, to believe for all those years that she was directly responsible for a man's death, the way he forced her never to see her daughters ever again and encouraged Laura and me to believe that she'd never wanted us in the first place, all that was horrendously cruel. Even for him.”

She'd known her father could be autocratic and controlling. She also knew, all too well, that he was a vindictive man. What Mariah had never realized, until now, was exactly how diabolic Matthew Swann could be. “I hate him.” Her tone was flat. Final.

He ran his thumb around her jawline. “In the long run, that'll probably end up hurting you a lot more than him.”

Mariah sighed. “I hate it when you're right, Callahan.” She looked up at him, all her tumultuous feelings swirling in her sober gaze. “How did you get so smart?”

He framed her face in his hands. “Life, I suppose.” He stroked his thumbs soothingly up her cheekbones. “If it was meant to be easy, it'd probably be boring.”

It was something he'd once believed, something he'd said on innumerable occasions over the years. Until the shooting. Until he'd watched Danny die. Then, caught up in his own helpless feelings of anger, he'd lost his focus. Now, slowly, surely, Trace realized he was getting back on track.

Something flickered in his dark eyes and made her pulse jump. She felt the chains around her heart loosen ever so slightly.

“Ah, a small-town sheriff philosopher.” Mariah's reluctant smile creased the silky skin beneath his hands. “I think we might have an idea for a series here, Callahan.”

The mood was changing. The air around them became warm and sultry. “Sounds good to me.” He ran his hand down her throat and watched her eyes cloud. “But doesn't a new series concept take a great deal of research?” His
hand continued over her breasts, his fingers flicking tantalizingly at the nipples engulfed in folds of fleecy sweatshirt, drawing a soft moan.

“Of course it does.” Mariah thrust her hands into his silky dark hair and went willingly, eagerly, as he laid her back on the couch. “But I told you, Sheriff, I've always prided myself on my research.”

 

While Mariah allowed Trace to ease her pain, Alan let himself into the house his wife had left to her sister. With his father-in-law's help, he'd already packed the few personal belongings he intended to take with him back to Washington. They were currently in cardboard boxes down at Waggoner's Lock and Store, awaiting shipment to the Capitol. But there was one more thing. Something he hadn't been able to retrieve with Matthew hovering over him.

He went into the den and made his way directly to the fireplace where he removed a sheaf of papers from behind a loose stone. He dropped it into the metal wastebasket, took a fireplace match down from the mantel, struck it against the front of the fireplace, then touched it to the papers.

He stood there, watching silently as the evidence that could derail his presidential hopes went up in flames.

 

Two days later, Mariah was back at The Branding Iron, waiting for an order of sticky buns to go.

“So,” Iris, whose family had run the café for three generations, said as she refilled Mariah's cup of coffee, “today's the big day.”

Mariah was not all that surprised that Iris knew about her plans to move into Laura's house today. “I guess so.” She ran her finger around the rim of the cup.

“Kind of a surprise, I'll bet,” the sixty-something café owner offered. “Laura leaving you her house that way.”

“That's putting it mildly,” Mariah agreed grimly.

“You gonna stay?” Iris scooped up the buns with a white waxed paper square and placed them in a pink box the same color as the walls of The Shear Delight salon.

“I don't know.” Mariah shrugged. “Right now, I'm just trying to take things day by day.”

“Makes sense, I suppose. But I gotta tell you, girl, if it were me, I wouldn't be in any hurry to hightail it back to California. Not if I had a chance to have Trace Callahan's boots under my bed.”

Mariah felt the damning color rising in her cheeks and realized that in spite of two deaths having occurred in this peaceful town, she and Trace were still managing to provide entertainment for Whiskey River's residents.

 

It was not easy, moving into what, during Mariah's childhood in Whiskey River, had been her grandmother Prescott's house. Especially since memories of Laura continued to live on in every room, making the transition painful.

When she first entered the ranch house, although it was a bright sunny July day, Mariah felt chilled all the way to the bone. The investigation had left the house a mess, but Mariah didn't focus on the papers scattered all over the floor, the overturned drawers, the fingerprint powder still dusting the bannister, the doorways, the desk drawers. Instead, at first, she saw only a vague blur.

Then gradually, she began to focus. The furniture was Ethan Allen traditional country, with a comfortable western influence which suited the casual ranching life-style. The knotty pine paneling looked buttery in the slanting sun streaming in through the oversize windows that overlooked the back pasture and beyond that, the woods.

Various personal items—family heirlooms—were scattered about in what Mariah suspected was a vain attempt to make the Fletcher house a home.

She recognized her grandmother's pewter watering can by the living room fireplace. It had been used as a vase, although the fresh daisies and black-eyed susans had died. Their white and yellow petals were scattered carelessly on the red brick hearth. A leather-bound photo album sat on a pine plank coffee table, its pages filled with faded sepia photographs of ancestors and more candid shots of the family from happier times.

Although there were no pictures of Maggie, which made Mariah assume that her father had destroyed any reminder of his wife, there were several shots of herself as a young girl: seated astride Buttermilk, her first pony, standing beside Whiskey River, a toothless grin splitting her face as she held up an eight-inch rainbow trout.

She paused at a picture of herself and Laura, decked out in western wear for some long ago Fourth of July and holding huge slices of watermelon, their joyous smiles offering no proof of the rift that was to come.

Saddened by the image of those two young girls—herself at eight, Laura, at thirteen on the threshold of womanhood—Mariah bit her lip and closed the album, unable to continue toward the time when her presence would no longer appear in the family annals. She had no idea how long she sat there, remembering, regretting. The towering grandfather clock in the corner had not been wound; its pendulum was motionless, its once cheery Westminster chimes silenced by death.

When she finally went into the den and saw her brother-in-law's blood still staining the back of the leather sofa, Mariah's head began to swim. She sank down on a nearby chair and pressed her fingers tightly against her eyes.

It was not that she felt any sympathy for Alan Fletcher. On the contrary, she still believed he was responsible for Laura's death. But viewing the scene of his shooting reminded her all too well what awaited her upstairs. And although she knew it was cowardly, Mariah was not prepared to witness the room where her sister had died.

Her first night in the house, Mariah slept downstairs, in a little room off the kitchen that in her grandmother's day had belonged to the cook employed by the Prescott family. The cot she'd found packed away in the camping equipment was hard and narrow, but since she doubted she would have gotten any sleep anyway, Mariah didn't mind.

Her second night, she managed to move upstairs, to the guest room. But she turned her head away as she passed the master bedroom.

She avoided her sister's bedroom for two additional days. Then, finally, knowing she could no longer put it off, Mariah ventured into the room where Laura died. It was a mess. Clothes and personal belongings had been strewn everywhere. Like downstairs, fingerprint dust had drifted over everything. The faint odor of dried blood lingered, giving testimony to what had occurred here.

She began shortly after dawn and worked all day, scrubbing the floor, the walls, the headboard, picking up Laura's scattered clothing and jewelry.

Since she could not bring herself to rid the house of her sister's presence, as if preparing the room for Laura's return, she returned the lingerie to the bureau, the paperback romance novel to the drawer in the mission-style bedside table, and changed the bedding.

One thing she had no qualms about throwing away was the framed wedding photo of Laura and Alan.

Little by little, as the days went by, and she began to settle into the house, the good memories began to out
weigh the bad and gradually, Mariah began to believe that perhaps Laura was, as usual, right.

Perhaps she did belong here, after all.

 

It was late. Jill had gone home and Cora Mae was settled behind her desk, knitting away at an afghan for her granddaughter. The phone had been blessedly silent, allowing Trace an opportunity to review the information on Southwest Development's alleged business ventures in Arizona. He'd requested, and received, the information by fax from the attorney general's office in Phoenix. The AG assured Trace that he was keeping a close eye on the company, but since the elected official was known for his political ambition, and there were rumors of Alan Fletcher having promised his longtime friend a cabinet post, Trace had wanted to read the paperwork himself.