Cowboy Behind the Badge (20 page)

“When was your last real kiss?” she asked.

Oh. Tucker knew exactly what to do with that question.

He eased her to him and kissed her. It was long, hard and pretty darn satisfying. Well, until oxygen became an issue. “That one.”

She made a dreamy little sound of pleasure before she pulled back her shoulders and stared at him. “Well, at least you're better with your mouth than you are with your words. Have you ever told a woman you love her?”

Tucker had to shake his head. He'd had women in his life, but he'd never wanted to lie to them. And saying “I love you” would definitely have been a lie.

Until now, he realized.

The corner of her mouth kicked up as if she knew she'd just hit pay dirt. Probably because he had a goofy look on his face. Hard to keep his cocky bad-boy look when he'd just figured out what exactly was going on in his head.

And in his heart.

She wadded up a handful of his shirt and pulled him back to her. “Here's the deal,” Laine said, her mouth against his. “I'm in love with you. Always have been, always will be. Yes, I want your help raising the twins, but I want more than just that.”

Laine paused, kissed him. “Tucker McKinnon, I want it all. I want
you.
”

Well, heck. More pay dirt. Tucker figured he should just keep quiet since she was saying all the things that he wanted her to say. All the things he wanted to hear.

“You're in love with me?” he asked, just to make sure he hadn't misheard her. And because he wanted to hear her say it again.

“Yes. Of course I love you.” Her smile got even wider. He had to have a sample of it to see if it tasted as good as it looked on her.

It did.

Like his birthday and Christmas all rolled into one.

She pulled back, obviously waiting, and Tucker wanted to say to her what he already knew in his heart. But before he could do that, he saw the approaching headlights of a vehicle making its way up the road.

Because of the nightmare they'd just gone through, Tucker automatically stepped in front of Laine and reached for his gun. But it was a false alarm.

The best kind.

It was Egan in an SUV, and he was no doubt bringing the babies home. Tucker and Laine made it all the way down the steps before Tucker decided that this was indeed their home.

Well, hopefully.

He might have to convince Laine of that first.

Tucker let her make it to the SUV ahead of him, and the nanny bodyguard stepped out. She handed one of the babies to a waiting and eager Laine. Since the baby was dressed in a blue gown, he figured it was Matt.

He was glad they'd taken the time to come up with better names.

Laine pressed a flurry of kisses on the baby's sleeping face and then handed him to Tucker so she could do the same to Mattie. Heck, he hadn't thought it possible, but they were cuter than they had been a few hours before when they'd left for the safe house.

Since Tucker figured this kissing, oohing and aahing could go on for a while, he thanked Egan and the nanny, and while they drove away, he got Laine moving back toward the house.

“I want to do more than just help with them,” Tucker blurted out. “I want to be with them all the time. I want to feed them. Play with them.” He paused. “Yeah, I'll even change 'em, often, but I'll let you know up front that's not something I especially want to do.”

Though it no longer seemed like the chore it had been just a few days before. In fact, spending any kind of time with the pair would be something special.

“What exactly are you saying?” Laine asked.

Tucker fumbled around with this thought a moment and finally plucked out words that he hoped made sense. “I think we should make this legal and all. You should marry me and move into my house. Or your house. The location's irrelevant. Your answer, well, it isn't.”

She stared at him as if he'd lost his mind, and for a few heart-stopping seconds, he thought he'd gotten this all wrong. That Laine's “I love you” hadn't meant the whole big dream that was now playing out in his head.

“Say yes,” he prompted.

“Well, of course I'll say yes.”

The relief caused him to make a funny breathing sound. Thank goodness it still managed to sound manly.

“Yes,” she repeated.

Laine leaned in, kissed him. And that simple motion reminded him that once they had the babies put to bed, he wanted to strip off her clothes and make love to her again.

Plenty of times.

But first, he had to get something else off his chest.

“I'm in love with you, too, Laine.”

The words felt darn good for something that'd never slipped past his tongue before. Tucker thought he'd be saying them for a long, long time.

Like the rest of their lives.

Laine pulled him to her and let him know that it was exactly what she had in mind, too.

* * * * *

Read on for an extract from CRYBABY FALLS by Paula Graves.

 

Chapter One

The roadside memorial wasn't tattered or faded as so many monuments to the departed were. The simple wooden cross planted in the ground off Black Creek Road gleamed white in the midday sunlight, and the flowers in the resin urn were real, not plastic, still dewy with recent life.

Sara Lindsey crouched beside the small display and touched the big red gerbera daisy in the center of the urn. A chill skittered through her, as if someone had touched the back of her neck with cold fingers, and she nearly knocked herself on her backside turning to look.

Nobody's there, Sara. Get a grip.

Turning back to face the monument, she silently read the name etched there, darkened with black paint by whoever had planted this latest incarnation in the ground.
Donnie Lindsey. Beloved son and husband.

Today was the third anniversary of the accident. Some days, Donnie's death seemed like a distant memory, as if life since the accident had slowed to an interminable crawl, each minute stretching to hours or even days. And other times, like now, the raw realization that he was gone forever ached and bled like a brand-new wound.

Joyce must be the unseen caretaker,
Sara thought. For her mother-in-law, the wound never stopped bleeding. Her grief was a physical thing, a heavy pall hanging over whatever space she occupied these days. How her husband, Gary, lived with her constant state of mourning, Sara couldn't imagine. As painful as her grief for Donnie had been for the past three years, Sara still managed to find moments of happiness within the sadness.

Joyce never seemed to. Grief had aged her a decade in the past three years, her pain exacerbated by the loss of her daughter years before. And as much as she mourned the loss of her children, Joyce craved someone to blame for their deaths.

For Renee's death, there was no closure. Her murder remained unsolved. But for Donnie's death, Joyce had found a target for her silent wrath.

After all, Sara had been behind the wheel of Donnie's truck the night of the accident. And she'd refused to play by her mother-in-law's rules of grieving widowhood, choosing to honor her husband in her own way.

She checked her watch. Almost noon. Joyce, Gary and all of Donnie's childhood friends who still lived near Purgatory would be leaving the cemetery now, heading back to the Lindseys' home for a potluck dinner. This was the second year of what Joyce called “The Remembering,” and for the second year in a row, Sara hadn't been able to bring herself to go, even though everyone clearly expected her to make an appearance.

As the widow and part of the reason Donnie was dead, the least she could do was show up and take part in the ritual show of grief, right?

But grief was a private thing for her. She wasn't going to put on a show or stand around and watch others grieve just because people expected it. So she'd come here instead, to the hairpin turn on Black Creek Road, the place where everything had fallen apart, for her own personal memorial. And if she allowed no tears to dampen her cheeks or sobs to escape her throat, there was no one else around to pass judgment on her restrained style of grief.

Bitter much, Lindsey?

With a sigh, she pushed to her feet, grimacing at the lingering pain in her joints, and turned toward the drop-off only a few short yards from the roadside. Donnie hadn't actually died here, at the site of his monument, but nearly forty feet down the gorge that ended where Little Black Creek snaked its way through the foothills of the Smoky Mountains.

Sara wasn't sure how she'd survived the accident. She remembered none of it, not even why she and Donnie had been in Purgatory that night in the first place. She knew Donnie had been following a new lead about his sister's murder, but thanks to the head injury she'd sustained in the crash, she couldn't even remember what the lead had been or how he'd come by it. She'd spent a month in the hospital, missing Donnie's funeral and wallowing in a toxic combination of grief and pain until she'd finally talked her doctors into letting her go before the hospital killed her.

Recuperation had taken a year, and to this day, though she was pretty much back to normal physically, the memory loss lingered like a big, blank hole in the middle of her upended life. And the memory she most wanted to recover was what had happened in those last few seconds before the truck had left Black Creek Road and spun over the cliff edge.

What had caused the accident? Was it something she could have avoided? The question had haunted her for three years.

“Must've fallen asleep and missed the hairpin turn,” had been the accident investigator's best assessment. But she'd never been able to picture the accident happening that way. She was so careful behind the wheel. She never drove sleepy or even distracted by the radio or her cell phone, because her first two years as a Birmingham police officer had been spent in the traffic division. She'd seen a lifetime's worth of the grim results of inattention behind the wheel in those two years.

She wouldn't have been driving impaired. And she couldn't imagine how anything but impairment would have led her over that cliff at such a high rate of speed.

She heard a faint rustle in the woods nearby, and the creeping sensation that had followed her down from the scenic overlook where she'd parked intensified until the hair on the back of her neck prickled to attention. She eased around in a full circle, studying her surroundings with the eye of an investigator.

The woods around her bristled with life, leaves fluttering in the late September breeze that ruffled her hair into disarray. She spotted a squirrel shinning up a tree with quick, darting movements, its black eyes scanning the area for threats much the same way her own gaze was seeking some cause for the unsettled sensation that had set her heart pounding and scattered goose bumps across her limbs.

You're alone,
she told herself, firmly turning her gaze back to the road and the long walk uphill to the scenic overlook.

Always alone.

With the skin on the back of her neck still twitching as if brushed by invisible fingers, she took one last look at the roadside memorial before heading up the mountain road.

* * *

C
AIN
 
SHOULD
 
HAVE
 
known Sara Lindsey wouldn't show up for the graveside memorial. From what he'd heard around Purgatory over the past couple of weeks, she hadn't been back to Ridge County more than a handful of times since the accident.

Thanks to being laid up in ICU, she'd missed the funeral. Even her in-laws couldn't fault her for that. But what had kept her away after that?

A hunch had brought him out here to Black Creek Road and the roadside memorial Joyce Lindsey tended with obsessive attention. And sure enough, here she was, the grieving widow crouched beside the gleaming white cross, her head bent, a glossy curtain of dark hair hiding her face from his curious gaze.

She couldn't remember the accident, people said. Unfortunate for her if it was true, because without any memory of what had happened that night, there was no way for her to refute the whispered rumors about what might have led her to drive their truck off the road and down the steep bluff.

There had been no witnesses. Nobody to say, one way or another, whether she'd been reckless or even careless. The hospital wouldn't release the records of the tests they'd done on her, but he knew they'd have checked her blood-alcohol level and probably even done a tox screen, since she'd been found behind the wheel. If anything had turned up, she'd have been charged.

Her husband, on the other hand, had gone through the windshield. He'd been dead before anyone arrived on the scene.

Cain knew that for a fact. Because he'd been the one to find them.

A few yards away, Sara stood and looked around, her shoulders hunched and her eyes narrowed as if she sensed his presence. He stood very still, knowing that motion, more than the color of his clothing, would betray his location. His drab clothing would blend in well enough with his woodsy surroundings, but a turn of the head or a flick of a hand would give away his position in a heartbeat.

She had become a beautiful woman, a combination of age and tragedy carving away any vestige of baby softness from her features, leaving the fine bone structure in full view. A stirring sensation in his chest caught him by surprise, and he averted his gaze without moving a muscle.

After a moment, she seemed to shake off her nervous tension, turned back to the road and started walking uphill toward the scenic overlook located a quarter mile up the mountain.

He watched until she was out of sight around the next curve. Then he pulled out his cell phone and pressed the speed dial for his office.

Alexander Quinn answered on the second ring. He didn't bother with a salutation. “Did you find her?”

“Yes.”

“Any clue why she didn't show for the memorial?”

“Oh, she showed for a memorial. Just not the one at the cemetery.” That strange flutter he'd felt in his chest earlier recurred. He tried to ignore it.

“I didn't hire you to be cryptic.” Though Quinn's voice barely changed tone, Cain knew his boss was annoyed. In fact, something about this case had been making the old spymaster cranky from the moment Joyce Lindsey had showed up at Quinn's detective agency, The Gates, and hired him to look into the deaths of her two children.

“Sorry.” Cain started walking along the narrow shoulder, keeping an eye out for cars coming around the blind curve. “I found her at the roadside memorial her mother-in-law maintains.”

“Thought those weren't legal in Tennessee.”

“What's legal and what's tolerated can be two different things.” Cain paused as he reached the small white cross. “From what I hear, Joyce Lindsey sets up a new one almost as fast as the state can remove the old one.”

“She's lost a great deal.” Coming from almost anyone else, the comment might have been a statement of sympathy. But Quinn was anything but sentimental, and what Cain heard in his voice was unease.

“You think you were wrong to take her case?”

“Cases,” Quinn corrected. “She lost two children. But I don't need to remind you of that, do I?”

Cain tightened his grip on the cell phone. “No, you don't.”

“She wants justice. I don't blame her for that.”

“But?”

“But she seems very sure she already knows the answers,” Quinn answered. “I wonder whether she'll accept a truth that conflicts with what she already believes.”

“Just a second.” Hearing the sound of a vehicle engine approaching around the curve, Cain edged away from the shoulder of the road, taking care not to get too close to the drop-off. A sturdy thicket of wild hydrangea offered a hiding spot; he crouched behind the thick leaves until the truck passed. He caught a glimpse of Sara Lindsey's fine profile before sunlight bounced off the driver's window with a blinding glare. The flutter in his chest migrated down to his lower belly, and he knew instantly what that feeling was.

Desire. Raw, visceral and entirely unwelcome.

“You think she wants us to confirm her beliefs rather than find the truth,” Cain continued after the truck was safely past, dragging his mind out of dangerous territory. “For instance, if we find that her daughter-in-law didn't cause the accident—”

“The police looked into the accident pretty thoroughly. They found nothing to prove the widow was at fault.”

“So they say,” Cain murmured, remembering the flicker of guilt he'd seen on Sara Lindsey's face as she looked back at the small white cross before heading up to the overlook.

“You think they missed something?”

Cain started up the mountain, where he'd left his own truck parked at the overlook. “Maybe. It would help a whole lot if Sara Lindsey could remember anything about that night.”

“How sure are you that she doesn't?”

A three-year-old memory pricked Cain's mind. Sara Lindsey, bloodied and panic-stricken as she lay strapped upside down in the crumpled truck cab. She had looked straight at Cain, but he could tell she wasn't really seeing him. Her breathing had been fast and labored, but she'd managed to find air enough to scream her husband's name in terror, over and over, until she'd gone quiet and still, falling unconscious.

He shut the memory away, not wanting to let it taint his present investigation. “From all accounts, she and her husband had been happily in love since they were both in grade school. Even the people who think she must have caused the accident don't reckon she did it on purpose.”

“And the sister's death?”

“We know Renee's death was murder,” Cain said grimly. “We just don't know who did it.”

“Joyce Lindsey still thinks
you
did it, doesn't she?”

Cain crossed the road to the wider shoulder on the other side while there was no traffic approaching from either direction. “You should have told her you were assigning me to the case. She'll find out sooner or later. Nothing stays secret in a town this small unless you bury it.”

“I didn't want to give her the chance to say no.”

“She'll just fire you later rather than now.”

“We'll deal with that when it happens.”

“What's this case to you, Quinn? Why are you misleading a client in order to keep investigating?”

“It's not what the case is to me, Dennison. It's what the case is to
you
.”

Cain pressed his mouth to a thin line, torn between irritation and an unexpected flicker of gratitude. “I've lived this long without answers.”

“Too long. You almost turned down a job with The Gates because of what happened here in Purgatory eighteen years ago. Nobody should have to live his life under a constant cloud. Believe me.”