I Got You, Babe (25 page)

“Reprimand?” Renee said.

Dave grinned. “You didn’t tell her?”

John dropped his head to his hands.

“He got all pissed off because some guy he arrested got a not-guilty verdict, so he went into the john at the courthouse and beat the crap out of a paper-towel dispenser.”

“Dave?” John said. “You want to shut the hell up?”

“Then he got exiled to Lieutenant Daniels’s cabin in east Texas. That’s where the lieutenant sends all the bad boys who don’t behave themselves.”

So that was what John had been doing out in that cabin. It was clearly not the vacation he’d made it out to be. And it was doubly clear that he didn’t like anyone talking about it.

“Come to think of it,” Dave said, “you’re back a little early, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” John said. “I’m back a little early.”

“The lieutenant won’t like that.”

“The lieutenant doesn’t need to know about it, does he?”

“Hey, my lips are sealed, bro.”

John looked at Brenda.

“What are you staring at me for? What do you think I’m going to do? Rat on you?” She huffed with disgust. “Personally, I don’t think you should have beaten up the paper-towel dispenser. You should have saved your energy to beat up the little bastard who walked.”

“Of course, there’s that little issue of police brutality,” Eddie said.

“You bet,” Brenda said. “And I’m all for it.”

Eddie let out a long-suffering sigh and kept on eating.

“Just lighten up a little,” Dave told John. “You win some, you lose some. You’ve got no control over it, so why let it get to you?”

“I don’t need you to tell me how to do my job.”

“This isn’t the first time you’ve second-guessed the system. You gotta learn to roll with the punches.”

“You’re going to have to learn to roll with a few punches if you don’t shut up.”

Dave shrugged. “Sure. We can go a few rounds if you want to. Or you can think about what I’m telling you. You’ve got to quit getting so personally involved. Sooner or later it’s going to eat you alive.” He eyed John carefully. “Don’t give Daniels a reason to slap your hand again. You’re too good for that.”

John stared down at his plate. Finally he gave his brother an almost imperceptible nod, and Dave immediately turned the conversation to the Cowboys’ chances for a victory today.

Renee couldn’t believe everything she’d just heard. Now she knew why John had gotten so angry when they were out in the woods. She’d accused him of not caring enough whether justice was done, never realizing that he’d just lost a battle with his supervisor because he cared too much.

All at once she regretted the insults she’d hurled at him, suggesting that he was just going through the motions without a thought as to whether she was guilty or not. Now that she knew better, the strangest feeling came over her, a tingly flush of warmth she hadn’t expected. Every moment they spent with John’s family knocked one more brick out of the wall that surrounded him, allowing her an occasional glimpse of who he really was. He couldn’t stand the thought of a guilty man going free. Would it hurt him just as much to see an innocent person go to jail? How far would he go to make sure that didn’t happen?

Aunt Louisa checked her watch. “Everybody about finished? It’s almost kickoff time. You boys go into the living room and turn on the game. We girls will do the dishes.”

Brenda huffed with disgust. “Louisa. You
know
how I feel about all that girls-do-this, guys-do-that crap.”

“Of course I do. Now be a dear and grab that gravy boat, will you?”

Brenda rolled her eyes. She yanked the gravy boat off the table and headed for the kitchen. Renee reached for a pair of dinner plates, but John pulled her aside. “You come with me,” he whispered.

“No,” Renee whispered back. “It’ll look bad if I don’t help.”

“I don’t care what it looks like. I don’t want you out of my sight.”

“Come on, John. I can’t even walk in these jeans, much less run in them.”

Brenda and Sandy popped back out of the kitchen.

“Now, Alice,” John said for their benefit. “You’re a guest. The others can handle the dishes.”

“What are you trying to do?” Brenda said. “Deprive your girlfriend of the right to play out her role as a second-class citizen?”

John was forced to comply or look very suspicious. “Alice isn’t much of a football fan,” he said as he walked away, with a smile that didn’t quite make it to his eyes. “Let me know if she tries to slip out the back door, okay?”

“Don’t worry,” Sandy said with a smile. “We’re not letting this one get away.”

After they took the dishes to the kitchen and put them in the dishwasher, Sandy washed the casseroles while Renee dried them.

“Don’t take it seriously when John blows up like he did at lunch,” Sandy told her. “We’ve been going on at each other like that since we were old enough to talk. John just happens to be one of today’s targets. He’s not really as mad as he acts. He’ll be over it by halftime.”

Renee just smiled, knowing halftime wouldn’t do a thing toward improving John’s mood. “John and Dave are a little different from each other, aren’t they?”

Sandy laughed. “Like night and day. And Alex is different from the two of them. Dave’s so laid-back he’s practically in a coma. But he puts that to good use on the job. He can defuse a lot of situations because nobody sees him as an adversary, even people he’s dragging to jail. Alex, on the other hand, has the perp in one hand and a copy of the criminal code in the other. He’s nobody’s pal if he thinks they’ve broken the law. Alex was Dad’s favorite. Oldest son, you know.”

“And John?”

“To Dave, being a cop is a job,” Sandy said. “To Alex, it’s a mission. But to John, it’s a passion. He’s got this startling notion that justice will always be done. His brothers can walk away at the end of the day, no matter how things turn out. He can’t.”

Brenda snapped the lid on a plastic container she’d filled with leftover potatoes. “I don’t know what’s so tough about it. You don’t think about the job. You just do it. Can you imagine me zeroing in on a hostage taker and then stopping to wonder whether there are extenuating circumstances before I blow his brains out?”

“No, Brenda,” Aunt Louisa said, wiping the countertop with a dishrag. “None of us can imagine that.”

“I’m told what my target is, and I take it out. Mission accomplished.”

“But there’s a big difference between you and John,” Sandy said. “See, John actually has a heart.”

“True. But he could get over that if he really set his mind to it.”

Sandy gave Brenda a look of disgust.

“Oh, all right!” Brenda turned to Renee. “John’s a good guy. Really. I’m just saying he makes it hard on himself by thinking he can change the world when the rest of us know that it can’t be done. Guilty people are gonna walk, and innocent people are gonna fry. And there’s not a damned thing anybody can do about it.”

The world according to Brenda. A very scary place,
Renee thought, particularly since she might be one of those poor, unfortunate people who were destined to fry.

A few minutes later they came back into the living room. The guys had fired up the game, and by the time the seating shuffle was complete, Brenda, Eddie, and Dave had commandeered the sofa while Ashley toddled around the living room. Sandy was sitting cross-legged on the floor with Melanie, Aunt Louisa had taken the chair next to the lamp so she could do her crocheting, and Grandma sat on a dining room chair by the sofa because of her recent back surgery.

John was left alone on his love seat. His very small love seat. On which Renee was required to join him.

She sat down gingerly, and immediately she felt a slight dip between the cushions that tilted her in John’s direction. She folded her arms and tried to make herself as small as she could. John seemed to be just as uptight as she was, and if everyone’s attention hadn’t been focused on the game, she was sure not a soul in the room would have believed they were actually a couple.

There wasn’t anything awkward about the rest of the family, though. They shouted, cussed, cheered, made side bets on every other play, cussed, collected the bets, then cheered some more. The whole room seemed to be in motion at once, with smiles and laughter and good-natured insults.

Renee knew her being here was all a sham, but for a long, heavenly moment, she closed her eyes and basked in the feeling of a family surrounding her whether it was hers or not, and suddenly she was so jealous of John she couldn’t stand it. He had this wonderful family that she was pretty sure he took for granted, while she’d had nothing but an alcoholic mother who had treated her like crap, and whom she hadn’t spoken to in years. The feeling of longing she had was so powerful she felt as if she were going to pass out.

She’d worried about the wrong threat here today. The problem wasn’t that they were all into law enforcement. The problem was that she liked them all just a little too much. What if she ended up in jail? She barely knew these people, but she couldn’t bear the thought of their thinking she was a criminal.

But most important of all—what did John think?

He sat stiffly next to her, not acknowledging her at all. In fact, he didn’t acknowledge much of anything. He merely sat with his arms folded, staring at the television, even though Renee could tell he wasn’t really following the game. He clearly hated having to pretend she was his girlfriend. And on the few occasions he glanced her way, his expression was laced with suspicion, as if he expected her to go nuts and take hostages at any moment.

As if she’d even consider such a thing with Brenda on duty.

“Alice?”

Renee looked around to see Melanie standing beside her, holding a deck of cards.

“Yes?”

“Wanna play Go Fish?”

“Melanie,” Brenda said. “Don’t bother Alice when she’s watching the game.”

“It’s okay,” Renee told Brenda, then smiled at Melanie. “I’d love to play. But maybe we’d better go over to the table so we don’t bother anybody.”

As she stood up, John came to attention, giving her one of the subtle warning looks she’d grown so accustomed to. She nodded toward the dining room table. He settled back on the love seat with an expression that said he didn’t much like it but he wasn’t going to stop her. Still, as she walked across the room with Melanie she was sure she could feel his gaze boring into her back. She wanted to whip around and shout at him,
It's just a card game, not a prison break!

But she didn’t. Instead she sat down at the table with Melanie and tried to pretend John wasn’t even in the room. For a few hours more, she had the opportunity to play a dumb card game and delude herself into thinking her life was absolutely normal, and she decided that was exactly what she was going to do.

John sat on the love seat, drumming his fingertips against the arm, staring straight ahead as if he were focusing on the game. Right now, though, he could barely tell one team from the other, and if his life depended on stating the score, he’d be a dead man. He just wished everyone would get out of his house so he could have time to think, to find a way to fix this mess he’d created. Fortunately, nobody seemed to suspect that Renee was anything other than his girlfriend, which was a good thing.

But did they have to
like
her so much?

He didn’t get it. They found fault with every other woman he’d ever introduced them to, even though they supposedly wanted him to get married. Why did they have to choose now to decide Renee was the woman for him?

He was actually relieved when Renee got up to play a game with Melanie, thinking maybe he could turn most of his attention to the football game and the time would pass more quickly. He kicked off his boots and put his feet up on the coffee table, staring at the television, but no matter how much he tried to concentrate on the game, his gaze continuously shifted back to Renee like some kind of high-tech tracking device.

They’d been playing Go Fish for the past half hour. Ten minutes in, Grandma had joined them. He heard snippets of their conversation, Melanie squealing when she got four of something, and Grandma griping that the numbers on the cards were just too damned small to read.

Once, before Renee dealt the cards, she pointed to one of the clubs and told Melanie all those little black spots were puppy dog feet. Melanie giggled as if that were the most hysterical thing she’d ever heard, practically falling out of her chair in a paroxysm of childhood laughter. Even Grandma smiled at that one. Renee played the game with the energy of a blackjack dealer and the good nature of a favorite aunt who indulges her niece at every opportunity.

And John couldn’t take his eyes off her.

He absorbed every nuance of movement and color and light she emanated, from her golden hair that shimmered with every toss of her head, to her long, slender fingers deftly fanning out her cards, to the radiant smiles she showered on Melanie. But on the few occasions when she glanced at him and their eyes happened to meet, her smile would fade. Just for a moment, he wondered what it would be like to be the reason she started smiling rather than the reason she stopped.

What if she weren’t a fugitive? What if she really were his girlfriend? Was this how it would feel? As though he never wanted to take his eyes off her?

Stop it. You’re forgetting who she is and why she's here.

But as the afternoon wore on, the image of Renee as a gun toting convenience-store robber slipped further and further from his grasp, and he started to see her as his family undoubtedly saw her—as a beautiful woman who was smart, friendly, and engaging. His brain automatically added
sexy
to that list, which he mentally erased, only to have it pop back onto the list again, this time in bold capital letters.

Very, very sexy.

Then Sandy got up from where she was sitting on the rug and headed toward him. He braced himself. No telling what she had on her mind.

She plopped down beside him. “I guess the Cowboys can’t count on you for a lot of fan support today, huh?” She grinned. “Alice, on the other hand, can count on you just fine.”