Baby Dreams

In a moment, he was back, and she only rolled down the window a crack this time. After all, there was a limit to the amount of snow she was going to let the wind whip in around her. It was freezing and she had no heavy coat.

Why she’d left Santa Fe in only this medium-weight linen suit was a question she would be asking herself later on, along with many others—such as, what sort of an idiot had she been to brave the mountains on a night like this? But that was all waiting for the moment when this trip was over and she would have the luxury of second thoughts and incredulous comments. For now, basic survival seemed more important.

“Get out of the car,” he said, his voice hard and authoritative.

“What?” She squinted, trying to see him better. He sounded meaner than before. And here she’d been hoping for a thaw in their relationship. “It’s snowing!”

“Get out of the car,” he ordered grimly, “face it, and spread your arms out.”

And that was when she noticed he had his gun drawn.

Her heart leapt into her throat. Suddenly things seemed very serious indeed. “What are you doing?” she gasped, staring down the black muzzle of the weapon.

“Get out of the car, face it, and spread your arms out.”

She swallowed hard. He had a bad habit of repeating himself, but she wasn’t about to call him on it now. For one split second, she considered starting up her engine and driving off as though all this had never happened. But that gun was just too ominous. And the snow was just too heavy. And most of all, his face was just too hard and cold.

“Okay,” she said hoarsely. “Just a minute. I’m getting out.”

She put her hands up so he could see she had nothing in them. Wasn’t that what they always did on TV? Then she stepped out, her soft leather shoes sliding a bit on the sleetcovered blacktop. She looked at him questioningly, shivering with the cold, and he gestured for her to turn.

“Spread your arms,” he said softly, but his softer tone seemed even more chilling and she complied quickly, gasping again as he stepped up close behind her and reached out to pat down her sides.

“This is insane,” she said sharply, pulling away from his touch.

“Hold still,” he ordered, taking control of her by the back of the neck the way a cat might a kitten. “And listen carefully to your rights. You have the right to remain silent…”

She shook her head slowly as he went down the list he was obliged to give her. He was arresting her. This was surreal. It couldn’t be happening. She’d just been driving along, on her way to Denver to see old friends and have a jolly time celebrating her college roommate’s new baby. That all seemed innocent enough, didn’t it? Just exactly when had she stepped out of the real world and into this wonderland where everything was upside-down?

It was all so strange. There was a break in the wind, and snow was falling in tiny, glittering flakes, falling silently all around, hitting her face with small, frosty impacts and melting there. It had been years since she’d even seen snow, not since her college days in Northern California, when they’d all packed up the car and headed for the mountains to try out the ski lifts. It always made her marvel how the snow could change the landscape in such a short time and never make a sound. It was like magic—as though some wizard had waved a wand and transformed everything when no one was looking. An enchanted episode.

And so was this whole situation. Was this really happening? Was she in the middle of some off-the-wall nightmare?

“If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you.”

She sighed and began to shiver uncontrollably. No, she wasn’t dreaming. It was all crazy, but very real.

“This is a joke, right? You’re just trying to scare me.” She half turned so that she could see his face again, look into his eyes, search for a spark of humor. “Hey, I promise. No more speeding, honest. I’ll be a good girl from now on. In fact, I’ll stay away from driving altogether and get myself a chauffeur. How about that?”

He didn’t seem to hear her, his eyes as opaque as ever. “Do you have any questions? Have you understood these rights I’ve just read you?”

She shook her head, feeling silly, and gripped her arms tightly around herself. “I don’t understand anything at all.”

His mouth twisted and he gestured toward her. “Hold your hands out behind your back.”

“What?”

The handcuffs were on before she knew what was happening, and she was so shocked she couldn’t utter a word.

“Let’s go.”

She turned to look at him, aghast. “But why?” she asked weakly, too stunned to fight for the moment. “What have I done?”

“Armed robbery, for starters.” He pointed her toward his car, and she went along in a fog of disbelief, his hand guiding her. “That was in Utah. Arizona said something about kidnapping. Colorado mentioned bunco. And then there was the little matter of a shooting in Laughlin, Nevada. Remember that one?”

“No,” she said, shaking her head, dazed. “No!” she repeated more loudly. She stopped, eyes blazing as her spirit revived. She was no criminal. There was a mistake being made. He had to listen to reason. It was silly, really, in a perverted sort of way. Surely he would see the joke if she just explained. “No, this is crazy,” she told him, shaking her head. “I’ve never done any of those things. I’ve never even been to Laughlin.”

“Get in the car.” He held open a door to the back seat.

She stared in at the interior of the car. It looked grotesquely lonely. He couldn’t do this. Could he? She started shaking her head again, backing away. “No, I…”

Reaching out, he gave her an encouraging push that brooked no argument or hesitation. She got in awkwardly, her hands stretched out behind her.

“Okay, wise guy,” she muttered, anger beginning to rise in her. “Okay,” she said more forcefully, turning to look at him, her cheeks bright with the humiliation. “If you think you know so much about me, tell me this. Who do you think I am?”

He flipped up a clipboard from the front seat and scanned it. “Billie Joe Calloway of Fort Worth, Texas,” he read off what he had clipped there. “Twenty-eight years old and good-looking. Five foot six with nice curves. Golden blond hair. Blue eyes. Driving a green Ford Mustang with California plates.” He dropped the clipboard and looked at her. “Now, doesn’t that sound familiar?” he asked her softly, his eyes as cold as an Arctic winter.

If it wasn’t so scary, the situation might have been funny. But right now it would be pretty hard to work up a real, honest laugh out of it.

“I’m thirty,” she said quickly. “And I’m not from Texas. Do you hear even one tiny hint of a Texas twang in. this voice?” But when you came right down to it, the rest fit her to a tee. “I’m not this Billie Joe person,” she said more strongly, glaring at him for emphasis. “You’ve got the wrong woman this time.”

She thought quickly. There had to be some way to prove it. Of all the times to lose her purse. “Oh, my car registration!”

He shrugged. “So you stole a car.”

“Oh, I see. No matter what I come up with, you’ll have a reason why it doesn’t apply.” She stared at him in exasperation. “You’re going to feel like such an idiot when you find out the truth.”

He shrugged again, seeming totally disinterested. “We’ll see,” he said as he swung into the driver’s seat.

“My car,” she protested, suddenly realizing they were going to drive off and leave it. “It’s just sitting there. Someone will take it.”

He turned and looked at her through the opening in the glass partition between the seats. “Don’t you get it?” he said, his voice soft but tough. “There is no one around, Miss Calloway. You took the wrong road, all right. You must have gone past three separate barriers to get this far. You were on a street to nowhere when I picked out your headlights and came on out here to see what was going on.” He started up his engine. “If you’d gone a mile farther, you’d have probably driven right off a cliff,” he added, sounding almost cheerful for once, “since you seem to have an opposite reaction to warning signs, or any other sort of rules or regulations.”

Cami turned slowly and looked back, squinting into the blurry white wilderness, dumbfounded. Was he right? She didn’t remember any barriers. So now she was supposed to consider him her savior instead of her enemy? It didn’t make any sense, but it served to keep her quiet as they rode down the mountain and turned onto a highway. She was thinking things over—and getting more and more puzzled all the time.

“My purse,” she murmured hopelessly at one point.

“The snow’s getting too deep to find it now,” he told her. “I’ll send someone out in the morning to look for it.”

She lapsed into silence again, overwhelmed by it all. She’d been in scrapes before. In fact, she’d been known by her friends as someone who seemed to attract trouble. She liked to think of it as trouble attracting her. And she usually had no problem in dealing with such things. But nothing in her background and experience had prepared her for this, and it was going to take some time to pull herself together and figure how to get out of this one.

“This is utterly outrageous,” she said, staring at his rock-hard profile. “You can’t just go around arresting people like this.”

“Sure I can,” he responded, glancing back at her. “It’s my job.”

Two

Okay, so this was going to be a little more complicated than he’d thought. Rafe eased the car around the corner, wheels spinning in the snow, and avoided looking in the rearview mirror. With the storm coming in, he was probably going to be stuck with her for the night. Oh, well. It came with the job. And it had been so long since he’d arrested anyone, he’d almost forgotten how to do it.

“Here we are,” he said as the car slid to a stop beside the old adobe building. “Hold on a minute. I’ll get your door.”

He wasn’t being gallant, merely careful. With the rap sheet this lady carried in her background, he wasn’t going to take any chances. She was tougher than she looked—had to be, with the things she’d done lately. He held the door and watched her emerge awkwardly from the car, and then wished he hadn’t.

She had the longest damn legs he’d seen in some time. And what was she doing wearing a skirt up here in the mountains, anyway? Nobody wore skirts around here. And if she had to wear a skirt, why couldn’t she control it better? She didn’t have to let it hike halfway up like that.

He knew that was hardly fair. After all, she was still in handcuffs. Still, it made him feel better to complain, even silently. The way she moved did allow him to get a good look at some of the most beautiful legs he’d ever gawked at, but that wasn’t what he wanted to do—not at her. She was a suspect, for Pete’s sake. He wasn’t supposed to notice her legs, or anything else about her. It wasn’t professional. He swore at himself and looked away. No, this definitely was no cinch.

“We’ll go on in,” he told her, turning her and pointing her in the right direction. “We’ll get the proper forms filled out, and then we’ll call Santa Fe.” There was still a chance they would come on out and pick her up right away. It all depended on how badly they wanted her.

“Okay,” she said absently, gazing about herself.

A city girl all the way, Cami had been expecting a nice brick building swarming with experience-toughened cops who would be crusty but ready to hear the truth if it were presented correctly. One call to some sort of centralized information bank, one check of the picture with the arrest warrant for Billie Joe, one look at Cami herself in the light, and this whole fabrication of her supposed criminal career would crumble into the dust. Apologies all around. Someone would drive her back to her car and send her on her way. And it would be all over.

No such luck.

“This is it?” she asked in wonder as he led her through the thickening snowbanks into the small adobe building set right against the street. She looked to the right and to the left and saw no more than three or four small buildings set back along the side of the road, one of which had a sign that read Country Store and had a bus stop designation hanging out front. The place was barely a crossroads, much less a town.

“This is your police station?” Standing in the middle of the floor, she looked from side to side at the desk, the table and two chairs, the television set, the small, old-fashioned cell in the corner of the room. “Where’s the rest of it?”

The only sign that he’d heard her was a slight twitch at the corner of his mouth as he came in behind her, shrugging out of his jacket. With one quick, deft movement, he unlocked the handcuffs and removed them, setting them down on the desk beside the hat he had just removed, as well, then pulled up a chair. “Sit down and we’ll get the paperwork started,” he suggested.

“This looks like something right out of an old Western movie,” she said, still looking around nervously and rubbing her wrists. “A relic.”

“It is,” he told her calmly, dropping into the desk chair and pulling a typewriter into position. “It’s been here since 1889.”

“That’s over a hundred years.” She tucked her arms in close and shivered, as though the ghosts of all that history were treading on her space.

“You got it.”

Looking down, she eyed the ancient machine he was adjusting. “Is that why you still use a typewriter? Just to keep in line with the historical accuracy of the place?” She pointed to the television in the corner of the room. “In which case, that’s certainly an anachronism you ought to get rid of.”

He gestured toward the chair once more and said with cool formality, “I still use a typewriter because the good people of this little town can’t afford to buy me a computer.”

She sat down with a thump and glared at him, annoyed that he was ordering her around, even if silently, and even more annoyed with herself for letting him get away with it. “I guess that means they probably got you dirt cheap, too, doesn’t it?”

He looked her full in the face and his voice hardened. “It does. But no matter what I get paid, I’m still the sheriff. That means I’m the law here, lady.” It was something he was going to have to remember around this woman. “I think it’s time you stopped and thought that over.”

She did, but only for a moment. She resented his tone, and she told him so.

He gave her a long-suffering look. “Okay, if you want to argue about every detail of this arrest, we can do that. But that will only delay filling out the forms I need before I call Santa Fe and get to the bottom of this.”

She knew he was right, but she could hardly help complaining. After all, this was a case of mistaken identity. How dare he keep her here this way? “Meanwhile I get to cool my heels here in a jail cell?” she said, looking over her shoulder at the bars and shuddering lightly.

His gaze darkened as he looked at her. Her hair was floating around her face in a cloud of silver and gold that set off the crystal blue of her eyes. He’d noticed the shudder and he assumed it was part of her act. He had to admit, she was damn good. “Look at it this way—it’ll keep you out of trouble for an hour or so.”

Her chin rose and she glared at him. “I don’t need to be kept out of trouble.”

He shrugged, turning away. “It’s pretty obvious you need a keeper of some kind,” he muttered.

“Hey, I don’t like the sound of that.” He didn’t seem to care, so she got tougher. “What are you, some kind of sexist pig?” she said pointedly.

That got his attention. He turned back and stared at her, his eyes hard as tinted glass. “Excuse me?” he said icily.

She turned down the corners of her mouth and lifted her chin. “That was a purely sexist comment.”

He considered her words for a moment, tilting his head to the side, before shaking it slowly. “No, I don’t think so,” he drawled at last. “I would have said the same to any criminal, male or female.”

She flushed, but luckily he’d already turned away again, so he didn’t see it.

“You’re the one who’s going to look ridiculous when it all comes out and you see that I was absolutely right,” she told him quickly. “I am Cami Bishop. I’ve never even heard of this Billie Joe person.” He didn’t respond, and she tried again. “Who am I going to have to see to get compensated for this outrage? I’m going to sue the pants off you and your town.”

“You can certainly try,” he said casually, taking papers and pens out of his drawer and setting up for the paperwork. “It’s within your rights.” Looking up, he met her gaze. “But that would mean you’d have to come back and hang around here for weeks, maybe months.”

She made a face. “You’re right. It wouldn’t be worth it.”

For the first time, she really took a look at the man who was causing her so much trouble. His dark hair was thick and worn a little too long in back and lightly touched with silver at the temples, as though a few snowflakes still clung to him from the storm outside. There was a primitive strength to him. His face was handsome in a hard, emotionless way, dark, all granite planes and angles, with deep grooves that almost made him look bitter. Something about him fit the place, though. He might have been here in 1889, back in cowboy-and-Indian days. And she wouldn’t know which category to place him in. With his dark skin and wind-weathered look, he could have fit in either one.

Sheriff Rafe Lonewolf was what the sign on his desk called him. She could see traces of Native American ancestry in his face, but other things were mixed in with it. He looked tough, as though he were used to using his fists as well as his brain to get himself out of trouble. She searched his expression, but there was no humor, no empathy. Was this just the mask he put on to do his job, she wondered? Or was this the real thing?

“If I do decide to file, I guess you’re the one I’ll have to name in my unlawful arrest lawsuit, huh?” she said brightly, wondering if she could get a rise out of him and not stopping to realize that might not be such a good idea. “I hope your little town can afford that judgment.”

She watched him for a moment, but there was no response, no change in his expression. So what now? Should she say something more impertinent, try to get his goat? Probably not. But how was she going to get out of this? A gust of wind rattled the windows and she pulled her chair up a little closer, glad that at least she was out of the storm.

But that wasn’t going to be enough to satisfy her for long. “When do I get my phone call?” she asked, looking around the room restlessly.

He glanced at her, then looked away. “As soon as we get this paperwork out of the way.”

“I think I’ll use my call to order a pizza,” she quipped, leaning back as though she were sure of herself. “By the time we get the paperwork done, you’ll realize you made a big mistake and I’ll be ready to get on my way. A nice hot pizza would hit the spot about then.” She smiled. So there, her expression said, even if her mouth didn’t actually form the words.

He looked at her balefully as he rolled a form into the typewriter. How had he gotten so lucky, anyway? It had been a nice quiet night. In fact, it had been a nice, quiet life since he’d taken this job out here in the sticks. He liked it that way. He’d had enough of the rough stuff down in the city to last him a lifetime. Peace and quiet were slowly healing a lot of wounds he’d collected down there.

But something told him it couldn’t last. Not now that Billie Joe Calloway had hit town and entered his jurisdiction.

He had no doubt that he had the right person in custody. After all, how many beautiful blondes in green Mustangs would be cruising through Clear Creek during any given space of time? Not many. This area was so out-of-the-way, they didn’t even have a real gas station—just the pump at Gray Eagle’s farm. Not too many tourists cruised through here. That was why he’d barely paid any attention to the bulletin that Billie Joe might be in the area when it had first come in that morning.

No, the idea that two blondes in identical cars might drive through stretched credulity a bit past the breaking point. And the prospect of having two of them in one weekend would be more than he could handle, he thought with a surge of humor he was careful not to show to her.

He glanced at her, letting himself look her over for a moment. He had to admit she didn’t look much like the usual criminals he’d dealt with in the past. There was a softness to her they usually didn’t show. Her expensive clothes and jewelry didn’t impress him. He’d arrested women before who’d looked like they belonged in Beverly Hills. But there was something about those blue eyes. They flashed with annoyance, but not with craft. And the rest of her—he only allowed himself one quick, cursory look and his immediate response served to warn him not to do that again. Her body was as pretty as her face, curves that nicely strained the fabric of her clothes and sent a rush up his thermometer. That wasn’t supposed to happen. He couldn’t let her get to him. He looked away, hardening his face even more, determined not to let her know she was in any way attractive in the cold eyes of the law.

He typed in a few spaces, then sighed softly and sat back. “Name?” he asked, though he knew it was probably going to lead to another argument. The night stretched out long and unpleasant before him.

“Cami Bishop,” she said smartly. “Cambria Shasta Bishop, if you want to get formal about it.” She added her date and place of birth. “Unmarried.”

He nodded, typing in the information she was giving, though he knew he was going to have to fill out another form with what he assumed was the more accurate version. The warrant said, though she was currently unmarried, she’d been married three times. He glanced at her from under lowered brows, wondering about such a young woman with three marriages behind her, but he couldn’t see any evidence of her past on her face. In fact, she looked far too open and trusting to be the sort of man-eating babe the warrant portrayed. But looks were deceiving. He’d learned that lesson before.

“Occupation?”

She hesitated. For some reason, it was always hard to explain that one to people. “I publish a fern journal,” she said at last.

His mouth twisted with obvious annoyance. “You mean a foreign journal?” he asked, looking at her.

She shook her head and held back a sudden urge to giggle. “No. I told you I wasn’t from Texas, didn’t I? The word is fern. You know, those green plants that grow in shady forests.”

“Oh. Botany.” He glanced at her linen suit and soft leather shoes and frowned skeptically. “You don’t look much like a nature freak,” he noted coolly.

“Oh, I’m not,” she assured him quickly, amused by the thought herself. “I don’t actually go out and tromp in the woods or anything like that.”

He looked slightly pained. “Of course not.”

She heard the sarcasm but chose to ignore it. “No, I edit research articles scientists submit.”

She was something all right. She said these things with a cool patina of honesty that could almost fool you. He had to hold back the grin that wanted to steal into his expression. “I see. You don’t get your hands dirty.”

She smiled as though she could sense his amusement. “Only with printer’s ink.”

He abandoned the typewriter and faced her, his natural skepticism plain to see. This was just too much. “Who the hell reads something like that?” If she could answer that one, he’d have to hand it to her. She could manufacture the whoppers.

She gazed back in wide-eyed innocence, her answer ready. “Other scientists. Hobbyists. People who like ferns.”

Throwing his head back, he groaned, “Right.”

For the first time, she thought she detected the barest glint of amusement in his eyes, but this time it didn’t make her smile. “You think I’m making this all up, don’t you?” she cried with sudden insight.

He stared into her eyes for a moment, then nodded and shrugged. “Of course you are.”