The Sheriff's Surrender

“Come over here and close the door,” Reese commanded gruffly, and she returned from her examination of the room to do so. What had looked like a regular door from the other side was actually steel, she realized, and quite heavy. Fortunately, it didn’t require significant effort to move it—at least, not until it was closed and secured. There was what appeared to be a heavy-duty dead bolt lock, along with a steel bar that fitted through brackets on the inside of the door.

“The structure isn’t attached to the house, so the house can blow away without affecting this room at all. The walls and ceiling are reinforced concrete, more than a foot thick. This design has been proven to withstand winds up to three hundred miles per hour. It’s also bulletproof.”

A shiver danced down her spine, one she thought she controlled, but he noticed and frowned. “You’re not claustrophobic, are you?”

“Oh, no. I’m learning to love small, enclosed, safe places.”

They stood there a moment, the silence around them thick and unnatural. When he broke it, Neely wasn’t prepared for the sound of his voice…or had she been anticipating it?

“Who is Forbes?”

A chill swept over her, and she rubbed her bare arms vigorously to generate some heat. After a halfhearted effort, she unfastened the two locks, pushed open the door and returned to the brighter, warmer environment of the bedroom. She thought about brushing him off, about flat-out lying that she didn’t know anyone by that name or not answering at all. But as long as she was around, whether in his house or his jail, her problems were his problems.

Threats against her now included him.

A large bay window with a seat looked out onto the front porch and the yard. She sat there, folded her arms across her middle and replied, “Eddie Forbes is a convicted felon whose business interests range from trafficking in narcotics to money-laundering to murder-for-hire.”

“Whose murder?”

“That of his primary rival in the drug trade. His wife’s lover.” She smiled tautly. “And mine.”

“Why yours? You give him bad legal advice?”

Though her smile didn’t waver, she felt a stab of hurt that he thought so little of her. She hadn’t busted her butt all those years to become a lawyer to defend people like Forbes—career criminals, amoral scum who took what they wanted, destroyed countless lives and bought, manipulated and threatened their way out of trouble. Yes, she had defended some guilty people, and yes, she’d gotten some of them off when the cops or the D.A.’s office had screwed up. But that was justice. Even criminals had rights that couldn’t be violated.

But justice was all she’d ever sought for any of her clients. She had never gone into court with the intention to free a client she knew was guilty. A fair trial. That was all she’d ever promised, all she’d ever delivered.

“No, I wasn’t his lawyer,” she replied carelessly. “That would have been a conflict of interest.”

“Why?”

“Because I was working for the D.A.’s office at the time. I was Eddie’s prosecutor. I sent him to prison.”

She saw the surprise that flashed through his eyes, followed by a hint of bitterness. Why don’t you put that expensive degree to good use? he’d asked her countless times back in Thomasville. Why don’t you go to work for the D.A., where you can do some real good?

She’d never wanted to be on that side of the courtroom. Overzealous, ambitious or uncaring prosecutors were responsible, in her opinion, for much of the injustice in the justice system. They sent innocent people to jail, sometimes knowingly, sometimes not, but almost always without caring. But Judy Miller’s murder and Reese’s breaking her heart had convinced her that, just as in providing poor, uninformed clients with a chance for justice, there could be some noble purpose in providing that same justice to guilty people who so richly deserved to be in prison.

And so she’d gone to work for the Jackson County District Attorney’s office. She’d been as good a prosecutor as she was a defense attorney. She’d built an impressive record and been rewarded with a heavier caseload and more pressure to perform. She’d had less attention to pay to the details, had had to rely on other people’s information and opinions. Clearing her cases had become more important than justice.

The day she’d won a conviction against a man whom she honestly doubted was guilty, she’d turned in her resignation. In the years since she’d neither defended nor prosecuted anyone. She handled wills and trusts, product liability and medical malpractice, prenuptial agreements and divorces, custody cases and adoptions—a little bit of everything. She charged big fees of clients who could afford them and adjusted them accordingly for clients who couldn’t, made damn good money and didn’t care much about any of it.

“So you prosecuted this guy and got a conviction.”

She nodded. “He served five years on a fifteen-to-twenty-year sentence. He warned me at the sentencing that he wouldn’t forget me. He got out a few weeks ago, killed his wife, who’d divorced him while he was inside, then came looking for me.” Her smile was thin and bitter. “So…thanks for the great advice. At least when I was on the defense side of the table, none of my clients ever tried to kill me.”

“No, they killed innocent people instead.”

She opened her mouth to argue, but what good would it do? He’d refused to see reason nine years ago, and he appeared even more rigid now. A decade of blaming her seemed to have set his opinions in stone.

When she didn’t respond, he walked out of the room, his boots echoing on the wood floors. She didn’t follow him, but sank back against the window. She was suddenly tired—of being alone, being afraid, being sorry. Of trying so hard and failing so miserably. Of being damned for doing her job, for obeying the law, for other people’s mistakes. She wished she could run far away and never come back, but at the moment she’d be lucky to get within ten feet of a door.

Since that was out, she wished she could curl up in bed, pull the covers close around her and sleep deeply, peacefully, without dreams, until all this ugliness was done. There was a bed six feet in front of her, the navy-blue covers turned down on this side, the fat pillow with an indentation ready to cradle her head. She could kick off her shoes, leave her clothes in a pile on the floor and sink down into all that softness, with nothing showing but the top of her head. The sheets would smell of Reese, and the covers would create a warm, dark cocoon, and she would feel safe because Reese’s bed had always been a wonderful place to be.

Had been. Until nine years ago. Wasn’t anymore and never would be again.

Wearily she got to her feet, intending to return to the guest room and go quietly insane. She stopped beside the bed for a moment, picked up his pillow and lifted it to her face. It did smell of him, of the same cologne he’d favored years earlier, of the scent that was simply him, of the time when she had smelled of him. She breathed deeply, bringing back sweet memories of sweeter times, then, with a lump in her throat, hugged the pillow tightly to her chest.

When she finally walked away, it wasn’t out of the bedroom, but into the safe room. She left the door open barely an inch, allowing a bit of weak light into the darkness, then sat on the bed and breathed deeply. There was nothing wrong with feeling melancholy as long as she didn’t cry, and she wasn’t going to do that. Crying served no purpose. It solved nothing and merely provided others with proof of her weakness. It didn’t even make her feel better—her eyes got puffy and red, her head ached and she had trouble breathing—so she absolutely was not going to do it.

And then she lay down, snuggled close to Reese’s pillow and cried.

Lunchtime came and went with no sign of Neely. Reese had spent the rest of the morning thinking about what she’d said, trying to imagine her working as an assistant D.A., wondering why she’d gone that route when her heart had always been set on defending crooks, not prosecuting them. Was it the Miller case that had pushed her to the other side? Had getting shot opened her eyes to the fact that there was more to justice than simple fairness?

He’d always thought her insistence that justice equaled fairness was naive. What was just about a man who’d beaten his wife half to death on numerous occasions going free because he hadn’t been read his rights—rights he already knew by heart from the five other times he’d been arrested? Where was the justice in dropping charges against a drug dealer because the officers had lacked probable cause for searching his car? When their search had been justified, when drugs and money, both in great quantities, had been found, what did probable cause matter?

Why did acknowledged criminals even have any rights?

When his stomach started grumbling, he put a frozen casserole in the microwave oven, set the timer, then glanced at the wall that separated the guest room from the kitchen. What was she doing in there that kept her so quiet? Reading? Sleeping? Looking outside where she couldn’t go and heaping silent curses on his head? He told himself it wasn’t important. All that mattered was that she was keeping her distance from him. That was the only way they were going to get through the rest of the day. But when he kept wondering, he finally walked down the hall to check.

It was so quiet in the guest room because she wasn’t there. He checked the bathroom—the door was open, the lights off—then his bedroom. It was empty, too. She couldn’t possibly have left the house. The first thing he’d done after sending the deputy on his way was reset the alarm. Even if she’d managed to sneak out without his knowing it, the dispatcher would have called.

He made a quick check of the entire house, including the garage, then ended up once again in his own room. He was about to turn away and resort to searching closets when the door to the safe room caught his attention. Normally he kept it closed, but when he’d left Neely earlier, it had been wide open. Now it was only slightly ajar.

He pushed the door open and reached for the light switch, then abruptly stopped. She was lying on her side on the bed, her knees drawn up, her sherbet-green skirt covering her legs and feet, and she was asleep.

The first sensation that swept over him was relief. He might resent her like hell, might wish she’d disappear from his life and his memory, but he didn’t want her dead, hurt or in danger. Whatever wrongs she’d committed, whatever mistakes she’d made, she didn’t deserve to die for them. She certainly didn’t deserve to die for sending a drug dealer and murderer to prison.

The second sensation was…hard to identify. Something weak. Soft. Damnably foolish. For the first time he noticed the signs of unrelenting stress—the shadows under her eyes, the tension that wrinkled her forehead even in sleep, her fists clutching his pillow to her chest. She looked so fragile. Vulnerable. Pushed to the limits of her endurance and beyond. There was a part of him—the part that remembered loving her—that wanted to close the door and lock them inside this safe place, then gather her into his arms and simply hold her. That part knew instinctively that as long as he held her, she would sleep without dreams, without fear, until the fatigue was banished and she was rested enough to rely on her own strength.

Thank God the rest of him knew better than to give in to such weakness.

Minute after minute passed, and he simply stood there and looked at her. Nothing broke the silence but breathing—hers slow and even, his ragged and less than steady. Nothing existed but the two of them, no place but this room.

The timer beeping in the kitchen finally spurred him to move. He left the safe room, then, on impulse, returned with a chenille throw. Careful not to touch her, he spread it over her, pulled the door nearly shut and went back to the kitchen.

After lunch, he spent the next few hours on the Internet, searching for whatever he could find on Eddie Forbes. By the time he read the last archived newspaper article, he felt pretty damn grim. A lot of criminals accepted the risk of arrest and prison as part of the cost of doing business and bore no ill will toward either the cops or the D.A. Everybody—good guy or bad—was just doing his job.

Eddie Forbes wasn’t one of them. He blamed his unfortunate incarceration on everyone but himself. He’d already killed his ex-wife and her lover and threatened to kill Neely next. Because he blamed them most? Or because they were women and more vulnerable than the cops, crooks and lawyers involved?

Reese had just signed off the computer and risen from his chair when the cell phone rang. He sat back down and answered, fully expecting to hear his cousin’s voice. He wasn’t disappointed.

“Hey, bubba. How’s it going?”

Thinking about Neely’s escape that morning and his dragging her back into the house, Reese ignored the heat rising up his neck and carelessly replied, “Everything’s okay here. How about there?”

“Everybody’s stirred up. Seems somebody disappeared from the department’s protective custody and no one has a clue where she’s gone.”

“That’s what you get for working in a big city. We couldn’t lose a prisoner down here if we wanted to.” Unless she just got up and walked out. If she had closed the door quietly instead of giving in to her temper and slamming it, who knew how far she could have gotten?

“Did you ever start locking the jail cells, or couldn’t you find the key?”

“Funny, Jace. When are we going to see you again?”

There was a guilty silence, followed by a slow, “I don’t know. I thought I was going to be able to get away sometime soon, but it didn’t work out. There’s too much going on here. I’m stuck.”

Reese scowled. Jace had lied to him, conned him into taking Neely and accepted his deadline for getting her out by tonight, and now he was backing out of the deal, just like that. As if no one else had a say in the matter. And, really, how much say did they have? She was here. She had no place else to go, and he had only one place to take her—one place she certainly didn’t belong. They were stuck, not Jace. “For how long?” he asked stiffly.

“I don’t know, bubba.”

“Listen, bubba—”

“Hey, I tried. There’s just no way I can get away right now.” After a pause, Jace’s tone lightened. “But it’s nice to know you miss me so much.”

“Yeah, like a pain in the—” Reese broke off as Neely, looking very much like a small child awakened too soon from a nap, came into the room. “Hey, your mom says you never call.”

“I call her every week.”

“Yeah, well, call her twice this week.” That would make Aunt Rozena happy, and all Barnetts had a stake in keeping Rozena happy. “You know, you owe me more favors than you’ll ever be able to repay.”

“I know, bubba. Thanks. And, hey, tell her… Tell her not to worry.”

Reese glanced at Neely, standing in front of the fireplace and looking at the family photos there, and wondered yet again what was between her and Jace. It had better not be anything more than friendship, because if his cousin thought for one minute he was going to marry her, make her part of the family and subject Reese to her presence for the rest of their lives, he was crazy.

But Neely had been known to make men crazy before.

She’d sure as hell made him crazy.

“I will,” he said quietly. “Keep in touch, will you?”

“When I can.”

Reese hung up and laid the phone aside, then swiveled around to watch her. He could tell the instant she became aware of his gaze. She stood an inch taller. Became less soft. Tried to look tougher—and failed.

“Was that Jace?” She sounded as cool and unapproachable as she tried to look, and never shifted her gaze one millimeter from the photograph in front of her.

“Yeah.”

“He’s not coming, is he?”

“No.”

If he hadn’t been studying her, he would have missed the nearly imperceptible shiver that rippled through her. “Then we may as well go. My bag is already packed.”

If he took her to the jail, as he’d threatened, her presence in Canyon County would no longer be his and Jace’s secret. She would be out of his house but not out of his life. He might be more comfortable—though he wouldn’t bet on it—but she would be trading one difficult situation for another. She very well might be no safer there than she was here—maybe not even as safe. Everyone in the department and a good number of courthouse employees would know she was there, and who knew who they might tell?

No, transferring her to the jail wasn’t the answer—not yet, at least. He would give his cousin a little more time, then reconsider, but he wasn’t taking her anywhere today. “Jace said to tell you not to worry.”

The faintest of smiles touched her mouth before disappearing. “Jace is an optimist.”

“So are you.”

She shook her head. “Maybe I used to be, but not anymore. These days I’m a realist.”

And these days her reality wasn’t too encouraging.

“You hungry? There’s a casserole in the refrigerator—one of my aunt’s Tex-Mex specialties.” Reese went into the kitchen, and she followed, taking a plate from the cabinet to dish up a helping to put in the microwave.

“Smells wonderful,” she said, breathing deeply. “How is Rozena?”

Pausing in the act of returning the casserole container to the refrigerator, Reese looked at her sharply. When they were together, she’d never met any of his family but his father and Jace. He couldn’t remember ever mentioning his aunt by name, or believe Neely would remember after all these years. “You know Rozena?”

The suspicion in his voice stiffened her spine as she watched the food slowly rotate inside the oven. “We met the last time she visited Jace in Kansas City.”

He didn’t know Rozena had visited Jace in the city. And why in hell would Jace include Neely in a family visit unless… “You think he’s going to marry you?”

Either the question itself or the hostility that made it so harsh startled her into looking at him. Her brown eyes were open wide and faintly amused, and her mouth wore the beginning of a smile that never quite formed. Instead she grew serious and thoughtful. “Does that worry you?”

“Jace deserves better.”

“But we don’t always get what we deserve, do we?”

And what did she think he deserved? Eternal damnation?

“The family will never accept you.”

“Why not? Because you’ll tell them whatever is necessary to make them dislike me?”

“All that will be necessary is the truth.”

The microwave stopped, and she removed her plate, carried it to the table, then returned for a Coke and silverware. As she settled in the chair she calmly said, “You can’t tell them the truth, Reese, because you don’t know it. All you know—all you can accept—is your narrow-minded version of what happened, but there’s so much more to it than that.”

“There’s nothing more to it,” he argued, moving to sit across from her. “Leon Miller tried to kill his wife. We arrested him and took him to trial. You manipulated the law to get the charges dropped, and he walked out of the courthouse and blew her away. Bottom line—if not for you, he wouldn’t have gone free that day. If not for you, Judy wouldn’t have died that day.” He stared at her a long, cold moment before finally finishing. “The bottom line is you were responsible, Neely. You should have paid the price.”

Neely held her fork so tightly that the beveled stainless edges cut into her palm, but she kept her hand from shaking and thought she succeeded fairly well at keeping the hurt and frustration out of her expression. In fact, even to herself, she sounded polite. Conversational. “It must be nice to be able to pass judgment on the rest of the world—to lay blame wherever you want, to condemn whoever you want and absolve whoever you choose. You decide which laws are worth enforcing and which to ignore in the name of right. You point fingers, lay blame, assign guilt, judge, condemn and sentence, all from your intolerant, mean little viewpoint, and all with the certainty that you have a God-given right to do so.

“Well, you don’t, Reese. You’re no wiser than anyone else. You overstep your authority, and you do incredible harm. You accuse me of manipulating the law. How could you possibly tell after you and others like you have twisted and subverted it beyond recognition? In your quest for justice as you define it, you trample all over people’s civil rights, and then when your case gets thrown out, you look for someone else to blame. You don’t have the guts to say, ‘I shouldn’t have conducted an illegal search, or beaten a confession out of the suspect, or failed to read him his rights. I screwed up.’ Oh, no, you say, ‘It’s his lawyer’s fault. It’s the judge’s fault. The D.A. wasn’t prepared. It was that bleeding-heart jury.’”

She took a breath, forced her fingers to uncurl, and lay the fork on her plate. Folding her hands tightly in her lap, she met his gaze unflinchingly. “The bottom line, Reese, is that Leon Miller walked out of the courthouse a free man that day because your department screwed up. Your fellow deputies failed to read him his rights and coerced his confession. From the first time they hit him, it was guaranteed that those charges were going to be dropped. It didn’t matter who his lawyer was or if he even had a lawyer. The judge had no choice but to dismiss the case. Your people set him free. Your people gave him another chance to kill his wife. Not me.”

His face was a few shades paler than normal, which heightened the color staining his cheeks, and his eyes were a few shades darker. He wanted to argue with her—she knew that from too much experience arguing just such cases in the past—but he didn’t seem able to get the words out. They would just be a waste of breath, just as all her words had been wasted.

He believed, as the rest of the Keegan County Sheriff’s Department had, that, to some extent, the end justified the means. When Leon Miller had given his wife the worst beating yet, they’d shown him what it was like to be brutalized by someone bigger, stronger and angrier. They’d gotten a confession and some small satisfaction, and had left the D.A. with no case.

Thankfully, Reese hadn’t been involved in that particular case, though he’d arrested Miller a number of times before. He hadn’t approved of the beating, but he’d understood it, and he hadn’t thought it a reason to let the man go. Well, hell, Neely had understood it, too. What woman, victim or not, hadn’t fantasized at least once about some tough guy coming along and teaching a wife-beating bully a lesson he would never forget? And if it had merely been some tough guy, she probably would have cheered him on and volunteered to represent him if he was arrested.

But they’d been deputies. The so-called good guys.

And their crime had been worse than any Miller had committed until that day.

“It’s an old argument that we may as well drop now,” she said wearily. “I can’t accept your point of view, and you won’t consider mine.”

“And what is your point of view, Neely? That fairness should always win out over justice? That Miller’s civil rights were more important than Judy’s life? That you can’t be held responsible for what your client does once he walks out of the courtroom? Because that’s all just so much bull. We don’t live in the courtroom. If you make it possible for your client to walk out of the courtroom, free to commit other crimes, you share the responsibility for every one of those crimes.”

Giving a shake of her head, she picked up the fork and took a bite of beans, shredded beef and cheese. Though she wasn’t hungry and felt queasy, she forced herself to eat. She needed the strength if she was going to make it through one more day with Reese.

How had they ever hooked up together when they were such different people? Had the intense emotions they’d called love merely been stronger-than-usual lust? Had they wanted love so badly that they’d fooled themselves into believing they’d found it in each other? Surely at some point they’d realized that they could never make the relationship work. They must have known it was only a matter of time before their differences became so great that they couldn’t be overcome.