The Sheriff's Surrender

But she didn’t remember realizing any such thing. She’d loved Reese with all her heart. She’d believed they would be together forever. She’d thought differences of opinion were inconsequential in the face of such love. Maybe they would have been, if the love hadn’t been one-sided. If he had been as committed to her as she’d been to him, they could have withstood anything.

But he hadn’t been. At the first serious challenge they’d faced, he’d folded. Turned away from her. Betrayed her. Broken her heart.

“All right,” she said flatly. “You’ve been damning me for nine years. I’ll accept your blame, and I’ll share it with Leon, with Judy and every one of the deputies involved in his confession, with the sheriff of Keegan County, the district attorney, and with you. There’s plenty of guilt to go around, and I’ll take my portion if you’ll take yours.”

Why shouldn’t she? Despite her protests this morning that she’d done nothing wrong, she’d been living with her own guilt all those years. In the early months she’d tormented herself with it. What if she’d refused to represent Miller? What if she’d persuaded him to plead guilty in spite of the civil rights violations? What if she’d made it clear to the D.A. and the judge that she wouldn’t raise any questions about the way the confession was obtained? That even though the state’s entire case was tainted, she would stand quietly by and let her client go to prison because, after all, there was no question of his guilt?

It wouldn’t have been fair, but it might have been justice. And it wouldn’t have cost her much—just a lifetime of living with the knowledge that she’d betrayed her client and herself. Her ethics, her morals, her self-respect—the very essence of who she was—all would have been destroyed.

But Judy wouldn’t have been killed, and Reese wouldn’t have left her…though eventually she would have left him because her love would have been destroyed, too.

She ate as much of her lunch as she knew she could keep down, then pushed the plate away and lowered her face into her hands, rubbing her temples and the ache that seemed to have settled there permanently. She’d eased a bit of the tension when Reese spoke and the mere sound of his voice brought it racing back.

“Do you need some aspirin?”

She felt the tautness as her faint smile formed. “I need a new life—a normal life, where the people who say ‘I wish you were dead’ are generally talking out of anger or rebellion and aren’t really intending to plant a pipe bomb in your car or redecorate your bedroom with bullet holes. But since a normal life doesn’t seem likely at the moment, yes, aspirin would help.”

He went to the cabinet next to the sink, then came back with an open bottle. He shook two tablets into her palm, then sat again. After she’d washed the pills down with pop, he quietly asked, “Did Forbes do that?”

For a moment she considered not answering, but those were quite possibly the only non-accusing, non-bitter, non-hostile words he’d spoken to her. Besides, she was hiding in his house. If Forbes found her, the next car bombed might be Reese’s, the next house shot up, this one. It was only fair that he know.

Managing another tight smile, she nodded. “The verdict’s not in on the bomb yet—whether it malfunctioned or their timing was simply off—but I wasn’t in the car when it exploded. As for the shots in the night, I was lucky. The first one woke me up and I managed to crawl to safety. But don’t worry. They say the third time’s the charm. Then I’ll be out of your life for good.”

His features darkened into a scowl. “I don’t want—” Clenching his jaw on the denial, he dragged his fingers through his dark hair, then gave a shake of his head, as if he knew he was wasting his breath. “Look, we’re stuck here until Jace makes other arrangements, and God only knows when that will be. If we don’t start acting like reasonable adults, it’s going to be the most miserable time of our lives. We can either stay in our respective corners, or we can negotiate a truce.”

Staying in their corners hadn’t worked very well so far, Neely admitted. She felt as if she’d gone five rounds with a much better opponent and couldn’t possibly survive another five. Compromise was the only reasonable action, though it held risks of its own. If Reese quit attacking her, if he let her forget for one moment that he despised her, she could be foolish enough to fall for him all over again. He was more handsome than ever, surely—with others, at least—as charming as ever, and she’d always been so susceptible. She’d built such fantasies around them.

But he’d despised her so much more—and so much longer—than he’d ever loved her, and he wouldn’t forget, or let her forget. He was offering to compromise on his behavior, not his beliefs. That damning look in his eyes, the one that shadowed every other emotion he was feeling, would probably never go away, no matter what.

“So what do we do?” she asked. “Agree that certain topics are off-limits?”

Reese shrugged.

“The Miller case?”

“Your noble profession.”

Ignoring the sneer underlying his words, she smiled. “Your narrow-minded, damn-the-law-and-the-lawyers pigheadedness.”

He opened his mouth to refute her statement, then almost smiled. It had been so long since he’d smiled at her that she stared and made silent, fervent wishes that he would let the smile form. He didn’t. “At least we agree that we don’t think much of each other professionally.”

“You’re wrong, Reese. I always thought you were the best thing that ever happened to the Keegan County Sheriff’s Department…until you became just like the others.”

“I was never just like them,” he denied a little too quickly and too vehemently.

“Careful there. A person might think you find being compared to your former fellow deputies an insult, and that might suggest that you have a problem with the way they did their jobs. That maybe they weren’t always so right. Maybe I wasn’t always so wrong.”

After studying her a moment he mildly said, “It seems to me that discussion encompasses all three topics we just agreed were off limits. So…how are your sisters?”

It was entirely too normal a question, one that left her feeling unbalanced, as if the gibe would come in a moment, when she wasn’t prepared. She shrugged and cautiously replied, “My sisters are fine. Kylie is living in Dallas. Hallie is in Los Angeles, and Bailey lives in Memphis.”

“Any of them married?”

“Hallie just divorced number three—no kids, fortunately. Kylie and Bailey are waiting for the right guy. They’re learning from her example.”

“And yours?”

“Hallie’s got the relationship ‘dos and don’ts’ all to herself. I’m the ‘don’t’ for everything else.” Don’t try to make a difference. Don’t make the mistake of thinking you can be important. Don’t care too deeply or too passionately about anything. Don’t mix relationship and career. Don’t work where you might make men with guns angry with you. And the biggie—Don’t piss off drug-dealing murderers.

“And your mother?”

“She’s also fine. She’s living in Illinois with husband number two. She golfs, cooks, plays doting grandmother to his grandkids and routinely complains that none of us has provided her with grandchildren of her own.” She heard the cynical note in her voice and was embarrassed by it. She’d long ago learned to not expect much from her mother. Doris Irene had done the best she could with the life she’d gotten. All she’d ever wanted to be was a wife, mother and grandmother, with a husband who would take care of all life’s problems so she wouldn’t have to bother her pretty little head with them. And that was what she’d gotten in the first ten years of her marriage.

Then the police had come in the middle of one winter night, kicking in doors, waving guns, shouting commands, and they’d taken Lee Madison away. To this day Neely remembered the cold, hard knot of terror in her stomach, her mother’s tears and her sisters’ screams. She’d stood there in her little flannel nightgown, the younger girls and Doris Irene huddled behind her sobbing, and her feet had felt like ice as she stared unflinchingly at the officers who dragged her father away.

“You never mentioned a father.”

Her startled gaze jerked to Reese. Seeing curiosity in his expression, she forced herself to relax, to breathe deeply and hopefully get some color back into her face. Under the protection of the table, she rubbed her hands together, her fingers as icy as her heart that long-ago night. “You never asked.”

“I figured he was a sore point. People who get along with their parents tend to bring them up from time to time. You never did.”

“I got along with him beautifully. I loved him dearly. I adored him.”

“Is he dead?”

The cold, hard knot was back, making it difficult to breathe. For years she couldn’t think about her father without bursting into tears, or dissolving into a nerveless, trembling heap. I’m not bitter, he’d told her the last time she’d seen him. She had been bitter for him. That was when she’d learned to truly, intensely, unforgivingly hate.

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