Читать книгу New Year Heroes: The Sheriff's Secretary / Veiled Intentions / Juror No. 7 - Carla Cassidy, Delores Fossen - Страница 12

Sleep fell away in increments. Mariah became aware of the faint sound of chirping birds drifting through the windowpane, and for just a moment a sense of well-being filled her.

Then she opened her eyes and realized she was in Billy’s bed, and reality slammed into her a like a sledgehammer crushing her heart.

Another dawn, and he was still not home. She squeezed her eyes shut as a rush of emotion filled her. She could only assume that nothing had happened while she slept, for if it had, Lucas would have awakened her.

How was she going to get through another day … another minute of the tormenting fear? How was she going to survive her next breath not knowing where her son was or if he were alive or—

She gasped, not wanting to even think that she might never see Billy’s smile again, would never hear that silly giggle of his.

Drawing a deep breath, she took in the scent of him that lingered in his room, the faint Billy fragrance that clung to his little pajamas. How long before that Billy smell went away? Would he be gone so long that there would be nothing left of him?

Needing to escape her own thoughts, she hurried into the bathroom where she washed her face, brushed her teeth and pulled her hair back with a ponytail holder at the nape of her neck.

She looked tired despite the sleep she’d gotten. Of course, much of her sleep had been haunted by dreams of Billy crying for her, needing her, and she’d been unable to go to him.

She was living every mother’s nightmare. She’d read the tragic news stories of missing children, had seen parents on the television years after the disappearance still seeking answers. She didn’t want to be one of those parents. She didn’t want to think that Billy might be a statistic.

Shoving away the horrible thoughts, she went in search of Lucas.

She found him stretched out on his back on her sofa. He was sound asleep. He wore a pair of worn jeans and a white T-shirt and she realized it was the first time she’d seen him out of his khaki uniform.

He looked good in jeans, and the T-shirt pulled across the width of his chest. She had always been attracted to Lucas. From the first time he’d strode into the office demanding to speak to the mayor, she’d felt a magnetic spark.

But he scared her more than a little bit. He reminded her of the husband she’d fled. She’d already made one major mistake in her life, and she had the feeling that following through on her attraction to Lucas Jamison would simply be another monumental mistake.

He must have been exhausted, for the lamp on the end table closest to his head burned bright but didn’t seem to bother him.

She moved into the kitchen and quietly began to make a pot of coffee. That was all she seemed to be good for. She couldn’t find her son. She couldn’t figure out who might have taken him. She didn’t like feeling so useless, so utterly powerless. She’d had years of feeling that way with Frank and had sworn she’d never allow herself to feel that way again.

Only the first stir of dawn’s light brightened the eastern skies and she turned on the small light over the oven, then poured herself a cup of the freshly brewed coffee.

As she sipped, she realized she was hungry, and that sent a stabbing guilt through her. How could she sleep? How could she even think about food when Billy had been kidnapped? Was he being fed? Was he warm? The questions tormented her.

“Good morning.” Lucas’s deep voice came from behind her and he flipped on the overhead light.

“It can’t be good if Billy and Jenny aren’t here,” she replied.

She heard him open a cabinet and knew he was getting a cup for coffee. A minute later he joined her at the table. His sleep-tousled hair did nothing to detract from his handsomeness. She waited for him to tell her that he’d get them back, that everything was going to be okay. When he didn’t, her heart clenched so tight she felt as if she were suffocating.

“At least we both got some sleep,” he finally said.

She set her cup down. “I feel horrible, that I could sleep and not know if my son is being fed or being allowed to sleep. And you know what makes me feel even more guilty? The fact that at the moment I’m thinking about making some scrambled eggs and toast because I’m starving.”

He reached across the table and captured her hand in his. “You can’t feel guilty about the things your body requires to live. You have to eat and you have to sleep.”

His hand was big and strong and warm around hers, and she welcomed the warmth, the touch. Maybe the old adage was true, that misery loved company.

“Are they coming home, Lucas?” The question was a mere whisper and until the words left her lips she hadn’t realized she was going to ask it.

His gaze held hers. “I don’t know.” He squeezed her hand more tightly. “I wish I could tell you otherwise, but I don’t think you’d appreciate me lying to you.”

“Absolutely not,” she agreed. “I want to know every piece of information you know, every feeling you have. I need to know what’s going on every minute.”

He nodded, released her hand and leaned back in his chair. “Now I have a very important question to ask you.”

She sat up straighter, steeling herself for whatever he might need to know. “What?”

The corners of his lips turned up in a smile that momentarily erased the stress lines of his face. “Are you making the eggs or do you want me to? I have to confess I make a mean omelet.”

Her burst of laughter surprised her, not only with its unexpectedness but also in the fact that it eased some of the knot of tension in her stomach. She sobered almost immediately and pointed to the stove. “Knock yourself out. I don’t think a man has ever cooked me breakfast before.”

“Then sit back and relax and let me do the driving,” he replied as he stood.

She watched as he began to pull items out of the refrigerator. “You like that, don’t you? Being in the driver’s seat.”

He frowned thoughtfully as he set a carton of mushrooms on the counter. “I’ve never thought about whether I like it or not, it’s just something I’ve always had to do.”

“Why’d you decide to run for sheriff? It’s no secret that you have enough money that if you didn’t want to, you wouldn’t have to work for the rest of your life.”

He grabbed a knife from the drawer and began to cut up a green pepper. “When I was young I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. There was a group of young men here in town. We were all friends and we spent most of our high school days acting like rich jackasses. We were overindulged, full of ourselves and good for nothing. Then the five of us decided to all go to the same college in Missouri.”

He stopped talking long enough to get the skillet from the cabinet and the carton of eggs from the refrigerator, then continued. “Anyway, while we were there we all developed a social conscience. We called ourselves the Brotherhood and we all made a pact that we would choose careers that gave something back to our community. We were not going to be the kind of wealthy young men who got our names in the tabloids.”

“So you became sheriff. What about the others in the Brotherhood?” She welcomed the conversation to keep her mind from dark places.

“You know Sawyer. He became an architect. Then there’s Jackson Burdeaux, who is a criminal defense attorney, Clay Jefferson, who became a psychiatrist and Beau Reveneau, who joined the army.”

“I’ve met all of them but Beau. Does he still live in Conja Creek?”

Lucas poured the egg concoction into the awaiting skillet before replying. “We don’t know where Beau is. His family moved from Conja Creek about eight years ago, and none of us have heard from him for several years.”

“So you were all close friends?”

“The best.” He took a sip of his coffee, his expression reflective. “We swore that we’d always have each other’s backs, that we’d support each other for the rest of our lives.” He shook his head ruefully. “We were very young and idealistic.”

“Must have been tough on you last month when you thought Sawyer had killed his wife,” Mariah replied. The crime had been shocking. Sawyer’s wife, Erica Bennett, had been stabbed and pushed off the dock and into the swamp water behind the Bennett home. Erica had been an unfaithful wife who at the time of her death had been pregnant. Sawyer had been the number-one suspect.

“The most difficult part was that I knew in my gut that Sawyer wasn’t responsible, but I was pressured by your boss to make the arrest.”

It had turned out that Erica had been murdered by her best friend and next-door neighbor, Lillian Cordell. And despite all the drama, Sawyer had found love with the nanny he’d hired to care for his daughter, Molly.

“I hear Sawyer and Amanda are getting married next month,” she said.

“Yeah. I got an invitation. It’s going to be a small wedding in Sawyer’s backyard. I’m glad he found somebody who makes him happy. He was unhappy with Erica for a very long time. And speaking of weddings and marriages, tell me about yours.”

As always, whenever she thought of Frank, her wrist ached as if to remind her of all the pain her marriage had brought to her. “There’s nothing much to tell. We got married, it didn’t work out and we got a divorce.”

“But there’s more to it than that, isn’t there?” He pushed the button to lower the bread in the toaster, then turned and looked at her expectantly.

“I’m surprised you’d find the minutia of a broken marriage of any interest,” she replied.

“I think there’s more than the usual minutia in your broken marriage. After all, it was you who told me Frank Landers might be responsible for all this.”

As he took the eggs from the skillet and ladled them onto two plates, she turned her attention to the window and stared out, knowing that she was going to have to tell him how bad things had been, how stupid she had been. The toast popped up and she turned her gaze back to him.

“I was twenty-one and Frank was forty when we married. We’d met in a bar, and I thought he was strong and smart. He seemed to adore me.”

She released a humorless laugh and wrapped her hands around her coffee cup. “I guess you could say I was a cliché. My father left us when I was ten and I never had a real relationship with him. My mother worked two jobs to support us and I rarely saw her. When I met Frank I was hungry for somebody to love me, and he fed that hunger. It wasn’t until after we were married that I realized his adoration was obsession and he was dictatorial and mean.”

Lucas carried the two plates to the table and joined her there. She was grateful that his eyes held no judgment, nor did they hold pity. He just looked at her curiously.

“I was smart, but I fell into the same trap that other abused women fall into,” she continued. “You’ve probably heard this story a million times before. At the beginning things were okay, although Frank had total control over what I did, where I went and who I saw. I wanted to please him so I played right into his game. By the time I got pregnant I’d been isolated from my friends and my mother. And while I knew things weren’t right, I wanted my baby to be raised in the kind of complete family that I hadn’t had.”

“When did the physical abuse start?”

She looked at him in surprise. She hadn’t mentioned anything about physical abuse. Unexpectedly, tears burned at her eyes as she thought of those years with Frank, years of fear and pain and broken dreams.

“About the time I got pregnant with Billy. Frank wasn’t happy about the pregnancy, although initially I thought he’d come to embrace the idea of a child. The first time he laid a hand on me it was just a push … a shove. I fell into the coffee table and got banged up. He was instantly sorry and we put the incident behind us … until the next time.”

“When did he hurt your wrist?”

She flushed and realized she’d been rubbing the ache since she’d begun talking about Frank. “The day I left him. By that time I’d been punched and kicked and slapped enough. I’d already begun to make plans to leave him, but that day he raised his hand to Billy. I stepped between them and he grabbed me by the wrist and twisted. I heard the snap when it broke. He drove me to the hospital, apologizing and telling me how much he loved me. But that snap of my wrist was a defining moment for me and I knew I wasn’t leaving the hospital with him.”

“You pressed charges?”

She nodded and once again wrapped her hands around her coffee cup, needing the warmth to infuse the chill that had taken up residence with the bad memories. “He spent a week in jail, then got out. Billy and I went into a shelter that night and we stayed at the shelter until the divorce was final. That day I packed up and Billy and I got into my car and left Shreveport and Frank Landers behind.”

Lucas picked up his fork and pointed to her plate. “You’d better eat before it gets cold.”

Although the hunger pangs that had gnawed at her had fled with the talk of Frank, she picked up her fork and took a bite. Instead of hunger, what gnawed at her now was a fire of simmering anger. She was angry with herself for falling into the trap of a battered woman, angry with Lucas for maintaining such control on his emotions, for fixing her eggs instead of finding her son.

She knew her emotions were irrational, that the anger she felt at the moment was misplaced, but she couldn’t get a handle on it, and as she attempted to take another bite of her breakfast, it flared out of control.

“You remind me of him,” she said.

He looked at her in surprise. “What are you talking about?”

“You remind me a lot of Frank.” Careless abandon filled her. Her pain rose up inside her, so enormous she wanted to strike out and Lucas was a convenient target. “You treat Jenny a lot like Frank used to treat me.”

He set his fork down and narrowed his dark eyes. “What does that mean? You’re somehow comparing my relationship with my sister to the abusive relationship you had with your husband?”

“Oh, I’m sure you’ve never laid a hand on Jenny, but emotionally you do to her exactly what Frank used to do to me.”

His narrowed eyes flickered with the heat of a burgeoning anger. “I think maybe your own emotional baggage is coloring the way you see things.”

“On the contrary, my emotional baggage makes me see things more clearly.” She wanted an explosion, needed to release not only the tension that balled so tight inside her, but also to diminish the physical attraction she felt for him.

What she wanted more than anything else was for him to reach out to her, to grab her and hold her tight in his arms as he had done the night before in the cemetery.

As crazy as it sounded, she wanted him to take her to bed, to fill her heart with anything other than the agonizing horror that was in there now. And that scared the hell out of her.

“You undermine her confidence, you belittle the choices she makes.” She got up from the table, unable to sit next to him and say the things that threatened to burst from her. “You never let her forget that you have to rescue her, that she isn’t smart enough, isn’t old enough to do things right. That’s abuse, Lucas, whether you recognize it or not, whether you mean it or not, it’s abuse.”

A muscle ticked in his jaw and his eyes were as dark as the night that had just passed. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You don’t know anything about me or my sister and the relationship we have.”

“I know what I see. Did you know that Jenny wanted to be a teacher? But that’s not what you wanted her to be. So she flunked out of college on purpose, because that’s what you secretly expected of her, because she’d rather disappoint you than stand up to you.” She took a step backward, somewhere in the back of her mind appalled at her audacity, yet unable to stop herself.

“You treat her like she’s stupid and worthless and that’s what she becomes when she’s around you. You’ve stolen her self-esteem. Believe me, I know all about that.” Tears fell down her cheeks and she swiped at them angrily.

“You have no idea what a great woman Jenny is. She would have made an awesome teacher, and my only consolation right now is that Jenny is with Billy wherever he is and I know she’ll do everything in her power to keep him safe.”

She left the kitchen then, horrified by her own words and consumed with the emotion she’d tried so hard to control since the moment she’d realized Billy had been kidnapped.

LUCAS STARED AFTER HER, stunned first by her emotional outburst and secondly by what she’d said to him. As his surprise abated, anger welled up inside him.

Who in the hell did she think she was? How could she possibly compare him to an abuser? She knew nothing about him, nothing about Jenny.

Lucas pushed away from the table and stood, his intention to chase after her, but by the time he reached the living room he decided to give himself a few minutes to cool off.

He returned to the kitchen and cleaned up the dishes, his head whirling with his thoughts.

She was under an enormous amount of stress, he told himself. Surely she didn’t really believe those things about him. He was not abusive to Jenny, he was just trying to save her from turning into the kind of woman who had given them birth.

Mariah didn’t understand him, didn’t understand where he was coming from where Jenny was concerned. And in any case he certainly didn’t owe her any explanations or apologies for how he conducted himself with his sister.

He grabbed his overnight bag, his cell phone and a clean uniform and headed for the bathroom. Maybe beneath a refreshing cool shower some of his anger would dissipate.

It worked. As he stood beneath the spray of water he couldn’t sustain the anger that had momentarily gripped him. Instead, a swell of sorrow filled him for her. He couldn’t imagine being a young woman with a small child and having to run away in fear from the man who had promised to honor and cherish her.

He’d suspected secrets were in her past, and now she’d shared them with him. Was it any wonder she saw imagined abuse in others? She’d been through hell and had survived only to have her son ripped away from her by some unknown perpetrator.

Dammit. He wanted to be a hero for her. Her father had left her, her husband had abused her. She needed a hero. He wanted to bring her son home safe and sound. And he wanted to be a hero for Jenny. He leaned weakly against the shower wall as his head filled with thoughts of her.

He’d refused to allow himself to dwell on her, had instead tried to keep his focus on Billy. But now a rush of fear consumed him, clenching his stomach muscles as he broke into a cold sweat.

Jenny. His heart cried her name. From the time she’d been born, he’d taken care of her, seen to her needs and protected her from the world. And now he couldn’t do any of those things. She was gone, taken for some reason he couldn’t discern by a madman playing a game.

He hadn’t cried when his mother died. He hadn’t shed a tear when his wife had walked out on him, but the thought of never seeing his sister again pulled a deep sob from the very depths of him.

He sucked in a deep breath and stuffed his emotions deep inside. The only way he’d be able to get through this was to keep emotional distance. He wasn’t just one of the victims’ brother, he was the sheriff of Conja Creek and had to be strong, if not for himself, then for Mariah.

Getting out of the shower, he grabbed a towel and quickly dried off, then dressed in his clean clothes. He opened the bathroom door and bumped into Mariah, who had apparently been waiting for him.

“I’m sorry,” she said, obviously tortured. “I was way out of line and I apologize. It’s really none of my business.”

“Apology accepted,” he replied easily. There was nothing to gain by holding on to a grudge, and she obviously felt terrible about what had happened between them.

“I’m scared and I’m angry and you were convenient to vent to,” she continued. She worried a hand through her hair. “I don’t know why I said those things.”

He held up a hand to halt anything else she might say. “We’re under a lot of stress. As far as I’m concerned it’s forgotten.”

“I guess I’m just finding it difficult to think about facing another day,” she said as he stepped out of the bathroom door and into the hallway.

“I know.” He couldn’t fight the impulse to draw her into his embrace. Despite the things she’d said to him, in spite of the fact that he should be angry with her, he felt her need to be held. Or was it his own need?

He pulled her against him, molding her curves against him as her arms wound around his neck. She was soft and warm and yielding.

She buried her face into the front of his shirt as her body trembled. He tightened his arms around her, wishing he could provide a barrier between her and her heartache.

He rubbed his hand down her back and tried to focus on giving comfort instead of the rising desire that filled him with her intimate nearness.

They stood that way for several long minutes, then she raised her head to look at him. He had no intention of kissing her, but as her full, sensual lips parted, he lowered his head and covered them with his own.

He half expected her to pull away, knew somehow that the kiss was out of line, crossing a boundary that shouldn’t be crossed, but she didn’t pull away. Instead, she seemed to move closer to him.

Her mouth opened to him and he deepened the kiss with his tongue as full-blown desire crashed through him. She returned the kiss, her tongue battling with his.

Her hands tangled in his hair at the nape of his neck and a slight moan escaped her, only increasing his need to take her.

Yet in the back of his mind he knew this was wrong. He felt as if he were taking advantage of her, exploiting her vulnerability. Reluctantly he broke the kiss.

She stared up at him and swallowed. “Temporary insanity,” she said, her voice hoarse as she stepped back.

He was saved from making a reply by the ring of his cell phone. He listened to what his deputy had to tell him, then clicked off.

“That was Wally,” he said to Mariah. “He picked up Remy Troulous and has him down at the office for questioning.”

Her features lit with hope. “Surely he’ll tell us if he knows anything about this. Just let me talk to him. I’m sure I can get him to tell us what he knows.”

He didn’t have the heart to tell her that Remy Troulous was a man who wouldn’t be moved by a mother’s pleas. If Remy didn’t want to cooperate, there was nothing on this earth or beyond that would make him do so.