Читать книгу Protective Instincts - Julie Miller - Страница 9

Chapter Two

Twenty-five minutes later, Sawyer pulled his truck up behind the black and white, killed the lights and wipers and turned off the engine. A smile from his mom had improved his mood if not his trepidation about tonight’s visit to Melissa Teague’s tiny white house in the Kansas City suburb of Independence. The place was neat, but plain and unassuming, showing the signs of its age in the sag of the front porch and the cracks running through the brickwork along the house’s foundation.

He pulled his badge from his jacket and slipped it back into his wallet before checking the gun on his belt and climbing out. Squinting into the rain, he braced his shoulders for the unpleasant task at hand and moved toward the officer in the squad car.

“I’m a friend of the family,” he explained, fudging a little on the friend part as the blue suit read his badge and ID and okayed him to approach the house.

Sawyer caught a glimpse of his drowned-rat reflection when the officer rolled up his window against the moisture splashing into his car. Big scary man coming in from the dark and the storm. Yeah, he’d be a real re-assuring sight.

One more reason to hate the rain.

Muttering a curse that was half damnation, half resignation to the inevitable, Sawyer jumped the torrent running along the curb and hurried across the street. Pausing for a quick scan up and down the sidewalk and into the side yards, he made sure there were no unwelcome eyes watching the place. In fact, other than the officer in the car, the block was deserted. The isolation of locked doors and dark windows nagged at him almost as much as the sight of someone spying on the house would have. But he supposed he was the only one without the sense to stay in on a night like this. Tomorrow, he’d order a rundown on all the neighbors to make sure there were no empty houses and that the residents were who they said they were.

Resolved that he could at least do that much to keep Melissa safe, Sawyer climbed the steps onto her front porch. The wood shifted and creaked beneath his weight, groaning like an ominous portent of unseen danger. But the light beside the door was on, so she’d be able to get a good look at him before opening it.

He pressed the doorbell, then shook the excess water from his unbuttoned jacket, making sure his Glock was tucked out of sight behind his back. He was squeegeeing the rain from his hair when the inside door nudged open a crack.

Sawyer braced for the impact of seeing Melissa again.

But the breath he’d been holding eased from his chest in an odd mixture of disappointment and relief as he caught his first glimpse of the woman peeking over the chain latching the door to its frame.

Not Melissa. Just as petite, though, maybe five foot two or three at the most. Pretty in a soft sort of feminine way that must be an inherited trait. The wary suspicion in this woman’s eyes was similar. But the hair was shorter, curlier, laced with silver amongst the gold. “Yes?”

“Mrs. Teague?”

“Who’s asking?”

Sawyer held his badge up beside his face. “KCPD, ma’am. I’m Detective Kincaid from the Fourth Precinct.”

The older woman squinted. “The Fourth Precinct’s in downtown Kansas City. What are you doing out…? Oh, shoot.” She turned away from the door and shouted inside. “Benjamin? Bring Grandma her glasses. Please.” She looked back through the screen that separated her from Sawyer. “I wondered when someone was going to come up to the house. That police car has been sitting out there for a half hour. I was still cleaning the dinner dishes when he pulled up. Makes me nervous.”

“It’s just a precaution, ma’am. He’s keeping an eye on the neighborhood.” Sawyer tucked his badge onto his belt and retreated a step to hopefully ease her concern. “Is Miss Teague here?”

“Gandma?” Short, chubby fingers pushed a pair of glasses into the woman’s hands, and then a little boy with shaggy black hair, barefoot and dressed in overalls, peeked around her leg.

Sawyer’s pulse hitched in recognition as he looked down into a carbon copy of Melissa’s clear blue eyes.

“Hey, pal. How’s it goin’?” Sawyer grinned at the little guy. He must be three years old. He barely cleared Sawyer’s knee, but there was no mistaking the bold curiosity in his expression as he inched his way around his grandmother’s leg and craned his neck to look up into Sawyer’s face.

“I can’t talk to stwangers,” he announced very wisely.

Sawyer nudged the boy’s age up to four, or maybe twelve or thirty-six, judging by his verbal abilities. “That’s smart.” He held out his ID again, now that the woman at the door had her glasses on. “Did your mom teach you that?”

“How come you’re so big?”

Laughter was the only option with a question like that. “My mom’s a good cook. And I’m a good eater.”

“I’m a good eater, too.”

“Of course.” The woman snapped her fingers in recognition, drawing Sawyer’s focus back up. “You’re that man who came to visit Melissa in the hospital. The co-worker from when she was waitressing at the Riverboat Casino. I don’t know that she was ever awake while you were there. For a long time, I didn’t think she was going to come out of that coma. I’m Fritzi Teague, Melissa’s mother. This is her son, Benjamin.” Her welcoming chatter slowed into suspicion once more. “I thought she said you were a bartender, though.”

“That’s how she knew me at the time. But I was working a case. I assure you I’m a cop.” He wondered if he should offer to let her call in his badge number for verification. “It’s a long story. Is Melissa here?”

“She’s at her accounting class tonight. She usually gets home around nine-thirty.” Fritzi hugged little Benjamin closer to her leg and dropped her voice to a whisper. “Is something wrong? Has something happened to her?”

“No, ma’am,” Sawyer quickly reassured her. “I wouldn’t be asking for her here if I thought she’d been hurt in any way.” Logical words in almost any case. Still, a tremor of uneasy awareness rippled over his shoulders at the idea that Ace Longbow had somehow survived his bloody escape and had already found a way to get to the Kansas City area and track down his ex-wife. “I’d like to wait and speak to her in person if I could.”

The older woman’s gaze darted down to her grandson. She offered Sawyer an apologetic smile when she looked back up. “My daughter doesn’t like anyone to come inside when she’s not here. Especially at night.”

Sawyer glanced over his shoulder at the steady curtain of rain whipping ahead of the wind. A soft drumbeat of thunder mocked him in the distance. But even as he shifted inside his soggy clothes, he had to admire the Teague women’s efforts to keep their little family safe. “No problem, ma’am. I’ll be out in my truck.”

“Wait.” Fritzi called him back from the edge of the porch. “It’s not like you’re a complete stranger. And since you’re the police, well, I just made a pot of decaf coffee. I don’t suppose it could hurt if you came inside and warmed yourself up. Just let me get the door.”

As she closed the door to unlatch the chain, Sawyer made a mental note to ensure there were secure locks on every entrance to the house. If Fritzi Teague thought that flimsy chain would keep unwelcome visitors out, she was living with a false sense of security. He hated to tell Melissa’s mother that he could have cut through the screen and busted down the door with little more than a shove. If she didn’t keep the dead bolt fastened, the chain and the knob lock would barely slow him down, much less stop him if he wanted to get inside. And they sure as hell wouldn’t stop a fanatic like Ace Longbow.

Sawyer fixed a smile on his mouth and, for the moment,

kept his concerns to himself when she reopened

the door and invited him inside.

MELISSA TEAGUE SPOTTED the black-and-white police cruiser parked in front of her house the moment she turned her old Pontiac around the corner.

The ingrained alertness that had become as much a part of her as breathing kicked up to warning levels, speeding her pulse and sharpening her senses. She squeezed the steering wheel in her fists and pressed a little harder on the gas.

She didn’t recognize the black truck, either.

Melissa splashed through the lake pooling at the end of her driveway and parked her car up beside the house. She left the bag of groceries tipped over in the passenger seat, grabbed her keys and climbed out into the rain.

“Mom?” She turned up the collar of her trench coat, blinked the beads of moisture from her eyelashes and spared a glance for the officer in his car. Drinking his coffee. Just sitting. He wasn’t on his radio or writing up a report as though the truck was illegally parked or stolen, or if there’d been a break-in. Still, surprises had never been a good thing for her. Especially this close to home. “Benjamin?”

Forcing her lungs to breathe deeply and evenly, she ran across the slick grass to the porch. She quickly unlocked the knob and dead bolt, cursed when she discovered the chain wasn’t fastened and pushed her way inside. “Mom!”

The screen door slammed shut behind her as she hurried toward the light streaming through the archway from the living room. “Ben? Mom? Why won’t you answer—”

She turned the corner and froze.

Her mother was sitting on the sofa, cradling a coffee mug between her hands and laughing with rare abandon—laughing at the man wrestling with Melissa’s precious son on the braided rug.

For one awful moment she thought that Ace… But no, Benjamin might be a dead ringer for his father with his black hair and olive skin, but her ex had never claimed him. He’d seen their child as a threat—as competition for her love. To Ace, their son was an abomination. A betrayal. Ace had never accepted any other males in her life—not even his own child.

All the more reason to hold her little boy close and keep him safe.

The man’s deep voice cracked as he teased Benjamin with a high-pitched plea for mercy. “Aagh! Big Ben got me!”

“Get me! Get me!”

“You asked for it.” Her four-year-old squealed in delight as the dark-haired man closed him in a scissor hold between his knees and rolled back and forth on the floor.

You asked for it. Melissa blocked out the painful memory the words conjured and found her voice. “Mother!”

The wrestling ceased in an instant. Her mother’s smile vanished. “Melissa.”

“Mommy!” Benjamin beamed from one flushed cheek to the other. “’Tective got me!”

Melissa gripped the door frame and retreated half a step as the man sat up and scooted Benjamin onto his lap.

Oh my God.

She wasn’t ready for a reunion like this.

“Hey.” The slightly breathless laugh that lingered in their guest’s bass voice should have reassured her with its familiarity. His lazy grin should have struck a pang of welcome recognition instead of tensing every muscle with the urge to turn and run from the remembered horrors of her old life.

Melissa Teague didn’t run anymore. But standing her ground still didn’t come easy.

She knew this man. Not exactly a stranger. Not exactly an old friend, either. His straight, coffee-brown hair was shorter than she remembered, his clothes certainly different. Tom Sawyer. No, that wasn’t right. Tom Sawyer Kincaid. He’d said something about his mom being an English teacher who’d named all her sons after characters in books. He’d said something about being a cop—something about asking her out and getting to know her better.

“What are you doing here?” was the only greeting that worked its way past the guarded tension squeezing her throat.

“Melissa—your manners!” her mother chided, setting down her coffee and rising to her feet.

As her initial panic ebbed, an embarrassing self-consciousness took its place. He was looking at her in that way. The way a man who wanted something looked at a woman.

Before she was completely aware of doing it, Melissa combed her fingers through the hair at her left temple, urging a golden wave over her cheek. But just as quickly, hating even that revelation of weakness about herself, she squared her shoulders and marched across the room to pluck her son from the officer’s arms. “Benjamin’s too small for roughhousing with you.”

“Mommy, you’re wet. I want down.”

“I didn’t hurt him. Boys like to wrestle—”

“Get me again!” Benjamin reached for their guest.

“See?”

The man’s lopsided grin was just as innocently boyish as her son’s. In another lifetime, she might have succumbed to its charm.

But this was the life she had to deal with. Despite Benjamin’s squiggles to climb down and resume the game, she wedged him firmly on her hip. “Why is there a police car parked in front of my house?”

“I let Detective Kincaid in, dear,” her mother explained. “He’s only been here a half hour or so. I checked his ID before opening the door. Don’t you remember him?”

“Of course I remember—”

“Better let me handle this.” The man she’d known as Tom Sawyer, a bartender with a sweet but misplaced sense of responsibility for the waitresses who worked with him, smoothed the scattered strands of hair off his forehead and rolled to his feet. He stood. And stood. Melissa’s pulse quickened with an instinctive self-preservation and she backed away.

His warm brown gaze darted to the subtle movement of her feet. But she didn’t apologize or make excuses.

He didn’t ask for any. “It’s good to see you again, Mel.”

She forced her gaze up past the evening beard that studded his square jaw, and acknowledged his greeting with a nod. “Tom.”

He raised his focus and skimmed her face, probably noting the newer, shoulder-length cut of her hair—probably satisfying his curiosity about how her injuries had healed as well. “You look great.”

He looked…male.

Ignoring the little tremor of awareness that blipped through her brain, Melissa concentrated on all the reasons why she’d never picked up a phone to resume their friendship, never encouraged him to turn that friendship into something more. One, he was an old-fashioned kind of guy—the sort who held open doors, sent flowers and who’d try to make everything right for her. Two, nice as he’d seemed back at the casino where they’d worked together, he’d lied about who he was. What he did for a living. Why he’d been so interested in her. And whether or not the lie was unavoidable and he really was one of the good guys, she couldn’t afford to be fooled by good intentions and false promises. She couldn’t allow herself to drop her guard and be taken in by any man—even a nice one. Especially a nice one. She needed her independence in order to survive.

And three? Oh, hell. She remembered thinking Tom Sawyer Kincaid might be the one man in her life with the brawn and bravado to stand up to her ex-husband. The man who’d come galloping to her rescue. But any chivalrous fantasy she might have toyed with scared the hell out of her, too. She’d forgotten just how imposing he could be, with those broad shoulders and thick forearms, every sinew and hollow made blatantly evident by the sticky second skin of his damp white shirt and rolled-up sleeves.

She couldn’t help but compare. There’d been so many times she wished she’d met a man like Detective Kincaid before Ace had ever walked into her sheltered life back in South Dakota. But wishing didn’t help reality. There were no more fantasies to be dreamed, no trust to be given. There was only survival.

So she sloughed off his compliment and ignored the spark of interest her female instincts tried to rouse in her. “I look worn-out from a day that’s gone on way too long.”

“It’s been a long one for me, too.” He splayed his fingers at his hips, drawing attention to the badge with the black stripe bisecting it that was clipped to his belt. Did that black stripe have anything to do with this surprise visit?

“More ‘Get me!’” Benjamin pushed against Melissa’s chest, saving her from the compassionate impulse to ask about that black stripe and the length of his day.

“Not now, sweetie. It’s getting late.” She stroked his silky black hair and hugged him a little tighter, to settle her own nerves as much as his. But she kept her eyes on their guest. She needed a safer topic. “What’s it been? A year?”

“Not quite. I haven’t seen you since last July.”

Not so safe.

Last July she’d been in the hospital, broken and unconscious. Even now, the events that had put her in that ICU bed were hazy. But she remembered his last visit. Though she couldn’t recall his words, she remembered being just as frightened as she’d been pleased to see him. He’d asked for something from her, something she couldn’t—wouldn’t—give to a man again.

Her affection? Her trust? Permission to give those things to her? Was that why he was here tonight? Did he think enough time had passed—could ever pass—for her to give a new relationship a chance?

“So what are you doing here?” she asked again.

He reached for a dark blue uniform jacket draped over the back of a chair, and picked up a holstered gun he’d set high up on the mantel of her fake fireplace. He’d come here armed? With another officer sitting outside? This visit wasn’t personal, after all.

“Can we talk? Someplace private?”

Even if that grin had stayed in place, she would have suspected his motives for showing up at her home unannounced.

After a slight hesitation, she nodded. Giving him a wide berth as she circled around him, Melissa handed Ben off to her mother, trading a reassuring hug with the older woman and giving her son a kiss. “Benjamin needs to be getting to bed. Do you mind starting his bath?”

“Of course not. Thanks for the company, Mr. Kincaid.”

“I appreciate the coffee, ma’am.”

Benjamin stretched out both arms toward his new playmate and curled his fingers into a wave. “Bye, ’tective.”

“See ya, Big Ben.”

Her mother reached out and squeezed her hand. “Honey, Mr. Kincaid isn’t the enemy.” Melissa weathered a sad, maybe even apologetic, frown, then turned away as Fritzi carried her grandson down the hallway toward the bathroom at the back of the house.

“We can talk in the kitchen, Tom.”

He followed her across the hallway to the room where she could turn on the brightest lights and put a solid piece of furniture, namely the width of her kitchen table, between them. “Thomas is my first name, but I go by Sawyer in real life.”

Real life. Ha. She’d been crazy to worry for even one moment about him seeing the changes in her appearance after a shattered face and reconstructive surgeries. Her reality didn’t include old friends stopping by for let’s-get-reacquainted visits. Her reality included living paycheck to paycheck, working when she wasn’t going to school, updating restraining orders and looking over her shoulder.

She flipped on the overhead light switch beside the door and crossed to the sink to turn on the light there, too. But the bright lights and distance between them did little to diminish his overpowering presence. The smells of earthy dampness clinging to their clothes and skin intensified in the smaller room, giving the atmosphere an intimate electricity she shouldn’t be feeling.

Attraction of any kind—emotional attachments beyond her mother and son—weren’t an option for her. She needed to be on guard. Always. The last six years of her life had taught her that.

She unfastened the top two buttons of her raincoat and straightened her collar before crossing her arms in front of her and bracing herself for whatever he had to say. “Okay—Sawyer—does this have something to do with the Wolfes’ illegal activities at the casino? When I gave my deposition at the hospital, the D.A. said he didn’t think I’d have to testify in person.”

“As far as I know, you won’t.” Watching him unhook his belt and strap his gun and holster back into place wasn’t exactly reassuring. “To my knowledge, the case against Theodore Wolfe is still tight. Once the state of Missouri is done with him, he’ll be taken back to London to face international charges.”

“Then what’s wrong? Why are you here?”

“It’s your husband. Ace Longbow.”

“My ex-husband,” she corrected. The handsome man who’d first beaten her the night he’d accused her of getting pregnant to trap him into marriage. The flowers and apologies and diamond ring he’d brought her the next day had fooled her. Ace Longbow, the exciting, slightly dangerous man, who—as a nineteen-year-old barely out of high school—she’d naively thought she could tame.

She’d mistaken passion for love. Control for caring.

She’d thought a divorce would end the torture.

But the man who, to this day, claimed to love her in the letters that went straight to her attorney, had accused her of betraying his loyalty to the Wolfe crime family and had dragged her down to the river to kill her.

Melissa self-consciously touched the scar on her cheek, then quickly turned away to busy her hands with pouring herself a cup of coffee. The bones had mended. And the surgeons had done a good job of rebuilding her shattered face. But the scar they’d left behind was functional, not pretty. And until she could get ahead on her bills, a plastic surgeon was out of the question.

It wasn’t vanity so much as the violence it represented that made her sensitive about the long, curving mark. Every time she washed her face or brushed her hair in the mirror, she saw the brand of her shameful marriage stamped there. “What about Ace? Has something happened to him?”

“I’m sorry. I guess you haven’t seen the news this evening.”

News? Sawyer’s shadow fell over her, consuming her breathing space. The coffeepot rattled against her cup. He rescued the objects from her shaking grasp and set them safely on the counter. But the surprising gentleness of even that impersonal touch chilled her to the bone.

This couldn’t be good.

Melissa curled her fingers into her palms and scooted some distance between them, steeling herself for the worst. With Richard “Ace” Longbow, there was always a worst. “Sorry about what?”

“He escaped with two other inmates from a courthouse in Jefferson City this afternoon. Authorities there believe he was shot. The getaway car they were in ran off the bridge and plunged into the Missouri River.”

The words swam inside her head. She gripped the edge of the counter to stop the dizzying sensation. “Are you telling me Ace is dead?”

Sawyer’s silence lasted a beat too long. Her world instantly righted itself with cold, numbing clarity. She angled her gaze up to Sawyer’s eyes. “You don’t know if he’s alive or dead. You don’t know where he is.”

His big shoulders lifted, absorbing the weight of the accusation. “Since none of the bodies have turned up, we’re assuming all three fugitives are still alive. But they’ve gone underground and disappeared. We don’t know where Ace is or what his plans might entail. But we’re doing everything we can to find him.”

Melissa didn’t bother asking where Sawyer and the prison authorities thought Ace might be headed. If Ace wasn’t dead, there was only one answer.

Here.