Rumors: The McCaffertys

by Lisa Jackson

  “How…how did you find me?” she asked again as they tumbled together.

  “When I want something, I go after it.” He caressed her chin with one long finger. “You told me you were leaving, I decided to follow.”

  “Seattle’s a pretty big city.”

  His smile was wickedly delicious. “I’m a pretty determined guy.”

  “With connections.”

  “Lots of ’em.” He kissed her shoulder and she shivered with want.

  “And you use them.”

  “When I have to.” He leaned toward her, kissing the top of her breast and lowering her bra strap, exposing more of her. Kelly swallowed hard as his hands sculpted her ribs, sliding behind her back, drawing her closer, and he finally took her nipple into his mouth.

  She thought she would die.

  He suckled and she arched her back.

  “Kelly,” he whispered across her abdomen, and lowered himself, brushing his mouth across her skin, touching her, tasting her, teasing her, dragging her panties down her legs and tossing them onto the floor. She writhed at his ministrations and she felt herself melting, wanting, aching for more of him. The corners of the room began to fog and she knew only the sensations he evoked from her.

  Sweat dotted her body and her blood pounded through her veins, pulsing in her eardrums, thundering through her brain. She heard a moan before she recognized her own voice. Heat spread from the back of her neck through her extremities and she moved against him, wanting so much more.

  “Matt, please…” she whispered throatily, and he came to her, slid up against her and somehow kicked off his jeans. His lips found hers, muscular arms circled her body as he poised above her for a heart-stopping moment. In one thrust, he entered her and she gasped against his skin. He began to move and she caught his tempo, her blood on fire, her heart thudding. Her fingers scraped his back and he held her tight, breathing in counterpoint to her own ragged gasps, his rhythm increasing, his sinewy body straining with each rapid thrust.

  She stared into eyes that looked down at her, deep brown, intense, searching her soul. Deep inside she convulsed, and behind her eyes a thousand colors splintered, a million lights danced, and she was certain the universe collided. He let go and with a roar as untamed as the wild Montana wind, he fell against her, wrapped his arms around her and buried his face in her neck. “Kelly,” he whispered. “Oh…Kelly.”

  They lay spent, entwined until at last their breathing had calmed. She nestled against him, resting her cheek on his bare shoulder as he caressed her face and brushed the hair off her cheek.

  A dozen recriminations assailed her, but she ignored them. Instead, she slid him a mischievous glance. “So…tell me, cowboy,” she teased. “What do you do for an encore?”

  He barked out a laugh. “You want to see?”

  “Mmm.” She ran fingers through the curling hairs of his chest. “If you’ve got it in you?”

  “You’re asking for it, lady.”

  “Again. I’m asking for it again,” she clarified with a giggle.

  Quick as a rattler striking, he surrounded her, pressed his mouth against hers, and as she gasped, said, “Then you’re gonna get it.”

  “Wait a second—” But her protest was cut off by his kiss, and within a heartbeat her blood had heated again, her heart was pounding and she lost herself all over again, realizing as she did so that there was no doubt about it, she was hopelessly, helplessly in love with him.

  Chapter 10

  “Randi’s awake.” Slade’s voice echoed through the telephone wires and pounded through Matt’s brain the next morning. Matt glanced to the side of the mussed bed where Kelly, her red hair splayed around her face, was stretching, yawning, those beautiful brown eyes blinking out of a deep sleep.

  “When?”

  “Just a little while ago.”

  “Has she said anything?” he asked, and Kelly was instantly alert, all traces of slumber disappearing. She’d reached over the side of the bed for her clothes.

  “Not yet. I’m on my way to the hospital now.”

  “We’ll catch the next flight out.”

  “We?” Slade repeated, and Matt winced.

  His brother chuckled and the sound grated on Matt’s nerves. “You can tell me all about it when you get back to Grand Hope, brother.” Slade hung up and Matt reached for his clothes.

  “Randi?” Kelly asked.

  “She’s awake.”

  She was suddenly all business. “What are we waiting for?”

  * * *

  “Maybe you’ll tell me what’s going on,” Randi said as Matt and Kelly walked into her already-crowded hospital room. Slade, Thorne and Nicole surrounded the bed where Randi was ready to spit nails. “I want to see my baby.”

  Not only awake, Randi was ready to tear into any doctor or brother who made the mistake of keeping her from her child from limb to proverbial limb. In a private room, the top half of her bed elevated, she was glaring at the small gathering of people around her bed, and Matt felt as if a ton of bricks had been lifted from his shoulders.

  Randi’s brown eyes were clear, her face only slightly swollen, her short mahogany-colored hair sticking up at odd angles. Her jaw, which had previously been wired, was now working with some difficulty as the wires had been removed, and she winced as she lifted her right arm as if her broken ribs still bothered her. However, it was easy to read her expression: she was ticked. Big-time.

  “Is there any reason she can’t see J.R.?” Matt asked, his gaze landing on Nicole.

  “We’re arranging it.”

  “Well, arrange it faster,” Randi insisted as she read the name tag pinned to her lab coat. “Who are you?”

  “Dr. Stevenson,” Nicole answered as Randi’s eyes narrowed on her.

  “I can see that, but I already met two other doctors who claim to be taking care of me.” She was speaking with some difficulty, only forcing out the words by sheer will. They sounded a little muffled, but the message was clear: Randi McCafferty was awake, angry and not about to be bullied. Good. That meant she was definitely getting better.

  “I was the admitting doctor when you were brought in,” Nicole explained, “and you were in pretty bad shape. Aside from being comatose, you had a concussion, punctured lung, broken ribs, a fractured jaw and a nearly shattered femur. Some of your bones have knit, you can talk, but it’ll be a while before you can walk, I’m afraid, and then there was the complication that you’ve just had a C-section. And don’t forget to factor in that someone slipped some insulin into your IV and you nearly died, so I think it would be best if you just took your time, listened to the doctors’ orders and tried to get well before you start making too many demands.”

  “So are you the one in charge? My physician of record?”

  “You have several. In fact, an entire team. I’m just interested because you were my patient and…and I’m involved with your family.”

  “Involved?” Randi repeated, her eyes narrowing. “What does that mean—‘involved’?”

  “Nicole’s my fiancée,” Thorne explained, stepping closer to the bed rails and linking his fingers through Nicole’s. “And believe me, we’ll bring the baby in as soon as the pediatrician and your doctors agree.”

  “Fiancée?” Randi whispered, then winced as if a sudden pain had slammed through her brain. “Wait a minute, Thorne. You? You’re going to get married?”

  “That’s right. We’ve only been waiting for you to recover so that you could attend the wedding.”

  “Hold on a sec. This is a little too much for me to process. Just how long have I been out of it?”

  “Over a month,” Slade said.

  “Holy Toledo!” She lifted her hand palm outward to stop the flow of conversation. “Now, wait a minute,” she said, finally zeroing in
on Thorne’s cane and cast. “What happened to you?”

  “An accident. I was lucky. My plane went down.”

  “What?”

  “And you…” She turned her eyes in Slade’s direction. “Were you hurt, too?”

  Slade touched the fine line that ran from his eyebrow to chin. “Nope. Skiing accident. Don’t you remember?”

  She shook her head slowly.

  “It happened last winter, not quite a year ago. You saw the scar at Dad’s funeral.”

  Her eyes clouded. “There’s a lot I don’t remember,” she admitted, then turned her attention to Matt. “Is the whole family falling apart? What about you? Seems like everyone named McCafferty is cursed, so what’s happened to you?”

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “No near-death experiences, no injuries, no engagement?”

  “Not so far,” he drawled, and saw Kelly’s shoulders stiffen slightly.

  “Good. As for you,” Randi said to Thorne, “I’ll catch up on your love life later. For now, what I want is to see my son, so you can either bring him to visit me, or I’m walking out of here.”

  “Hang in for a while, okay?” Slade requested, his voice surprisingly tender. “We named him, J.R., like junior or after Dad. He’s with Juanita at the ranch, and as soon as we can we’ll get you two together.”

  “Just don’t waste any time, okay?” Randi was adamant, but obviously starting to tire. “And we’ll discuss the name thing. I don’t think I want to stick with J.R. I mean, come on. After Dad?” She swept a skeptical gaze over her brothers. “Whose brilliant idea was that?”

  “Mine,” Thorne said.

  “Figures. You always were a Dudley Do Right. Even though you couldn’t stand the guy.”

  Thorne started to argue but held his tongue, and Kelly stepped forward, closer to Randi’s bed. “I’m Kelly Dillinger, with the sheriff’s department,” she said clearly as she offered an encouraging smile. Matt had a quick mental flash of another grin, one much more naughty, that she’d rained on him last night. His thoughts strayed for a second to their passionate night in Seattle, but he forced himself into the here and now. With Randi. “When the doctors agree,” Kelly was saying, “I’d like to speak to you about the accident.”

  Randi’s eyes clouded. “The accident…” she said, and shook her head.

  “Up near Glacier Park. You were forced off the road, we think,” Thorne added.

  “You mean you think that someone purposely tried to kill me?”

  “It’s a possibility,” Kelly said. “Or possibly it was a hit-and-run accident and the guilty party took off. But that seems unlikely, since someone walked into your hospital room and injected you with insulin. We’re approaching this as an attempted homicide.”

  Randi’s gaze traveled from one somber-faced half brother to the next. “Tell me she’s exaggerating.”

  “’Fraid not,” Matt replied, his blood cold at the thought of how close the would-be murderer had come to snuffing out Randi’s life.

  “Oh, God.” The starch seeped from Randi’s body and she leaned back on her pillow. “I…I can’t remember....” Her eyebrows slammed together in concentration. “In fact…I don’t remember much,” she admitted. “I mean, I know all of you and realize I’m in a hospital and I know that I’m a writer, that I usually live in Seattle, but…so much else is blurry.”

  Thorne’s shoulders stiffened. “How about the father of your child?” he asked, and the room was instantly so quiet that the noise from the hallway—the rattling gurneys, carts and the hum of conversation—seemed suddenly loud and intrusive. “Who’s J.R.’s dad?”

  Randi swallowed and turned suddenly pale. She glanced down at her hands, one strapped to an IV, the other bound by plaster and tape, her left hand bare, no wedding band surrounding her third finger. “The baby’s father,” she whispered, biting her lip. “I…I can’t remember…I mean…oh, damn.” She blinked rapidly, as if fighting a sudden wash of tears.

  “That’s enough,” Nicole interjected. “She needs to rest.”

  “No!” Randi was adamant. “Are you a mother?” she asked her soon-to-be sister-in-law.

  “Yes. I have twin girls.”

  “Then you understand. I want to see my baby. And as for you—” she swung her gaze to Kelly “—I’ll answer anything I can, but right now I can’t remember a thing. Maybe seeing my baby will jog my memory.”

  Matt knew a con when he saw one, and unless he missed his guess, his half sister was conning all of them, bargaining by trading on their emotions. Randi wanted to be reunited with her child, and she’d pull out all the stops, including lying about what she remembered, to attain her goal. Matt didn’t blame her. The best medicine in the world for baby and mother was to get them together. “I’ll take care of it,” he said.

  “Wait a minute.” Nicole was suddenly in his face. Nicely, but with emphasis on each syllable, she added firmly, “Of course we’ll bring J.R. here as soon as possible.”

  Matt glanced over Nicole’s shoulder to the battered, determined woman lying on the bed. “I’ll see to it,” he said to Randi, and he meant it. To hell with hospital procedure and damn the police investigation. Right now, all that mattered was to get J.R. into Randi’s eager arms.

  * * *

  “So that’s about the size of it,” Kelly reported to Espinoza later in the day. He, too, had visited St. James, only to be rebuffed by hospital personnel. He hadn’t gotten so much as a word with Randi and now sat in his chair, one leg crossed over the other, fingers tented under his chin, as Kelly told him about her dealings with the Seattle PD, the people at the Clarion and later, her short conversation with Randi McCafferty.

  “You think she’s an amnesiac?”

  “I don’t know.” Kelly was seated on the corner of a visitor’s chair on the other side of his cluttered desk. She lifted a shoulder. “Randi obviously remembered her brothers, her job, where she worked, but the accident seemed to elude her. Any references to foul play stopped her short, but she was bound and determined to see her child. Until she and J.R. are reunited, I don’t think we’ll get much out of her, including the name of the baby’s father.”

  “Odd,” Espinoza commented, clicking his pen as he concentrated. He was beginning to grow a mustache again, his upper lip darker than it had been a few days earlier.

  “Not really. I think the motherhood instinct is the strongest on the planet.”

  He sent her a look silently begging the question How would you know? but had the presence of mind not to ask it. They talked for a while longer and he asked her how she’d gotten the information on Randi, as he’d tried to call her hotel room and no one had answered. Kelly couldn’t dodge that one, admitting that she’d heard the information from Matt McCafferty, whom she’d bumped into in Seattle. Espinoza’s eyebrows had lifted, inviting further details, but Kelly hadn’t offered any. She was still trying to sort out her own emotions on her involvement with Matt. She didn’t want or need any fatherly or brotherly advice from anyone. Especially not her boss, who seemed edgy and out of sorts.

  “Some people still think one or maybe all of the McCafferty men should be suspects.”

  “Why?” She couldn’t keep the snap from her voice.

  “Because the half sister inherited so much, for starters. She was obviously the old man’s favorite. If she was out of the way, everything would be left to her child, and since there’s no father stepping forward, Randi’s brothers would probably be appointed guardians.”

  “I think I told you before that theory’s way off base.”

  “Just reminding you.”

  “Fine. I’m reminded,” she snapped, then caught the censure in his eyes. He’d been testing her and she’d risen to the bait like a stupid trout to a salmon fly.

  Irritated at Espinoza, her job, herself and life in ge
neral, she left her boss’s office without slamming the door, collected a cup of coffee, received the local gossip and phone messages from Stella, then holed up in her office where she typed reports, returned calls and generally caught up. She worked through lunch, then spent the afternoon following leads in the McCafferty case. Who was trying to kill Randi or terrorize the McCaffertys and why? Something Espinoza had said triggered her to search through her notes. Motive. That’s what they needed. Who besides the brothers would benefit by Randi’s death? Was there someone angling for her job? A boyfriend who’d been jilted? J.R.’s father, whoever he was? Someone with an old grudge against the family?

  Like your own mother?

  John Randall had made his share of enemies during his lifetime, but he was dead. Certainly no one would seek revenge against his progeny. But what about Randi? Had she offended someone in her columns, inadvertently triggered a homicidal response in someone who had written to her seeking advice? What about the book? Did someone know that she was writing about graft and corruption, and if so, who?

  With more questions than answers, she finally gave up and stretched, her back popping as she shut off her computer and climbed out of her desk chair. The night crew had arrived and she waved to some of the officers she knew, then, zipping up her jacket and yanking on her gloves, made her way to her four-wheel drive.

  The temperature was nearly ten degrees below freezing and she didn’t want to think what the windchill added. Snow was beginning to fall again, dancing in front of her headlights and sticking to the windshield.

  Adjusting the heater, she listened to the local news, only to be reminded by a newscaster that Randi McCafferty, the local woman who’d been in a coma for over a month, had woken up.

  It was after seven by the time she reached her house, climbed up the stairs, peeled off her clothes and took a long shower. She’d just opened a can of soup when the phone rang. Her heart skipped a ridiculous beat at the thought that it might be Matt, and when she answered, she was disappointed to hear her sister’s voice.