He couldn’t listen to questions he couldn’t answer. Didn’t want to look at her and see the betrayal she probably had a right to feel.
Didn’t want to experience any more of the guilt that was already settling to irritate and inflame his gut like bad coffee on an ulcer.
As gently as provocation and fear allowed, he interrupted her by catching her wrist and removing the fistful of photos from his face. Even under the circumstances, awareness crackled with skin on skin, briefly drew their rattled attention from one urgent consideration to another.
Desire was mutual. They recognized that simultaneously, shied from it equally quickly. If there had ever been, or would be, a time or place, now with all its attendant complications was not it. But he couldn’t look away. Wouldn’t. Couldn’t-wouldn’t-didn’t stop himself from imagining what the flare of heat in her eyes would feel like if it sparked all the way through her, then wrapped its fire around him.
He knew the instant Hallie recognized the reflection of his wishes on his face. Her tongue flicked out, touched the corner of her mouth in un-Hallie-like hesitation. Then, for the first time since he’d known her, she blinked startleddoe-lost-in-headlights eyes at him and looked at the floor, giving ground first.
Realization punched him suddenly, hard in the gut. She was afraid of him; he knew it without doubt. Afraid of desiring him, but beyond that, panicked that he had a legal leg to stand on that might allow him to take his daughter from her. Frightened that she could even think—however briefly—that he might be capable of hanging around town for a month taking pictures of her and the kids without her sensing they’d been followed.
Scared to death that because he’d changed so much physically, hardened beyond recognition emotionally, she didn’t really know him at all anymore.
Sickened by the fact that he couldn’t very well reassure her when he’d just begun to understand that he had no reassurances either for or about himself, he swallowed once and let go of her wrist; he said quietly, “I didn’t shoot these pictures, Hallie. And I didn’t shoot the video they were lifted from.” He picked up the fallen envelope carefully by its edges, knowing from experience there would be no prints, but hoping. “This is addressed to me, see?”
She moistened her lips; eyed him quickly up and down, probing for possible lies, then looked. Cocked her head suddenly to see what else he held.
Too late he remembered the other instant photographs, tried to palm them away from her. But whether or not she thought she knew him anymore, she was still on to his tricks; they’d learned magic together when they were eleven, after all.
She put out a hand. “Let me see.”
He shook his head. Dios, let him just this once protect her from something. “No, it’s nothin’.”
She hunkered at eye level with him, afraid, but not about to let fear get the best of her, and said evenly, “You’re a rotten liar, Joe. These are pictures of my family we’re picking up that fell out of an envelope addressed to you. Some of them were taken the day before yesterday, but some of them had to have been taken at least last month. Now; damn you, show me what the devil you think you’re going to protect me from.”
He hesitated, studying her face, her eyes in all their fathomless blue storm-tossed depths. It really had been so much easier answering only to himself—was that only this morning? Easier to shut off conscience when he didn’t have Hallie looking him in the eye.
Easier to hide things from himself, to do the kinds of things he’d never let himself look at by light of day.
Stuff that, if he ever thought about it, he wouldn’t be proud he’d done.
Stuff that would, undoubtedly, have made Father Nelson in his homemade confessional throw up his hands and—at the very least—consign Joe to the farthest reaches of purgatory for all eternity.
But he was a good liar, damn it, and even better than that, as his bounty record proved. He’d just never been able to lie successfully—even by omission—to Hallie.
Which was why, twelve months ago, he’d had to leave.
Without a word he turned his hand palm up. Equally wordless, she studied the snapshots of her front porch, the message “welcoming” Joe home. Lifted her gaze once more to meet Joe’s.
“Get your duffel and put on some pants,” she said much too calmly. “You’re right. It won’t be about you taking Maura, but we have to talk.”
It took a while for him to rejoin her in the dining room over the beer and freshly warmed bowls of chili.
Instead of simply dressing, be took advantage of luxuries he’d grown accustomed to living without and showered, then trimmed his thick beard and shaved clean, turning himself—at least in appearance—as much as possible back into the Joe Hallie remembered.
She recognized the gesture for what it was: an attempt to regain lost confidence by presenting the face she trusted. But she didn’t trust this face any more than she had the unfamiliar face of the bearded stranger who’d appeared at her door just a few hours earlier. If anything, she found herself trusting this visage even less. The countenance of this Joe was visibly scarred and vulnerable, whereas the one disguised behind his beard was not, and made her heart pound with recognition, her insides flutter and plummet with the desire to believe him and more.
Especially the more.
His mother’s Incan ancestry had given him high, carved cheekbones and a chiseled jawline; the Castilian Spanish mixed with French in his father’s heritage had given him the thick black beard, and allowed in part for the gray charcoal rather than black of his eyes. His skin, too, was from his father: a smooth, warm brown with a tendency to show the color of embarrassment that his mother’s ruddier complexion frequently denied. His body, encased now in a clean white T-shirt and wear-softened jeans, was hard and sculpted, wide-shouldered, narrow-hipped—designed, she shocked herself by admitting, to fit easily between a woman’s thighs for long, full nights of loving.
Embarrassment slid revealingly up the pale skin of her throat and cheeks, while heat hewed a path south along the long overgrown roadways through her breasts and belly. God bless the universe, where had that come from? And why now, when in all the long years she’d known him, she’d never reacted to Joe in quite this way?
Because he wasn’t the same guy she’d taken for granted, grown up with, seen every day for thirty years. And for that brief period of time in her late teens and very early twenties when she sort of remembered maybe feeling a glimmer of something more than friendly love for him... well, by that time they’d both become sheriff’s deputies, often worked as partners and she’d stamped on the hint of unwieldy feelings as unprofessional, a potential conflict of interests. And then, of course, Zeke had come along and found all her hot spots and that was all she wrote.
Until now.
Now Joe was different. Looked different, felt different, seemed different, treated her different. She’d borne his child, for Pete’s sake; if that wasn’t different, nothing was.
Now was different, too, because she no longer knew if she could quite trust him. And that meant she couldn’t turn her back on him.
Which meant she had to look at him. And looking at him, gulping in the sight of him after too long without him being around, was driving her crazy.
In short Joe was, as she’d always unconsciously known without allowing herself to acknowledge it, a damnably attractive, frustratingly desirable man. But because he was also a vengeance-seeking vigilante whom she might conceivably have to arrest, as well as the man who could possibly just pick Maura up and take her away, Hallie couldn’t allow herself to either simply want him, or to feel anything more for him at all.
Not friendship, not partnership, not anything, but especially not... that.
Why couldn’t Maura wake up and be cranky now, when Hallie needed both the rescue and the distraction?
She drew breath, expelled it, as she watched Joe come toward her.
He moved easily around the table and sat opposite her, a big, dangerous night creature unc
onscious of his own grace. She watched him because her rebellious body demanded it, refused to allow her to look away while “videotaping” the images, feeding the fantasy library that would, she knew with dismay, fuel her dreams.
“All right,” he said quietly, drawing her attention. “I’m here. Let’s talk.”
“I—”
Her voice cracked and failed. She swallowed and worked her tongue around her mouth, trying to moisten it. Reminded herself that having the hots for this or any man right now was entirely inappropriate when a person or persons unknown had been out on her street this very afternoon taking pictures of Maura, her, Joe and the house. That the same unseen person or persons had previously followed—and perhaps still followed—her kids and her around, shooting video of them whenever he darned well pleased.
She reminded herself that the only person at this table who seemed to know anything at all about the pictures scattered across the oak surface was Joe Martinez, and she was damned sure going to get some answers out of him whether his buff new look rang her body’s chimes or not.
Resolved, she picked a lime wedge out of the bowl on the table, sucked the juice into her mouth and cleared her throat. Heat flared in his eyes; she did her best to pretend to herself she didn’t see it.
“I want to know all of it, Joe,” she said. Her voice seemed a little too hoarse.
She cleared her throat, found a spot over his left shoulder where she wasn’t too focused on his face and could ignore his body, and repeated for emphasis, “All of it. Start with this—” she tapped the photo with the “Welcome home, killer” note across the bottom “—and bring me up to speed. You know the drill—why’d you run, what couldn’t you tell me, why’d you come back, what makes me think this isn’t the first batch of pictures you’ve gotten....”
He regarded her, assessed the deliberate withdrawal of her attention from him. She might possibly want him in the way he wanted her, but she’d never trust him again if he didn’t come clean with her. And Hallie’s trust had long ago defined his world. He wanted it back now.
“Because it’s not the first batch.” He eyed her for a moment, got up to retrieve his jacket from the front hallway, took out the envelope and tossed it onto the table in front of Hallie. “This is the first bunch. At least,” he amended, “these are the first pictures I saw. There may’ve been others before ’em, but I don’t know.”
Hallie opened the envelope and spilled its contents onto the table, sifted through them. Eyed Joe without comprehension. “Mary?”
He nodded. “Yeah. In that envelope addressed to me. I never got it till too late.”
“Too late for what?”
“To stop her getting killed.”
The words hung heavy in the air—an admission, a confession, a plea. Hallie’s mouth opened, closed, instant denial in search of immediate understanding.
“What?” Hallie felt like a monosyllabic moron, but when you were starting to feel a little numb with suspicion, and you were missing information besides, what else was there to ask? she wondered. “You—I—” She looked at the pictures, then up at him. “When—why—how—”
Joe shrugged. “You wanted those damned shoes for her funeral. The pictures were stuffed in a shoe box with a bunch of other junk.” He reseated himself at the table, took a pull on his beer, and tapped the table, a study in careful detachment. “You know how she saved every box for every frigging pair of shoes she ever bought. When I couldn’t find the shoes you wanted on her racks, I figured she kept ‘em in the box to keep ’em clean. Or something.”
“But—you—I—” Flabbergasted, she stared at him, her jaw working. At the bottom of her stomach a kernel of fury blossomed. She held it tightly, encouraged it.
Used it.
“It wasn’t a carjacking, was it.” Accusation, not question.
His mouth thinned at her tone. Here it came. Shock relieved by the lie discovered. Wrath fueled by both being left out of his confidence and the accompanying sense of betrayal. “No.”
“You knew all this time.”
He eyed her stonily, but didn’t deny it. Couldn’t, obviously.
“You bastard.” She huffed disbelieving outrage, rose and paced the room, collecting could-turn-out-of-control temper. “You withheld evidence.” She came to a halt in front of him, her anger banked but evident. “You deliberately interfered in a murder investigation.” She gave him a stiff, two-fingered poke in the shoulder. Okay, so her ire wasn’t all that banked. “You thought you’d cowboy it.”
He looked away, refusing to respond. It was too late to deny the truth.
She threw up her hands, uncomprehending. “Jiminy Pete, Joe. Why?”
Joe swallowed but said nothing. He owed her something, but not this.
She used the same two hard fingers she’d used on his shoulder against his chin, forcing his attention. “I mean, I kinda understand where maybe there might be some sort of twisted revenge goin’ on here from you, but the rest of it—” she shrugged “—doesn’t make sense. What’s goin’ on, Joe, you can’t share this with me? I thought the pact was, we could share anything.”
“Not this.” He looked at her because he couldn’t help it. “So please don’t ask me, Hallie.” His jaw burned beneath her touch. The rest of him ached for seven different kinds of relief. He shut his eyes against the sting of coming home. “This is... It’s just...personal.”
“Too personal to involve me, Joe?”
He nodded. “Yeah.”
“I thought we were family.” She swallowed hurt. “I thought we were partners.”
“We were. But not for this.”
“No,” she agreed bitterly, sweeping a hand at the pictures of Sam, Ben and Maura spread across the table. “Not for that. Just for me watching your backside for thirty years and carryin’ your baby.”
He started to respond to that, saw the look on her face and thought better of it. Yeah, he’d backed her up for thirty years, too, but he was the one who’d cut and run, not her.
“What have you brought to my house, Joe?” She picked up the photo printed with its frightening “welcome home” note. “And if you’re not going to give me enough to protect my family—your daughter, Joe—from it, why did you come here at all?”
“I wanted to pick up my house keys, Hallie, that’s all.” He laughed without humor. “I got a case brought me to town, the guys at the department wouldn’t even give me the time a day about it before I talked to you. I didn’t want to come, but I figured maybe I needed someplace to sleep, keep a base, so I came by to get my freaking keys.”
“That’s all?”
“Damn straight.”
“And instead of your keys you find out I had your and Mary’s baby, and you get a packet of pictures left in your truck during—what?—the hour or so you’re in here the first time.”
“Bingo,” Joe said dryly. “Give the detective a prize.”
Hallie eyed him, her mouth set in a hard line. “October is national sarcasm-awareness month, Joe. Did you know that?”
“It’s November, Hallie.”
“Cut the cake, Joe.”
He glared at her for an instant, mouth tight. Then his lips softened, shoulders slumped, eyes closed. “I’m sorry, Hallie. I don’t know what else to say.”
Because she had to, Hallie touched his hand, folded her own about his. “Then say anything, Joe,” she urged softly. “There’s too much on the line here to go on keepin’ it to yourself. Start with what you know about who killed Mary.”
He worked his tongue around his mouth, opened his eyes to see her. “I got a man who tortured and killed his ex-wife and kidnapped his kids to find, Hallie.”
She almost smiled. This Joe she knew. “You want a she-bear to help you, you ought to know damned well that no matter how much I might want to do to you personally, I’ll back you up for kids.” She squeezed his fingers, deadly earnest. “But you’ve got to give me what I need to protect mine, too. You have to tell me, why and how could anyone
use us to manipulate you?”
For a long moment he simply looked at her and breathed, weighing consequences, decisions, druthers. Then he smiled sadly.
“Yeah.” He nodded and withdrew his hand from under hers. It was too hard to think with her touching him. Also, he had to be able to say this one to her on his own. “I suppose so.” He took a deep breath and spilled it. “Mary had a lover. The third baby we lost wasn’t mine.”
Chapter 6
Once open, the secret he’d kept was both harder and easier to divulge than Joe had thought.
“She kept a... an ovulation diary,” he said matter-offactly. “I don’t think she really looked at it as being unfaithful, I think it was more an...experiment. She wanted a baby and it didn’t matter whose.”
He paused, regrouped against painful history, then went on. “She didn’t want to believe it when the doctors told her that even though there wasn’t anything wrong with her ability to get pregnant, her body was just going to keep rejecting the pregnancies. She thought—probably she hoped—she’d find it wasn’t my fault or her fault, but a combination of genes or something that didn’t work. That if she just changed the combination a little, maybe it would make a difference.
“So—” he shrugged “—she found a guy who was willing and checked him out—soundness, diseases, all that crap. A big Mexican-American like me, to make sure the physical mix matched. That way, if it worked, I wouldn’t get suspicious because the baby was blond or something. They had the affair. She got pregnant, ended the affair.”
He huffed humorless laughter. “Damned thing is, she charts this all out like it’s a biology lab. Guy has no name, he’s just a subject with the right look and genetic background. They have sex this date, this date, this date. No pregnancy results, so they try it again during the hot dates next month. Clinical. Six months later, the stars are right, she misses a period. Meets him again in month seven just in case she’s getting a false positive. Month eight she tells me she’s pregnant and stops meeting him. I’m cautiously happy through month ten when, right on schedule, we lose another baby. Only this one’s not mine.” His laughter was self-derisive. “Does that make me the biggest chump in the universe or what?”
Mary's Child Page 6