Mary's Child

by Ramin, Terese

  “You mean when he had to put down your boyfriend?”

  She gave a clipped nod of response.

  Hallie opened her jacket, showed her the Beretta. “I won’t let you hurt him.”

  Montoya lifted but didn’t point the weapon she’d managed to unholster without Hallie noticing. “I know that, Lieutenant.”

  “He won’t let you hurt me, either.”

  Montoya’s smile was tight. “I know that, too.”

  “Then what are we doing here, Cat? The real reason. Besides waiting.”

  The other woman shrugged—tiredly, Hallie thought. “I just need to know if he knew before he shot Tomas. I used to be sure he did. After two days of being in on you looking for me, I’m not sure anymore. Seems like maybe he didn’t. But then maybe it doesn’t matter, either.”

  “Knew what?” Hallie kept her voice soft, neutral, an encouraging whisper without judgment behind it.

  “Knew his wife screwed my boyfriend to get herself pregnant. I thought he knew. I thought that’s why he managed to be first on the scene the day I found out. That’s what Tomas and I were fighting about when my little girl got hit by that ricochet from my service pistol. Mary Martinez. Tomas wanted to leave me for her. I figured her husband must have found out, too, and come to confront Tomas. I thought that’s why he didn’t try harder not to shoot Tomas. I thought maybe it just made a good excuse. If anybody got to kill Tomas, it should have been me.”

  Hallie eyed her, appalled, trying not to show it. “Joe didn’t know it was your boyfriend Mary had the affair with until about forty-five minutes ago,” she said. “He didn’t know she’d had an affair at all until I made him look through her closet for shoes she could be buried in.”

  “God help me,” Montoya whispered. “That’s what I was afraid of.”

  Then she glanced at the anniversary clock, cocked her head to listen to the timer on her watch. Eye- and eartracked the sound of a car bouncing over a curb and screeching to a snow-crusty halt at the foot of Joe’s front porch steps. Listened to the sound of men crunching and stamping onto the porch, the slam-bang of the front door opening, Joe yelling, “Hallie?” and sounding desperate when he did it.

  Then Montoya smiled briefly at Hallie, brought her pistol to the center of her chest and, before Hallie could reach her, steadied it with both hands and fired.

  Shucking off her jacket, Hallie dropped to her knees beside her deputy, pressed the garment into the pumping wound. “Don’t you die, damn you, Montoya. Not yet.”

  “Better now than later, Lieutenant,” Montoya gasped. Her eyes widened and fixed on the ceiling. “It doesn’t even hurt anymore,” she said. Then the blood pumping from the wound in her chest slowed and stopped, respiration ceased, eyes glazed.

  The digital watch on her wrist read 6:27 p.m.

  The gunshot drove Joe wild with fear. He drew his weapon and moved forward with as much caution as he could muster.

  “Hallie?” His voice cracked and he didn’t care who heard. “Hallie. Dios, m’ija, answer me! Please!”

  “Here, Joe. In the living room. Cat’s dead.”

  He rounded the corner, stopped at the sight of Hallie on her knees closing Montoya’s eyes.

  “What—?”

  Hallie’s eyes and face were wet when she looked at him. “That day you killed him, she thought you knew about Tomas and Mary. That’s what they were arguing about. She found out about the affair. She thought you had, too—that you came and killed him on purpose. When she found out you didn’t even know... she shot herself, Joe. Just like that, Time of death—6:27 p.m. I was here. I can tell the M.E.—” Her words broke and a sound suspiciously like a sob hiccuped out of her.

  Joe knelt and folded his arms around her, pressed her face to his chest even as he buried his in her neck. “Shh, Hallie. It’s all right. It’ll be all right.”

  “Eventually.” Hallie’s voice was watery and muffled.

  “Yeah,” Joe agreed, wondering if his heart would ever beat properly again, if he’d ever stop hearing the shot he thought might have taken Hallie. “Eventually.”

  Around them Frank marshaled state troopers and deputies called to the scene, the arrival of the medical examiner, the return of Crompton who had to be told about his partner. The anniversary clock ticked, the digits on Montoya’s watch turned over. Silence and grief were palpable entities: not only would the sheriff’s department bury one of their own, but she’d considered taking another of theirs with her. It was a merciless, difficult scene. Unable to look anymore, Hallie turned away.

  She ached both physically and emotionally to hold Maura, to wrap her in the special comforting bond that existed between mother and nursing infant—only one of the many bonds that indirectly but inevitably and irrevocably for all time tied her to Joe. She looked at him, chest suddenly aching, words she wanted—needed—to say to him dried on her tongue. If things had gone differently today...

  But they hadn’t. Joe was all right. The boys and Zeke had made especially sure that Maura was all right. She, herself, was all right—or would be eventually. She risked another glance at Cat. Time would dull the ache of this betrayal, of this loss, and Life with a capital L would tapdance on. But not yet. Not yet.

  Behind her, as though he’d read her mind, Joe touched her shoulder. “Looking at her won’t bring her back,” he said quietly.

  She ducked her face, brushed her cheek against his hand. “I know.” Looked up at him and said softly, “I need to hold Maura, Joe. Just really...” She hesitated, feeling the tears rising behind her eyes, burning in her throat. “I just really need to see the boys and hold her.”

  He shut his eyes, wanting much the same thing himself, except the person he needed to hold was Hallie. He drew her out of the way of the activity in the living room and into the relative privacy of the tiny dining room. “You got room in there for me, too, Hallie? Room to let me hold you?” He didn’t want to ask, but he couldn’t hold the question back.

  She smiled up at him tremulously, everything she was, mirrored in her eyes. “As much room as you want, Joe. As long as you want it. My house and my bed are yours.”

  “What about your heart?” This wasn’t the time or the place to ask, but he couldn’t, didn’t, stop himself. “Can I have that, too?”

  She eyed him, surprised. “You’ve had it for thirty years, Joe. I’m not takin’ it back now it’s been riding around in your back pocket or tossed under the seat of your truck. Thing’s probably never been washed and—”

  He hauled her into his arms, bent his head and kissed her to shut her up. To taste her. To make sure of her life. To blot out the fear he’d felt coming through the door.

  To stake a claim on “forever” that until now he wasn’t sure he’d have. When he lifted his head, her mouth was tender, her eyes soft, her being gentle in his arms.

  “I love you. Halleluia Thompson,” he said. “Will you take me home with you and raise my daughter and maybe after we give it some time, be my wife?”

  “How much time?”

  Joe grinned. “Enough,” he said. “Just enough.”

  Epilogue

  Eighteen months later, May 3, 1:55 a.m.

  Except for the dim light she left on for him in the kitchen, the house was dark when Joe came in at the end of his shift. He’d been back with the department a little over a year now, after deciding that bounty hunting and married life didn’t mix.

  The county had been dubious about having both him and Hallie in the same department, but since she’d become a shift commander and he was currently working evenings—performing penance, he was certain, for the time he’d been away—as a deputy rather than a detective, things were going smoothly.

  Things would have gone smoothly in any event, Joe thought, because there was no way he intended to mess up what he had with Hallie.

  Somewhere off in the shadows of the front hall, George’s nails clicked across the floor in greeting. Joe took off his shoes and switched off the kitchen light, picked his
way carefully through the front hall, stooping to scratch the dog in passing.

  “How’d it go tonight, George? All quiet?”

  The dog groaned and stretched, accommodating himself to the better placement of Joe’s fingers on his ribs. Joe chuckled softly.

  “Good. Glad to hear it.”

  Shoes in hand, he tiptoed up the stairs, opened and shut the baby gate, then turned left at the landing to go first to the farthest bedroom where Sam and Ben slept, lightly snoring in the moonlight. They’d grown over the past eighteen months, and their opinions with them; but they’d forgiven him his year-long desertion the instant he assured them he had no plans whatever to remove Mary’s child from their household. When he’d asked for their mother’s hand in marriage, Sam had politely asked if he didn’t want the rest of her, too, and Ben, as literal as ever, had wondered which hand he wanted. They’d both stood up for him and Hallie three months later, on the day Hallie’s adoption of Maura was finalized.

  Next he peeked into Maura’s room, stepped softly across the floor to pull the blanket up over the twenty-one-monthold who seemed to think she was every bit as old as her big brothers, and who had gone on her first climbing expedition to prove it at the age of ten months when she’d tossed all of her stuffed animals out of her crib, hauled herself onto the dresser at the head of her crib and gleefully shouted her first word, “Jump!”

  Fortunately Sam—oh, he of the chocolate frosted idea—had heard her and thwarted the expedition in true hero fashion before anyone else could arrive: quietly, firmly and in no uncertain terms. Joe shuddered to think what might have happened if Ben was the one who’d heard her first. Zeke’s and Hallie’s younger son was equally as protective of his little sister as his brother, but he also had a tendency to encourage her adventurousness. Instead of removing her from the dresser before she could “Jump!” into the pool of her toys the way she’d learned to jump into mom’s or dad’s arms at the community swimming pool for lessons, Ben would probably have told her to wait a minute, dragged over her bean bag chair and allowed her to practice “Jump!”-ing into his arms so he’d be able to do it at the pool.

  Needless to say all climb-on-able stuffed toys had been removed from her bed, the dresser placed elsewhere and “Jump!” was a word reserved for the swimming pool when daddy was in front of her period. Her most recent favorite phrase was “Me, too” as in “me, too, go,” or “me, too, not...” whatever Ben and Sam were doing.

  Particularly Ben.

  The last bedroom was far and away Joe’s favorite. Smiling at the lump Hallie made in the bed, he shed his clothes, then glanced at the crib where the newest Martinez slept, butt in the air. Lord, the woman did make the prettiest babies he’d ever seen, bar none. He lingered for a moment, watching his six-week-old son sleep the sleep of the recently fed, then breathed a deep sign of contentment and rounded the bed to join Hallie,

  She rolled toward his weight, sinking the soundless mattress and box spring of their new bed. “Joe?”

  He leaned in to give her a kiss. “Who else you got crawlin’ into this bed at two in the morning?”

  “You mean besides your son?” Her voice was sleepy, laugh-filled.

  Joe glanced across at the crib. “He givin’ you problems again?”

  “Nothing I can’t handle.”

  “Maybe I should just get him up and have a talk with him anyway.” Being on second shift, he liked having middle-of-the-night chats with his offspring. That was when they were usually their funniest and most talkative.

  “Joe Martinez,” his wife warned him, “you wake that baby and I won’t tell you what my doctor said today.”

  Anticipation flooded his loins. He forgot about waking the baby immediately. Antonio was six weeks old; the wait was over. “He say we’re good to go?”

  “‘Good to go’?” Mock furious, she flung her pillow at him. “Good to go? Is that how you think about us? The honeymoon’s over, we’ve got four kids, so no more romance? I’m just ‘good to go’?” Huffy, she gave him her back. “Well, you can just think two or three times about that, José Guillermo Martinez, because that’s how long it’ll be before you have—”

  He scooped her over into his arms and smothered the rest of her huff in a kiss that teased and coaxed, that made hot, dark, laughter-filled promises. She stiffened her lips, pushed halfheartedly against his shoulders for a moment—just long enough to give him a silent piece of her mind. Then she sighed and surrendered, closed her arms around his neck and opened her mouth under his, drawing him in and meeting him promise for promise until he was lost. When he was groaning into her mouth she pulled her head away.

  “Promise me something?” she asked.

  “Everything,” he swore. “Anything.”

  “Don’t let my mother go the frog-in-the-pants route with Tonio without making sure he understands the other version first, too?”

  Shaking with silent laughter, Joe folded her against his chest, buried his mouth next to her ear. “I promise.”

  “Good.” She sighed, contented, and traced his mouth. “I love you, Joe.”

  “M’ija, ” he whispered back, stretching out beside her and opening her pajamas to find her breasts with hands and mouth. “My darling. My heart. Te amo.”

  Then they were silent except for the breathless, muffled sounds of parents, mindful of sleeping children, loving each other.

  And getting really “good to go.”

  ISBN : 978-1-4592-6580-6

  MARY’S CHILD

  Copyright © 1998 by Terese daly Ramin

  All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the editorial office. Silhouette Books, 300 East 42nd Street, New York, NY 10017 U.S.A.

  All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.

  This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

  ® and TM are trademarks of Harlequin Books S.A., used under license. Trademarks indicated with ® are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the Canadian Trade Marks Office and in other countries.

  Table of Contents

  Table of Contents

  It was only Hallie, Joe thought.

  Letter to Reader

  Books by Terese Ramin

  About the Author

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Epilogue

  Copyright