The Lonesome Lawmen Trilogy

by Pauline Baird Jones

  “Willow?” Matt looked at her then.

  She flinched. “I think I’m going to give that handle a permanent rest. I’m not feeling too willowy right now.”

  He felt like a jerk for reminding her of Hayes. He vented it by banging his cupboard doors as he assembled cups and spoons. They were both wound so tight the air in the room vibrated with it. Tired and tense. Bad combination. He didn’t kid himself that lust wasn’t part of the tension. He wasn’t made of stone—well, ninety-five percent of him wasn’t—and she was a sexy woman. Who needed something he couldn’t give her. It was unprofessional to get involved with her. Not fair either. He had already screwed up one woman’s life. Dani’s life had been gotten worked over real good before he met her. She didn’t need him administering the breaking blow.

  He wiped at the sweat beading on his forehead, then wet a towel with cold water and applied it to face and neck. He would have applied it lower if he could have.

  “I’m sorry I invaded your space,” she said, her voice drowsy, like a woman sounds after good sex. “I didn’t know how to get around the police tape and bomb squad.”

  “Don’t worry about it.” He hesitated, there were things he needed to know, but was she up to it? “Can you handle a few questions?”

  There was a short silence. “Sure. What do you want to know?”

  Did you see him die, was the first question that came to mind, but he couldn’t bring himself to ask. “How did you plan to get inside?”

  “We had a plan.” She sounded defensive.

  He didn’t tone down disbelief. “Really?”

  “Really.” Another short silence. “Kelly was going to jump up on a car and do a strip-tease.”

  He stopped what he was doing, thinking about the picture of Kelly Kerwin Alice had shown him.

  “Too bad it got called off,” Dani said.

  He grinned. “Yeah, too bad.” He leaned against the counter, watching the coffee bubbling in the pot. “The explosion came before one. It’s now closing on nine. Where you been?”

  “I’d feel safer telling you if you weren’t wearing that gun.”

  “Not another strip joint?” He might have to use his gun if she had.

  “Movies.”

  “Movies? At a movie theater?”

  “Yeah, three of them, one after the other.”

  She saw Richard Hastings get blown sky high, called her ex-husband, and then went to the movies?

  “It was quite cathartic, actually,” Dani said.

  “Cathartic?”

  “What would you do if you found out your ex wanted you dead?” Dani asked him.

  Matt didn’t hesitate. “I’d live.”

  Dani chuckled. It was a husky, tired sound, not unlike a music box winding down. “Well, I plan to live, too.”

  Matt’s grin faded with her words. She planned to live. Hayes planned to kill her. He wouldn’t stop now. It wouldn’t matter that Bates was out of the picture. His reputation was at stake. The hit man couldn’t be beaten by a romance writer. Not if he wanted to kill in this world again.

  The coffee pot finished bubbling. Matt wasn’t sorry for the distraction. He poured two cups. “How do you take your coffee? I have sugar, but we’re out of milk.” Only silence from the living room. “Dani?”

  He stepped round the bar and found her asleep. Not in a relaxed sprawl, but curled nearly fetal where the back met the side, her head turned to one side, her cheek resting in the palm of her hand. That tenderness thing started in again. The only way to stop it was to get pissed off. It was hard to drum up pissed when she looked like that. He could kick bad guy butts till the cows came home, but one look at a sleeping woman…

  He turned away from her, went into the bedroom, turned back the covers on the bed and closed the curtains over another set of long, narrow windows. Back in the living room, he hesitated. It was one thing to look, but to touch? To gather close. Insert in his bed?

  He could take the coward’s way out and cover her where she lay. He wasn’t a coward. That was against regulations. His problem, he decided, was that his focus was wrong. Instead of thinking of her as a soft, warm female, he needed to think of her as an item that needed to be moved from point A to point B. That settled, he bent and picked her up. She made a small murmur of protest before settling against his chest with her face pushed into the side of his neck. One arm slid around his neck. Her soft bare skin rubbed against his. Her warm breath stroked the side of his neck.

  She didn’t feel like an item. What she felt like, he refused to think about. He lowered her to the bed and she muttered again, a soft, distressed sound that put another dent in the armor of his detachment. He had to pull her arms from around his neck before she relaxed against his pillow with a small sigh. He arranged the blanket, taking care not to touch her again. She shifted, turning her cheek towards the pillow, one arm curved above her head as her chest rose and fell. He should have turned away then.

  How long had it been since he had watched a woman sleep?

  Too long.

  If he didn’t watch it, he would be in coyote position again, howling for the moon. He didn’t get the moon before, wouldn’t get it this time. It was harder to turn away from her this time.

  He did it because he had to. He checked the locks, downed a cup of coffee, very black, and then carried another cup with him to the bedroom. He shed his jacket, loosened his tie and put his gun close at hand on the table by the bed. After adjusting the bedside lamp to a low setting, he pulled the easy chair close and dropped into it, his body going slack with a weariness that caffeine couldn’t blunt anymore. It went too deep.

  He blinked, rubbed his eyes. Had to stay awake. He sipped the coffee, then picked up the book on the night stand—hers. Settled deeper in the chair, and opened to where he had left off last night.

  …Daniel stood by the bed, watching her sleep. The body that had given him so much pleasure the night before was relaxed, enticing in unguarded slumber. She murmured, then rolled to her side, pulling the sheet taut across her naked body. With a sigh she lifted her arm over her head exposing the smooth, erotic line from breast to thigh…

  Dani muttered in her sleep. He looked up in time to see her lift her arm over her face, stretch, then arching her woman’s body, before relaxing back into the mattress. She wasn’t naked.

  It didn’t help.

  Matt swallowed, tugged at his shirt collar. Maybe this wasn’t a good time to be reading her book. He tossed it on the floor, but without something else to focus on, his gaze did a homing pigeon back to Dani, deep in a restless sleep. It looked like neither of them was going get much rest this night, even if they were sitting in the small eye of a very big storm. There would be no peace while Hayes remained at large.

  Tomorrow the storm would be on them again. Hayes was probably tapping his contacts. Matt was the only one who knew where Dani was, but in the morning, he would have to report in. He trusted his own people, but information had a way of getting out when the incentive was big enough. If they were to have a shot at catching Hayes, they had to be in control of the field, the flow of information. Hayes would be expecting that. He would be making his move while they were making theirs. They would have to move her first thing tomorrow, but where?

  SEVENTEEN

  She was lying in a bed that wasn’t hers, staring at a ceiling that wasn’t familiar. It was too ornate, carved into shapes she couldn’t make out because the light wasn’t good enough. She heard movement in the shadows. Uneasily she turned toward it. “Who’s there?”

  “Willow.”

  She knew his voice, even before his face emerged from the shadows, went from uneasy to terrified in a heartbeat.

  Dark Lord.

  The pale glow of his eyes pinned her in place, left her with nothing to do but watch him walk toward her.

  “I don’t want to die,” she told him.

  He stopped by the bed. “Willow.”

  As if she were a wild animal instead of his next victim, he ben
t and touched her hand. Her flesh shrank from his touch. He looked at her and she knew there was something he wanted her to understand.

  “What? What do you want?”

  He sat down beside her, his hand hovered next to her cheek, then drew back when she shrank away from him. “Soon, Willow. Soon you’ll understand.”

  A low moan brought Matt awake in a rush. His hand closed around the butt of his gun before his eyes opened. Took him a few seconds to realize he was in his own bedroom. In his bed, Dani moaned, her head turning from side to side as if she were trying to escape something. Or someone.

  Hayes. How are you sleeping nights?

  Still not good, it seemed. He rubbed his face, then leaned forward and touched the hand twitching on top of the blanket.

  “Dani? Dani, it’s just a nightmare—” Her eyes opened so fast, so wide, he wasn’t ready. Their faces were too close together. He needed distance to look at the fear in her eyes and not feel anything but responsibility for erasing the cause. “It’s Matt. Matt Kirby. The…”

  “Lonesome lawman. I remember.”

  He started at being nailed so neatly, went to let her go, but her hand gripped his for a endless moment, then relaxed so that he could sit back.

  “What—time is it?”

  He angled his arm. “Five am.”

  “I had a feeling you’d say that.”

  “It’s too early to get up. Why don’t you go back to sleep?”

  A wry smile edged across her mouth. “I don’t think ‘the repose of the night’ belongs ‘to me.’ It opens an ‘inn for phantoms.’”

  “What?”

  “Bachelard. Gaston Bachelard. French philosopher.” She looked at him. “Ironic, don’t you think?”

  “I’m not sure. What are we talking about?” Why—no—how could she quote a French philosopher at five in the morning?

  “Spook. The king of quotes. I wouldn’t know why I can’t sleep if it weren’t for him launching the quote wars on the boards. Course, I wouldn’t need to know why if it wasn’t for him. That’s the ironic part.”

  “Oh.” He didn’t know what to say. What she had done was stupid, but she knew that.

  She sighed. “I guess I should have known he was a hit man.” Her mouth drooped at the edges. “Real men aren’t that sensitive.”

  Matt grinned. “After twenty in the Marshals, I thought I’d seen all there was to see, but Hayes—well, he’s in a class of his own.”

  “You’re just saying that to make me feel better.” Her eyes were losing their bruised look and her smile came more easily this time. “Thanks for being kind after I, you know, avoided you and everything.”

  Matt rubbed his face, mostly to take a break from looking at her in his bed, her hair spread across his pillow. “I’ll admit it annoyed me.”

  “It wasn’t personal,” Dani said, then, added with conscious honesty, “Until you told me to get my ass back into custody. Then it might have gotten personal.”

  “Alice called me on it at the time,” Matt admitted.

  “Alice?”

  “Alice Paysse, a member of my team. You saw Riggs at Boomer’s and talked to Sebastian on line…”

  “The counterfeit smiley guy?”

  Matt grinned, the movement taking the harshness from his face. “That’s right. He enjoyed the world tour you took him on.”

  “More than you did, I suspect.”

  Matt didn’t answer, but his gaze was amused. “How did you learn to navigate cyberspace like that?”

  Dani didn’t want to tell him she had learned the good stuff from Spook, so she arched her brows. “Isn’t it in my file? I thought you had all my sad, little secrets at your fingertips?”

  “If I’d had all of them, we’d have had this chat a lot sooner.”

  “Oh, really?” Dani punched up the pillow and tucked it behind her head. When she was comfortable, she donned her best innocent look, the one she used when being interviewed by jerks. “So it was simply a lack of information that complicated your hunting? Not seriously under-estimating the romance writer?”

  His stare tried to be hard, but he didn’t get the twinkle completely under control. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Okay. Tell me about yourself instead.” When he opened his mouth on a protest, Dani added, “It’s only fair. You have my file. Quid Pro Quo.”

  He sighed. “What do you want to know?”

  Everything, she thought, but aloud all she asked was, “What do you do when you aren’t tracking down poor, defenseless romance writers?”

  The bushy line of dark brows shot up, but he didn’t take the bait. “This is Colorado. Rock climbing, skiing, hunting, hiking, fishing—we have a cabin up by the Rocky Mountain National Park.”

  A mountain cabin. Why wasn’t she surprised. “We?”

  “Me and my brothers. Luke, the oldest, is a cop and little brother, Jake who is also a Deputy Marshal, comes when he’s around. He travels a lot.”

  “How law abiding you all are.”

  Matt grinned. “Runs in the family, I’m afraid. My dad was a cop. His dad, too.”

  Against the odds, Dani felt herself relax, felt sleep trying to steal back in. Matt had taken the edge off the fear she usually used to fight it back. He was far too comforting for his own good. Or hers.

  “Was?”

  “He died in the line of duty when I was in college.”

  “My parents died just before I started college, but you know that already, don’t you?” The words came out in pieces as her mind began to blur.

  “Yeah, I do.” Matt noted the signs of sleep returning with a mix of regret and relief. The more vulnerable she was, the more dangerous she was.

  “Your mom,” she had to yawn before she could get the whole question out, “she’s still…”

  “Yeah, she lives not far from here in the house I grew up in. She’s dating again. He was my dad’s best friend. She’s known him, well, since the wedding. He was the best man.”

  “You don’t like it,” she said on a sigh.

  “I do, too,” the protest was automatic, “I’ve known him forever.” He shoved his hands into hair. How had he got on this subject? “He’s a stand up guy.”

  “I didn’t say you didn’t like him,” Dani said, her hand covering his where he gripped the sides of the chair. Her palm was cool. His skin heated to warm it. “I just said you don’t like the situation.”

  “I don’t have the right.” To dislike the situation or to like her hand on his.

  She smiled. “I’m glad you realize it. Though it’s natural to feel like he’s doing your dad down.” She yawned again, taking her hand off his to cover her mouth. Her words came out in sleepy pieces, “With guys, it’s about…territory. If you can see that might get over it…”

  She yawned again, her eyes closing as her voice faded. She sighed, then turned on her side. She reached out and found his hand again. A strand of hair fell forward over her face, curling against the smooth line of her cheek. The hand she wasn’t touching curled into a fist. He flexed the fingers of his free hand, then smoothed the hair back behind her ear. Where her skin touched his, heat flowed, igniting the age old longing to mate.

  She wasn’t, he reminded himself, a short time girl. She was a life time woman for a guy with regular hours and a job that wasn’t life threatening. Someone who could be there when she needed him, not when he could fit her in.

  She sighed, her body shuddering as she slipped into a deeper sleep. He closed his eyes. If he could just get through the night, the need would fade. He was just tired. That’s all. At five in the morning, everybody felt lonely…

  * * * *

  Niall McBride was almost too easy to kill. The last five days had turned him into something that needed to be exterminated, Hayes decided with disgust, not sacrificed on the altar of pain. Hayes did it slow. He wanted him to know he was dying and why. As life faded from his eyes, he told him about Willow, told him why his betrayal was costing him so dear. Told him he
wouldn’t burn. Hayes would not make him a martyr. All he was fit for was to wallow in his own blood.

  Hayes sat and watched until the blood stopped flowing out the gash in his neck, then used his blood to write, “Not worthy” on the wall by his head. There was still the problem of Copeland, but he had a plan for him, too. When he walked out, he was almost a free man.

  Willow was safe. Her enemies were dead. Even Orsini, though he hadn’t done the job himself. He smiled. The hit man had put out a contract on the employer. Ironic.

  Willow would like that. She liked irony. He couldn’t wait to tell her about it. He could, now that it was time for them to be together.

  All he had to do was find her.

  * * * *

  Matt woke up hurting with the sun stabbing through a slit in the blinds right into his eyes. He was slouched deep in the chair, his back at a bad angle. Inch by painful inch he straightened. Good thing Dani was still asleep. Would not be good for the witness to see the Marshal grimacing and wincing in pain because he slept in a chair all night. Not when he was trying to inspire confidence in his ability to protect her.

  Standing was marginally better than sitting. A hot shower would increase the margin. All he had to do was get there, as long he didn’t meet a belligerent two year old in the hall.

  At least hurting had killed horny.

  Dani chose that moment to roll over, taking her covers with her. Her dress had ridden high on her thighs. Way too high. Her legs, still covered in black nylon, were dangerously good in daylight. She sighed, then bent one leg, sliding it up the pillow she was hugging. This took her hem line to new heights.

  All the female parts that interested were outstanding. That made her three for three on the lust scale. He could be in trouble here.

  For the third time in twelve hours, he turned and stalked away from her. He would like to meet the idiot who said there wasn’t life after forty, he decided. Probably some kid who didn’t know that if there was breath, there was life.

  On the other side of a cold, then hot shower, his stomach rumbled a reminder it wasn’t just sex that had been in short supply last night. In the kitchen, the refrigerator was almost bare, a state easily corrected with a market just across the street, if it weren’t for the stairs. He tossed back a couple of Tylenol. Out in the hall, he locked the door, then punched the buttons on his cellular telephone as he headed down the hall. When his assistant answered he said, “Let me talk to Alice.”