The Last Honorable Man

by Vickie Taylor

  Leaning over her, he whispered. “Is this how you like to be touched?”

  She nodded, losing coherency.

  One-handed, he freed the remaining buttons on her sundress and pushed back the flaps. His knuckles brushed the line below her white cotton panties, tickling the tender crease just inside her hip where leg meets torso. Her stomach muscles fluttered.

  “And this?” he said, his voice getting rougher.

  She nodded again, head thrown back while his magic hands levitated her. Higher and higher she floated until, mewling, she reached for the snap of his jeans. She got them unfastened, but he pulled away, denying her the contact she sought. He stood, shucking the jeans and boxers, then helped her wriggle out of her panties. The process allowed her more than enough time to realize that the parts of him she had not seen were every bit as magnificent as the parts she had. A tingle of anticipation buzzed along her nerves as he lowered his full, naked length to her. Hands thrown over her head, she arched into his male hardness and heat. His strong arms supported her while his fingers penetrated her and she was flying with him. Soaring.

  How could she ever have thought of marriage to him as a sacrifice? It was a gift.

  He rolled with her, settling her on top, and she realized he was every breath she took. He set her free.

  Elisa had never been skydiving before, but she imagined this was how it must feel. Balancing over the ranger’s flushed, naked body, she felt as if she were teetering on the brink of a plane’s open hatch, looking out at a mile of nothingness between her feet and the earth.

  Their gazes met, held, and without hesitation she leaped.

  His hands on her hips guided her gently down. She tipped her head back, focused on the expansion of her body, nearly grimacing with the strain of accommodation.

  “Don’t…let…me…hurt you,” he ground out, but she barely heard him with the winds of passion rushing by her, roaring in her ears.

  Touching the tip of her tongue to her upper lip in concentration, she angled her hips a few degrees and pressed down. With a pop, the pressure inside her released, and she seated herself fully on him.

  For a moment they did nothing more than breathe—it was all either of them could manage. Then he took her hands in his and brought them to his chest, tilting her forward. Slowly his hips lifted her, pushing him deeper inside her. Hipbone to hipbone they gyrated, and then floated back to the bed. Her thighs tightened, held him, and he took her back up again. And again.

  They moved harder. Gasped louder. The mattress squeaked. The headboard rapped the wall. Del reached for her breasts, plumped and squeezed them, shooting a molten message straight to her core. Her fists twisted in the sheets. Her hair hung over them like a curtain, tangling in his hands. Tied together, they flew. Soared.

  “That’s perfect. You’re perfect,” he said through gritted teeth, punctuating each word with an upward thrust. “I love you.”

  The unexpected declaration sent her spiraling out of control. Never had she felt like this. She was free-falling. Diving headlong into oblivion. She twisted, grasping at air, gasping for breath from the greedy wind rushing by. Vertigo took her in its grip and she couldn’t tell down from up, right from left. The world was spinning, her body was convulsing and the scream that pierced the roar of the wind sounded like her own.

  When she regained her balance, she was lying on his chest. Del’s body was arched and tight as a strung bow until his own release subsided and he sagged beneath her.

  He smoothed back the long, black hair plastered to both their faces.

  “What,” she asked, still disoriented, “was that?”

  He smiled lazily. “That, sweetheart, was one more reason to fight the bastards that want to keep us apart, until my last breath.”

  “Clint will take you to the train station,” Del told Elisa the next morning. Ranger Clint Hayes followed the discussion by watching in the rearview mirror. “He’ll put you on a rail to Detroit, then catch a plane and meet you there. He’ll help you get over the border and stay with you until you’re settled.”

  When he was through repeating the plan for the tenth time, Del couldn’t quite meet Elisa’s gaze. Instead he stared out the back window of his Land Rover at DuPage Street, a block away from the Dallas County Courthouse, where his arraignment was scheduled to begin in half an hour.

  Elisa sat as stiff as a mannequin in the seat next to him. “You cannot go to the courthouse.”

  “I have to.”

  “You said you were going to fight.” Her voice crackled like fire on dry tinder.

  Del sighed. He shouldn’t have left this for the last minute. He should have said goodbye at home. Or slipped out of bed this morning before she woke. God knew, he tried.

  He met Clint’s gaze in the mirror. “Give us a minute?”

  With a sympathetic nod, Clint stepped out of the vehicle and closed the driver’s door behind him.

  “I am going to fight. But through the system.”

  Her head snapped toward him. Her gaze was sharp as a buck knife. “The same system that sells guns to an army run by a madman?”

  “The system I’ve spent my whole life upholding.” It tore him up to think his country might be responsible for any of the suffering in San Ynez. But he still couldn’t turn his back on the American way.

  She popped the car door open, stepped into the street. A car blared its horn at her as it swerved to the center lane. More deliberately he followed, and joined her on the bench at a bus stop a few yards away.

  “You could come with me to Canada,” she said.

  “And abandon my family?”

  “You would rather have them visit you in prison?”

  He shook his head slowly. What would his grandfather say? His father? He didn’t know. He did know one thing. “I’m supposed to be one of the good guys, ’Lis. I can’t live as a fugitive. I just don’t have it in me.”

  “And I would rather die than live with that kind of injustice.”

  He kicked a pebble, and a pigeon scrabbled after it as if it were a breadcrumb. He felt bad for giving the bird false hopes. “I guess we’ll always be on opposite sides of the coin on that one.”

  She stared at the cement between her sandals. “You said you loved me. Was it just…the moment? Or did you mean it?”

  He tipped her head up to his with his hand on her chin. Del had never thought twice about the term broken heart. He figured it was just a romantic notion for love-struck teenage girls. After today he might have to revise that assumption. Because when he lifted Elisa’s head and saw the tears glistening in her eyes, it felt like someone had stuck a handsaw in his chest and was hacking away.

  “I never say what I don’t mean,” he told her, willing her to believe it. “Especially that.”

  “I…I love you, too.”

  A grin tried to crack on his face even as his heart fell into two neat halves. “I was wondering when you were going to work up the nerve to tell me.”

  She jerked her chin away.

  Clint walked toward them. He didn’t say anything, and his eyes were hidden by mirrored shades, but a tap on his watch told Del what was on his mind. Del would be late if he didn’t get moving.

  He pulled Elisa to her feet and put her in the front passenger seat, lowering the power window and leaning in as he shut the door between them. “Even if they convict me, they can’t lock me up forever. When I get out, I’ll come for you.”

  “Do not make promises you might not be able to keep.”

  He hardly let her finish her complaint before he crushed his mouth over hers. Damn it, he hadn’t meant to kiss her. He’d meant to make a clean break. Say his goodbyes and walk away, even if it killed him.

  They’d left his bed only a few hours ago, and already his body was hungry for hers again. His need for her was a physical craving. Only, it wasn’t just the physical release he craved. The moment she was out of earshot he longed to hear her voice; the moment she slid out of his grasp he longed to feel her aga
in; the moment a kiss ended he longed to taste her again.

  He was the man who had pledged to help her, the Texas Ranger, and yet somehow he’d come to depend on her strength. Her resolve.

  Damn, but she wasn’t even gone and already he ached for her.

  He broke off the kiss before it was too late, before he couldn’t walk away at all, and thumped his palm on the roof of the car to signal Clint to go. “Wherever you are,” he said, focusing all his will, all his strength into that one sure statement, “I’ll find you.”

  The first of her tears rolled down her cheek. Even with all she had been through, this was the first time he’d seen her cry, Del realized.

  She shook her head, then looked at him through glazed, wet eyes. Her head tilted as if something were broken inside her. “You were right before. We do not believe in the same things. We are too different.”

  The car rolled forward a foot. Del kept pace on the curb, his face twisting. “’Lis? No. I will find you.”

  She looked over her shoulder as the Rover pulled into traffic. “It would better for us both if you did not.”

  How many blocks passed before she reined in her emotions, Elisa could not be sure. What she was sure of, was that Clint Hayes scowled at her through every one of them.

  “Damn women,” he mumbled, his hands strangling the steering wheel. “Ought to be a law against ’em.”

  “I am sorry,” she said, though she was not sure what she was apologizing for, other than being female. And maybe for whatever woman had ruined his opinion of the gender.

  “Damn well ought to be sorry,” he said, spearing her with a hard look. “You didn’t have to do that, you know?”

  “Do what?”

  “Rip Del up. Leave him in pieces after everything he’s done for you.”

  She squirmed deeper in the bucket seat. “I did not ask for his help.”

  “How about sex, did you ask him for that? He’d already given you his name, a ring and every penny he had, but you had to seduce him, too. Make sure he had nothing left when you were gone, not even his self-respect.”

  Clint’s anger knocked the breath out of her. “I did not seduce—”

  But she had known Del well enough to realize that once they made love, his commitment to her would grow even deeper. She would not be just the woman to whom he owed a debt. She would be his wife, in every sense of the word. He would not do anything to jeopardize her safety.

  Even save himself.

  “I am sorry,” she said again, and this time she meant it.

  “Aw.” Clint waved his hand impotently. “Wouldn’t have goddamn mattered. Damn Del, it’s like he’s got this code of honor of his hardwired in his brain.”

  The last honorable man, she had once thought of him. She had been right.

  “Please take me to the courthouse.”

  “You’ve got a train to catch.”

  “I need to say goodbye properly.” She could feel him appraising her from behind his mirrored lenses. “He deserves better, but it is the best I can do.”

  At the next corner Clint swung the Land Rover in wide U-turn. “So help me, lady, you do right by him this time or I’ll put you on a plane to San Ynez myself.”

  They hurried through the parking garage at the courthouse, counting the minutes before Del’s case was called. At the elevator Clint punched the up button and checked his watch. “Fifteen minutes. We’ll make it.”

  She nodded and nervously watched the lights indicating the elevator’s descent to their level. She had no idea what she would say when she found Del. If he would even talk to her.

  The last light blinked on, a bell dinged and the lift doors opened. Before she and Clint could step on, a man stepped out of the stairwell to her right, pulling a deadly looking pistol from beneath his sport coat.

  Clint shoved her to the floor with one hand and reached for the gun at his hip with the other. A shot exploded, echoing like thunder through the concrete garage, and Clint hit the ground rolling, blood already spreading across his left shoulder. His gun clattered to the cement beside Elisa. She picked it up, and the shooter dived for the cover of a steel drum being used as a traffic barricade. Before he could set up for another shot, Elisa dragged Clint behind the minivan in the parking space next to them.

  She was searching for something to stanch the flow of blood from Clint’s arm when cold metal touched her temple. A second man stepped out from behind her.

  Knowing it was useless, she instinctively raised the ranger’s gun a fraction of an inch. The first man appeared, smiling, and kicked it from her hand. “I don’t think so, sweetheart. Move away from ranger-boy. You’re coming with us.”

  Chapter 15

  The fifteen steps to the front entrance to the Dallas County Courthouse looked like Mt. Everest to Del. He dreaded the climb. Loathed the pack of reporters that waited for him at the glass doors like feral dogs at a rabbit hole.

  With a deep breath he focused on his goal—get in, enter his plea, get out—and started forward. Standing here broiling in the sun wasn’t going to help.

  “Ranger Cooper, you’ve been charged with negligent homicide. What do you have to say?”

  “Ranger Cooper, how will you plead?”

  Never slowing his forward momentum, he shoved a microphone out of his face. “Haven’t you people figured it out yet? I’m not a Texas Ranger anymore.”

  The burly anchor for Channel Seven blocked his path. “Mr. Cooper, how will you plead when your case is called?”

  “Guilty on a charge of assault and battery if you don’t get out of my way.”

  A dozen lights flashed in his face. Half the news crews walked away. They’d gotten their sound bite for the noon report. On to ruin someone else’s day.

  Del pushed through the dispersing crowd into the cool lobby and through the security checkpoint. Turning the last corner before he reached his assigned check-in area, his stomach dropped. His grandparents sat rigidly on a hard wooden bench. Dressed in their church clothes, they looked older and grayer than when he’d seen them just a few days ago.

  His steps slowed. He fought a childish urge to turn and run the other way like he had when he’d been seven years old and left the gate to the chicken coop open. The coyotes had taken three of Mami’s best hens.

  It wasn’t fear that fueled his apprehension over facing his grandparents with his failure all those years ago. Nor was it now. They would never hurt him or stop loving him.

  Shame was what held him back. Deep and raw remorse.

  Bad enough he’d left the Rangers in disgrace. Been branded a criminal. But to have his grandparents in the court when the charges were read against him…that would be worse than the rest combined.

  Seeing his grandparents disappointed had always hurt Del more than any physical punishment could.

  They stood when they saw him. “Querido,” Mami crooned, her hand brushing his cheek and a tear in her eye.

  “You shouldn’t have come.”

  “We wouldn’t be anywhere else,” his grandfather said. “Jury can see what kind of person a man is by what kind of family he’s from.”

  “This is just an arraignment. The judge will read the charges, I’ll enter my plea and they’ll set a court date. No jury.”

  “Querido, you said your rangers agreed that you did nothing wrong. This Garcia’s death, it was an accident.”

  He shuffled foot to foot. The last thing he wanted to do was get into a discussion about what was really happening here in the courthouse hallway. “Things have gotten a little complicated. There are more people involved, not just rangers. Nothing is exactly what it seems.”

  Papi thumped his cane on the floor. “What does that mean?”

  Del shifted his gaze left and right to see who might be watching. Or listening. “I can’t explain right now. Please, just go on home. Mom will be worried, being there alone. I’ll come by as soon as I can and fill you in.”

  “I don’t like this, son. Not one bit.”

&nb
sp; “I know, Pap. But I have to go check in before they call my case. Please. Take Mami home.”

  Walking away from his grandparents was almost as hard as watching Elisa drive away. His chest felt as if it had been filled with concrete, and a lump the size of Amarillo rose in his throat. He almost went back to them, realizing he hadn’t told them he loved them, but he only had nine minutes before his case was called.

  He laid his hand on the door to the room where his lawyer was supposed to be waiting to check him in. A siren screamed by outside, close. His ears tuned it in a second before he chastised himself for caring. He wasn’t a cop anymore.

  Someone clapped his shoulder from behind.

  Del turned. The cement in his chest settled lower. “You son of a bitch. Who are you?”

  Mr. Baseball, dressed today in a conservative pinstripe and carrying a briefcase, nodded down the hall.

  “I’m not going anywhere with you until you tell me who you are.”

  The man sauntered away, whistling. “I’m the man who just might be able to make your life worth living again.” He turned in a small conference room two doors down.

  Del checked his watch. Eight minutes. Swearing, he followed Mr. Mysterious. The man made himself comfortable at the conference room table, setting a file folder out in front of him.

  “Nothing more,” Del said, “until I know who you are.”

  The man straightened his tie. “You can call me Mr. Bradford.”

  “Who do you work for?”

  “The same person who used to employ you, only at a higher level. Uncle Sam.”

  “Could you be more specific?”

  “Do you want to play twenty questions, or do you want me to tell you how you can walk into that courtroom in—” he checked his watch “—seven minutes and clear your name.”

  “What are you going to do? Buy another judge?”

  “I don’t have to.” The man shoved the file across the table to Del.