The Love of a Lawman, The Callister Trilogy, Book 3

by Jeffrey, Anna

  He was so close she could smell his cologne, smell the coffee on his breath, hear the soft lisp of his tongue when he spoke. "In a roundabout way," she said, "it's Paul I'm talking about. How me being his sister could damage you."

  "I'd rather talk about how sweet your lips are."

  "You're a Pied Piper, John Bradshaw. It isn't fair I'm such a soft touch."

  "Hmm.... Thank God for that."

  Her misgivings dissolved like candy in the warmth of his sweet mouth. She couldn't refuse to kiss him back. His hand slipped under her sweater and in one quick movement unhooked her bra. The same hand closed over her breast as his tongue played with hers. His thumb brushed her nipple and a familiar urgency called out from a deep place in her belly.

  He cupped her shoulder, eased her back and pushed his knee between her thighs. She was such a slut. Already she had grown hot and swollen and damp. "You really are a devil," she whispered when they stopped to breathe.

  "I almost went crazy when I thought I'd lost you," he murmured. "Don't you know I need you?"

  She sniffed away gathering tears. "You had lunch with Rita Mitchell."

  "Not lunch. Not even a full cup of coffee."

  His deft fingers moved down and undid her jeans, pushed them down her hips. "Lift up," he said and she lifted her bottom for him to slide her jeans and panties past her hips. He slipped them off one leg, then undid his fly.

  His erection made a tent in his boxers. She opened the fly, freeing him. His penis, swollen and roped with full veins, stood like a monument bronzed by the firelight, visibly throbbing, and it was all hers. She closed her hand around him, sat up and took the bulbous head into her mouth, ran her tongue over the velvety cleft, tasted his salty moisture.

  A grunt, low and deep, came from his chest and his body stiffened. "I don't know if I can stand that," he choked out. His hands closed on her shoulders and he pulled her up. "It's been too long since it was inside you."

  He wrapped his arms around her and rolled her to her back. In no time, through a tangle of arms and legs and denim fabric and with her help, he slid his boxers down and rolled a condom onto his turgid shaft. He pushed into her and the utter bliss of him filling her made her gasp.

  His head lifted and eyes dark with passion looked into hers. "Okay?"

  Oh, she was so okay words eluded her. She sniffled and nodded.

  "Then stay with me," he whispered. He clutched her bottom, pressed her closer and seated himself. She lifted her knees and took him deeper. A guttural response came from the back of his throat and thrilled her. He braced himself over her, hooked his forearms behind her knees, spreading them wide. She lay helpless beneath him, his long, thick erection buried to the hilt, but she wasn't afraid. He would never hurt her and delicious sensations were rushing through her. She would do anything to please him.

  For a few seconds, he held himself motionless, looking into her eyes. "I love you."

  She thought her heart might burst with joy. How could she have ever believed she could be happy without him? The tears that had been hovering trailed from the corners of her eyes, past her temples. "I love you more."

  "Not possible." He began to move, in and out with a slow, steady rhythm, the tip of him touching her deepest place with each stroke. Their souls met and she felt the moment they became a unit. She lost count of his thrusts, lost touch with time, could think of nothing but the incredible friction as the root of him drove against her again and again. She wanted to squirm, her hips wanted to pump, but couldn't, pinned as she was. Lightning began to skitter inside her, sending fire everywhere, pushing her to the edge of a steep cliff. His mouth moved over her face, her throat. His voice murmured sexy words in her ear, whispered how much he loved making love to her.

  Her head spun as she teetered on the edge, panting and desperate. "John... oh, please..."

  His pace picked up. His chest heaved, his breath rasped in her ear. He thrust harder and she began to spasm. She dug her fingers into his biceps and hung on as he flung her into a great abyss and she cried his name as she fell.

  Then she was floating in a mindless purple haze. She felt his body turn rigid, felt him buck, heard him shout out, caught him as he sprawled on top of her.

  They lay for quiet minutes, until the last embers of the fire within them died, until the last contraction made him shiver. She loved knowing they had come to this moment together.

  "Godalmighty," he mumbled. He slipped to her side and took her with him, cocooning her in the nest of his arms. "Christ." His chest heaved for several breaths. "Want to know what I think?"

  "I want to know everything you think."

  "This feels a lot better in bed without our clothes.... Not that it felt bad."

  She giggled and nuzzled his chest, inhaling the scent of him in his clothes. A pulse thumped in the hollow at the base of his throat, just above the neck of his T-shirt. "Want to know what I think?"

  He grunted.

  "I think you're right. We should try it again. Ava won't be home until after church tomorrow. Do you want to stay the night?"

  "I thought you'd never ask. I've had dreams about waking up with you."

  "I'm a witch in the morning."

  "Haven't I ever told you how good I am at witch-handling? I'm as good with witches as I am with horses."

  "Are you hungry?"

  "For food?"

  "Soup? It's homemade."

  "Sounds good. I might need the energy later. 'Cause I intend to fuck you 'til you beg me to stop."

  She smiled and ran her hand through his soft hair. "Never happen, cowboy."

  They gathered themselves and while Isabelle went to the kitchen to reheat the soup she had made the day before, John added logs and stoked the fire in the fireplace.

  The rain had increased in intensity and beat in a roar on the house's tin roof. They ate on the sofa in front of the fireplace, then stretched out their legs, placing their bare feet in front of the flames.

  "I can't think of a thing to do but go to bed," John said.

  She laughed. "I can. I have to take the dogs out."

  He groaned. "Awww, shit. I'll do it."

  "I should let you since it's your fault they're here, but your clothes are still damp. I don't want you to take pneumonia. I'll only be a minute. You can warm up the cold sheets."

  * * *

  While she took the dogs out, John cleared away their dishes and put them in the sink. Then he wiped the counter and straightened the clutter they had left in the kitchen, the whole time his mind on the coming hours. Lord, if sex with Isabelle got any better, he would end up so pussy-whipped he couldn't function.

  In her bedroom, he picked up the picture of her and Paul as children, rubbing the scar on his stomach as he studied it. Five weeks had passed since the bar fight. Enough time for a wound to heal up and hair over, but John hadn't forgotten how close the knife slash had come to being serious. As he looked at the picture of Paul this time, he saw him from a different perspective.

  He began to undress. He wanted to be in bed when she returned so he could watch her take off her clothes.

  He had just pulled off his T-shirt when she came into the room. Her gaze landed on the scar, still red and angry, on his abdomen.

  She came to him and placed her palm on it. "Oh, John. I had no idea.... When you said he cut you, you made it sound like a scratch."

  He picked up her hand and kissed it. "It's well now."

  She looked up at him, her eyes glistening. "This is what I mean? How can we—"

  "Shh. One step at a time, remember?"

  They crawled under the blue quilt and he wrapped his arms around her. She kissed his shoulder. "Paul really isn't a bad person," she said.

  John's feelings about Paul Rondeau spanned a wide spectrum. "Tell me something, Isabelle. I know he's your brother, but he's a grown man. Why do you feel so responsible for him? Other than patching up the barn, I can't see that he does much for you. I want to understand your feelings."

  "I o
we him, John. Pa was so mean to him and no one ever helped him."

  "If he was mean to Paul, wasn't he mean to you, too?"

  "Not in the same way. He beat Paul. He used to say he was teaching Paul to be a man, but what he was really doing was destroying my brother's future."

  She turned her back, but he kept her close against him, his arm around her waist, his knees fitted against the backs of hers. At least he wasn't hearing what he feared he might about Izzy and her father.

  "My mother always took up for me," she went on, "but she just sort of abandoned Paul. Fortunately, he was tough. By the time he was about fourteen, he was a match for Pa. One day in the barn, Pa went at him over something, probably something that happened in the bar that had nothing to do with Paul. The next thing I knew, Paul had hit him with a shovel. Pa staggered backward against the stall. Paul had just come back from hunting and had his rifle with him. I was terrified. I thought Paul was going to shoot him."

  John frowned. Even as bad as the story sounded, it didn't seem enough to warrant the kind of devotion Isabelle had for her brother. "What else?"

  "What was so bad was Paul had no way to get away from him. In the summer he could run off into the forest, but in the winter he was trapped."

  Her voice became a dull monotone. "It was such a nightmare in the house. Pa would come in from the woods around November or December and it was nothing but hell until he went back in June. School was the only place we could escape to. Neither Paul or I had a car. He had no friends except Merle Keeton, who did have a car. And I had no one but Billy."

  "Child abuse has been against the law for years. Why didn't you go to the sheriff?"

  "John, I didn't even know who the sheriff was. And whoever he was, in Callister there was no telling how he might have handled a child-abuse complaint. Besides, Rondeaus didn't hang out around the sheriff's office."

  John's imagination didn't stretch far enough to picture Izzy's childhood. He couldn't imagine a man being mean to his kids, though as sheriff he had seen it firsthand. He had been out on a couple of domestic-abuse calls, one where a grown man had severely beat his wife and kids. He felt the same emotions tonight as he had felt then, disgust and frustration.

  "So you see, neither one of us could stay home. I had terrible grades in school and no one believed I would ever graduate. I started nagging at Billy about leaving Callister. Everyone thinks it was Billy who lured me away, but that isn't true. He left here because I wanted to. He wasn't hard to persuade. His life at home wasn't great either."

  "You were kids. I don't know how you survived."

  "Billy wasn't. He was twenty. We went to Nevada and looked for ranch work. We had it figured out that we'd get jobs on some spread about as remote as it could possibly be. You can get completely lost on some of those desert ranches. It could have been dangerous for him because I was underage. After I turned eighteen, we left Nevada and went to Arizona, then Southern California, then back to Arizona. Finally ended up in Texas."

  "Training horses?"

  "Yes. I loved it and Billy followed along. In those days he always followed along. We didn't have this great romance, but we sort of occupied the same cage and we depended on each other.

  "I was so grateful to him I tolerated worse treatment from him than I should have and stayed with him too long. Maybe things could have been okay if he had been able to resist all that we found ourselves exposed to. Once we got to Texas, a world I never dreamed I would be a part of became our livelihood. More money than you can imagine, plus booze and drugs. Billy jumped into that huge mud hole with both feet. It's funny how life comes full circle. By the time Billy left me, he behaved a lot like Pa."

  "He wasn't mean to Ava—"

  "No. He didn't have that much interest in Ava."

  She paused again and John heard her sniffle. "So that's my sad tale. If Billy hadn't become such a problem, I wouldn't have lost touch with Paul. I didn't even come back here when he and Sherry got married because Pa was still alive then. I hated the idea of seeing him."

  "I remember when Paul and Sherry got married," John said. "I was in college, but I was home for the summer."

  "Paul seemed to be getting his act together as long as he had Sherry and his kids. When she left him, he became a real mess. He's always been a maverick, but never mean. I can't desert him. He deserves to be saved. He deserves to be loved by someone in his family."

  He drew her against his body, wrapped her with his arms and legs, and buried his face against her neck, as if he could shield her from hurt with his body. "It's a good thing your old man's already dead. I'd have to kill the sonofabitch."

  Chapter 24

  John's week began with him in high spirits. Today as he made coffee on top of the filing cabinet in the corner, he was happier than he had been in months, maybe years, maybe ever. Saturday night he and Izzy had spoken their feelings aloud for the first time. In a matter of a weekend his life had made a sea change.

  He finally understood Isabelle's devotion to her brother and now knew that if a man wanted her, Paul came with her. He could learn to live with that. He believed her when she said Paul wasn't hopeless.

  Typically, Mondays were spent preparing cases to be heard by Judge Morrison when he came up from Boise on Wednesday. John had an organized, disciplined mind, which had taken him to good grades in high school and college, even while being distracted by rodeoing. The same discipline and organization skills had earned Judge Morrison's respect and John did all he could to maintain that status. This week there was one domestic-abuse and one burglary case to be cleared. While he waited for the coffee, he opened the file folders and glanced through them, sorting and planning.

  Disciplined or not, he couldn't keep his thoughts from drifting back to the weekend. After making love and talking for hours Saturday night, he and Isabelle had awakened together and stayed in bed 'til noon, dozing and making love more until the threat of Ava coming home from Nan Gilbert's house forced them to get up and dress.

  When Ava returned, the three of them had gone to Boise, where they watched Finding Nemo, a movie that, along with Ava's long explanation, gave him a new perspective on fish.

  While he worked on the case files, a serious plan for his future cooked in his head. Election of a real sheriff would take place in the fall. He had only a few months to find a career at which he would make enough money to pay his child support and provide for a family of three. He needed the increase in income because he couldn't imagine his future without Izzy and Ava in it. He intended to ask her to marry him. He wanted to be able to assure her that he could take care of her and Ava.

  Promising opportunities were available to him. One position in particular interested him—sales for a lariat manufacturing company, with the possibility of early promotion to management. An old friend from his rodeo days had told him the company execs were chomping at the bit at the chance to hire an ex-rodeoer who had placed in the money. If he took the job, some travel would be required, but there was a good chance he could continue to live in Callister. That would work out just fine. Izzy could continue with her horses.

  As he planned, a possessiveness about the sheriff's job niggled at him and he worried about who would replace him. Even with his fumbling inexperience in law enforcement, he had done some things for the office he deemed worthwhile. He had implemented a dependable 9-1-1 service—key word, "dependable."

  On a few occasions, he had been able to truly help some folks and they had shown emotional displays of gratitude. A few times someone had thanked him by baking him something and one elderly woman had knitted him a wool scarf. He wasn't supposed to take gifts and he knew that, but how could a man who lived on cafe food refuse one of Georgia Plunkett's chocolate cakes or a plate of Merry Jordan's chocolate oatmeal cookies? No one with any sense could view simple gifts of that type as bribes.

  Beyond helping people, he liked being the voice of sanity in an often-insane world. He believed he had built goodwill and earned the confidence of the loc
al people. If he ran for the office, he might win.

  Forget it, he told himself. Callister County was poorer than a Third World country and almost as backward. No way would the county ever pay the sheriff a salary that could be called a decent living. The low pay was the major reason few wanted the office and the ones who did took bribes. Jim Higgins was a good example of that very problem.

  He had tried unsuccessfully to convince the commissioners if they wanted a sheriff who had some smarts and who didn't take money under the table like Higgins had done, they had to pay a living wage. But, with the exception of Luke McRae, the commissioners were mossbacks determined to fend off the outside world and its customs. With no crime of great consequence in Callister, they reasoned, why did they need a professional lawman to be the sheriff?

  He kept his old friend's phone number and the scant information he had about the lariat sales job in a file in his desk drawer. Finding out the salary and more details about the job was, at the moment, more enticing than studying the case of a wife beater or a petty thief, so he set aside the court case files and began to punch in his friend's phone number.

  He heard the distinctive sound of the metal door from the outside open and someone came into the anteroom whistling a tune. Rooster coming to work.

  As he listened through the receiver to the burr on the opposite end of the phone line, the deputy appeared in the doorway and leaned a shoulder against the jamb as he usually did when he had something to say. His face looked more dolorous than usual. "Mornin', John T."

  Getting no answer to his phone call, John hung up and slipped the folder labeled job file into his middle desk drawer. "Mornin', Rooster." He walked over to the farthest filing cabinet and filled his mug with coffee. "What's up?"

  "Thought I'd better tell you Mae Hamlin came in yesterday. She's worried about Frank."

  Frank Hamlin, the local Fish & Game officer. John hadn't seen much of him of late, but had known him for years. Frank had moved to Callister before John left home for college. "What's he done?" John sipped, the coffee warming him from the inside out.