The Baby Pursuit

by Laurie Paige

  “How?” He mocked her, but gently, knowing she hadn’t a clue to the reality of his life.

  One rainy night he’d stared at his father’s lifeless form at the morgue and known the old man would never make one of his false promises again, that they would never be the family he and his mother had hung their hopes on.

  He had watched the light dim and fade and finally flicker out in his mother who was ever the optimist, who had believed that this time they would make it as a family.

  And for a while, sometimes months, once a whole year, they would be that way, long enough for him to let his guard down and begin trusting again.

  That night that hope had died. Forever.

  He lifted the slender hand that was capable of so much. He didn’t want the light to die in her, too. Or even dim. If she thought she needed him for her happiness for a while, he would bear it. Then when she didn’t, he would leave.

  “No regrets,” he murmured, and planted a kiss in her palm and closed her fingers around it.

  “Never.”

  She pressed his hand to her cheek and slid it back and forth. The smooth warmth of her skin sent vibrations through him that hummed and echoed through his blood and made him remember how hope had once felt.

  “Are we going to spend the night?” he asked.

  “It’s too dark to return.”

  “Let’s make our bed.”

  They brought the blankets and saddles up to the cave and made a bed and pillows out of them. He retrieved the coffee and sandwiches from a saddlebag. They ate dinner in the light of a lone candle stuck on a small can.

  “Romantic,” he said, catching her gaze on him, her eyes glowing like crystals in the flickering light.

  “Works for me.”

  Her grin was teasing, perhaps somewhat mocking of his efforts at levity. He smiled, then finished his meal and polished off the coffee. “We didn’t save some for breakfast.”

  “I have crackers and orange juice with me. The juice is at the seep. The water will keep it cool.”

  “Good thinking.”

  “Well, a compliment from Sergeant Friday.”

  He reached for her. “You’ll regret those words before morning,” he told her.

  She settled into his lap as if made for him. “Are you going to torture me with kisses, do unspeakable things to my body and all that?”

  “You bet.”

  “Good.”

  They shared the toothbrush she’d stockpiled long ago, then the orange juice and peanut butter crackers. Vanessa yawned and stretched before mounting for the trip back to the ranch. The peace of the night after the wild lovemaking lingered inside her like the slumbering embers of an earlier crackling fire.

  A hand touched her shoulder, then a finger caressed her mouth. “Douse the glow,” he said. “You’ll set the woods on fire.”

  “I’m too happy.”

  His smile was quick, but she saw through it. There was something distant in him. She saw it in the bleakness in his eyes, as if he saw far into their future…and there wasn’t one.

  He doubted now, but he wouldn’t. Someday he would realize it was okay to dream again and to believe in them and their feelings. He was a challenge, this doubting man. Her dark knight with the heart of gold.

  At the paddock, they brushed down the horses and gave them each a bucket of oats before turning them out to pasture. Across the meadow, she saw Cruz working with one of the young cow ponies, teaching it how to cut and spin and move the cows where he wanted them to go.

  He saw them, too, and after a second, lifted his hand to return her wave. A blush flowed into her face. Cruz knew they had spent the night at the cave.

  “Your friend knows,” Dev said, stopping behind her and slipping his hands around her waist.

  “Yes.”

  “Does it bother you?”

  She twisted around. “Why should it? We’re consenting adults. Our personal life is no one’s business.”

  “Spoken like a modern woman, one with old-fashioned values. Shall we go face the music?”

  She laughed at the grim determination on his face. “We’ll go take a shower, then have a real breakfast.”

  “Yeah, our last meal before your father shoots us.”

  She laughed again at his dark humor. Slipping her hand into his, she matched her stride to his longer one while he shortened his for her. Together they walked to the hacienda, slipped around to the side door and into their rooms without spotting anyone.

  “Join me,” she invited, and led the way to her bathroom. She tossed her clothes into the hamper and stepped into the shower. After a minute, Dev joined her.

  “You have a most interesting birthmark,” he said, touching her hip.

  “It’s how we recognize a true Fortune heir. Most of us have it.”

  She turned to him eagerly, ready for a new experience in this wonderful thing between a man and woman.

  He examined the birthmark then took her face between his hands while the water splashed merrily over them. “Shall we?” he murmured, and hovered an inch above her lips as he waited for her reply.

  “I would be very disappointed if we didn’t.”

  “That’s why I came prepared.”

  He placed the foil packet in the soap dish and, taking up the bar, lathered them both all over. She formed a new concept about the idea of cleanliness.

  Two hours later, Ryan met in the study with the agent as usual. “What are you checking now?” he asked.

  “Bank accounts, personal financial history.”

  The agent was nothing if not succinct. Ryan hid his impatience in the face of the other man’s seemingly endless attention to detail. “And?”

  “There are some interesting facts that have turned up.”

  “What are they?”

  “I’d rather not discuss it now, sir. If you don’t mind.”

  The fact that this was said with unfailing courtesy, as always, also grated on his nerves. The agent stayed busy all the time, looking, checking, double-checking. Nothing was coming of it that he could see. He reined in the feelings of impotence and helplessness. If the FBI hadn’t given up, neither would he.

  “Fine.” He poured himself a cup of coffee and refreshed Dev’s mug from the coffeemaker in his office. “Perhaps we can talk about you and my daughter.”

  The agent didn’t move a muscle. Neither did he speak.

  Ryan thought he should have listened to Lily and not gone down this road. But he was concerned about Vanessa and he wasn’t about to back down in front of the younger man.

  “I, um, saw you returning to the house this morning…before the sun came up. Vanessa wasn’t at dinner last night. I didn’t know you had returned to the ranch.”

  The agent nodded.

  “I don’t want her hurt.”

  “Neither do I.”

  The man returned his stare without so much as a muscle twitch. “You ever play poker?” Ryan asked.

  For the first time a smile, somewhat rueful, broke over the stoic features. “No, sir, I never had the time or inclination to gamble with my money.”

  “Only with your life?”

  “I take calculated risks, not foolish ones.”

  “Hmm.” Ryan sipped the hot, strong coffee and mulled over how to gracefully exit this discussion. “Do you love her?” he asked suddenly.

  That brought a flash of emotion into the younger man’s eyes that startled him. For a second he looked into stark desolation, then it was gone.

  He had depth and secrets Ryan figured the agent didn’t share with anyone, not even with his lover, who happened to be his daughter. What a mess he was making of this interview, he acknowledged glumly. Lily had tried to warn him.

  “There are…feelings,” the agent admitted.

  A very cool customer. Ryan liked the man in spite of his worries about his daughter. He felt she was vulnerable right now due to the kidnapping. “Vanessa is very strong on family and all that entails, ties and loyalty, all that.”

>   Dev nodded. “I’m aware of that, sir.” He couldn’t for the life of him figure out where this conversation was going, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to volunteer anything to Vanessa’s father.

  The man was worried. Join the club. Dev was pretty worried himself. He couldn’t allow her to interfere with the investigation, but he couldn’t ignore her. Sometime during the night, he had decided he could juggle the two elements of his life, but he wouldn’t mingle them. The hours they shared would have to be taken from their real lives, but that would be okay. He could handle it.

  “There is one thing,” her father said.

  Ryan watched him with that hawkish gaze that could easily wring a confession from guilty souls such as his young sons…and a man old enough to know better but who was lover to his daughter.

  “I ask that, if the time ever comes, you let her down easy. Will you do that?”

  Dev sorted through the confusion the words caused. If the time ever comes? It was a surety. She would get tired of playing games with him at some point. When it happened, she would be truthful with him, but gentle. And he would let her go as gracefully as he could.

  It was an easy promise to make. “Of course.” He picked up a tablet. It was time for business. “Did the sheriff and his men go over every inch of ground around the main house?”

  Eight

  “Just what are we looking for?”

  Vanessa stretched her weary back. Bending over for hours, staring at the ground, was not her idea of an investigation, especially after spending the night lying on the ground. Although being in Dev’s arms had been heavenly.

  “Clues.”

  “This has all been done before,” she reminded him. “Wyatt and his men were very thorough.”

  Dev straightened and looked at her, but said nothing.

  She sighed. “Yeah, the spoiled brat syndrome.”

  He chuckled. “The Fortune impatience.”

  “That sounds better.”

  She sat on one of the boulders beside the dry creek in the front courtyard and shook a pebble from her shoe. Dev patiently turned over every rock and fallen leaf. His white shirt strained across his shoulders as he bent to his task again. His jeans outlined the hard thighs and buttocks.

  Her adult life had been more attuned to books and thinking than the physical, but now she found herself acutely aware of his body and her own. She wanted to be near him all the time. He never left her thoughts.

  Dreamily, she watched as he slowly filtered through every phase of their lives and the daily routine of the ranch. He knew every chore to be done and who performed it. He knew who went where and when they came back. He knew things he wasn’t telling her.

  Some of it was about them.

  She had tried to tactfully draw him out about his morning chats with her father, but he only smiled and shook his head at her inquisition.

  But his eyes…they made her want to weep. Instead of their intimacy dispelling the loneliness, it had only increased, drawing him deeper into himself even while he smiled and teased her.

  Oh, if only you could see what I see, she wanted to cry. What a fine, decent person you are, the life we could share, the future we could build…

  But she couldn’t tell him. He would have to find the truth for himself if they were to ever have a chance.

  “So take what the day presents and make the most of it,” she said aloud.

  He glanced her way again, his eyes dark and quiet and so very gentle in his regard of her. He broke her heart.

  Sobered by her thoughts, she started searching once more. They worked until noon, then stopped in the glaring heat of the day and retreated inside. Dev worked alone in the office after a quick lunch. When she took him a fresh glass of iced tea at three, she overheard him talking to his boss.

  “No, nothing,” he said. He murmured a thanks to her, then went back to his phone conversation.

  She lingered, wanting to be near him. The futile search had deepened her anguish about Baby Bryan. She couldn’t—wouldn’t believe he was dead. But she worried about him.

  “The end of the month,” Dev said. He flicked her a glance before running a finger down the desk calendar.

  Her heart gave a giant lurch. She pressed a hand to her chest. Dev frowned slightly. She turned to leave, knowing he didn’t like her invading the office.

  “Wait,” he said.

  She glanced over her shoulder. He motioned her to come back. She crossed the room, her feet heavy. She could sense bad news a mile away.

  He looped one arm around her waist while he finished his conversation. When he hung up, he pulled her into his lap. Surprised, she leaned against the chair arm and watched his eyes roam her face.

  “It won’t be the end of the world,” he said quietly, “when I leave.”

  “When?”

  “You heard.” His eyes scolded her for refusing to see the truth.

  “The end of the month.” She repeated his words. “Then you’ll be assigned elsewhere?”

  He hesitated. “I’m already working on other things.”

  She couldn’t hide her surprise. “What?”

  “An old case that recently reopened. I’m sifting through reports, looking for the odd tidbit that might tell us something to go with the new information.”

  “Was it a kidnapping?”

  He shook his head. “Gun running.”

  “That sounds dangerous.”

  He smiled and rubbed a strand of hair between his thumb and finger. “All life is like that.”

  “Yours was. It doesn’t have to be that way.” She wanted desperately to convince him. “There can be peace and contentment. There can be shared goals and mutual trust as well as respect.”

  His eyes were kind, but disbelieving. “For some.”

  “But not for you.” She didn’t know how to break through thirty-seven years of doubt.

  “Not for my partner, my best friend,” he said. “He died, taking a shot for me. He left a wife and two kids behind. When I first joined the FBI, the agent I replaced had lost his wife and kid when the bad guys came after him at his home.”

  She made soothing sounds and wished she could bring rest to his tortured spirit. “That isn’t common. Very few families of law enforcement officials have ever been subjected to violence because of their spouses’ jobs.”

  “But some are. I vowed never to allow that to happen to anyone I knew—”

  “By never letting anyone get that close,” she ended, the sadness dipping deep within her. “No one could hurt the person you love because you decided not to love anyone. Except,” she added, “you made an error, Mr. FBI man, you fell in love with me.”

  A shadow dropped over his face. “We became lovers.”

  She laid her fingers over his lips, then lingered to trace the outline, recalling how much pleasure he could give with his mouth…

  “Stop it,” he ordered, giving her a shake.

  “Stop remembering how much we’ve shared? Never, Dev. There is nothing you can do to diminish our time together. Please don’t be sorry.” She cupped his beloved face between her hands. “Promise me you won’t be sorry.”

  She held his gaze, saw the struggle in his eyes, felt the lowering sensation inside when he at last smiled in that heart-twisting way he had.

  “I’ll never have regrets. I told you that.”

  “But do you believe it?”

  He kissed her for an answer.

  At five, Dev yawned and pushed his hat off his forehead. Vanessa ignored the sweat meandering between her breasts. The air was dead still. The temperature was in the hundreds…again—the tenth straight day of high heat. Ranchers were worried about their cattle, farmers about their crops.

  “I give up,” he said aloud.

  Vanessa rolled her eyes. “The FBI never gives up. It’s in the code.”

  “Well, I’m retiring for the day, then.”

  “Huh.”

  She continued her hunt along the ground between the house and palov
erde. Dev had said it was probably too far away from the windows, but she reasoned that the kidnapper might have stood in the light shade, such as it was from the thin bladed leaves of the desert tree, until his accomplice had signaled him to get the baby.

  Noticing one of the tiny spotlights was slanted toward the ground instead of up into the tree, she stopped her search, plopped on a rock and leaned over to see if she could bend it into the correct position.

  Yes, it moved easily. Satisfied at doing something useful, she huffed out a breath that seemed as hot as all of Texas was these days. Crossing her arms on her knees, she rested her chin on them. Staring into the gravel around the spotlight, she noticed a coppery gleam among the stones.

  She picked it up and studied it. “Dev, come here. I’ve found something.”

  “What?”

  “A rowel from a spur. It has a medallion from a rodeo mounted on one side. The medallion is dated last year. ‘Calf roping champion,’ it says. Hmm.”

  “Don’t pick it up,” he said.

  “Too late.”

  He strode over, whipped a plastic bag from his pocket and told her to drop it in.

  She did with a grimace. “I probably messed up any fingerprints, didn’t I?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.”

  His noncommittal answer fueled her disgust with herself. She knew better than to touch evidence with her bare hands. The worry about Baby Bryan, never far from her mind, rose to haunt her. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  He hooked a finger under her chin. “Don’t beat yourself up about it. Let’s go to town and see what we can find out about this.” He held up the bag.

  “Perhaps I should stay here. I’ll only be in the way.”

  “Don’t go humble on me, Beauty. I’ll think you’ve been taken over by aliens.”

  After giving him a scolding punch on the shoulder, she went with him to his car. A little more than an hour later, they were ensconced on high stools at the crime lab in San Antonio.

  Charlie Fong, the crime lab specialist, held the rowel in a clamp and studied the medallion. “I’ll run prints first. You want me to check for blood, too?”

  “If you don’t mind.”

  Charlie grinned. “Well, I do, since it’s past time for me to go home and I’m hungry, but I already called my wife and warned her I’ll be late. She said I had better eat before coming home. She won’t save my supper.”