The Marshal's Hostage

by Delores Fossen

  Or cry.

  There were so many emotions whirling inside her. Old memories that suddenly didn’t feel so old because of the kiss in Webb’s office. She couldn’t even berate herself for it or swear that it wouldn’t happen again because one of the big moments of a day filled with big moments was that she knew she wasn’t over Dallas.

  Never had been.

  And wishing things were different wasn’t going to make her feelings go away. Besides, Joelle wasn’t even sure she wanted things to be different. Not her feelings, anyway.

  Speaking of the devil, she heard movement in the hall, lifted her head and spotted Dallas in the doorway. He’d obviously finished his phone call, and with his attention fastened to her, he propped his shoulder against the jamb. He stared at her but didn’t come closer.

  “Feel up to coming into the kitchen?” he asked, his voice low. He tipped his head toward Kirby’s door. “Don’t want to wake him. And besides, you need to eat.”

  She did. Her stomach was growling, and she agreed with the part about not waking Kirby. Still, it took a little effort for her to get off the bed. Joelle didn’t bother with her shoes. Barefoot, she just followed Dallas to the kitchen.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked. She didn’t think his expression was solely from the fatigue and the ordeal they’d just gone through.

  He didn’t answer her right away. Dallas pulled out a glass dish of leftover spaghetti and meatballs and put it in the microwave. “Owen will be out of jail soon. His lawyer is already working on posting his bail.”

  Joelle glanced at the time on the stove clock, groaned and sank down on one of the stools at the breakfast bar. “He spent only a few hours in a holding cell.”

  Dallas lifted his shoulder. “He can afford good lawyers. And obviously bail. Besides, the charges weren’t as serious as they should have been. Only obstruction of justice and making a false statement about the fake knife that he turned over to the marshals.”

  No attempted murder charge, but then it would have been hard to pin that on him. For now. However, Joelle could maybe get those white-collar crimes she’d uncovered to stick.

  “What about the real knife, the one with your prints?” she asked.

  “Owen has agreed to turn it over and claims he was only holding it back because he was afraid it would implicate you.”

  What a snake. He was holding it back to blackmail them. “You’ll tell your boss the truth?”

  Dallas nodded. “When the results are back. I’d like to delay the charges brought against us.”

  Yes, and there would be charges. Joelle didn’t see a way around that.

  “What about Kirby?” She hated to bring it up, but it was his DNA they’d found on the handkerchief, and the marshals would have to deal with that.

  She silently cursed Owen for adding this stress to a man who could be on his deathbed.

  “Saul’s going to wait on the handkerchief, too,” Dallas explained. His breath and expression were weary. “But after all the test results are in on the real knife, Saul will have no choice but to question Kirby. And maybe file charges,” he added in a mumble.

  Yes. That meant they only had a couple of days at most to try to find the real killer. It might not get Dallas, Kirby and her out of hot water, but delivering a killer to the marshals would end the threats against them and maybe stop Kirby and Dallas from being arrested for murder.

  And that brought her to another concern.

  “Once the governor finds out that there’ll be charges brought against me, I seriously doubt he’ll give me permission to continue this investigation.”

  Dallas looked back at her, the corner of his mouth lifting into a weary smile. “Guess you’ll have to go rogue like me. Because I’m not stopping until I clear Kirby’s name.”

  “And your own.” When Dallas turned around, her gaze fell to his rodeo belt where his badge should have been. “I’m sorry.”

  “Couldn’t be helped.” He said it offhanded enough, but she saw the hurt in his eyes.

  Dallas took the dish from the microwave, put in on the counter between them and grabbed some forks. “I say let’s skip the plates.”

  As hungry as she was, Joelle thought that was a great idea, but when he passed her one of the forks, his hand brushed against hers. With everything else going on, the last thing that should cross her mind was his touch.

  But it did anyway.

  Dallas didn’t ease back, either. He stood there, his index finger covering hers. “I’m thinking this is a bad idea,” he drawled.

  “A terrible one,” she confirmed.

  Of course, that didn’t stop her from leaning forward. Dallas leaned in, too. His mouth brushed against hers. It barely qualified as a kiss, but because it was Dallas’s mouth, it slammed through her. Not all pleasant, either, since the brush-kiss only made her ache for him.

  “We always were good at this,” he mumbled, and the movement caused more touching of his lips against hers.

  “Too good. You taught me how to kiss,” Joelle reminded him.

  “Must be why you’re so good at it,” he joked.

  Dallas chuckled. More movement. More touching. More barely qualifying kisses that were still making her burn. Despite the burn, despite everything, it felt good to be with him like this. And even better than good, it felt right.

  It wasn’t.

  But Joelle was suddenly having a hard time remembering why it was wrong.

  He slid his hand around her neck, and while keeping it in place, Dallas came around the breakfast counter and eased her off the seat.

  Right into his arms.

  He didn’t kiss her though. With his forehead bunched up, he just looked down at her as if trying to decide what to do.

  “You’re not going to say no, are you?” His forehead bunching up even more.

  “No to what?” she asked.

  “Anything that happens between us in the next few minutes,” he clarified.

  Oh.

  That.

  Joelle shook her head. “There won’t be any nos from me in the next few minutes.”

  Maybe not ever when it came to Dallas. And she wasn’t exactly proud that Dallas was her hormonal Achilles’ heel. It wasn’t hard to understand why. He stood there, all cowboy, in his jeans and boots. He’d left his Stetson in the entry, but that only allowed her to see his rumpled, bedroom hair.

  Bedroom eyes, too.

  Ironic, since they’d never actually had sex in a bedroom. Every time they’d been together at the ranch, they’d had to sneak away so that Webb or someone else wouldn’t see them.

  Dallas cursed, squeezed his eyes shut, and she thought he might indeed back away. But he didn’t. His eyes opened, he dragged her to him and kissed her the way her body was begging for him to kiss her.

  It was like stepping back in time. But better, too. They weren’t the same people they’d been back then, and Dallas somehow brought all of that and their shared past right into that kiss. Joelle heard herself make a helpless sound of surrender, and she was lost. Willingly.

  Dallas brought her closer to him until they were wrapped in each other’s arms. Until everything was hot and spinning out of control. The spinning got worse when he kissed her neck.

  And lower.

  He pushed aside the gold heart necklace and kissed her throat.

  Then lower.

  To the tops of her breasts, which he kissed through her clothes.

  She’d known that nothing could stay simple with them. A kiss couldn’t just be a kiss. And when he deepened it and slid his hand between them to touch her breasts, Joelle figured they were only minutes away from hauling each other off to bed.

  She fought to remember why that wasn’t a good idea, but the buzzing sound cut through her thoughts. Through the heat.

  Dallas cursed, pulled back and yanked the phone from his pocket. “What now?” he snarled.

  Joelle glanced at the screen, expecting to see a message from one of his brothers or maybe his boss. The
re was a lot going on with the investigation, and there’d hopefully be updates. Good ones. She’d had her fill of bad news for a lifetime.

  But the message was from Owen.

  They groaned in unison. “What does he want now?” Joelle asked.

  Dallas held up the screen for her to have a better look. “Here’s something you should know,” the message said.

  Joelle felt her heart thud against her chest, and it wasn’t a residual effect of the kiss. She shouldn’t have such a reaction to anything Owen might say, but her mind immediately went in a bad direction.

  But then she shook her head.

  Owen didn’t know about that.

  “It’s probably another threat to get you to marry him,” Dallas mumbled, and he clicked on the attachment that Owen had sent with the message.

  It seemed to take an eternity for the page to load, and it wasn’t a photograph as Joelle had originally thought. She wouldn’t have put it past Owen to show them more so-called evidence that would send them to jail.

  But it was a document of some kind.

  “What the hell?” Dallas said, and he positioned his phone closer so he could have a better look.

  Joelle went to his side so she could do that same thing, and when she saw the wording at the top of the document, all the air vanished from her lungs. She staggered back, and in the same motion, she caught onto Dallas’s wrist. Trying to stop him from reading it.

  Oh, God.

  It was too late.

  Dallas’s gaze slashed to hers, his eyes already narrowed while he shook his head. Everything about him was demanding an explanation.

  “It’s a birth certificate,” he said.

  She had no choice but to nod. Joelle tried to speak, tried to explain, but her throat clamped shut.

  Dallas had trouble speaking, too. The shock and maybe the outrage had turned his jaw to iron. He got right in her face. “You have a baby?”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Dallas felt as if someone had punched him.

  He wanted Joelle to look at the document on his phone and shout out a firm denial that she had a child. He wanted her to say it was another of Owen’s tricks. A lie meant to tear them apart so he could get some measure of revenge for his failed attempt to get Joelle to marry him.

  But Joelle didn’t deny anything.

  She just stood there, shaking her head, while every drop of color drained from her face.

  Hell.

  It was true.

  Joelle had a baby.

  Cursing, Dallas forced himself to look at the document again, and his attention zipped over the lines. It was a birth certificate, all right.

  Amber Reese Tate.

  Joelle was listed as the mother. The info on the father had been left blank, but Reese was Dallas’s middle name. Then he quickly did the math. The baby had been born fifteen and a half years ago.

  Seven months after Joelle had left Rocky Creek.

  And him.

  “She’s my baby,” Dallas heard himself mumble. But not a baby. A teenager.

  Joelle was still shaking her head, and tears spilled down her cheeks. Normally, those tears would have sent him reaching for her. So he could comfort her. But he didn’t want to comfort her now. He wanted to wring her neck.

  “You kept my child from me,” he said.

  “I didn’t,” she said, her voice hoarse and raw.

  He showed her the document again and dared her to repeat that lie.

  “I didn’t keep her from you,” Joelle repeated.

  She yanked something from her blouse. The heart-shaped locket, and she opened it. On the left side of the heart was a baby’s picture. His picture was on the right, exactly where he’d put it sixteen years ago when he’d given it to her.

  So it was the same locket.

  Before he’d seen that birth certificate, Dallas might have asked her why she still wore it after all these years, but there was only one thing he wanted to know now.

  “Where is she?” he demanded, pointing to the picture.

  Joelle’s breath rattled in her throat. “She died.”

  Nothing could have prepared him for that.

  Nothing.

  Dallas stumbled back and probably would have fallen to his knees if he hadn’t caught on to the counter.

  “Amber was born nearly two months early,” Joelle continued, speaking in a whisper. “She only lived a few hours.”

  The tears were coming faster now, streaking down her face, but Dallas still couldn’t go to her. The pain was almost unbearable. He’d fathered a child. A child he’d never seen, never known about. And he couldn’t do either of those things, ever.

  Because his child had died.

  Dallas had so many questions firing through his head. Why hadn’t Joelle told him? And why the hell had he learned about this from Owen? How had Owen gotten his filthy hands on the birth certificate? Dallas had wanted answers to all of that—but dealing with Joelle was first on the list.

  “The doctors did everything they could to save her,” Joelle went on. She blindly fumbled behind her, located the chair and sat back down. “But she was just too weak.” Her voice broke. “She was buried on my eighteenth birthday.”

  Dallas could practically see the images of that. Joelle, no more than a kid herself, burying a child. Their child. It must have broken her heart, the way it was doing to him now, but Dallas still couldn’t go to her.

  Not with this anger and hurt stabbing through him.

  “You should have told me you were carrying my child,” he finally managed to say. His teeth were clenched. Every muscle in his body was so stiff he was in physical pain.

  “I considered it,” Joelle said. “But I also considered what you would have done if I’d told you.”

  “I would have married you!” he practically shouted.

  “Exactly. You would have married me and tossed away your scholarship. You wouldn’t have become a marshal.”

  “You don’t know that. I would have found a way to do both, but you didn’t even give me a chance.”

  She paused, gathered her breath. “I was going to tell you. I saw her face after she was born, and I decided that you should know. But she never even opened her eyes, Dallas.”

  Hell. Each word was like a knife to the heart.

  “I should have been there,” he insisted.

  “I thought I was protecting you,” Joelle insisted right back.

  He jabbed his index finger at her. “You weren’t. You were keeping a secret that wasn’t yours to keep. I fathered her, and I should have had the chance to see her.”

  The pain crushed him, hard, and it mixed with another surge of anger that was stronger than the first. Dallas wasn’t sure how to deal with it, but he knew he didn’t want any interruptions. Unfortunately, he heard the movement in the hall and snapped toward the visitor, figuring it was Kirby’s nurse, Jackie Hall. It was, but she wasn’t alone.

  Kirby was with her.

  He was leaning against the nurse, but he was on the verge of falling so Dallas rushed to him. “You shouldn’t be out of bed.”

  “Had to,” Kirby mumbled. “Heard you arguing.”

  “I’m sorry,” Joelle said, going to him. “It’s all right.”

  “No, it’s not.” Kirby dragged in a ragged breath. “I knew about the baby, but I didn’t tell you, either.”

  Dallas swung his gaze back to her, but Joelle shook her head. “You knew?” she asked Kirby.

  “Highly suspected,” he confirmed. “And I didn’t do a thing to encourage you to tell Dallas.”

  Damn. How could these two people—who supposedly cared about him—do something like this?

  How?

  Dallas was sure they didn’t have the right answer because it wasn’t right, plain and simple.

  “I went to visit Joelle,” Kirby said, his voice getting weaker with each word. “To check on her and make sure things were going okay with her foster family. But they were in the backyard when I got there, and before
they spotted me I overheard them talking about a baby.”

  Joelle made a sound as if trying to recall that. “You heard me say I was pregnant?”

  “Not exactly, but I put one and one together. I also did some other math. You were seventeen, and Dallas was a year older. An adult in the eyes of the law.”

  Her breath became thin. “But Dallas and I had been lovers for months, well before he turned eighteen. And the baby was probably conceived when we were both underage.”

  “Yeah,” Kirby conceded. “I’m not saying it was right, but you were a ward of the state then, and I didn’t want anyone trying to make an example out of Dallas by filing charges against him.”

  “Oh, mercy,” she mumbled. Dallas wanted to mumble something much harsher.

  “I was wrong not to tell you what I suspected,” Kirby added, looking at Dallas now. “So if you’ve got to blame somebody, son, blame me.”

  He didn’t want to blame anyone. He wanted back the opportunity he should have been given sixteen years ago.

  Kirby groaned, a sound deep within his throat, and he would have collapsed if all three of them hadn’t caught him. His father had once outweighed Dallas by a good thirty pounds, but the cancer had eaten away at him, making it easy for Dallas to scoop him up in his arms.

  “You got to forgive Joelle,” Kirby mumbled. “And me. I made a lot of mistakes raising you boys, and I told myself it’s because I wanted you to grow up right.”

  Yeah. Dallas had always known that was one of Kirby’s concerns. He owed Kirby, but Dallas couldn’t give the forgiveness that he’d just requested. Not now, anyway.

  “We’ll talk about this later,” Dallas settled for saying. He put Kirby back into bed, covered him with the quilt and turned to the nurse. “Make sure he stays put.”

  The woman gave a shaky nod, and though she probably didn’t know what was going on, she had to realize it was serious.

  And it was.

  Dallas marched back into the hall, grabbed Joelle and headed not back toward the kitchen but outside to the front porch where they could hopefully finish this conversation without Kirby hearing.

  “I’m not blaming him for this,” Dallas insisted. But part of him was doing just that.