The Lawman's Last Stand

by Vickie Taylor

  “Why did you become a veterinarian?” he asked.

  She relaxed visibly. “Because animals are more civilized than people.”

  “In general, or just a few particular members of the species?”

  “Uh-uh.” She gathered up the cards. “That’s two questions. You want another answer, you’ve got to win another hand.”

  So, she’d picked up the gauntlet. Things could get interesting from here.

  Shane won the next hand easily.

  “Out with it,” Gigi groaned.

  He grinned. Sooner or later he’d work his way around to what he really wanted to know—who she really was and exactly what had happened in New York—but for now, he just wanted to have some fun with her. “Are you really a blond, or is it a disguise?”

  “A gentleman wouldn’t ask.”

  “What gave you the idea I was a gentleman?”

  Her lips pursed and she scooped up the cards. “I’m a natural blond. And you’re going to pay for that.”

  He smiled, liking this game more and more. “Not unless you win a hand.”

  “We’ll see,” she said sweetly.

  A few minutes later, he won another round and started his attack by disguising a serious question behind the fun they were having. “When you left New York, did you leave a man behind? Someone special?”

  “Yes.” She lowered her gaze, busied her hands straightening the deck. When she looked up at him again, he wished he hadn’t asked. “He was tall, athletic in his day. His hair was a sophisticated gray.”

  “He was older?”

  For some reason, the thought of Gigi with an older man disturbed him. She needed someone young to match her vigor.

  Her eyes took on a far-off look. “Yeah. So old that I worry he might not be around by the time I can get back. Even if he is, he probably won’t be able to…perform…the way he used to.”

  Shane gagged on the soda he’d been drinking. She couldn’t possibly mean what he thought she meant. Could she?

  She sighed melodramatically and looked up at him surreptitiously, as if checking his reaction. “Such a shame. I did so enjoy our early morning…rides.”

  “A horse. You’re talking about a horse.” Shane narrowed his eyes. “At least I hope you’re talking about a horse.”

  A bubble of laughter burst from Gigi. “Of course I’m talking about a horse—my jumper, Skywalker. What did you think I was talking about?”

  “I thought you were flirting with me again.”

  “Now why would I do that?”

  “To distract me from the next hand, so you can win and have your turn to ask a question.”

  She grinned. “Did it work?”

  He cleared his throat, dealing the cards. “Yes,” he admitted. “Seriously,” he said, needing more than the jokes she’d given him. “Isn’t there anyone you regret leaving behind? Family?”

  Her gaze fell. She picked at a piece of lint on the bed spread. “My father…” Then she snapped up the cards and shuffled. “My turn.”

  He wondered what that meant, what she wanted to say about her father, but if he wanted to ask, he had to win another hand. He picked up the hand she dealt and prepared for some serious gambling.

  “I’ll see your one question and raise you two,” Gigi said.

  He’d torn the matches out of a La Casa matchbox, and they were using them as poker chips. She tossed her matches into the pot.

  He studied her determined mien. She was bluffing. She had to be. Wasn’t she?

  If she was bluffing, she was good at it. But then she would have to be, to have lived under an assumed identity for nearly three years.

  “Call,” he said. He threw his matches into the hefty pot. Whoever won this hand was going to learn a lot about the other. “What’ve you got?”

  “What’s the line they say in all the old movies? Read ’em and weep?” She spread a full house—aces high, no less—on the bed in front of her crossed legs.

  He tossed his cards facedown, surprisingly anxious about what questions she would ask. There were some things about him she was better off not knowing.

  Her first question turned out to be easy enough. She wanted to know his favorite movie star. They debated the relative merits of Michelle Pfeiffer and Julia Roberts.

  Her next questions were as lighthearted. By the time she held her last “chip” in her hand, he almost forgot to be nervous.

  Until her eyes turned pensive. The headlights of a car on the highway shone through the curtains for a moment, then moved on. The noise from the highway had tapered off sometime while they’d played. It was late.

  “Why are you thinking about quitting the DEA?”

  The rush of self-recrimination that always accompanied any serious thought about his work flooded his system. This time he suspected the heat in his blood had as much to do with his foolishness for underestimating this woman, whoever she was, as with his mixed feelings about the DEA.

  He should have known better than to play games with her. She was nobody’s fool. This was supposed to be about getting information out of her, but now she’d turned his tactic to her own advantage. Instead of finding out what she’d been hiding, he was going to have to expose things about himself better left buried.

  But he’d made the bet; he wouldn’t welsh. “A lot of reasons. I guess…I’m just not sure I’m good enough anymore.” He used to be good enough. He used to be one of the best. He was well-suited for the job. DEA agents were nomads, the fewer roots they had, the more they could concentrate on the job, wherever it took them. Shane was perfect. He didn’t have any roots—any family ties—at all. He could play any role, be anybody, because he didn’t know who he really was.

  “But you said it’s what you do. It’s who you are.”

  “Maybe it’s not who I want to be.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s a tough job.” He sounded irritable, even to himself. “I’m tired of trying to save the whole world.”

  Especially when so much of it didn’t seem to want to be saved. Or maybe he’d been jaded by one bad experience. Either way, it was time to get out. An agent with doubts, about himself or his mission, was a danger to himself and his team. And Shane had lots of doubts.

  “Tired people take vacations, they don’t quit.”

  “You don’t give up, do you?”

  “No. And I didn’t think you did, either.”

  “Don’t you ever get tired of it, Gigi? Living somebody else’s life?”

  “I’m not living somebody else’s life, I’m just using somebody else’s name.”

  He wished it was that easy for him. “I’ve worked so many undercover assignments, been so many different people, that sometimes I worry I might forget who I really am. I have a hard time distinguishing between Shane Hightower, human being, and Shane Hightower, DEA Agent.”

  “Maybe that’s because they’re the same person.”

  “No. It can’t be that way. If you can’t separate the two, you can’t do the job. You make mistakes.”

  “Everybody makes mistakes.”

  “Not the kind that get good men killed.” He scrubbed his hands over his face, knowing she wasn’t going to let him off with half an answer. “The assignment in Utah was my first one after over eighteen months of leave. It was…sort of a test. To see if I could still do the job.”

  “You made the arrest.”

  “Yeah.” He made a derisive sound. “And nearly got myself and a couple of civilians killed doing it.”

  “That wasn’t your fault.”

  He smiled wryly. “It never is.”

  Gigi fiddled with the covers on the bed while he paced the room. “Why had you been on leave?”

  His mouth tightened like a vice. He wasn’t sure he could open it to answer. Wasn’t sure why he wanted to try. He never talked about this. Never.

  “A raid on a drug warehouse had gone bad. I was hurt—”

  Her expression darkened. “Seriously enough to keep you out of work for
eighteen months? My God—”

  “No,” he assured her. “Not that seriously.”

  “Then what?”

  “I just needed some time after…to get my head together.”

  He waited for her to laugh in derision or scowl in recrimination. Instead, she turned her face up to him with such an expression of care and empathy that it hurt to look at her.

  He wasn’t used to being the object of that kind of concern. “Two years ago,” he continued, the story he never told flowing out, unstoppable as a flooding river, “an informant— Lucia Espinoza—came to me with information about a major drug op on the West Coast. She said she wanted out of the life. I believed her. She set me up undercover in the organization, and I worked there four months, making sure I could catch all the major players with their hands dirty.”

  “What happened?”

  “It turned out one of those players was her brother. When it came time for the bust, she couldn’t betray him.”

  “So she betrayed you instead?”

  He nodded. “A good agent was killed in the raid. Two more were hurt, including me. Although I got the least of it. I was lucky.”

  “You couldn’t have known.”

  “But I did know. I knew Carlos was her brother, and I kept pushing anyway. I—” He spun around, his hand raking the hair back from his forehead. He clenched it into a fist when he saw that his fingers were trembling. “Damn.”

  Seconds stretched on like days in silence.

  Finally Shane picked up his gun from the table and methodically checked the clip, occupying his mind with anything but the memories—the guilt and the hurt. “I’m going to check outside.”

  “You just checked a little while ago.”

  “Well I’m checking again.”

  “Were you in love with her?”

  Not only was she nobody’s fool, she was too intuitive for her own good.

  He pulled the door open. Outside, the night was quiet, the darkness undaunted by the sliver moon—as pale and thin as his heart—hung in the black sky. His grip tightened on the doorknob. He should answer her question before he left. She deserved to know what kind of man he really was.

  “No. I wasn’t in love with her,” he said. “I was just sleeping with her. But it still shot my judgment all to hell.”

  Life was never simple. Nor was Shane Hightower, or so Gigi figured. It was getting harder and harder to think of him as just a cop who had gotten in the way of her plans. It was getting harder and harder to think of him as a cop at all, and that was dangerous.

  She guessed she’d fallen for those trust-me-baby blues after all.

  She thought of him alone out there, alone in the dark, patrolling the hotel grounds, keeping her safe, and she knew she had to go after him. She’d opened the wound that had driven him outside. She was too much of a healer at heart not to try to mend it.

  She found him near the pool house.

  He looked up at the sound of her footsteps and she saw him slide his gun back into the waist of his jeans. At least he wasn’t so distracted that he’d let his guard down.

  He was sitting on a short landscaping wall. His hand dangled down beside his leg, resting on a black-and-white lump she couldn’t quite make out in the dark.

  The lump moved, and Gigi heard a low whine, then the unmistakable thump of a tail on the ground.

  She covered her mouth with her hand, her heart expanding as she recognized the stray dog that had been running in the parking lot the day they’d checked in. Any vestiges of doubt she’d had about Shane Hightower’s trustworthiness vanished.

  “You shouldn’t be out here,” Shane said as she drew close.

  She lowered her hand, trying not to give away the depth of emotion raised in her by seeing Shane’s hand absently scratching behind the mutt’s ear, as if he didn’t even realize how much comfort he was providing.

  “I was worried about you being alone,” she said. “I didn’t know you were meeting a friend.”

  He pulled his hand away from the dog’s ear, and the animal snuggled close to the side of his leg. “Darned dog’s seen me out here so much he’s started following me. I can’t get rid of him.”

  “Uh-huh.” She sat next to Shane on the landscape timbers, careful not to frighten his friend. “And here I thought all the food you were stashing in your pockets before you came out here was for you to snack on.”

  Shane looked away, clearly embarrassed. “I don’t like to see anything go hungry.” He looked down at the dog, reached out and patted his head. “Even if it is ugly as a two-headed goat.”

  She leaned over and slowly moved her hand toward the dog. “You’re not ugly, are you fella?” When he didn’t balk at her touch, she traced her fingers along his back, hips, and legs, feeling for injuries.

  “Is he okay?” Shane asked.

  “I think so. Besides being a little malnourished.” She sat up. “Maybe we should think about getting him something to eat besides crackers and peanut butter cookies.”

  Shane shrugged. “I guess I can pick up some dog food next time I’m out.”

  “Good. Because I don’t like to see anything—or anyone—hungry, either.” She looked at Shane pointedly and softened her tone. “Or in pain.”

  “I thought you said he was okay.”

  “He is. I’m not so sure you are.”

  She sensed, more than saw, Shane stiffen. The dog at his feet must have felt it, too, because he whined and squirmed closer.

  Gigi scanned the field of stars above, thinking how many wishes there were to be made in the world tonight. She wished for a few less secrets. “I don’t think you were honest with me in there. Or maybe you’re not being honest with yourself.”

  “How’s that?”

  “You must have cared something for that woman, or her betrayal wouldn’t hurt so much.”

  “I cared all right. I cared about putting her brother out of business, even if I had to use her to do it. Sound like love to you?”

  “It sounds like you had a job to do. An important one.”

  “I made love to her and then I turned her against her own brother—or tried to, anyway. I don’t know why I thought she’d choose me over her blood family, just because we’d enjoyed a few hours in the sack. Ego, I guess.” He shook his head. “I should have known better.”

  “You threw her a lifeline; she was the one who couldn’t hang on.” She might as well have been talking to a statue, for all the impact her words seemed to be having. “But if pretending you didn’t care about her makes it easier to accept what she did, then go right ahead. Don’t let me interrupt your delusions.”

  She twisted to stand, but his hand shot out and stopped her before she made it up. His touch unbalanced her, and she plopped down, nearly in his lap.

  The look he gave her sent a quiver of something—anticipation, apprehension, or maybe pure appetite—arrowing down through her. His lips were a mere whisper from hers.

  And then even that small distance was gone.

  His mouth was warm and giving—as opposite from the granite impression she’d had of him a moment ago as black was to white. Yin to Yang. Male to Female.

  His teeth nibbled at her lower lip and then he suckled the tender spot, coaxing a moan from her throat. Her lips parted under his gentle assault and his tongue invaded. One of his hands cupped the back of her head. The other curled around her waist, cradling her closer.

  She felt as if she was being drawn into him, inside him. She closed her eyes and saw the shrouded secrets of his soul. Felt his hurt.

  Felt his need.

  His burgeoning erection pressed into her hip, awakening an arousal of her own, a curling fist of pure want, winding around her femininity.

  She should stop him while she still could—while they still could—but his hand felt so good, skimming up her rib cage to cup her breast. She arched against his palm, her nipple rising, tightening, aching under his touch.

  She couldn’t stop. Didn’t want to stop.


  But he did, apparently. The clear air of a warm Phoenix night touched her where his hands had been only seconds ago. She opened her eyes to see him standing beside the pool. Over his shoulder a cluster of stars glittered like the lights of a far-off town down a lonely highway.

  He offered no soft words—either of apology or in invitation to continue in the privacy of their room what they’d started here by the pool.

  Finally he reached for the hem of his shirt and pulled it over his head.

  “What are you doing?” Gigi pulled her knees to her chest and locked her arms around her legs.

  “Going for a swim.” He extended his hand while he toed off one shoe and then the other. “Care to join me?”

  “I don’t have a suit.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “The water is probably freezing.”

  “This is Phoenix. Nothing ever freezes.”

  He kneeled beside her, a glimmer of danger in his eyes and more than a little seduction in his voice. “Besides, we could both use a little cooling off, don’t you think?”

  The water wasn’t freezing, but it was chilly enough to make her gasp and suck in her breath as she hopped into the shoulder-deep pool. Her T-shirt billowed above her waist and she tugged it down. She caught Shane staring as her over-sensitized nipples puckered further, tight points clearly distended against the wet shirt molded to her breasts.

  She crouched lower in the water until the surface lapped around her collarbones. “What now?”

  Hands resting lightly on her waist, he turned her until she faced away from him. “Have you ever played Marco Polo?”

  “More games, Hightower?”

  “Have you got something better to do?”

  She swirled her arms in the water, buoying her weight. If he wanted to pretend nothing had happened between them, she’d go along. For now. “It’s like blind man’s bluff, right?”

  “Right. You close your eyes and count to five while I move away. Then you call out, ‘Marco.”’

  “And you have to answer, ‘Polo.”’

  “You follow the sound of my voice and try to catch me. If you touch me, you win. Then I’m it.”

  The thought of touching him—in the water or out—sounded pretty appealing. Maybe he wasn’t denying what had happened after all. Maybe he just needed her to make the next move.