The Lawman's Last Stand

by Vickie Taylor

  To feel pursued.

  The thought made her heart thump. “Okay,” she agreed. She closed her eyes and started counting. “One. Two.”

  Water rippled to her left. She hadn’t heard him move; he was good. This wouldn’t be easy. That was okay. She liked competition. And a challenge.

  “Three. Fourfive,” she finished quickly, lunging to her left at the same time.

  Her fingers found nothing but water.

  He was really good.

  “Marco,” she called.

  “Polo.”

  His deep, quiet voice, so much more resonant with her eyes closed, caused a vibration deep inside her.

  “Marco.”

  “Polo.”

  She ducked under the water and swam a few feet ahead. When she broke the surface she immediately called the signal and targeted his response as behind her. She wheeled and half ran, half swam in that direction. She’d played this game as a child. The trick was to gradually herd your opponent into a corner, where he couldn’t get out without passing nearby, then feel for the movement of water and lunge.

  She moved tentatively toward the direction of his voice. Somehow, childhood games had never prepared her to stalk Shane Hightower.

  She stopped, listening and feeling the currents of the water. “Marco,” she called out.

  He didn’t answer. He must have been underwater.

  She waited a few seconds and called the signal again. Still no answer.

  The temperature of the water seemed to drop. Chill bumps rose on her arms and thighs. Seconds passed while she waited for the soft splash that would tell her he’d resurfaced, but that sound never came.

  “Marco.” Her lips trembled on the word, and she told herself it was from the cold.

  Only the cicadas answered her.

  “Shane?” This wasn’t funny anymore. He couldn’t have been underwater that long.

  Suddenly she was painfully aware that they should never have been playing games at all. Someone was trying to kill her. He could be here. He could already have killed—

  Panic laced her blood with pure adrenaline. She opened her eyes and lunged for the side of the pool, already half out of the water before she saw him.

  Shane squatted on the concrete a few feet away. Water ran down the center of his chest, matting the fine spread of light-colored hair and dripping next to his feet. Oliver was stretched out next to him, resting his head on his paws.

  Confusion stopped her cold. He didn’t seem to be hurt, or in danger.

  “You’re not in the water,” she said, still trying to sort out what was happening.

  “No, I’m not.”

  He rose and walked to the edge, where she still hung in the water.

  “But that’s cheating.”

  He squatted back down. Nearly on eye level, just inches away, his gaze burned a path past her confusion and she knew. Knew he’d done this—scared her—on purpose.

  But there was one thing she didn’t know. She met his stony gaze with a rock-solid stare of her own. “Why didn’t you answer when I called?”

  “Maybe because I wanted you to know what it’s been like for me the past few days, groping around blindly after you. After the truth.”

  His words hung between them until finally she began to understand. While she’d pried open the door to his past and trampled over his perceived failures and regrets like a stampeding buffalo over a field of daisies, she’d given him nothing of herself in return. She’d left the pool. Held herself out of reach.

  He must have seen understanding sink in. “I don’t even know your real name,” he said roughly.

  The need to reestablish a connection with him, to regain his trust, warred with trepidation. She was cautious with the truth for good reason. Her life depended on it.

  But so did his. He’d put his blind faith in her, and she hadn’t answered his call. Hadn’t given him a fair chance to win. Like the woman who’d betrayed him two years ago, he’d thrown her a lifeline, and she was letting it slip through her grasp.

  Slowly she lifted her hand from the edge of the pool and held it toward him, a silent request. After only a moment’s hesitation, he took it, but his eyes were shuttered.

  When she stood on the pool deck beside him, he turned to walk away. Pulling in a deep, calming breath, she pulled him back. Nothing was slipping through her grasp. Not tonight.

  “My name now is Gigi McCowan,” she told him. He slanted his head away, his mouth thin, disappointed. She pulled him back. She would give him the truth, but she also wanted him to know it wasn’t as simple as a name. “But once upon a time I used to be Julia Ferrar.”

  His gaze was dark, impenetrable. “I don’t understand.”

  “When I left New York, I changed more than my name. I became a different person. For once I stood up and did what I needed to do, what I thought was right, not what I thought my father would want me to do or what everyone expected. Starting over was hard, but it made me strong.”

  He shook his head. “I have a feeling you’ve always been strong, no matter what your name was.”

  “Maybe. But I’m happy with who I am now.”

  “You can’t hide out forever.”

  “That’s what you’re here for, right? To find out who killed those men in New York and send him to jail. I don’t want to live looking over my shoulder anymore, wondering if someone is behind me with a gun, but I don’t ever want to go back to being Julia Ferrar.” Her voice cracked. “I’m not sure I even like her.”

  Shane folded her gently into his arms and rocked her. She buried her face in the side of his neck. He smelled clean and strong.

  When her breath had steadied, he blew out a breath of his own. “I know what it’s like to have doubts about who you are.”

  From what he’d told her about his past, she could see why. But it was hard to imagine Shane less than supremely confident about anything.

  “So what do we do now?” she asked.

  He pulled his head back until he could look at her. “Now we go inside and you tell me all about New York.”

  “And then?”

  “Then I’m going to fix it so that you can be whoever the hell you want to be.” He cupped her jaw with his sturdy fingers and lifted her face until her gaze met his. “In the meantime, I guess it won’t hurt for you to be Gigi McCowan for a few more days. It’ll keep me from tripping up every time I have to say your name, anyway.”

  His smile warmed her from the inside out. She felt her own lips curve in answer. A few more days, that was probably all they had left together.

  So why did she feel like he’d just promised her forever?

  Chapter 7

  Gigi had grown accustomed to waking quickly. Three years of waiting for a killer to find her had trained her to gauge her safety—or lack of it—in that first wakeful heartbeat. This morning was no different, except that this morning, her senses told her she wasn’t alone.

  A soft snore snuffled up from the foot of the bed. Gigi smiled in her slumber, thinking for a moment it was Shane. Despite his protests that he wasn’t a gentleman, he’d very nobly slept between the bedspread and the top sheet, with his head at the foot of the bed, each of the last three nights. He hadn’t snored before, but she supposed it wasn’t unusual for someone to be an occasional snorer. She didn’t mind. The sound was reassuring, in a way. Peaceful.

  Until she realized the muffled sawing couldn’t be coming from Shane. He wasn’t at the foot of the bed.

  Something must have interfered with her security sensors this morning, because she’d been awake a minute or more before she realized she was caught in the circle of a pair of strong, warm arms. Or that an even stronger, warmer body pressed against the length of her back. How could she not have felt the soft sough of breath tickling behind her ear?

  She recognized Shane from nothing more than the breadth of his palm where it rested on her hip. But who the heck was snoring?

  Her eyes blinked open wide and focused on the far end of
the bed. Oliver lay curled in a circle next to Shane, his mottled black-and-white head pillowed by a bulge that was probably Shane’s foot. The dog’s muzzle twitched as he snuffled again, and his paw scratched impatiently at the bedcovers. Chasing rabbits in his dreams, Gigi thought.

  She let her eyes drift shut, looking for a few rabbits of her own. The early morning sun filtering in through the nappy curtains over the window turned the room a soft golden shade. The warmth seeping into her body from Shane’s all night long had eased her muscles like a warm oil massage. She felt languid. Content.

  And for the first time in three years, she allowed herself to relax. Really relax. She basked in the luxury of hovering in that almost-sleep state, dreaming of blue skies and bluer eyes.

  She couldn’t recall exactly how Shane had come to be snuggled up behind her with nothing but her thin T-shirt separating skin from skin, but she didn’t trouble herself over it long. It felt too good.

  Vaguely she remembered tossing restlessly during the night, her sleep disturbed by the memories she’d dredged up talking to Shane. Out by the pool, with a quarter moon backdrop and under a ceiling of stars, she’d told him everything. How surprised she’d been to see Uncle Ben, her father’s business partner and best friend, with another man she didn’t know, but found out later was an assistant D.A., in the horse barn so late at night. How she’d seen Ben give the assistant D.A. a book. The shots and the bloody mess of death.

  The police arrived quickly. She was still in shock, she thought. Another man showed up almost as soon as the uniformed officers. A tall man, with perfect skin and an expensive haircut.

  The man had identified himself as the chief District Attorney Paul Branson and taken her away. Distraught over the death of his colleague, he’d warned that this was a sensitive case, and told her not to talk to anyone but him about what she’d seen and heard.

  She’d waited in his car, watching out the window as the garish lights from the police cars flashed over Ben’s body like something from a house of horrors.

  Branson had taken her to a house he called safe and locked her away with strangers.

  She told Shane how scared she’d been when the newspaper headlines announced that the prosecution had an eyewitness to the murders. The information had been leaked to the press by the insider in order to scare her into silence, the D.A. told her later. Branson had also told her that he had a suspect, but not enough evidence to make an arrest. He didn’t know how long she could be in hiding. Indefinitely, maybe.

  Finally she replayed the full story of the attack at the safe house for Shane, ending with how she’d abandoned everything she’d known—family, friends, job—cleaned out her bank accounts and “borrowed” the identity of an old veterinary school mentor, Dr. Gigi McCowan, and became a new person.

  He’d listened patiently, interjecting a quiet question now and again, showing his understanding with a squeeze of her hand or solemn nod.

  Then she’d waited for his judgment. For his condemnation that she’d run from her duty. His proclamation that she should have stayed and seen the killer brought to justice at any price, no matter how long it took. No matter what it cost.

  But his judgment never came. Instead, he wrapped his arms around her and rocked her until she had to bite her lip to keep from crying at the sweetness of it. He’d threaded his fingers through her hair, which the desert breeze had dried into wispy curls. “You’re a hell of a fighter. You know that?”

  He held her a long time. Eventually her eyelids had grown heavy and her muscles took on a fluid tone, and he’d taken her inside and laid her on the bed. She wondered for a moment if he meant to make love to her. For a moment, she wished he would.

  But her limbs were lethargic. She felt drained, physically and emotionally. She tried to tell him, to explain.

  He shushed her with a finger over her lips, smiling, then pulled the covers up to her chin and kissed her good-night on the forehead, like a parent tucking in a beloved child.

  The first hours of sleep passed peacefully. Later she woke to the sound of her own whimpering, swallowed by the darkness, and an engulfing sense of loneliness that left her as hollow as when she’d been eight years old and woken up alone, frightened and missing her mother.

  But the creak of the bedsprings soon reminded her that she wasn’t eight years old, and she wasn’t alone. Ensconced in the warmth of Shane’s arms, she had slept undisturbed until dawn. But now that the sun was up, she was ready to get on with the day. Today they would talk to Margo Maitland, and take the first step toward bringing her three-year nightmare to an end.

  Gently she extricated herself from Shane’s grasp and eased out of bed.

  “So, was it good for you?”

  “What?” She stopped midstride on her way to the bathroom and wheeled to face him. His hair fell carelessly over his eyes. He looked sleepy, sexy, and oh so seductive.

  “Never mind. I can see that it was.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Your night’s rest.” He quirked one eyebrow in question. “What did you think I was talking about?”

  “I thought maybe you were delirious.”

  “Deliriously happy to see the shadows gone from under your eyes.”

  His lopsided grin wormed its way straight to her heart. Not quite sure how to take this lighthearted Shane, she dug at the rough carpet with her toes and then hedged toward the bathroom. The brooding, loner agent had been easier to understand.

  “I’m sorry I woke you,” she finally said to fill the silent space between them.

  “I’ve been awake half an hour.”

  His admission only flustered her more. There was something frighteningly vulnerable about knowing he’d held her so intimately, watching her sleep, for half an hour.

  She dealt with her perceived weakness the only way she knew how—head-on. “In that case,” she said, tilting her chin regally, “I hope it was good for you.”

  His grin widened into a rogue’s smile. “It might have been, if you’d wiggled your bottom against me just a few more times.”

  “Wiggle—?” Flames licked across her face. She whirled, then slowed her step just enough not to appear to be running—she hoped—and sought sanctuary in the tiny bathroom. The cool tile under her feet slowly seeped the steam from her veins.

  She should have known better than to try to beat Shane at his own innuendo. He was a master. And when he turned his full skills on her, she seemed to lose all ability to think coherently, much less fire off a quick-witted retort.

  Her composure gradually returning, she stepped into the shower and adjusted the water. Other men had teased her, flirted with her, outright tried to seduce her, but none of them had the stinging effect of one rapier remark from Shane. He seemed to know just what to say to get a reaction out of her.

  Unless it wasn’t his words she was reacting to, but the man himself. He was appealing, no doubt about that—an outer layer of boyish charm not quite concealing a bad-boy attitude, both guarding a wounded soul visible only in rare glimpses, when his trust-me-baby blue eyes turned solemn, haunted.

  Three days cooped up with him would make any woman fantasize about throwing him to the ground and finding out for herself if all of his body was as impressive as what she’d seen so far.

  Her imagination conjured lots of ways, with him, to release three days’ worth of pent-up energy. Maybe the waiting wouldn’t be so bad if she was limp from exhaustion. Used beyond thinking, beyond caring.

  Too bad she’d come to that conclusion on the day the waiting was to end. Then again, maybe it was for the best. She had a feeling that if she and Shane ever did get together, nothing would ever be the same again.

  Smiling wryly, she twisted off the water faucet, stepped out of the shower, dried herself and slipped the thigh-length T-shirt she’d slept in back over her head. Determined to get herself back on even footing with Shane, she opened the bathroom door and breezed toward the dresser to pull out some clothes for the day.
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  Halfway across the room, she stopped. Shane sat on the foot of the bed in his briefs, his cell phone in his hand. His tanned face had paled to the color of parchment.

  “Shane, what is it?”

  When he raised his gaze to hers, his eyes were as vacant as an Arizona ghost town. “It’s Bill Maitland,” he dead-panned. “The police answered the phone at his house. He’s been shot.”

  Shane dodged a moving van changing lanes and tried not to let himself think about what would happen if he got to the hospital too late. The officer, who’d answered the Maitland’s phone and relayed the news when Shane had called, hadn’t been certain of the extent of Bill’s injuries. The officer only knew that it was bad. He could already be gone… No. Shane refused to acknowledge that possibility. He’d make it in time, and once he got there, everything would be all right. It had to be all right; he couldn’t live with anything less.

  A glance at Gigi told him that guilt weighed as heavily on her as it did on him. Her shattered expression almost cracked open the defensive wall he’d built around himself wide enough for him to reach out to her, to comfort her as he had last night. But when he tried, he found no comfort within himself to give. He struggled to dredge up a single kind word, and came up only with a gruff, “Don’t.”

  She turned to him. “Don’t what?”

  “Blame yourself.”

  She turned to look back out the side window, as if the passing warehouses and train yards held some special interest. After a moment, she said, “I don’t blame myself. I blame you.”

  A knife in his heart wouldn’t have hurt as much, but she’d only said what he’d been thinking. “Well, we finally agree on something.”

  He should never have involved the Maitlands in this. Someone must have connected them to him. Bill wouldn’t have told them anything, no matter what they’d done to him. He never should have gone to the Maitlands’ house.

  God, what had he been thinking?

  He glanced at Gigi. Despite her words to the contrary, he saw the guilt in her expression. And the pain.