The Lawman's Last Stand

by Vickie Taylor

  How could he want her so much when he’d already decided to betray her? It was as if he thought that by joining himself to her in the most intimate way he could stave off time, keep her with him forever.

  Her breath accelerated. Her lips parted, and he saw the same need shining from her eyes.

  But they didn’t have time. It was tough to tell without a watch, but he figured they had about twenty-five minutes before they were supposed to meet her father, and the ballpark they’d selected for the reunion was four blocks away.

  Plus, he had business to attend to before they left.

  Deadening his mind to his desire, he rubbed the pad of his thumb over her chin. “Why don’t you take a minute to freshen up in the washroom?”

  The spell broken, she answered, “Are you trying to tell me I look like hell?”

  “No.” He smiled, pulling his hand away to show her the white blob on his thumb. “I just didn’t think you wanted to see your father for the first time in three years with cream cheese on your face.”

  Gigi hurried to the rear of the deli while Shane hurried outside and collected Oliver. With any luck, he could finish his phone calls before she caught up to him.

  Gigi caught up to Shane outside the deli with Oliver. The recreation department little league baseball fields were only a few blocks away, but by the time they got there her heart was pounding—and not from the exertion of the walk.

  In a way, her physical reaction irritated her. It had been like that since she was a little girl, standing in front of her father’s massive oak desk trying to muster the courage to ask him not to send her back to boarding school, or summer camp or bible retreat. To beg him, if necessary.

  But she’d never been able to get the words out. She’d never begged.

  Shane pointed to a players’ dugout across the farthest ball diamond and led the way. The cinder blocks provided some relief from the sun, but Gigi’s skin still prickled with sweat. Damp strands of hair stuck to the back of Shane’s neck as he waited in the dugout, scanning the park.

  Minutes ticked by monotonously.

  A car pulled into the far lot. Before the man was all the way out its door, she knew it was him. He approached with the same daunting strides he’d taken as a younger man, only a little slower. She’d been right about the suit—it looked like a pinstripe gray from here—although he’d left the jacket in the car. His hair had thinned beyond what she remembered, and gone from charcoal to silver in the years since she’d seen him last.

  But he was still her father.

  She made no sound creeping up behind Shane in the shadows, but he must have known she was there. He put out an arm to hold her back.

  “Wait,” he said quietly, and she obeyed, for now, without question.

  As much as she needed to talk to her father, she felt out of her element at a cloak-and-dagger rendezvous such as this. She had to trust Shane’s experience.

  More minutes passed. Her father paced restlessly under the broiling sun of center field, pausing now and again to mop his brow with a white handkerchief. His once-crisp white shirt began to stick to his chest and back. He loosened his tie with two fingers.

  The shadows of the dugout that had once cooled and soothed now pressed against her, cloistering her.

  “Why are we waiting so long?” she hissed.

  “I want to make sure he’s alone.”

  “It’s been ten minutes. Maybe more.”

  His head never turned. He watched her father as he spoke. “Right. If he’s got help, eventually they’ll make contact to figure out what to do next.”

  She planted her hands on her hips, stepping around in front of him and demanding eye contact. “When? Next week?”

  He graced her with a flickering glance, then turned his attention back to the field. Only then did she notice the tension in his shoulders and neck. He was leaning against the side of the dugout casually, but his body was lit like a stick of dynamite, ready to explode.

  Did he really think they were that close to danger?

  “Give it a few more minutes,” he said. “It’s best to be sure.”

  She stepped around to his other side, and he avoided her gaze again. Every third second or so, his look left her father and darted to the streets at either end of the ball field.

  She had a very bad feeling about this. It was like he knew something was going to happen. But how could he?

  He couldn’t. Could he?

  Despite the heat, chill bumps burst over her skin. She put a foot on the first stair of the dugout. “I’m going.”

  “Wait!” The desperation in his voice made her certain that something was very, very wrong.

  He reached for her, but she dodged his grasp. Her first steps were tentative. Then her father turned to her, recognition flashed across his aristocratic features. Something softer flooded his eyes. Something she remembered, barely, from many years ago.

  Her feet flew across the dry grass of the infield. “Daddy?”

  Two dark vans turned onto the block.

  She ran faster. Her father took a step toward her, then fixed his gaze on something over her shoulder and retreated a step. She heard Shane closing in behind her.

  Glancing side to side at the vans at either end of the street and behind her to Shane, her father opened his arms.

  She flattened her stride into a dead run and hit him square in the chest. The impact reeled them both backward, off balance a moment.

  Before she had a chance to recover, Shane passed in a flying leap, ripping her from her father’s arms and propelling her to the ground in a tangled heap. Over his shoulder she saw her father turn, wide-eyed as men in black poured from the vans, rifles at the ready.

  Shane covered her body with his, pinning her to the ground. “Stay down,” he yelled in her ear.

  Any moment she expected bullets to slam into his body, and eventually into hers. She clenched him to her and ground her forehead into his shoulder praying please, God, no. Not Shane.

  But the bullets never came.

  Eventually she opened her eyes and saw that the men in black had surrounded her father. He was on his knees with his hands behind his head and a dozen rifles circled around him.

  It struck her that the men in black holding the rifles weren’t just all dressed in black. They were dressed exactly the same, in black. Like uniforms.

  Realization set in like icy water flooding her heart one chamber at a time, sinking it slowly in her chest.

  “Shane?” she asked, her voice shaking.

  He turned his head to one of the armed men, who nodded to him. “All secure.”

  Shane rolled off her and tried to help her to her feet. She jerked away from the brush of his hand like he was poison ivy.

  “Daddy?”

  Her father stared at the ground. Even from that angle, Gigi could see the flood barely retained in his eyes.

  She turned to Shane, the same flood rising in her eyes. “Shane?” she asked, daring him to come up with any explanation other than the obvious.

  He’d used her. Betrayed her. Set her up to get to her father.

  “Was this the plan all along, Shane? Did you know who I was even back in Utah, or did you just decide to use me to get to my father after we got here and Margo found out he was a suspect in the murder of a DOJ employee?”

  “Neither.”

  She wheeled away, afraid she wouldn’t be able to contain her rising tears if she had to look at him a second longer.

  “Gigi.” He capped her shoulder with his hand and his touched burned. How could she ever have let him touch her other places, other ways?

  “I couldn’t let him hurt you,” he said.

  The men in black—officers or agents of some sort or other—had handcuffed her father and were walking him to one of the vans.

  “He could have killed you, Gigi!” Frustration rang clear in Shane’s words.

  She turned to face him. “But he didn’t. He didn’t have a gun, or anything else, did he? And there
is no one else here—no sniper or drive-by shooter. So what does that do to your theory, big-shot DEA?”

  Neither of them bothered to raise the fact that he wasn’t DEA any longer.

  “He was here to talk.” She advanced on Shane with venom boiling in her blood. At least the anger drove back the tears. “He opened his arms to me for the first time since I was eight years old, and you arrested him!”

  “He’s not under arrest. They’re just taking him in for questioning.”

  A technicality, in her opinion.

  “I only wanted to keep you safe, sweetheart. I was afraid—”

  The black warriors had moved out of earshot and his voice had dropped to a seductive tone that grated instead of soothed.

  “You just couldn’t do it, could you? Couldn’t trust that I wouldn’t betray you, like she did.”

  She struggled for control over her rampaging emotions. Struggled and lost as her father stopped outside one of the black vans and looked pleadingly back her way before being forced inside by one of the warriors. “Next time you look in a mirror, Shane, you ask yourself who you were really protecting. Me, or yourself?”

  His foul oath colored the air as she spun on her heel and marched away, determined to get into that van with her father.

  And just as determined not to look over her shoulder. She didn’t care if the crust of his frustration had cracked and the soft underbelly of his hurt showed on his face. She didn’t care about the vulnerability that bloomed in his eyes at her words. Or the rage that followed it.

  She didn’t care.

  She wouldn’t.

  Shane sat on a hard bench in the hallway outside the Justice Department offices, just as he’d sat for the last four hours, his hands hung between his knees, his head hung between his shoulders.

  Through the curtain of hair veiling his eyes, he saw two pair of legs approach—female legs in a dark skirt, hose and conservative pumps and male legs in navy blue wool trousers and wingtips.

  He looked up to face Margo and the man he recognized as District Attorney Branson from New York.

  “We got a full confession,” Margo announced. “The money laundering, the murders in New York.” Her voice softened. “And the attempts on Gigi’s life.”

  A lump rounded out Shane’s throat. “And Gigi?”

  “He swears she knew nothing about it,” D.A. Branson said. “Frankly, I have my doubts. But with the confession from him, there’s no need to pursue it.”

  Numbly, Shane nodded, then hung his head. As she passed, Margo dropped a hand on his shoulder. “Come by the house this weekend. Bill will be out of the hospital, and I know he’d like to see you.”

  Shane swallowed hard. “I’ll try.”

  Margo moved on, down the hallway and through another door. Shane thought about leaving, but couldn’t seem to lift himself from the seat. He was tired. So damn tired.

  The door Margo had come through opened again and Gigi walked through. Her red eyes and nose stood out against pale cheeks. Her impossibly long lashes looked even longer and heavier, weighted by recent tears.

  “I guess you heard,” she said stiffly. “I suppose you’re happy.”

  He should be happy, at least about the case. A murderer would be brought to justice. But looking into her eyes, once as full of life as the teaming seas, now dead like a stagnant pond, he found no joy. The case wasn’t the only thing over here. He didn’t know why he’d even waited around. Why he’d bothered to hold out hope. “Nothing about this makes me happy.”

  “Good.”

  Shane schooled himself not to react. The barb was no more than he’d expected, no less than he deserved.

  She lifted her chin, even if it did wobble a bit, and strode down the hall. He couldn’t tear his eyes away from the taunting sway of her hips or swing of her arms. He had no doubt she wasn’t trying to be sexy. She just couldn’t help it. Everything about her appealed to him. Even her stinging remarks.

  He’d earned them.

  Dammit, he couldn’t let go of what they had without a fight. He had to try one more time.

  His footsteps echoed with hers on the tile walkway.

  “Gigi,” he called. To his surprise, she stopped just inside the door without pushing it open. The fact that she didn’t run from him sparked hope in his chest.

  He caught up to her in three steps and stopped behind her. His palms itched to settle on her hips, to stroke up from there, soothing her and seducing her until she remembered something besides the pain he’d caused. Until she remembered the way he could make her cry out in pleasure instead of hurt.

  “I wanted to give this back.” He pulled her Taurus from the back of his waistband.

  She turned slowly to face him. His hope flickered out like a wick in a windstorm at the lack of emotion in her expression.

  “I don’t need it anymore.”

  He pulled her pack around to her side and stuffed the gun in the front zipper pocket. “Take it anyway. You never know.”

  She twisted toward the door.

  He couldn’t stand to see her go. “What will you do now?” he asked, intent on delaying the inevitable, even if only for a few more seconds.

  “I’ll go home again, I guess.”

  “New York?”

  “No. There’s nothing there for me now.”

  In a way, he was relieved. He knew she’d grown up in New York, but he hated to think of her going back there, all alone. There was only one place he could picture her being happy. “Utah?”

  She nodded. “Pine Valley is my home now. If my friends there will forgive me for deceiving them.”

  “There’s nothing to forgive. They’ll understand.”

  “I hope so.”

  “I know so. I wasn’t exactly honest with everyone when I came there, either. They didn’t hold it against me.”

  She didn’t look so certain. She glanced at the door as if she wanted nothing more than escape.

  Shane shifted his feet, desperate for something else to say. Anything to keep her there. “The mountains will be good for you.” He knew well the healing power of their peace and beauty, the way old doubts seemed to get lost in the sheer vastness of the wilderness.

  She nodded again, then turned to leave. This time he couldn’t think of a single other thing to say to make her stay.

  With the door halfway open she angled her head back over her shoulder until he could just see the corner of one eye, and the teardrop that fell out of it. “I hope you find your mountains someday, too, Shane.”

  Then she left. The latch on the door caught softly behind her.

  He could have stopped her again, but what would he have said? He’d already found his mountains, and he’d let them get away.

  Chapter 13

  Shane stretched out on the couch in his living room the next day, one hand thrown behind his head in place of a pillow and Oliver snoring on the floor beside him. Freshly showered and shaven, he should have felt more human than he had in days. Instead he just felt numb.

  Dust coated his television screen, but not so thick that he couldn’t see that nothing had changed on Bonanza in the weeks he’d been away. Even with the sound down, he could tell Little Joe was in trouble again. And Pa Cartwright and the older boys, Adam and Hoss, were hell-bent on rescuing him.

  Shane flicked the TV off with the remote control. He wasn’t worried about Little Joe. His family wouldn’t let him down; they never did.

  Wasn’t that how family was supposed to be? Some unshakable, unbreakable tie that bound lives together, no matter what? Made one brother hurt when the other fell? Made the father die to protect the child?

  Groaning, he pulled his arm from behind his head and let the back of his wrist fall over his eyes. He’d never pretended to know much about family, but what John Ferrar had done contradicted the few principles Shane thought he understood.

  Shane’s mother had abandoned him so she could go back to her family. Sure, he was her son, her family, too. But she’d been too young
to start a family of her own, especially all alone, and he’d been an accident, so the rules didn’t really apply. She needed her old family; Shane didn’t begrudge her choice.

  Lucia had betrayed him to protect her brother. As much as that hurt him, at least her motives were clear.

  But what motive drove a man to kill his own daughter? Money? Power? The thrill of getting away with murder?

  Just contemplating John Ferrar not loving his daughter—anyone who knew her not loving her—was like trying to make sense out of one of those confounded inkblots. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t see the butterfly.

  And he knew Gigi couldn’t, either. Hurting and confused, she’d refused to see her father before she left for Utah. The questions she’d once wanted so badly to ask just didn’t matter anymore.

  Or so she said. Shane knew differently. He knew from experience how those kinds of questions could fester in the mind, infect the heart. Until she knew why, her father’s betrayal would destroy her from the inside out. By God, she deserved to know why he did what he did.

  If she wouldn’t ask her father what the hell was wrong with him, Shane would.

  Much as he hated to take advantage of Margo’s influence again—not having a badge to flash limited Shane’s access to prisoners—he called his longtime friend and convinced her to clear him into the lockup.

  Two hours later, an officer escorted John Ferrar through the door of a plain interrogation room that smelled of old sweat and fear, and removed the prisoner’s handcuffs. An orange jumpsuit replaced Ferrar’s tailored clothes. His gray hair was rumpled and uncombed. But his eyes were bright. Intensely blue, like Gigi’s.

  Ferrar scanned the empty chairs at the table. “Where is my lawyer?”

  “If you mean that low-rent public defender assigned to you, you don’t need him. This isn’t an official meeting,” Shane replied. He’d been wondering why a man with the resources of Ferrar Industries at his disposal had settled for a public defender. But that wasn’t his mission today. “I’m here on a personal matter.”