RENEGADE'S REDEMPTION

by Lindsey Longford

  Beau looked over his shoulder. “Somebody’s got to, Royal.”

  “But not me.” Royal smiled gently. “Not me.”

  “Yeah. Guess not. But you were the best damned cop I ever saw, Royal, and that’s God’s own truth.” Beau’s smooth, dark face was sad, innocence lost. “I’ll have one of the guys get your bike back to you. Take care, Royal. Not that you will.” His voice was glum, his expression invisible in the darkness. “Call me. Any time.” He stared at Royal for a long time. “But you won’t, will you?”

  Royal didn’t answer. What, after all, could he say? Of course he wouldn’t call Beau. Beau’s reputation didn’t need the burden of friendship with a disgraced former cop.

  As soon as the red taillights disappeared into the moony darkness, Royal had climbed stone sober into his restored ‘68 Mustang and roared straight out at ninety miles an hour down the deserted old beach road, letting the wind and engine roar numb him.

  He didn’t have the nerve to wrap the car around a tree. Too easy an out. Besides, the way he was, as Beau had so bluntly put it, “screwing up,” he might spend the rest of his life in a coma.

  But he thought about it for that brief instant as the speedometer hovered toward one hundred.

  An oncoming van came waddling out of the blackness. Royal blinked and lifted his foot off the accelerator as a skinny kid watched solemnly from a side window, his face pale and ghostly in the headlights before it vanished into the darkness.

  Slowing down to forty-five, Royal kept the needle resolutely between forty-five and fifty, five miles under the speed limit as he headed back toward his house.

  Now, sprawled on the gritty sand, thirsty, and with the remnants of last night’s headache thumping inside his brain, he fingered the brown bag, tearing the opening into strips as he let his gaze drift in the direction of his quarry in her gauzy dress. She’d changed out of her conservative, cover-everything-up—silver suit that made her look like nothing so much as a small minnow flicking through the crowd, but he’d spotted her the minute she’d left the changing area. That hat made her easy to track.

  She wasn’t his type, but he’d liked the look of her in that smooth, sleek suit, the barely there curves shaping it as she’d strolled leisurely through the late afternoon with her son, the silver winking and drawing his attention to the swell of hip and fanny under the shiny fabric.

  He took a deep breath.

  Last night’s brawl had probably been a mistake, but if a man couldn’t satisfy a hankering for a little set-to in the midnight hours, hell, what was the world coming to, anyway?

  Chugging another bitter swallow, he stared at the chop of the outgoing tide. He knew what his world had come to, all right.

  The emptiness he’d danced with all his life, feared, had finally swallowed him up, leaving him on this hot beach watching some runaway wife while away the hours with her son. Royal wished he cared, but he couldn’t find it in him to give a damn.

  He’d skated too close to the edge too long, and now he was, as the cracker-barrel philosophers would say, “gettin’ his comeuppance.”

  He was, after all, exactly what they expected him to be. Royal Gaines. Fast man on a fast track to nowhere.

  Tipping the bottle once more, he frowned and shook it upside down. Empty. Hell. He checked out the woman, the flash of her loose dress catching his attention. Even from a distance, he could see the slightness of her small form. No, definitely not the kind of woman who appealed to him. He liked independent women. Strong women who could hold their own. Women who didn’t need him, who wouldn’t depend on him. Not fragile blossoms who couldn’t thrive outside the greenhouse.

  This fragile blossom was still near the pavilion and its parking area, the kid nowhere in sight. She was moving more quickly, stopping briefly to speak with passersby, who shook their heads.

  And for three hundred thousand dollars, he was going to sell her out to her husband.

  Crossing his legs at the ankle, Royal scowled into the sun and looked away from her. Damn, but he didn’t want to be here. And he didn’t want to go home. As for calling up his old buddy, his old partner, his former fiancée, Maggie Webster well, she’d be happy to see him, but Sullivan wouldn’t be.

  Thinking about Sullivan Barnett’s reaction if Royal dropped in, Royal almost laughed again. Might be worth it, just to see Barnett stiffen up and get that steely edge in his voice. Maggie and Sullivan.

  Maggie and her bristly, wary Sullivan. Married. Cop and reporter.

  Only Maggie wasn’t a cop anymore.

  She wasn’t his partner. Not in any sense, not in any way.

  Married, was his Maggie, that’s what she was.

  The Malloy woman he’d been tagging had moved to the far side of the pavilion, her hands moving in agitation. Royal shaded his eyes irritably.

  At least Maggie hadn’t asked him to give her away.

  But he’d gone to the wedding. Oh, he’d had that much courage. He’d smiled pleasantly, courteously, at everyone whose glance skittered toward him and away, smiled until he wanted to slug someone.

  Beautiful, luminous, her whole body curving toward the man with bleak, blue eyes, Maggie hadn’t seen anyone in the church except Sullivan, the man who’d taken her away from Royal.

  But Maggie had never been his for the keeping, not really, not since she’d died and come back to life. The Maggie he’d known, the woman he’d loved, had vanished after being shot in a convenience-store holdup. That Maggie was gone forever, almost as if someone else had come to live in that sturdy, sweet body he’d loved. She’d turned into a stranger, her warm eyes filled with secrets and confusion and a dark knowledge he didn’t understand.

  Elly Malloy’s purple-and-pink dress floated like sunset as she headed onto the blinding white sand of the beach area, alone. Moving quickly across the sand in her brilliant colors, she reminded him of a hummingbird.

  Maggie had always made him think of grass and earth, not fragile things of the air.

  On the afternoon of her wedding, watching her as sunlight had spilled all around her in the old, shabby church, Royal could see that for Sullivan and Maggie there was no one else in the world, nothing else except the power of their feelings for each other as she lifted her face for Sullivan’s brief, hard kiss, her eyes filled with Sullivan before they drifted shut.

  In that sun-bright moment, Royal had been struck by the odd sense that Maggie and Sullivan were two halves of the same self, that the two of them had been places, seen things no one else had. Their world was each other. No, Maggie had never been his. She’d always been Sullivan’s, and Sullivan? Well, he’d always been hers.

  After the wedding as Maggie had walked back down the aisle, she’d seen Royal and drawn him toward her in a quick hug. He’d kissed her, teasing her in front of Sullivan. “Don’t know what you see in this guy. A journalist, for heaven’s sake, Maggie. Damn, I thought you had better taste.”

  Sullivan hadn’t said anything. But he’d given Royal one of his back-off looks and stood there, his arm tight around Maggie’s waist, a cold heat in his bright blue eyes.

  Laughing, Maggie hadn’t really seen Royal. Her whole attention was on the man beside her, and that was the day the emptiness finally flowed completely into Royal, settling deep and endless inside him, a sickness of the soul.

  That night after Maggie’s wedding, he’d gone to a notorious two-day, high-stakes poker game upstate. For two whole days, he couldn’t lose. No matter how wildly he bet, he won. On the last hand, he’d held a pair of threes and gone for broke. When Scanlon had covered and raised, Royal grinned and, recklessly, knowing full well what he was doing, he covered with everything he owned.

  Which, even at the time, he’d known wasn’t all that much, not after he’d paid the legal fees for the lawyers who’d manfully striven to keep him out of jail. And after he’d paid them off, he’d plunged into heavy-duty poker playing.

  Like they said, the devil made work for idle hands.

  And his had b
een plenty idle.

  He’d wound up in Scanlon’s debt.

  Three hundred thousand dollars. A lot of money, if you cared about anything. And because Royal had scraped up the money to salvage the Mustang and the old house, Scanlon was fool enough to think Royal did.

  A seagull’s shriek jerked Royal back toward the shore where a flock of gulls strutted and scolded before wheeling off. Watching their effortless soaring against the glowing horizon, Royal brushed his mouth again. Sand dry. God, he wanted a drink. Restlessly, he dug the heels of his boots into the sand.

  In all the crowd of beachcombers, the small, dark dot way down at the end of the sugary stretch of white beach focused his attention.

  If he’d had a hair more energy and a hair less hangover, he might have sat up. Instead, he shaded his eyes against the red glare and watched the dot shape itself into a kid, head down, trudging along the line of sand and water, heading toward the swoop of the island where the beach suddenly ran out, yielding to the slash of gulf and riptides.

  Fumbling his sunglasses out of his shirt pocket, Royal wiped them desultorily with his shirttail. Sand and salt smeared, they weren’t worth a hoot, but they shielded his stinging eyes from the still-bright sun.

  Stooping, the kid picked up a shell or rock and tossed it from hand to hand awkwardly and then, like Royal, spotted the sailboat. He dropped the shell and waved, leaping up and down, chunky legs pumping as hard as they could.

  Royal watched gloomily as the small figure waded ankle deep into the water. “Hell and damnation. The brat thinks he can walk on water.”

  Drawing his heels toward his butt, Royal rested his throbbing head on his knees.

  Maybe the kid could swim.

  The kid couldn’t.

  Slopping against him, waves swallowed up ankles, knees and droopy butt, splashed into the kid’s face.

  “Shoot.” Reluctantly, Royal worked himself into a standing position, every bone in his body screaming. He didn’t want to go within ten feet of this kid. Ambling down to the edge of the sand, he saw the top of the kid’s head drop under the water, bob, disappear.

  “Son of a bitch.” Keeping his eyes on the kid, who fearlessly waved his arms underwater, moving ahead, Royal sighed and surrendered to the inevitable. Boots and all, he slogged through the water until, waist deep, he stooped and snagged the squirt under the arms, fishing him out.

  Current and tide pulled against Royal’s calves, his chest, tugged at his captive. With his dripping catch under one arm, Royal staggered back to shore, boot heels sinking into sand, jeans soggy with water.

  “I wasn’t drowning.” Water streamed from the round, jug-eared face grinning happily up at him from under lank, dripping hair.

  “Sure fooled me.” Eyes narrowed behind sunglasses, Royal contemplated the unrepentant face turned up to him. “What were you doing, tiger?”

  “I’m not a tiger, mister.” The brat wiggled impatiently under Royal’s arm. “I’m—Tommy Lee. And I wanted to go visit the boat.” He waved his arm backward toward the gulf as Royal strolled back to dry sand.

  “Underwater?”

  “Diving. See?” Tommy Lee pulled up the water-filled mask dangling around his neck. “I can scuba real good and see ‘zactly where I’m going. I was not drowning. And I was not lost.”

  “Huh.” Extending his arm and its dripping burden, Royal examined the kid as he burped up saltwater. “You okay, Jacques?”

  “Of course. But I’m Tommy Lee, not Zack.” Tommy Lee wrinkled his face. “And I knowed what I was doing, mister.” Arms and feet pumping, Tommy Lee swung in front of him. “See how good I swim?” Inquisitive eyes peered up at him. “So, what you doing, mister?”

  “Fishing?”

  “Where’s your pole?”

  “Where’s your mom? Or dad?” Royal countered with what he thought was respectable cleverness. Under the circumstances.

  Examining him from under brown eyebrows, Tommy Lee paused for a moment before answering carefully, “Over there.” His arm waved north, south, east and west.

  “You’re a real big help, kid, I’ll give you that.” Scanning back toward the main beach area with its pavilion and refreshment areas, Royal waited hopefully for the kid’s irate mother to appear magically, thus solving several problems.

  Nothing. He’d lost sight of her when he’d snatched her son from the briny deep. “Uh, tiger, think you could narrow it down for me?”

  The boy’s sturdy body hummed with energy as he twisted and turned to see Royal. “Mommy went into the bathroom to change clothes. I was s’posed to wait by the counter and the mirror.” The brat’s eyes widened, and he clapped a hand over his down-turned mouth. “Oops.”

  “‘Oops’ isn’t the half of it, kid.” Royal sighed and tucked the soggy burden more tightly against him. He should have let the kid drown. Would have been simpler all around. With his wiggly catch tight in his grasp and imprisoned next to him, Royal sauntered toward the pavilion area. He wasn’t about to turn the little hellion loose. Who knew where he would turn up next? Head down, Royal kicked a clump of dried seaweed in front of him as Tommy Lee squirmed against him. “Be still, kid.”

  “Thom—Tommy Lee!”

  Slamming into Royal, a whirlwind of flowers under an enormous sun hat surrounded him with a scent of lemon and verbena, an old-fashioned fragrance that stirred memories within him as hands and feet and hat flailed at him.

  “Turn my son loose!” Long, narrow hands plucked at Tommy Lee, who paddled happily in the air between Royal and the column of flowers.

  “Hey, wait a minute, ma’am,” he drawled, stepping back and breathing in her fragrance. Warmed by her skin, a lingering hint of sunscreen lotion drifted to him. Pineapple and coconut underneath the lemon. He inhaled that perfume of skin and sun, losing track of the moment in the rich warmth of her scent.

  “Mommy, I dived!” Swinging back and forth, Tommy Lee chortled and waved at the flowers and sun hat. “Till this mean man stopped me.” Tommy Lee kicked out, his sandy foot banging against Royal’s crotch.

  “Damn, kid! I told you to hold still!” Doubled over, Royal took a deep breath and straightened.

  “Turn him loose, I said!”

  Royal lurched to one side as the whirlwind pummeled his chest and feet, sandals slapping against his boots. “Ouch!” Holding the brat out to one side, Royal caught the thrashing fists of Tommy Lee’s mom. “Look, ma’am, slow down. Hold on a minute, will you?”

  “Turn my son loose. Now. Let me go, too. Or I swear to God I’ll make you sorry.” From the shadows of the hat, soft brown eyes met his fiercely. The glint of a thin white scar showed at the edge of her forehead and disappeared into the shade of the hat and the cloud of brown hair curling onto her face.

  “Believe me, I’m already sorry, ma’am. Your kid’s a handful. You ought to keep a closer eye on him.” He frowned at her, and the woman’s face went utterly still. “Look.” Royal studied her as he added, “He was two feet underwater when I found him.”

  “What?” Her face went sickly white, not a fragile, appealing paleness, but a green white, terrified white. She sagged, all the fury draining from her as she clung to her child’s foot. “Tommy Lee? You went into the water?”

  “Um…” Dangling from Royal’s arm, Tommy Lee cast her a wide-eyed, limpid blue glance. “I wasn’t drowning, Mommy. I told him I wanted to see the boat. I had to scuba to get there. Of course I was underwater.” Indignant, he wiggled and glared at Royal. “I was supposed to be underwater.”

  The woman groaned, slid her arm under Royal’s and pulled her child toward her. Gratefully, Royal released the terror. Despite the early-summer heat, her arm where it brushed his was cool, shock icing its softness.

  “Thank you,” she said, her eyes shifting away from his. “I thought—”

  “I know what you thought.” Royal took off his sunglasses, tucking them back into his pocket as he raked one hand through his sand-crusted hair.

  “Not likely,” she mut
tered, backing away from him and dragging Tommy Lee with her. Her floppy hat drooped down to her narrow shoulders, her shapeless, flowered sundress ended around her ankles and annoyance and leftover terror sparkled in her pansy brown eyes.

  Stepping forward, Royal almost tripped over his brown bag. Stooping to pick it up, he saw her gaze fasten on the bottle as the pulpy bag crumpled in his hand.

  “And you’re drunk—”

  The brim of the straw hat flipped up, flopped back into place as she raised her cat face toward him with its narrow, pointed chin. With her movement, the neckline of the dress slid onto her shoulder, and Royal could see the tiny, delicate ridge of her collarbone.

  “But not disorderly,” he corrected mildly, watching the sunset dust her hothouse-pale skin with gold before he glanced back into her eyes.

  There was a shadow deep in those brown eyes, an emotion that nudged what remained of his old self and prompted questions, but he ignored the impulse and smiled in the sheer enjoyment of the moment, a pleasure he hadn’t felt in a long, long time flooding him. “Actually, I’m not drunk. Mellow, but definitely not snockered.”

  “I don’t see the difference.” She frowned. “But it’s not my business.”

  “No, ma’am, it’s not your business.” He pitched his trash into the large metal drum nearby. “Not your business at all.” Hearing the harshness in his response, he shrugged. “Not that I mean to be rude.”

  “You’re right.” Echoing his earlier thoughts, she added with chilly politeness, “It’s not my concern.” Like a recalcitrant puppy dog, her silent but wriggling son tugged at the end of her arm, moving her this way and that, purple and pink flowers on the thin fabric twisting and shaping to the curve of a rounded hip, the softness of breasts and small bumps of her nipples.

  Royal felt his grin widen and lift the corners of his mouth as the loose, sheer fabric flowed and tightened like the stroke of a lover’s mouth over the pale skin underneath.

  Blinded by the power of his smile, Abigail Eleanor Malloy blinked and stepped back. Lifting the brim of the hat clear of her face, she stared at Tommy’s savior.