At the promenade, he sat with her on the wrought iron bench, still holding her hand. “You hit pretty hard, Jessye, but I can take it. When I first took this job, I cruised. In recent years, I’ve done my best to make up for it, but nothing comes my way. I’m a good detective, a damn good one, and I know it.” His sigh bespoke his puzzlement. “Hickson could have fired me and rid himself of me for good, but he didn’t, and I’m still trying to figure out why.”
She stroked his arm in a gesture of comfort. “He’s a decent man, and he took himself out of your way. At Third Precinct, you have a chance to start over.”
His hand squeezed hers and she wished—oh, how she wished—that the chemistry would lock them together. “But can I start over with you?”
No woman could want a more handsome or masculine specimen of the male gender, and she responded to that. “Let’s be friends, Axel. Only the Lord knows what’s in our future.”
Chapter 15
Kate read and reread the results of her father’s trial from the record she obtained from her father’s lawyer. She’d done the right thing, and, no one, Luke included, could convince her otherwise. Her father hadn’t intentionally broken the law, though he admitted having closed his eyes when his common sense should have warned him to open them wide. A phone call to her father’s lawyer left her with little or no hope of a retrial, or that if one were granted the verdict would be reversed. She put the court papers where Jessye and Randy wouldn’t find them, and settled down to work.
At that moment, her cousin breezed into the shop. “Kate, honey, Axel found me some good old Southern butter beans cooked down with some good old smoked ham hocks, and I knew you’d want some. I stopped by the wharf and got some crab cakes and corn muffins, some spoons and things so we can eat lunch right here.”
What had gotten into her? “Wonderful. How’re you and Axel getting on?”
Jessye set the bag of food on the desk. “Let’s say we have an understanding.”
“Oh? Really?”
Jessye focused her gaze on the bag of food. “We’re friends, and if I ever decide the sight of him shakes me up and wrings me out, we’ll take it from there.”
So it hadn’t worked out. “I see, but did you at least try?”
“He’s a sweetheart, Kate. A few spikes here and there, but we all have those. I’m just going to let nature do her own thing.” She laid out the food. “Her own thing? Humph! Anybody who screws up things like this is bound to be male.”
Kate let herself laugh, though realizing that Jessye still had designs on Luke saddened her. What would Jessye do when it all came to a head, as it surely would? Her cousin could be trying, but she was one of only three close relatives and the only female one, so she accepted her shortcomings.
Later, Jessye wrapped the remains of their lunch and put them into an empty shopping bag, waved airily and left. It would help a lot, Kate thought, if Jessye would touch earth occasionally.
“Cousin Jessye left some crab cakes for you,” she told Randy, who came from his French class shortly after Jessye left.
“I don’t want any.”
She looked closely at him. “You feeling all right?”
“Yes, ma’am. I don’t think I like her. She came to Captain Luke’s house Sunday, and I heard her whispering her stupid talk. What did she want, Mom?”
His words struck her like a blow to the solar plexus, but she managed to smile her best smile. “I don’t know, dear. Why didn’t you ask her?”
“She didn’t come in. I heard her at the front door with her silly talk.”
So she’d started an undeclared war. Same old Jessye. Always after whatever stood beyond her reach. She looked at her watch. Twelve-thirty. Where on earth was Luke?
“Randy, go shelve those books, please. And you’re not to talk about your cousin that way,” she admonished him, but her mind was on Luke. Maybe he hadn’t gotten back. She threw up her hands. Worrying about a man, after she’d promised herself never to do it again. She put on a Louis Armstrong cassette and worked at changing her mood.
She hummed as she worked, posting the weekend receipts and answering mail, until the scent of musk and lavender reached her nostrils, bringing her head up sharply.
“Luke!”
“Hi. You spoiled my fun, sweetheart. I meant to plant a kiss on your ear.”
She opened her mouth, but not a word escaped from it as she gazed on him. Satchmo’s horn screamed in frenzied passion like the joyous coming together of long-parted lovers. Her heart’s rhythm adopted a pattern of its own choosing, and the fingers of her right hand trembled like chattering teeth. God forbid that their verdict, the test of their love for each other, should come so soon, but he had the appearance of a man with a mission.
“How’d it go?” she asked in a tone more subdued than usual, and she corrected it at once. “Did you get what you wanted?”
Even before he spoke, she knew his answer from the furious way in which he rubbed the back of his neck. “No, I didn’t, but I met an old friend of yours.”
She pointed a finger at her chest. “Mine? Who?”
He looked hard at her, obviously to gauge her reaction. “Lucy Monroe Watkins.”
Her loud gasp brought a rush to protect her, and his arms rested briefly around her shoulders as though to steady her. “You’re not serious,” she said, and she supposed that her face bore a stunned look.
“You bet I am.”
“Did you get lost?”
He raised and lowered each shoulder in rapid succession. “I definitely did not. She was waiting for me on Route 13 at six o’clock this morning.” He slapped his forehead. “I never take that highway. Never. Is she a real live human being?”
Kate couldn’t help grinning. At one point during her visit with Lucy, a similar question had plagued her. “Real as rain. When we parted that morning I hugged her, so I’m certain. She’s alive and breathing.”
A sharp whistle flew from his lips. “Well, I’ll be. Incidentally, I’m putting a double tail on you.” She nodded, and he continued. “Do we still have a date this evening?”
She pushed her chair back from the desk and got up. “We do indeed, and I have a lot to tell you.”
“And I want to hear it. Suppose I come by your place around seven.”
The place and the time told her he hadn’t relented. For two cents, she’d outfox him, but knowing the man, she figured he’d still come out on top.
“My place?” she asked, aware that her face and her tone communicated her disappointment. She didn’t set out to build a fire in him, but her need was so intense that her whole being had to telegraph it to him. She thought of the cataclysmic eruption he’d drawn from her in Biddle, when he’d destroyed her sanity and her will to be other than his. Her memory of it must have shown on her face, for the hot fire of desire sprang forth in his eyes, gray, stormy and wildly possessive.
Her right thumb trailed across his full lower lip, and his eyes blazed with passion and something else. He’d make her pay for that audacity, but she didn’t care. She wanted him, and she’d pay the freight.
“Don’t tamper with what you don’t understand, Kate,” he said, his tone harsh as though it pained him to utter the sounds. But the uncertainty of his voice only served to embolden her.
“I’ll understand it later,” she replied, heedless of her inner warnings. “I’m hungry, and I need you. Luke—”
A steely grip held her, and he stared down at her, a storm brewing in his eyes. “You want me, damn the consequences. Is that what you’re telling me?”
“Luke, your arms—”
One hand grasped the back of her head, and the other tightened around her hip. Her breathing came in fast spurts, and he stared down at her, a blazing mute furnace.
“Kiss me or let me go,” she moaned as his heat drew a hot, feminine response from her, a quickening within her love nest. She rimmed her lips with her tongue, and she could see his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down while he fixed his gaze o
n her mouth and gritted his teeth.
“Luke!”
Nothing, not even their nights in Biddle, had prepared her for the seductive force of his mouth on hers. Strong. Demanding. Stroking. Drugging. Had she pushed him too far? His hands, big and powerful, pressed her hips against his hardened flesh, and his tongue, thrusting deep into her mouth, commanded her total capitulation. Strong, masculine fingers found her left nipple and toyed with it mercilessly. She tried to hold back, but her moans and whimpers escalated in volume and intensity until, as if dragging himself back to reality, he forced himself to pull away from her. Abruptly, he released her and stepped back.
He looked down at the floor and stabbed at it with the toe of his left shoe. “By now, you ought to be able to predict my response to any move you make, and you shouldn’t have to prove to yourself that I want you.” He trained his gray eyes on her, serious, but, thank goodness, not accusing. “I take it you didn’t feel a need to prove it to me.”
She threw up the first defense that came to her mind. “What was Jessye doing at your house Sunday evening?” Taken aback by her own words and the temerity of uttering them, she slapped her hand over her mouth, furious at herself for having let him know she cared about it.
He stepped closer. “If Jessye told you about that, you should have laughed, and if Randy told you, you should have ignored it. Do you consider me a philanderer?”
His heat still captured her, and she couldn’t help responding to it. She wanted—she needed—to be back in his arms, but if she attempted to seduce him again, she knew she’d regret it.
“You didn’t answer my question.”
She swallowed hard. “No, I don’t think that of you.”
“And you know Jessye. Right?”
She nodded.
“Case closed. Your place at seven?”
“All right.” So he was staying with his agenda. Well, she had to stand by hers, and only the Lord knew where they’d end up.
Why the devil would she concern herself with Jessye’s antics? Didn’t she know when a man loved her, adored her and couldn’t see another woman? He laughed at himself. He’d had a few anxious moments after seeing Kate with Axel at Martha Armstrong’s fund-raiser. He nodded to the officer stationed in the lobby of the apartment building in which Kate lived. At her door, he raised his hand to knock and left it suspended in the air. How much was he prepared to yield? He shrugged, and tapped the doorbell. Best to play it by ear and let the chips fall where they would.
He had to laugh when she opened the door in a white shirt buttoned to the neck and a pair of navy blue pants. Nobody was going to accuse her of being seductive. What a scenario! She’d get mad, but laughter poured out of him.
“Hi. What’s funny? Do I have a fly on my nose?”
He ran a finger over that nose. “You can’t hide it, sweetheart, at least not from me. Your allure has nothing whatever to do with your clothes.”
“Oh, for goodness’ sake. Come on in and have a seat. I sent Randy to bed.”
He looked at his watch and raised an eyebrow. “Kinda early for that, isn’t it?”
She ignored the remark, went to the kitchen and returned with a tray of coffee and gingerbread. He let his gaze sweep the tray of goodies.
“That’ll seduce me as sure as you’re born.” He savored the dessert. “This is…wonderful. Thanks for thinking of it.”
To his astonishment, she plowed right into a discussion of their immediate concerns. “Luke, I saw my father last Saturday for the first time in the six years since his arrest.”
How could she say it that casually, when she hadn’t even told him where she was going, though he’d guessed. He chewed more slowly, so as not to miss a word or gesture.
“You don’t visit him?”
“He’s forbidden it, and he doesn’t answer my letters or make phone calls.”
He set the cup and saucer on the coffee table and focused on her. “Did he say why?”
“Same reason why he clammed up and took the rap at his trial. If he revealed the name or description of the man who hired him to deliver that package, every member of his family would suffer. Luke, unless you count a couple of other cousins, that’s only Jessye, her father, Randy, and me. Since he’s been in prison, he’s had a dozen reminders. He also said he didn’t answer my letters because he didn’t want anyone to know that I got mail from a prisoner.”
He spread his knees, leaned forward and propped his elbows on them. She was telling him something important and relevant to her case, but he couldn’t grasp it because his thoughts were on her and how she must have felt at that prison. It was there, right in front of him, and he couldn’t pull it out. But he would. He stopped himself as his hand started toward the back of his neck. “Go on. What else?”
“I got him to agree to answer my letters if I got a post office box. It wasn’t…I mean—”
“What is it? Tell me.”
“A guard stood there while we talked, and my father signaled me to whisper. But I had the feeling that, in spite of our whispers, every word we said was heard somewhere else.”
“Yeah. I wouldn’t be surprised.”
Suddenly, she sprang up and hovered over him. “Luke, he was wrongfully convicted, because he didn’t know what was in that box.”
His blood seemed to stop flowing. “Wait a second. If we’re back to that, I’m wasting time here. Ignorance is no excuse for breaking the law.”
“But can’t you understand what it means to a man—”
He pushed the tray farther from him and held up both hands, palms out. “I don’t want to hear it, Kate. If Jethro Raven told you he was falsely arrested and convicted, I withdraw any sympathy I had for him.”
She sat down. “No. He said he should have asked what he was carrying, that in his subconscience he suspects he didn’t want to know because the money looked so good.”
He got up, walked away, and then back to her. “Then why in king’s name are you telling me he was falsely convicted, when he and I know that isn’t true?”
He stared, almost transfixed, while she wrapped her arms around her middle and rocked backward and forward, her face marred with pain and her eyes dry and haunting.
“He’s not guilty.” Her voice thinned like the fading chirp of an aging parakeet. “That place is drab and bare and ugly. He loves long walks at sunset, nature, flowers, gardening. And fishing. He loves fishing. It’s his passion. He’ll be a broken old man when he gets out of there.”
He wanted to hold her, to comfort her, but he couldn’t. She’d resurrected that barrier between them. “Kate,” he whispered, “I want to hold you so much, but it would be a lie.” His voice strengthened. “When you called me from Cumberland, Maryland, and when I met you at the airport, I believed you’d straightened it out. I need to know you understand that I’ll always try to do my duty as best I know how.” He shifted his glance from her eyes, unable to look at their failure to connect with him, to show him that she was with him.
“You haven’t accepted my obligation to be faithful to my profession.”
“But, Luke, you should have seen him—a man who’d enjoyed the respect of everybody who knew him—wearing a number on his plain battleship-gray shirt. I nearly died. It’s not right.”
He stood. Why couldn’t she see the truth, understand it and him? “If you change your mind and your attitude about this, I’ll be waiting with open arms.”
He stared down at her, the vessel of his hopes, dreams and all that he longed for, and she gazed back at him, open and honest, hiding nothing. Poles apart. He wished she wouldn’t look at him with pain and vulnerability etched in every pore of her face, and he grabbed at his chest as the weight in his heart nearly shortened his breath.
“I don’t think it’s too much to expect that the woman I love and hold above all others, who professes to love me, should believe in me and trust my judgment in matters relating to my profession. I have faults, Kate, plenty of them, but I believe I’m entitled to that muc
h.”
She stood—with difficulty, he observed—reached out to him, and immediately let her arm fall to her side. “I…I do, but—”
“I can’t compromise on this. If you can’t tell me I did the right thing when I lived up to my oath of office and arrested Jethro Raven, there isn’t anything for you and me.”
“Why can’t you understand?”
“We’re at loggerheads, Kate. That’s the same question I’m asking you.” A new kind of loneliness ate at him when she squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head, yet released no tears. “God knows I don’t want to leave you right now. But I can’t stay.”
He sympathized with her love for her father—because he’d loved his own beyond words—but that love shouldn’t blind her to what was right. He let himself out.
He turned on the red flashing light atop the Buick so that drivers would do what they usually did when they saw a policeman—drive carefully—because he could hardly focus on anything. He’d thought they’d be celebrating by then, but no. She’d tried to come to terms with her dilemma, and he knew it, but she hadn’t been able to accept that her father could have committed a crime, intentionally or not.
He parked in his garage and entered his house by the side door, and for all its elegance, its void cried out to him. No loving woman greeted him to wrap him in the warmth of her smile and let her lingering kiss tell him how much she wanted and needed him. He didn’t hear the laughter and playful patter of his children. There was no music to welcome him home, darkness where there should be strong, glowing light. He made his way up the stairs without bothering to turn on a single lamp. The less emptiness he saw, the better.
He walked into his bedroom, saw the red light flashing on his answering machine, pushed the button and sat down to listen.
“Luke, this is Cowan. Do you know a black Cadillac tailed you from Ms. Middleton’s place straight to your house? I wonder what would have happened if your squad light hadn’t been flashing.”
“You’re sure of this?”
Secret Desire Page 29