Big Sky Lawman

by Marilyn Pappano

  With a disappointed sigh, she pulled to a stop at a stop sign on the edge of town. She wouldn’t put it past him to be back out in the woods, searching for evidence or maybe even hoping for a run-in with Homer’s alien. He could be at his dad’s house, or his grandparents’ place, or even at his own property, sitting alone in a starlit meadow. It would take her only a few hours to check them all out.

  Or he could be at the Branding Iron catercorner from where she sat.

  She stared at the red pickup in the bar’s parking lot, certain it was Sloan’s. She would have preferred to find him alone, but if she had to face him with his friends, well, then, she had to.

  After looking both ways for traffic, she pulled into the parking lot, found a space at the rear of the lot and walked through the cold night to the front entrance. The Branding Iron was, she imagined, a typical bar, not that she’d ever been inside one to know. Dimly lit, smoky, with loud country music, neon signs and a crowd of people having a good time. It was probably not so typical with the hundreds of brands burned into every wooden surface, from walls to booths to the floor.

  She stopped just inside the door, gathering her courage for a search of crowded booths and dark corners, but then her gaze went straight to Sloan. He was part of a small group at the bar, three other men and four women, and one of the women, seated on the stool next to where he stood, was artfully draped over him. Her arm was across his shoulders, her fingers idly playing with his hair. Her long, tanned, stockinged legs were crossed, with her knee pressed to his thigh. She was blond, beautiful, sexy, and obviously quite taken with him, but he was so deep in conversation with the young man beside him that he hardly seemed to notice her.

  Until he noticed her.

  The other man saw her first and pointed her out, and Sloan shifted his gaze her way. He didn’t look surprised, or guilty at getting caught with another woman, or even particularly happy to see her. In fact, she couldn’t read any emotion at all in the dispassionate set of his features.

  Part of her wanted to turn around and walk out, but the fear that he would let her go held her in place—that, and emotional fatigue. She’d come to make up for that morning, and he was entitled to make it as difficult as he wanted. That didn’t mean she could run away again. She was so damn tired of running.

  She crossed to the bar, weaving her way between tables, aware of the weight of his gaze increasing with every step. By the time she stood in front of him, her palms were damp, her lungs hurting, and she thought maybe she could run away one more time. But, as his friends turned their attention to her, too, she held her ground. She even managed to sound halfway steady when she spoke. “Can I talk to you?”

  For a moment, she knew he was considering ignoring her, or making her speak her piece right there in front of them all. She wouldn’t blame him if he did, but it would hurt. She’d been publicly humiliated before, and it was no fun, but she could go through it again.

  Slowly he straightened, pulling away from the blonde, and gestured for her to lead the way. With no privacy to be had inside, she went back out, breathing in the frigid night air, clearing her lungs of alcohol and smoke. Too bad the nerves weren’t so easy to get rid of.

  Across the street was a small park, with benches underneath trees that had lost their leaves. She crossed the street, and he silently followed, but when she reached the nearest bench, she didn’t sit. Instead she leaned against the tree trunk, shoved her hands into her coat pockets and fixed her gaze on a distant street lamp. He stood behind the bench, hands in his own pockets, and waited.

  She took a deep breath, then started, though not with an apology. “Eighteen months ago a young woman about Christina’s age disappeared from the town nearest Boonesville. She’d had a very public breakup with her boyfriend, and he’d threatened to kill her. He was the last person seen with her. His neighbors had reported a disturbance the night she disappeared, and the police found fresh blood that matched her type in his house and in the trunk of his car.

  “They arrested him, the D.A.’s office brought charges against him, and James was given the case. Because of his family name and his political ambitions, he got all the high-profile cases—and this was the highest profile of them all. The girl was beautiful. Her family was wealthy and influential. The boyfriend was a drunken, tattooed ex-con. James had a perfect circumstantial case. There was only one thing missing—the girl’s body. Only the boyfriend and one other person knew where he’d dumped her body, and he wasn’t talking.” She fell silent for a long time before quietly adding, “Unfortunately for him, I was.”

  Risking a glance at Sloan, she saw that he was staring at the yellow grass fifteen feet in front of him. Little light reached his face, making his expression once again impossible to read. Was he remembering the day they’d found the clearing, when he’d asked if she’d ever had a vision like this one before, and she’d said no, not like this? The day she’d lied to him?

  “I—I’d had a vision of her, obviously dead. I’d recognized her immediately. Her face had been on the news, in the papers, in photographs that covered James’s desk. I tried to ignore it at first. My parents had always insisted that that was the only thing I could do. But the vision kept returning, with more details, until I was able to recognize where she was. Finally I made an anonymous call to the police, but they wrote it off as a crank call. They didn’t even send an officer out to check. The trial was scheduled to start soon, and James was fairly worried. The girl’s father had promised his considerable support if James got a conviction. He made even bigger promises if James could get a confession and a guilty plea from the boyfriend and spare the girl’s mother the nightmare of a trial.

  “Finally, I told him what I’d seen. Told him that I’d had visions all my life, that I knew things…I told him where to find the girl’s body, and he passed the information on to his two detective friends who had made the arrest. When they found the body, the boyfriend confessed and pled guilty, and there was no trial for the grieving mother to endure. But everyone, from the girl’s parents to the D.A. to the media, wanted to know how they found the body.

  “James knew the truth would be the kiss of death to his political career. A prominent assistant district attorney from one of Georgia’s oldest and most illustrious families relying on psychics, weirdos and freaks?” She made a scandalized sound. “The detectives were none too eager to be tarred with the same brush, and so they decided to go with the anonymous informant story. The only one who disputed it was the boyfriend, who knew no one had seen him dump the girl’s body. But, hey, he’d just confessed to murder. Who would believe him?”

  Now Sloan was looking at her, but she still couldn’t tell what he was thinking. She knew one thing, though—there was more distance between them than the ten physical feet that separated them.

  “So James and the cops told their story, and everyone believed them, and I thought it was over. I was safe. I’d told the man I was going to marry the truth about me, and I hadn’t lost him. He still loved me, still wanted me. He was even willing to lie to protect me. Then…one day he made an appointment to meet me for lunch. He told me over the salad that he was breaking our engagement. The case had given him the type of positive publicity that money couldn’t buy. It had boosted his political standing tremendously. There was just one small problem. He’d told his advisors about me, and they’d told him to get rid of me. I was too big a liability. He was certain I would understand that he had no choice, and he thought I would go quietly.”

  She impatiently wiped away the tear that had seeped down her cheek. “For the first time in my life, I didn’t go quietly. My parents would be so disappointed. They would stop loving me again, and they would blame me. ‘I can’t believe this,’ I told him. ‘If I weren’t psychic, you never would have found her body, you never would have gotten that confession or that guilty plea, and now you’re dumping me for it?’” She smiled bitterly at the memory. “Who knew there was a reporter seated in the booth behind me?”


  “Crystal—”

  “I’m almost done. Let me finish, please.” Taking her hands from her pockets, she hugged herself tightly. For much too much of her life, she’d been the only one around willing to do that. Hopefully that wouldn’t be the case—please, God—for the rest of her life. “It was on the front page of the evening paper. ‘Assistant District Attorney Makes Psychic Connection.’ All the media picked it up and ran with it. Within a day, James and the two detectives called a press conference. They insisted I was not involved in the case in any way. They even played a tape of their anonymous informant. My words. A man’s voice.

  “James stood there in front of all those reporters and TV cameras and told them that I was unstable. Delusional. That I’d had emotional problems since I was a child. He said that was what he’d meant when he said he’d told his advisors about me. That was why he’d broken our engagement, because he feared I wasn’t strong enough to handle the stress of being a politician’s wife. And my mother and my father stood there beside him, and said, ‘Yes, she’s sick. She always has been.’

  “I lost my friends, my family, my job, my future, all in one swoop. I moved to Atlanta, but I couldn’t get a teaching job there, not with my former employer saying I’d been fired because I was crazy. So that’s how I wound up here.”

  Heedless of the cold or the numbness in his fingers, Sloan didn’t seem able to let go of the back of the bench. It anchored him, kept him from going to her and dragging her into his arms, whether she wanted to be there or not. He just gripped it harder and wondered what the hell he could say. “I’m sorry” was too damned inadequate. “I love you”—hell, who could blame her for not believing that? “I’ll never hurt you” was another promise he couldn’t keep. He had hurt her, and would probably do so again in the future. After all, he was only human.

  But he wasn’t a bastard like James. He wasn’t cold-hearted and selfish like her parents, or dishonest and unethical like the two Georgia detectives.

  No wonder she wanted to keep her psychic abilities secret. No wonder she’d wanted to stay hell and gone from the Montgomery case. The only wonder was that she’d survived the ugly mess—a little the worse for wear, no doubt, damaged but whole.

  Finally, when the silence had gone on too long, he found his voice, forced some steadiness into it and quietly asked, “Why are you telling me all this?”

  In the dim light he saw the corners of her mouth curve up, but it was too sad to be a smile. “You’re a smart cop. You figure it out.”

  Why did a woman confide her worst nightmare in a man? For sympathy. Understanding. So he’d know why she did the things she did. So he could know her better. So he’d know what he was up against.

  He suspected that, to some degree, all those answers were right, but there was one more that was even more right. Because she trusted him to know all her secrets and not leave her because of them. Because she trusted him to guard that information and never use it to hurt her. Because she trusted him, period.

  Desire stronger than anything he’d ever felt swept through him, burning, making his muscles taut, making his body ache. His fingers uncurled from the cold, unpainted wood, and he started toward her. “Say it,” he demanded.

  Sticking close to the tree, she backed away one slow step at a time. “You already know.”

  “I want to hear it from you. Say it.”

  “Sloan—”

  “Just say it once and put me out of my misery.” He caught her one hand, then the other, and used them and his body to pin her against the tree trunk. Pressing his erection against her, he nuzzled her hair back from her ear, then murmured, “Jeez, you’re killing me here. Say, ‘I trust you, Sloan.’”

  With little effort, she freed her hands and cupped his face. “I trust you, Sloan, and I am so sorry—”

  He realized in that instant that her fingers were bare. James’s ring—the ring that reminded her every day to trust no man, to give her heart to no one, the ring he’d never seen her without—was gone, and he fiercely kissed her in mid-apology, thrusting his tongue into her mouth, lifting her tight and hard against his body. He felt starved, as if he’d never had such a kiss, as if he might never have one again. Greedily he stroked her tongue while his hands found their way inside her coat and beneath her sweater. When his cold fingers came in contact with her warm skin, she shuddered, but when he tried to withdraw them, she made a sound of protest deep in her throat.

  He’d just reached her breasts when a wolf whistle from across the street made him stiffen. “Hey, Sloan, get a room!” Eugene Elkshoulder called to the accompaniment of feminine laughter.

  Though he ended the kiss, Sloan didn’t move, aware that his body shielded from view what he was doing to hers. Crystal stretched onto her toes, though, to see over his shoulder.

  “Blondie’s leaving with your friend,” she commented, her voice husky and thick in his ear. “Do you mind?”

  “’Blondie?’” he repeated in a daze. “Oh…Marita. No. I don’t mind.”

  “If I ever catch her with her arm around you again, I’ll break it,” she said so matter-of-factly that he couldn’t help but grin. Then, bringing her mouth into contact with his ear, she murmured, “Slide your hands up a bit…a little more…oh, oh, there.”

  He stroked her nipples, making her breath catch, raising tiny goose bumps across her breasts, then pulled his hands free of her clothing. When she started to protest, he silenced her with a kiss and a rough-edged warning. “If we don’t go someplace private soon, I’m going to make love to you right here against this tree and we’re both gonna wind up in the city jail. Will you come home with me?”

  She smiled at him then, the sweetest, most delicate, innocent smile. “I don’t know. Since that first Saturday when you showed up at Aunt Winona’s to give me a tour of all the clearings in the county, I’ve had this fantasy about making love with you under the stars. We have stars here. You don’t have them in your apartment.”

  Crystal, lit only by starlight, wearing nothing but the quilt his grandmother had made for them. It was an image powerful enough to make his knees weak and erotic enough to push him dangerously close to the edge. “Do you know how cold it is?” he asked hoarsely.

  “Do you know how hot you make me?”

  “I know a place…” His place. Their place. It was fitting that he should make love to her for the first time in the place where they were going to share the rest of their lives.

  Grabbing her hand, he started for his truck, his strides so long she had to ask him to slow down. They made one stop at his apartment, where she waited in the truck while he went inside to gather his sleeping bag and an armload of blankets, and then they headed out of town.

  They made the journey in record time. Once he shut off the engine, the night was utterly silent, then gradually the sound of the river reached him. The sound of her breathing. The thunder of his heart beating.

  “Wait here.” He left the truck, carrying the blankets with him. In warm weather he sometimes camped out here for the simple pleasure of sleeping in a place that belonged to him. His usual spot was near the river, with a rise to the northwest that offered shelter from the wind and a stone ring for campfires. He kept a stack of wood just for that purpose nearby. Now, after spreading first the unzipped sleeping bag, then the various blankets and quilts, he knelt beside the ring and used a lighter and a pile of dried leaves to start the twigs he’d laid out. He was adding small chunks of wood to the blaze when he suddenly became aware that he was no longer alone.

  She hadn’t made a sound, but he knew Crystal was behind him. Slowly he turned and saw her as he’d imagined her, wrapped in his grandmother’s quilt and nothing else. The log he held in his left hand fell into the fire, sending up showers of sparks, but he didn’t feel them. He was too dazed.

  She left her shoes at the edge of their makeshift bed, then gracefully sat down, tucking the quilt around her until no part of her was exposed except her beautiful face, and then she smiled at him. “
The fire is nice.”

  “Y-yeah.” Blankly he turned back to it, trying to remember what in hell he was doing. Oh, yeah, adding logs. Building a blaze. Providing heat, when he already felt feverish, when his skin was already starting to get slick with sweat. He tossed on a few more logs from the pile he’d gathered, then slowly stood, dusted his hands and gazed down at her.

  “You are so damn beautiful,” he murmured.

  She freed one slender pale arm from the quilt and extended her hand to him. “Come here.”

  He let her pull him down onto the makeshift bed, let her slide his coat off his arms, then unbutton his shirt, one torturous button at a time. When she tugged it free of his jeans, then pushed the sides apart, the cold air made his breath catch. The gentle caress of her hands made it catch again, and made him forget the cold.

  “Take off your clothes and come under the covers and make love to me,” she invited, her voice husky as she managed to gracefully, modestly, slide out of the quilt and under the pile of blankets. “I want you inside me, please.”

  “’I want you inside me, please,’” Sloan mimicked, the words sending a powerful surge of lust through him. “You Southern girls, so polite and proper in every circumstance.” He tugged off his boots and socks, shrugged out of his shirt, undid his belt and jeans and shucked them and his briefs in one long, controlled movement.

  She laughed as he slid beneath the covers, then pulled her into his arms. “I bet every woman you’re with says please and gives thanks because you’re so perfect and handsome and sweet and they can’t help but love you.”

  Gently he tilted her head back so he could see her face. “Is that a roundabout way of saying you love me?” When she shyly lowered her gaze, he placed a kiss on her forehead. “I know the last three people you said it to all hurt you deeply. You don’t have to say it to me.”