Harlequin Superromance September 2014 - Bundle 1 of 2: This Good Man\Promises Under the Peach Tree\Husband by Choice (14 page)

He shook his head, and she saw his compassion. For the dead girl? No, she knew, it was for her. Anna.

“She was talking about college. She was tutoring younger kids in the foster program and had decided she wanted to be a teacher. All that hope lost because her boyfriend wanted to show off.”

“I heard that much. He's in critical condition, too.”

Her first, vengeful thought had been,
He deserves to be.
But, of course, he was young, too. Only seventeen, swaggering the way boys his age did. If he survived, he would have to live with terrible guilt. Two tragedies for the price of one, she thought sadly.

“Was he speeding?” she asked.

“Yes, but under normal conditions it wouldn't have been dangerously so. With the ice, though...” He didn't have to finish.

She nodded.

“Eat,” he said gently.

She did for a minute, not tasting what went in her mouth, but what did that matter? It was a while before she said, “I want every one of them to have a chance at a happy life. Is that so much to ask?”

“No.” Reid set down his own burger, braced his feet on the floor and drew her to him, between his legs. “No,” he repeated huskily, rubbing his cheek on top of her head. “It's not too much to ask.”

She let him hold her for longer than she should have. Anna wanted to trust him enough to stay in his arms forever, but she knew better than that.

When eventually he drove her back to where she'd left her Toyota downtown, Reid's dad followed behind them all the way in his SUV.

Anna got into her RAV4, waved and watched as Reid started forward again, his father crowding his bumper. Trying to make him mad. Anna couldn't help wondering whether, given their history, he would succeed. And if so...what would Reid do?

CHAPTER EIGHT

C
ALEB
DIDN
'
T
GIVE
a shit about cars or what made them run. He wasn't old enough to get a driver's license, and now he wouldn't be able to go for one until he was eighteen. He didn't understand what made half the guys spend hours every day with their heads underneath the hood of one or another of the beaters the Hales kept around. Personally, he figured Roger messed them up as soon as someone figured out how to get one running, but Isaac said Roger and Paula gave a car or pickup to anyone who'd “graduated” from the Bear Creek Resort Home for Screwed Up Boys. They were able to drive away. Isaac said he wouldn't take one, though. Like Caleb, he didn't seem very interested in engines or brake linings or clutches. Since he was going to college, he said, he didn't expect to need a car for a long time. Which was probably true; the only reason Isaac ever got off the computer or put down a book was because he was expected to do chores.

Caleb wouldn't mind driving away when his time came, but not in some dented piece of crap.

Jose, Apollo and Damon had gone out to work on one of the old pickups. They'd gobbled breakfast because Roger had come home from town yesterday with the part they needed and they were excited.

Caleb didn't even lift his head when they went out the front door. Isaac had already taken over the computer that was in the corner. He was teaching himself some kind of programming that looked like gibberish to Caleb. Paula leaned over his shoulder as if she understood what he was doing. Who knew? Maybe she did. Roger was taking a shower. Caleb could still hear it running, which meant he'd be pissed if Diego and Trevor, who were on the schedule to clean the kitchen, turned on hot water before he got out. Caleb had had it happen—a blast of cold water. How come nobody got excited about plumbing instead of internal combustion engines? he wondered.

Only TJ and Caleb were still at the table, neither of them looking at each other. Caleb was reaching for another piece of toast when he realized the voices outside had risen in pitch. Suddenly footsteps thundered on the steps and across the porch. Caleb turned and was vaguely aware TJ and Paula had, too. Isaac, who knew?

Apollo burst in, the whites of his eyes showing.

“Roger's truck!” he burst out. “Somebody slashed the tires. All four tires.”

Caleb felt as if he'd just been subjected to one of those blasts of cold water.

Some instinct made him turn his head to look at TJ. There was a flash of something on his face that might have been fear, until he noticed Caleb watching and blanked his face.

The other boys had followed Apollo in, too, and they were all babbling. Caleb tried to take it all in.

Without Roger's truck, nobody could go anywhere. They'd be stuck here unless Roger called a tire store and asked them to bring new tires out, and Caleb knew he didn't like outsiders to come here. Wait. No, he could call Reid—

Except...yesterday Paula had sat Caleb down to tell him his father really was in town and that Reid might not be out here for a while, because he couldn't risk leading their father right to Caleb. Yeah, so that left them... He experienced that weird chill again.

Trapped
was the word whispering in Caleb's head, even though he knew it was dumb and melodramatic, 'cuz it was daytime already and there were neighbors and cars passing occasionally on the road, so it wasn't as if they couldn't get help.

He finally identified why he was so bothered. So, okay, they might not actually be trapped. But he was willing to bet that was the message the slashed tires were meant to send.

See what I can do to you.

* * *

A
FTER
HOURS
SPENT
brooding and then a nearly sleepless night, Reid was still angry at himself. The anger hardened into fury when he looked out his front window Wednesday morning and saw his father's Denali sitting there at the curb. Still.

Or again?

Gritting his teeth, he went back to his bedroom and dressed in athletic gear adequate for temperatures hovering around freezing. He finally let himself out the back door, hopped over a neighbor's rickety fence and went for a hard run through streets still messy from a melt-and-freeze cycle that wouldn't let up.

He had a sudden vision: himself running on the hard-packed, wet sand at the ocean's edge north of Malibu. The bluff to one side, the endless blue of the Pacific Ocean to the other. Seagulls dipping and wheeling and calling. The sun shining, a cooling breeze off the ocean, the crash of waves better than any music from an iPod.

When he lived down south, he hadn't gone out to the beach often enough. But when he wanted to, he
could
go. Now look at his options, and this was spring. Supposedly.

Neither the exercise nor the satisfaction of jogging slowly back to his front door and seeing his father's startled face at Reid's unexpected appearance allowed him to let go of his dark mood.

What he couldn't let go of was the reality that, yes, he'd been caught flat-footed by his father's presence yesterday, but that didn't mean he'd had to tell Anna the truth. He could have kept it simple.
My father wants to talk and I'm refusing. He thinks if he hangs around I'll relent. Not happening.

Uh-huh. And then
she
would have said,
What does he want to talk about? You must have some idea.
If he'd said no, she would have looked at him with those eyes, which held all the compassion in the world and a hell of a lot of the world's pain, too, and told him it wouldn't hurt to find out, would it?

Staring at his dark ceiling last night, he'd run dozens of possible scripts, and none of them had turned out well. But wouldn't
any
of them have been a better option than admitting that, yeah, sure, he had stolen his fifteen-year-old brother and was hiding him from his legal guardian?

Did he
want
to spill his guts? he asked himself incredulously. Was that the explanation? Did he suddenly buy into a shining faith that confession was good for the soul?

A snarl erupted from him and he slammed his fist against the bathroom door frame. Swearing and nursing knuckles he suspected would be bruised, he stepped into a blisteringly hot shower and closed his eyes.

I'm losing it,
he thought with shuddering dismay. He didn't understand what was happening to him, a man whose self-discipline had become absolute.

Not since that first tumultuous year with the Hales had he felt his composure fray like this until there were moments he could literally hear the ripping sound as it tore. He had never, as an adult, done anything like hammer his fist into a wall.

He'd never needed another person's liking, approval and touch with an ache that wouldn't leave him, either. And, damn it, this craving he understood the least. He and Anna had had lunch a few times. Spent the one day skiing with scarcely any conversation. He'd kissed her a few times. Held her.

Looked at objectively, she wasn't the kind of stunning beauty who could bring a man to his knees. She was prissy and judgmental. She still had secrets, and he had no idea whether she felt the same desperate compulsion to confess them to him that he apparently had to roll over and bare his unprotected belly to her.

She made Reid feel young and vulnerable and scared, and he hated it.

He especially hated having told her so much yesterday.

Swearing yet again, he turned off the water and grabbed for a towel. No, she wouldn't tell anyone what he'd said. He knew that much. But that wasn't the frightening part. It was that he wanted to tell her everything, and he couldn't.

Dressed for his day, he took a few minutes to scramble some eggs and eat them with whole-wheat toast before donning his weapon and badge and going out the door. He didn't glance toward his father. He hoped the son of a bitch
had
sat there all night and frozen his ass off. Too bad he hadn't asphyxiated himself with carbon monoxide.

When the GMC Denali fell in behind him, Reid's fingers spasmed on the steering wheel. Anna was one thing, but Dean Sawyer was another. He wouldn't give his father the satisfaction of knowing he'd riled him.

A slow thought crept in. It wouldn't be hard to make life in Angel Butte damn uncomfortable for Sergeant Dean Sawyer. No, Reid would rather his personal problems didn't become general knowledge, but it wouldn't take a whole lot of little jabs before his father would lose it.

Little jabs like traffic tickets.

Reid had a suspicion that his smile wasn't a pretty sight.

He parked and walked in to work without so much as looking back, though his internal radar never quit operating. He knew exactly where his father had parked and that he hadn't gotten out of his vehicle.

Instead of going straight to his own office, Reid detoured to Lieutenant Renner's.

“I have a problem,” he told her.

She listened attentively and without comment. At one point, she turned to reach for a report and her blazer fell back. Her blouse rose enough for him to see that she hadn't been able to get the button at her waist fastened.

Damn,
he thought.
Say something?

No, wait. She probably didn't want other people knowing her business any sooner than was necessary. Generally, he felt the same. He was gaining enough respect for her, he hoped she intended to come back to work after a maternity leave.

Tuning back in, he heard her explain that, as was usual around Angel Butte, significant crime had plummeted with the recent crappy weather. Patrol officers were busy with fender benders and cars that had slid off the road; investigators had time on their hands. She could spare a couple of detectives as Reid needed them. She felt sure they'd be glad to help. She called two of them into her office. One immediately volunteered he had a friend patrolling Reid's neighborhood at night, too. He'd ask Officer Munro to drive by Reid's house often.

Reid thanked them all and went upstairs to deal with the usual morning phone messages and emails.

A call from Roger didn't improve his day. The creep had struck again, this time inflicting damage that would be costly. The tires had been slashed not only on Roger's truck, but on the three vehicles the boys had been working on.

Roger turned down Reid's offer to pay to replace them; a donation had just come in from another former alum that would cover the cost, no problem, he said. Feeling uneasy without transportation, he'd taken the opportunity to have a local tire store deliver four tires for his truck. According to Roger, he'd grumbled about vandalism, leaving the impression he'd already reported the crime.

His worry spiking, Reid felt even more unsettled. He had to get away from his father and stake out the grounds of the old resort again. He should have been there last night. If he wasn't going to get any sleep, he might as well be doing something productive.

Now, though, he'd have to do his best to know his father's whereabouts at night instead. Incidents had been staged somewhere around a week apart and, until now, only on weekends. Maybe chance, maybe not. Here, by unlikely coincidence, Dean Sawyer was in town midweek and, yes, they'd had another incident at the shelter. Patience never had been one of his virtues. Now that he was openly in town and showing his hand, if he was the one playing the tricks, he might accelerate the pace of his threats.

Reid almost wished he believed his father was behind the fires and all the rest. He'd positively enjoy arresting him. But he'd already put his finger on the source of his uneasiness. Dean not only wasn't patient, he also wasn't subtle. He lashed out when he was angry; he didn't taunt.

Although keeping Reid under observation 24/7 could be seen as a taunt. So maybe he'd changed in the past twenty years. It was something to think about.

Given his inability to concentrate on anything on his desk, Reid figured it was just as well that he'd scheduled a ten o'clock meeting at the sheriff's department headquarters. On his way out, he made a quick call to Detective Conner, one of the two detectives who had cheerfully agreed to provide one of those jabs.

His father crowded his bumper again the minute Reid pulled out onto the street. Now,
that
was his style. In-your-face.

Not five minutes later, Reid had the pleasure of seeing flashing lights appear two vehicles behind him as his father was pulled over, surprised by an unmarked car. Fun as it might have been to stay to see the show, Reid kept going.

Strike one.

If he hadn't had the upcoming appointment, he could have used the opportunity of having escaped his shadow to drive out to Bear Creek. Not that he'd learn anything. His mistake, he decided grimly, was not being sure he knew where his father was all night. He wouldn't make it again.

His talk with a major who headed the county sheriff's department support services turned out to be productive, and he was glad he hadn't postponed it. They were winding things up when the major said, “Oh, I almost forgot. If you have time, Sheriff McAllister asked if you'd stop by his office.”

“Sure.” Reid levered himself out of the chair and asked for directions. A minute later, McAllister's PA smiled and told him to go on in to the inner sanctum.

He'd met the guy a few times, although their conversations had been brief. Tall and rangy with steady gray eyes, Colin McAllister had to be close to Reid's age, maybe a little older. They shook hands and McAllister offered coffee, which Reid accepted out of politeness more than desire, since he'd just had a cup downstairs with the major. The PA took their orders and produced two cups with admirable efficiency.

When she stepped out with a final smile, closing the door behind her, Reid watched her go. “If I thought I could get away with kidnapping her, I'd do it. Keep her for a few days so I could suck everything she knows out of her head.” There was more fervor in his voice than he'd meant to reveal.