Sherryl Woods - Natural Born Lawman

At the end of the row of shelves, he spotted Sharon Lynn and another woman, her blond hair scooped up into a careless ponytail, damp tendrils curling and clinging to her neck. The desperate expression on the stranger’s face spelled trouble.

She was talking so fast he couldn’t make heads or tails of what she was saying, but he didn’t waste time trying to figure it out. While she was distracted, he moved in beside her and laid a restraining hand on her shoulder. Though she was dressed in expensive, tasteful clothes, she was so thin he could feel her bones. At his touch, she jolted as if she’d been shot, her panicked eyes clashing with his. It all added up to the kind of vulnerability that could make a man lose sight of the job he was being paid to do.

Keeping her firmly in his grip, he glanced at Sharon Lynn. “Everything okay?”

The stranger’s eyes pleaded with his cousin. Sharon Lynn touched her hand gently.

“It’s okay. Justin’s my cousin. He’s not going to hurt you.”

“That all depends,” Justin said, contradicting her. “What happened?”

“I needed some children’s Tylenol,” the woman said in a voice barely above a whisper. “My son’s sick.”

Sharon Lynn sighed. “I caught her trying to slip them into her purse,” she admitted with obvious reluctance.

Justin tried not to react to the tears that were welling up in the woman’s eyes, turning them into huge pools of green light, like sunshine reflected in a pond surrounded by tall pines. She was little more than twenty, it seemed to him, and fragile as a bird. He had a feeling if she was shoplifting Tylenol, then she hadn’t had much to spend on food lately, either. Just because her clothes were pricey didn’t mean she wasn’t truly down on her luck. At the thought of the sick child, his rock-solid value system shifted ever so slightly. He felt justice clashing with compassion. Because he had a sudden, uncharacteristic instinct to bend some rules, his next words came out more harshly than he’d intended.

“Where’s the boy?” he demanded gruffly.

“In the car.”

He fought to hold his temper in check. “You left the baby in the car by himself? As hot as it is out there today?” And why, he wondered, hadn’t he spotted the kid if he’d been securely strapped into a car seat as he should have been? He hadn’t even checked inside the car. Obviously he was slipping.

“He’s okay. I left the windows open a little. He’s sound asleep. Besides, I knew I’d only be gone a minute.” She stared at him defiantly. “You don’t have to tell me all the terrible things that could happen. Believe me, I know. I weighed every one of them and decided he’d be safer there than with me. I didn’t want him to cry and draw attention to me.” Her shoulders sagged. “It didn’t matter. I really am no good at this.”

“Get him,” Justin said tightly. “Now.”

The instant he released her, the woman scooted past him and out the door.

“She’ll run,” Sharon Lynn said, staring at him in astonishment.

“No, she won’t,” Justin said.

“How can you be so sure?”

He held up the package. “Not without medicine.” He handed his cousin a ten-dollar bill. “Pay for them out of this, okay?”

Sharon Lynn gaped. “Are you all right?”

“Just take the damned money.”

She grinned. “Yes, sir.”

“And then fix a couple of milk shakes. I’ll grab some juice for the baby.”

“Uh-oh,” Sharon Lynn said. “What did it, Justin? Those big green eyes or the tears?”

“Go to hell.”

“You ought to be nicer to me,” she taunted. “I can tell this story far and wide by morning. Grandpa Harlan will know every touching detail by the time you get there tonight for the poker game. Your life won’t be worth living by the time they finish teasing you about letting a nasty, evil shoplifter off the hook just because she was beautiful.”

“You know, Sharon Lynn, there are things about you that old Kyle Mason doesn’t know about,” he said grimly, referring to her fiancé. “That man’s been dangling on the hook for the past fifty million years, it seems like, waiting for you to marry him. Could be I know just the way to cut him loose before the latest wedding date next month.”

“You wouldn’t dare,” she breathed.

He could see her calculating the risks and twisted the knife a little more. “Wouldn’t dare tell him that you were the party girl of your senior class at ole Los Piños High? Wouldn’t dare mention that you landed in jail on your senior trip?” he taunted. “Try me.”

“Kyle knows all that,” she said airily. “He loves me anyway. Besides, you know perfectly well what kind of party girl I was, all talk.”

“So you say.”

Her gaze shifted toward the front window. “If you ask me you’d do a whole lot better to be worrying about why your suspect appears to be about to pull out of the space in front and hightail it out of town.” She shot him a smug look. “Just the way I predicted she would.”

Justin looked up in time to see a car shoot backward into traffic amid a squeal of tires. As he’d expected, it was the fancy car with the out-of-state tags.

“Well, hell,” he muttered, and took off running, the carton of juice he’d just grabbed still clutched in his hand.

“If you catch her, tell her I’m not pressing charges,” Sharon Lynn shouted after him, laughing.

“If I catch her, I’m throwing her in jail,” he vowed. “You give me a reason, even an itsy-bitsy reason, and you’ll be in the cell right next to her.”

Patsy wasn’t sure why she’d run. Obviously she hadn’t wanted to be hauled off to jail, something that the sheriff’s deputy had seemed perfectly capable of doing. But it was more than that. Fleeing had been instinctive, which told her quite a lot about the damage even a few days on the run had done to her normally assertive personality.

Seeing the judgment in the deputy’s eyes, the disdain, ordinarily would have infuriated her enough to make her stand her ground. She was capable of holding her own in an argument, or at least she had been until living with Will had taught her that silence was often the only way to escape from escalating tensions.

One look at the deputy had told her that arguments would be wasted on him, too. There was an unyielding air about him, the kind of steadfast determination that would be great if he were on your side, not so terrific if he weren’t.

She had been startled when he’d released her and sent her after Billy. Grateful for the unexpected opportunity to escape, she had seized it, not pausing to consider just how incensed the deputy might be by her actions.

Maybe the woman in the store could calm him down and keep him from chasing after her, she thought hopefully. Patsy had seen the compassion in the woman’s eyes, had known that she was only a hairsbreadth from getting both the medicine and her freedom when the man had turned up. Though she hated taking advantage of anyone’s kindness, she had been relieved that Billy would have the medicine he needed. That was all that really mattered.

Now, not only did she not have anything to bring her son’s fever down, but she was a criminal, with an attempted shoplifting charge pending if that deputy decided to pursue matters.

For all she knew there were kidnapping charges on file back in Oklahoma, too. Will was perfectly capable of doing something so despicable just to make a point to her, to prove that he was the one with all the power. What would turn up if the deputy happened to catch her tag number and run it through his computer? There was no telling.