Gayle Wilson - Remember My Touch

www.millsandboon.co.uk

is a two-time RITA ®Award recipient, winning Best Romantic Suspense Novel in 2000 and Best Romantic Novella in 2004. Gayle has also won a Daphne du Maurier Award for Excellence in Suspense and Mystery and a Dorothy Parker International Reviewer’s Choice Award for Series Romance. Beyond those honors, her books have garnered more than fifty other awards and nominations, including a National Readers’ Choice Award for Best Romantic Suspense, won by Wednesday’s Child, a novel from HQN Books.

Gayle holds a master’s degree in secondary education, with additional certification in the education of the gifted. Although her specialty was honors and gifted, as a former high school history and English teacher, she taught everything from remedial reading to Shakespeare—and loved every minute she spent in the classroom.

Gayle was on the board of directors of Romance Writers of America for four years. In 2006 she served as president of RWA, the largest genre-writers’ organization in the world. Please visit her Web site at www.BooksByGayleWilson.com.

For Huntley Fitzpatrick,

who is both my editor and my friend, with love and gratitude

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

EPILOGUE

“WHAT’S GOING ON here, Mac?” Jenny McCullar demanded. Her voice was soft, but her dark eyes were flashing. “What kind of game do the two of you think you’re playing?”

Mac knew he probably should have been expecting his wife’s questions, except Jenny had never been one to fret or nag. And he thought she had learned a long time ago to live with the dangers inherent in his job as county sheriff.

But there had been a lot of pressure on both of them lately, unexpected stresses on a marriage that had been rock solid for the past five years. That was the reason he hadn’t told her he’d asked his brother to come home this weekend. At least, he amended, that had been one of the reasons.

“I asked Chase to come down because I wanted his advice. Nothing more than that, Jenny.”

“Just a little advice about somebody running drugs?” she questioned. The muscles in the perfect, olive-toned oval of her face were tight, a small furrow forming between the winged brows.

That would have been a reasonable assumption, since Mac’s brother had spent the last four years working for the DEA. Chase was someone who could certainly provide answers to what was going on and some advice about what Mac should expect. Jenny would have figured out eventually why his brother was here, except she hadn’t had to. Almost as soon as Chase arrived, he had spilled the beans.

His brother’s eyes had been full of contrition and apology when they’d met Mac’s, a matching set of clear McCullar blue. In Chase’s there had also been a trace of surprise. Mac knew his brother couldn’t believe he’d been keeping secrets from Jenny. “Maybe running drugs,” Mac hedged.

“In this county?” Jenny’s voice was full of the same doubts Mac himself had had when he first began to suspect what was going on.

“Better than seventy-five percent of the drugs that enter the States come across this border, and we’re sitting right in the middle of it. Why would you believe we’re immune?”

“Because…that’s never been a problem here,” Jenny said.

She was calmer now, but the fear was still in her eyes. She raised her hand, running small fingers distractedly through the gamine cut of her dark brown hair. “Why do you think…?”

The question faded as her intelligence and her knowledge of the way things worked along the border provided the answer to that unfinished question.

“They made you an offer.” She spoke that sudden realization aloud. “Oh, dear God, Mac, they’ve already approached you.”

Mac McCullar had never outright lied to Jenny, and he wasn’t about to start now. Besides, she had a right to know. If the other hadn’t been going on, he would already have told her.

The bribe he’d been offered had been huge and the warning that had accompanied it subtle, containing little overt threat of violence. That was the way it was done, of course, and not many people held out against the promise of that much money. Not given the salaries of law-enforcement officers. Not in a rural Texas county this size.

Sheriff Mac McCullar had been expecting the overture for months. It had probably been delayed only because of the location of his county, far from the Mexican cities where the drugs from South America were flown in. Or because of its distance from the major U.S. highways that led north into the American heartland.

But law-enforcement efforts were increasing on both sides of the border, squeezing the dealers who had been operating at the major crossing points. Mac had known it was only a matter of time until someone realized that this isolated stretch would be perfect for bringing drugs across.

Too many of the people who had been cooperating with the cartels had gone down in the investigations carried out by federal agencies in both the U.S. and Mexico. Some of those had been respected Texas law officers, men who had given in to the lure of the obscene amounts of money the Mexican cartels offered so freely—enormous sums that were paid them to do nothing besides look the other way when drugs were transported across their jurisdictions.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Jenny asked.

“I figured one of us worrying about it was enough.”

“Then you are worried?”

“I guess I’d be a fool not to be.”

“You told them no,” Jenny said, holding his eyes.

Mac thought maybe she was hoping that wasn’t what he had said, but she knew him better than that. “What do you think?” he asked.

Then he smiled at her, his soft brown mustache lifting to reveal a flash of even, white teeth set in the strong angles of his tanned face. She didn’t return his smile and the fear in her eyes hadn’t faded.

“I imagine you told them to go to hell,” she suggested.

“I wasn’t quite that polite,” Mac admitted truthfully, his smile widening. If he had been hoping for a lessening of the tension in her small, squared shoulders, he was disappointed.

“Why is it your responsibility?” Jenny demanded. “Where the hell is the DEA? Why aren’t they doing something?”

“It’s my county, Jenny. My job.”

“And when your job gets you killed, who’s going to look after your precious county? Who do you think cares about any of this besides you?”

“Anybody who lives here ought to care. Anybody with kids, a home, a family.”

“What about your kids, Mac? Our kids.”

“I’m working on that,” he reminded her, his lips tilting again, this time in memory. He’d been working on that with real diligence. Only that kind of pleasure—making love to Jenny—had never before had anything, really, to do with what he considered work.

Her chin quivered suddenly and that movement, quickly controlled, almost broke him. Jenny wasn’t a woman who cried. She had never used tears to get her own way. But her emotions had been on edge lately, and Mac certainly understood all the reasons why.

Once they had decided it was time to add children to the wonder of their marriage, they had pursued that goal with a willingness that had little—on Mac’s part, at least—to do with making babies. Babies were just something he had always believed would happen naturally, given enough opportunities. And those, he had willingly supplied.