Marilyn Pappano - The Sheriff's Surrender

He’d smelled the coffee perking the instant he’d awakened and wondered if she’d developed a taste for it over the years. He saw the answer was no when he walked into the kitchen, where she sat at the table, bare feet propped on an empty chair, a magazine open in both hands and a glass of orange juice in front of her.

She wore another of those too summery, too feminine dresses, this one in a soft green that reminded him of his favorite sherbet. It was sleeveless, with a row of buttons from the point of a deep vee all the way to the hem, but she hadn’t buttoned them all. The fabric fell away on either side, exposing ticklish knees, shapely calves and delicate ankles. Her pale brown hair was longer than he’d acknowledged yesterday, long enough to flip up in a tiny curl on the ends, and her glasses—

Apparently suspecting that he’d done a double take on the half-glasses that perched below the bridge of her nose, she peered at him over them. “Do I look like an old-maid schoolmarm?”

With that face? That body? That sleek, waifish hair and those brightly painted stars that decorated the glass frames? Not by a country mile.

She didn’t seem to notice that he didn’t reply but turned his attention instead to filling the biggest mug in his cabinet with steaming coffee.

“For vanity’s sake, I resisted reading glasses for as long as I could, but I finally realized that I never saw anyone anyway, so what did it matter?”

“How do you practice law without seeing anyone?” He wasn’t interested. He swore he wasn’t. He was merely making small talk.

“Well, of course I see people in court, but I hardly ever read there. The rest of the time I’m usually alone.”

Except for meetings in her office, he thought with a scowl. And lunches and dinners outside the office. Movies with friends. Dates. Sleepovers. Weekends away. She’d always been a very social person, more so than he would have liked when he’d been with her. He didn’t believe for an instant that she’d changed.

How social was she with Jace? Intimately so, she’d hinted last night. Though he wouldn’t admit it to anyone else to save his life, that hint was part of what had kept him awake last night. Every time he’d started to doze off, the image of the two of them together had jerked him awake again.

His first impulse was to write off her implication as a lie. She’d proven she wasn’t above lying. Hell, she was a lawyer. One went hand in hand with the other. Besides, Jace knew everything that had happened—all that she’d put Reese through. He might like her, but his loyalty was to family first. He would never have an affair with her without telling Reese first.

His second impulse stopped him from following his first. It wouldn’t be the first time it had happened. Barnett men shared a lot in common, including similar tastes in women. He and Jace had dated each other’s exes in high school and again through college. And that would explain why his cousin cared so much about keeping her safe.

Of course, so would the fact that Jace was the best damn cop Reese had ever known. He had an unshakable sense of right and wrong. He hated injustice, hated to lose, and would give up his own life without hesitation to save the least worthy person out there. It was because of him that Reese had become a cop—because of him that Reese tried to be as good. He failed, though. He wasn’t as selfless, and couldn’t be as unbiased. He saw too many of the shades of gray that Jace simply didn’t see.

The soft pad of bare feet on stone alerted Reese to the fact that Neely was coming closer—or was it the fine hairs on the back of his neck standing on end, or the unsettled twinge in the pit of his stomach? He moved to one side and watched as she took a bowl from the cabinet and a box of cereal from the pantry. Considering how little time she’d spent in his kitchen, she seemed very much at home there. She knew which drawer the silverware was in and which of four identical pottery jars held the sugar. What else had she snooped into while he’d slept, or tried to?

She settled at the table again, and for a moment there was only the sound of crunching. Of course the moment didn’t last. “So…I realize you aren’t married now, but have you been?”

“No.” Marriage had never come high on his list of priorities. He’d more or less taken for granted that it was something he would do after he’d done everything else. He had assumed for a long time that he would do it with her, even though their relationship had come with its own built-in problems—namely, her nasty habit of helping crooks stay out of jail. Eventually, he’d figured, between him and the babies they would have, they would get her out of the criminal-defense business and who knew—maybe even make a full-time wife and mom out of her.

He’d been a fool.

“So you’re playing the field.” When he glanced at her curiously, she gestured to the answering machine. “Shay. Ginger.” She lowered her voice into erotic-dream range. “‘Hey, cowboy, come take me for a ride.’”

He tried to ignore the heat that seeped through him—did his damnedest to shut out long-repressed memories of him and Neely, naked and wicked and incredibly good. He’d always enjoyed sex. Even his first time, when he was seventeen and Joelle Barefoot’s cousin had come up from Broken Bow for a week and shown him things he hadn’t even imagined, had been pretty damn amazing. But it had been different with Neely. Not always-fireworks-seeing-stars-multiple-climax spectacular, but…special. Satisfying in ways that went much deeper than mere physical pleasure. Connecting in ways that had nothing to do with Part A sliding into Slot B.

He took a swallow of coffee to clear the hoarseness from his throat. It didn’t work entirely. “Shay’s a friend. So is her husband. And Ginger would be too young to be my kid sister…if I had a kid sister.”

“What about ‘Ride me, cowboy’?”

Her name was Isabella, she’d come to Heartbreak a month earlier to spend a weekend with her college roommate—Callie, the town’s nurse-midwife—and hadn’t left yet, and he wasn’t sure he would ever look at her again without thinking of sex.

And Neely.

“Believe it or not, the riding lesson she was talking about was actually a riding lesson. She’s never been around horses so I taught her the basics.”

Studying him thoughtfully, she chewed a mouthful of cardboard-tasting wheat chaff and washed it down with juice. “Why wouldn’t I believe you?” she asked evenly. “As far as I know, the only thing you’ve ever lied to me about is the way you felt about me.”

“I never lied.” He’d loved her dearly, even though they’d had some very different ideas on some very important subjects such as right, wrong and justice. Even though he’d taken a lot of flak on the job because of his relationship with her. He’d loved her more than he’d ever loved anyone.

Until the day he’d watched Judy Miller die.

“So your definition of always was just different from mine—as, apparently, was your definition of love.”

“No. We’d simply reached the point where I could no longer overlook certain aspects of who you were and what you did. I couldn’t continue a relationship with you and maintain any measure of self-respect.”

She brought her dishes to the sink, rinsed them, dried her hands, then faced him. There were two spots of bright color on her cheeks, made more prominent by her unusual paleness. “I didn’t kill that woman.”

“You made it possible.”

Stubbornly she shook her head side to side. “Feel guilty if you want, Reese, but don’t try to put it on me. I didn’t do anything wrong. My client was entitled to a proper defense, and I saw that he got it. I did my job, and I did it well. End of story.”