Sheriff’s Runaway Witness

Chapter 10

“Here, here-let me have him.”

J.J.’s voice sounded husky and cracked and rough as sandpaper, and oh-so-beautiful to her ears.

She uttered a sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a sob as she half turned toward him, and his hands slipped down her arms, so deft and sure she surrendered her baby to them without a moment’s hesitation.

“Shh…” he murmured, crooning to the baby as he rocked him, with a rasping sound like a tiger’s purr. And miraculously, her son stopped crying and opened his eyes and turned his face toward the sound.

Then, for a moment, she simply stood still, utterly captivated by the vision of her tiny newborn baby nestled against Sheriff Jethro J. Fox’s broad chest. His bare chest, adorned only by a modest furring of golden brown hair that arrowed down the middle of his torso to disappear beneath the drawstring waistband of the sweatpants he wore, riding dangerously low on narrow hips.

“I’d hurry up with that,” he drawled, glancing up at her and nodding toward the package of formula bottles now forgotten on the island top. “I’ve got his attention, but I don’t know for how long.”

“I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you,” she muttered as she fumbled with the package, at the same time trying to brush the tears from her cheeks without him noticing. “You didn’t,” he said dryly, and his eyes were once more on the baby in his arms.

Which gave her a chance to look at him again, and she did-a longer look that took in the sheet-wrinkle across one cheekbone and the dark beard-shadow on the lower half of his face. Her heart did a curious flip-flop, and she had to look away.

She sniffed. “I’m sorry, I guess I don’t have enough…um, to feed him. I’ve nursed him three times…” Tears threatened again, and she gazed blindly through them at the bottle in her hand.

“You gonna heat that up, or what?”

She cleared her throat…swiped at her cheek. “Um…it says you’re not supposed to microwave it.”

“How ’bout if you just run some hot water in a pan and set the bottle in it. That’s what-couple ounces? Shouldn’t take but a minute.”

Rachel found a pan behind the second cupboard door she tried. She ran water in the sink until it was hot, filled the pan with it and set the formula bottle in the water, then turned and leaned her backside against the edge of the sink.

To her continued amazement, Sean was still staring intently at J.J.’s face, evidently entranced by the sight. So, she discovered, was she. Too much so.

She turned quickly back to the sink, picked up the bottle and swirled it. Silence thickened in the room while she tested the heat of the formula on her arm, swirled some more, tested again. Satisfied at last with the temperature-or unnerved by the silence-she carried the bottle over to where J.J. now sat, comfortably half reclining in a chair at the island, Sean tucked neatly in the curve of his arm.

“Okay-” breathless, she held out her arms “-I think it’s okay now.”

Instead of turning over her baby, J.J. made a hand gesture. Give it to me. So, she passed him the formula bottle. A moment later, with a tiny pang that felt oddly like jealousy, she watched her son gulp greedily at the nipple, making the same squeaky sounds he always made when he nursed. His dark eyes were still fastened on J.J.’s face.

“Where’d you get so good at this?” she whispered.

J.J. didn’t answer right away. He’d noticed her legs were bare all the way up to the edge of his old “Life’s a Beach” sweatshirt. Bare, smooth, pale golden skin that looked silky soft to the touch…muscles firm and well-defined…reminded him of a dancer’s legs. It took some effort, but he managed to haul his attention away from the vision.

“My sister’s got three,” he said with a one-shouldered shrug, keeping his eyes on the baby where they belonged. “Last one came while her husband was in Afghanistan. I helped her out a time or two.” He paused, then glanced up to meet her eyes and said with an unexpected harshness in his voice, “Nobody should have to do this by themselves.”

“I didn’t plan to.” She looked away, and he could see her swallow-hard. “Nicky-” She stopped.

“Should have been here for you,” he finished for her. “Yeah, I know. Should be your husband sitting here right now, instead of me.”

She laughed, and he hadn’t expected that, either. He stared at her. “What’s funny about that?”

“It’s not-except…I can’t picture Nicholas doing…what you’re doing.” She paused, evidently thinking about it, and he could see she didn’t feel like laughing anymore. She hitched a shoulder. “He probably would have hired a nanny.”

J.J. snorted. “Hey, whatever works. I guess if you’ve got the money to hire help…”

She shook her head, and couldn’t seem to look at him. “He wouldn’t have wanted me to nurse, either.”

“You didn’t get a say in it?”

Looking at the floor, she said in a low voice, “It’s just that-” she caught a breath “-he would have wanted me all to himself.”

Nice guy, he thought, but said aloud, “Well, I guess he must have really loved you.”

She lifted her head and shot him a defiant look. But before she looked away again he saw a tear-track glimmer on her cheek.

“What, you don’t think he did?” She shook her head slightly, but didn’t reply. He waited.

After a moment, she drew a breath that seemed to steady her, and said in a low voice, “I thought he did-obviously. Or else, why would I have married him? But lately, I’ve been…wondering about that.”

“That being whether he loved you or why you married him?” It occurred to him that he was interrogating her, but either she hadn’t realized it yet, or didn’t mind.

“Both, actually. I thought he loved me…but now I think-I know he loved the way I looked-the way we looked together. He told me often enough-he thought I was beautiful.”

Suspense sizzled inside him and raced beneath his skin. Was this the moment? They were on the subject. He could easily steer the conversation to that last night she’d spent with her husband. So easily…

She drew another of those bolstering breaths. “Now, what I think is, he loved the idea of me, but I don’t think he ever really knew-never even saw the real me.”

The moment had passed…like a river flowing past his feet.

He smiled and said, “And…who is the real you?”

He saw her lips quiver with the hint of an answering smile. “Well…let’s just say…I’m no angel, okay?” She looked down, her face somber again. “I think the main thing is, I don’t look like who I really am. I think I look…you know, little, and, um…kind of sweet-” she coughed and colored a little “-but actually, I have a temper, and I’m a lot tougher, a lot stronger than I look.”

“I can testify to that,” J.J. said, flashing back to those incredible moments with her in the backseat of his patrol vehicle. “I’ve seen what you can do, remember?” He glanced down at the baby now sleeping in his arms, then back at Rachel, and knew that she, too, remembered. Remembered the intimacies that hadn’t bothered her at the time, but maybe were beginning to, judging from the way the pink in her cheeks was deepening.

The moment stretched while he tried his best to block those memories from his mind. Then he frowned, forced himself to concentrate on the present and said, “How do you know your husband wouldn’t have loved ‘the real you’? Did you ever let him see that side?”

She snorted softly. “I guess not.”

“Why?”

She paused, restless now, and he could see the question made her uncomfortable. In a muffled voice, not looking at him, she said, “I was afraid, I suppose. Afraid he wouldn’t want to marry me. Isn’t that stupid? That I really did want to marry him, so badly.”

“Which brings up the second question-why?”

Again, she didn’t answer right away, and he saw another tear run down her cheek. She brushed at it, sniffed and muttered, “Sorry. I don’t usually do this.”

“That’s okay,” he said gruffly. “Hormones. My sister was a mess for weeks.” He was rewarded with a small laugh.

She frowned at the moisture on her fingertips. “Yeah, well. This is very hard on my self-esteem, you know?” She took a breath, faced it head-on. “What I’ve been asking myself is, what kind of person does it make me, that I was so desperate to marry a man who was basically spoiled, selfish, immature and was probably going to make me miserable at some point in the future?”

J.J. just looked at her while he worked on getting his own emotions under control. Because inside him there was a guy doing the fist-pump and hissing, Yes! Which was hard to understand, since even if she was having doubts about whether she’d loved her husband and maybe wasn’t as deeply mired in grief as he’d thought, it didn’t change anything as far as those questions he needed to ask her went. Except as a potential eyewitness, she was still as far off-limits to him as ever, at least for the time being.

But…for the future? He couldn’t keep the thought out of his head. Once he was back on the detective squad where he belonged and out of that desert purgatory…what then? How long did it take for a woman to get over the loss of her husband, even if he had been a selfish son of a bitch?

“Well,” he said, “did you know any of that then?”

She sniffed and whispered, “No, I suppose not.”

He cleared his throat and said carefully, “Let me ask you this. Nicholas Delacorte was a good-looking guy…right?”

“Oh, yes.” She gave a husky laugh and brushed again at her cheek.

“Charming?”

She nodded. “Yes-very.”

“And rich?”

“Yes, but that didn’t-”

“He treated you well?”

“Like a queen.” She’d gone still, and was staring at him intently now.

He shrugged, and forced the words out. They came, sounding like a truckload of gravel. “What’s not to love? You were young, vulnerable, maybe a little rebellious, like you said-and he had a touch of danger about him, too, right?” She nodded slowly. He tipped his head toward her. “So, there you go. Don’t beat yourself up about it.”

He set the empty formula bottle on the island top and stood up. She took a step toward him. He strolled toward her with her sleeping baby a warm, sweet weight in his arms. Close enough to hand her son off to her, he paused, and for what seemed a long time, just stood and looked down at her. And for some reason, she looked back at him, and her lips parted. He felt her warmth, smelled her scent-baby powder and milk and woman-and dangerous thoughts and wants filled his head. Not for you, he reminded himself. At least, not now.

He made a throat-clearing sound and she seemed to echo it, and they performed an awkward little dance while he did his best to hand over the kid without waking him up.

“Might want to burp him before you put him down,” he said gruffly, when his arms were empty again. He turned and hauled himself away from her, and it was like trying to break free of a magnetic field. The place on his body where the baby had nestled felt cold now.

At the kitchen doorway he paused to look back. Giving full credit to his vigilant Better Angel, who must have been perched on his shoulder just then, he cleared his throat and said, “Oh-you might think about giving your husband a break, too. Maybe the man loved you as much as he knew how to. Given the kind of upbringing he had.”

Whether that was true or not, he didn’t know. Maybe it would give her some comfort. Hell, he could do that for her, at least.

He went through the door and down the hallway to his room. To bed, but probably not to sleep.

“I saw her, yesterday. Down by the creek. Talked to her.”

It was early morning. Sam was leaning against a stack of alfalfa hay, watching Sage milk.

The kid looked sideways at him without stopping the rhythmic thrum-thrum of milk into the foam-filled bucket. “Yeah? Funny she didn’t mention meeting you.”

“She didn’t know it was me, and I didn’t enlighten her.”

“Why not?”

He laughed silently. “Well, I’ve been told I’m a coward.”

“A coward?” Sage threw him another look, eyebrows raised. “Who told you that?”

“Doesn’t matter.” Sam moved restlessly. It was warm in the barn, but he didn’t take off the fleece-lined jacket he wore. The older he got, he noticed, the harder it was to keep the old bones warm. “Truth is, I liked talking with her. Found out how she feels about me, too. Her not knowing who I was, she didn’t mince words.” He cackled a laugh. “Sure did remind me of her grandmother. Not her looks, of course. But she does have a way about her.”

He watched Sage kick back the milking stool and stand up, envying the kid his thirty-year-old’s agility. Waited while the kid carried the bucketful of milk to the milk room, poured it through the strainer, then into stainless steel cans. Watched him put the cans in the walk-in, then come back to release the cow from the stanchion, give her a slap on her bony rump to send her ambling back out to pasture. Pick up a push broom that was leaning against the wall, then finally come back to him.

“When you planning on telling her who you are?” Sam shrugged and didn’t reply. Sage made a couple of passes with the broom, then paused to look at him. “Still planning to wait till they all get here? Tell everybody at the same time?”

Sam plucked an alfalfa stem from a bale of hay and chewed on it. “I don’t know, I’m thinking of playing dead awhile longer. They think I’m already dead, maybe I’ll find out how they really feel about me. Find out why they’re really here.”

Sage snorted. “You know why they’re here.”

“The money, you mean.”

“That letter you sent said, come and claim your inheritance. You could have said, come and meet your grandpa, but you didn’t. What did you expect them to do?”

Sam made a scoffing sound. “If I’d said come meet grandpa, you think they’d come? Only way I could be sure they’d show up was to offer money.”

Sage gave him one of his inscrutable Indian looks. “Maybe. But now you’re never gonna know, are you? You didn’t give them a chance to show you whether or not they care about meeting you for you.”

Damn kid, Sam thought. He hated it when Sage was right.

He shoved himself away from the haystack and picked up his hat. “So, that’s why I’m gonna play dead,” he muttered. “Give ’em the chance to say what they really think about old Sierra Sam Malone.” He jammed the hat on his head, picked up the reins of his paint horse and made for the door.

“You going back up to the cabin?”

“Figure I better, if I’m playin’ dead. Can’t play the crotchety old neighbor too many more times. That little gal is no fool. And neither is that lawman she brought with her.”

“No, they’re not,” Sage agreed. There was silence. Sam kept walking. Sage said, “You want a leg up on that horse, or not?”

Sam eyeballed the height of the stirrup, then reluctantly halted and waited, hands on the saddle horn, for Sage to come up beside him. “Damnation, I hate bein’ old,” he grumbled as he planted his boot in the cradle Sage made of his interlaced fingers.

“You rather die young?” Sage said, and lifted him effortlessly into the saddle.

The next morning, Sage took Rachel to show her the farm and the old original adobe farmhouse where he now lived. J.J. was all set to go with them when Katie called him on his cell phone with information he’d asked her to get for him and for which he knew he was going to need to refer to his computer. Since he couldn’t think of a good reason to ask Sage and Rachel to wait for him, he had no choice but to wave them on without him.

It wasn’t that he really thought Sage might present some kind of danger to his potential eyewitness, or that Carlos’s thugs were lurking out there in the barn waiting to grab her. It was more of an indefinable uneasiness he felt-like an itch in a place he couldn’t reach to scratch. An itch brought on by that image that kept drifting into his mind of the two of them, Sage and Rachel, galloping side by side on horseback, both with similar long black hair flowing in the wind…

Funny, he thought, how much those two looked alike. Like a matched set.

And none of his business, when he got right down to it. None whatsoever.

Back in the study, with the house quiet around him, J.J. squinted at the computer screen and picked up his cell phone.

“Okay, I’ve got it. Talk to me, Katie. What am I looking at, here?”

“Well, first of all, you were right, Sam Malone did pay for Rachel’s college education, including medical school. Deposits had been made regularly to a trust fund set up by Rachel’s grandmother, Elizabeth Doyle Malone. The trust fund itself has no connection to Sam Malone, but the deposits came from one of his more obscure holdings, a pharmaceutical company headquartered in Dublin, Ireland. Obscure, but easily traceable to Malone.”

“What’s the status of the trust fund now?”

“Inactive since the death of Elizabeth Malone, currently being administered by a law firm in Beverly Hills. Presumably, since the trust is supposed to be for the costs of Rachel’s education, once she dropped out, the payments stopped. If she completes her education, then funds remaining in the trust are to be given to Rachel.”

“Huh. Did Rachel know about the trust?”

“Who knows? It doesn’t seem to be a big secret, but if she does know, based on what you told me about her attitude toward Grandpa, I’m guessing she thinks it was established and funded by her grandmother.”

“So,” J.J. said grimly, “if it’s no big secret, anybody trying to figure out where a runaway eyewitness might go, anybody looking for family connections, say…”

“Could easily find out about the trust and who funded it,” Katie finished for him.

He let out a breath, counted ten, then said, as he bookmarked the page and logged off, “Any developments in the case of the two dead federal agents?”

“Nothing I’ve been able to find. Also, no word on whether Carlos Delacorte is under surveillance.”

J.J. snorted. “I think it’s a pretty safe bet the feds have been watching the entire Delacorte organization for a while now. Which I’m thinking is probably what led to the attempted takedown outside that nightclub to begin with.”

“Probably,” said Katie, “but even if that’s true, the feds aren’t likely to be sharing their information with the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department.”

“Not with a lowly deputy from an armpit of a desert outpost out in the middle of nowhere, anyway,” J.J. said sourly. He let out another gust of frustration, thanked Katie for her efforts, told her to keep trying to get a line on Carlos’s activities and signed off.

With the computer screen blank, the cell phone silent and Josie evidently occupied in some distant quarter, the house seemed silent as a tomb. Since there was still no sign of Rachel and Sage, J.J. figured he’d go to his room and get his hat, then maybe take a walk down to the farm…see if he could meet up with them. He started across the courtyard to his room, then at the last moment, found himself taking a slight detour to Rachel’s room next door instead.

The French doors to both his and Rachel’s rooms stood open onto the veranda. He paused there, taking in the sweet smells of flowers and the warm spring breeze, listening to the wind chimes and for sounds of infant displeasure. Hearing none, he hesitated, and then, with no idea what motivated him, stepped into Rachel’s room. He waited a moment to let his eyes adjust to the dim light, then walked-okay, tiptoed, being mindful of the blinking monitor-to the side of the bassinet. Stood-for how long he didn’t know-gazing down at the kid, watching him sleep, and wasn’t even aware, just then, that he was holding his breath.

He had to admit the kid had improved with age, although he still didn’t think he’d call him beautiful, exactly. Then again, seeing him all wrapped up like a papoose in a blue blanket with teddy bears on it, dark hair waving across his scalp, lashes fine as spider webs laying on fat pink cheeks, he could see how a mother might think he was. One tiny hand had managed to break free of the swaddling blanket and was splayed over one cheek, wrinkly fingers spread wide. He reached out with one finger and touched the hand. Instantly, the fingers moved…curled… It reminded him of the way a sea anemone contracted when you poked it with your finger. The pink mouth contracted, too, drawing up into a tight little bud, and the forehead wrinkled into an infant version of a frown.

J.J. realized, suddenly, that he was smiling.

What the hell am I doing? He jerked his hand back, turned and tiptoed quickly across the room and through the French doors.

Rachel was in the courtyard, standing by the fountain. She was gazing down at the hand she was trailing in the water, but looked up quickly when he stepped onto the veranda, reminding him of a doe startled at a waterhole. She broke into a smile when she saw him, eyes bright and cheeks flushed, and it occurred to him she looked as guilty as he felt.

“Hi,” he said. “Back already?”

At almost the same moment, she nodded toward the room he’d just left and said, “Is he-”

He shook his head. His heart was thumping. “Sound asleep.”

“Oh.” For an instant she looked as if she didn’t know whether to be glad or sorry. Then, smiling again, she burst out, “Oh, I had the best-” just as he was saying, “How did your-” So he stopped and motioned for her to continue.

She did, breathless as a child. “Oh, Jethro, you should have seen it, there are just babies everywhere. I guess that’s the way it is, in the spring, on a farm. Baby calves-there’s even a little tiny calf Sage said they have to feed with a bottle because he was a twin and his mother rejected him, but that’s only until they get him strong enough, then he said they’ll let him nurse one of the milk cows. They are so pretty…the calves are. They seem so shiny and new, and they have such beautiful eyes. There are baby lambs, too, and baby goats-the goats and sheep don’t seem to mind twins. Almost all of them have twins, and one of the goats even has triplets. They aren’t out in the pasture-they have to stay in pens until the babies are bigger, because of coyotes. Even bears and mountain lions, sometimes, can you imagine? And there’s a litter of kittens- Sage said they were born in the haystack, but he moved them into the tack room because they’re safer there. They’re just getting their eyes open now. I can’t wait to see them when they start running around. Oh-and the house is fascinating, too. It’s over one hundred years old, made of adobe. The walls must be a foot thick. Sage said-”

“I’m glad you enjoyed yourself,” J.J. interrupted, mainly because he didn’t think he could stand hearing “Sage said” one more time. “I hate to stop you there-you’ll have to tell me all about it some other time. Right now, I’m fixin’ to head down the mountain, see if I can pick you up a cell phone.”

Her lips twitched and her dimple threatened. “‘Fixin’ to’-that’s Southern, right?”

He grunted. “Funny. Look, I was just wondering if there’s anything you need me to pick up for you while I’m down there.”

“Oh-yeah.” She pressed a hand to her forehead, smoothing back damp wisps of hair. And his stomach clenched as he flashed on an image of his own hand smoothing those same damp wisps while he growled at her, One more time…come on, baby, you can do it…one more. “I made a list-Josie has it…”

“Might as well save her the trip.” He motioned for her to stay put. “I’ll get it from her.” He started on across the courtyard, then reversed direction when he remembered he still needed to get his hat. Then halted again and turned back to her, feeling awkward as a tongue-tied kid. “Uh…any particular kind of cell phone? Color? Bells and whistles?”

She shook her head, smiling crookedly and without the dimple. “I don’t need fancy. Just need it to work.”

He nodded and stepped across the veranda, boots scraping on the stone pavers.

Rachel watched him go, one hand pressed against her pounding heart. She waited until he’d disappeared into his room before letting out the breath she’d been holding.

Thank God I have quieter shoes than he does, she thought. Otherwise, he’d surely have heard me. If he knew I’d seen him…knew I’d witnessed that moment…him with Sean…he might never forgive me.

Oh, but I did see it. And I’m so very glad I did.