The Sheriff's Son Read online

  Charlie wagged his head back and forth. “No. If I do something bad, Mommy won’t let me ride the horses with Aunt Chloe.”

  Sounded like Justine knew the right button to push to keep her son in line, Roy thought. “Then I’m not going to arrest you and take you to jail. You like to ride horses?”

  Charlie’s blue eyes lit up. “Yeah! I have a painted pony named Thundercloud.”

  “Can he run like the wind?”

  Charlie grinned. “When Aunt Chloe rides him he goes really, really fast. But Mommy won’t let me run him yet. She says I need to be six, and then I can take him on the galloping track.”

  “Sounds like you have something to look forward to,” Roy told the boy.

  “Charlie is like his Aunt Chloe. He has a great love affair with horses,” Justine said as she walked up to the two of them.

  Roy looked at her. “And what about you?”

  Justine didn’t want to get involved in small talk with this man. He’d caused her so much pain that she still, after all these years, wasn’t able to forgive him. But since Charlie was present, Justine didn’t want to appear short or impolite.

  “I love horses. I just don’t sleep, eat and breathe them, as my sister does,” she said, her eyes meeting his, then glancing away.

  “Kitty tells me Rose and Chloe went into town earlier.”

  Justine nodded. “To get a few things for the babies. Clothes, diapers, bottles and such. I’m sure they’ll be back any time now. Chloe doesn’t want the horses to go five minutes past their regular feeding time. She says it upsets their digestion, not to mention their nerves.”

  “I don’t behave too well when I’m hungry, either.”

  Justine didn’t think a full stomach could help Roy’s attitude. In fact, she was beginning to wonder what it would take to make the man smile more often.

  At that moment, Kitty appeared in the open doorway behind them. “Sheriff Pardee,” she called through the screen door. “The girls are back from town now, if you’d like to come in and speak with them.”

  “I’ll be right there.” He turned and headed toward the house. To Justine’s surprise, Charlie followed behind him. She opened her mouth to call him back, then closed it just as quickly. Not allowing her son to go into the house would look odd. Besides, being around Roy for a few minutes wasn’t going to harm him. Charlie was fascinated with the sheriff, not the man, she assured herself.

  With the two of them gone, Justine decided to walk down to the stables and feed the horses. Roy might keep Chloe and Rose tied up for several minutes, and she knew both her sisters would enjoy a little extra time with the babies.

  The stables were built on a sloping hill at the foot of the mountain. Several yards to the northwest, where the land flattened out to become valley floor, a plowed circle of track covered a half-mile distance.

  Justine had seen her father stand many a time at the edge of the track, watching proudly as Chloe galloped his racehorses. He would be there no more, Justine thought sadly. And she was beginning to wonder how much longer they would be able to hold on to the racing stock. It was very expensive to keep a stable of horses, and since their father’s death, they’d been faced with one debt after another. But there was always the possibility that one of the animals would win them a chunk of money. At least Chloe liked to think so.

  Justine was filling the last hay bag with alfalfa when Roy entered the long barn. Determined to ignore her pounding heart, she leaned against the door of the stall and waited while he approached her.

  “What are you doing down here?” she asked, annoyed that her voice had come out husky, rather than in the cool tone she’d been hoping for.

  He didn’t smile at her, but when his eyes met hers, they didn’t seem nearly as hard as they had yesterday. Or was she only imagining that they had softened?

  “I wanted to talk to you, remember?”

  She’d been hoping he would forget. “I knew my sisters were busy, so I decided to do the feeding for them.” Her eyes slipped over his face. “Did they have any helpful information?”

  Roy shook his head. “No. All of you say there’s no one out there that you know who would leave babies on the Bar M’s doorstep.”

  Justine made a helpless gesture with her hand. “There isn’t anyone we know. Look, Roy, all our friends and acquaintances live around here. They’re the same people you know.”

  “What about Charlie’s father?”

  Justine’s heartbeat went from fast to runaway. “Wh-what about Charlie’s father?”

  Frowning, Roy looped his thumbs over his belt. “Obviously he isn’t from around here. Perhaps he had something to do with this?”

  Justine was suddenly thinking of the old adage that one lie always calls for another. But in this case, she couldn’t come out with the truth. Not now! Roy hadn’t wanted a family back when Charlie was conceived, and judging by his single status now, he still didn’t want one.

  “There’s no chance of that,” she said curtly.

  “How do you know?”

  Justine frowned. “I just know. He—he doesn’t have a wife or children. And he has nothing to do with my life now. He…doesn’t want anything to do with it.”

  “You seem very certain of that.”

  Justine suddenly wondered if he was asking these questions because of the twins, or was merely using them as an excuse to pry into her life away from Hondo.

  “I am certain.”

  She moved her eyes from his and fixed her gaze on the far end of the stables. She didn’t want to keep looking at him. She was afraid that if she did, he’d be able to see the secrets she was hiding.

  “Well, it’s my job to ask these things. I’m not really trying to find out about your old lovers.”

  Her old lovers. Justine would have laughed if the whole thing wasn’t so heartbreaking. Roy was the first and only lover she’d ever had. What would he think if he knew that? she wondered wildly.

  “No, I don’t expect you are,” she said wryly.

  Roy hadn’t come down here to the stables to hash out the past with her. But as his eyes wandered over her face, the tender line of her jaw, the curve of her cheeks, the lush fullness of her lips, he couldn’t help but want to know many things. Most of all, why he’d lost her.

  “I would like to know one thing.”

  The quietness of his voice tugged her eyes back to his face. She couldn’t read his stoic expression, but it hardly made any difference. Just seeing the chiseled lines of his face, the gray-blue of his eyes, made her remember how it had been to touch him, love him.

  Before she could stop it, her mind went back to the day she and Roy had met. She’d been driving home during a semester break from college when, just north of Alamogordo, one of her tires suddenly blew. She’d been struggling to loosen the lug nuts when a patrol car pulled up behind her. The young deputy inside had been Roy, and by the time he’d changed the tire, she’d already agreed to meet him later in Ruidoso. The attraction between them had been instantaneous and overwhelming, and from that very day, Roy Pardee had changed her life.

  “One thing?” she asked quietly, forcing her mind back to the present.

  Roy closed the three steps between them, and Justine’s breathing stopped as he placed his thumb beneath her chin and tilted her face up to his.

  “Why did you leave? Why did you go without saying one word? Not even goodbye?”

  Her green eyes grew wide, her lips parted. “My Lord, Roy, what would you have had me do?”

  His face contorted with confusion and anger. “Come to me. Talk to me. I don’t think that would have been asking too much.”

  Bitterness hardened her eyes and twisted the soft lines of her face. “You had no right to ask me anything. You got Marla pregnant while professing to love me!”

  He looked sincerely surprised. “She told you that?”

  The rage Justine had felt at him back then begged to be let loose now. It was all she could do to keep from screaming, beating his ches
t with her fists.

  “Of course she told me,” she said cuttingly. “You didn’t seem to be able to.”

  Justine had never seen a look such as the one that suddenly spread over Roy’s face. Hate, anger, regret and pain all mixed to contort his features into a feral snarl.

  “Why would I want to tell you a lie?”

  Her senses were so scattered by his nearness, she hardly knew what he was saying. But she did latch on to one word, and she repeated it in a blank question. “Lie? What are you trying to say?”

  “I’m not trying to say anything. I am saying it.”

  He dropped his hold on her chin, then wiped a hand over his face. “What the hell…” he muttered. “It doesn’t mean anything now.”

  Justine should have let it go at that. But she couldn’t. His words and his touch had inflamed her. She had to know what happened with him and Marla.

  “If you didn’t want to lie to me, why didn’t you tell me about Marla—that she was pregnant with your child?”

  Her question came out in a heated rush. Roy stared at her face, seeing the outrage there, and realized that she’d gone through all these years believing the worst of him.

  “Because I didn’t know anything about it.”

  Somewhere in the back of Justine’s mind, she knew the best thing for her to do would be to leave the stables and never look back. But the years she spent away from her home and family had been the blackest of her life. She’d been young and alone and heartbroken, and this man had done it to her. She needed to know why.

  “Sure,” she said, her voice heavy with sarcasm. “The next thing you’ll be telling me is that you never had sex with the woman.”

  “No. I did have sex with Marla,” he admitted, with a rueful twist to his lips. “But it was before you and I became involved.”

  “How convenient. Did this happen hours before you asked me out on a date? Or can you narrow it down to minutes?”

  “You’re infuriating.” He gritted out the words between clenched teeth. “You know I’d been trying to break up with Marla. I hadn’t touched her in that way for weeks!”

  “And you’re disgusting to think I’d actually believe you! I’m not that same twenty-year-old you charmed and seduced.”

  He grabbed her by the shoulders, his fingers digging into the soft flesh of her arms. “Then believe this! Marla was never pregnant She lied to you and she lied to me!”

  His words knocked the wind from her, and she went limp against the wooden stall door. “She said—” Justine broke off as shock and regret swirled through her. “Marla told me she was carrying your child, and if I didn’t believe her, I could ask her doctor. She said I was standing in the way of you two getting married. She loved you and wanted to give her child your name. She said if I was any kind of woman at all, I’d leave you and the Hondo Valley for good.”

  “Marla never loved anyone but herself,” Roy said tightly.

  She lifted accusing eyes to his. “You married her!”

  “Only because she was carrying my child. At least I believed she was. And even though I didn’t love her, I wanted my child to have a name. I didn’t want it to be born a bastard.”

  How ironic, Justine thought sickly. He’d wanted to do the honorable thing. Yet his son had been born a bastard anyway. How could she tell him that? She couldn’t! He could never know that Charlie was his child!

  “Can you understand the situation I was in, Justine?” he asked, jolting her straying thoughts back to the present. “Marla’s father was the sheriff and my boss. He respected me. The whole town did. I couldn’t ignore my responsibilities. But you wouldn’t let me tell you any of this. You left without a word.”

  Justine felt sick and defeated. Stepping away from his grasp, she turned her back to him. “What could you have really said, Roy? You chose her rather than me. End of story.”

  “But it wasn’t the end of the story,” he said. “A few weeks after we were married, it became obvious to me that Marla wasn’t pregnant. I was furious. I wanted to kill her. I knew she’d made up the whole thing to get you out of the picture.”

  “Well, it worked,” she said bitterly.

  Roy sighed. “After we divorced, I called you to tell you what had happened. I tried several times, but you wouldn’t talk to me.”

  Pain spread from the middle of her chest up to her throat. “I didn’t want to talk to you. I knew you’d married Marla. And as far as I was concerned, it was all over between us.”

  Moving behind her, he placed his hands on top of her shoulders. To her disgust, his touch burned through her shirt.

  “What would you have done if you’d know the truth about Marla?” he asked quietly, all the anger draining from his voice.

  What would she have done? Justine asked herself. Would she have told him she was pregnant? He’d already married one woman out of obligation. Would it have eased her heart to be the second? She didn’t think so.

  Twisting her head around, she looked up at him. The moment her eyes connected with his blue ones, she felt her heart breaking all over again.

  “You weren’t ready to settle down to family life then,” she said. “You told me that more than once. And I had my education to get. It’s probably for the best that I didn’t know.”

  “Best for whom—you?” he asked. “It must have been. You didn’t waste any time finding another man.”

  She could hear accusation in his voice, yet she couldn’t even defend herself, she realized. She couldn’t tell him that he’d been the only man in her life without giving away her secret. She’d had to tell her family, everyone back in Hondo, that she’d gotten engaged to a college student, but he’d dropped her after she became pregnant. It had been the only thing she could think of to save face for herself, her baby, and perhaps even Roy.

  “I had to get on with my life, Roy.”

  “And pretty damn quick, too, wasn’t it? You’d hardly been gone a month when I heard you’d gotten engaged. Why didn’t you marry Charlie’s father?” he asked sharply.

  Justine felt as though his hands were on her heart, rather than her shoulders, twisting and crushing what little was left of it.

  “It turned out he didn’t want me nearly as much as he thought he did. When he found out Charlie was on the way, he left me high and dry.” Which was true enough, she thought sickly. Roy had left her for Marla. The other woman had been more important to him. “I guess I wasn’t as lucky as Marla.”

  He didn’t say anything, and Justine could only wonder if he was satisfied now. Had dredging up the past relieved him from some sort of guilt? The question very nearly made her snort out loud. What are you thinking, Justine? she asked herself. Roy Pardee never felt guilty about anything.

  “Justine,” he began softly, “I didn’t want things—”

  Justine couldn’t stand any more. She didn’t want to hear how it should have been, or could have been, if Marla hadn’t chosen to tear them apart with her lies.

  “I don’t want to hear it,” she said. Then, twisting away from his grasp, she hurried down the alleyway of the huge horse barn.

  Roy caught up to her in three strides and took hold of her upper arm. His angry face bore down on hers. “Is that the only way you know how to deal with things? Walk away from them?”

  Her teeth grinding together, Justine glared at him. “I don’t have any ‘things’ to deal with. As far as I’m concerned, the past is just that. The past. I didn’t ask you to come down here and—”

  Her words, her touch, inflamed him, made him forget everything but the need to have her in his arms again.

  With a small jerk of his hand, she tumbled against his chest. “You didn’t ask for this, either,” he muttered, then brought his lips roughly down on hers.

  Outraged, Justine stiffened and pushed her fist against his chest. He didn’t relent, his mouth continued its hot, hungry foray. And then, suddenly, stopping him wasn’t nearly as important as simply hanging on.

  Without her even knowing i
t, her hands spread open against his shoulders, and her lips parted. He tasted of promised heat and mindless ecstasy. It would be so easy to let herself want him again, need him again.

  The road her thoughts had taken shocked her back to the reality of what she was doing. With a great mustering of strength, she twisted out of his embrace and backed away from him.

  Her breast heaving, she glared at him. “You shouldn’t have done that.”

  His top lip curled with mockery. “You and I have done a lot of things we shouldn’t have. But kissing wasn’t one of them.”

  “Get out!” she screamed. “I never want to see you again!”

  Her anger caused a dry grin to spread across his face. “And what will you do if you see me again? Run away to Las Cruces? Find another man to cool that womanly fire of yours?”

  She desperately wanted to slap him, but the fear that he might arrest her for assaulting a law officer stopped her. She didn’t know Roy Pardee anymore. He was liable to do anything, she told herself.

  “Believe me, when I go looking for another man, he won’t have a badge on his chest and a gun on his hip!”

  Roy looked pointedly down at himself. “I guess it’s a good thing I keep these on—until I go to bed, that is.”

  If her eyes had been daggers, she would already have stabbed him to death. “You helped my sisters get temporary custody of the twins, but that doesn’t mean I have to listen to this!”

  His expression went flat. “Well, you won’t have to listen to any more tonight, because I’m leaving.”

  “Good!”

  He stepped past her and started toward the large open door at the east end of the barn. Before he reached it, he paused and glanced over his shoulder at her. She was watching him, her jaw clenched and her hands fisted at her sides.

  “See you later,” he told her.

  “No, I won’t. I don’t plan on ever seeing you again.”

  A taunting smile lifted the corners of his lips. “We both know better than that.”

  A half hour passed before Justine was collected enough to return to the house. In front of her family, she pretended that everything was normal, that nothing out of the ordinary had happened between her and Roy down at the stables.