Forbidden (Southern Comfort) (14 page)

He was beginning to think his cousin had gotten careless.

Carelessness and a life of crime were two things that didn’t mix.

Yes, this girl was a good find, and yes, they
likely already had a buyer.  But snatching a kid who would be missed right away was not only risky, it was unbelievably arrogant.

Combine arrogance with carelessness and you have a recipe for disaster.  That particular combination brought even the cleverest of criminals down.

And if Billy Wayne went down, he’d try to take JR with him. That was one thing he positively could not allow. 

JR watched Billy Wayne watching him, and visibly shook off his rage.  Angry confrontations were not his style, as they were usually counterproductive. 

Two pairs of blue eyes held each other’s gaze until the newscast began in earnest.  When a reporter came onto the screen with a Ferris wheel looming large behind her, JR cranked the volume and then stood, hands on hips, waiting to assess the damage.  They might have to cut their losses
,
get
rid
of
the
girl, and pull out of Charleston if this thing attracted too much attention.

The brunette started mouthing off about baseball and apple pie. And about thirty seconds into the newscast, dropped an unexpected bomb.

There was an FBI agent involved in the investigation.

Now, what the hell were the Feebs doing sticking their noses into a missing persons case that wasn’t even three hours old?  They had jurisdiction over kidnappings, but there should have been no indication that the girl had left the fairgrounds under anything but her own free will. 

Behind him, Billy Wayne began to make angry noises of protest, but JR stopped him with a quelling look.

Then the camera panned out, showing a blond man and what looked to be his family. JR noted the badge on his hip.  He was dressed casually – not standard government issue – and was holding onto a dark-haired woman and a sleeping child.

From that JR surmised that the man probably had been off duty. Simply a matter of being at the wrong place at the wrong time.   Which meant the FBI wasn’t hot on their trail.

Lucky thing for Billy Wayne.

Then, just as JR was about to lose interest – after all, the locals would never be able to catch them – the off duty FBI agent kissed his wife on the mouth.  As she turned, JR caught a glimpse of her face.

Memories long buried erupted to the surface.

He tilted his head.  Squinted his eyes.  He couldn’t be certain. 

The last time he’
d seen her in person had been outside a crowded courthouse.  She hadn’t seen him, of course – he hadn’t wanted anyone to see him, to know that he’d been drawn as helplessly as a fish on a line – so he’d dressed as a homeless bum.  It had been his first attempt at disguise.

And he’d kept up with what you could call the
main players
for a number of years afterward.

Until…

Well. Until there hadn’t been any reason to keep up with them any longer.  

Anger crept slowly back in, an unwelcome visitor with muddy feet, messing up the inner rooms he’
d swept clean.

The woman
turned more fully toward the camera, and doubt fled out the door so recently opened by his intrusive guest.  It was her.        

Then his gaze slid toward the sleeping child.

A boy.

Tate Hennessey had a son.

An emotion even more foreign than anger caused the remote he held to tremble.

CHAPTER TEN

SHIT.

It was Clay’s very first thought of the morning.  Before he’d showered, before he’d had coffee, before he’d even taken a leak, he had his cell phone in his hand.

And what, he asked himself, was he planning to do with it?

Call Tate?

Saying what, exactly?

Hi S
ugar, it’s me.  You know that man you kicked out of your life last night?  The one who has so far managed to drag you into an almost-mugging, give a peep show to your mother and your kid, disabuse any wide-eyed notions you might have about my big, bad FBI abilities to locate a missing teenager, and who all but forced himself upon you in my car’s front seat?

The one who is in town for no more than a few more days and has absolutely n
othing to offer other than a couple of dates and some hair-raising sex, and will leave you and your little boy with some nice memories and a stupid purple bear?

Yeah.  That’s the one.  So do you want to have dinner tonight?

Double shit.  He’d lost his ever-loving mind. 

Clay wondered exactly when he’d gone from being Clay Copeland
, expert on human behavior, easygoing bachelor and master of the fine art of Avoiding Entanglements With Women, to Clay Copeland – total head case.

Maybe he could find a way to engrave those new credentials on his badge.

Forget Fidelity, Bravery and Integrity.  FBI – as pertaining to himself – now stood for Full Blown Idiot.

As he lay there in Justin’s guest room watching the morning light dance through the blinds, he realiz
ed that somehow, in the past few days, he’d succumbed to what countless hours of putting himself in the mindset of some of the country’s most evil and diabolical killers hadn’t managed to do. He’d gone off the deep end, blown a fuse, gone postal or whatever you want to call it.

Because the first thought he’d had this morning, the last notion in his head before he’d succumbed to fatigue – hell, the
dreams
that had plagued him all night – had all revolved around how exactly he was going to get his hands on Tate.

Not that he’d stop with his hands. 

Oh no.

He wanted his mouth, and his tongue, and his… everything to suddenly fuse themselves to her like some kind of parasitic growth.

He wanted to taste her, to consume her, to frickin’
devour
her. And then start the entire process again.  He wanted… Hell, he didn’t know what he wanted.

Liar.  He did, too.

He wanted to have Max crawl into bed with him in the morning, and for it to be perfectly okay for him to be there.

Because Tate would be there.

On a regular basis.

Really regular.

Like every day.

He felt himself freefalling into complete and utter mental chaos.  “Shit, shit,
shit.”

When the phone in his hand started ringing, Clay nearly did that in his pants.   “Copeland,” he sighed into the phone, trying to keep the tone-of-a-man-who-has-lost-it out of his voice. 

He sort of hoped it was his boss.  Cutting his vacation short.  Getting him out of this rabbit hole he’d fallen into so that the world could start making sense again.

“Agent Copeland?  This is Deputy Jones with the Bentonville sheriff’s department.  We spoke to each other last night?”

Well thank God.  Law enforcement.  He felt familiar ground begin to grow under his feet.  “Yes, this is Agent Copeland.  How can I help you, Deputy Jones?”

“Well, Agent Copeland, I understand that you’re on vacation, but I was hoping you might be able to carve out some time today to come down to the station and help us out.  We put out some feelers last night to some of the other law enforcement agencies in the area, and, well… we’re beginning to think that we might have a situation that could benefit from your expertise.”

Ask and ye shall receive,
Clay thought.  It was his job to be on hand to assist the locals if they should need it.  And concentrating on work should help keep his mind off Tate.  “Absolutely,” Clay answered, sitting up in the bed and glancing toward the alarm clock on the nightstand.  Eight a.m.  There were still almost twelve hours left in that critical twenty-four hour period.  He didn’t hold out a lot of hope that they’d find Casey Rodriguez within that time, but he was thankful that the Sheriff was proactive enough to want to bring him into it. 

“Give me thirty minutes to shower and get changed and I’ll head out.  Give me the station address.”

The man rattled it off and Clay snagged a pen from a holder on the nightstand and jotted it down on the handy little notepad.

“Got it,” Clay said.  His blood juiced at the thought of getting back to work, and that worried him even more.  He’d come here to get away from work and now he was going to work to get away from here.

Somewhere along the line he’d gotten completely messed up.

He was just about to end the call when the deputy cleared his throat.  “Uh, I don’t mean to sound indelicate, Agent Copeland, but… is Ms. Hennessey with you, by any chance?”

Clay knew what the deputy was going to ask.  He wanted Tate to come down to the station house and look through some mug shots.  Maybe help a police artist work up a sketch.  This is where he should tell the man that Tate was
not
here, and that he should try to reach Tate at her home.  They could arrange an appointment on their own time, and it didn’t have anything whatsoever to do with Clay. 

Tate had made it clear that she had no intention of continuing to see him, and as a gentleman, he should respect that.

As a commitment-phobe, he should applaud that, running as fast and far in the opposite direction as he possibly could. 

As an agent of the federal government, he really shouldn’t lie.

“Ms. Hennessey is… unavailable at the moment.”  Hey, it was an accurate piece of information.  The fact that she was across town and not merely in the shower was simply a matter of semantics.  “But I’m assuming you’d like her to come in as well?”

“Yes, if it wouldn’t be too much trouble.”

“Not at all.”  Clay did some rapid thinking.  “But it may take us a little while to get there.  We’ll need to make some arrangements for her son.”

Man oh man, he was so full of
it.  Not to mention being a scheming, calculating
idiot
who didn’t know enough to get out when the getting was good.

He said his goodbyes to the deputy, stared at the rotating ceiling fan.

The last part of his sanity crumbled.

He opened his phone again to call Tate. 

TATE
frowned at her reflection in the hall mirror as she stabbed an earring through her left lobe.  Even with an application of concealer, the skin beneath her eyes was a particularly unappealing shade of lavender. Visible proof of her restless night. After Clay left, she’d lain awake for what seemed like hours.  Her body felt tight and achy, and her mind… her mind bounced from contemplating how differently the time would have passed if she’d let him stay with her to imagining – all too vividly – what could happen to a young girl in the clutches of a twisted, narcissistic adult. Sick, feeling guilty for even beginning to think of her own physical needs at such a time, Tate felt tears roll down her cheeks and soak her pillow. The day had brought too many bad memories to the surface. Her experience at camp.  Her mother, so distraught and overprotective and very, very angry. The nightmares. The subsequent trial, during which whatever scraps of innocence she’d maintained had been tattered and torn to bits.

When she finally managed to fall asleep, her dreams had been full of muscle-bound men with
leering faces painted like clowns, of the Ferris wheel lights – no longer lovely, but gaudy and bright and sinister – spinning faster and faster until she’d awakened with a scream clawing its way out of her throat. 

She’d practically fallen out of bed, and raced to Max’s room, to find him sleeping soundly.  Her baby.
She’d spent the rest of the night curled up on the floor beside his bed. 

Tate
couldn’t fathom what Casey’s mother was going through right now.

Hell, she thought, and stabbed the other silver hoop through her right lobe.  Sheer hell.

When Clay had called earlier, she’d been hopeful that it was with good news. Instead, here she was, getting dressed to go down to the police station to look at mug shots. She felt… not dirty, exactly.  But stained.  As if the filth that had altered her life so drastically that long ago summer had never quite washed off.

When the knock sounded at the back door, Tate smoothed her damp palms over the skirt of her sundress.  She was nervous, she realized.  Though whether it was due to her upcoming task or to seeing Clay again, she couldn’t say.

She pasted a smile on her face and opened the door.

To a very well-dressed and armed federal agent.

“Good morning.” Clay
’s brow quirked over his sunglasses when she just stood there. No doubt with her mouth agape.

“Oh. Right.  Good morning.”  God, she sounded like an idiot.  She’d known he worked for the FBI, of course.  But for some reason, the sight of him in
that dark suit, weapon holstered beneath his jacket… he looked so unbelievably responsible.  It was a strange thing to get flustered over, but then everybody had their buttons.  Considering the negligent ass who’d fathered her son, Tate guessed that upstandingness was one of hers.