Forbidden (Southern Comfort) (15 page)

She gestured him in, the
cool, dim interior of the back hall a welcome relief from the morning’s heat. 

“Let me just get my purse.” She started to turn, but Clay whipped his glasses off and shifted
to block her path.

“Are you alright?”

“I’m fine,” she hedged, feeling uncomfortable under his scrutiny. 

In a gesture that was becoming familiar, he brushed his thumb over her cheek.   “These shadows say otherwise.” 

“Another curse of the fair-skinned.  And how kind of you to point
them out.”

“Your skin is lovely.” He tapped her nose
in a light reprimand. “I’m sorry.  Given what happened, I should have realized you’d have a rough night.”

“It’s
nothing. Really,” she said when he gave her a dubious look.  “I’m okay.”

“Mr. Clay!” 

Tate closed her eyes at the sound of her son’s voice, because she’d been hoping to avoid this particular scene. But Max was running down the hall, small bare feet slapping against the wood floor, an excited expression on his elfin face.

A
nd a familiar purple bear tucked beneath his arm. 

Clay
’s frown melted into a warm grin as he held out his hand for Max to slap.

But Max pulled up short when he caught sight of Clay’s
gun.  Eyes huge, he looked first at Clay and then at Tate.  “Are you and Mommy going to
shoot
the bad guy who took Amber’s sister?”

“Max,” Tate began, but Clay held up his hand to show that it was okay.  Then he hunkered down to Max’s level. 

“Your mama and I are going to try to help the policemen find the bad guy we think took Amber’s sister. And if they find him,
they’ll
take the man to jail.  I’m not going to shoot anybody, and nobody’s going to shoot at me.  When I’m working, like I am today, I’m required to carry my sidearm.” He patted the weapon.  “But that doesn’t mean we’ll be in danger.  Your mama will be perfectly safe.”

A mixture of both relief and disappointment flickered across Max’s face. 
Clearly he’d been envisioning something akin to the OK Corral. Clay smiled, ruffling her little boy’s hair, and Tate’s heart squeezed.  “So what lucky lady gets to stay with you while your mama’s gone?”

“That would be me,” came a deep voice fr
om the end of the hall.

CLAY
looked up to see Rogan Murphy leaning indolently against the doorway.  His thick, brown hair waved almost to the top of his broad shoulders, which were bare as the rest of the torso that rose out of a snug pair of jeans.  The lazy expression in his blue eyes didn’t fool Clay for a minute.   The man was clever and quick – he’d made the scene of the mugging with an impressive display of speed – and apparently a favorite with Max.

And he looked like a walking ad for Calvin Klein.

If it wasn’t for the fact that he was Tate’s blood relative, Clay would have hated him immensely.

As it was, he still felt inordinately… jealous.

Stupid and immature, but there it was.

Rogan raised a glass of amber liquid in Clay’s direction.  “It’s nice to see you again, Agent Copeland.”

“Same here,” Clay lied, gaze narrowing at the glass.  My God, was the man drinking
beer
at nine o’clock in the morning?  What was Tate thinking, leaving him alone with Max?

And then, to Clay’s horror, Mr. I’m Too Sexy For My Shirt passed off the drink to the child, who took a huge gulp before smacking his lips together.

Apparently, Tate’s cousin was teaching Max to do more than cuss.

“There’s nothing like a refreshing glass of apple juice to wet your whistle, is there Max?”

Clay looked up, and sure enough Murphy was smiling at him as if completely aware of what he’d been thinking.  Okay, so add
perceptive
to the list of reasons to dislike the man.

Then he chastised himself for behaving like a Full Blown Idiot.

If this was how he handled a completely innocuous situation with another male, imagine what he’d do if the man hadn’t been related.  He’d probably have strolled across the room and tossed the guy on his perceptive ass.  

Just chalk it up to his complete and total mental breakdown.

He turned to Tate, still not liking the bruised look of her eyes.  And looking at mug shots all day wasn’t likely to make things better. “We should probably be leaving.”

“Okay.”  Tate grabbed her purse off the console table,
then glanced at her cousin.  “Are you sure you don’t mind watching Max until Mom gets home?”

Rogan passed it off with a wave of his hand.  “Max and I are cool.”

“Okay, well…” she bent down to hug her son.  “Be a good boy, and listen to Rogan.”

Recalling what Max had told him about cussing and bottles of whiskey, Clay silently wondered if that was such a good idea.  But he swallowed that thought and his ridiculous bout of jealousy, because acting like a possessive asshole wasn’t going to win
him any points with Tate.  

He said goodbye to Max, nodded to Rogan and shepherded Tate out the door.

THE
Bentonville sheriff’s office wasn’t much to look at, with its speckled gray linoleum and cinderblock walls in that hideous shade of green Clay thought of as institutional.  Why bureaucrats insisted on painting civic buildings a color that was sure to drive a bunch of armed people to depression was completely beyond his ken.  The frigid blast of air-conditioning that greeted them was welcome, though, as it had to be reaching toward ninety outside.  Just the walk from the parking lot to the station had caused his shirt to plaster itself to his back.  Tate’s hair – piled atop her head with some kind of clip – had loose, damp tendrils trailing down.  It was unbelievably sexy. 

Clay peeled his eyes away and looked for Deputy Jones.  

There was a small grouping of desks in the center of the room, separated into cubicles by a freestanding partition.  They stepped up to the reception desk, and when Clay flashed his badge, the woman pointed toward an office in the rear.  Through the glass on the closed door he could see Deputies Jones and Harding, whom they’d met last night, standing near the desk of an older man that Clay took to be the sheriff.  All three men looked up as he rapped on the door.

Deputy Jones motioned for them to come inside.

The sheriff rose to his feet as his deputy made the introductions.  Sheriff Nolan Callahan was a big man, balding and ebony-skinned, with a paunch that even the world’s best posture couldn’t disguise.  And while he looked like he’d be more at home kicked back in his Barcalounger with a beer and a ballgame than behind a badge, Clay knew that looks were deceiving.  He’d run a check, and Callahan had a solid reputation in the county. It might not seem like much, considering the county was little more than a backwater, but Clay well knew that even backwaters can harbor dangerous microbes.  It was therefore with respect that Clay shook the man’s hand.

“Agent Copeland,” Callahan said with a nod, cool
dark eyes radiating intelligence.  “I appreciate you coming in.”

“It was fortunate that I happened to be in town.”

Sheriff Callahan’s eyes darted toward Tate.  “Yes, well, we’re sorry to have interrupted your vacation, but I do thank you.  As Deputy Jones told you this morning, I believe we might have a situation.”  With that, he turned to the second deputy – the one named Harding – and asked him to escort Tate to the interview room, where she would begin the process of looking through the mug shots. 

For a moment, nobody moved.

Then Harding – who with his mussed hair and too-pretty face had a boy band sort of thing going on – blushed to the roots of that artfully arranged coiffure when he realized that the sheriff was talking to him.  He hadn’t heard him, apparently.

Because he’d been staring at Tate’s legs.

“Oh, uh, yes sir.”  Harding snapped out of it and stepped from behind the desk.   He smiled at Tate, flushed again, and steered her toward the door.

Clay forced himself not to bristle. 

What the hell was a metro-sexual male doing working as a sheriff’s deputy in East Jibip?  Something just wasn’t right.

Like your malfunctioning brainwaves, Copeland.  Stop thinking about the girl and start acting like you know what you’re doing.

“Okay, Sheriff.”  He stepped closer to the desk.  “What kind of situation are we discussing?”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

TATE
took a sip of the lukewarm bottle of water Deputy Harding had brought her almost an hour ago, but it did little to settle her stomach as she slid her finger across the screen of the digital mugbook.  They’d started off by showing her shots of all the registered sex offenders in the area – which had pretty much stolen her breath when she realized there were so many – and then expanded her personal little cesspool to wade through by expanding the search to almost any and all apprehended felons who fit the physical criteria.

She’d taken her time, trying to give each face due consideration as opposed to just a cursory glance, even when they all started to look alike.  It had been dark when she’d seen the man, and he’d been wearing a hat with the brim pulled low, and on top of that he’d been backlit by a barrage of blinking lights.  Not exactly the best scenario for identification purposes.   Aside from the fact that he’d been dark – dark hair, dark skin, dark eyes – she wasn’t absolutely sure that she would recognize his face.

His body, however, was a different matter.

The man had been huge, with bulging muscles evident despite the covering of clothes.  There had been a few large men in the mug shots she’d examined, a few that she would describe as burly and a few that might qualify as jacked. But so far none of them had shown quite the size
or well-sculpted delineation that she remembered.

She kept searching,
all the while hoping that Casey had simply run away from home or gone off somewhere with a boy, and not fallen prey to the man she’d seen talking to her.

A small, vulnerable girl didn’t stand a chance against a man like that.

Shuddering, she sat the bottle back down and studied the screen.

The door opened with a squeak of hinges, and Tate looked up to see Deputy Harding entering with a sketch pad and a laptop computer. 

He scraped in just a little shy of six feet, had the sort of lean, muscular build she associated with runners, and was the most inherently… stylish man she’d ever met.  Even in his police uniform, he possessed an air of elegance that was quite at odds with his surroundings.  Taking in his trendily styled dark hair, laser beam blue eyes and charmingly lopsided smile, Tate had no doubt that Deputy Harding brought all the teenyboppers in town to their knees. 

“Hi.” He sat the laptop down on the table.  “Still no luck identifying anyone?”

Tate shook her head.  “Lots of scary-looking people, but no one that I recognize.”

“Well, thank God for that.”

Surprised, Tate looked up. 

“I mean, it’s too bad that you can’t ID the guy we’re looking for, but a relief that you didn’t see your next door neighbor in there and have to be like ‘Oh my God! Bob’s a sex offender!’   That kind of thing’s always a bummer.”

Tate grinned.  The guy was all kinds of adorable. And he was, she suspected, trying to make this easier for her by keeping things light.  She motioned toward the sketch pad.  “Is this the part where you bring in the artist and I have to describe a man that I only vaguely got a glimpse of, and she ends up doing a sketch that looks like Sponge Bob wearing a baseball cap?”

His smile
was wry as he flipped open the pad.  “I’m not sure whether to take that as disparagement of your observational skills or an insult to my artistic abilities.”

“Oh my goodness.  You’re the… uh, artist?”

“Guilty.”

Tate decided she didn’t like the taste of having her foot in her mouth.  “I’m sorry.  I didn’t mean to imply –”

Deputy Harding waved her apology away as he sat down.  He smelled good, like quality bath products and a light dash of cologne.   “Don’t worry about it.  My dad – who was sheriff until about three years ago, when they practically had to pry his behind out of that chair in there to get him to retire –  had a similar reaction to the idea of me becoming an artist.  So we compromised.  I got to do a few years at the Savannah College of Art and Design on his dime, and I then had to put in my time as a sheriff’s deputy.”  He smiled at her, showing a row of perfectly aligned teeth, and then tapped his pencil on the sketch pad.  “It came as a surprise to both of us to learn that I could find a way to combine the two.  In a couple weeks I’ll be starting with the Charleston PD, doing this kind of thing on a regular basis.  So when you see the wanted posters of Sponge Bob hanging around, you’ll know who did them.”

Tate laughed, charmed and chagrined, and the deputy smiled back.

CLAY
heard the burst of mingled laughter that erupted from the interview room, and turned away from the report he was studying to see what the hubbub was about.  Through the open blinds he could see Deputy Harding leaning close to Tate as they consulted.  They’d been at it for about thirty minutes, and this was the second time they’d broken out in giggles. Clay had no idea why trying to put together the sketch of a suspected child abductor should be so amusing, and frankly, it was beginning to piss him off.