Heroes In Uniform (265 page)

“I let myself get distracted again, May. Just like I did with Lexi. I got Lexi killed and I’m about to do the same thing to Katelyn.”

May shook her head at him sadly but her eyes were fierce. “You did no such thing, young man.”

John tried to let that sink in as she dressed him down like he was one of her own boys. He figured Cade and Shane had been on the receiving end of this more than once. “I almost got her shot today, May!”

“I’d be willing to bet it wasn’t your fault she almost got shot. What do you expect of yourself, John? Do you think you should have kept her under lock and key at all times? With an armed guard outside her house? That you should be with her twenty-four seven? That you should have predicted the exact time and location of the shooting and prevented it somehow? What superhuman thing is it that you think you should have done? Because I got news for you, John. You can’t keep everyone safe all the time.” She barely seemed to take a breath as John stood, stunned into silence.

“And I’ll tell you something else—you didn’t get Lexi killed. That gang killed Lexi. Her circumstances and her own choices before you connected with her weren’t the best, so that didn’t help matters any, but you didn’t kill her, John. Criminals did that. You just brought them to justice, that’s all. And you won’t get Katelyn killed either. You and your men can keep her safe until you can find out who’s doing this to her.”

John looked back at May, wanting to believe her, but doubt still swirled in his mind and his heart. Could he really keep her safe here?

“You can’t take the world on your shoulders, John. You’ll crumble if you try. This person who’s doing these things, they’ve hidden for over twenty years. They’re coming out of whatever hole they’ve been hiding in all these years. That means they’ll make a mistake, eventually. They’ll leave a trail for you to follow somewhere along the way. When they slip up, you’ll get them. You just keep Katelyn close to you until then. Pull her close and keep her safe with you instead of pushing her away. Heaven knows that child has been pushed away long enough.”

May turned her chair and pushed herself back along the paved pathway, one of many that webbed the farm to allow her to get around in her chair. She was muttering something about foolish men making foolish choices. He didn’t know if she was talking about him or the choice Alan had made to send Katelyn away and keep her away all these years. Probably both.

John saw Josh Samuels, Shane and Cade’s likely future stepfather, walk out of the shadows and push May’s chair back up to the house for her. What he wouldn’t give to have the kind of love those two had.

It took about two seconds for John to realize May was right. He needed to talk to Kate. To try to explain. Then he’d let her decide whether she wanted to take the risk; whether she thought he could keep her safe if they were involved. Katelyn would understand. But, he had a feeling she wouldn’t want to let ghosts rule her any longer. Whether it was Lexi’s ghost or her mother’s ghost, John knew Katelyn wouldn’t want any of them getting in the way of her living any longer. And, neither did he.

Everlasting: Chapter Twelve

Katelyn paced the kitchen. Normally, when she was upset she’d go to her studio and lose herself in her art. That wasn’t possible right now. Her studio was still being built, and all of her art and supplies were packed away in storage boxes in her car and her father’s dining room. She thought about cooking, but the refrigerator and freezer were already filled to capacity with casseroles and cakes and salads from her neighbors who insisted on feeding her while her father was ill.

Katelyn sighed. She should be grateful to them. She
was
grateful. But she was also irritated, aggravated, annoyed, and pretty damned ticked off at this point. At John. Not her neighbors.

If John would just get back here, she could vent her frustration...no, it was anger really. She could vent her anger where it belonged—on him. It had taken Katelyn about two minutes to see what he was doing after he dropped her off. He was pushing her away. The only thing she couldn’t figure out was why.

But the
why
didn’t matter. Katelyn had lived her whole life letting her father push her away and she was tired of it. Whatever was going on in John’s head, she’d just tell him he had to stop it.

Sure...that oughta work, Katelyn. Good plan.

Katelyn huffed out a breath and tossed herself down in a chair to wait.

She popped back up again. Pacing was better. Pacing would let her keep up a good head of steam to spew at John when he came back.
Yup, mad is better.

The sound of a car door closing pulled her from her thoughts. She heard the front door open and murmured conversation in the living room between John and the deputy who had been babysitting her. Katelyn braced herself in the kitchen. She’d just wait for him to come in and then tell him how this was going to go. She’d just tell him she wouldn’t stand for him just pulling away whenever he wanted to. That whatever was going through his head was...well, she really didn’t know what was going through his head so she had no idea what she’d say. But, she’d say something, dammit.

The look on his face when he walked through the door stopped Katelyn short. John looked positively wrecked. The man in front of her was utterly destroyed. Katelyn looped her arms around his neck and pulled him down to her, resting her forehead on his. She needed to be close to him, to feel him and know he could feel her.

“What is it?” she whispered.

John didn’t answer. He lifted her into his arms and walked to the couch, holding her tight to him as though he’d never let her go. And, Katelyn realized, she never wanted him to let her go. The feeling of being in his arms felt so right. As though everything that was messed up in her world was suddenly okay. Or, at least, didn’t matter very much just then. With his arms around her, Katelyn could just ignore all the stress and the fear, and the questions and doubts. She could let herself just be.

John sat on the couch with Katelyn in his lap and leaned back. He held her for a long time before speaking.

“Sorry, I freaked and ran,” he finally said.

Katelyn looked into his eyes. She’d always been drawn to his eyes. They weren’t quite brown, or quite green. They were some mixture of both colors that mesmerized her and made her want to sink into him for hours. Made her want to lose herself in them. When he had shuttered his eyes from her earlier, it had scared her. The fact that he would hide himself from her freaked her out immeasurably.

“What happened?” she asked, and she had a feeling the answer wouldn’t have anything to do with today.

“Did your dad ever tell you anything about my background when I came to work for him?”

Katelyn shook her head. In fact, only his slight accent told her he was from New York. Other than that, she didn’t know anything about his background. It hadn’t struck her as odd until now that her father hadn’t told her anything. Her father talked about John all the time. And yet, as she thought back, she couldn’t remember a single story about John’s past.

“I worked undercover in New York City before I came here. Eighteen months deep undercover in one of the sickest gangs New York had ever seen. I worked my way through the ranks getting close to the leader, Eddie Coleman; a crazy bastard who ruled his turf by killing anyone who got in his way in the most twisted ways he could come up with.”

Katelyn felt a chill run through John. She lay her head down on his shoulder and held him as he kept talking, his hands running up and down her back as he spoke.

“I always wanted to be a cop, and I never really gave much thought to the danger I’d put myself in to catch this guy. We needed evidence we could use to get him off the streets for good. And I was okay with putting myself at risk to do that.” The deep breath John took felt like he had to work to take it, like he was choking on the life he was remembering. “I got close to one of the girls who hung out with the gang. Girls were passed around from member to member—group property. But, if a guy was strong enough, if his position was solid enough in the gang, he could claim a girl as his property only.”

The words were bitter, and she could tell the thought of having to claim a woman as his property sickened John. It sickened her. Katelyn had to hold herself still, be sure not to flinch. She couldn’t imagine John living in that world, having to immerse himself in it for any reason. Justice and doing what was right were such innate parts of who John was. She could tell he was sinking back into that life as he talked. The slight New York accent she hardly ever heard from him became more pronounced.

“I claimed Lexi. Technically, Eddie could still touch her if he wanted to, but no one else could. She gave me information, told me things she overheard when no one thought she was listening.” John paused for a long time, as though gathering himself.

“Then one day, I was hanging out at Eddie’s house with a bunch of the guys and I got this bad feeling. We were set to take down the whole gang in the next few days. We were just waiting on some warrants. But, I got this feeling, like everyone was looking at me funny and no one wanted to let me leave. I kept texting Lexi but she wasn’t answering.”

John seemed lost in reliving the story, and Katelyn was frozen in his arms. She couldn’t stop him even though she wanted to. The tension coursing through his body was palpable, his muscles taut and unyielding beneath her.

“All of a sudden, everyone was fine with me leaving, but they had these big smiles on their faces and I knew something was wrong. The whole way to my car, I thought I’d be shot in the back any minute. I thought they’d made me and I wasn’t going to get out of there alive. But nothing happened. They let me drive away. I went to Lexi’s apartment but she wasn’t there. I drove to all the places she might be, but I couldn’t find her. I looked for hours. Then, I got to the station and heard about the rumors. My cover had been blown. Lexi had been labeled a snitch. I’m not there for two minutes before there’s a whole lot of noise out front.”

John didn’t speak again for a while and Katelyn just waited. The tension in her body matched his with the dread of knowing what was coming. Whatever it was would be horrible and she didn’t want to hear it, but she would. For John, she’d hear it and help him through it, because it was obviously affecting what he was feeling about her at the moment.

“I let myself get distracted by Lexi. I wasn’t focused. I should have focused on the job,” John all but whispered. “They dumped her body out in front of the police station like she was trash.”

John’s voice was thick with unshed tears and Katelyn took his head in her hands, forcing him to look at her. “I’m not Lexi, honey. I’m not her, and we’re not caught in the crossfire of a gang war.”

John’s voice cracked when he answered, and she could hear the pain seeping in no matter how hard he tried to cover it. “What if I lose focus? What if I lose you?” he asked.

Katelyn framed his face with her hands and kissed him softly. “You won’t,” she said against his lips. “You won’t lose me.”

He just wrapped himself around her, kissing her with his drugging kisses that stoked the fire burning inside her. But, tonight wasn’t about that fire. It was about comfort and connection. About simply being together, holding on.

Hours later, he walked her up to her bed and went back downstairs to sleep on the couch. Katelyn didn’t sleep for a long time. Her mind raced with thoughts of the man who was guarding her downstairs, thoughts of the man she knew would do anything to protect her. And with no memory of what she’d witnessed as a child, Katelyn was powerless to help him figure out who was coming after her. Who was putting them both in harm’s way.

Everlasting: Chapter Thirteen

John stared at the
big house at the top of Evers Hill on the edge of town. It was easily twenty times larger than any single man needed, but as a developer, it was Charlie Hanford’s pride and joy. He threw an annual holiday party there that anyone in any kind of position in town was invited to, complete with valet parking and personalized Christmas trinkets for each guest. The party was gaudy as heck, but it was all Charlie.

John stared up at the house that had been the scene of Caroline Bowden’s murder, and wondered why Charlie Hanford wouldn’t have moved out after it happened. His best friend’s wife had been killed in his office, yet he still worked at that desk every day. What on earth would possess a man to do that?

Arrogance
, came the answer. John knew Charlie was too arrogant to give up his house on the hill even after finding Caroline murdered there.

He sat in his cruiser and looked up at the house. He’d driven over to each of the neighbors’ houses and checked the angles. Because of the hill and the way the driveway leading up to Charlie’s house curved, neither neighbor had a very good view of the top of the driveway. It would have been hard to see much more than a general description of a car parked up there.

Unless Marcy Whorton was driving past at the precise moment the red truck drove up the driveway, she wouldn’t have seen much. Danny had left for Sol City—the large retirement community outside of town—this morning to see if Marcy remembered what she saw the day of Caroline’s murder. John headed back into town as he waited for a call from Danny. The radio crackled to life just as he pulled into one of the slanted parking spots in front of Two Sisters Diner.

“Boss?”

“Yeah, Danny? What have you got?” John asked, not opening his car door. He didn’t want anyone to overhear this conversation.

“Marcy Whorton is here all right, and she remembers everything about that day. She’s pretty, um, spunky, I guess you could call her, boss.”

John would have laughed if the information he needed wasn’t so serious. Danny was often fighting off advances from older women.
Much
older women.

“What’d she remember, Danny?”