Passion to Protect (17 page)

Chapter 18

“W
here?” Jake demanded, shaking the sheriff to rouse him. “Where did you hide it, Harry?”

“My wife—it was for—the first transplant failed. The kidney died, and the dialysis was—it was killing her. But the insurance said we’d...maxed out, and she was so far down the list...I couldn’t let her go. She’s everything...all I had.”

“You took the money to save your wife,” Jake said flatly, though he wondered, if the woman he loved were dying, could he have resisted the temptation?

“We got her into a program—Asian—they promised they could get a living donor if we...if we flew over there.”

“You told everyone you were going for an experimental drug protocol, but it was really for a black-market kidney,” Jake said, sickened by the memory of a photo he had once seen of poor villagers lined up showing off their scars. According to the news report, some had netted as little as a few hundred dollars, while the facilities that brokered the transplants charged tens of thousands—sometimes hundreds of thousands—for their services. “Deke knew, didn’t he?”

“Not at first, but he...he figured out I hadn’t turned in the money. Tried to give him what was left, but he refused....”

“So you’re the one who’s been paying off his bills in cash.”

“The rest—Liane and the kids should have it....”

“So where is it, Harry? Tell me, damn it,” Jake asked as the ambulance came into view. “McCleary could be killing her right now!”

Eyelids shuttering once more, the sheriff’s lips moved. Bending low to hear him, Jake barely made out the words, but when he tried to rouse Harry to get him to repeat them, there was no response.

Seconds later the EMTs were rushing past him. Still reeling from the sheriff’s confession, Jake stopped the driver of the ambulance and asked if he had spotted Liane’s silver Jeep on his way.

The man shook his balding head. “I don’t think so, no. Now step out of the way. This patient needs—”

“You’re
sure
you didn’t see that Jeep?” Jake pressed, still not budging. “A woman’s life might depend on your memory. That’s who Sheriff Wallace came out here to help.”

“Pretty sure, yeah. Now, I really have to go.”

“Thanks.” Stepping out of the man’s path, Jake rushed back to his pickup. Still standing in the bed, Misty wagged her tail in greeting. “Up in the front,” Jake told her, not wanting to worry about her falling out if it came down to a chase.

But before he could chase Mac and Liane, he would have to find them.

As the dog hopped up into the passenger seat, Jake wondered if the driver might have been mistaken, but his gut was telling him that he’d been wrong from the beginning. McCleary hadn’t risked coming back for Liane because he’d suddenly developed paternal feelings.

He had returned for either revenge or the money. If it was Liane’s life he wanted, Jake reluctantly admitted there was no way to guess where he would take her or whether he’d killed her already. But if he wanted to find the missing millions, why would he leave with Liane in the first place?

Unless he’d planned to return to the homestead as soon as Jake was gone?

Could that be right? Could Liane’s phone call really have been meant to lure him from the house? Jake pictured McCleary pulling off the road somewhere, then watching from some hidden spot until Jake’s truck vanished from view. In that case, he was probably back at the ranch right now, demanding that Liane produce the stolen money.

“And when she can’t...” he said aloud, his mouth drying as he thought of Harry, pretending he knew nothing, while all along he’d had the answers. With a squeal of tires, Jake turned the truck around and sped back toward the homestead. He couldn’t afford to waste his focus on questions of guilt or blame.

All he could do was pray that he was right—and that he wasn’t already too late.

* * *

When stone met skull, the impact reverberated, running the length of Liane’s arm. The pressure on her throat vanished as Mac fell to his side with a grunt, blood staining the jagged rock she was still clutching for dear life.

Crawling away from him, she sucked in greedy gulps of air, her vision clearing and her strength returning with the oxygen. But Mac was already rousing, moaning curses and struggling to push himself onto his hands and knees.

She raised the rock again, her arms shaking so hard she could barely lift it. Getting up onto her knees, she felt the adrenaline surging through her body and the muscles coiling, giving her the chance to save herself, to keep her children and Jake safe from Mac forever....

She could slam the sharp-edged rock against his head again and again, until bone yielded and brain splattered. It was no more than he deserved, a brutal payback for the fists that had battered her flesh, for the bullet that had stolen her chance for future children, for the murder that had taken her father away forever.

When he turned to look at her, bright streamers of blood pouring down his face, she hesitated, revolted to her core to think that he’d reduced her to such savagery—made her a stranger to herself. And in that single moment the pain and confusion in his face morphed into fury, and he lunged for her, grabbing for her arm and sending the rock tumbling.

She jerked away, springing to her feet and running, racing toward the road. Behind her, she heard him bellowing, “It was all for you! All for my family! Why can’t you understand that?”

Despite their heat, his words were slurred, and—when she dared to look back—she saw him staggering and crashing through thick branches that slowed his clumsy progress. It was only then that she began to think she might make it, might reach the road and find help....

And then the woods exploded, the trees and rocks around her echoing with gunfire.

* * *

Intent on the road ahead, Jake scarcely noticed when Misty jumped up onto the seat and started whining, thrusting her muzzle out the open window.

When she yelped, he said, “Be quiet,” and snapped a sharp look her way.

The dog was craning her head to look intently at a break in the trees they’d just driven past. She barked again, the high-pitched sound reminding him of the last time he had seen her react that way—only hours earlier, when Liane had stood just outside his cabin door.

“Liane!”
he shouted, and at the sound of her mistress’s name, Misty put her front paws on the door frame, gathering herself for what could easily be a fatal leap out of the speeding truck.

“No,” he ordered sharply, braking hard as he pulled onto the shoulder.

Gravel still crunching beneath the tires, he made a grab for the dog, but his healing right arm wasn’t strong enough, and she scrabbled out the window and raced toward the woods.

Jake craned his head, scanning the brush and trees ahead but spotting nothing. Could he have been wrong about the dog reacting to Liane’s presence? Was it possible Misty was chasing some animal instead? Unwilling to take the chance, he grabbed his gun and ran after her, desperate not to lose her.

He’d only made it a few steps when he saw bushes near the tree line sway. An instant later a slim figure burst from cover, stopping short as she spotted first the dog and then him.

“Jake!” Liane screamed, her hair as wild as her eyes. Her face was swollen, desperate and tear-streaked. “Get down! He’s right behind me!”

Despite her warning, Jake charged toward her, unable to think of anything but getting her to safety.

Misty rushed past Liane, then slid to a stiff-legged stop, her hackles rising and a deep growl rumbling in her chest.

Liane staggered to a stop, a look of shock and confusion washing the color from her face. “Jake,” she cried, rubbing at a spot behind her back. “I think I’m—”

“I’ll kill you, bitch!” Mac shouted, bursting from the trees behind her.

The moment he showed his blood-streaked face, Misty charged him—a barking, snapping distraction that had him turning his gun on her.

Before Mac could shoot the dog, Jake lunged past Liane and fired on McCleary. When his first shots missed, Mac crouched and took aim—setting his sights not on Jake but on Liane.

But he never got a chance to fire, because Jake’s next shot caught him, not in the chest, where he’d been aiming, but just beneath the eye. Jerking backward, Mac dropped his weapon and sat down hard. His body teetered back and forth, the rage on his face giving way to a blank stare.

Still holding the gun on him, Jake raised his voice to make himself heard over the dog’s barking, “Hands up and we’ll get you help.”

But Mac didn’t seem to hear. Instead, he toppled onto his side, where he convulsed weakly and went still.

Jake rushed in, grabbing the man’s fallen weapon and then checking for a pulse. Shaking his head, he said to Liane, “He’s gone.”

She stared, wide-eyed, the color draining from her battered face. “It—it’s really over?”

Turning away from the dead man, Jake rushed to Liane and gathered her in his arms. “It’s all over,” he promised. “He’ll never hurt you again.”

Their gazes locked as she cried out, and he felt the warm stickiness on his palm. Blood, all over her back.

“Liane, what happened?” But before the question was out, her legs folded beneath her and her head tipped back, exposing her bruised throat as she turned to dead weight in his arms.

She couldn’t be dead, too. A bolt of blue-hot panic blasted through him. After all they’d been through and everything she’d suffered, she couldn’t possibly be gone, too, especially not now, when they’d come so close to finally getting things right between them.

“Wake up,” he pleaded, lowering her to the ground and checking for a pulse. Finding nothing, he cursed, wanting to revive McCleary just to kill him again, to make him suffer. But he couldn’t give up on Liane—he refused to, so he checked again, praying for all he was worth....

This time he felt it. A bumping, faint and rapid, but her heart was beating. After making sure she was breathing, too, he rolled her onto her side to check the damage to her back.

Blood was oozing from an entry wound near the base of her rib cage, on the right side. No exit wound that he could see, but he quickly stripped off his shirt, balling it up and applying pressure to stanch the flow.

“Stay back,” he ordered Misty, as the dog tried to nose her way in, whining and licking Liane’s forehead.

As the dog backed off, he pulled out his phone to call for help. But both his training and his instincts told him that by the time another ambulance made it here, it would be too late.

As he struggled to lift her, he glared at McCleary’s body. “I’ll send the authorities for you later, but I hope like hell the buzzards find you first.”

Chapter 19

A
s Liane drifted, she heard her father demanding that she wake up and get moving or she would miss the school bus, heard her mother urging, “Hurry, or we won’t have time for waffles.”

Later there were others, strangers speaking of transfusions and surgery, then familiar voices encouraging her to open her eyes. But fatigue weighed down her lids, and she couldn’t make her mouth work, couldn’t pluck more than a few words from the torrent that washed past her.

It was far easier to ride the ebb and flow of pain, to sink down into the black comfort of oblivion. In this refuge time meant nothing, so she had no idea how long it had been until she became aware once more of people talking somewhere nearby. Tethered as loosely as a balloon to consciousness, she wasn’t certain who they were. She only knew she loved them more than anything on earth.

“Why won’t she wake up?” the first asked, high and piping. “Why won’t she look at the pictures we made her?”

“She’s working hard on getting better. We just have to keep doing our part, saying prayers and hoping.”

“That’s what you said last time. Cody says...”

“What does Cody say? Come on, now. You can tell me, Giggle Girl.”

Jake,
thought Liane,
it’s Jake, talking to Kenzie....

“He says Mommy’s going to heaven, just like Grandpa. He says she’s going to ride Buttercup and see the carrots growing upside-down and the peppermint mountains and all the other cool stuff.”

“We don’t know that, Kenzie. The doctors said your mom could wake up any—”

“I don’t want her to leave without me,” Kenzie sobbed. “I want to go with her—and Grandpa, too.”

“Then who would keep me company? And your brother? How could we all be a family, like your mommy wanted, without you?”

“Then she has to stay here with us! You and her can get married, and we can all be a real family with a mom and a dad and everything!”

“It’s what I want, too, Kenzie,” he said gently, “more than anything, but sometimes, what we want can’t come true, no matter how hard we...”

As the sound of her daughter’s weeping overrode his words, Liane’s body shuddered, sending a blast of competing sensations ricocheting through her: the crisp cotton of the sheets, the dryness of her lips, the tight itch of a sore spot on her back. But it was the emotion pouring into her that had her fighting to open her eyes, to reach out and—

“Her hand moved! She’s awake!” Kenzie cried.

“Sometimes,” Jake warned, “it’s like when you kick the covers when you’re sleeping.”

From somewhere deep inside her words formed like tiny bubbles, forcing their way through what felt like thick mud before rising to the surface. “And sometimes,” she managed, her voice a threadbare whisper as her eyes took in their hazy figures, “sometimes it means you’ve fought your way back to everything you love.”

* * *

Though the nurses scolded them repeatedly about “tiring the patient,” there was little Jake could do to dampen Kenzie’s joyful squeals, along with Em’s and Cody’s when they returned from their brief foray to the hospital cafeteria. There were tears and hugs, joy and relief, until finally Liane’s strength subsided and she fell into a blessedly natural slumber.

As she regained her strength over the next few days, Jake came as often as he could, sometimes bringing the children and at other times returning on his own. Aware that the time wasn’t right to talk about everything that had happened, much less what might happen next between them, he contented himself with talking about the ordinary details of life and helping her do the things she still found difficult, such as walking the hallway with her IV stand, and—once he judged her stamina sufficient—giving in to her pleas to help wash her long hair.

After they were finished she sat up in a padded chair, resting while he carefully worked a wide-toothed comb through the sweetly scented, damp brown waves. Finally she sighed.

“Feel better?” he asked.

Nodding, she reached out to catch his hand, her blue eyes filling with tears. “You’ve been so good to me, and so wonderful with the kids,” she said, “but this isn’t right, I can’t—can’t keep letting you do all this when I can’t—there’s no way we can ever—”

He squeezed her hand. “There are things we need to talk about. Things I’ve been waiting until you’re well enough to tell you.”

She sighed, then nodded, looking apprehensive.

He began with the hardest news. “Harry Wallace passed away. They say it was his heart.”

“Harry? Oh, no. That’s terrible.”

“There’s worse,” he said, before explaining, as gently as he knew how, about Harry’s misappropriation of the money her father had turned in.

“Then, my father—” Fresh grief leached her returning color. “He tried to do the right thing.”

“He did. And the bulk of the money was found where Harry hid it, underneath the flooring of an old camper he had stored in his garage.”

She closed her eyes. “I know he loved his wife, but if he hadn’t—if Mac had known the money was out of his reach, he never would’ve come here. Never would’ve killed my father, and—”

Jake gathered her into his arms, stroking her damp hair until her trembling subsided. “I’m so sorry, Liane. I know this is hard. Maybe we should talk about it later.”

“No,” she said, pulling away from him, visibly steeling herself for what she had to say. “I need you to understand, I’m going to have to leave again, to sell the ranch to pay back the money Harry put down on the taxes and—and I’m going back to my old job in Las Vegas.”

He saw in her face what that would cost her, and he swore to himself that he wouldn’t let it happen. “There was a pretty substantial reward for capturing your ex and his buddies,” he told her, “and when I led the FBI to the money, it turns out there was a reward for that, too. The agent put my name in for it. But, Liane, that money’s yours, to cover what Harry paid on those bills so you can stay here. To save the ranch for your kids.”

“But I can’t—there’s no way. The business has been slipping away for so long, and besides that, I could never hope to run it on my own the way my dad did.”

“Not alone,” he admitted. “But what if you had help? What if you could do things better?”

“After everything you’ve done already, you’re offering to give up your own career?” she asked in amazement.

He laughed and took her hands in his. “Liane, I
hate
my work. I’m bored stiff. I want to be outdoors again, out in the forest. And leading tourists on horseback tours, sharing everything I know about these mountains, sounds almost perfect.”

She smiled at him, her color returning. “Almost?”

“For it to work, I’d need your help full-time—your ideas and your expertise to make Equine Adventures bigger and better than it ever was. We can remodel the old cabins into first-class accommodations the way you were always trying to convince your dad to do, and add a gourmet chuck wagon to do high-end sunset dinners for the well-heeled types from the lodge.”

“You’ve been plotting with Em, haven’t you?”

He nodded. “While you were unconscious, I had a lot of time to plan.”

“To daydream, you mean,” she said with a shake of her head. “But what you’re suggesting—it’s risky. And it would take a lot of money.”

“Em wants to invest, to buy a minority share, and then she’ll start referring clients from the lodge and adding package deals once we get things going. And I have some savings, too, to throw in. Since my grandmother’s property in Tahoe finally sold, I’ve been looking for a good place to—”

“I can’t take your money, Jake. I can’t—”

He smiled and went to his knees, gazing up into the beautiful face he’d been terrified would be taken from him forever. “Don’t you understand? Whatever’s mine is yours, Liane. My heart, my soul, everything I have to offer. Because I want to marry you. I want to be your husband, if you’ll have me. I’ll work at your side—or, hell, if you really want to give up the ranch and take another job anywhere, I’ll go with you and keep translating.”

“If I thought there was any way to do it,” she said, emotion shimmering in her gaze, “I’d keep my family’s legacy forever. And I love you so much, Jake, I do, but I—”

“Then say yes. Say yes and be my wife.”

When she shook her head, his heart plunged toward jagged bedrock, threatening to shatter. Could she really be rejecting him again?

“I can’t,” she said, tears streaming, “because of what Mac—the scars you saw—I can never give you children. Children of your own.”

“I figured that much out already, but don’t you understand? It doesn’t matter to me. Only
you
do.”

“But you’d be—you’re meant to be a father. It’s what you’ve always dreamed of.”

“Then, damn it, let me be a father to your children. Let me give them my name and be the dad they’ve never had. And let me be the man you’ve always deserved, the one you should have—”

“But, Jake, I—” She shook her head. “Are you really
sure
about this?”

“Are you
kidding?
” Rising to his feet, he told her, “For five long days I prayed and hoped and hugged those children whenever Em brought them to visit. When she took them home, I stayed here. I spent every minute of every night just watching you breathe, praying that I’d—that we’d get one more chance to finally get this thing right. Well, now we have it, Liane, so tell me, after everything we’ve been through, are you really going to let that bastard win?”

Shaking her head, she somehow got to her still-unsteady feet and then stepped into his arms.

“Not on your life,” she whispered, standing on tiptoe to claim a kiss so sweet, so right, so perfect, that the memories gave way, allowing the shared dream of their future the space it needed to unfurl.

* * * * *

Keep reading for an excerpt of
The Cop's Missing Child
by Karen Whiddon