Shotgun Honeymoon Read online

  Feeling more than a little underdressed for the company she was in, Janina tucked her honeymoon robe more securely around herself and stood, intent on returning to her own room for more substantial clothing. A muffled sob from behind Maddie’s closed bathroom door stopped her. She glanced at Damiano and Bisti, the two cops on duty. They shrugged a nonverbal it’s been off and on all night at her. On a sigh, she eyed the door, sucked air between her teeth and grimaced an “Aw damn” at herself, and marched over to rap gently on the door.

  “Maddie?”

  The bathroom went silent.

  “Maddie, it’s Janina. Let me in.”

  “What did you do, a food run from the Fat Cat?” The attempted tartness sounded pretty clogged and watery to Janina. “I’m pretty sure they serve breakfast downstairs at a reasonable hour, so you needn’t have bothered.”

  Not in the mood for tart or anything like it, Janina punched the door with the edge of her fist. “Madelyn Thorn, I know you’re upset, so I’m gonna let the aspersions cast on my job slide. Now open the damn door before I kick it in and the Winslow P.D. has to pay for it, or you do, because I sure as lightning will not.”

  There was a brief pause where Janina could almost hear Maddie considering the question “Can you really do that?” To which the answer was “Do not try me,” because yes, Janina had learned to do exactly that sort of thing in her kickboxing classes, but she wasn’t wearing shoes at the moment and she didn’t want to have to prove herself here and now without them.

  Fortunately, the brief pause passed and Maddie opened the door far enough for Janina to squeeze through. Then she slammed it closed and locked it, leaving the police emphatically on the outside once more.

  The “two women in Russ’s life”—as Jonah had referred to them—sized each other up.

  For the first time, Janina took a good hard look at Maddie close up, and realized what she’d never seen before: that despite the other woman’s best efforts, her cosmetics training and expertise, at thirty-two the brutal mileage inflicted on Maddie during her early years definitely showed. Gone was the Sharon Stone-like image. Instead Janina saw scars at the hairline and at her lip that plastic surgery couldn’t hide, burn marks at the side of her face and on her arms it hadn’t erased. Janina didn’t want to think where else the scars existed on Maddie’s body, how bad they might be, the horrors that had produced them.

  Instead, she looked at Maddie’s reddened eyes and said the first thing that came into her head. “Are you in love with Russ?”

  “If I were,” Maddie retorted promptly, “would it be any of your business?”

  Janina held up her ring hand, waggled the fingers. “Vegas, the eighteenth, married. So, yeah.”

  “What?” Maddie grabbed Janina’s hand for a better look at the ring. “You’re kidding. No wonder he wasn’t here. He didn’t say anything.” She turned Janina’s hand this way and that, studying the ring. Shook her head with a wry laugh. “Trust Russ to mix something like Baltic amber with the most expensive metal he could find.”

  Janina took offense, immediately fingering the cross at her throat. “Why? Amber’s my favorite gem.”

  Maddie held up a placating hand. “I didn’t mean anything by that, and if it’s your favorite, that’d be why he did it. It’s just…” Her gaze hit suddenly on Janina’s fingers, the cross. She reached for it, stopped. “May I?” When Janina said nothing, but let go so she could see it, Maddie lifted the piece delicately, held it to the light. Smiled slightly. Turned it over so she could look at the silver backing. Laughed softly. “And this is how he knew.”

  “What?” Janina took the cross back, shoved it into the mirror to try to see what Maddie hen.

  “See this down here?” Maddie pointed out a mark stamped into the silver. “I could tell by looking at the design, but this proves it. You found this, where…medieval fair, Renaissance festival, something like that?” Janina nodded. Maddie smiled. “Yeah. Well. He might not seem like it, but Russ likes to play. This is how he relaxes. That’s his lowercase RL. He made this cross, too.”

  “He did?” Janina shoved the cross back into the mirror, moved in for a closer look. The flamboyant RL that she’d never have equated with Russ took backward shape in the glass, feeding her subconscious insights into the man she’d married even as her mouth softened and her eyes started to glow without her knowledge. “He did.”

  Maddie laughed gently and shook her head, squeezed Janina’s shoulder. “You’ll do.” Another headshake, accompanied by a wry chuckle. “Which makes your ring vintage Russ. Unusual to see amber paired with diamonds and platinum, you know? And he’s the only native designer I know who works in platinum, the only designer I’ve ever met who’ll pair expensive precious anything with more or less inexpensive semi just because he likes the way it looks.” She held out her own left hand, showed Janina the wide platinum band with the exquisitely cut figures decorating the third finger. “He designed and made our story rings, too.”

  Something queasy and unhappy fluttered in Janina’s belly. “Ours?”

  Maddie sniffed and nodded before she caught the accusation, the inflection on the single word. “Yeah. Ours.” She stepped up close suddenly, and looked Janina in the eye, all flint, steel and seriousness. “Do you love him?”

  “Since I was sixteen. Yes.” The answer sprang out of Janina as involuntarily as her initial question to Maddie. She drew breath, swallowed. Shuddered. “Wow. I’ve never said that out loud before.” Then anxiously, “Don’t tell him. He needs his head bounced a few times before he hears it.”

  Maddie’s face crumpled into a genuine smile and she fingered an X on her chest. “Cross my heart he won’t hear it from me.” She held up her own ring hand, pointed to the ring before Janina could pursue her original line of inquiry. “And I love Russ, too, but I’ve got my own lover, so you needn’t worry about…” She hesitated, considered the options. “Me getting in the way like that. I won’t. I’m a little needy right now, that’s all. Sort of goes with the territory, you know? Charlie out of prison, history catching up…”

  She shrugged, looked away, spelled it out. “He took Jess, my girlfriend. My partner.” Her face grew bleak. “My life. She’s everything, made me everything.” She breathed through her nose, blinked hard. Eyed Janina steadily. “Russ ropes the moon, he walks on water as far as I’m concerned. But Jess…” She fiddled with the ring on her finger. “Jess is the earth, she makes the sun rise, she’s the reason. Do you see?”

  “Oh,” Janina said, at once relieved and curiously deflated. She’d sported green-eyed monsters around the edges of her vision for a long time where Maddie was concerned. She wasn’t sure what it would be like not to see things tinged in that shade anymore. B she did see. Understood completely. Because in some way, Russ had been all of those things to her for years: earth, sun, water, moon, reason. She just hadn’t known him well enough to be more than “in love” with him. But six days and nights and she knew she was way beyond “in love.” Hopelessly hooked would be more to the point.

  Even if they still didn’t know each other all that well.

  She nodded once in empathy. “Yeah. I do. Oh man, do I!” Then, curiously, “Is that what Russ meant when he said Charlie—your father—was taking people from the field? Is Jess who he meant? He said but he didn’t if you know what I mean.”

  Maddie snorted. “Russ? Explain something? So you can actually understand it? Ha!”

  “You do know the same guy, then. I thought maybe it was just me. He doesn’t talk around me, you know. Or quite to me for that matter.”

  “Well, it’s you and it’s not just you.” Maddie crossed her arms over her chest and leaned tiredly against the sink. “He likes to think he knows what’s best for everybody. Unfortunately, he does a lot of the time. Comes from growing up in charge of everything. But that’s not the point. He also likes to tell you what’s best for you, but not why it’s best for you. Which is damn annoying if you ask me—which he often doesn’t.”

/>   “Ah,” Janina said wisely. “Hence the arguing.”

  Maddie tapped herself on the nose with an index finger, pointed at Janina. “Precisely.”

  They were silent for a moment, digesting, settling, then Janina made a soft sound of “the hell with it,” screwed up her face and asked, “Do you ever get used to it?”

  “What?” Maddie rubbed her eyes tiredly.

  “Russ.”

  “It?” Maddie’s attempt to swallow her involuntary grin was visible.

  Janina ignored her. “And more important, have you ever found a way to get him to just stop?”

  “Stop?” The swallowed grin became painful-sounding choked-back laughter. “Russ? How long have you known him?”

  Russ’s wife grimaced. “That’s completely beside the point. Which is,” she said emphatically when Maddie would have interrupted, “have you ever figured out a way to get him to tell you what he should when he should just because you need and want to know it?”

  “Oh.” Russ’s best friend winced. “That.”

  Janina nodded. “Exactly.”

  “No.”

  “Well what good are you as his best friend, then?” Janina snapped irritably. “And a woman to boot? Aren’t you supposed to be able to help me figure him out?”

  For a space of ten seconds Maddie stared at Janina dumbfounded. Then she dropped her face into her hands, her shoulders started to shake and little gurgles erupted from

  “Maddie?” Oh hell, she hadn’t meant to sound so abrupt.

  Janina reached out to put a hand on the other woman’s shoulder in an attempt to comfort her. The moment she did, Maddie’s gurgles changed to snorts and then to huge, gulping whoops of laughter. She waved Janina away, grabbed her sides and doubled over her knees in an attempt to regain control.

  “I’m sorry,” she said through the mirth. “I didn’t expect…”

  A fresh wave of amusement wiped out whatever she wanted to say. Disgusted, Janina decided she understood exactly why Russ and Maddie were best friends despite their constant bickering. Their senses of humor clearly matched.

  She smacked Maddie between the shoulder blades when the other woman started to cough from laughing too long and hard. “Get a grip,” she said grumpily. “You remind me of Russ.”

  That sobered Maddie some. “God forbid,” she croaked. “I talk to people—he doesn’t.”

  “So help me figure out a way to get him to talk to me.”

  The simplicity of Janina’s plea, the underlying uncertainty behind it, must have spoken to Maddie’s own fears and doubts and changed everything. Abruptly serious, she straightened.

  “Come on,” she said. “Let’s get Winslow’s finest to order us some room service and I’ll tell you about Russ. It’ll keep my mind off Jess, and if we’re lucky, you’ll find something in what I know about your husband that’ll help you figure out what to do about him.”

  Chapter 9

  August 3

  Russ didn’t make it back to Janina in time for dinner. In fact, he didn’t make it back in time for anything for days.

  A lot of days.

  Even if he’d planned to open his mouth and say, “You know I got married, I just wanna go kiss my wife,” there’d have been no opportunity to do so. Because aside from the need to find Charlie and Jess, Winslow and its environs were experiencing a sudden upsurge in violent crime due to the increasingly intense late-July-into-August heat, a couple of kids from nearby Two Guns had gone ATVing in the desert and disappeared in approximately the same area that a convict being transported to the state facility at Phoenix had escaped, and the ongoing drought had finally led to the fires they didn’t need. So no one else was off kissing spouses or significant others, either.

  In fact, “You go AWOL for six days and this place goes to hell in a handbasket” was pretty much the only printable thing Russ heard from his chief whenever their paths crossed, which, mercifully, wasn’t often as they were each needed to direct traffic and coordinate…a lot of stuff…elsewhere.

  So Russ stayed out of the chief’s way and went out and turned over way more rocks than he would have liked searching for Charlie.

  And came up empty every time.

  Including chats with the prison warden and psychologists, who swore up and down Charlie was a changed man who stuck to his medication religiously and would never return to his old ways without the sudden removal of the meds, which would likely cause psychotic episodes, the parole officer with whom Charlie had never checked in, Charlie’s few known associates and all of the campgrounds or remotely viable campable areas within a three-hour radius.

  He met Guy—and the massively pregnant Hazel who insisted that as an FBI ASAC—Assistant Special Agent in Charge—even on forced maternity leave, she had connections they could use—at his trailer in an effort to go over the days’ old trail in an attempt to pick up something that might have been overlooked when Jess had gone missing.

  And he still came up with nothing.

  Which was discouraging, and took him more outside his comfort zone than he was already. The fact that he’d stepped outside himself enough to get married rocked him. He barely understood how he’d done that, let alone how to handle it, but this…

  This was Maddie’s—his best friend’s—life, her heart on the line. He wanted results, he wanted them last week, and he didn’t like not having control over this situation. Not when he had women, plural, to protect, as well as one to retrieve.

  Particularly not when one of those women held his heart in her hands. He especially didn’t know what to do about that. A few days absorbing Janina followed by a few days of unscheduled apart, topped by the knowledge that because of him—well, because of Charlie and Buddy and him—she could face any sort of danger, scared him.

  To death.

  He had to keep her safe.

  Rather chauvinistically macho of him to think of it that way, perhaps, but you didn’t grow up the oldest, the biggest and the tallest brother in a family full of boys and come away thinking differently. He had to protect his younger brothers, too. Jonah, for instance, eight years his junior and too untried to be let out alone much of the time. And Russ was trying to let go, but it would be a damn sight easier if the kid read the signs and took up law enforcement in some other jurisdiction the way Guy and Jeth had.

  The way Mabel had done by going into forensics. Hard for Russ, two years her junior, to overprotect her there. Harder still for him to dictate how Guy and Jeth did their jobs when they weren’t under his thumb as well. Which didn’t stop him trying, it simply meant he’d been forced to learn his limitations with them.

  Maybe because he was of an age with them and had been up close and personal with the dangers his siblings faced, it was more difficult for him to accept, than for their parents to understand, that you can’t make choices for the people you loved, they had to choose for themselves.

  Dangerous situations between him and them or not.

  And between finding out what Charlie had really done to Maddie, his youngest sister, Marcy, dying a few years ago on Jeth’s watch, and the lives his brothers had managed to lead—especially over the last many months—there’d been enough dangerous situations among them to fill at least two books. He did’t want Janina facing anything more that could fill a book. Maddie’s life was already book enough.

  If he was to be completely truthful with himself, keeping Janina safe was the only way to protect himself, his heart.

  His soul.

  He had to see her, had to touch her, make sure she was real. They were real.

  And he was aware that since he’d essentially abandoned her without contact roughly a week ago now, if she had any sense at all, she’d left him.

  Please God, he hoped not.

  In the middle of the moment when the missing Two Guns boys were located alive sixty miles from the last available escaped-convict sighting, Russ left the latest non-productive search of an abandoned underground storage facility to other investigators, turn
ed around and headed back to town, stalked by the uneasy sense that something he’d left undone was either haywire or about to go in that direction. Disquiet only increased when he tried to raise Jonah by radio and failed. A quick stop at La Posada to discover that both Janina and Maddie had been checked out by their respective keepers helped not at all and had him headed for the station at speed.

  A glimpse of Jonah’s multicolored pickup parked to the rear of the Fat Cat sent him skidding and squealing, fishtailing into the diner’s parking lot where he barely took time to slam the Jimmy’s door shut when he vaulted out and stalked inside.

  “Ah, there you are,” Jonah said, rising from Russ’s usual booth to stretch the kinks out of his back. “I wondered when you’d show up.”

  Russ grabbed him by the shirtfront, prepared to shove him back into the booth. “What the hell—”

  A hand fell on his arm, elbow linked through his, yanked him forcibly away from Jonah. “Why, hello, Lieutenant,” Maddie said brightly. “How nice of you to drop by. Let me show you to a table.” She shoved him into a chair at a table in the center of the room.

  He eyed her up and down, the gum she chewed avidly, the pink whatever it was she was wearing to play diner hostess. Overalls, he thought maybe, tied down around her waist, with a belly shirt, and was that a diamond in her navel? Weird. Not Maddie at all. Clearly, distraught over Jess didn’t begin to cover it.

  Hysterical and gone mad might be closer to the point.

  “Ah, here’ll be fine, thanks,” he said. “I guess.” Though it wasn’t. Because he didn’t like sitting in the center of the room. He liked the back of the restaurant. The corner. Where he could see everything without being seen unless he wanted to be. But he thought it might not be good to disagree with her just now, the way she looked and all. Full of attitude.

  “Good.” She smiled—sort of—and patted him on the head. “I’ll get you a menu. Meanwhile, digest this.” She dug into a pocket, handed him a folded receipt and, nose in the air, ambled off in no real hurry to get anywhere, particularly to his menu.