The Marshal's Hostage

Chapter Thirteen



Dallas felt as if someone had punched him.

He wanted Joelle to look at the document on his phone and shout out a firm denial that she had a child. He wanted her to say it was another of Owen’s tricks. A lie meant to tear them apart so he could get some measure of revenge for his failed attempt to get Joelle to marry him.

But Joelle didn’t deny anything.

She just stood there, shaking her head, while every drop of color drained from her face.

Hell.

It was true.

Joelle had a baby.

Cursing, Dallas forced himself to look at the document again, and his attention zipped over the lines. It was a birth certificate, all right.

Amber Reese Tate.

Joelle was listed as the mother. The info on the father had been left blank, but Reese was Dallas’s middle name. Then he quickly did the math. The baby had been born fifteen and a half years ago.

Seven months after Joelle had left Rocky Creek.

And him.

“She’s my baby,” Dallas heard himself mumble. But not a baby. A teenager.

Joelle was still shaking her head, and tears spilled down her cheeks. Normally, those tears would have sent him reaching for her. So he could comfort her. But he didn’t want to comfort her now. He wanted to wring her neck.

“You kept my child from me,” he said.

“I didn’t,” she said, her voice hoarse and raw.

He showed her the document again and dared her to repeat that lie.

“I didn’t keep her from you,” Joelle repeated.

She yanked something from her blouse. The heart-shaped locket, and she opened it. On the left side of the heart was a baby’s picture. His picture was on the right, exactly where he’d put it sixteen years ago when he’d given it to her.

So it was the same locket.

Before he’d seen that birth certificate, Dallas might have asked her why she still wore it after all these years, but there was only one thing he wanted to know now.

“Where is she?” he demanded, pointing to the picture.

Joelle’s breath rattled in her throat. “She died.”

Nothing could have prepared him for that.

Nothing.

Dallas stumbled back and probably would have fallen to his knees if he hadn’t caught on to the counter.

“Amber was born nearly two months early,” Joelle continued, speaking in a whisper. “She only lived a few hours.”

The tears were coming faster now, streaking down her face, but Dallas still couldn’t go to her. The pain was almost unbearable. He’d fathered a child. A child he’d never seen, never known about. And he couldn’t do either of those things, ever.

Because his child had died.

Dallas had so many questions firing through his head. Why hadn’t Joelle told him? And why the hell had he learned about this from Owen? How had Owen gotten his filthy hands on the birth certificate? Dallas had wanted answers to all of that—but dealing with Joelle was first on the list.

“The doctors did everything they could to save her,” Joelle went on. She blindly fumbled behind her, located the chair and sat back down. “But she was just too weak.” Her voice broke. “She was buried on my eighteenth birthday.”

Dallas could practically see the images of that. Joelle, no more than a kid herself, burying a child. Their child. It must have broken her heart, the way it was doing to him now, but Dallas still couldn’t go to her.

Not with this anger and hurt stabbing through him.

“You should have told me you were carrying my child,” he finally managed to say. His teeth were clenched. Every muscle in his body was so stiff he was in physical pain.

“I considered it,” Joelle said. “But I also considered what you would have done if I’d told you.”

“I would have married you!” he practically shouted.

“Exactly. You would have married me and tossed away your scholarship. You wouldn’t have become a marshal.”

“You don’t know that. I would have found a way to do both, but you didn’t even give me a chance.”

She paused, gathered her breath. “I was going to tell you. I saw her face after she was born, and I decided that you should know. But she never even opened her eyes, Dallas.”

Hell. Each word was like a knife to the heart.

“I should have been there,” he insisted.

“I thought I was protecting you,” Joelle insisted right back.

He jabbed his index finger at her. “You weren’t. You were keeping a secret that wasn’t yours to keep. I fathered her, and I should have had the chance to see her.”

The pain crushed him, hard, and it mixed with another surge of anger that was stronger than the first. Dallas wasn’t sure how to deal with it, but he knew he didn’t want any interruptions. Unfortunately, he heard the movement in the hall and snapped toward the visitor, figuring it was Kirby’s nurse, Jackie Hall. It was, but she wasn’t alone.

Kirby was with her.

He was leaning against the nurse, but he was on the verge of falling so Dallas rushed to him. “You shouldn’t be out of bed.”

“Had to,” Kirby mumbled. “Heard you arguing.”

“I’m sorry,” Joelle said, going to him. “It’s all right.”

“No, it’s not.” Kirby dragged in a ragged breath. “I knew about the baby, but I didn’t tell you, either.”

Dallas swung his gaze back to her, but Joelle shook her head. “You knew?” she asked Kirby.

“Highly suspected,” he confirmed. “And I didn’t do a thing to encourage you to tell Dallas.”

Damn. How could these two people—who supposedly cared about him—do something like this?

How?

Dallas was sure they didn’t have the right answer because it wasn’t right, plain and simple.

“I went to visit Joelle,” Kirby said, his voice getting weaker with each word. “To check on her and make sure things were going okay with her foster family. But they were in the backyard when I got there, and before they spotted me I overheard them talking about a baby.”

Joelle made a sound as if trying to recall that. “You heard me say I was pregnant?”

“Not exactly, but I put one and one together. I also did some other math. You were seventeen, and Dallas was a year older. An adult in the eyes of the law.”

Her breath became thin. “But Dallas and I had been lovers for months, well before he turned eighteen. And the baby was probably conceived when we were both underage.”

“Yeah,” Kirby conceded. “I’m not saying it was right, but you were a ward of the state then, and I didn’t want anyone trying to make an example out of Dallas by filing charges against him.”

“Oh, mercy,” she mumbled. Dallas wanted to mumble something much harsher.

“I was wrong not to tell you what I suspected,” Kirby added, looking at Dallas now. “So if you’ve got to blame somebody, son, blame me.”

He didn’t want to blame anyone. He wanted back the opportunity he should have been given sixteen years ago.

Kirby groaned, a sound deep within his throat, and he would have collapsed if all three of them hadn’t caught him. His father had once outweighed Dallas by a good thirty pounds, but the cancer had eaten away at him, making it easy for Dallas to scoop him up in his arms.

“You got to forgive Joelle,” Kirby mumbled. “And me. I made a lot of mistakes raising you boys, and I told myself it’s because I wanted you to grow up right.”

Yeah. Dallas had always known that was one of Kirby’s concerns. He owed Kirby, but Dallas couldn’t give the forgiveness that he’d just requested. Not now, anyway.

“We’ll talk about this later,” Dallas settled for saying. He put Kirby back into bed, covered him with the quilt and turned to the nurse. “Make sure he stays put.”

The woman gave a shaky nod, and though she probably didn’t know what was going on, she had to realize it was serious.

And it was.

Dallas marched back into the hall, grabbed Joelle and headed not back toward the kitchen but outside to the front porch where they could hopefully finish this conversation without Kirby hearing.

“I’m not blaming him for this,” Dallas insisted. But part of him was doing just that.

She swiped at the tears but more came. “Kirby has his reasons for not telling you, and I had mine. I didn’t think of the age difference between us back then, but Kirby was right about someone maybe using it to arrest you. The main reason I didn’t tell you was because I was worried you wouldn’t go through with college.”

“I wouldn’t have,” Dallas snapped. “But that was a decision for me and me alone to make.” He couldn’t help it, Dallas cursed again. “Hell, no wonder you wouldn’t see me or answer my calls. You didn’t want me to know I was about to be a father.”

That was one thing explained. He’d never been able to figure out how Joelle could go from red-hot to ice-cold in such a short period of time, but yeah, a pregnancy would do it. Part of him hurt to the core that she’d had to go through that alone. At seventeen, no less. But another part of him just hurt.

“You need time,” Joelle murmured.

“I’m not sure that’ll help.” But it was the pain talking. He did need time. He had to sort all of this out and come to terms with what he’d lost.

And what he had lost was his baby.

The lump in his throat was so thick he wasn’t sure he could breathe. It felt as if someone had a fist clamped around his heart.

God, he hadn’t expected anything to hurt this much.

His phone buzzed again, and he nearly bashed it on the porch, but then he saw it wasn’t Owen and his troublemaking attempts this time. Nor was it a message.

It was a call from Clayton.

The last thing Dallas wanted to do was talk to anyone, but he knew in his gut that his brother wouldn’t have called if it weren’t important. And with all the irons they had in the fire, it was a call he had to take.

“Yeah?” Dallas answered, unable to hold back the anger and other emotion in his voice.

“Uh,” Clayton said. “You okay?”

Dallas ignored that question and went with one of his own. “Why’d you call?”

“I thought you’d want to know that I’m out at Rocky Creek.”

That was the last place one of them should be right now. “What are you doing there? What went wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong. I’m actually calling with some good news. From the sound of things, you could use it right about now.”

“Yeah,” Dallas said. He glanced at Joelle. She was pacing now. And still crying. Hell’s bells. What a tangled mess this was.

“I’ve been here for about a half hour,” Clayton continued. “Quietly observing the CSI team. Not with Saul’s permission or knowledge, but I called in a few favors. Don’t worry. I’m not in the actual building. Figured I wouldn’t want to call into question anything they might find.” He paused. “They found some things, Dallas.”

Even though he doubted Joelle could have heard what Clayton said, she must have sensed something because she stopped pacing and moved closer. Dallas wasn’t feeling very generous, but he put the call on speaker so she could hear.

“The initial tests indicate that it’s Webb’s blood on the window frame. Better yet, it’s a cast-off pattern consistent with someone who plunged the knife into Webb and then drew it back to stab him again.”

“Any way to use the pattern to determine the killer?” Joelle asked.

“They’re working on it,” Clayton answered. “Not just the blood on the frame, but there are spatters on the wall invisible to the naked eye that the luminol lit up. They might be able to get some details about where the attack started. And who started it.”

Good. Luminol was a chemical spray that could detect even small amounts of blood. Too bad Dallas’s mind was still in a horrible place right now because this conversation was important.

“From what I heard from my contact inside,” Clayton went on, “there was some indication of blood on the floor, too.”

Joelle shook her head. “Why wasn’t this detected sixteen years ago?”

“Because it wasn’t tested, that’s why. Webb was just a missing person, and the local sheriff then checked for any signs of foul play, but he missed the spatter on the frame.”

Easy to miss. The sunlight had been just right for Joelle to see it and then point it out to him.

“Without the luminol, you can’t see the blood on the floor, either,” his brother continued. “Plus, it looks as if someone tried to clean it up. There are swipes and smears. The CSIs might be able to determine if Webb was dragged from his office after he was stabbed and how his body was taken from the building. And that could give us more clues about the killer.”

“Yeah,” Dallas agreed.

“I know what you’re thinking. This new evidence could point to Kirby, but I don’t believe it will. Kirby’s well over six feet tall, and from the CSIs’ initial observations, they’re thinking the killer was someone shorter.”

Someone shorter would still implicate a lot of people. Including Declan and Joelle. But it would also point the finger at Sarah, Rudy and a dozen other kids who were living there at the time.

“I haven’t gotten to the best part of what they found,” Clayton went on. “When they were looking at the blood on the floor, they found a loose board, and one of them lifted it. There was a makeshift safe.”

Now that grabbed his attention. “What’s in it?”

“Don’t know yet. It’s locked, and it’s too heavy and big to lift out of the floor. Plus, they want to make sure it’s not booby trapped.”

Good point. Webb would have done something like that, but what was so important that he would want to seal it off in a secret safe?

Clayton huffed. “What the hell’s the matter with you? This is good news, Dallas. Or it could be, anyway. This is the first break we’ve had in the investigation.”

“I know. I, uh, just have, well, something else going on.”

“Not a good time for that,” Clayton countered. “I’ll call you back as soon as I hear anything else.”

Dallas mumbled a thanks, ended the call and tried to get to a place in his head where he could deal with the news about his daughter and everything else. He looked at Joelle, who was clearly waiting for him to say something.

Maybe that he could forgive her.

But Dallas wasn’t anywhere near that just yet. He groaned and turned to go back inside. However, he made it only a step before his phone buzzed.

“Owen,” he grumbled when he saw the name on the screen.

“I’ll talk to him,” Joelle insisted, and her teary voice was replaced with a huge amount of anger. Anger she’d no doubt aim at the man who’d sent that birth certificate.

Dallas was furious with Owen, too, but he had to accept that if Owen hadn’t delivered the bombshell, then he might have never learned about his and Joelle’s child.

He didn’t give the phone to Joelle even though she was motioning for it. Dallas pressed the button to take the call, and like Clayton’s, he put it on speaker.

“Did you like my little present, Joelle?” Owen immediately asked.

“You bastard.” She moved closer to the phone. “You’ve done a lot of slimy low-life things in your life, but this takes the prize. How did you know? How did you find out?”

“You can thank Lindsey for it,” Owen happily volunteered. “She hired a P.I. to dig into your past. Looking for dirt, I’d imagine, so she could use it to break us up. Little did she know she’d find this.”

And this was tearing at Dallas’s heart.

Yes, Joelle should have told him. Kirby, too. But he wasn’t pleased that Owen had used something like his baby’s birth certificate as a way to get back at Joelle.

“If I were you, I’d watch your back,” Dallas said to Owen. “Lindsey’s unhinged, if you ask me, and now that Joelle’s called off the wedding, Lindsey will probably think that’s her invitation to go after you. How far do you think she’ll go when you reject her?”

Owen didn’t respond to that. Yeah, it was a small victory, but Dallas was glad to get in that dig. Besides, he really believed that Lindsey could be dangerous, and with Joelle out of the picture, maybe she’d aim some of her efforts and venom at Owen.

“Stay out of my life,” Dallas warned the man, and he jabbed the button to end the call.

He’d barely had time to put his phone in his pocket when it buzzed yet again. No profanity this time. He was too tired and too aggravated to curse, but if it was Owen, Dallas intended to find him and beat some sense into him.

But it was Clayton again.

“I hope this is good news,” Dallas said when he took the call.

“Sorry.” And with just that one word, Dallas heard the concern in his brother’s voice.

“What’s wrong?” Joelle asked before Dallas could.

“We’ve got a problem. A big one. You need to get out here to Rocky Creek. Fast.”