The Marshal's Hostage

Chapter Nineteen



Dallas was tired of waiting. Joelle, his family and he had been through hell and back, and here he was waiting in his boss’s office for his brother, Wyatt, to return with reports and updates. Yeah, he wanted to hear those, but he also wanted to get Joelle out of there and try to ease that worried look on her face.

They’d managed to shower off most of the mud and grime before Saul had ordered them all to the marshals’ building so that Wyatt could brief them. But all of them—Harlan, Clayton and especially Joelle—looked ready to collapse. Dallas was sure he looked the same.

Dealing with adrenaline crash was always a bear.

Plus, there was all the other stuff going on. He’d shot a woman just hours earlier. It’d been a necessity, but that didn’t make it easy to swallow. As if Joelle knew exactly what he was thinking, she reached out and slid her hand over his.

Their gazes met, and he saw a lot of emotion in her eyes. “Thank you,” she whispered, “for saving my life again.”

You’re welcome didn’t seem like the right thing to say. For that matter, neither did anything else he could come up with. He didn’t dare tell her that it’d taken a dozen years off his life when he thought she’d been hurt. So instead of words that were pretty much useless, Dallas leaned over and kissed her.

Clayton made a sound of amusement. Harlan grunted.

Dallas ignored them and kissed Joelle anyway.

When he eased back, he saw a little heat mixed in with all the worry.

“I had help,” Joelle said, repeating what she heard Sarah say. “What do you think Sarah meant?”

“You’re sure you understood her correctly?” Dallas asked.

“She did,” Clayton said. “I heard it, too.”

Great. That was not the verification Dallas wanted. He needed this put to rest. Sarah had killed her abusive husband. End of story.

But maybe it wasn’t.

“You believe Sarah had an accomplice?” Joelle’s voice was tentative. Clearly, she didn’t want that to be true, either.

“I don’t know,” Dallas said. But there were some things that didn’t fit right in this. “According to the blood the CSIs found, it looks as if someone dragged Webb down a flight of stairs. And he was buried over a mile away from Rocky Creek.”

“Webb was a big man,” Clayton added. “It would have been next to impossible for a woman Sarah’s size to do that all on her own.”

“Next to impossible,” Dallas repeated. “But still doable.”

Maybe.

Harlan made a hmm sound that rumbled in his chest. “I’m thinking we shouldn’t be borrowing trouble. Especially that kind of trouble.”

Before Dallas or the others could agree with that, Wyatt appeared in the doorway. “You all right?” he asked to no one in particular.

“We are now,” Clayton mumbled. “Kirby, too.”

Dallas was about to demand to know what was in those reports they were waiting on, but he frowned when his gaze landed on Wyatt.

Like Harlan, Wyatt was tall, around six-four, and right now he looked more than a little imposing since he had a busted lip, a butterfly bandage over a mean-looking cut above his eye, and blood all over the front of his shirt.

“You all right?” Dallas repeated, eyeing the blood. “I thought you were on prisoner transport duty before Saul called you back in to help with this Webb mess.”

“I was. The prisoners didn’t exactly cooperate. Don’t worry, they look a lot worse than I do,” Wyatt joked. And despite the busted lip, Wyatt flashed Joelle one of his killer smiles. “How about you? My brothers taking good care of you?”

She nodded, and her mouth quivered as she tried to return a smile, but it didn’t quite happen. “We’re just anxious to hear what’s going on.”

“Yeah, well, be prepared to hear a lot. Saul’s still tied up with the locals, but he gave me the go-ahead to start things off.” Wyatt sat on the edge of Saul’s desk and added a where do I start? huff.

“All of you have been checked out by the medics, right?” he asked.

They nodded, one by one. Joelle and Dallas had some bruises, one particularly bad one on Joelle’s right cheekbone that made Dallas want to punch the daylights out of the person who’d put it there. But he knew it could have been much worse.

“Saul’s orders are that Dallas, Clayton and Harlan will take a few days of paid leave while he sorts through all this,” Wyatt explained. “Declan, Slade and me will be on other duties out of the county. In other words, they don’t want us within smelling distance of the wrap-up.”

“You’re still thinking we did something wrong?” Dallas asked.

Wyatt shook his head. “I’m thinking you did a lot of things right, including catching a killer. But there’ll be a mess of paperwork. And Saul doesn’t want anyone saying that any of you had a hand in giving it the right kind of spin to benefit Kirby or anyone else.”

That wasn’t an unreasonable request. Besides, Dallas didn’t mind having a few days off to settle things with Joelle. He hoped that would mean coaxing her back to his bed. He’d been damn lucky to get her there the night before, but that luck might not hold.

“First of all, Sarah Webb isn’t dead,” Wyatt went on. “But she did go into cardiac arrest during surgery and is in a coma. The docs aren’t sure if she’ll come out of it, but things aren’t looking good.”

That punched at Dallas harder than he thought, and Joelle gave his hand another gentle squeeze. He’d never shot a woman before, and he prayed he never have to again.

“I understand Sarah confessed to her husband’s murder before Dallas had to shoot her.” Wyatt wasn’t looking at them but rather the reports.

“Yeah,” Dallas confirmed. “And she also confessed to trying to kidnap Joelle so she could force me to tamper with the evidence that the CSIs found. She thought there was something incriminating in the safe.”

“There wasn’t,” Wyatt confirmed. “Not for her, anyway, but I’m sure Sarah did some other things to try to cover her tracks. Like setting up those trash cans so they’d spew smoke in the building where Joelle and you were conducting an investigation.”

“An unauthorized one on your part,” Saul said, coming to the doorway. Thankfully, he didn’t elaborate on that.

“Sarah was going to have Kirby kidnapped, too,” Joelle volunteered.

Yet another reason for him not to regret shooting Sarah. What a twisted woman to use a sick man to cover up her crimes.

Dallas looked around the room at the others to see if they were going to offer anything else. None of them said anything to Saul about what might have been a confession from Sarah before she collapsed.

I had help.

Hell, the woman had been bleeding out at the time she’d muttered those words so she might not have had a clue what she was saying. Judging from the others’ silence, they were taking the same stance.

Wyatt put the one report aside and picked up another. “Owen was picked up the airport in San Antonio. He was trying to get on a flight to Mexico because he figured that was better than going to jail once Joelle testified against him.”

“Which I would have done. And I’ll still do it,” she insisted.

Good. That would put Owen behind bars for a while. “You need to add charges for him drugging Joelle and trying to shoot us in the woods.”

Wyatt shook his head. “That was Lindsey who did the drugging. Owen’s not saying much, but she’s been a regular little chatterbox. Can’t shut her up, in fact. She wanted to stop the wedding, and that’s why she drugged Joelle.”

“And Lindsey sent those men after us?” Joelle asked.

“Nope. That was Sarah’s doing. One of her hired guns—the one who Harlan nabbed outside the ranch house—is talking, too. Sarah hired the three guys to kidnap Joelle because she wanted to make sure Joelle married Owen.”

“Owen?” Clayton and Dallas asked in unison.

Wyatt nodded, then shrugged. “It appears that Sarah was running scared when she thought Joelle’s inquiry might lead to her arrest, and she wanted to help Owen force Joelle to marry him so that Owen in turn would help clear her name. If you hadn’t carried Joelle out of the church when you did, then Sarah’s men would have forced her to walk down the aisle.”

His boss cocked his head and stared at Dallas over the top of his reading glasses. “Just to clarify—you did take Joelle out of that church because you were concerned about her safety, right?”

That was part of it, yeah. But he’d also done it so that she wouldn’t release the report that he thought would incriminate Kirby.

“Yes,” Joelle answered for him. “Dallas was protecting me.”

“Good.” Saul sounded a little skeptical. He cleared his throat and motioned for Wyatt to continue.

Wyatt went to the next report. “Owen agreed to turn over the real knife, the one that Sarah sent him, as part of a plea bargain his lawyers are trying to work out.”

“It’ll have my prints on it,” Dallas reminded him.

“Figured that, but we have Rudy’s statement that you picked up the knife in Webb’s office. Then we have Sarah’s confession that she used the same knife to kill her husband. That ties it up in a nice little package.”

It did, and it was one less thing for Dallas to worry about. But the knife wasn’t all that Owen had hidden away. “And what about the handkerchief with Kirby’s DNA?”

Saul shrugged. “That could have come from anywhere at any time. No chain of custody to make it credible to link Kirby to a crime. Especially considering that Sarah was more than willing to try to set up a marshal for a murder that she committed. It’s not much of a stretch for her to try to frame Kirby, too, with his own handkerchief.”

No. It wasn’t a stretch, and Dallas wanted to keep it that way.

“Going back to the first attack in the woods,” Joelle spoke up. “One of the gunmen said something, well, personal about me.”

Dirty little secret. Dallas remembered that, and now he realized the gunman might have been referring to Joelle’s pregnancy.

“Owen could have passed on any info that he had about you to Sarah,” Dallas reminded her. And they already knew that Owen had the baby’s birth certificate.

“Yes,” she softly agreed, but he heard the anger mixed in with that softness. He was right there with her. He hated that Owen, and Sarah as well, had used their baby to try to get back at them.

“Anything I should know about this personal thing the gunman said?” Saul asked. “Didn’t think so,” he said a moment later when none of them spoke up.

Wyatt picked up the next report. “Rudy probably won’t face any charges except for the stunt he pulled at Rocky Creek when he locked out the CSIs. We’ve got no proof, but we think Sarah might have been the one to take that shot at him in the woods. There’s no love lost between those two.”

“No,” Clayton agreed. “And when Sarah realized she’d failed to rile up Rudy enough to destroy the evidence in Rocky Creek, she probably took her anger out on him.”

Wyatt nodded. “That’s my theory, too.” He picked up yet another form. “And that brings us to Lindsey and her call about shooting Owen. She didn’t. Sarah put her up to that by promising Lindsey that she’d help her get Owen back. Sarah talked Lindsey into making that call with the hopes of luring you and Joelle out to the house.”

“And it worked,” Joelle whispered.

What color she had in her face vanished. Well, except for that god-awful bruise. Dallas knew it would raise Saul’s eyebrows, but he didn’t give a flying fig about that. He leaned over and pulled Joelle to him.

She made a soft sound, and he heard the pain in it. Oh, yeah. It was going to take a while for her to start forgetting this.

Saul cleared this throat again. “The governor wants you to call him first chance you get,” he said to Joelle.

She managed a shaky nod. A nod that didn’t sit well with Dallas. Of course, she had to call her boss. And of course, the governor would want her back at work. But that would mean her leaving.

No.

That didn’t sit well with him at all.

Her gaze came to Dallas’s and he saw the tears shimmering in her eyes. A bad mix with the bruises, scrapes and his own worry and concerns.

“You were never practice,” Dallas heard himself say.

And he said it a whole lot louder than he’d intended. Actually, it hadn’t been a good time to say it at all, but he couldn’t very well take it back. Especially since it was true.

Joelle blinked. Opened her mouth. Closed it. Then she looked around the room at the others.

“Could you excuse us a minute?” Dallas asked to no one in particular, but he didn’t wait for an answer. He eased Joelle to her feet and got her out of there.

By the time they made it out into the hall and to Dallas’s own office, there weren’t any tears left in Joelle’s eyes. But there was a Texas-size amount of confusion. He had a lot to tell her, and maybe what he said in the next few minutes would ease some of that confusion.

But she spoke before he could ease anything.

“You’re sending me mixed signals, Dallas. One of the main reasons I left you was because you never asked me to stay. Heck, you never asked me to be your girlfriend. Or to even go on a date. You definitely never asked me to be...yours.”

Yeah, and he was quickly coming to the realization that had been one of the biggest mistakes of his life. Dallas tried to figure out the best way to fix that, but after looking at Joelle, he decided to do what he thought was best. Heck, it might be the wrong thing to do, too, but it would make him feel a heck of a lot better.

Dallas pulled her into his arms, put his mouth on hers and kissed her.

She went stiff for a few seconds. Hopefully because she hadn’t seen the kiss coming and not because she objected to it. Dallas deepened it just in case, and he finally heard the sound he’d been waiting for.

That little purr.

He been lucky enough to hear it the night before when they were in bed together, and it was music to his ears now. Music to his body when she sort of melted against him.

“You always did play dirty,” she mumbled against his mouth.

Now, it was his turn to go stiff. Dallas eased back and met her gaze. “I’m afraid if you’re thinking too clearly, you’ll leave again.”

She tilted her head to the side and stared at him. “You think the only reason I’ll stay is if you keep me hot? Well, here’s a news flash. Looking at you gets me hot. So technically, I never think clearly around you.”

“Looking at me gets you hot?” he asked and tried not to smile. Heck, he failed at that, too.

She pushed her fingers against that smile. Frowned. And then moved her fingers so she could kiss him right back. But she didn’t just kiss him. Joelle could play dirty, too, and she slid her body right against his.

In all the right places.

The kissing and touching were so good that Dallas wanted to haul her onto his desk and do things to her that he’d never considered doing in his office.

Later, he might.

But for now, he obviously had to finish that explanation.

Hard to do, though, with Joelle nibbling at his mouth and sliding her hand down his chest.

“Will you go on a date with me?” he asked.

Her mouth moved into a slow smile. She nodded. “I’d love to.”

That was a good start, so Dallas went through the list of grievances she’d spelled out for him a few moments earlier. Except this one was a lot bigger than a date.

“I’m also asking you to stay,” he tossed out there. “If that’s not possible, then I can see about getting a transfer to Austin—”

She shoved her fingers against his mouth again. “You’re asking me to stay? Here? In Maverick Springs?”

He moved her fingers so he could answer. “Yeah. I know it’s not Austin, but—”

“I want to stay,” she interrupted.

“You do?” Dallas tried not to sound too surprised, but he was. He’d expected to have to argue that point.

She nodded. Kissed him again in that idle way that only Joelle and a siren could have managed. “Maybe I can open a law practice. I figure you owe me a lot of dates, and that’s the way to collect on them.”

“Good move.” He liked the way she thought. The way she kissed. The way she touched.

Hell. He liked everything about Joelle. Always had. And that’s why he moved on to the next item on his mental list.

“Sixteen years ago I should have asked you to be my girlfriend. Or go steady. I should have asked,” he said.

Aw, heck. The tears popped back into her eyes, and he had a moment of panic that he’d blown it. But then she went sliding back into his arms and kissed him. It was hot, needy and everything he’d come to expect from a Joelle kiss. He wanted to get caught up in it. Caught up in her.

On his desk, since it was close and convenient.

But sex was going to have to wait.

Something he thought he’d never hear himself say when it came to Joelle.

“One more thing.” Dallas looked her straight in the eyes. “I’m asking you to marry me.”

She sucked in her breath so fast that she coughed. Oh, man. Obviously, Joelle hadn’t seen that coming, and he was about to launch into the most important argument of his life to convince her why she should say yes.

“Yes,” Joelle blurted out before he could argue. But then she shook her head. “Wait.”

“You can’t take it back.” And he played dirty again and kissed her until neither of them had any breath left.

She pulled back, gasping a little. “I don’t want to take my yes back. I just want to know why you’re asking.”

Oh. He got it then. She wanted the words. The ones he’d been too young and stupid to give her sixteen years ago.

“I’m in love with you, Joelle.”

Tears again, but he was pretty sure these meant everything was okay, that she wasn’t taking back her yes.

“Good. Because I’m in love with you, too.”

Dallas hadn’t expected those words to go through him with the heat and intensity of Joelle’s kisses. But they did. In fact, the words did more than that. They warmed him. They soothed him.

They made him happy.

And before now, before this moment, he wasn’t sure he ever had been. Not completely. Not like this. That feeling slid through him. A feeling that he figured he’d get to experience for a long time. As long as Joelle was with him.

“You were never practice,” he whispered to her.

She blinked. Shook her head. “Then what was I?”

“The same thing you are now. Joelle, you’re the love of my life.”

And to prove it, Dallas pulled her to him and kissed her again.

* * * * *

USA TODAY bestselling author Delores Fossen’s

new miniseries, The Marshals of Maverick County,

is just getting started.

Don’t miss ONE NIGHT STANDOFF, coming next month, wherever Harlequin Intrigue books are sold!

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