The Lawman's Secret Son

“He was conceived on our wedding night.”

He had a son? Just like that? One moment alone in the world, the next moment, a son?

Very slowly, he lowered his hand until the backs of his fingers grazed the baby’s round cheek. How could skin be that soft?

His son. Nathan.

“Will you lift him for me?” she said, glancing at him.

He nodded. And just like that, he lifted his son for the first time, careful to put one hand behind the little guy’s heavy head. The baby kicked and squirmed and Brady held on tight, terrified he’d drop him.

“Relax,” Lara said. “You’re doing fine. Just comfort him. Hold him closer. Don’t be afraid.”

He pulled Nathan against his chest, one hand all but covering the small boy’s back. Then he tipped him away from his chest for a moment, anxious to really look at this few pounds of humanity that instantly redefined his life.

The Lawman’s Secret Son
Alice Sharpe

MILLS & BOON

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This book couldn’t have been written without

the patient support of my son, Officer Joseph Sharpe

(mistakes are mine, not his), and is dedicated, with love,

to his wonderful daughter, Carmen Amelia Sharpe.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alice Sharpe met her husband-to-be on a cold, foggy beach in Northern California. One year later they were married. Their union has survived the rearing of two children, a handful of earthquakes registering over 6.5, numerous cats and a few special dogs, the latest of which is a yellow Lab named Annie Rose. Alice and her husband now live in a small rural town in Oregon, where she devotes the majority of her time to pursuing her second love, writing.

Alice loves to hear from readers. You can write her at P.O. Box 755, Brownsville, OR 97327. SASE for reply is appreciated.

CAST OF CHARACTERS

Brady Skye—The oldest son of alcoholic parents, this ex-cop has lost both the career and the woman he loves. Now someone’s out to take something even more precious—but they’ll have to kill Brady first.

Lara Kirk—Brokenhearted, she left when Brady rejected her. Now she’s back with a secret capable of destroying them all.

Tom James—Will Brady’s old partner let his temper be the death of him?

Chief Dixon—The chief’s decades-long hatred of Brady’s father has now spilled over onto Brady.

Billy Armstrong—Brady is almost positive the boy drew a gun. Most think it never existed. Billy’s death throws Brady’s and Lara’s lives into a tailspin.

Bill Armstrong—Billy’s father’s lust for revenge is pushing him over the edge of sanity. He swears to ruin Brady as well as anyone Brady loves.

Jason Briggs—This teenager must be silenced.

Roberta Beaton—The querulous old woman will pay a price for her curiosity.

Karen Wylie—A rebellious teenager with dreams of becoming a movie star.

Nicole Stevens—She’s positive something horrible has happened to Karen Wylie. And she may know what.

Charles Skye—Brady’s father has been lost in a bottle for thirty years.

Garrett Skye—Brady’s younger brother has become a bodyguard for a casino comptroller and his attorney wife. This decision to make more money so he can gain custody of his toddler daughter is about to blow up in his face.

Contents

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Prologue

Officer Brady Skye scanned the dark, empty road. Parked on a side street, he waited for his shift to end, using the dashboard light to attend to last-minute paperwork. He checked his watch—a quarter of midnight and still hot outside. Well, that was August for you.

He checked his watch again a minute later and smiled at himself. Talk about being anxious. But in fifteen minutes, he’d be off duty for two weeks and in fifteen hours, he’d stand at the altar with Lara Kirk.

Again.

He had to admit he’d been confused when Lara suggested they elope a week before the wedding. Why would she want to ruin her big day?

Her smile had been wistful when she replied, “My big day? You mean my mother’s big day. This wedding is turning into the social event of the year, Brady, it’s not about you and me anymore. I want to go to a justice of the peace. I want to get married, just the two of us, the way we wanted. Then we’ll come back and do it Mom’s way.”

The memory of that private, secret ceremony and the night that followed made Brady all the more anxious to put this shift to bed. He would make her the happiest woman in the world. Things would be perfect. He’d make them perfect.

The squad car radio burst into life at that moment. Brady leaned forward, adjusting the volume. He caught little more than blue sedan, dented right front fender before a car matching the description sped past. He reported his location and that he had the vehicle in sight, rattling off the license-plate number as he trailed behind.

Apparently noticing Brady’s flashing lights, the sedan accelerated. It made a series of turns, brake lights flashing through intersections. Brady followed, but not too close. They weren’t going to get very far and he didn’t want to push them into doing something stupid.

More information came in over the radio as the sedan made a wide turn toward the river. Car stolen, two suspects, both minors, unarmed, alleged to have lifted beer from the all-night store up on Breezeway…

Brady and his brother, Garrett, had grown up in Riverport, Oregon, not far from this very neighborhood. Unless the kid driving that sedan had a trick up his sleeve, he’d soon dead-end against the gate securing the old Evergreen Timber loading dock.

But the gate was old, the chain connecting the two sides weak with rust. With barely a pause, the sedan busted through the gate and kept going, careening back and forth as it skidded toward the waterfront and the Columbia River beyond.

Dumb kids. Lifting a couple of cases of beer was nothing to die for, even if they’d compounded the offense by stealing a car. Brady backed off as his buddy and soon-to-be best man, Tom James, chimed in he was seconds away from lending backup.

A collision with a stack of oil drums saved the car from plunging into the river. With a series of thuds, the sedan came to a grinding halt in the middle of the pile, heavy drums rolling and bumping into each other with dull heavy clunks. An overhead light illuminated the scene. Brady stopped his car and exited, rushing forward as the welcome sound of a waning siren announced Tom’s arrival.

A few empty beer cans fell to the ground as the driver and passenger doors opened. Two kids got out of the car. The passenger looked familiar, hardly unusual given Riverport’s modest population of under five thousand. The driver, closest to Brady, stumbled once before taking off across the torn concrete, leaping over oil drums with surprising agility.

“Hey,” Brady yelled as he pursued the driver, leaving the passenger to Tom who he’d heard come up behind him. Within a hundred yards, Brady caught up with the kid and wrestled him to the ground. He avoided a few drunken punches and a torrent of swearwords as he flipped him onto his stomach and cuffed him. He pulled the boy to his feet and marched him back to the squad car where he found no sign of Tom or the passenger.

“If you’re smart, this will be the last night you ever get drunk,” Brady said.

The kid swore at him again.

Once the driver was safely secured in the backseat, Brady turned his attention to Tom and the other teen, following their raised voices. The ground became trickier as the pool of light dispersed. Rambling blackberry vines had sprung up between the cracked concrete pads and snagged his pants as he ran. He got out his flashlight and flicked it on.

A movement caught Brady’s eye. Two figures, six or seven feet apart, facing each other a scant foot or so from the edge of the wharf, the river a shimmering ribbon behind them. Tom, a barrel-chested man who had played football when young, was heaving after the run. He’d lost his hat in the chase and his balding dome glistened with sweat. The boy, only half Tom’s size, appeared posed for flight. The kid yelled something was his fault as Tom’s low voice droned on.

Brady hung back, giving Tom a chance to calm the kid with his usual aplomb. He had a way with kids though some in the department thought him too lenient. Nevertheless, Tom usually got his point across. The kid grew quiet. Good old Tom and his silver tongue.

Brady swung his flashlight down before switching it off. In the last instant before the beam died, he caught a glimpse of the boy reaching behind his back, his pale arm stark against his dark T-shirt, then the glint of light off metal as a gun emerged from beneath the shirt. It all happened in slow motion, time suspended—

A torrent of training flooded Brady’s brain as he pulled his Glock. Tom was a microsecond away from taking a bullet in the gut and he obviously didn’t know it. In that instant, Brady, without options, fired.

For a few seconds, the echo of the gunshot was the only sound in the world. The kid, bathed in shadows, flew to the ground.

The shot thundered again and again in Brady’s head. He couldn’t feel his hand still gripped around his gun. He saw Tom kneel beside the boy, his body mercifully blocking Brady’s view for a brief moment, saw Tom’s jaw work as he looked over his shoulder and yelled something, saw him yank his cell phone from his pocket and start punching in numbers.

The place would be swarming with help within minutes.

Brady, finally able to move, walked toward Tom and the still shape of the fallen boy. He’d lost his flashlight, he couldn’t feel his feet, he still held the gun and it weighed a million pounds. He stopped short.

Tom’s flashlight illuminated the scene. His florid face had taken on green undertones. “It’s the Armstrong boy,” he said. “He’s dead.”

Brady’s heart sank like a rock to the very bottom of the sea. No wonder the kid had looked familiar. The Armstrong family had lost their only other child, a sixteen-year-old girl, a few weeks before. This kid was a year behind her in school. Billy, that was his name. Brady had gone to school with Bill Armstrong Senior.

His voice low as though afraid of being overheard, Tom said, “What in the hell happened?”

“He was going to shoot you,” Brady said. Wasn’t it obvious?

Tom shone a light at Billy’s empty hands, flung toward the river. The boy’s silver watchband shimmered on his wrist. “With what?”

Brady made himself concentrate past the roaring inside his head. “He pulled a gun out of his waistband in the back. There wasn’t time to do anything but react.”

“Are you sure? I mean, the light is tricky—”

“He pulled a gun.” Brady tried to muster more confidence than he felt. He had seen a gun, hadn’t he? Oh, God…

Tom’s voice sounded just as dazed. “I was trying to talk some sense into him. You must have heard him, ranting and raving, blaming himself for his sister’s suicide, blaming the cops—”

“I thought you had him calmed down, but when I lowered my flashlight, I saw him reach—”

“All right, Brady, all right. If you say there was a gun, there was a gun.”

Brady wasn’t any more convinced by Tom’s words than by his own thoughts. If there’d been a gun, where was it now? If he’d made a mistake, how would he ever live with himself?

Tom pushed his hat back on his high forehead and added, “This is going to hit his parents hard. And Chief Dixon. A thing like this looks bad for the department and he’s been waiting for you to mess up.”

Like my father, Brady thought. He couldn’t wrap his mind around any of that, not now, not so soon. Distant sirens announced the imminent arrival of the troops. The supervisor, an ambulance, the M.E. The place would soon be crawling with professionals.

“Lara, too,” Tom added as though it just occurred to him. “I bet she got to know Billy and Sara down at the teen center.”

Brady shook his head. He couldn’t think. Wait, sure, she’d mentioned these kids along with a dozen others…

Tom suddenly seemed to grasp the impact of his comments. He said, “Damn, I’m sorry, Brady. Don’t worry, if there was a gun, we’ll find it. You saved my life. I won’t forget it.”

Brady’s gaze shifted to the river rushing only a few feet from where the boy had fallen. If Billy Armstrong’s gun had flown into the water as Billy took the bullet, it was possible they would never find it.

And in the back of his mind, a voice. Slurred like his father’s voice, thick with booze. What if there wasn’t a gun, you moron? What if you gunned down an unarmed kid? What then?

Chapter One

One year later

The minute Lara drove over the bridge into Riverport, she knew coming back was a big mistake. It didn’t matter how many times she told herself it was only for a couple of days, the feeling persisted. There was too much history here.

She turned on Ferry Street, passing the teen center without looking at it. Next came the bank and the hardware store. A red light at the corner of Ferry and Oak caught her as it always had. She kept her eyes on the road until the light turned green.

Her mother’s big old Victorian sat perched on an acre of manicured gardens on the outskirts of town. Most of Riverport’s other big old houses were gone, their land cut up and sold off to contractors for subdivisions. The mansion had been updated over the years—a solarium on the back, the kitchen expanded—until now it was quite a showpiece.

Lara had grown up in the house and it was with a surge of familiarity, if not homecoming, that she turned into the driveway. Her mother wasn’t actually in residence as she’d left for an Alaskan cruise just a few days before. Myra, her mother’s housekeeper, must have been waiting, though, for Lara had barely set the parking brake when the garage door rolled upward. Lara restarted the car and drove into the enclosure, sighing with relief when the doors closed behind her. She glanced into the backseat, then heard Myra coming through the side door that connected the house with the garage.

“Miss Lara,” Myra called as Lara got out of the car. She approached with a big smile. “Your poor mother will just die when she learns she missed your visit. Here, let me help you.”

Myra Halifax had worked for Lara’s mother forever. A woman in her sixties with gray permed curls, she was built with a low center of gravity and formidable forbearance. That trait was a plus when it came to dealing with Lara’s high-strung mother.

Lara returned the smile. She couldn’t return the sentiment.

An hour later, she’d emptied the car and spent several moments upstairs settling into her old bedroom. Restless and uneasy, she decided something cold to drink and a friendly chat with the housekeeper might ward off her growing sense of foreboding.

She was one step into the kitchen when the doorbell rang. The shrill interruption came as a surprise. With her mother gone and her own presence in Riverport more or less a secret, company was unexpected and unwanted.

“I’ll send whoever it is away,” Myra said as she bustled past Lara into the foyer.

Lara hung back. There was a sense of destiny in the air, of colliding worlds. An overwhelming desire to race out the back swept through her and yet she stood off to the side as Myra impatiently flung open the door.

“You!” Myra said, and even though Lara couldn’t see who stood on the front-porch step, she knew. Myra added, “What do you want?”

There was a pause during which Lara stopped breathing. Her heartbeat drummed in her head.

And then his voice.

“I need to speak to Mrs. Kirk.”

“Mrs. Kirk is away for several weeks.” Myra started to close the door.

Lara saw the hand that caught it. His hand. “Maybe you can help me.”

Myra sputtered a little before saying, “I don’t see how—”

“I need to get in touch with Lara,” he cut in. “I have to talk to her. Warn her. All I need is her address or a telephone number.”

Was it possible he didn’t know she was at this house? It seemed so unlikely. No, someone must have seen her drive by, someone must have alerted him.

What else had they reported?

“I won’t give you her phone number,” Myra announced. “You broke her heart once and I won’t stand by while you do it again.”

Lara grabbed the edge of the door and opened it wider. “It’s okay,” she told Myra who stood her ground, glowering at their guest. Staring up into two very dark eyes, she added, “Hello, Brady.”

For a second he didn’t answer. For a second he looked as dumbstruck as she felt and she knew in that instant that he hadn’t expected to find her here, that she was as much a surprise to him as he was to her.

That moment gave her a second to absorb his changed appearance. The thinner face, the longer hair, the hollows in his cheeks, the deep, deep tan, the solid muscles under the worn T-shirt, the dusty-looking jeans. What had happened to Mr. Press and Fold, Mr. Perfect Haircut, Mr. By the Book?

This Brady looked younger, rangier, cagier, sexier.

“I’m glad you’re here,” she said, which was an out-and-out lie. Sure, she’d planned on seeing him while she was in Riverport, of course, but not quite so soon, and not here at her mother’s house. She’d spent three long hours in the car rehearsing her what-comes-next speech and now drew a total blank.

She hadn’t taken one factor into account. She hadn’t considered the impact of seeing him face-to-face. The months of tears that had cleared her head apparently hadn’t cleared her heart. Yet.

“I’ll just be a minute or two, Myra,” she said with a backward glance. “You’ll take care—”

“Of course,” Myra huffed as Lara stepped onto her mother’s broad porch and softly closed the door behind her.

“I was going to call you later,” she told Brady.

Before he could answer, a car drove by, slowing down as the driver craned his neck to see who stood outside the Kirk house. Brady said, “Let’s walk around back so we don’t give the whole town something to talk about.”

Lara suspected it was too late for that. She’d recognized Frank Duncan leaning forward, eyes wide. The hardware store would be abuzz within minutes. But she led the way around the back just the same, toward the riverside garden where they couldn’t be overheard through the open windows.

The back sloped down to the river, which flowed by at a leisurely pace this late in the summer. Lara stopped by a grouping of wrought-iron patio furniture arranged on a brick island, surrounded by a sea of flowers. Too nervous to sit, she stood in back of a heavily scrolled chair, gripping the metal for support. Brady leaned against the edge of the old brick barbecue, linking his arms across his chest. He’d always been fit, but had his shoulders and arms always bulged with so many muscles?

“I didn’t know you were in Riverport,” he said.

“I’ve been here less than an hour.” She tried not to stare at him but her traitorous gaze strayed his way every chance it got.

“How have you been?” he said.

She shook her head, unable to bear the thought of small talk.

“You look good,” he added, his gaze taking her in from head to toe. She hadn’t changed out of her traveling clothes, the white shorts and white halter top felt suddenly too revealing.

She whispered, “It’s too late, Brady. I didn’t come back for this.”

His eyes flashed, then he smiled, kind of, his lips doing all the work, his eyes not playing along. “Oh? Then why did you come back? Explain it to me.”

“Don’t use that tone with me. You’re the one who called everything off.”

“And you’re the one who left.”

“You sent me packing like a kid. I was hurt at first but I’m over it now.”

No reaction showed on his face. He was quiet for a long moment before saying, “Listen, Lara. Things between us ended kind of abruptly.”

She met his gaze.

“Okay, okay, it’s all my fault. I know that.” He threw up both hands. “I admit it. I take full responsibility. I couldn’t give you a whole man—”

“So you gave me nothing,” she said, pushing herself away from the chair and walking toward the river and the abandoned dock her father had built twenty years before.

“I was a wreck—” he said from right behind her.

She jumped at the nearness of his voice. “Of course you were,” she said, memories of the night flooding back. His stunned expression, his self-incrimination, the reality of the last few hours circling them like a cyclone, lifting them off their feet, tossing them around before flinging them back to earth a hundred miles from where they’d been.

She pushed it all away. “This is pointless. Let’s skip the postmortem on our very short marriage. You told Myra you needed to warn me. Warn me about what?”

His voice, pitched low and combined with the mysterious intensity of his dark gaze, made Lara’s knees go weak as he said, “I expected divorce papers by now.”

“I have a lawyer working on them.”

“For a year?”

“I haven’t wanted anyone to know—”

“‘Anyone’ being your mother.”

“Does it matter? I’m sorry I haven’t moved fast enough for you. I’ll get to it right away.” The truth was the papers were ready. They were upstairs, in her suitcase. But she couldn’t give them to Brady without an explanation. There were things he needed to know, things they needed to work out. But not now, not in her mother’s garden, not when she needed to get back inside the house.

“The only reason it matters is Bill Armstrong,” Brady said.

“Billy’s father? Why—”

“Since the internal investigation found reasonable cause for the shooting, he’s threatening a civil suit against me. I guess I don’t blame him.”

She waited.

With a bitter twist to his lips, he added, “They never found the gun and trust me, they looked. Armstrong insists his boy didn’t have access to a handgun and wouldn’t have carried one if he did. I still swear I saw one. It’s a stalemate.”

“But the river…” she began, something more niggling at the back of her mind. But what?

“Yeah. I know. It could be buried in three feet of silt and muck, it could be halfway to the ocean by now. Who knows?”

“Mr. Armstrong won’t win.”

“He’ll have the sympathy of the jury. He lost both his kids within a month. And you know what the name Skye is worth around here.”

“You are not your father,” she said. She’d said it before, but it never seemed to sink in.

His laugh was sudden and without mirth. “You’ve always been naive. Maybe it comes from being born with a silver spoon in your mouth.”

“And you’ve been afraid you’ll turn into your father. It’s not written that you will be a drunk and a loser.”

“Ah, darling, it’s the family tradition,” he said, his voice low and silky and taunting. “My dad, my brother—”

I will not rise to the bait, she told herself and stood there with her mouth closed.

He finally added, “Anyway, it’s not me I’m worried about.”

“Maybe you should.”

Frowning, he said, “What does that mean?”

“What’s happened to you? When did you stop caring?”

“Stop caring about what? What are you talking about?”

“Your appearance, for instance. I can’t believe the department lets you wear your hair that long.”

“I’m not a policeman anymore, Lara. That part of my life is over. I thought you knew that.”

She could hardly fathom such a thing. Brady had always wanted to be a cop. “Then what do you do?”

“I work construction like I did in college.”

That explained the muscles. “But you were exonerated, weren’t you? Why didn’t you go back? Was it Chief Dixon?”

He shrugged and looked away.

“Brady,” she said, touching his wrist. Big mistake. Sensory recognition traveled through her system like a lightning bolt, erasing the last three hundred sixty-three days in the blink of an eye. She drew her hand away at once. “You wouldn’t have shot the boy if you hadn’t had to,” she said, her voice gentle. “You saved Tom’s life.”

He looked straight into her eyes and her heart quivered in her chest. She did not want to feel anything for him, let alone the tumultuous combination of lost love and resentment currently ricocheting inside her body like a wild bullet. Her mother had warned her a man with Brady’s past could never really love anyone. Lara hadn’t believed it until that night when he’d proved it to her.

He said, “I have nothing to lose. But you do.”

“Me? Oh, you mean money. You think Bill Armstrong is going to come after my family’s money.”

“If he finds you’re legally my wife, yes. If he finds a way to stick it to me or anyone I care—cared—about, yes, I do. Our marriage is a matter of public record. All he has to do is look. Maybe you ought to light a fire under your lawyer.”

She closed her eyes, trying to imagine her mother’s reaction to someone suing Brady and walking off with the Kirk fortune.

“It’s not the civil suit I’m worried about,” Brady added. “It’s Armstrong himself. He’s gone half-crazy since losing Billy. If he finds out about you—”

“Why would he even think about me?” she said, looking at Brady again, but her mind’s eye casting a different image. Both of the Armstrong kids had come into the teen center on occasion. First Sara, Billy’s delicate sixteen-year-old sister, then Billy and his pal, Jason Briggs, both a year younger. When Sara took a whole bottle of her grandmother’s sleeping pills, it had stunned the community and it had devastated Billy.

The senior Armstrong had come into the teen center looking for answers no one could give him. Grief and anger had battled in his feverish eyes and she’d felt horrible for him. And truth be known, a little afraid of him, too.

And then, three weeks later, Billy died.

Good Lord, no wonder Brady looked haunted.

But she couldn’t offer him what he needed. Maybe another woman could, someday, one who knew how to crack through his defenses or live with them. But not her. She said, “I’ve been gone a year, Brady. I’ll leave again in a few days. As far as anybody in Riverport knows, I’m just the girl you didn’t marry.”

He looked down at his feet then back at her, his gaze unfathomable. How could she have ever thought she knew him better than she knew herself? He was a stranger. She glanced at her watch. Almost three o’clock. “I have to get back inside.”

His eyebrows raised in query. Before he could ask a question she wasn’t prepared to answer, she told him something she hadn’t planned to. “I have a meeting this evening with Jason Briggs.”

As she’d known it would, this news diverted his curiosity. “What does he want?”

“I guess he wants to talk.”

“Why does the boy who convinced Billy Armstrong that stealing a car and a half case of beer was a good idea want to talk to you?”

She shrugged. “He got out of juvenile detention earlier this week and apparently went straight to the teen center. My replacement called me up in Seattle where I live now, and I called Jason. He asked if I was going to be around Riverport soon because he needed to talk.”

“And so you drove all the way back here to talk with a delinquent sixteen-year-old boy.”

“Among other things,” she hedged. “But, yes. There was something in his voice.”

“What do you mean?”

“He sounded nervous.”

“Jason Briggs hasn’t, to my knowledge, told anyone anything about that night except to try to blame everything on Billy.”

She almost smiled. Brady was acting like what Brady really was. A cop. How could he not see that? She said, “I won’t know what’s troubling him until I talk to him.”

“Yeah. Okay, I’ll go with you. This may be a break.”

“No, you won’t go with me,” she said firmly.

“Where are you meeting him?”

“Like I’m going to tell you?”

“You don’t know what he has in mind.”

“And neither do you,” she said. With a warning glance, she added, “Come back later tonight. If Jason says anything I can pass along to you, I will.”

“I don’t like you going alone.”

She stared at him until he had the grace to drop his gaze. “I’ll call my lawyer tomorrow. We’ll have this sham of a marriage annulled.”

One minute he was staring at her as she talked and the next he’d closed the three feet between them and grabbed her arms. The energy that surged directly into her bloodstream almost knocked her off her feet. Her heart banged against her ribs.

He dipped his head so low his deep dark brown eyes burned into hers. “Can a marriage consummated the way ours was be annulled?”

“Brady…”

“Don’t you remember our wedding night? Don’t you remember what we did—”

She shrugged herself away from him. Sex had never been the issue. “You’d better go now.”

Seconds ticked by in absolute silence before he finally moved. He paused at her elbow. “I’ll be back at nine o’clock.”

“Make it ten,” she said.

He nodded once before striding away. She stood in the garden for several moments, staring out at the old dock, waiting until she heard the roar of his motorcycle and knew it was safe to move.

Then she walked back inside the house, head high, eyes mostly unseeing. She’d shed her last tear for Brady months before. She was over him.