horror of a gentle seventeen-year-old girl was still too strong. Too vivid. He was losing her again. But until then, he would hold her and keep her safe.
He sensed the exact moment she drowsed. Her body grew heavy, the hand clasping his uncurled. Her breaths slowed to a measured rhythm. And he hoped that just for a while, she could rest.
Jericho had drifted into a somnolent state himself, when the jangling chime of his doorbell roused him. Slipping his arms from Maria Elena and covering her carefully, he pulled on his discarded slacks, then hurried to answer the summons.
“Court!” The deputy’s normally spotless uniform was stained and smudged with soot. “What’s wrong?”
“A problem at the museum.”
“What sort of problem?”
“Just after dawn, a kid hot-wired a rental car in the museum parking lot. The culprit was the wannabe delinquent, Toby Parker.”
“And?”
“The car blew him across the lot. Lucky for the kid it did. He’s toasted around the edges and bruised, but he’ll see his day in court. The rental burned to a twisted heap.”
Startled, Jericho tried to think. “The museum isn’t officially open. Why would a rental car be left in the lot?” Abruptly, like a knife in his heart, he understood. Maria Elena.
“We found enough of the tag to trace. That’s how we know it was a rental. Ms. Delacroix’s.”
Jericho’s head cleared, his response was coolly concise. “You’ve secured the area? Everyone knows what to do?”
“Yes, sir. No one touches anything until you get there.”
“Good. Make sure nobody does. I’ll be five minutes behind you.” Closing the door after his deputy, Jericho stood with his hands on the heavy panels, his thoughts a morass of fear and worry. A light step and the rustle of cloth made him turn. Maria was there, in the bedroom doorway, a beautiful waif lost in the folds of his robe. The woman he loved, and must keep safe. “You heard?”
“I wondered what effect my homecoming might have on my old friends in Belle Terre.” She was ashen, but calm. “Now we know.”
“We don’t know anything yet,” Jericho contradicted. “Not even if it was a bomb. But whatever it was, it could have been gang related, targeting the kid who got singed. That it was your rental could be purely coincidence.”
“Gangs in Belle Terre?” Maria made a doubting grimace.
“Damn right. Belle Terre isn’t the sleepy, peaceful town you left eighteen years ago.”
“Perhaps not,” she conceded. “But you don’t believe the bomb in my car was a coincidence any more than I believe it.”
“I don’t know what I believe,” he admitted honestly. She was too astute not to recognize evasion. “We both know I can’t make a judgment until the investigation is complete. For that reason I’ll feel better when you’re on the plane and out of reach.”
“There’s just one catch, Jericho.”
His thoughts filled with the carnage she’d barely escaped, he looked at her, a questioning expression on his face.
“I won’t be on that plane.”
“Like hell you won’t.”
“Sorry, Sheriff.” Oblivious of his robe puddling at her feet and flowing inches beyond her hands, she crossed her arms and leaned against the doorjamb. In a voice that was ominously pleasant, she declared, “Until this is resolved, I’m staying in Belle Terre.”
“Dammit, Maria Elena…” He stopped as she slipped off his robe and let it fall at her feet. “What are you doing?”
“I’m getting dressed.” Her comment was tossed over her shoulder as she walked away. “You should, too. Unless you plan to go in that particularly fetching, but unprofessional, state.”
“Go where? What state?”
“To a bombing, darling. I’ve no choice but my gown. But, as sheriff, do you really want to go in tuxedo slacks, looking exactly like you just spent hours making love to your wife?”
“My wife?”
“Until you find someone else.”
Jericho smiled hollowly. Maria Elena had just said the words he’d waited half his life to hear. At the time he least wanted to hear them. She shouldn’t stay. He wouldn’t let her if it was in his power to stop her. But even as he regretted her decision, he knew it was the decision he would have made.
To the world she was Maria Delacroix. To Jericho she was Maria Elena Rivers, a woman of extraordinary courage.
His wife.
“Until forever,” he promised grimly. “If I can keep you safe.”
Three
Maria Elena Delacroix Rivers moved like a cat. A very savvy cat who knew her way around the jungle. Any jungle. Even this one, and what it had become in an instant.
Her rental was a burned-out skeleton squatting in the nether regions of a long deserted parking lot. But, oddly, little around it showed more than the insidious signs of scorching from an intensely generated heat. Even the kid who’d decided to help himself to a joyride in the lone vehicle left unattended in the lot was okay. Just bruises, some burns, maybe a broken bone. A small price for a close call and a lesson, hopefully, well learned.
While rescue and police personnel dealt with the kid, Maria circled the car, studying it from every angle. As Maria studied the car, Jericho studied Maria.
Her work as a newscaster of no little fame also included quite a number of stints as a foreign correspondent. One such assignment had taken her to the Middle East. With her trusty microphone in hand, and her own personal camera never very far away, she’d put together riveting reports. With Pulitzer prize photographs thrown in for compassionate emphasis. Jericho remembered that many of her published photographs of that recent time portrayed scenes more than a little like this one.
“You’ve seen this before,” he surmised as her circling inspection brought her close.
Maria’s eyes narrowed, the piercing scrutiny of her gray, level gaze didn’t alter, or turn from the car. “Almost,” she answered softly. “But not quite.”
A special bomb squad had flown in from Columbia 150 miles from Belle Terre. These experts in every known method of blowing a person, place, or thing to kingdom come, had studied every inch of the car, the parking lot, and the museum—with more to come later. Yet it was Maria who commanded Jericho’s attention. Maria whose answers and opinions he sought. But this terse comment wasn’t enough.
“Explain,” Jericho said, softly. Very softly, but any who knew him would have recognized it as a tense command.
“It’s different from the bombings I’ve seen and photographed.” Maria turned now to look at him. “At first I thought he, whoever
