and family.
King was not a patient man. Okay, that was a massive understatement. He liked to be in control, liked to make things happen on his own timetable. He did not like having his plans foiled again and again by the streak of stubbornness that ran wide through his own children. Right now his plan included grandbabies, a whole dynasty of Spencers.
He had one flesh-and-blood grandson, for all the good it did him. J. C. Gates had been kept from Bobby and from King for years. Some of that had been King’s own doing, so he could hardly complain now that the boy still hadn’t warmed up to him. J.C. was as cautious and fractious as a spooked horse around his own daddy, never mind King. But Bobby was both patient and determined that the boy’s attitude would change with time. King was counting on it.
In addition to J.C., there were four more little hellions King could claim, even if they didn’t have Spencer blood running through their veins. Daisy’s adopted son, Tommy, was turning into a fine boy, now that Daisy and Walker had taken a firm hand with him. And Bobby’s stepdaughter, Darcy, was a pistol. She looked real cute, too, now that her dyed-green hair had grown out. King was as proud of his two ready-made grandkids as if they were his own flesh and blood. He felt the same way about Walker’s two sons, even though they all saw precious little of them, since the boys lived down in North Carolina with their mama.
But even with all the commotion that brood had brought into his life, King wanted a new generation of full-fledged Spencers he could educate in tradition from the very beginning. He wanted a generation who’d grow up and see to things in Trinity Harbor, Virginia, the way King and his ancestors had from the beginning of time in this little town on the Potomac River. Spencers had a duty and an obligation to folks around here to keep things running smoothly.
Since Daisy and Bobby didn’t seem to be in the slightest hurry to give him grandbabies, that left Tucker. Unfortunately, his son seemed to be aware of King’s intentions. Tucker had been giving his father a wide berth for weeks now, making up excuses to avoid Sunday dinner at the farm and the pointed questions that King tended to serve along with the fried chicken and mashed potatoes.
Worse, King hadn’t been able to corner him in town or at the sheriff’s office over in Montross. Tucker was getting to be as slippery as some of those criminals he was always going on and on about.
Now, it was possible that Tucker was trying to crack a big case, but King doubted it. The kind of “big” cases that turned up around here tended to begin and end with a drunk-and-disorderly charge or a traffic citation. Oh, there had been that drug business a couple of years back, and an occasional shoplifting incident or shooting, but all in all, the county was fairly quiet and serene. Which should have left plenty of time for Tucker to pursue a woman, in King’s opinion.
“I guess that means it’s up to me,” King said aloud. “Again.”
He managed to pull off a resigned tone, but anyone looking would no doubt have seen the glint of anticipation in his eyes. There was nothing on earth that King liked better than a little well-intentioned meddling, especially when it came to romance. He glanced across the room at the silver-framed photos Daisy and Bobby had given him last Christmas. They both had fine-looking families, thanks to him.
Yes, indeed, a little lively romance was exactly what Tucker needed. And King was getting darn good at providing it, if he did say so himself. He’d get on it first thing in the morning.
1
T ucker stood in the doorway of his bedroom and wondered why in hell there was a woman in his bed.
Unless, of course, he was hallucinating. After the kind of day he’d had, that wasn’t out of the question. He blinked hard and looked again. Nope, she was still there. Practically buck naked and gorgeous.
Okay, then, he thought, deeply regretting that he hadn’t had one last cup of coffee. He rubbed a hand over his face and tried to get his brain to kick in with the kind of quick thinking for which he was known in law enforcement circles. The woman was a reality. That still didn’t give him the first clue about what she was doing in his house and, more specifically, in his bed.
He certainly hadn’t invited her to share that king-size space, not in years, anyway. He hadn’t even known she was there until he’d walked in the house, dead tired from working a double shift and ready for bed himself. If he hadn’t flipped on the bedroom lights, he might have crawled in beside her, which wouldn’t have been altogether a bad thing under other circumstances.
As it was, he was simply standing here, mouth gaping as if he’d never seen a half-naked woman before…especially this particular woman.
Last he’d heard, Mary Elizabeth Swan had wanted nothing further to do with him. In fact, the last he’d read on the front page of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, she was marrying the local delegate to the Virginia house of delegates. Though that was far from the last occasion on which her name had appeared in print, it was the last time Tucker had permitted himself to read any article that mentioned her. He had to skip quite a bit in the local weekly—to say nothing of entire pages in the feature section of the Richmond paper when the house of delegates was in session.
It sometimes seemed to him as if Liz, as she preferred to be called these days, was on the board of every cultural institution in the entire state. Her picture—always taken at some fancy shindig requiring designer clothes—leapt out at him at least once a week, reminding him with heart-stopping clarity of just how susceptible he was to any glimpse of that flawless face and tawny mane of hair.
Of course, he sometimes had a hard time reconciling those sophisticated images with the girl he’d fallen for on a schoolyard playground the day she’d pummeled a nine-year-old boy for trying to sneak a peek at her panties while she’d been scrambling up a tree. Mary Elizabeth had been a tomboy back then, and while she’d eventually outgrown tree climbing, she’d never outgrown her go-for-broke enthusiasm for life. Not while she’d been with him, at any rate. She’d looked depressingly sedate in those newspaper pictures, however, so maybe she’d changed now that she was going on thirty and a force to be reckoned with in Richmond society.
Tucker had finally taken to tossing the feature section aside just to avoid the temptation to sit and stare and brood about what might have been…what should have been. What kind of pitiful excuse for a man couldn’t get a woman out of his system after six years and a steady diet of gushing reports about the wildly successful man she’d chosen over him?
Lawrence Chandler had high-tech millions and political ambitions. Mary Elizabeth, who’d been born right here in Westmoreland County, came from generations of Virginia blue blood. She’d inherited Swan Ridge, her grandfather’s estate overlooking the Potomac. A cynic might have wondered if that stately old house with its manicured lawn and sweeping views hadn’t been as much a lure for Chandler as Mary Elizabeth herself. New money seeking old respectability, as it were.
Be that as it may, it was a marriage made in political heaven. If Tucker had heard that once, he’d heard it a hundred times, usually right before people realized they were saying it to the prior man in Mary Elizabeth’s life, the one who’d loved her since childhood, the one who’d expected to marry her. Then they’d slink away, looking embarrassed or—even worse—pitying.
According to all those same reports, Chandler intended to be governor by forty, bypass Congress and head straight for the White House by fifty. Not one single political pundit seemed to doubt him.
But he wasn’t likely to pull that off, Tucker concluded, if people discovered that his wife was sleeping just about bare-assed in the bed of a small-town sheriff who had once been her lover.
Tucker
