It’s too dangerous for you on the outside,” the DEA agent insisted, his voice deep with a life-and-death urgency. “You need to let me handle this.”
Over the past three years, Jed had learned that his black-and-white code of integrity was something few people followed. Most people, even law-enforcement officers, lived life with shades of gray. Some darker shades than others.
“Is there a shoot-on-sight order out on me?”
Rowe’s silence confirmed Jed’s suspicion.
The prison guard who had stepped aside and let him escape the burning ruins of Blackwoods had warned him that his life would be more at risk on the outside. That there were lawmen who took it very personally when one of their own was killed. Cop killers rarely survived in jail or on the outside.
“Then it’s not safe for me to go back into custody, either,” Jed pointed out. “No doubt I’d wind up having a fatal accident.”
“I will bring you in,” the DEA agent said. “And I’ll vouch for your innocence.”
A smile tugged at Jed’s lips. “Do you really think anyone is going to take your word that I’m innocent just because your girlfriend says so?”
“She’s not my girlfriend.”
Jed’s breath left his lungs in a whoosh of surprise. He had only seen Rowe Cusack once since helping the agent survive his undercover assignment at Blackwoods Penitentiary, but during that brief meeting in the midst of the riot, he had been able to tell that the guy had fallen hard for Jed’s younger sister. “Is Macy all right?”
Because if Rowe had hurt her, the DEA agent would be seeing Jed again—but not to bring him back to prison.
“She’s my fiancée now,” Rowe said.
“You proposed?” The guy had fallen really hard.
“She’s everything you told me she was,” Rowe said, his voice gruff with emotion, “and so much more. I would have been a fool if I let her get away.”
Jed had been a fool like that once. He’d fallen hard but had let the woman get away. In the end, it had cost him his freedom. And given that shoot-on-sight order, it could wind up costing him his life, too.
“I hope she wasn’t a fool to accept,” Jed said. As he’d learned, people weren’t always what you thought they were or what your heart wanted them to be.
“Your sister is no fool,” Rowe said, defending her, his voice sharp with anger now.
“No,” Jed agreed. Macy was the only one who had believed in his innocence … until the DEA agent. But Jed suspected that Rowe just believed in Macy, which was fine with him. His younger sister deserved to have someone who supported her and who obviously loved her. “Congratulations.”
“If I had my way, she would already be my wife,” Rowe admitted, “but she won’t set a date for our wedding until your name is cleared.”
Jed choked on a laugh. “So Macy’s given you some incentive to help me.”
“You gave me the incentive—when you saved my life,” Rowe reminded him. “Twice.”
“I didn’t do that to give you incentive,” Jed said. “I did it because it was the right thing to do.” And because he could never have lived with himself had he let an innocent man be murdered.
“I know,” Rowe said. “That’s why I believe you. That’s why I want you to do the right thing now. Tell me where you are, so I can bring you in.”
Jed blew out a breath that steamed up the cracked Plexiglas of the old pay-phone booth. He’d already talked to the agent too long, just hopefully not long enough for the man to have tracked Jed’s location. “Tell my sister I love her.”
“If you love her, you would—”
“Stay alive. That’s what Mace wants most of all,” Jed said with absolute certainty, “my safety.” Macy would have broken him out of prison herself if he’d agreed to go along with her plan. But he hadn’t wanted her to risk her freedom for his. And for years he had believed that justice would prevail and his innocence would be proven—the real killer finally caught.
He wasn’t that idealistic and naïve anymore. He knew that he was the only one who could prove his innocence. “I won’t be safe until I have irrefutable proof that I killed no one.”
Yet. Because he couldn’t trust the justice system to work, he might have to take his own justice.
“Jed, you have to come back, or it won’t matter if you clear your name,” Rowe said, trying to reason with him.
But no one really understood that nothing mattered to Jed but clearing his name. Not even his own life …
“I’ll keep in touch, Rowe.”
Jed hung up, hopefully before Rowe had had time to trace his call. The DEA agent would excuse his interference as help. But Jed didn’t need anyone’s help. He had broken out of prison because there were certain things—certain people—only he could handle.
Erica Towsley was one of those people. He wadded up the page he had ripped from the dangling phone book and shoved it into the pocket of his jeans. He had found her. For over three years he’d had his lawyer looking for her to no avail. In the three days since he had escaped from Blackwoods Penitentiary, Jed had tracked down his alibi.
He stepped out of the booth and sucked in a breath as the wind picked up, whipping icy chunks of snow at him. But then he thought of her, and his blood heated. Oblivious to the freak late-spring snowstorm, he trudged along the deserted street deeper into the heart of the small town. The businesses were closed, the storefronts dark. But above a few of those businesses, lights glowed in some of the apartments on the second and third stories.
Behind the blinds at one of those windows, a shadow moved. He couldn’t see any more than a dark, curvy silhouette, but his pulse quickened and his breath shortened.
He knew it was her.
ERICA SHIVERED BUT NOT because of the cold air seeping through the worn frames of the front windows. She shivered at what she saw as she gazed through the slats of the blinds.
Despite it being spring for a few weeks now, winter had snuck back into Miller’s Valley in the form of a blizzard. But the return of winter wasn’t what chilled her blood even with the snow blowing outside, nearly obscuring the street below the third-floor apartment. Nearly.
Erica still caught a glimpse of someone standing on the sidewalk across the street. He was just a tall, broad-shouldered shadow. But she could feel his gaze as he stared up at her window. And it chilled her far more than the cold air.
“There is no way that he found you,” she whispered, reassuring herself again, like she had been doing since that special report three nights ago. Nothing was in her name. Not the business. Not the building. Not even the car she drove. “It’s safe here.”
But despite all of her assurances, those doubts niggled at her, jangling her already frazzled nerves. That was why she was up so late, because every creak and
