“Are you all right?”
“Just take the damned money.”
She grinned. “Yes, sir.”
“And then fix a couple of milk shakes. I’ll grab some juice for the baby.”
“Uh-oh,” Sharon Lynn said. “What did it, Justin? Those big green eyes or the tears?”
“Go to hell.”
“You ought to be nicer to me,” she taunted. “I can tell this story far and wide by morning. Grandpa Harlan will know every touching detail by the time you get there tonight for the poker game. Your life won’t be worth living by the time they finish teasing you about letting a nasty, evil shoplifter off the hook just because she was beautiful.”
“You know, Sharon Lynn, there are things about you that old Kyle Mason doesn’t know about,” he said grimly, referring to her fiancé. “That man’s been dangling on the hook for the past fifty million years, it seems like, waiting for you to marry him. Could be I know just the way to cut him loose before the latest wedding date next month.”
“You wouldn’t dare,” she breathed.
He could see her calculating the risks and twisted the knife a little more. “Wouldn’t dare tell him that you were the party girl of your senior class at ole Los Piños High? Wouldn’t dare mention that you landed in jail on your senior trip?” he taunted. “Try me.”
“Kyle knows all that,” she said airily. “He loves me anyway. Besides, you know perfectly well what kind of party girl I was, all talk.”
“So you say.”
Her gaze shifted toward the front window. “If you ask me you’d do a whole lot better to be worrying about why your suspect appears to be about to pull out of the space in front and hightail it out of town.” She shot him a smug look. “Just the way I predicted she would.”
Justin looked up in time to see a car shoot backward into traffic amid a squeal of tires. As he’d expected, it was the fancy car with the out-of-state tags.
“Well, hell,” he muttered, and took off running, the carton of juice he’d just grabbed still clutched in his hand.
“If you catch her, tell her I’m not pressing charges,” Sharon Lynn shouted after him, laughing.
“If I catch her, I’m throwing her in jail,” he vowed. “You give me a reason, even an itsy-bitsy reason, and you’ll be in the cell right next to her.”
Patsy wasn’t sure why she’d run. Obviously she hadn’t wanted to be hauled off to jail, something that the sheriff’s deputy had seemed perfectly capable of doing. But it was more than that. Fleeing had been instinctive, which told her quite a lot about the damage even a few days on the run had done to her normally assertive personality.
Seeing the judgment in the deputy’s eyes, the disdain, ordinarily would have infuriated her enough to make her stand her ground. She was capable of holding her own in an argument, or at least she had been until living with Will had taught her that silence was often the only way to escape from escalating tensions.
One look at the deputy had told her that arguments would be wasted on him, too. There was an unyielding air about him, the kind of steadfast determination that would be great if he were on your side, not so terrific if he weren’t.
She had been startled when he’d released her and sent her after Billy. Grateful for the unexpected opportunity to escape, she had seized it, not pausing to consider just how incensed the deputy might be by her actions.
Maybe the woman in the store could calm him down and keep him from chasing after her, she thought hopefully. Patsy had seen the compassion in the woman’s eyes, had known that she was only a hairsbreadth from getting both the medicine and her freedom when the man had turned up. Though she hated taking advantage of anyone’s kindness, she had been relieved that Billy would have the medicine he needed. That was all that really mattered.
Now, not only did she not have anything to bring her son’s fever down, but she was a criminal, with an attempted shoplifting charge pending if that deputy decided to pursue matters.
For all she knew there were kidnapping charges on file back in Oklahoma, too. Will was perfectly capable of doing something so despicable just to make a point to her, to prove that he was the one with all the power. What would turn up if the deputy happened to catch her tag number and run it through his computer? There was no telling.
She couldn’t take any chances that he might find something damaging. She would just have to drive faster and more cleverly than she ever had before. Suiting her actions to her thoughts, she skidded onto the highway and headed north, back toward Dallas, after all. She would exit a few miles ahead, then take back roads to elude any pursuit.
Though her plight was increasingly desperate, she reminded herself that she still had a bank card with her. Though there was a risk that Will would use any transactions with it to track her, she would use it to get cash if there were no options left to her. She could get enough money to last a few more days, until she could find another town, maybe get a job and find a safe place for herself and Billy. It might even be smarter to abandon the car and fly to another state. If she used cash for the tickets, it would make the job of tracking her more difficult. It was a huge country and Will’s reach surely couldn’t extend to every corner of it.
When the car sputtered then chugged to a stop barely ten miles outside of Los Piños, she realized that in her rush to get away from the deputy, she’d made a terrible miscalculation. The blasted car was out of gas. It hardly mattered that she had the credit card or a few dollars left in her purse. She hadn’t passed a gas station heading out of town. It was impossible to know how far ahead the next one might be.
That was the only reason, she assured herself, that Justin whoever-he-was-lawman caught up with her. He found her on the side of the road, cursing a blue streak about the gas-guzzling car Will had insisted she have, and rocking the fussy toddler in her arms. His reflective sunglasses prevented her from getting a good look at his eyes, but his I-told-you-so smile said it all. He’d never doubted for a moment that he’d catch up with her and haul her into custody.
“Get in,” he ordered, gesturing toward the patrol car.
“You’re arresting me?” she asked, as if it were the most ridiculous notion she’d ever heard. Will had been a master of haughty indignation and she had learned by example.
Their gazes clashed, hers defiant, his unreadable.
“No,” he said finally with a heavy sigh. “I’m taking you back into town. Unless you’d prefer to stand around here and wait for someone else to come along and offer you a lift. I’ll tell you right now, though, that it’s a very long way to the next town and hardly anybody uses this particular stretch of road.”
Patsy had guessed as much. Not a single car had passed by while she’d been standing beside the car, cursing her lousy luck.
“Sooner or later…” she began, thinking anything would be better than going someplace with this hard, no-nonsense man.
“Are you willing to take that chance? If your son’s sick, this heat won’t help.”
Her resolve wavered. “But the car…”
“Isn’t going anywhere,” he said. “I’ll have someone bring out some gas and drive it back into town.”
“I could wait,” she suggested hopefully.
“I don’t think so.”
“Then you are arresting me.”
“Dammit, no. Like I said, I am just trying to get you and the baby out of this blazing heat.”
“Oh.”
He