Atonement

She didn’t want to tell him how much she’d missed him. Or how much she’d feared he would never come back. She’d survived on what he’d said before he left. He loved her.

“Is this your first day back at work?” she asked.

He nodded and took a drink.

He’d changed over the past six months. She couldn’t put her finger on what it was, though, but he seemed reconciled. A man like Frank Curry believed he could “fix” most anything—or at least should be able to. He’d blamed himself for Pam being the way she was.

“I’m so glad you gave up on finding Pam,” Nettie said.

Again he merely nodded.

She thought of the man who’d taken off out of the store, murder in his eye, to find Pam. So what had changed? she wondered as she studied him. Pam Chandler was still dangerous. She was still out there somewhere. Nettie lived with that knowledge every day. She didn’t cross the street to the post office or the Branding Iron Café without looking around for the crazy, vindictive woman. She no longer walked down to the store at night unless someone was with her. At the house, she locked all her doors, even in the daytime, something pretty much unheard of in most of rural Montana.

“I’d better be going,” Frank said. He had a deep voice. It had always sent heat racing through her blood. His gaze met hers and she felt a catch in her throat. “I was thinking you might want to go to a movie tomorrow night.”

He was asking her for a date? It had been so long in coming that she didn’t answer at first, out of shock.

“That is, if you’re free.” He sounded not so sure of things between them. Understandably, since it wasn’t that long ago that she’d given up on him and had spent some time with another man.

She shoved that thought away. “I would love to go,” she said, her voice cracking with emotion.

He smiled then and he was the Frank Curry she’d fallen so desperately in love with so many years ago. That love had lingered and only recently begun to bloom again, like a glacier lily coming up after a long, hard Montana winter.

Stepping down the hall, he took a look at her office door.

“Frank, I don’t want you to be late for work. The door can wait.”

“It looks as if I’m going to have to take it down and plane off some of the wood. The store must have shifted on its old foundation. I’ll fix the door this weekend. Just don’t get locked in.”

“I won’t.” His concern warmed her heart. She pushed aside her worries about him as he leaned over and kissed her softly on the mouth. He tasted of orange soda and smelled of the outdoors. She wanted to wrap her arms around him and hold him to her, but he was already drawing back, saying, “Don’t want to be late my first day back on the job.” And he was gone, the bell over the door jingling.

Nettie moved to the window to watch him leave, her fingers pressed to the glass, her heart pounding. She had waited so long for this.

Please don’t let anything spoil it.

* * *

TESSA STARTED AT the knock on her motel room door. Her first thought was, No one knows I’m here. No one but Ethan, or whatever the man wanted to call himself.

At the second knock, she moved to the door and asked, “Yes?”

“Ms. Winters, I’d like to have a word with you.” Ethan’s voice, though more authoritative. Just the sound of it hurt. “It’s Undersheriff Dillon Lawson.”

“I believe we said all we had to yesterday,” she called through the door.

“Not quite.”

She gritted her teeth and opened the door. For a moment she was taken aback by the uniformed man standing in her doorway. He wore a pale gray Stetson over his longish blond hair, a tan uniform shirt with his name tag and a gold star. A gun was strapped to his slim hips, over a pair of jeans that ran down his long legs to his boots.

Ethan was as handsome as any man she’d ever known, no matter what he was wearing. But in a uniform, he looked so responsible, so nice, so safe, that he threatened to break her heart all over again.

“What do you want?” she demanded.

“Just to talk. May I come in?”

Tessa hesitated. “I don’t see what talking—”

“Please.”

The break in his voice made her relent. She stepped aside to let him enter the room but left the door open. She’d made the bed, a habit her mother had taught her and one she couldn’t break even when it was a motel. The air smelled of pines and the Yellowstone River nearby. She breathed it in and braced herself for whatever was to happen next.

He saw the bed and looked surprised.

“I can’t stand an unmade bed and I wasn’t quite ready to leave yet.”

He’d removed his Stetson and now held the brim in his fingers. “Where are you going?”

“Not that it concerns you, but back to California. I have a job there, you might recall. I had a life there before I met you.”

“Do you have family there?”

She studied him. “Are you asking as undersheriff or as the father of my baby?”

He didn’t answer.

“As you already know, I don’t have family, but I have friends in California,” she said into the silence that stretched between them. She felt awkward standing in the small motel room. There weren’t a lot of places to sit in the room, other than the bed and one straight-backed chair by the desk. She wondered how long this was going to take. “I’ll be just fine, not that I think you honestly care about me or the baby.”

“You said you have a job. Where do you work?”

She eyed him suspiciously. “Why are you—”

“Please, just humor me, all right?”

Tessa sighed. “I work as a supervisor for a landscaping firm.”

He seemed surprised, which only annoyed her. “How much money did you say my brother took from you?”

She ignored the brother part, wondering what he was doing here. Apparently he wanted to continue this pretense. But to what end? Yesterday he’d threatened her with arrest for pulling a gun on him and trying to scam him. Surely he hadn’t come here today to do just that, had he?

“All of my savings. Just under five thousand dollars, as if you don’t know that, too.”

He looked down at his boots for a moment. “I was thinking...” He slowly raised his gaze. “If you really knew my brother, then you should have some way to prove it.”

She put her hands on her stomach. “The proof, as they say, is in the pudding. Anyway, why would I have come all the way to Montana looking for Ethan if I hadn’t known him? Or at least someone who’d pretended to be him?”

“That’s what I’m trying to figure out. Truthfully, I can’t see you with my brother. You seem to have too much going for you to get involved with him.”

She chuckled at that. “I should have been smarter. Neither of us is denying that.”

“I guess what I’m trying to say is that you and Ethan must have been together for a while before—” His gaze dropped to where her hands still rested on her stomach. “Before you say he left you.”

“Three months. I met him last April, three months before I got pregnant. That would have been a month after you stole his identity.” She couldn’t help being angry. What was he insinuating? That this wasn’t his fault because clearly she was just plain easy? Those were fightin’ words.

“Then you must have photographs of the two of you together.”

Tessa felt her pulse jump. “You know damned well I don’t.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Do we really have to continue this charade? Ethan took everything that tied him to me and the baby when he left, including photographs of the two of us, along with my money. He even killed the ones on my cell phone, not that there were many. Ethan didn’t like having his photo taken.”

“Didn’t you find that strange?”

She laughed. “I did until I met you. Now we both know why you didn’t want me to have any proof, don’t we?”

“So you have no evidence that you ever even knew my brother.”

Tessa glared at him. “Isn’t that the way you planned it?”

“Then I guess we’re finished here.” He settled his hat on his head, tipped the brim and started for the door.

That was it? He was just going to walk out again? What had he really come here for?

And that was when it hit her.

“Aren’t you curious how I found you, since you lied not only about your first name but also your last? You were so careful not to leave anything that would tie me to you. You must wonder how I found you.”

The lawman stopped short of the door and turned to look back at her. She reached into her shoulder bag and saw him tense, but she didn’t pull the .45. “I was wondering why you stopped by here this morning. Did you just realize that you’d dropped something when you left me in the middle of the night? Of course you would want to make sure I don’t use it to embarrass you, to prove what you did.”

He frowned. “I don’t know what—”

“Admit it. You came for this.” She held up the dog-eared, faded photograph and let out a bitter laugh. “I’m so stupid. Of course this was why you asked me about photographs. You realized you must have dropped it in your hurry to get away the night you left.”

His frown deepened.

“I’ll bet you’ve been racking your brain, wondering how I could have found you. You never told me enough to lead me to you in Montana. So what could it have been? Then you remembered the photograph.” She looked at him, her expression filled with disgust. “Here, take it,” she said, thrusting it at him. “I’m not going to bother you again. I’m going back to California and you will never see me or my baby again.”

He seemed to hesitate for a moment before he stepped to her and took the photograph.

* * *

ONE GLANCE AT the photo and Dillon had to pull out the chair and sit down. He bent over the snapshot, tears blurring his eyes. “Where did you get this?”

“I just told you. You dropped it. I almost threw it away when I found it. I thought, how egotistical that he carried around a photo of himself. I remembered seeing you with it a few times when you didn’t know I was watching. Clearly it meant something to you, so I thought the sentiment must be about the place.”

“Why didn’t you show me this yesterday?” he asked without looking up.

“As if it would have made a difference.”

He glanced up then and met her blue gaze. He’d been in law enforcement long enough that he had gotten pretty good at telling if a person was lying. This woman had thrown off his instincts from the moment he’d met her because of his grief over his brother’s death. Her story hadn’t held water, and yet... “You said you found me through this photo?”

“I tried Hard Luck Ranch from the logo on the side of the pickup in the background, but there was more than one, so I just looked up the brand on the cattle in the pasture behind you in the photo.” She shrugged. “It led me right to your ranch.”

It surprised him that she’d been that clever, but clearly the woman was smart and very determined.

“Now that you have your photograph back...”

It was obvious she wanted him to leave. Her disgust tore at his insides. He hated to think that what she was saying about his brother’s stealing her money and leaving her might be true. But he feared it was.

Which meant what? That Ethan hadn’t died in that car crash? His heart leaped at the thought, but quickly plummeted. Ethan was dead. Unless somehow there’d been a mistake in identifying the body, since the vehicle had apparently exploded on impact—

“This photo isn’t mine,” he said. “That is me in the picture, though. Ethan took it the last time I saw him, almost two years ago.”

He could see that she didn’t know what to make of that. For once, she looked as confused as he’d felt from the moment she’d appeared at his corral fence. “Tell me about my brother.”

She let out a small laugh. “You have to be kidding.” Her gaze met his, challenging him to tell the truth.

He only wished he knew the truth. “You say you met him last April?” A month after he’d buried his brother. Or at least what was left of the man he’d thought was his brother. “Please, tell me about him.”

Tessa stared at him, her blue eyes firing with anger and pain. Ethan had hurt her badly—and she believed he had been that man masquerading as his brother.

“Tell you about him? You mean other than his being a liar and a thief and a coward?” she asked sarcastically.

“There must have been something you loved about him.”

* * *

TESSA HAD TO swallow the lump in her throat. Since Ethan had left her, the pain in her heart had dulled. Being this close to the man now made her recall something she’d sensed in him the first time she’d met him. A sadness born, she’d thought, of compassion.

He’d told her he’d made mistakes in his life. That he had wanted to change for her. He’d made her believe that her love could bring out the man she’d sensed was in him. She’d wanted to believe that. There’d been something about him....

Tessa sat down on the edge of the bed and looked at the man sitting in her motel room. She told herself she wasn’t up to this charade. That was what it was, wasn’t it? This man was trying to confuse her, right?

And yet he looked heartsick, like a man who had lost his brother and thought she could bring him back.

She took a breath and let it out slowly. “He was...charming and funny and a little vulnerable. He made me feel...” She swallowed again and said, “Do we really have to do this? If Ethan was killed a month before I met the man I thought was him—”

“Where did you meet him?”

Tessa sighed and told herself to indulge him; whatever it took to get him to sign away his rights to the baby she was carrying. Even better, get him to write her a check for the money he’d stolen from her. Showing him the photograph had touched him in a way she hadn’t expected.

“At church.”

He actually looked surprised. “I would have thought—”

“A bar?” She could see that he wanted to think the worst of her. “Ethan was on a construction crew fixing part of the church. I had stopped by to bring some cookies I made for an upcoming potluck.... He asked me what kind of cookies I’d made and said they were his favorite.”

“Snicker doodles.”

She met his gaze. “Yes.”

“You gave him one, and that’s when he asked you out.”

Tessa hesitated a moment before she shook her head. “He didn’t ask me until a few days later at a church garage sale.”

“He must have liked you right from the start. Do you mind?” He took one of the plastic-wrapped cups and got up to fill it with water from the bathroom. He looked shaken, making her feel as if she, too, was on unfamiliar, unstable ground. Was it possible Ethan had fooled not just her, but also his brother and the rest of the world? She was no longer so sure this man was the one she’d known.

“So you fell in love with him.” It wasn’t a question.

She nodded. “We’d set a date to get married.”

That surprised him, she saw. “What happened?”

“You know what happened,” she said irritably, realizing she was buying into his act—and not for the first time. He’d played her for a fool once. She was determined he wouldn’t again. “You took my money and skipped town.” She stood up.

“You know it wasn’t me.” He said the words softly, his gaze holding hers.

She stared into his eyes for a long moment, then she lowered herself back onto the edge of the bed. She felt a small chill ripple through her. This wasn’t the man who’d hurt her. Hadn’t part of her known that the moment she’d seen the way he’d handled the horse yesterday?

“I don’t understand.” Her voice broke as her eyes welled with tears.

“There is only one explanation,” the undersheriff said. “If you’re telling the truth, then my brother is alive.”

CHAPTER FIVE

FRANK HAD WANTED to tell Lynette—he’d never called her Nettie—about the crow he’d seen on the telephone line at the ranch. But he already regretted telling Dillon. He knew it was silly, but he feared he’d jinxed it, and when he went home the crow would be gone.

He couldn’t explain it, but the crows gave him a feeling of well-being, as if everything was right with the world. The birds fascinated him, as well. He recalled one morning when he and Lynette had sat in his patrol pickup and watched two young crows playing on the main street of Beartooth.

It had been a game of tag, the young crows dancing around, teasing each other with a twig between them. Before that morning, Lynette hadn’t understood his fascination with the birds.

“They are like us,” she’d said after watching the young crows play.

He’d told her how they made extended families, taking in uncles and aunts, any crow that needed a place to stay. He still wasn’t sure exactly how they communicated among themselves, but they did. There was one thing he did know, though, for certain. Crows were better at making and keeping their families together than humans.

Frank shoved that thought away. He was in too good a mood to think about the past now. He and Lynette were going on a date. He smiled. And he was going back to work, back to a job he loved and had almost given up because of—

Nope, he wasn’t even going to think his ex-wife’s name. He’d put that all behind him. Over the past six months he’d worked hard at the ranch, filling his days so full that at night he couldn’t think. He would walk into the house, often too tired to eat, and would fall into his bed.

All that was in the past, he told himself, and yet he wasn’t sure he would ever be able to quit locking his doors at night or stop keeping his loaded gun within reach beside his bed. So maybe not everything could be put to rest in the past.

Frank had barely reached the sheriff’s department, retrieved his service gun and gold star, when he got his first call. A domestic dispute. Never his favorite. But it was nice to be back in the saddle, so to speak.

* * *

“WHAT ARE YOU saying?” Tessa demanded as she stared at Dillon. It was hard to look at him and not see Ethan. But more and more she was seeing subtle differences between the two men that had nothing to do with their looks.

“There is only one way you can be carrying my brother’s baby,” he said. “And that is if Ethan didn’t die in that car crash last March.”

“Then who did?”

“I don’t know.”

She shook her head. “If the person behind the wheel wasn’t him, then why didn’t he come forward?”

Dillon let out a short, hard laugh. “He wanted everyone to believe he was dead.” He shook his head, as if amazed that his twin could be that cruel. A thought seemed to strike him. “What name was he going by when you met him? You said he’d lied about his last name.”

“Ethan Cross.”

He nodded. “That makes sense. It’s our mother’s maiden name.”

“You really are his twin brother.” She suddenly felt awful for calling him a liar. “I’m sorry I doubted you.”

His smile was benevolent as he held out his hand. “Maybe we should start over. My name is Dillon Lawson.”

“Tessa Winters,” she said, her hand disappearing into his large, warm, callused one. She couldn’t tell which of them was trembling. Maybe both of them were, given what was becoming apparent. “Is it really possible?’

“With Ethan, anything is possible. Even probable.”

“Why would he let everyone think he was dead?”

“My guess is that he was in trouble and needed to disappear. How better than letting everyone believe he had died in the car wreck?”

“Everyone, including his twin brother?”

“We haven’t been close in years. Also, he’s apparently good at disappearing.” He reached into the back pocket of his jeans and pulled out his checkbook. “You said he took five thousand dollars from you?”

“Not quite. But I don’t want your money.”

He raised a brow. “You wouldn’t have come all this way unless you needed it.”

“I’ll manage. More than anything I wanted to look into Ethan’s eyes one last time.” She hated to admit that she’d actually thought about giving him another chance. Not for herself, but for their daughter. She couldn’t bear the thought of her little girl growing up without a father.

How foolish she had been. The man had let everyone believe he was dead. He’d lied about more than she could have imagined. Now all she wanted was for Ethan to sign the form giving away his rights. The last thing she wanted was him coming in and out of their lives and bringing his troubles with him.

“I’m sorry.”

She met Dillon’s blue gaze and wondered why she hadn’t seen it before. They might be identical twins, but where Ethan had tried to be gentle and caring, Dillon just was.

“What I really want is for him to sign the form. He didn’t want this baby. I don’t want him showing up years from now and trying to lay claim to my daughter.”

“You’re having a girl?” His voice broke. He cleared his throat. “I’m going to have a niece?” He smiled as she nodded, and she felt her heart lift at the joy she saw in his expression. She’d so wanted her daughter to have family, especially since she herself had grown up without any.

“I’ll see what I can find out about Ethan,” Dillon said, suddenly looking uneasy. “In the meantime, I would imagine you’ll be going back to California. I’ll let you know when I find him.”

Tessa shook her head. “I didn’t come all this way to give up that easily. If Ethan is alive, I’m finding him—with or without your help.”

* * *

“I DON’T THINK that’s a good idea, Tessa. Not only are you pregnant—when are you due?”

“Three weeks.”

“Very pregnant, and not trained for this sort of thing, and we have no idea what kind of trouble my brother is running from.” Even as Dillon said the words, he saw the stubborn lift of her chin. Determination burned in her blue gaze.

“You said you hadn’t seen him in two years,” she argued. “I, on the other hand, have firsthand knowledge of your brother during the past year. Between the two of us, we stand a better chance of finding him if we work together than alone.”

He studied her for a moment, remembering the .45 in her shoulder bag. He didn’t doubt that she could take care of herself under normal circumstances. But these weren’t normal. Whatever his brother was running from, it must be something big if it had forced him to fake his own death.

“You have to think about yourself and your baby,” he said. “If I’m right, my brother was involved in something bad. This could get dangerous.”

She crossed her arms on top of her stomach and stared him down. “Then I have already put myself and my baby in danger by finding you, haven’t I?”

Dillon worried she might be right about that. “Still—”

“You don’t owe me anything. You can wash your hands of me right now. But I will find Ethan. As hard as he tried, he left me somewhat of a trail. You are only one of my leads.”

“Leads you aren’t going to share unless we do this together.”

She smiled.

He considered the woman. From the moment he’d laid eyes on her, there had been something in her demeanor that had gotten to him. Her story had been preposterous, and yet... And yet he hadn’t been able to let it go.

He’d thought she was trying to con him when they’d first met. The lawman in him reminded him that he might be falling for the worst con of all, because he desperately wanted Tessa to be carrying Ethan’s baby—and she would know that.

He recalled how Sheriff Frank Curry had never opened the DNA test that had been run on the girl claiming to be his daughter, Tiffany Chandler. Frank had said he didn’t need to. Tiffany was his daughter.

Dillon knew Frank wanted to believe Tiffany was his daughter. Just as Dillon wanted to believe this woman had known his brother and was now carrying his child.

“You still aren’t sure about me,” she said as if reading his thoughts.

Did he believe she was carrying Ethan’s baby or did he only want to believe it? He thought of the photograph that Ethan had left behind and how he’d used their mother’s maiden name.

“I believe you knew my brother, and if you’re telling the truth...” His gaze went to her stomach. He saw something move across the surface. Before he could react, Tessa took his hand and placed it on her swollen belly.