Atonement

“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?”