The Bluest Eyes in Texas

The only car in the parking lot belonged to the owner, the daughter of Ella’s cousin three times removed. She didn’t blame him for Ella’s death; she would tell him what he needed to know if he just went inside and asked.

He didn’t.

Another slow drive through town revealed only business as usual. There was no strange woman walking down the street—tall, pretty, nice body, according to Manny—and no Tennessee tag adorning any of the cars. Maybe Manny had guessed wrong and she’d taken a room in a nicer motel an hour away. Maybe her promise to come back had merely been idle talk. Maybe she’d moved on to create trouble someplace else.

Instead of heading back to the motel to talk to Ella’s cousin’s daughter, he turned north off the main street and headed out of town. He’d traveled this road hundreds of times—on foot, on the motorcycle he’d bought with the earnings from his first job, in a rental car on his occasional visits back…and once in a funeral procession. That had been one of the two worst days of his life. Considering that at the time he’d still been in the Army, fighting in the war in Iraq, that was saying a lot.

A mile and a half out of town he turned onto a hard-packed dirt road and followed it into thick woods. The countryside here was a world apart from the West Texas town where he’d grown up and the Iraqi desert where he’d spent more than a year and the Afghani mountains the year before that. Everything here was green and overgrown; all the rich color and smells were home to him.

Sam had been a farmer, Ella a farmer’s wife, and they’d had some hopes of making a farmer out of him. They had encouraged him to join the Army after high school; Sam had done it and claimed it made a man of him. But instead of coming home to the farm after his enlistment, Logan had decided to sign up for another three years, then another, and by then he’d been well on his way to a career. They’d worried about him after 9/11 and prayed for him when the war started, and they’d been proud of him.

No one else in his life had ever been proud of him.

And to repay them, he’d brought their killer into their home.

He stopped at the gate where the road narrowed to one lane. The house wasn’t far—up a rise, sitting in the middle of a clearing, with the barn out back and untended fields on three sides. This was probably the first time in a century that the fields had gone untilled, but Logan had never become a farmer. Even if he had, he couldn’t work this land, couldn’t live in this house.

The gate was open, listing drunkenly to one side. He couldn’t remember ever seeing it closed. There was no livestock to keep in, no strangers to keep out—that had been Sam and Ella’s philosophy. Even the sturdiest of gates wouldn’t have kept their killer out—not when Logan had invited him right up to the supper table.

Hands tightening around the steering wheel, he drove through the gate and up the final rise. Like the town, the house was unchanged from the last time he’d seen it. Two stories, painted white, a porch with rockers. It was small enough to fit in one wing of the house where he’d grown up, but it had been more a home to him than anyplace else. He hadn’t known fear in this house or need or violence. Just love and comfort.

And great sorrow.

There was one thing different—the car parked in front of the house. It was one of those imports that passed as a midsize sedan these days. Like millions of other cars on the road, it was red, dusty and unremarkable…except for its Tennessee tags.

What the hell was she doing there?

He parked behind her car, blocking it in between his own vehicle and the stone flower bed in front. He got out and pushed the door up but not shut, then crossed the yard to the porch.

The front door stood open, as it always had on a warm day, with an old-fashioned screen door to keep out pests. It obviously didn’t work against pests of the two-legged variety. It squeaked a bit when he eased it open, then slipped inside. After listening a moment, he heard the creak of a floorboard upstairs and headed in that direction.

He could find his way through the house blindfolded. Ella had never bothered to rearrange anything. She’d had too many other things to do—helping out on the farm when needed, cooking, cleaning, sewing, taking care of the church and the family and the occasional stray teenage boy. Who had the time to worry whether the couch looked better here or there?

He moved stealthily up the stairs, automatically stepping over the ones that creaked, bypassing the half-moon table at the top and avoiding the chest at the corner that visitors always stubbed their toes on. When he reached the room that had once been his, he stopped silently in the doorway.

The woman—tall, pretty, nice body—stood at the window, one of his high school yearbooks open in her hands, using the sunlight to get a better look. So this was Bailey Madison. Who was she? What did she want with him? And what the hell was she doing in Sam and Ella’s house?

Time to find out. Leaning one shoulder against the door-jamb, he folded his arms across his chest and said softly, dangerously, “Come on in, Ms. Madison. Make yourself at home.”

Startled, Bailey choked off a shriek and nearly lost her grip on the annual as she spun toward the door. She hadn’t heard a sound—no car driving up, no footsteps on the wood floor, no creaking on the stairs. Just, one minute she’d been utterly alone and the next Logan Marshall had appeared out of thin air.

She had no doubt the man standing so casually in the doorway was Logan Marshall. Not only did he bear a strong resemblance to the yearbook photo she’d been studying, but there was an even stronger resemblance to his brother, Brady. He was a few years younger, a few years harder and missing Brady’s incredibly sexy mustache, but other than that, the features were the same. Black hair, dark skin, straight nose, sensual mouth and incredible eyes. Startlingly blue, a surprise in the midst of all that darkness.

With a rush of relief that slowed her pounding heart, she closed the yearbook, marking her place with one finger. “Jeez, you startled me.”

He didn’t move a muscle—didn’t come into the room, didn’t smile, didn’t ease that harsh expression at all. He just stood there looking at her, all dark and intense and making her feel cold despite the sun shining in the room. “I wonder why. Because you’ve broken into a house where you don’t belong? Because you’re snooping through a stranger’s belongings? Or because, as the saying goes, curiosity killed the cat?”

She swallowed hard. She was about ninety-nine percent sure he was just trying to intimidate her…but that one percent niggled at her. No matter how much he looked like Brady, he wasn’t. He’d lived an entirely different life that very well might have turned him into an entirely different person. While Brady was good, honest and decent in spite of his upbringing, it wouldn’t surprise anyone if Logan was exactly the opposite.

She opted to believe—to pretend to believe—that the tone of voice and the soft words were merely an intimidation tactic. Straightening to her full height of five foot seven, she took a few steps toward him, right hand extended. “I’m paid to be curious. My name is Bailey Madison. I’m a private investigator and I’ve been hired to find you.”

He ignored her outstretched hand and pulled the yearbook away instead, flipping it open to the place she’d marked. It was the senior class photos, and right in the middle of the right page was his. Logan James Marshall. He looked so young in the picture but, at the same time, decades older than the kids around him. Life hadn’t been kind to the Marshall boys growing up, and it showed.

Dropping the yearbook on the nearby dresser, he circled around her. She resisted the urge to turn with him, to avoid turning her back to him for even an instant, but she did watch, first over one shoulder, then the other. She knew he was checking her out, knew what he would see—that her jeans and T-shirt fitted too snugly to provide cover for a weapon of any sort, that nothing of any consequence could be tucked inside her pockets, that her cell phone was clipped to her waistband. She had a couple weapons—one in the purse she’d left downstairs, another in the car—but at the moment she was unarmed…except for her favorite boots, with pointed toes and three-inch heels, and the moves her self-defense instructor had drilled into her.

Completing the circuit, he stopped at the door again, then held out his hand. “Can I see your cell phone?”

She unhooked it from her jeans and was in the process of offering it when abruptly she drew back. “Why?”

“Because I need to call the sheriff and report a burglar.”

She hid the phone behind her back with both hands as if that could somehow stop him from taking it. Her face growing warm with a blush, she swallowed hard again. “I haven’t taken anything.” It was a weak excuse, and sounded it.

“But you did break in.”

The crimson in her cheeks deepened. “I, uh, yeah, I did…manipulate the lock just a little.”

“Why?”

Because there was no way she could excuse the fact that she had broken in, she chose instead to fall back on what they called Charlie’s Rule back at the agency: the ends justify the means. It was so much bull, and she’d argued it with him repeatedly, but her opinions didn’t carry much weight when Charlie was the one who always got the big cases while she spent most of her time doing research on the computer. “Because you’re a hard man to find.”

“Maybe that’s because I don’t want to be found.”

She acknowledged that with a shrug. “A lot of people don’t want to be found. That’s why private investigations is a thriving industry.”

“Why are you looking for me?”

Back in Memphis, when she was spending long, long hours on the computer and the telephone, tracking down every Logan Marshall in the country, she’d figured she would be straightforward with him when she found him: Your niece hired me to locate you, she wants to meet you, let’s head to Oklahoma. She’d known he had run away from home when he was fifteen, that he’d had no contact with any of his family since then, but she’d thought, as she usually did, that honesty was the best policy. After all, his problems had been with his parents, not his brother, and nineteen years gave a kid a chance to grow up, to forgive and forget.

Then she’d begun getting leads on him and had given up the phone and the keyboard for face-to-face interviews with people who knew him, and discovered that to this day he denied the existence of a family, including his brother. He wasn’t likely to welcome the opportunity to reconnect with Brady or to meet his nieces with open arms, so she’d looked for leverage…and found it.

“It’s not a difficult question.” His sarcasm drew her from her thoughts. “Why are you looking for me?”

“I want to talk to you about your family.”

“I don’t have any family.” The dismissal was delivered with the perfect timing, the perfect level of disinterest to suggest that he was telling the truth.

“Denying them doesn’t make them cease to exist. Your parents, Jim and Rita Marshall, are still the powers-that-be in Marshall City, Texas. Your brother, Brady, is living in Buffalo Plains, Oklahoma, with his wife and daughters—Lexy, who’s almost sixteen, and Brynn, who’s almost one.”

“Damn,” he said, his tone so mild it robbed the word of any meaning. “And here I’d been hoping they were all rotting in the ground someplace.”

Bailey stiffened, her shoulders going back, her nerves tightening. She couldn’t care less what he thought of his parents—based on what little she knew of them, she would also wish they were dead—but Brady and the girls were her family, and no one messed with her family without taking her on, too.

“Which of ’em are you working for?”

“Lexy.” She bit off the name, silently daring him to say anything about the niece she adored more than anything. She would see just how disdainful he could be with her size-nine, pointed-toe, three-inch-heeled boot in his throat…after she’d eliminated the possibility of his ever having children himself.

“You must be some P.I.,” he jeered. “Working for a kid.”