LOVING HER SOUL MATE (32 page)

John’s heart rammed against his
chest.
 
He knew he had to have heard him
wrong.
 
“Shay Turner?” he said with a
frown.
 
And just the mention of that name
caused Faylene to stop fluffing her hair, and stare at John.
 

Her shock, however, was dwarfed by
his.
 

“That’s why I called you, sir,”
Malvaney continued.
 
“Miss Turner is
involved.
 
When I phoned the station to
run her license, that’s when Captain Yannick told me that
y’all,
that
you and Miss Turner, that is, used to be sort of like. . . Sort
of.
. . that y’all were friends.”

John knew exactly what the young
man was insinuating.
 
Ever since that
night when he had to shoot and kill Blair, he and Shay had been intrinsically
linked.
 
She’d been gone for two years,
but that still didn’t stop the gossip.
 
The very nasty, untrue gossip.

“Cap told me to phone you before I
let her go,” the officer continued.

But this still didn’t make sense
to John.
 
What was Shay doing back in
Alabama when she all but told him she was never coming back here?
 
They tried to keep their love alive after she
left, with John traveling to Philly every single weekend, but the anguish of
that night was still too fresh for both of them.
 
Then she got a job in Philly and decided she
was going to stay even longer than they had planned.
 
John was crushed by her decision, and she was
anguished by it, even though they both declared it wouldn’t change their
relationship one iota.

But their relationship had already
changed.
 
Because it never really got off
of the ground.
 
Because
there was always too much drama swirling around them.
 
Because they cared for each other so much
that they couldn’t bear to see the other in pain.
 
So John accepted her decision, although he
didn’t like it.
 
And they settled on a
long-distance love affair.

But soon the daily grind of
running a police department began to get in the way.
 
First there was yet another tri-county drug
sting operation with the Feds that consumed all of John’s weekends.
 
And then, a year after Shay had left, the
major arrest of Willie Glazer, the Dodge serial
killer, that
managed to split the town in two.
 
Willie
Glazer was a drifter, a man who was born in Brady and hailed from a good
family, but who got on drugs at an early age and never got straight.
 
He would spend many months in town and then
hitch-hike his way across the country again, and then come back for a few more
months.
 

It was during those visits back,
John and his men
believed,
that Glazer killed those
women.
 
Many
 
disagreed
, including Glazer’s
family.
 
They believed he was being
railroaded because he was a drug addict who drifted in and out of town.
 
It was
easy,
they
felt, to pin those crimes on him.
 
They
had no DNA, no eye witnesses, nothing.
 
And when Glazer confessed to the murders and then claimed he was forced
into confessing, his family blamed John.

There were charges and
countercharges.
 
John, who used to be a
hero in the black community, was now being portrayed as a villain.
 
He met daily with older black church leaders,
who were on his side and weren’t about to defend some drug addicted drifter
like Glazer, and younger civil rights activists who were more than willing to
stand up for Glazer.
 
It was an
all-consuming period of time and became darn near impossible for John to get
away.
 

But he and Shay kept trying.
 
They spoke every night on the telephone,
although it would sometimes be after midnight before John could phone her, and
Shay once came back to town herself to see him at the new home he had
purchased.
 

But it wasn’t the same.
 
The pain was still too raw.
 
She returned to Philly the next day, tried to
find some normalcy there, and they both decided to give their relationship a little
cooling off period.
 
That was two months
shy of two years ago.
 
They had both,
technically, moved on.
 
Although
emotionally was another story.
 

But why, John wondered, was she
back?
 
Had she decided that she had
cooled off enough and was now back for good?
 
Was she ready to start their relationship again, or only ready to live
her own life without him as a part of that life?
 
It was confusing and scaring the hell out of
John.

“Was she . . . was anybody hurt in
the accident?” he asked his officer.

“No, sir.
 
Like I said it was just a
fender bender.
 
But when Captain Yannick
recognized the name, he said that I should phone you.”

 
“The accident happened where on Bainerd?” John
asked.

“Two blocks west of Moose Kernan,
sir.”

“I’m on my way.”

“Should I take her to the
station?” the officer asked.

“Didn’t I tell you I was on my
way?” John snapped.
 
“You don’t take her
anywhere.”

After killing the call, John held
his cell phone a moment longer, a frown enveloping his face.
 
He still was unable to reconcile the fact
that Shay was back in town; that the woman who still haunted his dreams was
within reach of him again.
   

“Did you know she was back?”
Faylene asked
,
her eyes riveted on him.

“No,” John said pointblank as he
sipped the last of his coffee and stood to his feet.

“Funny she’d come back and not
even tell you about it.”

It was hardly funny to John.
 
“How about that,” he said absently, tossed a
twenty on the counter, and headed for the exit.
 
The red-headed waitress returned to Faylene’s side just as the chief was
walking out.

 
“Did I hear that right?” she asked as she
handed the coupon and ticket order to Faylene.
 
“Is Shay Turner back in town?”

Faylene sighed.
 
“That’s what the man said.”

The redhead shook her head.
 
“The nerve of her to come
back here.”

“Who’s Shay Turner?” another
waitress, a new one, asked as she walked up.

Faylene balled up the coupon, a
sadness coming into her bright blue eyes.
 
“A thorn in John Malone’s ass if you ask me,” she said with bitterness
in her voice.
 

Shay stood patiently against the
driver side door of her aging Volkswagen Beetle and asked the officer again
what was taking him so long.
 
The way he was on the phone, and then writing, and then on the
phone again made it seem as if he’d just captured an escaped convict.
 
The other driver had been given his paperwork
and was well on his way.
 
But the
officer, for some reason, still had her detained.

Her return to Brady could not have
gone any worse.
 
Her goal was to keep a
low profile.
 
Go see her old boss at the
Tribune this afternoon, pray he takes her back, and then attempt to start all
over again.
 
Quietly.
 
But now she was standing on the side of one
of the busiest roads in Brady, her Beetle banged up to where it wouldn’t even
start, and her savings account was just enough money for her to survive a good
month.
 
Now she had what could turn out
to be a costly car repair bill to contend with.
 
This was not the return she had envisioned.

And Barney Fife here, she thought
annoyingly, seemed determined to keep her detained far longer than it could
possibly be necessary.
 
He was seated in
his police cruiser behind her car and appeared to her to be on the phone
again.
 
Although she was waiting on the
tow truck and couldn’t exactly go anywhere until it came, she still didn’t
understand why the officer hadn’t given her an unsafe driving ticket or
whatever he was going to give to her, and set her free.

 
She quickly realized the reason, however, when
she saw that familiar Chevy Silverado drive past her, pull over to the side of
the road, and then back up to the front end of her car.
  
She steeled herself as John Malone stepped
out of the truck in his always pristine-pressed dress shirt, his big gun
holstered on his hip, his muscular, athletic body walking toward her with that
same sensual swagger that caused her to dream about him the first time she met
him.

It had been almost two years since
she’d seen him, two long years, but that didn’t mean her feelings for him had
diminished.
 
Not by the way her heart was
pounding as he approached her.
 
She’d had
many other men to take a shine to her since she left Brady, men who would be
classified as darn good catches by even her standards, but her heart was still
with John.
 
Her heart kept roaming back
to Brady, and to a certain gruff police chief who always seemed to relax
her.
 
But who, she knew, she no longer
had any claims to.

John walked slowly toward
her.
 
He knew the toll those rumors and
gossip had taken on her.
 
That was why
his heart always ached for Shay Turner.
 
They had tried to blame her for everything, including his divorce, which
occurred before he even met her.
 
But
that didn’t stop them from labeling her with vicious home-wrecker whore labels
that were nowhere near the truth.
 
Those
labels were, in fact, the polar opposite of the kind of young lady Shay really
was.
 

And that was why, when John was
forced to do the unthinkable to his ex-wife, the firestorm that followed and
built against Shay was directly because of her relationship with him, and the
fact that he had insisted she spend a few days at his house rather than her
own.
 
And he felt guilty about it.
 
Even as he walked toward her now, his heart
hammering against his chest at just seeing her again, he still felt guilty
about it.

When he reached her side, with his
blue eyes blazing against the bright morning sun, his heart swelled with
emotion.
 
He still could not believe
it.
 
Shay was back.
 
After all of this time she was back.
 
After night after night of worrying about
her, wondering if she was okay, getting a hard-on just thinking about her, she
was back within his grasp.

With the sun reflecting off of her
soft brown skin, giving it a golden glow, she looked like a tall drink of
chocolate loveliness standing before him.
 
It looked as if time had not only stood still for her, but had granted
her more of that unpretentious but regal elegance he’d always found endearing
about her.
 
She wore a pair of white
hip-hugging pants, a sleeveless silk purple blouse low-cut enough to reveal a
tasteful but nonetheless enticing amount of cleavage, yellow, white, and purple
stiletto slipper shoes, and a bright yellow scarf tied in a slant around her
neck.
 
Her long hair was draped down her
back in a curled underthrow, and her soft brown eyes were covered by
rose-colored, tinted glasses.
 
She was
inside and out, for John Malone, the very definition of what it meant to be
beautiful.

“Hi,” she said when he made it to
her side.
 
She wanted to remove her
glasses, to get an unobstructed view of the man who put all others to shame,
but she didn’t trust her eyes.
  
Just
seeing him again was already making her feel heady, and too emotional, when she
couldn’t afford to shed any more tears.

John was feeling those emotions
too.
 
As he glanced down at her cleavage
and then back into her wonderful face, not only his heart but his penis was
throbbing at just the sight of her.
 
This
wasn’t good.
 
How in the world was he
going to be able to hold out a second longer, when, in truth, he wanted to pull
her into his arms right where they stood?
 
That was why he said good morning to her, but then immediately looked
from her to the considerable damage to her car’s front bumper and dented
hood.
 

“What happened here?”