McQuaid's Justice Read online

  “I guess you don’t grow up on a ranch in south Texas and not turn out a cowboy, huh?”

  Letter to Reader

  Title Page

  Dedication

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Epilogue

  Copyright

  “I guess you don’t grow up on a ranch in south Texas and not turn out a cowboy, huh?”

  “Not hardly.”

  Amy smiled. “I always loved cowboys.”

  “You are making that up.”

  “No. I swear” She crossed her heart. “It’s the character you know? The loner, the stars in the sky for a roof over your head. The one man who always tips his hat to a lady. It’s a macho thing, too. The boots and vest and chaps, all that leather. All that sexy cowboy stuff.”

  He was laughing at her now.

  “Okay, maybe it was only a romantic notion of a cowboy I loved, but when the rodeo comes to town, every girl in town wants one.”

  Cy gave her a long look. “You too?”

  She looked back at him. Very slowly, very deliberately, she sighed. “I want this one.”

  Dear Reader,

  Welcome to the McQuaid family—three brothers who are easy to love and hard to forget. They live their lives the way their father taught them—by The Cowboy Code.

  This exciting new miniseries about danger and desire in the west kicks off with RITA Award-nominee Carly Bishop’s Cy McQuaid, and continues in the next two months with his brothers Cameron, a Colorado rancher, in Laura Gordon’s A Cowboy’s Honor (February) and Matt, a Texas lawman, in Lone Star Lawman by Joanna Wayne (March).

  Don’t miss any of these sexy cowboy brothers!

  Regards,

  Debra Matteucci

  Senior Editor & Editorial Coordinator

  Harlequin Books 300 East 42nd Street

  New York, NY 10017

  McQuaid’s Justice

  Carly Bishop

  TORONTO • NEW YORK • LONDON

  AMSTERDAM • PARIS • SYDNEY • HAMBURG

  STOCKHOLM • ATHENS • TOKYO • MILAN • MADRID

  PRAGUE • WARSAW • BUDAPEST • AUCKLAND

  For my brother

  whose contributions to my life and writing

  are too many to count,

  & Emily Jean, my niece and poet extraordinaire.

  With a wink to Howard.

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  Amy Reeves—Only the truth would set her heart free to hear, and to love again.

  Cy McQuaid—Jake McQuaid’s first son, rancher and FBI agent, Cy wanted to be man enough to show up for Amy.

  Byron Reeves—Had the judge made a terrible mistake, or a selfless gesture of compassion?

  Perry Reeves—Amy’s uncle would never have what he wanted most; power was the next best thing.

  Fiona Reeves—Granny was crazy—like a fox.

  Brent Reeves—Was Amy’s stepbrother a scapegoat or murderer? Even he didn’t know.

  Zach Hollingsworth—The threat of libel had never gotten in the way of his journalistic integrity.

  Joke McQuaid—Cy’s father, a man of bedrock values, he never made an honest woman of Susan.

  Susan Powell—Jake’s woman, loyal to a fault, mother to his boys.

  Cameron McQuaid—Jake’s middle son, Sheriff of Chaparral County, sworn to a strict code of honor.

  Matt McQuaid—Jake’s youngest, a Texas lawman, like it or not, very much his father’s son.

  Phillip Gould—The U.S. Senator held a fearsome grudge against Amy’s father and his ambitions.

  Prologue

  An ear can break a human heart

  As quickly as a spear;

  We wish the ear had not a heart

  So dangerously near.

  —Emily Dickinson

  “Thanks. I’ll pass.” Zach Hollingsworth waved the senator’s hovering manservant away. The refusal didn’t come easily. The port wine the butler offered was exquisite. Lush. Richly scented, as full-bodied as the women Zach preferred and the news stories that had made his career.

  But Zach needed to keep his wits about him. What he wanted, more than anything, was the promised tip. Phillip Gould, California’s senior senator, had lured Zach to his ritzy D.C. town house with the promise of a scoop guaranteed to make his career, to forever lay waste to the lean years of scandal and allegations and he-said/she-said propositions.

  What Zach really wanted was for the senator to spit it out. Either the nomination of Byron Reeves to the Supreme Court was in jeopardy, or it was not.

  Phillip Gould allowed his goblet to be refilled, then directed the manservant to retrieve a portfolio that lay conspicuously on the antique sideboard. Watching below his hooded brow, the senator waited until the servant disappeared behind enormous swinging oak doors to the serving area.

  He set the leather portfolio carefully to his left and gave Zach a speculative look. “Have an interest in architecture, Hollingsworth?”

  “None.”

  “Interesting piece in the Post a couple of days ago.” Gould pared the end off a fat Cuban cigar. “Thought you might have seen it.”

  “Sorry, I must have missed that one.” Zach forced an easy, self-deprecating smile to mask his mounting irritation. A California golden boy in his youth, tanned, trim, blond and blue-eyed, Gould had gone to very expensive seed. Now, even the senator’s sentences, lacking a subject—“I spotted an interesting piece,” or “I thought you might have seen...”—were tending to annoy Zach. “What was the story?”

  “An architectural design award.”

  “A prize.” Zach leaned back, slouching a bit in his chair, letting a bit of his impatience surface. “Senator, forgive me, but is this going somewhere, or is your question—”

  “An idle one?” Gould interrupted, blithely lighting his cigar. He dragged the powerful, sublimely scented smoke into his lungs and exhaled. He fixed his gaze on Zach through a blue haze curling toward the flames of seven candles mounted in an antique porcelain candelabra. His expression hardened. “I don’t deal in idle questions.”

  “All right. Just so we understand each other. Who won the award?”

  “A woman.”

  “Was the competition rigged?”

  Gould tapped ashes into a crystal tray and blinked. “Assuredly not, or this young woman would not have won no matter how far superior her work.” He shoved the portfolio toward Zach. “Tell me if you recognize her.”

  About as likely to identify some obscure female architect as he was to write about one, Zach cut the senator a look that said as much.

  Snaring the cigar from between his teeth with a curled forefinger, Gould dropped his heavy hand on the table. “Humor me.”

  Zach sat forward and dragged the portfolio closer, then flipped the cover open to a black-and-white photo on newsprint, sans story or attribution. He had never seen the woman captured in the shot. He knew that up front. But having cultivated a near photographic memory, he searched his mind for some obscure connection to Judge Reeves and the impending confirmation hearings.

  He thought the woman in the photo to be in her midtwenties, a brunette with exceptionally fair skin, not a classic beauty, but a beauty nonetheless. “Should I recognize her?”

  Gould blew more smoke, tapped more ashes, nei
ther confirming nor denying, just... waiting.

  Zach frowned at the photo again. “Reeves has a daughter who must be about her age.”

  The senator’s fleshy lips bent themselves to the suggestion of approval. “Indeed. Her name is Amy. Interesting twist...she’s deaf as a stone.”

  Zach skidded the photo back into the open leather portfolio. “So Reeves has a deaf daughter who won an architectural award. I’m impressed. Wonder,” he cracked, his voice thick with now ill-concealed disdain, mocking the senator with his own annoying habit of speech, “what the Judiciary Committee members will find in that to impugn Reeves’s character.”

  “Spare me your sarcasm, Hollingsworth.” Gould sucked on his cigar. Smoke curled about his face, soiling his commentary. “When a man has suffered a dry spell as long as yours since winning an award of any description, never mind the Pulitzer, perhaps one should begin to reflect upon one’s own lack of imagination.”

  “That’s the problem for a world-class journalist these days,” Zach snapped, reflecting instead on the approximate amount of time it might take him to cram the senator’s fancy cigar down past the turkey wattle of double chins down his throat. “So little is left to the imagination. But if it makes you happy, I’ll look into it.”

  “There’s the spirit. An open mind is fine asset. I’m persuaded that you’ll be able to set aside your preconceived notions of Byron Reeves’s stellar record. Enough, perhaps, to recall where you were twenty-four years ago?”

  Zach stared at the senator. “I was at the Trib in Chicago on an internship—working, like everybody else, on the Jessup heiress kidnap story.”

  “When the poor, innocent little heiress showed up on the security tapes in the thick of pulling off a bank heist,” Gould prodded.

  “Byron Reeves prosecuted the case. Your point would be...what, exactly?”

  Gould blinked. “Pamela Jessup was never apprehended, or charged for her crimes—despite which,” Gould went on, honing the circle of fire on his cigar, “the case propelled Reeves into the national spotlight. Saved him from a life of obscurity as a run-of-the-mill prosecutor and landed him a career on the federal bench.”

  Zach shrugged. He was starting to believe that the senator might be about to offer him something substantial. He didn’t want to risk losing it, but he wasn’t going to play lapdog either. “Reeves won a conviction. They both got what they deserved.”

  “On the contrary. Byron Reeves,” Gould snarled, “has never gotten what he deserves.”

  “Meaning what?”

  Gould sat back, sucking smoke into his throat, then issuing smoke rings like an overfed guppy belching bubbles of air. “I believe, Hollingsworth, that if you pursue the issue with a modicum of imagination, you will find Byron Reeves at the heart and soul of a felony conspiracy.”

  “To do with Pamela Jessup?”

  “The feds bagged David Eisman and his sidekick.” Gould squashed the butt of his cigar till its stubbed sides split open. “Ever think to ask yourself how a twit debutante like Pamela Jessup slipped through his fingers?”

  “I don’t recall any great hue and cry going up over it. Pamela Jessup was the kidnap victim, for Chrissake. The feds would have turned her into a witness. Even if they hadn’t offered immunity, her family had enough money to get her off.”

  “Her family,” Gould reminded Zach, “refused to pay the ransom.”

  The subtle buzz of excitement started up in Zach’s gut. He badly wanted Gould’s slant to have real substance. Instinct told him to play out the line. “They would have come around. The rich do that.”

  “No,” Gould denied categorically. “Her family knew from long experience what a conniving little liar she was.” He snorted. “Trust me.”

  A conniving little liar? Zach thought. What half-buried hatchet was this?

  “The Jessups,” Gould went on, “had washed their hands of their daughter.”

  “And you know that because—?”

  “Our families were quite close. Pamela was a wild seed from the word go. David Eisman, on the other hand, was a two-bit hood without the brains or the balls to stick up the local convenience store. Paint him in as the mastermind of a kidnap? I don’t think so.”

  “Are you suggesting Jessup’s abduction was a hoax? An extortion Pamela Jessup intended from the start to perpetrate on her own family?”

  “Let me fill in the picture for you,” Gould continued, with an air of forswearing subtleties in the face of Zach’s tedious skepticism, “Byron Reeves was also a family friend of the Jessups—even married a poor relation.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Not for a moment. Let me finish. It was Byron Reeves on hand for Justice the night the boys down at the local FBI nailed Eisman and his drugged-out sidekick. They both swore up and down that Pamela Jessup was locked in a warehouse closet—no way she could have gotten away without help.”

  “Come on! Reeves?”

  Gould ignored the protest. “Byron Reeves lived and worked in the jurisdiction of the bank heist, one among a hundred or so federal prosecutors. Still it isn’t outside the realm of possibility that he would be tapped to take on the case. But remember—”

  “The guy was married to Pamela Jessup’s shirttail relation.” Zach’s pulse hammered in his ears.

  “And yet Byron Reeves wound up as lead prosecutor in a case from which he should clearly have recused himself. Are you beginning to get the picture?”

  Zach nodded thoughtfully. Here, assuming Gould’s characterization of Pamela Jessup as a wild-seed conniving little liar meant that he did in fact have some dank and unsavory agenda of his own, was a likely case of the pot calling the kettle black. But Zach’s own Kansas upbringing, and years of picking his way through thickets of lies to get at the truth, left him certain of one thing.

  The pot calling the kettle black didn’t mean the kettle wasn’t black.

  Liars told the absolute truth when it suited their purposes. Whatever Gould’s ulterior motive, Reeves might well have ignored a serious conflict of interest and committed a felony or two all his own. The story potential would have been explosive if Jessup were still alive and on the lam, but she wasn’t.

  Still.

  Byron Reeves aiding and abetting the escape of a fugitive, failing even to indict Pamela Jessup for her crimes, was the big time.

  Zach had to ask the obvious question. He didn’t bother to cloak the query in watered-down euphemisms. “Senator, if you knew Reeves was covering up a conflict of interest, why in hell didn’t you go screaming bloody murder twenty-five years ago?”

  “I did.” Gould sat back comfortably, unintimidated. “The Jessups were personal friends. But unlike Reeves I put my civic obligation, however painful, ahead of the loyalty I had to her family. I informed the Justice Department.”

  “You’re telling me the Attorney General of the United States blew you off?”

  Gould sneered. “Let’s just say Reeves has friends in high places.”

  Which, Zach thought, only made it all the more heinous. A man who aspired to sit on the bench of the highest court in the land in judgment of his fellow citizens sure as hell should never have thumbed his nose at the law, even if the extent of his complicity was in poor judgment.

  “About Reeves’s daughter...”

  “Amy?” Heaving himself from his chair, clearly signaling the end of the interview, Gould smiled. “More than meets the eye there.”

  Chapter One

  “‘Wishing a thing,’ my grandfather used to say, ‘don’t make a thing so.’ But there was one thing he taught us a man could depend on—besides,” Cy McQuaid joked to the friends and neighbors gathered to mourn his namesake’s loss, “the love of a good woman.”

  Bittersweet smiles, a few heartfelt chuckles came. “I believe it too,” Cy went on. “He believed that working the land, carving out a living from a couple thousand acres of godforsaken earth, a man could trust that everything is exactly what it seems. Nothing more, nothing less, nothin
g hidden, nothing secret. Little else in life happens that way.”

  Done with what he had to say, Cy stepped back on the craggy, windswept hill next to his youngest brother, Matt, and let the Reverend Bleigh take over.

  He heard the ritual words, the return of His faithful servant Cyrus McQuaid, dust unto dust, unto his Lord and Creator. But in his mind’s eye, Cy imagined his granddad’s spirit, free at last to appreciate the rugged, good-for-nothing landscape, so barren only the hardiest scrub oak survived.

  Cyrus McQuaid had spent the whole of his life cooped up in an accounting office, shaping perfect numbers in rigid columns in search of a buffalo-head nickel’s worth of profit. If he’d ever found it two years running, he’d have bought the Circle Q himself. Instead, he spent his twilight years railing at his son, Jake, Cy’s father, for sinking his money into the place.

  Even so, Gramps had known in his heart of hearts ranching wasn’t about profit, it was about a way of life. You had to love the land for its own sake. You had to take your pleasures where you found them, as damn few and far between as they came. You had to believe your seed would sprout and produce enough grain to keep your livestock alive—or money enough in the bank to make up the difference.

  And when the calving started in the middle of the night and an ice storm hit with the first steaming calf to drop, you put everything else aside. Which was exactly what happened the night Cyrus’s daughter-in-law, Cy and Cameron’s mother, died.

  Jake McQuaid, Cyrus’s son, hadn’t made it back from calving till her body had gone stone-cold.

  After that, Jake boarded up the house, sold off the ranch in East Texas, and went back to sheriffing in the next county over. Then he’d gone through another wife he didn’t have the heart to love, and had another son, Cy’s youngest brother Matt.