Wanted: One Son. Laurie Paige

       Chapter One

      Nicholas Dorelli shifted restlessly from his left foot to his right, but his attention didn’t wander. He watched his quarry with the expertise honed by ten years on the job. As a senior deputy sheriff and special investigator in Colorado, he was there on business. Stephanie Bolt was that business.

      He tongued a toothpick from the right side of his mouth to the left. With a quick jab of his fingers, he shoved the annoying wing of hair that arced over his forehead to the side, where it stayed momentarily before returning to its natural position. He settled his hat with a firm tug over the stubborn cowlick and wished he was anyplace but here.

      “Here” was the public park. Stephanie was sitting on a bench gazing at the mountains that surrounded the small town high in the Rockies.

      Her short brown hair glowed with honey highlights in the June sun. She caught the strands blowing across her face and hooked them behind her ear. Her wedding band reflected the warm noon light, winking at him across the well-tended lawn of the park as if laughing at a private joke.

      The joke was on him. Once she’d been his girl. Until he’d found her in the arms of another man.

      For three months that fateful winter while he’d been away at college, he’d refused to believe the friends who reported Steph was seeing another man, not even when his own brother had confirmed it. He’d come home on spring break, determined to find out the truth. He had.

      Steph, the woman he’d trusted. Steph, who’d clung to him for comfort at her father’s funeral only three months before. Steph, who’d been his first love, had sat on her front porch and let another man hold and caress her….

      After all these years, that bitter betrayal still lingered like a burr under his hide.

      So did the hunger. It made him angry, this need that wouldn’t go away. With it came a sense of things unfinished, the tattered ends of emotions left over from those days when he’d thought the world was his for the taking.

      He shook his head slightly, as if he could cast off the past and the feelings associated with it. It had been a mistake to return home when he finished at the police academy. Having graduated at the top of his class, he’d been offered a job with the FBI in Virginia, a long way from here and from memories….

      He watched as she plucked a blade of grass, and he wondered what she’d felt for her husband. She’d certainly played the faithful and dutiful widow in the two years since Clay’s death. Too bad she hadn’t been as faithful as a lover…. He cursed silently.

      When she stood, the breeze pressed her silk shirt against her breasts. Her skirt folded between her thighs. He clenched his teeth. The toothpick snapped in half.

      With a grimace he dropped the two pieces into the pine needles and shoved himself off the wrought iron fence. Stephanie was heading his way.

      He knew the moment she spotted him.

      She stopped and watched him. Her eyes, blue as the noontime sky, seemed to become even deeper in tone. She opened the gate, stepped out, then closed it behind her, her movements precise as she made sure the latch clicked into place.

      “Nick,” she said.

      Not exactly a fond greeting for the man who had once been the love of her life, or so she’d claimed. They’d gone steady during their last year of high school and first year of college.

      He cursed silently and nodded his head. “Stephanie.”

      He noticed the faint perpetual frown she’d worn for two years. He observed the tiny, perfectly round mole one inch from the corner of her mouth on the left, a place just made for kissing…before a man moved on to the lush fullness of her lips.

      She was a woman to make a man dream. Full breasts. Slender waist. Rounded hips. Shapely legs. At five-nine, she was a good height for him. In heels, she’d fit his six-one frame perfectly. Once, they’d danced the night away, locked together so tightly he couldn’t tell where he ended and she began.

      She’d seldom worn heels during her marriage. That would have put her taller than Clay.

      A knot formed in his throat, startling him with the unexpected emotion. Clay had been his mentor on the force, taking him on as his partner when Nick was a rookie, as green as a spring leaf on a cottonwood. It had been difficult, but he’d learned to admire the seasoned officer who was eight years his senior and husband to the woman he had thought to wed.

      “What brings you here?” she asked, her eyes wary.

      He’d put that wariness there. Last Christinas, after a cup of hot buttered rum, he’d kissed her at the mayor’s annual party.

      The mayor’s wife had hung mistletoe over every door. He’d resisted temptation for an hour. When he’d run into Stephanie in the kitchen doorway, the mistletoe had been in place, they’d been alone for a minute and he’d given in to the passion that had erupted abruptly, catching him off guard.

      So sue him.

      “Doogie,” he answered her question.

      Surprise flew over her face, then she became wary again. “Doogie?” She sounded suspicious, as if she thought he might be lying for his own nefarious purposes.

      “Yeah.” He hesitated to disclose his news.

      “If he were hurt, I assume you’d tell me right off.”

      “Of course.”

      “So he must be in trouble.” She hooked the hair behind her ear with an impatient gesture. Her fingers trembled slightly. “What’d he do this time?”

      “This time?”

      “Last week he got in a fight with Clyde Marlow.”

      “Clyde’s his best friend,” Nick said, filing the information away. It tied in with his reason for being there.

      “Not anymore.”

      Nick shoved his hands into his back pockets and considered. “Sounds like the boy needs help.”

      Her shoulders stiffened. Hostility boiled between them, distorting the air like summer heat on asphalt. It was a defensive reaction on her part, he reminded himself. On his part, neither anger nor any other emotion had a place in his dealings with her. She was simply the parent with a kid in trouble.

      “Doogie…Douglas is fine. He’s just…” Her voice trailed off, and she looked uncertain.

      “Going through a phase?” He ended it for her.

      “Yes. All boys get up to mischief. What has he done now? Another fight?” She almost looked hopeful.

      “Shoplifting.” The word came out harder than he meant it to do, but there was no way to pretty it up.

      Her shoulders sagged. She closed her eyes for a second while she dragged in a shaky breath. Her skin, usually a smooth, healthy pink, mottled.

      Nick took a step forward, his hands going out, his arms opening instinctively before he caught himself. He tucked his hands into his back pockets again, where they’d be safe, and backed up a step.

      She opened her eyes, and he saw the heat in the usually cool depths. He steeled himself. People always took their anger out on cops. The Bad News Boys, as the sheriff labeled them in his jocular moments.

      “Where? What?” she asked.

      “Video, over at Joe Moss’s.”

      “A video,” she echoed. “Why? Why would