Marrying the Marshal. Laura Altom Marie

bench insanely complicated. Still, what she was going through was nothing compared to the pain of the grieving victims’ families here in the courtroom.

      The prosecution asked the latest witness, a wiry, elderly black man who’d lived across the street from the post office for the past forty-two years, “Sir, could you please tell the court what you observed the morning of the bombing.”

      The witness cleared his throat. “I was watching my shows. Price is Right and the like, when I went to the front window to draw the curtain. That time of morning, sun shines right through. Produces a glare.”

      “Yes, sir, and did you see something suspicious?” asked the chief prosecuting attorney.

      “Objection!” the defense attorney shouted. “Leading the witness.”

      “Overruled.” To the clearly shaken witness, Allie said, “Please, Mr. Foster, continue.”

      “All right, well, Bob Barker had just started the second Showcase Showdown. I was pulling the curtain closed, when I saw this primer-gray truck pull up to the post office. Ford. Powerful dirty. Mud splatters all over. Had those big, oversized tires. A confederate flag hanging in the back window.”

      “Did the flag shock you?”

      “Objection! Leading.”

      Allie, in no mood for attorney jockeying, shot Mack Bennett, lead attorney for the defense, her most stern look. “One more outburst, Mr. Bennett, and you will be fined. Mr. Foster, please, go on.”

      “All right, well, that boy—”

      “Excuse me,” the prosecution said, “but which boy? Is he here? In the courtroom today?”

      “Yessir.”

      “Would you be so kind as to point him out?”

      “I’d rather not.”

      “Why’s that?”

      “He’ll shoot me.”

      The courtroom erupted in low rumbles.

      “Order!” Allie slammed her gavel.

      “Mr. Foster,” the prosecution said once the crowd quieted. “Rest assured, in the county jail, the defendant has no access to firearms.”

      “Not him I’m worried about.”

      “Then who?”

      “His friends. Everyone in town knows Francis has lots of friends living on that compound of his, and every danged one of them have lots of guns.”

      The accused jumped to his feet. “That’s a bald-faced lie. I ain’t never—”

      “Order!” Allie said when the gallery exploded again. “Mr. Bennett, control your client or I’ll have him removed!”

      “Shut up, you commie bitch!” From out of the gallery someone flung an object. A balloon?

      By the time she’d registered what’d happened, the courtroom had erupted in screams. Caleb and another marshal ushered Allie out of a scene that could only be described as chaos.

      In her chambers, trembling, she put her hands to her face. Something wet and warm coated her cheeks. She pulled her hands down to find her palms stained with…blood?

      “Hurry,” Caleb said, tugging Allie’s ashen-faced secretary and clerks into her office, then dead-bolting the door. He shut the drapes, then barked directions into the radio in his sleeve. “Everyone okay?” he finally asked the women assembled.

      Allie nodded while her secretary fussed over wiping the blood with a tissue.

      “Excellent,” Caleb said. “Looks like everyone in the courtroom’s all right, too. They’ve all been cleared. Francis is headed to his cell, and I’ve got a cleaning crew on the way.”

      “Cal?” She was almost afraid to ask.

      “Just called his detail. All’s clear. Per his teacher’s instructions, they’re at the kitchen table practicing multiplication by making macaroni necklaces.” Caleb shot her a grin. A wonderfully sweet, strong grin so out of place in their current situation, it made her burst into a relieved nervous laugh.

      “I—I’m sorry,” she said. “I just—wow. That was—”

      She was still-rambling when Caleb pulled her into his arms. Impossibly strong, capable arms. How long had it been since she’d been held? Since she’d had someone to lean on? Yet as good as leaning on Caleb felt, she couldn’t open herself to the hurt of falling for him again. It would be all too easy, losing herself in the good. Forgetting the bad.

      “S-sorry,” she said. Releasing him. Backing away. Trying hard to look anywhere but at his face. Only that tactic landed her gaze squarely on his chest. On the rumpled white shirt he’d worn under his suit, now covered in blood. If she’d needed a sign to warn her to steer clear of the man she’d once loved, this was it in blazing neon.

      Sure, this time the blood was part of a sick prank.

      But what if next time, it was for real? What if her worst fears about Caleb being shot came true?

      Somehow she managed to say, “I—I should clean up.”

      Movements stiff and robotic, Allie locked herself in her small, private bathroom. Washed her hands and face, then sat on the closed toilet and prayed blood-balloons were the worst of Francis’s friends’ arsenal.

      “GOOD,” CALEB SAID late that afternoon from the courthouse parking lot, hand lightly shaking as he held his cell up to his right ear. “I caught you.”

      “Caleb?” his sister, Gillian, asked. “What’s up? I thought you were on assignment?”

      “I am.”

      “You got a cold?” she asked. “You sound weepy.”

      “Weepy?” He hadn’t cried in like…a day? Just the previous afternoon, upon his first sight of his son, hadn’t he spouted like a sprinkler? “I’m, ah, outside. It’s damned cold.”

      “Cut the whole defensive tough-guy routine,” Gillian said, “and just tell me what’s wrong. I thought over the past year or so we’ve gotten further than this. You know, like we could talk.”

      “We can,” he said. “Which is why I called. Gil, you sitting?”

      “No. But I can be. Just let me put the baby down for her nap. I’ll be right back.”

      “’Kay.”

      In rapidly fading daylight, drumming his fingers on the hood of his SUV, he grinned at the sound of his six-year-old stepniece’s cartoons blaring over the phone.

      A few years back, his sister married a great guy, Joe. The marriage turned out to be healing not just for Joe, but also for Gillian, who’d carried a chip on her shoulder the whole of her adult life.

      Caleb’s sister had never bothered to say anything to either her three brothers or their dad. He guessed she’d always felt as if they didn’t believe she could accomplish anything other than being a classic girly girl, and the men in her family went out of their way to shelter her. Or were condescending because she wasn’t their equal.

      What they all knew was that hell no, she wasn’t their equal. She was better than any of them! Tougher, smarter, with a forked tongue a guy didn’t stand a chance of winning an argument against!

      Good thing for them, since finally figuring out all of that for herself, she’d mellowed. Taken time from her crazed agenda of proving herself better than the guys to instead learn to appreciate her own unique feminine strengths and weaknesses.

      “Hi, Uncle Caleb,” six-year-old Meggie said into the phone.

      “Hey, potato bug.”

      “I’m not a bug,” the girl said with giggle.

      “Then