Free By Starlight by Dorothy Garlock Page A

hours pursuing criminals, eating, breathing, and sleeping the job. From the outside, he imagined it looked as if he never gave Maddy a thought. But the truth was something quite different. She was still there, not lurking in the shadows of the past, a musty memory that occasionally floated to the surface, but one he kept returning to again and again. It didn’t take much: a whiff of a woman’s perfume, a voice shouted across a busy street, a song drifting over the radio; even while he slept, she visited his dreams.
    Memories of Maddy filled his days and nights.
    Ever since he found out he was being sent to Colton, Jack had been wondering what she was doing. Had she met another man, married, raised a couple of children, and taken over her father’s business? Or was she alone and bitterly angry, unable or unwilling to so much as speak to a potential suitor? Was it somewhere between the two? He even wondered if she’d followed his example, leaving town for somewhere different and now living in Denver, San Francisco, or some other faraway city. Maybe she was long gone and his growing apprehension about seeing her again was for nothing.
    But there was another possibility Jack truly feared, one thing Maddy could have done that would pierce his heart.
    Maybe she’d forgotten all about him.
    Jack knew he deserved no less for what he’d done to her, but it bothered him anyway. If he were to see her now, would she just walk on past without recognizing him, or worse, would she chat for a moment, a word for an old acquaintance returned from a life she’d long since outgrown? They’d been so young, little more than children, but that didn’t mean it was meaningless or any less real. Jack knew he was being selfish, but he wanted their past to still mean something to Maddy, for her to still have a bit of him in her heart. He wanted her to be happy, but he didn’t want to be a discarded memory, either. That would’ve been too painful. He would have preferred being slugged in the face to being ignored, hated instead of forgotten.
    But even so, I know I’ve earned the worst.
    There’d been a reason for what he’d done to Maddy, for never writing back to any of her increasingly frantic letters, for never calling her on the telephone, for refusing to return to Colton. He’d clung to that reason tenaciously in the years since, as if it explained the way he’d treated her, as if it were perfectly understandable. Somehow, he’d managed to convince himself that it was all for the best, that he was doing it for her sake, but now that he was finally coming home, doubts began nagging at him.
    Most of the memories of Jack’s youth were hazy, out-of-focus bits and pieces of childhood, but the night he and his family had driven into Colton, traveling through a relentless storm, he’d seen a redheaded girl standing in a store window, watching him , and his heart had been snatched from his chest just as surely as if she’d walked out into the rain and pulled it out with her own hand.
    The courtship that followed had been brief but had opened the door to an unexpected love. There’d been long walks and kisses, but there had also been a few long nights and tears, too. On the night when they’d said their good-byes, he’d meant his promise to her, but…
    And now, there was a good chance he was about to see her again.
    During his time with the Bureau of Prohibition, Jack had willingly entered into some of the most dangerous situations imaginable: shady dives where, if his true identity were discovered, it could have cost him his life. But somehow, this assignment seemed even worse. The possibility of meeting Maddy played havoc with his nerves and caused his stomach to toss and turn. Because he had no alias to hide behind, he felt even more vulnerable; everyone in Colton knew him. For as much as he worried about Ross Hooper not being able to do his job, Jack wondered if his problems would interfere with his own.
    Jack knew he had to stay