“Uh-huh, sure,” Maggie answered, staring down at what might or might not have been part of her apartment. There was just too much rubble to be able to tell.
Jonah knew she didn’t believe him, and in her place, he probably wouldn’t have, either. But as he had told Maggie, he had seen things that she hadn’t, so he was in a better position to hold on to hope, however slim the thread was.
“Do me a favor, Maggie,” he requested.
The eyes that looked up at him were watery. He could see she was doing her best not to let what she saw get to her, but it seemed to be a battle that was destined to be lost—and soon.
“What?” Maggie asked, doing her best to regain her composure.
“Reserve judgment until all this is over,” Jonah said.
“Fine,” she sighed, forcing herself to think of something else. Anything but her apartment and the possessions that were in it. “Consider it reserved.” Wanting desperately to change the subject and focus on something else, she turned the conversation around back to Jonah. “I’ve been meaning to ask, why aren’t there any personal touches in your cabin?”
“It’s very simple. Because I don’t live there anymore,” he answered. “I haven’t really lived in the cabin for a few years. But whenever I’m home, I use it as a base.”
“So where do you live?” Maggie asked. “I mean on a permanent basis.”
He thought he’d already answered that. Maybe she hadn’t understood. Given what she was going through, he couldn’t fault her. “I live in Austin.”
“Any particular reason?” she asked, curious. She knew why she had left—she was looking to help her family. But she had returned once she’d decided to divorce James and now she felt safe here as well as happy. She didn’t understand why he would choose to leave Whisperwood when his whole family was here.
“I wanted to make a name for myself someplace where the name Colton doesn’t instantly bring my father and his ranch to mind.”
She thought of her own situation until recently. “Is there bad blood between you?” she questioned. She hadn’t heard anything, but that didn’t mean that all was rosy within the confines of the Colton family.
He was quick to set her straight. “Not at all, I just don’t believe in hanging on to anyone’s coattails.” He smiled at her. “I prefer my own coattails.”
“I guess I can understand that,” she admitted.
For her, family had always been the source of pain and misunderstanding. She had married James with the best of intentions. Yes, in the beginning, she had been in love with him—James had been her high school sweetheart—but her marriage had quickly soured when she discovered that he was cheating on her. She’d married him because she loved him and because she wanted to use his money to help her parents, who had incurred a great deal of medical debt since they’d been involved in a car accident. Her love for James might have died, but her resolve to help her parents did not.
However, she wasn’t able to get the money quickly enough. Both of her parents had died before she was able to pay off their debts. Not wanting to have anything to do with James’s money once she was finally awarded it, she wound up using it to buy her sister the house where they had grown up.
Stunned, Bellamy was forced to reassess her feelings about and toward Maggie. She realized that when Maggie had gotten married and moved away, she was really doing it in order to help the family, not to escape dealing with the problems that nursing two invalids created. Once she realized that, all of Bellamy’s bitterness vanished.
“Although,” Maggie went on to tell Jonah, recalling her own situation, “sometimes it’s nice to have family coattails to hang on to. You don’t realize that until you suddenly find that there aren’t any coattails for you to reach out for. That all you’re grasping is air.”
She really sounded as if she was in a bad way, Jonah thought. He hated to see her like this, hated what she had to be going through. He didn’t want to pry, not yet, so he dealt with the situation another way.
“Why don’t we knock off early?” he suggested. “Give you a chance to breathe, clear your head, forget about all this?” He gestured toward the rubble around them.
“It’ll still be there to deal with tomorrow,” Maggie said.
Then she understood what he was saying, Jonah thought. “Exactly. Tomorrow might be better.”
But Maggie shook her head. “No, what I mean is we might as well make more headway today. That’ll be that much less we all have to deal with tomorrow. And,” she concluded, “we’ll be one step closer to getting back on our feet.”
Jonah studied her for a long moment, replaying her last words in his head. He had to admit that he was impressed. “Like I said yesterday, you are one tough cookie, Maggie Reeves.”
“I don’t know about tough,” she told him. “But I’ll tell you this much.” She squared her shoulders. “I certainly have no intentions of crumbling.”
Jonah nodded, smiling at her. “Good for you. Okay, Maggie, let’s get back to this while we still have some daylight.”
He would get no argument from her.
Chapter 7
A week went by and in the midst of all this chaos, Jonah found that he and Maggie had managed to forge a routine of sorts. Each morning they got up, had breakfast and then they joined the search and rescue efforts, trying to locate the residents who were still missing. They would spend the entire day digging, clearing and searching. At the end of the day, they would return to Jonah’s cabin, almost too tired to chew.
To show their gratitude to the Cowboy Heroes, the owners of the General Store threw open their doors and generously provided provisions for all the volunteers involved in the search and rescue.
They also fed the volunteers who were clearing away the remnants of the houses that had been mostly blown down. The damage that had been sustained was just too great to repair. What was left in those cases had to be cleared away to allow new homes to rise out of the ashes, like the legendary phoenix.
Jonah noticed that Maggie was barely putting one foot in front of the other as they walked into his cabin at the end of another overly long day.
“Tired?” Jonah asked her.
She looked at him, wondering if he was trying to be funny. “I’d have to have a pulse to be tired. I think I’m beyond that,” Maggie confessed. She sighed. It was an effort to form words. “And I am so beyond tired,” she added with as much feeling as she could muster.
Because of the nature of what he did, Jonah was used to working like this. “You sit. I’ll make dinner,” he told her, gesturing toward the chair.
“That’s not fair,” she protested even as she practically fell into the chair, the absolute picture of exhaustion. “You made dinner last night. And the night before that. And the night before that.”
She didn’t think it was right that he had to do it again, although she couldn’t summon the energy to get back up on her feet.
“You know,” Jonah said, raising his voice as he took out a steak he intended to split between the two of them, “any other woman would be happy with this arrangement and accept it as her due without drawing this much attention to it.”
“Well, I’m not any other woman,” Maggie told him, meaning that, despite her exhaustion, she didn’t think that this was her due or that taking advantage of him was fair.
Jonah laughed softly to himself. “You can say that again,” he murmured under his breath.
He hadn’t meant for her to hear that and she hadn’t, at least not completely. But she’d caught enough to make her turn around to face him.
“How’s that again?” Maggie asked.
Jonah debated saying something vague in reply, or simply telling her that he hadn’t said anything. But instead, he turned up the heat under the frying pan, put the meat in the pan and said, “I certainly never thought that you were like any of the other gir
ls when we were in school.”
She stared at him, slightly bewildered. “You were five years ahead of me in school. I doubt you even noticed me.”
The steak was sizzling and Jonah flipped it onto its other side. Was she actually serious? “Everyone noticed you,” he told her simply. “Even before you hit high school, you were always too beautiful not to notice.” He smiled, remembering the effect she’d had on him. “You were like an exquisite diamond in the middle of a basket filled with coals.”
He’d said too much, Jonah thought. How had they even gotten to this subject? He had to learn not to say the first thing that came into his head.
He turned his attention back to the steak. Jonah knew that they both liked their steak rare, so frying it took next to no time at all. Done, he flipped the steak onto a plate, then cut it in half. He slid each piece onto a separate plate.
“Here,” he said, placing the piece he had just cut in front of her and taking the remaining piece for himself. “Eat. If you’re going to keep on arguing with me,” he told Maggie, “you’re going to need to keep up your strength.”
She waited until she took the first bite. Damn, but that was good, she thought. “I wasn’t arguing.”
Jonah inclined his head, humoring her. “My mistake,” he conceded.
She was tired, Maggie thought. Maybe she was being too touchy. “Telling a woman she’s beautiful is never a mistake—unless you were just feeding her a line,” Maggie said, just in case that was what he was doing.
“No line,” Jonah assured her. “If you own a mirror, you’d know that.” His eyes met hers. “You’ve always known that,” he added. No one could be that oblivious to her looks.
When his eyes met hers, Maggie stopped eating. She was also fairly certain that for a minute, she’d stopped breathing, too. And just possibly, the world around them had stopped spinning.
The man sitting across from her was having a devastating effect on her.
“If you thought that,” she said, “why didn’t you ever say anything?”
He found that really amusing. “There was always such a crowd around you, I doubt you would have heard me,” he replied.
Maggie frowned. “There was no crowd, Jonah.”
He begged to differ. “You were one of the really popular girls. You were voted both the junior and the senior prom queen.” And then he mentioned the biggest obstacle that kept him from making his feelings known. “Not to mention the fact that James Corgan was always there, ready to beat off any guy who came within two feet of you.”
Maggie flushed when he mentioned her ex-husband. Having the man as part of her life wasn’t something she liked being reminded of. But she couldn’t dispute what Jonah was saying, either.
“He was my boyfriend at the time,” she said, her eyes offering a silent apology for that part of her life and what had happened during that period.
“My point exactly,” Jonah agreed. “I wasn’t about to push my way in between the two of you. Not when you looked as if you had stars in your eyes whenever you looked at him.”
Right now, it took everything for her not to shiver at the memory. “Maybe I didn’t have stars in my eyes so much as I had sand in them,” she corrected. When he looked at her, puzzled, Maggie explained, “I had sand in my eyes and I wasn’t seeing clearly—or thinking clearly for that matter, either.” Uncomfortable, she blocked out those memories. “Please, let’s not talk about the past, Jonah.”
He was more than happy to oblige.
“Fine with me,” Jonah said. “If you don’t mind, I’m going to grab a quick shower. I won’t be too long,” he promised. “And then you can have the bed.”
Maggie gestured toward the back of the cabin. “It’s your cabin,” she reminded him.
“And you’re my guest,” Jonah countered. “That means I put your wishes ahead of mine.”
Because of her marriage to James, she wasn’t used to being treated with this much deference. “By all means,” she told Jonah. “You take a shower.”
“Five minutes,” he promised, holding up all five fingers to underscore what he was saying as he crossed the room.
“Splurge,” Maggie ordered. “Make it ten.”
And then she found herself alone.
Maggie tried her best to keep her mind—and her hands—occupied as she waited for Jonah to come out again. But the moment he had closed the bedroom door behind him, tired as she was, her mind went into overtime, going to places that it had absolutely no business going.
Trying to rein in her thoughts, she reminded herself that even though circumstances had thrown them together again, circumstances would definitely pull them apart once this unusual epoch finally passed. Hadn’t he told her that his life was in Austin, while hers, now that everything had been resolved, was finally back here.
Still, she just couldn’t stop thinking about him or envisioning the way the water was probably lovingly cascading over and down that incredibly muscular body of his.
She forced herself to do something to occupy her mind.
Rinsing the dishes, she curled her hands into her palms, trying very hard not to picture him like that. So of course she did.
“All yours.”
Stifling a squeal, Maggie swung around to see that Jonah was walking back into the living quarters, his hair still wet from the shower he’d taken.
Her hand covering her pounding heart, she told him, “You scared me.”
“Sorry,” he apologized, crossing to her. “I didn’t mean to do that. I just thought that you’d want to get to bed as soon as possible so I came out the second I was finished taking my shower.”
She felt her skin warming as his words evoked yet another image in her mind’s eye.
Maggie pressed her lips together. “That’s very thoughtful of you.”
Trying to pass by him in what was rather a narrow space, she breathed in the scent of the soap Jonah had used. It was something manly and arousing—just like he was.
She tried to find her voice again. “But you didn’t have to hurry on my account.”
“Okay,” Jonah replied, the words hanging between them as they stood so close to one another they were breathing in each other’s air. Jonah could feel his pulse speeding up, rushing through his body as very strong desires swept through him, urging him to take her into his arms. “Next time I won’t,” he told her in a quiet voice.
His eyes, Maggie was sure, were saying other things to her, things that had nothing to do with a shower. A warm shiver inched up her spine.
She didn’t know why she was feeling so vulnerable right now, or what had triggered this reaction from her. Yes, they were both working side by side, but they were doing it as part of a whole.
However, at the end of the day they left together, and when they “came home,” they occupied the same small space together.
Standing next to him now, she found herself almost willing Jonah to kiss her. She didn’t think of it beyond that, didn’t dwell on any of the consequences. All she knew was that, with her whole heart and soul, she really, really wanted Jonah to kiss her.
And then what? the voice in her head asked. Once the kiss happened, she would be opening up a whole can of worms, a can of worms she might not be capable of dealing with.
It was better not to go there and wonder than to kiss him and be disappointed. Although something told her that she wouldn’t be disappointed.
Maggie was about to briskly tell him good-night when she felt the back of Jonah’s long, tapering fingers brush along her cheek as he moved back a stray lock of her hair, lightly tucking it behind her ear,
Jonah was struggling to contain himself. Struggling not to give in to the urgent desire that was rushing through him as powerful as the river after the flood hit. He found himself being taken captive.
He desperately wanted to taste those lips of hers, to
satisfy his mounting curiosity. But that in turn might ruin everything. They were getting along right now. If he gave in to the passions that were all but pounding urgent fists against the walls of his weakening restraint, he just might wind up regretting it.
Especially if he saw Maggie looking at him with disappointment in her eyes. Right now, they were friends, working together in total harmony. If he gave in to himself, all that could be lost.
He didn’t want to chance it.
“You’d better get to bed,” Jonah whispered, moving back. “We’ve got another long day ahead of us tomorrow.”
She knew that, but wasn’t he forgetting about something?
“What about the investigation?” Maggie asked, forcing the words out of her mouth. He’d told her that they would get back to it, but several days had passed and they still hadn’t.
“Investigation?” he repeated, his mind still focused on how very tempting her lips looked and how much he wanted to kiss her.
“Into seeing if there were any more victims buried around that big oak,” she explained patiently. Why else had her ex-father-in-law sent her that cryptic note if it wasn’t to try to find other bodies?
The serial killer had left his victims buried in shallow graves, with barely just enough dirt thrown over their bodies. Other bodies would have surfaced by now—if he had buried them that way. But what if he hadn’t? What if Elliott had decided to change his MO? Or what if there had been a copycat killer? Someone who had wanted to put his own signature on his victims?
What if that killer was the real killer and Elliott wasn’t guilty at all?
Maggie wanted answers.
“You said that once the search and rescue had gotten underway, we’d go back to Live Oak Ranch together, to search around that tree that Adam marked off on his map,” she reminded Jonah.
Colton 911: Cowboy's Rescue Page 7