Rebel in a Small Town

by Kristina Knight

  “I was only trying to help,” Jenny said, knitting her eyebrows. Adam pushed the wheels and rocketed the chair forward, not waiting for her. Jenny watched him for a moment, then offered a half wave to Mara and James as she hurried after him. “We’ll see you later,” she said at the door. She held it open while Adam wheeled through it, and the two of them disappeared down the street.

  “That was uncomfortable,” James said after a long minute.

  “Ya think?” Mara asked. “What was with all the avoidance?”

  “I wasn’t avoiding anything.”

  “You barely said ten words to a guy who, until a few weeks ago, you had a standing weekly dart game with. A guy you grew up with. One of the Sailor Five.”

  James sipped his coffee. “He barely said ten words to me.” His voice was all defensive and wounded pride.

  Mara shook her head. “He was sitting in a wheelchair, not on top of a bomb.”

  “I didn’t know he was out of the hospital or that he’d be here.”

  “Because if you had, you wouldn’t have spoken to him like you might catch whatever it is that landed him in the chair? Newsflash, James. Wheelchairs aren’t contagious. Neither is the traumatic brain injury that put him, for now, in that chair.”

  “He’s not paralyzed, though, right? I’ve asked Jenny fifty times, but she always skips over the question. His parents are holding things together at the cabinet shop but they’re not talking about it, either.”

  “Traumatic brain injury, causing epilepsy. And a hip and knee that are going to need surgery.”

  The relief that flooded James’s face annoyed Mara even more.

  “For once the town grapevine didn’t get the story right,” he said.

  She put her hand on his arm, and that was a mistake, because the little flame of attraction she’d been trying to ignore since he walked in the coffee shop flared into a full-blown wildfire. Mara moved her hand away. “There’s something going on there. Seizures and surgery aren’t paralysis, and that’s wonderful, but that man isn’t the Adam I remember.”

  “Yeah. It’s not the Adam I played darts with a few weeks ago, either.” James sipped his coffee, still looking uncomfortable. “What are you doing in town?”

  “Getting groceries for Gran and real coffee for me.” She gently shook the to-go cup in her hand.

  “Do you want to walk for a bit?” He angled his head toward the barista, who was paying more attention to the nail file in her hands than their conversation. “Copper isn’t part of the gossip mill, but you never know who might walk in. We could talk. About Zeke.”

  Mara nodded. Outside, she put the bag of coffee into the front seat of her SUV, then walked down the street with James. She could hear hammering and sawing from the crews working on the building that housed Buchanan Cabinetry a couple of buildings away. James turned them toward the marina, taking her hand as they crossed the street. Once they were back on the sidewalk, he released her. Mara wanted his hand back. She shook her head. It was silly, missing the feel of his hand when there were so many bigger issues between them.

  “Why aren’t you on duty?”

  “Pulled a double last night. I’m off until Monday morning, when my call sheet will hopefully not include another call to Wilson DeVries.” She shot him a questioning look. “You remember the old guy who attends all the football games?”

  “He always bought wrapping paper from me.”

  “You and every other kid who knocked on his door. One of his maples fell in the tornado. So far, he’s being, ah, persnickety about clean up.”

  “Persnickety?” Mara giggled at his use of the word, which did seem to fit the older gentleman who hooted and hollered at football games, but who was very particular about the kind of wrapping paper he purchased.

  “It’s an official cop word. Like ‘bamboozle’ or ‘heist.’”

  “And ‘cockamamie’?” she asked.

  “That one, too. Anyway, I’m off duty and I was going to head out to the orchard. So we can talk.”

  “If you were on duty right now, would you be walking with me?”

  “Depends. Where would we be walking from and why?” He said the words lightly, but still Mara wondered.

  “Some people would say, no matter what was happening in town, walking with me would be part of your job.” James tilted his head as she spoke. “So you can ensure that I don’t make off with one of these boats, for instance.”

  “You never stole a boat.”

  “But I did steal milk and cookies.”

  “I thought you said that was a test.”

  “What I say and what people say about me are usually two very different things.” They stepped from the cobblestone sidewalk to the wood of the marina dock. Not that she wanted to talk about what people said about her. For the most part, she didn’t care. She’d realized long ago that certain people in town liked gossip. And if they had to embellish a bit to make it more salacious, so be it. For a while, she had done her damnedest to keep people talking about the present so they wouldn’t be tempted to speculate about the Tyler kids’ past.

  As long as the people who cared about her knew the difference, she was okay. She shot a glance at James. Until a few days ago, she’d hoped he might be one of those people. Now she wasn’t as certain. And it was completely her fault.

  “I’m sorry. For everything I’ve done where you’re concerned over these past two years. If I could do it all again...” Part of her wanted to say she would do it differently, but that wasn’t necessarily true. She had needed to confront all those demons surrounding her childhood. If she had told James about her pregnancy immediately, she probably would have kept shoving all that stuff into the deep recesses of her mind, insisting to herself that the past didn’t matter. “What I did was selfish, and it hurt you, and I’m sorry for that.”

  James was quiet for a long moment. Together they turned down a long section of dock, this one leading farther out into the lake. Their footsteps were quiet along the wooden boards, the water lapping gently against the pilings, and a few boats skimmed across the water farther out. A light breeze blew across the water, making the heat bearable, and the sky was the clearest blue, reflecting in the still water farther out. She had missed the quiet beauty of Slippery Rock. The back of her hand brushed against his. She had missed him. So very much.

  “You know, I’ve seen both oceans, the Rocky Mountains, all of the Great Lakes. Nothing is quite as beautiful to me as this man-made lake.”

  “Because this is home,” he said, and it was as if his voice touched her. The hairs on the back of her neck stood up, and a shiver ran down her spine. “I get it,” he said, and she knew he wasn’t talking about the lake. “I told my parents about Zeke at lunch today, and it was as if the past ten years hadn’t happened. I was eighteen again, telling them I was—I don’t know—failing chemistry or something.”

  “You were never failing chemistry.”

  James chuckled and bumped his shoulder against hers. “You know what I mean. Maybe I’m an idiot, but I don’t want to be mad at you. Not now. We were friends for a long time before we were...anything else. We’re adults now, and we have a child, but we can be friends again.”

  Mara swallowed. Friends. Not when the friendliest of touches between them made her senses go into overdrive. “What about—” She’d been on the verge of mentioning the kissing, but James spoke before she could say it.

  “Zeke? I want to meet him. Get to know him.” They turned another corner and walked toward the shoreline. “You said you didn’t need money from me, but you know me. I need to help out that way, so we’ll figure out custody and holidays and child support. We can figure out the co-parenting thing as we go along.”

  “Right, right.” Mara forced the words from her throat. “We’re friends. We’ll figure it out.” The words tasted bad in
her mouth, and she sipped her iced coffee, hoping it would drown out the bitterness of the word friend. The drink, too, left a bitter taste in her mouth. She tossed the cup in a trash can bungee-tied to one of the dock pilings.

  “I’d like to come by the orchard this afternoon, if that’s alright?”

  Which meant dropping another bombshell on her family this afternoon. Well, Amanda might not be talking to her right now, but Collin and Gran had been accepting of the baby news. It stood to reason they would accept the fact that James was the baby daddy. This way they’d know she hadn’t procreated with a drugged-out rock star or something. She’d procreated with the most responsible man in all of Wall County. Possibly all of Missouri. A man who always took his responsibilities seriously.

  “Sure,” she said. “Why don’t you come for supper, around five thirty?”

  They’d reached the edge of the dock. James held her hand again as she crossed onto the cobblestone sidewalk. Mara ordered her hand not to shake at his touch and her insides to stop flopping around like the fish people caught on lazy Sunday afternoons.

  James nodded and offered a wave as he turned toward his Jeep.

  “Well, I guess that went well,” she said to no one. He hadn’t kissed her in anger or exasperation. He’d told her they could be friends. He wanted to take responsibility for his child.

  So why did it feel as if she had lost something important between holding his hand as they crossed the street earlier and him walking away now that they were back on solid ground?

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “BUT HE’S ARRESTED ME. Twice.” Amanda stopped short. She and Mara were walking up the orchard drive from the roadside stand. Amanda’s summer job was working the orchard’s roadside stand. Several patrons had stopped earlier, but for the past hour the stand had been dead, so despite the fact that it wasn’t quite four o’clock on Saturday afternoon, she convinced Amanda to head toward the house.

  Mara needed to start dinner, and she wanted to shower before James arrived. She also needed to tell Gran. And Collin. She’d started with Amanda, hoping the news might break the glacier between the two of them.

  It hadn’t.

  “Did you deserve to be arrested?” Mara asked. “And were you ever actually jailed or did he just take you into the station house?”

  Amanda pressed her lips together and began walking again. “No. And no,” she said after a long moment.

  “Really?”

  “What? Are you my mother now?”

  Mara supposed she deserved that. She’d been using her mom voice on Amanda all afternoon, trying to get the teen to open up. To talk about anything. She should have stayed away from the James conversation, but at least she hadn’t mentioned the F word yet. As far as Amanda knew, he was only coming to dinner.

  “No, I’m your older sister. I’m staying in your house, and an old friend is coming to dinner. He won’t arrest you or question you.”

  They cut across the lawn instead of taking the crook in the driveway that wound toward the big, red barn. The farmhouse was just ahead.

  “He’ll come up with something,” Amanda insisted and hurried her pace.

  Mara shook her head. Usually, the gingerbread trim and crisp white walls soothed Mara’s mind, but not today. Gran sat on the porch swing with Zeke, looking comfortable despite the heat of the late afternoon. Amanda started up the steps.

  “Wait a second,” Mara said. Amanda paused, her hand on the doorknob. Mara looked around, but Collin was nowhere to be seen. Probably in the barn office or off somewhere with Savannah; Mara had yet to meet Collin’s girlfriend, although she remembered her vaguely from high school. “We’re having a guest for dinner,” she said to her grandmother, who nodded absently and continued playing with Zeke. He waved a dinosaur in her direction, and she waved a stuffed owl back at him.

  “He isn’t a guest,” Amanda said. “He’s a rigid cop.”

  “Technically, he’s the acting sheriff, but I suppose he could be described as rigid.” Mara pushed the image of James in bed from her mind. That was not the kind of rigid Amanda was talking about, and it wasn’t anything that Mara should have been thinking about, either.

  “How nice. We haven’t seen James around much since the tornado. What’s the occasion?” Gran asked.

  “Probably wants to put me on probation,” Amanda muttered.

  “I saw him at the coffee shop.” And regularly for most of the time since I started grad school, she thought but didn’t say. “He’s, ah, coming out to meet Zeke.” Mara felt her cheeks heat. She straightened her shoulders. Gran shot her a look. Mara nodded, and Gran focused her attention on Zeke again.

  She ran her thin hand over the little boy’s hair, gazed into his eyes and seemed to catch her breath. “Oh.”

  Amanda pushed open the door. “I’ll just be in my room, planning my prison wardrobe,” she said dramatically.

  “They don’t let you take clothes to prison, Amanda,” Gran said. Amanda muttered something Mara couldn’t understand and slammed the door behind her. Mara watched through the glass as the girl stomped up the stairs.

  Mara turned to Gran. “James is—”

  “I picked that up, Butter Bean,” Gran said, holding up a hand to stop Mara from talking. “I didn’t realize the two of you had stayed in touch.”

  “He had a law enforcement seminar in the same town where I was working a few years ago. Things just kind of started. The first few times, it was just friends hanging out, and then...things changed,” she ended lamely. Gran was quiet for a long time. “Gran?” she finally asked.

  Gran batted the lemur toward Zeke, and the little boy giggled. “I thought there wasn’t a father in the picture. Like, maybe he had walked away or you’d gone to a fertility clinic or something.”

  “Neither of those things.”

  “Are the two of you—”

  Mara shook her head. “No, no, we’re not. We haven’t been that for a long time.” Because you walked away. Mara told the voice in her head to shut up. “We’re just friends now. Friends with a baby.”

  “How long has he known?”

  “About as long as you,” Mara admitted, and Gran’s eyes widened to the size of quarters. The stuffed lemur in her hand dropped to the porch floor, and Zeke lunged for it. She grabbed him in her arms, and Mara snatched the lemur to put it on the swing cushion near him. Zeke picked up the lemur and the dinosaur and began to make fighting noises.

  “I didn’t know I was pregnant for a while, and we, ah, I left things badly with him the last time we’d seen each other.” Mara sat down heavily in the rocker near the swing. “I didn’t know how to tell him, and I didn’t know how to be a mother, and I convinced myself that until I got things figured out on my end, it was better he didn’t know.”

  “I’ll bet that went over well with him.”

  She offered Gran a small smile. “We’ve agreed not to keep going down the Mara-was-an-idiot road, for his sake.” She motioned to Zeke. “And we’re going to figure out the co-parenting thing.”

  “Does that mean you’re staying indefinitely?” Gran asked, unable to mask the hopefulness in her voice. “You keep saying you’re here for this one job.”

  “I don’t know,” Mara said. “Part of me wants to be here. Part of me isn’t sure how being here works, not in the long run. I travel a lot—”

  “Zeke could stay here on shorter trips. I could go along on longer ones,” Gran offered. “Amanda doesn’t start school again for a couple of months. Collin and I could work out some kind of schedule to make sure she’s taken care of, too.”

  “I’m not turning you into my at-home or traveling nanny service. We have plenty of time to figure it out. All of it. Nannies and work and custody and visitation.” Mara breathed heavily. It seemed like a lot to figure out in the four weeks she was scheduled to be on the
Mallard’s job. “Right now I want to get showered, and then I’ll throw the meat loaf in the oven.”

  Gran put her hand on Mara’s arm. “And Collin and Amanda and I will get out of your hair for the night—”

  “That isn’t fair to you,” Mara said, beginning to panic because what if James and Zeke didn’t click? What if she annoyed him so much he started kissing her again? Or, God, what if she couldn’t keep her hands off him? It had been hard at the coffee shop and then the marina. With more people around maybe she wouldn’t get all hot and fidgety and start thinking about him naked. The family would be the perfect buffer, for her and for Zeke.

  “Nonsense.” Gran waved her hand in the air. “Dinner out isn’t exactly unfair, and the three of you don’t need an audience as you get acquainted. It will be stressful enough without us sitting in the next room or around the same dinner table.”

  “But—”

  Gran cut her off. “No buts. There will be plenty of opportunities for big family dinners while you’re here. Tonight you can introduce James to this handsome little fella,” she said, picking Zeke up to rub her nose against his. The little boy laughed and put his hands to her cheeks so she couldn’t move.

  Gran set Zeke on his feet and then, still holding on to his little hand, went inside. Mara pushed her foot against the porch floor, setting the rocker in motion, and sighed. She could do this. She’d handled even the most obnoxious executives on jobs for Cannon. She could handle one county sheriff, no matter how handsome he was.

  * * *

  JAMES SAT IN his Jeep, watching the front door of the Tyler farmhouse. He’d been here a thousand times in his life. Picking up Collin for football practice, the five of them going hunting, working for Zeke Tyler during harvest season.

  James wasn’t sure what to expect, coming here as Mara’s ex-something and the father of her child. He couldn’t lay claim to the term boyfriend. He didn’t think the term lover fit, either, because although they’d had a lot of sex, there was very little emotion attached to what they’d been doing. No pillow talk. No declarations of feelings. Just a series of hookups, at least until Nashville.