by Deb Kastner
Her demand made him feel as if she’d thrown a bucket of ice water over him. Thankfully, the music was so loud it nearly drowned out the question even to his ears. He was fairly certain their conversation wasn’t being overheard by the friends and neighbors dancing around him. How humiliating would that be—not only being taken down a notch, but having it done right there in public?
“I don’t know.” He frowned and tried to shrug it off. Why did she have to be so serious all the time? “Why do you think?”
“You seriously don’t want me to answer that question,” she said, playfully swatting his chest.
He let out his breath. So this wasn’t a challenge, after all. She was goofing around with him. He didn’t know whether to be relieved or alarmed by the knowledge.
“But cut it out,” she continued, her gaze narrowing on him. “I don’t need you to fight my battles for me. I’m perfectly capable of taking care of myself—and Baby Beckett, if that’s what you are worried about.”
“Brody would have my hide if I didn’t look out for you.”
“That’s very sweet,” she said in a saccharine voice that suggested sarcasm. “But entirely unnecessary, I assure you.”
“Fine.” He didn’t see a point in arguing with her. They’d been over this territory many times before, and revisiting the matter wouldn’t change anything. He was still going to watch out for her and protect her—from outside forces, and from herself, when necessary—and she would no doubt continue complaining about it.
“Great music,” she said. Slade was relieved at the abrupt change in subject. Finally, she was giving him a break. “I’ll admit I was a little skeptical when Jo first told me about the jam session.”
He chuckled. “Why? What did you expect?”
“I don’t know. Heavy metal played by a bunch of high school kids?”
His chuckle turned into an all-out laugh. “In Serendipity? Princess, this is cowboy country.”
Her eyes narrowed on him in an unspoken warning.
What? What had he said?
“Exactly,” she said after a moment’s hesitation. “I’d call this a—a hoedown, maybe. A country dance.”
He winked at her. “We have those, too. Square dancing. Line dancing. A little more organized than anything you’ll be seeing tonight. This is more casual. It’s also open-mic, if you’re interested in joining in the singing.”
She shook her head. “That is so not going to happen. God gifted you with a wonderful voice, but me? Not so much.”
“I’m sure you’re exaggerating.”
“No, I’m really not. But you—you’ve got a beautiful voice.”
“I’m not sure I like my voice being called beautiful.” He grinned down at her. “Sounds kind of lame.”
“Feminine, you mean? You are such a guy.” She made it sound like an insult. “It sounds even odder to call your voice handsome.” She laughed.
He liked hearing her laugh. She was under a tremendous amount of stress between Brody’s death, her pregnancy, and now taking on the responsibility of the Becketts’ ranch. But tonight she seemed as if a load had been taken off her shoulders.
“I didn’t know you played guitar, either.”
“Does that surprise you?”
“Yes.” She shook her head. “No. I guess it shouldn’t, really. We weren’t exactly friends after I married Brody.”
“No. We weren’t.” His voice sounded terse and he cleared his throat.
“I just never pictured you performing on a stage, singing and playing acoustic guitar as if you did it for a living. Big, tough bull rider such as yourself?”
“I guess this wouldn’t be the time to tell you I’ve had classical music training.”
“No way.” She laughed, but he could see the doubt in her eyes and he knew he had her. He grinned like a cat.
“Naw. I’m pulling your leg. I’ve never had a lesson in my life. Taught myself. I play by ear.”
“Okay, you got me,” she admitted, chuckling. “I’m even more impressed. That’s not easy to do. You continue to surprise me at every turn.”
“Is that a bad thing?”
She shook her head, and then changed her mind and nodded. “Sometimes it is. Sometimes not.”
“Good. Someone’s got to keep you on your toes.”
“Is that what you’re trying to do?”
He arched his eyebrows and flashed what he hoped was a mysterious look. “Maybe. You’ll never know.”
“Hmm.” She stared up at him for a moment more, and then leaned her cheek against his shoulder. For a moment that was enough, that he and Laney were.
Just were.
“I noticed the drum set up there on the stage,” she said.
Slade wondered if she’d been uncomfortable with the silence between them. He hadn’t been. And he didn’t really want to go where the conversation had led them.
“Is the drummer sick tonight?”
Every sliver of contentment he’d been feeling instantly vanished, shredded by the truth Slade would rather forget. He leaned away from her so he could meet her gaze.
“Not sick, Laney. Gone.”
* * *
The pain in Slade’s eyes said it all, even before he’d voiced the words aloud.
Brody.
The drum set was empty because Brody had been the drummer. How had she been married to him for six months and not known that about him? What else was there? What had she missed?
She stumbled. If Slade hadn’t had his strong arms wrapped securely around her, she would have fallen into an undignified heap. As it was, he gently led her to a relatively quiet corner of the room without missing a beat of the dance.
“You okay? You look as white as a sheet.”
“I just—I didn’t know.”
“I’m sorry. I should have mentioned it before. That was totally thoughtless of me to drop that on you the way I did.”
“It’s not your fault. I asked you, and you answered. It’s just that—”
Her sentence dropped off as pain and guilt and anger ripped through her, stealing her breath and the beat of her heart.
“Laney.” Slade cupped her face in his hands, brushing his thumbs along her cheekbones as his gaze captured hers. “Laney. Look at me, princess. You’ve got to breathe. Come on, with me now. Breathe in, breathe out.”
Laney felt as if she were seeing Slade from a distance, her vision tunneling until she thought she might slip into darkness, but his gaze wouldn’t let her go there.
“Don’t pass out on me, sweetheart. I know I tend to have that effect on women, but Jo Spencer will have my hide if you go and faint in my arms, you being pregnant and all.”
Laney was beginning to feel nothing could reach her, but Slade’s joke, followed by his deep rumble of laughter, snapped her out of the thick shadows. Air filled her lungs as if she’d just broken through the water’s surface after almost drowning. She gasped.
Slade sagged in relief and pushed out a breath. Only then did she see the tension rippling from his neck into his shoulders and biceps. Odd that she hadn’t felt it in his hands.
“Good thing for you I’m not the fainting type.” She straightened and Slade dropped his arms, shoving them into the front pockets of his worn blue jeans.
“Brody and I used to dream about being rock stars.” He leaned his shoulder against the nearby wall, giving her a little bit more breathing space. “I think most kids do at one point or another. The whole ‘jam session in the garage’ really wasn’t that far off. We spent many happy nights playing in our band and dreaming of fame and fortune.”
“I didn’t know that about him, that he was a drummer. I imagine there are—” Her lips quivered and she swallowed hard but couldn’t release the lump of emotion in her throat. “Many thi
ngs I didn’t know about Brody.”
Slade frowned, but it was neither condescension nor censure. Sadness, definitely, and pity, maybe.
“You didn’t have the chance. God took him before you two could ever really get to know each other. That and—”
He paused as the music ended. Samantha waved at Slade, gesturing for him to return to the stage.
“Looks like you’re up.” Laney was actually quite relieved by the interruption. She didn’t want to talk about all the mistakes she’d made in her relationship with Brody.
Mistakes she’d made. Up until this moment she’d cast all the blame elsewhere. For as long as she’d known him she’d harbored resentment against Slade for leading her husband astray, and there was some truth in that. But Brody was his own man, and ultimately the decisions he’d made, which had damaged their relationship perhaps beyond repair, had been his to make. Slade might have influenced him, but at the end of the day, Brody was responsible for his own actions.
As she was for hers.
She’d been so busy casting blame elsewhere that she hadn’t seen her part in it at all. She’d been so angry when she’d discovered the kinds of things Brody had been doing in his spare time, most of which he’d spent at Slade’s side, that she’d swiftly booted him to the curb without even trying to work things out. She’d thought he was riding bulls—not drinking and flirting with women. And when she’d found out otherwise, she hadn’t handled it as well as she might have.
It wasn’t that she completely blamed herself for what had transpired, but neither could she assign all the responsibility to Brody—or to Slade. There were things she could have done better, things they all could have done better. And who knows that her life might have turned out differently if she’d made other—better—choices.
But it hadn’t. All of those actions and decisions had come together to form what had happened. And she couldn’t go back—only forward.
She shook her head to dislodge the melancholy thoughts and turned her attention back to Slade. She’d assumed he was returning to the stage and his guitar, but instead she discovered him running around with a pack of preschool-aged children. He carried one little redheaded girl in his arms, and the child clearly adored him. Apparently he was as equally able to charm the very young ladies as well as the older ones.
He whooped and laughed as he chased a little towheaded boy who was running through the crowd trying to avoid Slade’s touch. Slade appeared almost as youthful and innocent as the children he was playing with. He gave the boy a good chase but let the child get away from him several times before finally tapping the top of the boy’s head.
“Tag. You’re it!”
Laney’s jaw dropped in surprise. The Slade she thought she knew was far too wrapped up in himself to bother with children. She couldn’t even imagine him with kids—which was part of the reason she was so hesitant about Slade being a significant part of Baby Beckett’s life.
And yet there it was, right in front of her.
Slade smiling and laughing and zigzagging around other adults, trying to avoid the boy’s touch. He put up a good show but Laney could see he was purposefully putting himself out there so the boy could tag him.
“Tag. You’re it!” the boy exclaimed, proud to have caught up with Slade.
Slade touched him back. “No, you’re it.”
“No, you’re it.”
“You got me, scamp.” Still holding the little girl in one arm, Slade scooped the boy off his feet and swung him around in a circle. He was definitely having every bit as much fun as the children. Before today, Laney would have chalked it up to his immaturity. But now?
Maybe she was seeing the full-grown man Slade really was.
And she liked it.
Chapter Seven
Slade couldn’t wait to see Laney again—because she needed help with the ranch, not because he wanted to see her pretty face. Well, okay, he had to admit he missed her smile, enough that he rushed over directly after work. He didn’t even bother taking the time to change out of his police uniform before heading over to the Becketts’.
It had been a really long week and Slade had been putting in plenty of overtime at the station training a couple of new recruits. Serendipity wasn’t exactly crime central. They rarely had break-ins and hadn’t had a murder—ever. But drug runners occasionally used a route skimming close to their town. And then there was the paperwork—mounds and mounds of the stuff. Teaching young men who’d rather be out saving the world how to sit behind a desk buried in bureaucracy was more difficult than anything else he did.
He found Laney behind the desk in the Becketts’ office with her black reading glasses perched on her nose as she ran figures through an adding machine. She looked cute in glasses. They gave her a certain kind of style, and made her amazing eyes appear even larger than they were.
As soon as he entered, she looked up and sighed dramatically, smoothing her hair with her palms.
“Rescue me,” she begged him, twisting side to side in her chair to stretch her back muscles. “I have been crunching numbers all day and at the moment I feel like I’m drowning in them.”
He chuckled. “Not much of a math person?”
“I can hold my own. But eight hours of staring at columns upon columns of numbers would put a knot in anyone’s back.”
“I hear you. I’ve been training rookies all day. Doing paperwork, not shooting a gun.” Instinctively his hand hovered over the holster on his belt and Laney’s gaze followed the movement.
Her brow furrowed.
“Why the frown?”
She turned her head away, refusing to look at him.
“What? I’ve been around you long enough to know when you get into a tizzy about something, princess. What did I do now?”
That seemed to do the trick. She met his gaze, her eyes crackling with fire. “I’m not in a tizzy. And don’t call me princess.”
He raised a brow, daring her to continue to deny that she was in a pique. Something had gotten up the woman’s craw, and given their history, he was fairly certain it had something to do with him.
“I just don’t like guns,” she finally admitted.
“I’m a cop. Guns kind of come with the territory.”
He wasn’t telling her anything she didn’t already know. Brody had been a member of Serendipity’s police force, as well. She’d had experience with men with guns.
“Surely Brody brought his SIG Sauer home with him.”
“He knew I didn’t like having a gun in the house, so he never let me see it. It went straight into the lockbox the second he walked in the door.”
Slade slumped into the chair across the desk from Laney, laced his fingers behind his neck, leaned back and propped his feet on the hard oak surface. She stared at his boots a moment and he waited for her to explode on him for his lack of manners. At least that would get her mind off of the gun. He made a mental note not to come visiting in his uniform anymore. Not a good thing to upset a pregnant woman.
To his surprise, she didn’t burst out nagging like he’d thought she would. Instead, she steepled her fingers and rested her chin on them.
“I can guess why you became a cop,” she stated bluntly. “And Brody, too, for that matter.”
“Yeah? And why is that?” This he had to hear— because from the tone of her voice it sounded as if she were accusing him of choosing to be a career criminal and not the man who caught the bad guys.
“You want to be a hero.”
Slade burst out laughing. Whatever he’d expected her to say, that was not it.
“And why would you think that?”
“This town has Wild West stamped all over it. I can totally imagine you riding in on your horse, guns blazing, shooting up the air while your presence alone chases the bad guys out of town. Y
ou wear the wrong color of cowboy hat, but other than that, you’re a dead ringer for sheriff.”
“Somebody has been watching too many old Westerns on television. What’s wrong? Are you having problems sleeping at night? Baby keeping you awake?” He grinned at her.
“Read them, actually.”
“Right. Your romance novels. Is that how those cowboys do it? Shooting it up through the town?”
“Absolutely. I’ve always wondered, though, where the bullets go that they shoot into the air.”
“Back down again, I would imagine. Gravity and all that.” He chuckled at her question, which, now that he thought about it, had some merit.
She laughed. He liked the way it lit up her face, erasing the tension that usually resided there. “You never see that part in the movies, though, do you?”
“Bullets taking out random innocents? I’m guessing it doesn’t make for good pleasure viewing.”
“Funny, the parts you don’t see.”
The revelation struck him deep in the chest. She wasn’t seeing him. Not really. She was so stuck on what he was wearing—whether as a bull rider or as a cop—that she couldn’t look past it. As if the clothes made the man.
He hadn’t changed just because he was wearing the uniform, yet her response to him certainly had. What was up with that? Did she know so little about him that the idea of him carrying a weapon disconcerted her? Didn’t she trust him at all?
“I could teach you how to shoot.” He couldn’t begin to guess where that idea had come from, but it sounded like a bad idea as soon as it came out of his mouth. If she didn’t like guns, she certainly wouldn’t want to learn how to shoot one.
“Now?” She sounded surprised, but also curious.
“Sure. Why not? We’ve got a couple of good hours of daylight left. I’m sure we can rustle up a few empty aluminum cans.
“Right.” She didn’t sound too sure of herself, but there was grit and determination in her gaze. A man couldn’t help but admire her for that. “Um—okay. If you’re game for it, I guess I am, too.”
A half an hour later, Slade was propping aluminum cans on the mounded crest of a hill. Laney had said next to nothing since she’d made the decision to learn how to shoot. Only when they’d asked Carol for some cans and she’d given Laney a glowing report of her own experiences shooting did she smile a little, and only for a second.