by Andre, Bella
"Stop it. Just stop it!"
They jerked apart at Emily's shocked voice, as if their roles were reversed and they were two teenagers caught by their fathers. Flushing, Andie scrambled away from Will. How could they possibly have forgotten his daughter, asleep just a few feet away?
The girl stood outside the Jeep, her fists clenched as she glared at them through eyes that still held traces of sleep.
"Emily—" Andie began.
"You can't take her place. You can't!" She started to cry and slammed the car door shut, then raced into the cottage.
"Emily!" Will walked down the steps toward her, then turned back to Andie, as if he couldn't decide what to do.
It was palpable, this withdrawal of his. At the very mention of his dead wife, he had stiffened and pulled away from Andie as if he couldn't bear to touch her. As if their closeness of that day and the night before was nothing more than a brief and very regrettable weakness.
"Go on," she said. "She needs you now."
"I'm sorry, Andie," he said, his voice hoarse, then he turned and followed his daughter into the cottage, leaving her alone.
"Me too, Will," she whispered. "Me too."
Chapter 9
"He's growing, isn't he?" Andie hefted Dustin into her arms and nuzzled his soft neck. He smelled of baby powder and that indefinable, irresistible scent of an infant's skin.
"Three weeks old today," Beth said proudly. "Can you believe it?"
Three weeks? It felt like a lifetime since she'd helped bring the baby into the world. Since the night she'd confronted her own pain. Since she'd awakened in Will's arms.
She'd barely seen him since Emily caught them in each other's arms that night after their trip to Jackson. When she did, he was back to his former gruff self and so evasive, she'd stopped trying to reach him.
In truth, she'd hardly had time the past three weeks to worry about Will. Between all the harvesting of her garden and the canning and the endless preparations it took to ready the ranch for the coming winter, she had more than she could handle.
It was only late at night, while the autumn wind sent leaves scuttling against the windows, that she wondered if she'd imagined the whole thing, somehow conjured up their shattering intimacy in some wild, delusional corner of her mind.
Yet when she closed her eyes, she could still feel the imprint of his hands on her skin, still taste his mouth against hers, still feel him filling her, consuming her.
"Andie?"
Beth's questioning voice dragged Andie from her thoughts, and she blushed, hot color soaking her cheeks. "Sorry. What did you say?"
"I said Dustin already seems less of a baby and more like a little boy."
Andie forced a smile and looked at the baby's tiny features. "Yep. He'll be graduating from college before you know it."
Beth chuckled and settled deeper into the chair in Andie's office at the school. "I'm so glad I stopped by. I need you for perspective in my life."
"How are you really doing?" Andie asked.
Her friend gave a radiant smile. "Better than I've ever been. It's hectic and exhausting, especially with this colic, and I don't get more than two hours of sleep at a time, but I had no idea it would be so exhilarating. How about you? Are you still functioning without me around here?"
Andie laughed. "Just barely. It helps that the classes are becoming smaller since many of the workers have moved on. The big summer crunch is over and most of them are heading into Idaho for the potato crop or up to the fruit crops in Oregon and Washington."
"Well, I'm ready to come back whenever you say the word."
"Take all the time you need. You know the job is yours whether you come back next month or next year. Somehow we'll manage to get by without you."
Beth laughed just as a noise sounded from the doorway. They both looked up to find Emily there, clutching the book she'd been reading in the playroom while waiting for her aunt.
"Aunt Beth, can I walk down to the grocery store for a drink?" she asked, studiously avoiding even looking at Andie. It hurt, Andie admitted. She thought they had become friends during the shopping trip to Jackson. A quick image of them laughing together at Will as he tried on hats at an old-fashioned milliner's shop in town flashed through her mind, and she sighed. Whatever warmth had been between them that day had dried up as surely as Miller's Creek in the heat of the summer.
Oblivious to the undercurrents, Beth smiled at her niece. "Sure, hon. Let me find my purse and I'll give you a dollar."
"I've got money," Emily muttered.
"Here." Beth fumbled in the pocket of the diaper bag and triumphantly pulled out a few wadded-up bills. She handed them to Emily. "Why don't you get us a couple of sodas while you're over there?"
Emily's mouth, so much like her father's, tightened into a thin line. "I'll get you one, Aunt Beth," she said, with a rude look at Andie. Her brown curls swinging, she turned and marched out the door, leaving Beth staring openmouthed after her.
Dustin let out a squawk, and Andie realized she was holding him too tightly. She relaxed her arms. "Sorry, sweetheart," she whispered, kissing the downy skin of his forehead.
"All right," Beth said. "What's going on?"
Andie sighed again. "Your niece doesn't much like me. I think she's afraid I have designs on her father."
"What on earth gave her that idea?"
Andie blushed again as she pictured her and Will entwined in each other's arms, oblivious to the world. "I haven't any idea," she lied.
"Well, do you? Have designs on her father, I mean?"
"I wouldn't get very far, even if I did," she mumbled. Will obviously regretted their closeness. His daughter's accusing words about how Andie couldn't take her mother's place seemed to have jerked him back to reality. If he wanted to climb right back inside his grim existence, how could she stop him?
"He's miserable, you know."
Andie glanced up from the gurgling baby. "Who? Will?"
"Yes. That stubborn brother of mine. I don't know what's gotten into him, but ever since Dustin was born, it seems like he can't work hard enough. He's either putting in double shifts at the jail or spending all his time with Jace rounding up strays for the winter. It's almost like he's running from something."
She sent a speculative look Andie's way. "Or maybe someone."
Andie evaded her friend's gaze. "Maybe one of these days he'll slow his running down long enough to turn around and see that someone has no intention of trying to catch him."
"You'd be the best thing to ever happen to both Will and Emily," Beth said solemnly. "They need softness and laughter in their lives again. Will needs you, whether he wants to admit it or not."
A piercing ache spread through her, a powerful, sharp yearning to heal him, to make him laugh, and to tuck both him and his daughter against her heart.
To be needed. It was her fatal flaw, she thought, that overwhelming hunger to be needed.
Still, in the scheme of things, what she wanted didn't much matter. Will would be gone in a few weeks, anyway, just another part of the endless cycle of autumn migration in Whiskey Creek: the raptors and waterfowl catching a ride on the jetstream south; the workers and their families moving on to greener crops.
And Will, returning to the desert of his grief.
***
The sun straddled the mountains to the west, sending long, stretched-out shadows across the terrain when Will climbed out of the Jeep at the Limber Pine that evening.
The dogs barked a greeting and rushed to him from their favorite resting spot underneath the willow tree, as if it had been months since they'd seen him instead of just that morning. He cracked a smile and gave them the requisite pats. The two big retrievers fussed over him like this whenever he returned to the Limber Pine at the end of the day. Maybe that was why he always felt that little spurt of anticipation when he pulled into the driveway of the ranch. He always felt... welcomed, somehow.
Like coming home.
The thought appeared
out of nowhere, and he jerked upright. Where had that come from? His home was in Phoenix. He had a job to do there and that was where he damn well would stay, not on some dinky ranch in a backwater Wyoming town.
So what if he had a couple of dogs licking his hands and careening around his legs every time he came here? Phoenix –and unfinished business —waited for him. He'd do well to keep that uppermost in his mind.
A gust of wind sent leaf skeletons skittering across the lawn, then whirled them down the road. In a matter of weeks, he'd be just like those leaves, Will reminded himself, blowing out of there without once looking back.
He gave the dogs one last pat and was opening the screen door to the cottage when a flash of color near the front porch of the ranch house caught his eye.
Andie, in a bright yellow sweatshirt and faded jeans, knelt by her flower bed, yanking flowers from the soil. The dying sun glinted off her dark hair, and she looked as fresh and appealing as a sunflower. Hungry desire kicked through him at the sight of her. He curled his fingers on the door handle, willing it away.
He'd do well to remember what Emily had shouted that night three weeks ago. You can't take her place. You can't.
At her words, he had felt as if he'd been doused in frigid runoff, and Sarah's face, silently accusing, had burned into his mind. How could he have forgotten? How could he have let the undeniable magic he found in Andie's arms distract him from the cause that had kept him going for the past three years? Vengeance. He had to run Zamora to ground. He owed it to Sarah and he owed it to himself. Maybe then the demons of guilt would slither away, and he could find peace.
You found peace, a voice in his head reminded him. For an instant, he saw himself and Andie in her garden, bodies and spirits entangled, and he had to force himself to breathe.
Andie must have seen him drive up because she paused for a moment as their gazes met, then lifted a gloved hand in a polite wave. For an instant, he considered fleeing inside and locking the door behind him, away from the sight and the scent and the overwhelming temptation of her. But if he'd learned anything these past three weeks as he tried to put as much distance between them as he could, he'd learned running didn't help. No matter how hard he worked, how many steers he d, how much paperwork he filled out at the jail, he couldn't escape her. He couldn't keep from remembering how she'd looked in the moonlight, her skin flushed with passion, her eyes glittering with need. And how right she'd felt in his arms.
He would just say hello, he thought. It was the neighborly thing to do, after all. Just say hello and keep his promise to tell her what was happening with Jessop.
He thought he saw a glittering awareness shiver through her eyes as he walked closer, but the temperature of her smile just about matched the arctic wind that would be blowing down out of the mountains in a few weeks.
She climbed to her feet. "Sheriff."
"Looks like you've been hard at work." He gestured to the wheelbarrow piled high with plants.
"I'm just cleaning up a bit. Clearing the annuals out for the winter. After that frost we had the other night, most of them are finished blooming anyway."
"Sounds fun."
She grimaced. "I hate this part of gardening, when the flowers have begun to wither and the harvest is nearly over. It's so grim. So final. I know I have to do it, but I just hate it. It's like finally admitting summer's over."
She had a smudge of dirt edging her cheekbone, he noticed. Before he had time to think it through, he stepped forward and rubbed his thumb over the spot. It was a huge mistake. A monumental mistake. At the feel of her velvety skin, he froze, his chest suddenly tight, his blood pumping sluggishly through his veins.
Their gazes met and locked, and he watched the black of her pupils expand, leaving only a thin, gold-flecked circle of green. She drew in a gasping breath, and it was enough to jerk him back to his senses. He stepped away as quickly as if he'd just wrapped his fingers around a prickly pear.
"Sorry. You... uh... you left some dirt on your cheek there."
She rubbed the sleeve of her sweatshirt over the spot so vigorously, he was afraid she would scour the skin away.
"Where's Emily tonight?" she asked, avoiding his gaze as she carted another load of uprooted plants to the wheelbarrow.
"Beth got some bee in her bonnet about having Emily stay at the Bar W for the night. Jace had to go to some cattle sale in Laramie, I guess, and Beth suddenly decided she wanted company."
Andie sent him a quick look. "When was this?"
"She called me an hour ago. Why?"
Andie flexed her jaw, as if she was either trying not to laugh or not to scream about something. "No reason. Just curious."
"Anyway," he continued, "I've been meaning to tell you what happened with Jessop, but I haven't been around much."
"I noticed." She yanked off her leather work gloves with a bit more force than necessary and shoved them in her back pocket.
That damn guilt coursed through him again. Here was another one of the things he'd screwed up in his life. He'd used her. Selfishly, heedlessly used her at a time when she'd been at her most emotionally vulnerable.
He glanced away. "Yesterday I cited him for renting out unsafe and unsanitary housing. Under a deal made with the county attorney, if he builds new quarters for his workers, they'll drop the charges and the fines. He's agreed to bring in temporary trailers in the meantime. He's not happy about it, but I think he knows he doesn't have any kind of choice."
The cool reserve surrounding her dissolved as a wide, pleased smile lit up her face, sending his insides tumbling around. "That's terrific, Will! Thank you so much!"
He cleared his throat. "You're welcome."
"I mean it. Thank you! You did a good thing, Sheriff. Tom's a bully and most people would rather not cross him. I'm so glad you didn't let that stop you."
He didn't want her gratitude. He wanted... he wanted... Just what the hell did he want? If he knew the answer to that, maybe he wouldn't be filled with these conflicting urges to both back away from her as fast as he could and grab her so tightly she wouldn't even want to think about getting away.
"I didn't arrest him like you asked me to," he pointed out gruffly.
"Well, sometimes I go a little overboard when something's important to me. I think you did exactly the right thing."
She studied him for a moment as if debating some thing, then she stepped forward. He nearly pushed her away, but he forced himself to remain as motionless as the mountains around them as she stood right against him. "Thank you, Will," she whispered.
His blood churned as he felt the caressing butterfly dance of her lips against his cheek. The feel of her, the intoxicating scent of lavender that clung to her, sizzled through him. He had thought her effect on him would fade with time, but he ached with the need to touch her, to taste just a little of her softness.
"Andie." Her name was a plea on his lips.
She said nothing, just watched him out of those aspen-leaf eyes that could see straight into his soul. Their gazes locked and held as, against his better judgment, he lowered his head.
Their lips met and clung, hers gentle and tranquil, his rough and desperate. He felt the impact of her kiss rock him, as if she'd dislodged the ground beneath him.
How could they make such a powerful connection with just the contact of mouth on mouth? He had no idea, but it seared through him, potent and strong. He wanted to tuck her against him, to spend the rest of his life right here, with her soft breath blowing between her lips, with her body nestled against him so sweetly.
Gradually he became aware that the sun had slid below the mountain and the air had begun to chill. As the crosswind burrowed cold fingers through his clothing, he jerked back to awareness. To her in his arms. To his hand just inches from exploring her tempting curves.
What the hell was he doing?
He pulled back his breathing ragged, and looked away, unable to face her. "I'm sorry, Andie. I vowed to myself I wouldn't let that happen again."<
br />
"Why?"
He debated coming up with an excuse, anything but the truth. How could he tell her that because of her, he'd spent a night at peace for the first time in three years? That while he was lost in the wonder of making love to her, he'd been able to shake, if only for a little while, the hounds of guilt that pursued him?
And that he felt ashamed and brutally selfish because right then he wanted that oblivion again, with a fierce, all-consuming need.
"I don't have anything left to give you," he finally said. That, at least, was part of the truth.
Her bittersweet half smile nearly broke his heart. "I never once asked you for anything, Will."
"Andie, listen to me. Everything in me died right along with my wife and son. Everything. The only thing I have left is Emily and I'm screwing that up too. You deserve better than that, than some broken-down excuse for a cop who will never be able to give you any kind of promises."
"I don't need promises," she said, her voice barely a whisper in the night. "I don't need anything. Just you."
He should fight her, he told himself, should turn on his heel and walk into his cottage. But he wasn't strong enough. Everything in him cried out for that connection again, for the peace and solace he found only with her. He groaned even as he reached for her.
Like her ranch, she was warm and welcoming, and she sighed his name as he kissed her.
"You feel so good to me," she whispered. "I've wondered since that night if I imagined it all."
"Did you?" he asked gruffly, barely able to think.
"No." She trailed a kiss to his throat, to where his pulse throbbed out his desire. "If anything, I left out some pretty darned important information. Like how, when you're kissing me, I light up like the sky above Whiskey Creek on the Fourth of July."
He groaned again. "Much more talk like that, sweetheart, and we're going to end up giving that old goat staked up back there one hell of a show."