“Now you tell me.” Asa glanced at the service station he was passing on the right. He knew the next exit didn’t have one but that the one after that did. He let out a sigh of relief. Still his sigh came too soon. The van sputtered twice and coasted to a stop at the side of the road.
“Sorry, Deputy, but don’t you get the feeling that maybe somebody is trying to tell you that you ought not to be making this trip? Why don’t you let them go? You’re only going to make things worse.”
“Sarah, Mike knows that I don’t allow anybody to interfere with me doing my duty.”
“Spoken like a true officer of the law, Sergeant Friday. Or is it Sergeant Preston of the Yukon? Maybe you should send for your faithful horse and dog to get through the snowdrifts up ahead.” This time she didn’t need a flashlight to see his brows draw together in a thundering expression. “Take it easy.”
“Take it easy?”
“Somebody will come along who knows us.”
Not if Asa could help it. Before he stayed long enough for somebody to know him, he moved on. He’d learned about moving on by the time he was ten years old and had already been returned to the orphanage by three sets of foster parents that he could remember. He didn’t know how many homes he’d been through as a baby.
His own mother had taught him the first lesson by leaving him on the steps of a church. The others, well, they had tried, but Asa hadn’t let them get close. And one after another, they’d returned him to the orphanage, as if he were a pair of shoes that didn’t fit.
Eventually, when he was ten years old, he figured it out. Everybody in his life was temporary. After that he made so much trouble that he was sent to a group home where he lived until he graduated from high school. The next day he’d joined the Marines, and he’d been on the move ever since. He’d learned the hard way that love didn’t last and people were temporary.
Then Jeanie became his responsibility. Yet, even then he’d always managed to keep their association in perspective. She was in his charge for a while. He’d understood that one day she’d leave, too—but not this way.
Sarah felt Asa’s frustration and pursed her lips. So he didn’t want help. That didn’t surprise her. “Well,” she finally offered, “if you feel like walking, there’s a gas can in the back.”
Asa took the can, strode briskly down the road, then stopped and turned back, a sheepish expression on his face. “Do you have any money?”
Sarah didn’t answer. One more word and Deputy Canyon would explode. Silently she fished a crumpled ten dollar bill from her pocket and handed it to him. He stalked off, measuring the distance in such long strides that anybody would have been forced to run to keep up.
A car pulled into the emergency lane and stopped in front of Asa. The driver, an elderly man wearing overalls and smoking a cigar, stuck his head out and asked, “That’s Sarah’s van out of gas back there, isn’t it? Get in, son.”
Any other time Asa would have kept on walking, but tonight he had no seconds to lose. He crawled in the car and thanked the old man.
“Don’t worry about it, son. Not a man or woman in Smyrna who wouldn’t stop to give Sarah Wilson a hand. Fine girl she is. Not a better shortstop in the state when she was in high school. Lost out on an out-of-state college scholarship looking after her dad. Folks ’round here think a lot of Sarah.”
The old man talked faster than he drove, and he wouldn’t win a race at either one, Asa thought wryly. Several minutes lapsed before Asa filled the gas can and managed to get back to Sarah’s van. He emptied the gas into the tank, then thanked the man who had already told him more about Sarah than he ever wanted to know, and drove off.
Asa tried to concentrate on Jeanie and how he was going to convince her that marrying Mike was a bad idea. He’d offer to help her furnish the apartment she’d rented, and if she wanted to open a nice little photography studio, he’d help her do that, too.
He pulled into a gas station and began filling up, all the while planning his argument. But a little voice inside his mind told him that Jeanie wouldn’t be happy in a studio. She wasn’t like Sarah, who had taken over her father’s business and made a life for herself in the place where she’d grown up. Sarah knew everybody in town and everybody looked after her. Sarah Wilson wouldn’t need somebody like him around.
And she had a mind of her own. She’d stood right up to him. He thought of her threat to have him arrested and smiled.
He’d stolen her van and probably compromised her before her friend. He hadn’t even thanked her for helping him. But the thing that kept sticking in his mind the most was the kiss, the way she’d returned it and how her lips had felt beneath his own. He tried to put it out of his mind. But not thinking made the remembering more vivid.
This was the kind of situation he usually backed away from. Sarah was trouble. But this time he couldn’t leave. He couldn’t move on to another assignment in another city. He had to stay here until he was sure Jeanie was all right. He’d promised her father that.
But the long-legged shortstop who gave up her scholarship to take care of her dad interfered with his concentration on the problem at hand.
After Asa paid the attendant he climbed back inside and coaxed Henry to life. “Sarah,” he began, “I’m sorry if I’ve caused a problem for you tonight. I know this all seems … strange.”
“Strange? Nah. Practically every night I get a call to rescue a bridegroom handcuffed to a bedpost. But you may be the first one wearing maroon drawers.”
Asa groaned.
“Actually, Deputy Canyon, I don’t mind a bit of friendly practical joking, but kidnapping? If that’s what you have in for mind for Jeanie, I have to say I draw the line there.”
“I am not planning to kidnap Jeanie. I’m simply planning to prevent her from making a rash decision.”
“This Jeanie, how old is she?”
“Jeanie’s twenty-nine.”
“A year older than me. I thought she must be about sixteen from the way you were talking. How come she needs rescuing constantly?”
“Because she’s a poor judge of men and every time she’s disappointed, she runs off to some foreign country.”
“Well now, I’d say she wants to get away from you pretty bad to go to those extremes.”
“Not from me. And she isn’t always trying to get away. Sometimes she’s trying to get to something. She’s a photographer.”
“How’d she get to be your responsibility?”
“Her father was my commanding officer in ’Nam. He was a widower. Sixteen years ago he died saving my life and I gave him my word that I’d look after his daughter.”
“And you still are. Maybe she doesn’t need looking after any more.”
“Yes she does! Sooner or later I thought she’d get ready to settle down and live a normal life. But she has this thing about making pictures in parts of the world where no woman should go. Now she’s found a willing partner.”
“Is she any good at what she does?”
“She’s a fine photographer. It’s picking men that she isn’t very good at.”
“I can believe that.” Sarah decided anybody who could reject Deputy Canyon had to be a poor judge of men.
With pride, he told her how Jeanie had made the cover of a weekly magazine with photographs of a war-torn nation.
Sarah didn’t mean to gasp, but the thought of a woman slipping into a battle zone was terrifying. Still, Jeanie obviously went after what she wanted, whether it was a man or a picture, and Sarah could understand that. She could even understand Jeanie eloping, if that was the only way.
Sarah had never been in love but, like Jeanie, she was given to following her heart rather than her head, and she could tell that they were both dealing with a man who would always take the sensible approach to every action.
“If she wants your friend Mike, why are you trying to stop them?”
“You’d have to know Mike. His family has more money than he’ll ever spend. He doesn’t have to do anyt
hing he doesn’t want to and that’s what he’s done for the last thirty-four years—nothing. It seems that he and Jeanie ran into each other in Spain while he was running the bulls. He didn’t run very fast. According to him, Jeanie rescued him from certain death.”
“And they fell in love.”
“Infatuation more likely. But marriage? No! Mike is a man with no ambition. It’s not that I don’t like Mike, I do. He’d give you the shirt off his back. His problem is that he’s never set a goal and reached it in his life.”
“Except this time,” Sarah said. No-ambition Mike must have more get up and go than Asa thought. Mike wanted Jeanie and he knew Asa well enough to know that he’d never allow their marriage. So Mike had come with a plan. Talk first, but if all else failed, get Jeanie in a dramatic, off-the-wall way that Asa couldn’t have anticipated.
Sarah smiled. She liked a man who could slip a Mickey to a deputy sheriff. Reluctantly she admitted that she even liked a woman who could fall in love with a guy who ran the bulls.
About Asa Canyon, she was confused.
Sarah glanced over at the man with the silver handcuffs still attached to one wrist. There was real dedication in this deputy sheriff, a finely tuned sense of honor and justice that was rare. She’d been right about him when she thought he belonged in the Old West. Except he wouldn’t be the outlaw. He’d be the sheriff.
Still, there was something about that historical picture that didn’t quite fit. He was a man who protected his woman, all right, but in his burgundy shorts and with a kiss that came on like gangbusters, he was definitely a man of the nineties.
As the van lurched down Riverside Drive, Sarah realized the Old West sheriff image wasn’t the only thing that wasn’t completely correct. Her red van, with its smiley face on the side, stuck out like a sore thumb in the rich neighborhood. The houses they were passing were so far from the road that they couldn’t be seen and the only thing on the mailboxes were numbers.
“Your fiancée must do pretty well with her pictures, Deputy Canyon.”
“You mean the ritzy area? She’s been living with a friend, an airline stewardess. They share a carriage house, as much sharing as they do when both of them are gone all the time.”
As he pulled into a driveway, Sarah swallowed a protest.
Help is on the way, she thought, and wondered who needed help the most. Looking at the back of the Tudor mansion with burglar bars and carriage house, Sarah decided it might be the deputy. He was convinced that he should come between Jeanie and the man she loved in order to repay a debt of honor.
Acting totally on impulse, Sarah leaned over, slid the dangling bracelet across the steering wheel and snapped it closed.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“Saving you.”
“Saving me from what?”
“Ruining three lives.”
“The only life I’m going to ruin is Mike’s. I care too much for Jeanie to ever hurt her. Now get this cuff off the steering wheel so I can stop her.”
Sarah gasped. She’d been right about the affair. Deputy Canyon was in love with Jeanie. All his protesting was because he wasn’t over the affair. Acting before she thought was something Sarah often did, sometimes with disastrous consequences. But she always corrected her mistakes.
Quickly she turned to her toolbox and began to fish around for the spare set of keys she usually carried. But she couldn’t find it. Her heart was beating too fast and she was unable see very well. Finally she switched on the flashlight.
“Quit stalling, Sarah.”
Asa was beginning to sound very angry. And it looked as if he had every reason. “Deputy, I don’t know how to tell you this, but there isn’t another key in this toolbox. You’ll have to come back to my place with me and I’ll get the spare.”
“Then you’d better get inside that carriage house and make sure that Jeanie doesn’t move until I get loose.”
“Are you sure? Yes, of course. I’ll stop her.”
When the private neighborhood security squad arrived to apprehend the intruders, Asa had to explain why he was handcuffed to the steering wheel of a locksmith’s van, while the locksmith was attempting to break into someone’s house.
It wasn’t Jeanie who was eventually roused by the commotion, but her roommate. She explained that Jeanie and Mike had taken a late night flight to Africa where Jeanie had a new assignment. After the security men were finally satisfied that Asa’s concern was for the safety of his ward, they agreed to let them go.
It was nearly morning when Asa, following Sarah’s directions, drove the van past a sprawling white house and around a stand of pines to a bright red barn.
“Where do you live, Sarah? I’d like to get home as soon as possible. I’m tired and hungry and ready for bed.”
“Yes. Well, you do have a bed, but from what I could see back there, you have no other furniture, no curtains, no food and no—”
“More patience!” he roared. “That isn’t where I live, Sarah. Jeanie rented that apartment and bought that bed. I live in a log cabin on a lake. Now get these cuffs off me, or I’ll sit on this horn until every cow in that barn goes berserk.”
“Yes, sir. Just a minute.” Sarah climbed out, opened the gate and disappeared through a door in the side of the barn. In a minute she was back with a pair of very large clippers. With two snips, the handcuffs were clear of the steering wheel and both Asa’s hands were free.
Sarah looked over at Asa. His five o’clock shadow had gotten darker, making him look even more stern. He was tired and she couldn’t really resent him for being short-tempered. She was sure that he was blaming her for his not having stopped the elopement.
“I’m sorry,” she began. “One way or another, I always seem to make a mess out of dealing with men, unless they’re on a ball field. Don’t suppose you’d like to play a quick game of basketball, would you?”
He looked around at the trim red barn and the white fence anchored by two huge steel posts in front of the door. “At six-thirty in the morning?”
“No, I suppose that wouldn’t be a good idea. But I could make coffee. I’m not a good cook, but the coffee will be hot, and I do owe you something.”
For a moment Asa laid his head across his arms on the steering wheel. He must be more tired than he realized. He didn’t want to leave. There was something appealing about Sarah Wilson, something that touched him in a way that he couldn’t even put a name to.
He didn’t know how this had happened, but he’d let down his guard and she’d silently slipped into his mind without his permission. He didn’t have time or room in his life for a woman, certainly not an innocent like Sarah. It had to be because he was tired and hungry.
“Coffee, Deputy? Maybe some food?”
There was a soft coolness in the air. Beyond the van was the stand of pine trees between her mothers house and the barn, and the apple trees she and her father had planted when she was six. Pop had built the barn the next year, facing the trees. The cows would like the view, he’d said.
Sarah felt the lump in her throat that always came when she thought of her father and the good times they’d shared. This place had become her private haven during the time he was so sick, and afterwards when she’d needed a place where she could heal. Now she was asking a man inside and that felt right, too.
She stood waiting, expecting Henry’s engine to come to life any minute. But it didn’t. There was only silence. She opened the barn door and started inside. She didn’t really expect Asa to accept her invitation. But then she heard him climbing out and following.
“Just one question, Dame Galahad. I may be tired, but I’m an old country boy and if I’m not mistaken, this is called a barn. What exactly do you eat for breakfast—hay?”
“Sorry, no hay. There isn’t a cow on the place.” She snapped on the lights.
Asa blinked. He closed his eyes and opened them again. From the time he’d first cracked his eyelids in the wee hours of this morning he’
d felt as if he’d fallen down Alice’s rabbit hole. Now he was certain.
What he saw wasn’t a barn with a dirt floor and stalls. There were no cows or animals of any kind. Instead, he was standing at the edge of a basketball court, complete with a shiny polished floor and two baskets mounted on backboards.
“I don’t believe it,” he said, wide-eyed. “I must be dreaming. I’ll wake up in a minute and find that this has all been a dream.”
“Last night wasn’t a dream,” Sarah said softly. “Neither is this.”
Sarah’s voice echoing about the large room brought him dramatically back to earth. She was still standing just inside the barn door, waiting for him to get over his surprise.
“When I was in high school my dad and I turned the barn into what my mother called our playhouse. Pop couldn’t play, but he liked having my friends around. Two years after he died I turned the hayloft into an apartment and moved out here.”
“You live in a gym?”
“Not exactly.” She gave a warm laugh. “Though I know it must look that way. Come with me. I’ll show you.” She led him across the court to a set of stairs leading up to the second floor.
Asa decided that watching Sarah climb the steps unsettled him about as much as the barn below. Normally Asa was very good at masking his thoughts and his facial expression, but this morning he felt as if he’d borrowed someone else’s body and nothing fit.
First he’d had too much to drink with Mike. He’d lost Jeanie. He’d lost his clothes. He’d lost his Silver Girl. Now, for a reason even he couldn’t figure out, he was about to have breakfast in a hayloft.
At the top of the steps Sarah opened a door, flipping off the lights below.
“If you’d like to take a shower and clean up while I cook breakfast, the bathroom is through there.” Sarah flicked her head toward a corridor leading off the combination kitchen, dining and living room in which she was standing.
“Shower?” Asa finally roused himself enough to respond.
He was having a hard time following her conversation. Take a shower in her shower? Not this guy. There was something too personal about the idea. Then he shook his head at his hesitation. Hell, she was only offering the use of her shower—not her bed, or her body. He didn’t know why he was having such a problem with the suggestion.
Silver Bracelets: A Loveswept Contemporary Classic Romance Page 3