Return to Oak Valley

by Shirlee Busbee

  It gave her small satisfaction to see that he was as aroused as she was. His face had that hungry, intent look she remembered so well, the glitter in the golden eyes making her heart pound frantically. As for his body…she'd already felt his readiness. Knew that all she had to do was lift a finger and that he'd make love to her. Right here. Right now.

  Feeling as if she were fighting herself as much as him, she said, “I didn't come out here for this.”

  “Then why the hell did you?” he snapped, furious for his own loss of control, enraged to discover that she still had the power to arouse him more than any other woman he'd ever known. If he weren't a civilized man, he told himself, and this wasn't the twenty-first century, he'd grab her, tear off those tight little jeans of hers, and take her right then and there—on the floor, the couch, hell, it didn't matter. All that mattered was that he lose himself in that soft flesh of hers once more, and if he couldn't get them to his loft and the bed, the floor would do just fine. To his horror he discovered that a part of him was considering doing it.

  He spun away and, staring grimly out the window, he growled, “Well? What was it that brought you here, if it wasn't for that?”

  “You arrogant bastard! Do you really think I drove out here so we could take up where we left off? Are you crazy?”

  He ran a hand through his hair and swung back to face her. “Yeah. Where you're concerned I've always been a little crazy.” Cutting her off, he put up his hands in a gesture of surrender. “Forget it. I was out of line. Let's just bury this little incident with the past.” He grinned crookedly. “Put it down to cabin fever. You're the first attractive female who's been out here in a while. Guess I got all excited and forgot my manners. Now drink your coffee and tell me why you're here.”

  “I don't want your damned coffee,” Shelly said, her eyes bright and angry. She glanced over her shoulder, found her purse, and pounced on it. Opening it, she dug around and came out with a cashier's check. “Here, take this,” she muttered, almost throwing it at him.

  Frowning, he stared down at the check. It was made out to him in the amount of forty-eight thousand dollars. Puzzled, he looked over at her. “What is this for? You don't owe me any money.”

  Shelly's chin came up. “The Granger family does. That right-of-way isn't worth more than a few thousand dollars. Josh overcharged you. I'm correcting the error.”

  Sloan stared at her, stunned. He'd been prepared for her anger over the sale of the right-of-way, but he'd never considered that she'd try to refund part of the money. What game, he wondered, was she playing? Was she trying to renege on the deal? His face darkened. She couldn't do that. It was a done deal. And money, whatever her motives, was the last damned thing he wanted from Shelly Granger.

  “By God, you're not!” he said, insulted. “My deal was with Josh. It had nothing to do with you. Take your money back.”

  He thrust the check back to her, but Shelly, her purse in her hand, had already turned on her heel and was heading toward the door. “No thank you. It's yours. Do what you want with it.”

  “Now wait just a goddamn minute—”

  She spun around to glare at him, her eyes gleaming like emeralds. “No, you wait a goddamn minute! You overpaid for the right-of-way, and you know it. I'll say it for you: Josh screwed you. You know it, and I know it. All I'm doing is making things right and making certain that you damned Ballingers don't go around proclaiming what a tricky bastard he was.” Her voice shook as she added, “I'm sick of this whole Ballinger/Granger feud. It's stupid and silly. Take the money and admit for once that all the Grangers aren't crooks or thieves.”

  “I never said that all the Grangers were crooks or thieves. Just some of them,” Sloan said evenly, his temper cooling. She was upset, he could see that, and he could see that this was, for reasons that totally escaped him, important to her. “Look,” he said, “why don't you sit down, I'll fix us a fresh cup of coffee and we can discuss this like adults.”

  “There is nothing to discuss,” Shelly said from between clenched teeth. “The money is yours.”

  “And I don't want it,” he growled, his jaw set.

  “Too bad. It's yours, and there is nothing you can do about it.”

  “Wanna bet?”

  “Yeah, sure, why not?”

  And before her astonished gaze, he took the cashier's check and ripped it into confetti. He smiled, not a nice smile. “You lose.”

  Chapter Eight

  The door slammed behind Shelly, and Sloan couldn't decide from the expression on her face as she'd run away if she had been astonished, appalled, or just plain furious with his treatment of the check. Probably all three, he thought with a shrug, letting the torn paper fall to the floor at his feet.

  A nudge from a cold little nose on his ankle had him glancing down at Pandora. She regarded him unblinkingly. “What?” he asked. “You don't approve of my treatment of the lady? Let me tell you, kid,” he said as he picked her up and suffered a wet kiss on his cheek, “that there aren't many men who throw away that kind of money.” He looked down at the scraps of paper littering the floor and shook his head. “I can't believe I did that.” He grinned at Pandora. “Hope it impressed the hell out of her—it sure did me.”

  Shelly was not impressed. She was furious. Leave it to a Ballinger, she thought, to turn a perfectly honest, sincere gesture into a farce. She could strangle Sloan. Why couldn't he have been a gentleman and just taken the money? Even if he hadn't intended to keep it, he could have given it to a charity or set up a scholarship with it, or done something with it! He didn't have to rip it up.

  She bit her lip. Now what did she do? She'd have to talk to the bank. A cashier's check wasn't like a regular check; she doubted she could blithely just go ask for another one. Her face burned. And explaining what happened to the first one was going to be almost as embarrassing as standing up naked on a Sunday morning in a packed church.

  Shelly didn't let herself think about those moments in Sloan's arms. Didn't dare think about how right it had felt to be pressed against his big frame, didn't want to remember the sweet wildness in her blood, or the way her traitorous body had responded to his kiss. She forced herself instead to brood on the check and wonder what she was going to do next. Approaching the road to home, she decided that she wasn't going to go back to the house. She'd only wander around and dwell on Sloan…and the check.

  Pulling up in front of the cheerful red-and-white steel building that housed McGuire's Market, she turned off the ignition. Hopefully Melissa-Jane would be in the store office.

  She was, and answered Shelly's knock on the door with a frown. Seeing Shelly her expression changed, a wide smile replacing the frown. “Hi, Shell. What brings you here? Some hot gossip, I hope.”

  Shelly smiled back, shaking her head. “No. I thought that if anyone had gossip it would be you.”

  “Fat chance,” Melissa-Jane said. “I'm usually the last one to know.” She pointed to a chair next to one of the gray metal desks that crowded the area, and added, “Have a seat. I need a break anyway.”

  The office was small, almost a cubicle, and most of the floor space was taken up with either file cabinets, bookshelves, three desks, or other office equipment. A couple of short narrow aisles snaked through the clutter. Every conceivable surface was covered with brochures, advertising literature, and big red three-ring binders. The impression was one of disorganized order. There were two computers, a pair of large-screen monitors, a copy machine, fax machine, phones, and various other pieces of office paraphernalia scattered all over the place. A bank of security cameras hung from the ceiling near one wall and enabled anyone working in the office to keep an eye on the rest of the store. The room bordered on the claustrophobic, a small one-way window that looked out over the bread-and-bakery aisle the only thing that kept it from resembling a monk's cell. Lying on top of one of the file cabinets and completely out of place was a startling lifelike gorilla mask, the black lips pulled back in a ferocious snarl.

/>   “What in the world,” Shelly said, pointing to the mask, “is that doing in here? Last time I checked, Halloween isn't for months yet.”

  Melissa-Jane scowled. “Hang around long enough, and you'll find out.” She glanced at the big round clock over her desk. “Yeah, he ought to be here in about a half hour.”

  Having made that cryptic statement, Melissa-Jane plopped down in the high-backed oak office chair in front of the middle desk and put her feet up on the rim of a black metal waste-basket. “So, how's it going?” she asked.

  Shelly had known Melissa-Jane all of her life, and they had, until Shelly had left so precipitously almost seventeen years ago, been inseparable. Their parents had been lifelong friends, and there was only three weeks difference in their ages, Melissa-Jane, or M.J., as she preferred, having been born in late July and Shelly in mid August. They'd gone to grade school together and had endured the loneliness of private school when their parents had enrolled both of them in the same private high school. Only the presence of the other one had made the separation from family, friends, and the valley bearable.

  The two women were opposites physically. M.J. possessed a mop of bouncy blond curls, the blondness helped a bit these days by L'Oreal, and a pair of the biggest, darkest pansy brown eyes ever seen on a real live human being. She had a gamine face, a tip-tilted nose, and stood only about five-foot-three, to Shelly's commanding five-foot-nine, and while Shelly was on the lean side, Melissa-Jane was curvaceous—too curvaceous, she'd complained often enough. As teenagers, Shelly had envied M.J.'s small stature and generously endowed curves, and, naturally, M.J. had sighed over Shelly's tall slenderness.

  Eyeing Shelly's long legs as she stretched them out in front of her just now, M.J. commented, “You know, I still don't think it's fair that you got the height and the slenderness. My boobs and hips would look a lot better on you.”

  “1 dunno,” Shelly said with a grin. “I'll bet that even if we could switch body parts, we'd probably still think the other one got the better deal. You know—the grass always looking greener on the other side, or, you could say, the boobs always look greater on someone else's chest.”

  M.J. giggled, the same infectious giggle she'd had all of her life, and Shelly found herself giggling with her. That giggle, coupled with those big speaking eyes, were part of M.J.'s charm, and one couldn't hear that gentle gurgle of laughter without joining in, never mind that they were both approaching thirty-five years of age. Melissa-Jane's giggle was timeless.

  M.J. glanced at the sliding window of the office and perked up. “Oh, would you look at that.”

  Another security feature, the one-way window only allowed those inside the office to look out and observe the interior of the store. On the other side, there was just a mirror, giving the inhabitants of the office total privacy.

  Shelly turned her head and glanced out the window. “What?” she said. “It's only Jeb talking to some woman.”

  “Yes, but it's who he's talking to. Don't think you've met her yet, but that's Tracy Kingsley—the local vet. She came to the valley after you'd scooted off to New Orleans. Been around now, I guess, about ten years.”

  Shelly eyed the red-haired woman, laughing up at something Jeb had said to her. There was an air of familiarity between them, Jeb standing close to the woman, his hand resting on her shoulder. The woman was tall, probably about her height, Shelly estimated, and probably about the same build, maybe not quite as slim. Bigger boobs, Shelly thought gloomily. The other's woman's hair was pulled back in a ponytail and fastened with a plaid scrunchy, and she was garbed in typical valley wear—worn blue jeans, scuffed running shoes, and a comfortable shirt. A pretty woman, Shelly decided, taking in the even features.

  “Vet, as in, veterinarian?”

  “Yes. She's pretty good, too. When Jamie's dog, Rowdy, got kicked by a cow last summer and had his leg broken in three or four places, she patched him right up. Didn't charge an arm and a leg either. It was great not having to drive an hour down the St. Galen's road to Willits with a crying kid and a howling dog.”

  “How are Jamie and Todd?” Shelly asked, mentioning M.J.'s two sons.

  M.J. tore her eyes away from the window and made a face. “Fine. They're with their father this semester. Since the divorce, he gets them about half a year and I get them the rest of the time. They've adjusted to the midyear change in schools pretty well, although their grades always suffer a little until they settle in. They'll be home around the end of July.” Her features softened. “Can't wait. I miss them so much when they're gone—they're growing so fast. I can't believe that Jamie will be twelve in another month or that Todd, my baby, turned ten in February. Wait 'til you see them.

  You'll never recognize them from the pictures I sent you at Christmas.”

  The divorce, final two years ago, ironically on Valentine's Day, had been hard on M.J. She had adored her tall handsome Highway Patrol husband, Charles Sutton, and she had been devastated when she'd discovered that a lot of those supposedly late-night assignments had been assignations, with various attractive young ladies he'd met during the course of his job. To discover, as she had done, that Charles had been cheating on her for years had been devastating. She'd been shattered by the betrayal, and the decision to end her marriage of twelve years, with the future of two small children to consider, had been painful and difficult. But as she'd told Shelly during one of their marathon telephone conversations during that dreadful time, “I can't trust him,” she'd said, tears in her voice. “And if I can't trust him, there is no marriage.” She'd given a bitter laugh. “Everyone in his unit, hell, half the county, knew that he was playing around on me. Worse yet, I've found out that he's been doing it practically the entire time we've been married. I can't forgive him, and if I can't forgive him, I can't stay married to him.”

  Shelly didn't blame her for feeling as she did. She and Sloan hadn't been married, but he had betrayed her in a painfully similar manner. Hearing M.J.'s sad, sordid little tale long-distance, all Shelly could do was weep with her and try to lift her spirits. The Valentine's Day when M.J. had gotten her final decree, she and Shelly had gotten pretty well smashed. They'd both bought a bottle of champagne in anticipation of the event, and when Melissa-Jane had called with the news, they had stayed on the phone for hours, drinking champagne and telling each other what bastards men were.

  Once the house in Ukiah that M.J. had been so proud of had been sold, she'd packed up everything and moved back to Oak Valley. A good thing, too, she'd told Shelly. Her grandfather, the founder of McGuire's, wanted to retire—had wanted to for years—and since neither one of his two sons had ever shown any interest in the store, M.J. got tapped to take it over. “I think the only reason the crafty old devil dragged me into the store instead of one of my cousins was to keep me so busy I wouldn't have time to think about how miserable I was,” she'd told Shelly last spring. “And you know what? He was right. I'm not going to say I don't still have my bad days, or that I'm not bitter about Charles, but I sure as hell don't have time to brood over it. Clever man, my grandfather.”

  Knowing how torn-up M.J. had been at the time, Shelly agreed with her statement. But Shelly had always suspected that Bud McGuire had chosen his oldest granddaughter to succeed him, not only to keep her busy during that painful time but also because M.J. was the only McGuire, besides Bud, who had ever cared about or shown an interest in the store. Until she'd been sidetracked by Charles Sutton fifteen years ago. M.J. had been well on her way to stepping into Bud's shoes when the time came. She'd grown up working in the store, and attending the junior college in Ukiah, she'd been taking marketing and business classes, readying herself for the future.

  M.J. squealed, distracting Shelly's thoughts. “Look! Look! He kissed her.”

  Shelly looked. “On the cheek,” she said dryly. “Jeb does that to every female he meets. Doesn't mean a thing.”

  M.J. sighed. “Yeah. You're right. I'd forgotten that.”

  “Why are you so interest
ed in Jeb's love life anyway?” Shelly cocked an eyebrow. “Is it possible that you've changed your mind about all men being lying, cheating, penis-brained Neanderthals, and you've set your sights on Jeb?”

  “Good God, no! You know his reputation. He's left a trail of broken hearts from Santa Rosa to the Oregon border and beyond. Our boy gets around, and Jeb's the last man I'd be interested in.” Melissa-Jane sniffed. “If I ever get interested in another man in this life. After Charles, scum-sucking lowlife bastard that he is, men aren't high on my list.”

  Thinking of Sloan, Shelly nodded. “Can't disagree with that.”

  “So. What brought you to town today? Just slumming or are you bored?”

  “Not bored or slumming, I just didn't feel like hanging around the house by myself today. I needed a break.”

  M.J. studied her. Shelly's words were just a little too careless to be taken at face value. “The estate coming along OK? No problems?” she probed.

  “Everything's fine. It'll be six months or so before everything is finally taken care of, but for now, most of it is just stuff that Sawyer can take care of.”

  “Sawyer-the-Lawyer,” M.J. said in a singsong chant. “How is he to work with? I've finally convinced my grandfather that we ought to have an attorney on retainer, and I've been asking around.”

  Shelly hunched a shoulder. “You could do worse. He seems all right.”

  “Not a glowing recommendation. Don't you like him? Josh liked him pretty well. They were good friends.”

  “Maybe that's part of the trouble,” Shelly admitted. “Sometimes, I feel like he's Josh's lawyer, not mine.”

  M.J. started to say something, but a glance out of the oneway window had her leaping to her feet and grabbing the gorilla mask. Shelly stared as M.J. jerked on the mask.

  A look out of the window showed Danny Haskell, all decked out in his sheriff's office uniform, strolling down the aisle. When Shelly had left Oak Valley, Danny had been a gangly, big-eared, clumsy teenager, his feet too big for his growing body. Over the years she'd been gone, M.J. had sent pictures of herself and her family, as had Bobba, but Danny had not, and seeing him for the first time a month after she'd arrived back in the valley had been a shock. He had matured into a very handsome man and the fumble-footed, awkward, not-particularly-good-looking friend of her childhood was gone forever, replaced by the attractive man walking toward the office.