“The usual,” Kendra said, with an unconvincing attempt at sounding breezy and unconcerned. She prepared a cup of coffee for herself. “A husband. Babies. A great career.” She paused. “I guess one out of three isn’t bad.”
Joslyn knew her friend had been married, very briefly, to a wealthy Englishman with a title, but that was the extent of the information Kendra had been willing to share. As close as they were, both of them had their secrets.
“You’re young, Kendra,” Joslyn pointed out, treading carefully. “You can still have the husband and/or the babies if you want. There are a lot of options these days.”
Kendra brought her cup to the table and sat down opposite Joslyn. She looked down into her coffee, but made no move to drink it. “Call me old-fashioned,” she said very softly, “but if I’m going to have children, I want to be married to their father. And I’d have to believe in love to get married.”
“You don’t believe in love?” Joslyn felt a pang of sorrow. Kendra had always been the romantic; even with her 4.0 grade average in high school, she’d been voted Most-Likely-to-Live-Happily-Ever-After by the rest of the senior class.
“Not anymore,” Kendra said.
“Does this have something to do with Hutch Carmody?” Joslyn ventured, thinking of the odd charge in the air the day before, when Hutch stopped by to pick up Jasper.
Kendra’s cheeks flamed. “No,” she said very quickly and very firmly.
Joslyn winced slightly. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t seem to open my mouth without putting my foot in it.”
Kendra smiled, but her eyes remained sad. “I didn’t mean to snap at you,” she said. “But fair is fair, Joss. Why should I tell you my deepest secrets when it’s so obvious that you’re holding a lot of things back? We’re supposed to be best friends, aren’t we? And BFFs exchange confidences.”
“You’re right,” Joslyn said. “What do you want to know?”
“Why you came back to Parable, for a start. I know that someway, somehow, you’re behind all those big, fat checks that have been raining down on this town for the past couple of months, whether you’ll admit it or not. What I don’t get is why you’re so secretive about it—or why you would do something like that in the first place. Like I said before, you’re not responsible for what Elliott Rossiter did way back when.”
“Okay,” Joslyn replied, when the constriction in her throat loosened up enough to let a word pass. “Yes. I sold my software design company for megabucks, and I arranged for a law firm in Denver to track down everyone my stepfather stole from and see that they were repaid.”
“Why did I have to drag that out of you?” Kendra asked mildly, raising both her perfect eyebrows in an expression of perplexed good will.
Joslyn took her time answering; some soul-searching was required to translate a lot of confused feelings into words. “I don’t know,” she said after a few long moments. “Not exactly, anyway. Parable was always…well, it was home, and it’s been calling to me all this time to come back. I agree that what Elliott did wasn’t my fault, but it shouldn’t have happened—good people were all but ruined, after all—and since I had the means to make it right, I did.”
“Why keep it a secret, though?”
“Because I want to be accepted in Parable on my own merit, not because I bought my way back into the town’s good graces.”
“You have a very expensive conscience,” Kendra observed with a little smile that, though wobbly, was genuine enough. “But I do understand. And your secret is safe with me.”
“Good,” Joslyn said, relieved. “Now it’s your turn. Why don’t you believe in love anymore?”
Kendra’s eyes filled with such pain that Joslyn was immediately sorry for pressing the issue. Still, as Kendra herself had said, fair was fair.
“Because of Jeffrey,” she said. “My ex-husband.”
“What did he do?”
Kendra considered for a long time before replying, “He swept me off my feet, married me and promised me the moon. For a while, he even delivered. We traveled all over Europe after the wedding—it was a small, justice-of-the-peace ceremony—but oddly enough, we never got around to visiting his family in England. They didn’t approve of me, as it turned out, but Jeffrey said I shouldn’t let that bother me. Love conquers all, et cetera. We came back here, bought this house from the Rossiter estate and made plans to start a family of our own. He had plenty of money, and I was stupid enough to think I’d found someone to take care of me.”
“And?” Joslyn prompted, when Kendra fell silent.
“And a week after we closed on this monstrosity of a house, his father fell ill and Jeffrey flew straight home to London. Next thing I knew, he was calling to say so sorry for any inconvenience, but he wanted a divorce. It had all been a colossal mistake, our getting together. Several million dollars suddenly appeared in my personal bank account, and his ‘solicitors,’ as he called them, sent me the deed to this house. That was it. The fairy tale was over.”
“Ouch,” Joslyn said, reaching across to give her friend’s hand a light squeeze. “That’s brutal. Did Jeffrey ever give you a reason?”
Kendra swallowed visibly and shook her head. “He didn’t have to,” she replied presently. “I don’t know if his father was really sick, or it was just a ruse to get Jeffrey to come home, but once he got there, the home folks wasted no time convincing him that what we had together was just an unfortunate fling that must be curtailed at once, and damn the cost. Apparently, Jeffrey came around to their way of thinking. They raised the drawbridge and slammed the caste gate shut in my face and that was that.”
“The bastard,” Joslyn said with spirit.
“Amen,” Kendra said.
Joslyn bit her lip, hesitant to speak but in the end unable to resist putting in her two cents’ worth. “Still,” she said, “to give up on love seems a little rash, doesn’t it? I mean, how likely is it that that will happen again?”
“I loved him,” Kendra said simply.
“Yes, but—”
“I’d better get back to work,” Kendra interrupted. “I have to prepare the contracts for the chicken farm and get copies to both parties, and, of course, there’s the barbecue to plan.”
“Right,” Joslyn said, standing up and carrying her cup and Kendra’s to the sink.
“I could really use your help figuring out the food,” Kendra said.
Inwardly, Joslyn sighed. There was no way out—Kendra had given her a job and a place to stay, and, besides, they were friends. She’d have to join in the festivities, like it or not.
And she was more than willing to help.
“How many people are you inviting?” she asked in cheerful resignation.
“You’d better figure on at least a hundred,” Kendra said. “Probably more.”
By then, heading for the inside door, she had her back to Joslyn and probably thought her friend hadn’t seen her swipe at both cheeks with the heels of her palms as she dashed out of the kitchen.
* * *
SHOPPING WAS NOT SLADE’S favorite way to spend his time off.
He and his newest deputy, Jasper, were on their way home from the big discount store that morning, in Slade’s pickup, when Layne called him on his cell phone.
“I think I’m insulted,” Layne said without preamble, as usual. “Shea wants to leave for your place by yesterday, at the latest. She’s all packed and every five minutes she wants to know if I’ve bought the tickets yet.”
Slade chuckled, though he had a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach, too. He loved Shea, no question about it, but he wasn’t set up to give her a proper home, not yet, at least.
“You’re putting her on a plane, then?”
“Yes,” Layne replied. “If you’re still up for this, that is. Believe me, Slade, if you want to back out, I’ll understand.”
“We’ll make it work somehow,” he said.
“If you don’t mind, I’ll come along with Shea. Just to help her settl
e in and everything.”
Layne would probably take one look at his bachelor’s quarters and hustle her daughter straight back to the airport in Missoula and onto the first outward-bound plane, no matter where it was headed.
“Okay,” Slade said. He had to talk to Kendra, pronto, he decided. Even if he bought the Kingman place that day, which he didn’t intend to do, the deal wouldn’t close for at least a month. Maybe he could make arrangements to rent the house until he’d made up his mind about accepting Hutch’s offer to buy out his share of Whisper Creek, though.
“Try to contain your enthusiasm,” Layne teased. “I’ll only be in Parable for a couple of days, and your virtue is safe, cowboy. I’m madly in love with another man.”
Slade waited for the pang of regret Layne’s statement should have caused him—he’d loved her, once—but it didn’t come. He did wish he could have responded that he was “madly in love” with some hot woman, though.
One like Joslyn Kirk, say. He felt a stirring that did not bode well for getting out of the truck anytime soon, at least, not in the middle of town, where there were so many people around.
“I’ll reserve you a room at the Best Western hotel,” he said. “When are you planning on getting here?”
“Day after tomorrow?” Layne said, making it sound like a question.
Slade suppressed a sigh. “Shall I pick you up at the airport in Missoula?”
“Definitely not,” Layne answered happily. “We’ll rent a car.”
“Fine,” Slade replied. “I’ll make the room reservation. Text me your ETA when you can.”
“Will do,” Layne said.
Slade was about to say goodbye and hang up when she murmured his name.
“Yeah?” he asked.
“Thanks,” Layne answered. “I’ve been at my wits’ end over Shea.”
Slade wasn’t a glib man. He was intelligent, and he was educated, but folks said he was as stingy with words as a miser was with money, and he couldn’t refute that. “Everything will be all right,” he said.
The call ended, and he headed for Kendra’s place.
Once there, he parked alongside the mansion in the blindingly white driveway and spoke to Jasper.
“I won’t be long,” he said. “Mind your manners until I get back.”
Jasper merely sighed.
Inside the big house, Slade found Kendra’s office empty.
“Hello?” he called, just to be sure.
A woman’s voice answered, from a distance, though it wasn’t Kendra’s.
“In the kitchen!” someone sang out.
Joslyn Kirk?
Oh, hell, Slade thought. It hadn’t occurred to him that he might run into her, though he supposed it should have, since she lived on the property and she and Kendra were good friends. He cleared his throat, debating between sticking around and beating it.
Before he’d decided either way—he’d been leaning toward the first option because the second seemed pretty chickenshit—Joslyn appeared in the big arched doorway joining the office area to the formal dining room.
She had flour in her hair. Slade’s heart did a weird little jig and then seized up briefly.
“Oh,” Joslyn said, her eyes widening slightly and a blush climbing her cheeks. “It’s you.”
Slade gave a raspy chuckle. “It’s me, all right,” he agreed. “Is Kendra around?”
Joslyn shook her head, and her soft brown hair seemed to dance around her oval face. Her eyes were wide-set, her mouth full… .
Why was he thinking about her mouth?
“She finally sold the chicken farm,” Joslyn said. “She’s off delivering contracts.” She hesitated, moistened her lips briefly before going on and thus ignited an achy flame in Slade. “Is there something I can help you with?”
Oh, yeah, Slade thought, grimly wry. But it probably isn’t the kind of help you have in mind.
“I wanted to talk to her about the Kingman place—see if she’d get in touch with the owners and ask them about renting the house to me. I’ll catch up with her later.”
Joslyn swallowed, nodded. He wanted to touch his lips to the pulse leaping at the base of her throat.
Glad he’d brought his hat with him instead of leaving it in the truck, Slade held it in both hands at belt-buckle level. He hoped the move seemed casual.
“I’ll tell her you stopped in,” Joslyn said.
He took some consolation in the fairly obvious fact that he wasn’t the only nervous person around.
“That would be great,” he said. It was the perfect time to leave, but, probably for the same reason he was holding his hat in a strategic position, he didn’t.
Joslyn dusted her hands together. “I don’t know how to contact the owners,” she said, “but if you want another look at the ranch house, I’m sure the lockbox keys are around here somewhere. I could get them and let you inside.”
In the next moment, she looked confounded, as though she hadn’t planned to say what she had.
Slade didn’t need yet another tour of the ranch house—he’d been there with Kendra a dozen times. He knew every inch of the place, which floorboards creaked and the state of the plumbing. He knew just how each room would look, once he’d completed the necessary renovations, which he’d planned in detail.
“I’d like that,” he said, careful not to let his gaze drift any lower than the base of her throat. He was already in over his head; no sense making things worse.
CHAPTER FIVE
JOSLYN WASN’T A LICENSED real-estate agent; she’d been hired, she reminded herself sternly, as a receptionist—a job she hadn’t even started yet. For all that, here she was, having just tracked down the lockbox keys to a hook in Kendra’s office-supply closet, heading out to show Slade Barlow through a house he’d already seen a dozen times, by his own admission.
She could have simply handed him the keys and sent him off to the Kingman place on his own—he was, after all, the county sheriff and could certainly be trusted to enter an empty house unsupervised—but that didn’t seem like the right thing to do, either. Every business had its protocols. There were ways to do things, steps that had to be taken, procedures to follow.
“No sense in taking two rigs,” Slade said practically, opening the passenger-side door of his extended-cab truck and gently herding Jasper, who had been sitting in front, over the console and between the seats to the back. With a blush that might have arisen from self-consciousness, the cowboy-lawman brushed off the seat, raising a little red-gold cloud of dog hair in the process.
Amused—and strangely touched—Joslyn forgot her own concerns for the moment and indicated, with a gesture of one hand, that she was wearing old jeans and a T-shirt and therefore wasn’t worried about getting a little messy.
Slade stepped back, still holding his hat in one hand, and waited for her to climb inside the truck.
Joslyn did so. Felt a blush of her own rise along her neck to the backs of her ears as she made a major production of fastening her seat belt.
Jasper, evidently glad to see her even if he had forsaken her temporary care to appoint himself Slade’s dog, greeted her by nuzzling her cheek once with his cold, moist nose.
“Hello to you, too, you traitor,” Joslyn said fondly, smiling, while Slade rounded the front of the truck and got in on the driver’s side.
Even being in the same room with this man minutes before had all but jolted Joslyn back on her heels, as if she’d grabbed hold of a live wire or poked a finger into a light socket. Being in the same truck, sitting side by side, ratcheted the sense-riot to a level of intensity that nearly took her breath away.
What had she been thinking to suggest this particular outing in the first place, let alone agreeing to ride with Slade instead of taking her own car? The answer was all too obvious: she liked the risky, even dangerous, feeling of being so close to all that quietly uncompromising masculinity. She was electrified, her heart pounding, every nerve in her body thrumming with all sorts of unwise in
stincts, each more primitive than the last.
Slade was as handsome in profile as he was head-on, and while she couldn’t quite resist a glance in his direction, she made sure it was a short one and shifted her gaze to the windshield as soon she could tear it away.
Not usually a prattler, Joslyn prattled. “I’m afraid all I can really do is let you into the house, once we get out to the ranch,” she said unnecessarily. The silence was simply too volatile to endure, for her at least, though it didn’t seem to bother Slade at all. “I mean, I’m not a broker or an agent, so of course I couldn’t make any binding agreements—”
A corner of Slade’s mouth quirked. He was looking straight ahead, concentrating on his driving. Having a conversation with him would probably be like trying to herd cats into a culvert.
Having sex with him, on the other hand—
Well, never mind—better not to think about that. At all.
Except she couldn’t seem to help it. It was a thrilling prospect—one that brought another hot blush surging into her cheeks and made certain her insides felt as though they were melting.
Get a grip, she told herself silently.
“That’s all right,” Slade said, in that slow, easy drawl of his. By then, Joslyn had forgotten what they were talking about, and he seemed to realize that, because he added, “That you can’t actually sell me the ranch, I mean.”
Pause. Joslyn felt as though she’d suddenly wandered onto a field of ice; inwardly, she was flailing for balance.
“I understand you’ve looked at the place before,” she said presently, striving for a normal tone, and then wished she hadn’t spoken at all. He might think she was implying that he was indecisive, what people in the real-estate business called a looky-loo.
Again, she caught herself. So what if he did think that? Who really cared what Slade Barlow thought, anyhow? Besides you, you mean? she asked herself.
Joslyn huffed out a sigh of pure frustration. She was, it seemed, carrying on two parallel conversations, one with Slade and one with herself.
This was unlike her. She was a self-possessed, independent woman. Why should this one man’s opinion matter to her at all, let alone enough to rattle her so?
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