He chuckled—it was almost as though he’d guessed what was going on in her brain and body—and gave her another of those lethal blue-denim glances, the ones with all the impact of being sideswiped by a speeding car.
By then, they were on Main Street, nearly at the town limits. They passed Parable High School and the conveniently located hamburger franchise next door to it, and then they were in the country.
“I’d pretty much decided on buying the Kingman place,” Slade told her, “but then—well—another opportunity came up, one that complicates things. I’m thinking of renting the house short-term, since my stepdaughter is coming to spend the summer with me and I basically don’t have anywhere to put her.”
Joslyn was still digesting what, for Slade anyway, amounted to a lengthy discourse as they cruised on by Mulligan’s Grocery and the Curly-Burly Hair Salon on the opposite side of the highway. Both parking lots were semi-full.
Slade honked the horn once, probably saying “howdy” to his mom, Callie, who ran the salon, though he didn’t look in that direction.
“I see,” Joslyn said, though she didn’t see. That strange, charged silence was really getting to her now. It was like dancing barefoot on a hot tin roof, this feeling. She should have stayed put in Kendra’s kitchen, she decided peevishly, where she’d been whipping up a batch of her special garlic-rosemary focaccia bread to serve at Kendra’s upcoming barbecue. At least there she’d only had to deal with memory-ghosts, not a long, lean, red-blooded cowboy putting out vibes that might make her clothes fall off if she wasn’t darned careful.
Approaching a side road marked by a wooden For Sale sign and a rural mailbox that leaned distinctly to the right, Slade geared down, signaled and turned. The truck bumped over a cattle guard.
“What brings you back here, Joslyn?” Slade asked, easily navigating the narrow, winding, rutted road leading uphill. “To Parable, I mean?”
There it was again, she thought. The question she wouldn’t be able to avoid answering for much longer. It made her bristle slightly, that particular inquiry, even though it was perfectly reasonable. She supposed.
“I needed a change,” she said.
“From what?” Slade wanted to know.
“My old life,” she replied.
“Which was where?”
“Am I under investigation?” She was half-serious, though her tone was light.
Slade flashed her yet another devastating grin. “Nope,” he said. “If you were, it would have been a matter of a few strokes on a computer keyboard to find out all I needed to know.”
Joslyn sighed. It was true enough that her pertinent details were posted somewhere online, which gave rise to an interesting insight. Slade was curious about her past, that was obvious, and he could easily have run a search, but he was asking her face-to-face instead. What a concept.
Of course, he might already have run a background check on her and just wanted to see what she’d say.
Joslyn was still grappling with the possibilities when they crested one final hill, and the old house and barn sprang into view. Behind them, in the backseat, Jasper gave a happy little yip of anticipation. Clearly, the dog was already sold on the place, even if his master wasn’t.
“I’ve been living in Phoenix since I finished college,” Joslyn said quietly, because she knew there was no avoiding the topic of where she’d been all these years.
“And now you’re back in Parable.” Slade brought the truck to a halt between the two decrepit buildings that seemed to lean toward each other, as though silently sharing their secrets.
He didn’t move to get out of the truck, and neither did Joslyn.
Jasper began to pace back and forth across the backseat, his paws making an eager, scrabbling sound on the leather. He was anxious to explore the property on his own, evidently.
Joslyn still felt a little testy over Slade’s remark.
And now you’re back in Parable.
“Is there some law against my being here, Sheriff Barlow? A local ordinance, maybe? ‘No one remotely associated with Elliott Rossiter shall set foot in our fair community from now until the end of time’?”
He arched one of those dark eyebrows, and his lips twitched almost imperceptibly.
What, Joslyn wanted to know, did he think was so darned funny?
The dog, meanwhile, was getting more restless with every passing moment, so Slade finally got out of the truck, opened the rear door and stepped aside so Jasper could leap nimbly to the ground. He watched as the animal ran wildly around the overgrown yard, barking exuberantly.
“Are you coming inside or waiting here?” Slade asked Joslyn, his tone as calm and easy as a creek flowing over time-polished stones. This after practically giving her the third degree about her return to Parable.
Pride-wise, remaining in the truck was out of the question—not that the idea didn’t have a certain snit appeal—so Joslyn shoved open her door, grabbed her purse, and scrambled down out of the high seat. She marched around the front of the pickup, digging through the jumbled contents of her bag for the lockbox keys as she went.
She was so intent on the search—she’d often said her purse was like a portal to a parallel universe, and things disappeared into it, never to be seen again—that she arrived at her destination sooner than expected and nearly collided with Slade.
He laughed, low in his throat, and steadied her by taking a light hold on her shoulders. “Whoa,” he said, blue devilment lighting up his eyes. “I was just trying to make conversation before. If you don’t want to tell me what you’re up to, you don’t have to.”
Again, Joslyn took umbrage. She had Kendra’s keys clenched in one hand by then, and she practically brass-knuckled Slade with them, shoving them at him the way she did.
“What I’m ‘up to’?” she demanded, careful to keep her voice down. “What the heck is that supposed to mean?” She sucked in an angry breath and exhaled a rush of words with it. “Maybe you think I came back to Parable to steal whatever money my stepfather may have missed? Is that it, Sheriff?”
Slade let his hands fall from her shoulders, and, to her eternal chagrin, she actually missed his touch. That annoying little quirk appeared at the corner of his mouth again, and his eyes twinkled. Maybe she was all shook up, but he was clearly enjoying the situation—a lot.
“No,” he said matter-of-factly. He’d been holding his hat until that moment; now, he set it on the truck seat, crown side down, and shut the door. He rested his hands on his hips as he studied her, paying no heed to the wildly happy dog dashing hither and yon through the tall grass, chasing butterflies. “That’s old news, what Elliott did.”
“Then, what?” Joslyn pressed. “What could I possibly be ‘up to’?”
Slade sighed again, ran a hand through his hat-rumpled hair. “I don’t know,” he replied quietly. Reasonably. “That’s why I asked you.”
The man was maddening.
Joslyn struggled to regain her composure. Finally, measuring her words out carefully, she said, “I grew up here, Slade—just like you did. Parable is home.”
His jawline tightened, and his eyes darkened to a grayish shade of violet, reminding her of a once-clear sky roiling with sudden thunderclouds. “You couldn’t wait to get out of here, if I remember correctly,” he said.
Joslyn narrowed her eyes in consternation and tilted her head to one side as she studied him. So it was still there, that old boy-from-wrong-side-of-the-tracks hostility.
“Yes,” she said crisply, squaring her shoulders. “Having all four major TV networks converge on a person’s front lawn will do that.” Her stepfather’s very public fall from grace had been a feeding frenzy for the media; everyone wanted a comment from her, from her mother or even from poor Opal.
“You were making noises about getting out of Parable for good long before the authorities caught up with Rossiter,” Slade said, unwilling, it appeared, to give an inch. The laid-back way he’d behaved before must have been an act. “I remember
how you were back then, Joslyn. You made it pretty damn clear that you thought you were too good for a hick town in Montana and most of the people in it. So I can’t help wondering—what’s the big attraction now?”
The words struck Joslyn like a slap. She’d been a spoiled brat back in the day, and there was no getting around it. She’d had too much of everything—too much money, too much popularity, too many honors, like being prom and rodeo queen, class president and the captain of the varsity cheerleading squad. But all that had been years ago, and she’d grown up since then. She’d accomplished a lot of good things, become a genuinely nice person.
“People change,” she pointed out snippily.
“Not in my experience, they don’t,” Slade immediately replied.
With that, he turned and headed for the lockbox beside the front door of that ramshackle ranch house, his strides long.
Joslyn watched, still smarting with indignation, as he stepped up onto the sagging wraparound porch, opened the lockbox and took out the actual keys to the house, stored there by Kendra.
He glanced in her direction once, then unlocked the front door, opened it and went inside. Jasper, butterflies forgotten, bounded after him, tail wagging.
“Jerk,” Joslyn said under her breath.
And she wasn’t referring to the dog.
In the next moment, a wasp buzzed her like a pesky little airplane, driving her along the weedy front walk toward the door.
Not that she needed an excuse to go inside the house and look around or anything like that. She was here on Kendra’s behalf, albeit unofficially, and besides, if she stood out there in the yard, or waited in the truck, Slade would have won at whatever game he was playing.
Joslyn wasn’t about to let him intimidate her.
So she marched right up the porch steps and on into the house.
She stopped just over the threshold, struck by a strange, sweet sensation of nostalgia; even though she’d never been there before, it was as though the house were welcoming her back from a long and difficult journey, almost embracing her.
It was at once pleasant and downright spooky.
She blinked a couple of times, listened to the sound of Jasper’s toenails clicking on the hardwood floors in a nearby room, heard Slade speaking to him in low, affectionate words she couldn’t quite make out.
Slowly, she shut the door behind her and looked around the shadowy interior of the medium-sized living room.
The place was surprisingly clean for an abandoned house—Kendra or the owners must have hired a cleaning service to come in at regular intervals—and it had a certain quiet charm, too. The fireplace was formed of simple red brick, with a wide wooden mantel above it, and there were built-in bookcases on one of the outside walls, framing a set of bay windows with a bench seat underneath. The floors were varnished wooden planks, a soft butternut in color, and instead of nails, they’d been secured with pegs.
It was easy to picture that room with prints on the walls, comfortable furniture of the shabby-chic persuasion, colorful throw rugs scattered about, books crowding the shelves, a fire snapping on the hearth while fat flakes of snow drifted past the windows. Even a glittering Christmas tree wasn’t that big of a stretch.
Joslyn reined in her imagination with a sigh and a shake of her head. She’d gotten carried away for a moment there, but she was all right now. Really.
Except that something sweetly visceral flicked at her nerves just then, first in her solar plexus and then all over her body, and she turned to see Slade watching her from a nearby doorway, Jasper beside him.
For a few seconds, she and Slade simply looked at each other.
Then, in his forthright way, Slade said, “I’m sorry, Joslyn. About what I said outside, I mean.”
She swallowed and tried to smile, but couldn’t quite manage the feat. The truth was, he’d hurt her, this man whose opinion she did not want to value.
“All right,” she said. Now there was a witty reply.
He crossed to where she stood, faced her.
She looked up at him. Breathed in the fresh-air scent of his clothes and skin. Let the heat of him warm her bones. If he were to kiss her right now, she thought dizzily, there wouldn’t be a thing she could do about it.
Only he didn’t. He simply watched her for a long moment, with a crooked little smile and a light in his eyes, and then he asked, “What do you think?”
What did she think? Of what? Being kissed? Not being kissed?
“Oh, you meant what do I think about the house.”
He grinned, amused all over again. “Yeah,” he said. “About the house.”
“It’s—” Joslyn looked around, sighed softly. “It’s lovely, what I’ve seen of it, anyway. Not at all what I would have expected, seeing it from the outside.”
“Come on,” he said, offering his hand. “I’ll give you the tour.”
He led her through the place, room by room. They checked out the large, old-fashioned kitchen, the single bathroom with its huge claw-foot tub, the downstairs bedroom with its glaring lack of closet space. There were three more bedrooms upstairs.
“I missed houses like this when I lived in Phoenix,” Joslyn confided when she and Slade and the dog had gone full circle and returned to the living room.
Slade arched an eyebrow, asking “why” as effectively as if he’d spoken the word out loud.
“There are so many modern housing developments these days,” she explained, feeling oddly self-conscious again. “All the houses seem to be built to the same general plan, of the same materials, and they look pretty much alike. Places like this, well, they’re unique—they have character and personality.”
“I agree,” Slade said.
“You have a stepdaughter?” The question just popped right out of Joslyn’s mouth, without her intending to ask it. It was weird the way her mind leapfrogged all over the place when she was with Slade.
She saw a gleam of pride in his eyes. “Yes. Her name is Shea and she’s sixteen, going on forty-five.”
“Kendra mentioned that you had a wife,” Joslyn said. Keep digging yourself in deeper and deeper, advised the voice in her mind. Why don’t you just bump his hip with yours and ask him if he’s looking for a good time?
“Past tense—I used to be married. Layne and I have been divorced for a while now.” Without touching her, he somehow managed to steer her toward the front door.
She missed the strength of his hand curved loosely around hers.
“Oh,” Joslyn said, glad he couldn’t see how happy she was to have his marital status clarified.
That didn’t preclude a girlfriend, though.
“You?” he asked, as they stepped out onto the porch. He busied himself locking up again, while Jasper sniffed around in the grass.
“Single,” Joslyn told him. “I’ve never had the time to fall in love.”
He rested a hand lightly at the small of her back as they descended the rickety porch steps. “It takes time?” he teased. “I’ve always thought of it as something sudden, like getting struck by lightning.”
She smiled at that, incredibly nervous though she was.
They reached the truck, and he opened her door for her, simultaneously whistling for the dog.
“Well, yes,” Joslyn went on, as though there had been no gap in the conversation. “It takes time. You have to go out, circulate, meet new people, take chances. I was always too busy working.”
Or too much of a coward to risk a broken heart.
Slade didn’t move; he just stood there looking at her for a long moment, one hand on the door’s edge, while Jasper trotted toward them, tongue lolling. She would have sworn the man was about to say something, but, in the end, he didn’t.
Instead, he loaded the dog into the back, secured the door and came around to get behind the wheel again.
They were back on the main road and well on their way toward town when he finally spoke again. “What kind of work kept you too busy to fall in love?” he a
sked in a tone that might have been described as conversational—if anyone but Slade Barlow had been doing the talking.
The man did not engage in idle chitchat. Joslyn had figured out that much. “I was a software designer,” she said. “Computer games, that sort of thing.”
He shifted the truck from second gear to third, and out of the corner of her eye, Joslyn saw the muscles bulge in his forearm. He’d rolled his sleeves up at some point.
“Impressive,” he said without looking at her.
Joslyn swallowed. It was just too easy to make the jump from admiring his tanned, well-formed arms to imagining what it would be like to be held in them. And more.
“Not really,” she answered, practically croaking out those two simple, innocuous words. “It’s a matter of learning computer languages and practicing them until you’re fluent.”
He spared her a sidelong glance. “Is that all?” he said. He spoke lightly, but behind those blue eyes, Joslyn had no doubt, the wheels were turning and the gears were grinding. “Must be interesting work.”
“It’s demanding, too,” Joslyn said with a nod of agreement. “There’s a lot of pressure to come up with the next big, new thing, while the last big, new thing is still on the drawing-board. So I guess I’m a little burned out.”
There, Sheriff Barlow. Chew on that for a while.
What he said in response surprised her. “Me, too,” he said, with a sigh. “I loved being sheriff once upon a time, but now I’d just as soon do something else.”
“Like what?” she asked, intrigued. And very glad that they were talking about his life now, instead of hers.
“Ranching,” he replied. Why use ten words when one would suffice?
“That’s a tough business these days,” Joslyn said. “Ranching, I mean.”
As if she knew one darned thing about the subject. She hadn’t ridden a horse in years, and, even when she had, she’d been a terrified fraud.
“Every business is tough these days,” Slade answered.
They were both quiet for a while as they rolled on toward town.
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