by Jeannie Watt
“I just want to know about him.” Jeff was not wearing his cooperative face. “We’ll talk after you look him up, okay?”
His cousin exhaled loudly. “I take it this is on the Q.T.?”
“Yes. If you can’t do that, then—”
“I’ll do it. But only because I don’t want you getting into anything you shouldn’t.”
“Me, neither. How long?”
“I’ll get back to you tomorrow. I’m spending most of my day in the county,” he said, meaning he would not be back at the sheriff’s office until late. “I’ll let you know as soon as I have something.” He walked back to his truck muttering about pain-in-the-ass cousins and Zach went back to saddling his horse.
He didn’t know what would come of this, but the more information he had, the better he’d feel. His hope was that Tess was overreacting. Hell, the thought of being attacked, slashed...he couldn’t begin to imagine the terror she must have felt. She’d definitely been suffering from post-traumatic stress when she arrived in Barlow Ridge and probably still was.
Now the trick, once he knew what was going on, was to convince her she didn’t have to face these traumas alone.
* * *
“HEY, DAD?”
Zach looked up to find Darcy standing in the door of his office, dressed for school and carrying her quilting tote bag. “I know you don’t want us to go to Tess’s house, but I was wondering if she could come over here.”
Zach was glad he wasn’t drinking his coffee, because he might have choked on it.
He didn’t want the girls to know that he was seeing Tess, at least not until he was fairly certain they had a chance of building something together. There would be no women popping in and out of his girls’ lives, and he did not want them to think he was replacing their mom.
He also didn’t want to spend his life alone.
“Why?” he asked in a fairly normal voice.
“Because we miss her.” Zach believed her simple statement, but watching her face, his dad radar went up...there was something else going on.
Shit. What had she heard through the gossip mill?
“Well—”
“I don’t think she wants to be alone.” Darcy jumped in, interrupting his half-formed reply. “I mean, okay, she has something going on and asked us to stay away, but I don’t think she meant it.”
Zach blew out a breath. “Next time I see her I’ll talk to her about it.” Which would give him a little time to sort through this.
“Do you think that will be anytime soon?” Darcy asked a bit too innocently.
“I don’t know.” Zach met his daughter’s eyes in a conversation-ending way. She simply smiled at him.
“See you after school,” she said, leaving Zach with a lot to think about—as if he didn’t have enough already.
If only this was as simple as introducing a woman into his daughters’ lives. But no. He had to fall for a woman with some serious baggage. The solution, of course, was to either get rid of the baggage, or make sure it had no way of doing harm.
* * *
ZACH CAME OVER to her place around noon, as they’d planned yesterday, riding Roscoe. He tied the horse behind the lilac bush and knocked on the door. The dogs, who had gone to the door, did not bark.
“Hey,” he said to the dogs when he came inside. “No greeting. What’s up with you guys?”
“Maybe we’re all relaxing,” Tess suggested as Zach pulled her up against him for a kiss.
“Not to put you on edge again, but our secret might not be a secret.”
“You mean...” She pointed first to herself, then at him.
“Yes.”
“How?” she asked.
“Apparently someone saw my truck turn the wrong direction after the firemen’s meeting night before last.” He still wondered who’d spread the word. Jack Killian? He gossiped like an old lady and had been right behind Zach when he’d left the firehouse.
“Maybe you came by to drop off the lease check,” Tess suggested.
“At midnight.”
“It could happen.”
“I guess.” He took her by the hand and went over to the recliner, sitting down and pulling her onto his lap. Tess curled into him, debating the consequences. For herself, not many. She was no more visible as his lover than simply being the standoffish, rude lady in the old Anderson place. But Zach had more at stake.
“I imagine gossip travels fast here.”
“Let me put it this way...Beth Ann knew about you not accepting Melba’s casserole before school let out that day.”
Tess put a hand on his chest and pushed herself up until she could see his face. “Do you think the girls will hear?”
She did not like the look on his face. “I think they already have. At least I think Darcy has.”
Tess laid her head back against his chest as his arms closed around her. To be here in her house, midday, cuddled up against this guy who she was beginning to suspect she was falling in love with felt so perfect...or would have if she wasn’t worried about devastating his daughters.
“I don’t know what to say, Zach.”
He inhaled deeply, his chest rising beneath her cheek, and then falling again. “I think Darcy likes the idea, but I don’t know how to proceed with this.”
Tess lifted her head at that. “We’re not going to proceed beyond what we’re doing now, Zach. Not for a long time. This is good, or it would be if only you and me are involved and not the rest of the community.”
“So this is all you’ll ever want?” he asked in a low voice, those blue eyes drilling into her.
“I have to take this day-to-day, Zach. I can’t do it any other way until I have some answers about Eddie.” She ran the flat of her hand over her injured cheek.
“I understand,” he said in a low voice, pulling her back against him. “I wish I didn’t, but I do.”
But something had shifted. Tess could feel his tenseness. She closed her eyes, wishing things could be different. They’d made a deal for the here and now and that was what she had to stick to until she knew for certain she could handle it. She would not be the source of further disruption to this family.
“I need to get to work,” he finally said before pressing a kiss against her hair.
“Just stopped by for a cuddle?” she asked.
“You never know who’s watching,” he said.
The words sent a shiver through her, although she knew that wasn’t his intent.
“Is this worth it?” she asked quietly. “For you?”
For a minute she didn’t think he was going to answer, then he cupped her face between his hands and kissed her in a way that made her knees go weak.
“What do you think?” he asked when his hands dropped back to his sides.
Tess cleared her throat. “I think you’d better go back to work right now or you won’t be leaving for a while.”
* * *
BETH ANN DID not stop by to help the girls with their homework that night and Lizzie warned Zach to watch out for Tia because she was grumpy.
“Any idea why?” he asked Darcy after Lizzie went into the kitchen.
“Nope, but Liz is right. Tia has been kind of mean lately.”
Normally Zach left Beth Ann to her business and vice versa, but something had felt off between them over the past couple of days, so after dinner Zach left the girls loading the dishwasher and walked to his sister-in-law’s trailer. She ope
ned the door almost as soon as he knocked...an uncapped marker in one hand. He could see a poster she’d been working on lying on the table—no doubt another lame assignment.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“I came here to ask the same question.”
Beth Ann’s mouth tightened as she glanced over his head in the direction of the Anderson place and Zach knew.
“Tess.”
“It’s none of my business, Zach. I mean if you want to...date...it’s been three years. You should.”
She didn’t mean a single word of it. “If you’re worried about the girls,” he said, “I’m not going to do anything to upset them.”
“How can you not upset them, Zach? I mean, this woman is not hanging around this valley for any longer than she has to.”
“You don’t know that,” he said quietly.
“I know she doesn’t belong here!”
“She got a rough start here.”
“A rough start? Come on, Zach! She kicked Melba Morrison off her property.”
“Maybe she had reason.”
“To send a grandma packing. With her casserole.”
“Is this about Karen?” he asked.
Beth Ann dropped her chin for a moment. When she raised it again, he could see tears glistening, but they didn’t fall. She shook back her hair and said, “I don’t expect you to be celibate, Zach.”
“Fair enough. But you want to okay who I date?”
“I want my nieces’ lives to be stable.”
“So do I. It’s my top priority.” And she knew that. Zach had a sudden unsettling thought. “What is this really about, Beth Ann?”
“This is about me not wanting to lose out on my nieces’ childhood. I need to be here, for Karen’s sake. And for mine.”
“Why wouldn’t you be here?” Zach asked.
“Because if you do get serious about someone, then she is not going to want her former sister-in-law living a stone’s throw away from her marital bed.” Beth Ann snapped her mouth shut then half turned away, letting out a shaky breath, telling Zach how much she already regretted blurting out her feelings.
“Beth Ann...” He reached out to touch her shoulder. The muscles were tense beneath his fingers. “That day is probably a long way away.”
“Maybe it is, and maybe it isn’t,” she said.
“You will always have a place here.”
“I know,” she said quietly. “But will I feel welcome?”
* * *
JEFF TOOK HIS sweet time getting back to Zach, although he assured him it was because it’d taken him a while to hear back from his sources, which surprised Zach, who’d assumed he’d simply run the guy through the National Crime Investigation database.
“This Napier guy is bad news,” Jeff said over the phone. “Major drug dealer. Arrested in both Nevada and California. Did time in both places on various charges. The last stretch was for dealing, extortion, assault with a deadly weapon—two counts. One of the weapons was a car.”
“Great,” Zach said, his stomach knotting.
“The good news is that he’s flirting with the three-strikes law. If they put him away again, he may never get out.”
“Good to know.” Although if the asshole did what he wanted to do—hurt Tess—then that didn’t do either of them a lot of good.
“He’s a model parolee,” Jeff said with a touch of irony.
“How’d you get all this? NCIC?”
“I called a cop buddy in Los Angeles. That’s what took me so long getting back to you.” There was a brief silence and then he said, “This lady of yours...do you know her background?”
Zach hoped he did. “Maybe.”
That was all the encouragement Jeff needed to fill Zach in on who Tess was and what had happened to her. His story matched Tess’s exactly, the only additional information being her name. Her real name—Terese Olan.
“How easy was it to get that information?” Zach asked, very afraid that Tess might be easier to find than she had hoped.
“Napier got called in for questioning concerning an assault on his former stepdaughter. A model whose face was slashed. It wasn’t hard to put it all together.” Jeff let out a low snort. “No wonder she was so jumpy when she moved to Barlow Ridge.”
“Nobody can know about this, Jeff.”
“Give me a break,” his cousin replied harshly. “I have no reason to tell anyone anything. It’s her secret. And yours.”
“Dad!” Emma came flying into the room clutching a flyer with a 4-H emblem in one corner and Zach held up a hand to quiet her. She skidded to a stop, still smiling widely.
“I have to go. Thanks, Jeff. I owe you.”
“No problem. But, Zach?”
“Yeah?”
“This guy’s a real scrote, but there’s nothing, not one thing, connecting this guy to Tess’s assault. The official case report concluded that it was a random attack.”
“Thanks again,” Zach said. “Talk to you later.” He’d barely hung up the phone when Emma slapped the paper onto his desk in front of him.
“I have my horse camp list!” she announced.
“Let’s take a look,” Zach said.
After helping Emma go over the checklist of what she had to find/purchase/procure for a successful week at horse camp, which was almost two months away, Zach sat back in his office chair and pulled the whiskey out of the file drawer. After making sure there were no children lurking in the hallway, he took a swig straight from the bottle. It burned all the way down to his stomach. And then he took another. Half an hour later, while the girls were watching TV, he told Darcy he was going to check cattle and to call Beth Ann for any emergencies. She gave him a distracted nod, being deeply involved in the animated adventures of some kind of undersea kingdom. Emma and Lizzie didn’t even look up.
Satisfied that his girls were occupied for the next hour at least, he went outside, climbed onto the four-wheeler and went to check cattle. At Tess’s house.
* * *
TESS AND THE dogs recognized the sound of Zach’s four-wheeler, but while the dogs lazily ambled toward the door, Tess crossed the room quickly. He’d never stopped by at this time before. It’d always been when the girls were at school, except for two nights ago, when he’d knocked on her door close to midnight—and put them squarely on the gossip radar.
When she answered the door, she could see by the intense look on Zach’s face that something was wrong. But before she could ask, he took her face in his hands and kissed her.
Tess kissed him back, deeply, and soon there was a trail of clothing, leading from the living room, up the stairs to her bedroom. But when they got to the bedroom, Zach did not lay her down as usual. Instead he boosted her up by her bottom and she automatically wrapped her legs around him, surprised that he could lift her so easily. But this was a man she’d once seen tackle a man-size calf and bring it down. He set her butt on top of the single bureau and then slowly, oh, so slowly, impaled her on his erection, his eyes locked on hers.
Tess’s breath caught as he buried himself fully within her, and then he started moving, thrusting hard and deep in a slow rhythm as Tess wrapped her legs around him even tighter. Tess clung to him as her head fell back and she gasped for breath.
It was only a matter of minutes until Tess all but exploded. Zach gave a few more thrusts before burying himself to the hilt as he emptied himself inside her. For a moment they held then Tess’s forehead came down to rest on Zach sweat-slicked shoulde
r.
“Well,” she said as he slowly stepped back a few minutes later. “I kind of like how you say hello.”
He smiled then started gathering his clothes, pulling them on as he went. Tess did the same, following him down the stairs.
“I didn’t come here just for a quickie,” he said after he’d zipped his jeans.
“You know,” Tess said, shrugging her black T-shirt over her head, “I kind of suspected that.” The smile she wore faded. “Why are you here?”
“I want to make a few things clear, so you know where I’m coming from.”
“Okay...” Her stomach tightened.
“I sincerely hope your past does not come back to haunt you, but if it does, I’ll be there for you.”
“I know.” So far he hadn’t said anything he hadn’t said before.
“I care about you, Tess. The more time I spend with you, the more I care.”
That one was new. Tess felt herself start to withdraw, but before she could get the shutters up, he was there, in front of her, tipping her chin up.
“I will not push you. I will not ask for anything you cannot give. But it’s only right that you know how I feel. If you need to back off because of it, that’s something I’ll have to deal with.” Tess simply stared at him, eyes wide, not certain what to say. “But even if you do back off, I want you to promise that you’ll call me if you ever need any kind of help. With anything.”
“Clogged drain?”
It was a poor joke, one meant to give her a little breathing room. It didn’t work. There was a glint in Zach’s eyes as he said, “I’m an excellent plumber. And you know what I mean.”
Tess felt her skin warm. Again. “I do know what you mean.” It was as close to a promise as she could get at this point and Zach seemed satisfied. Or, if not satisfied, smart enough not to push.
“I have to get back to the ranch,” he said, dropping a kiss onto her lips.
“I know.” And it suprised her how much she wanted him to stay.
After Zach had gone, she sat in her chair, dangling her sewing shears from one hand, watching as the shiny stainless steel caught the light of the late-afternoon sun.