Lana's Lawman

by Karen Leabo

  “They’ll wait five minutes.” He strained his facial muscles into a smile, all the while wondering why he was making this effort. It wasn’t like he owed her anything.

  He fully expected a cool rebuff. Instead, she smiled back, and his heart did a little somersault. “All right,” she said, her teeth worrying her lower lip in an uncalculated gesture of nerves. “I’ll wait for you here.”

  Sloan paced nervously as he directed traffic, feeling alternately anxious and foolish for making anything out of Lana’s need for a ride. What was he, a masochist? He’d sworn he would never let his hormones override his common sense again, and so far he’d managed to keep that promise. But his hormones were sneaky bastards. He’d forgotten just how willful they could be.

  Lana sat in the front seat this time. She wasn’t quite sure what to make of the man sitting next to her. He hadn’t seemed any too friendly on their trip to the church. Kind of bristly, actually. Then why had he gone out of his way to offer her another ride? And should she have accepted?

  The past year she’d fought hard for her independence. When she’d first announced to Bart that she was leaving, she’d been seized with second thoughts every hour or so. She’d never supported herself, much less herself and a little boy. What skills did she have? Every time an appliance went on the fritz or her car needed work, she’d longed for a man to help her with all those little things.

  But Callie and Millicent assisted her through her crises large and small. Somewhere along the line she learned that she could do things for herself—argue about car repairs, juggle the bills, make decisions about her son’s discipline. She got skillful at budgeting, stretching her paycheck to cover church camp and an occasional new outfit for herself. And somewhere along the line she stopped yearning for a man to rely on for support and companionship. She stopped calling Bart and enduring his belittling comments about her inadequacies just to find out how to flip a breaker switch or change an A/C filter.

  She learned to value her own company above anyone else’s.

  The last thing she needed was a new man in her life. She would do well to remember that, no matter how her body was reacting to the virile male sitting beside her, his powerful-looking muscles straining the sleeves of the crisp blue policeman’s uniform, his dark hair curled into unruliness by the damp weather.

  “So, how’d you end up as a cop?” Lana asked, genuinely curious. Sloan Bennett would have been voted Most Likely to End Up in the Pen by their senior class if there had been such a category.

  Sloan visibly tensed, and she wondered if she’d somehow managed to offend him once again. But then he seemed to relax, and a brief smile lifted one corner of his mouth. “I guess I owe it all to Nicole Johnson.”

  Lana felt a sudden tension herself. She certainly hadn’t meant to get into a discussion about her. “You mean the police chief’s daughter?” she asked casually.

  “That’s the one. We were … close friends for a while. I got to know her father. He … straightened me out, convinced me to try life on the right side of the law.” The headlights of oncoming cars revealed a faraway look in Sloan’s eyes, an expression of wry amusement on his face.

  So, the rumors had been true. Sloan and Nicole had been an item, even though she was ten years his senior. Lana had grabbed on to that bit of gossip as evidence that Sloan really wasn’t right for her if he could jump right into Nicole’s arms, Nicole’s bed, after their breakup. Nicole was fast and vastly inappropriate for a boy Sloan’s age. Why had Lana ever imagined he would wait around until she was ready?

  “What did Captain Johnson do?”

  “Well, first he threatened to fill my butt full of buckshot when he caught me with his daughter. But instead of skulking off, I stood up to him. Something snapped in me, I guess. Nicole and I hadn’t done anything wrong, and I was determined that I was going to make her father understand.”

  “And did he?” Lana asked.

  “After I talked until my voice wore out. Nicole put in a few good words for me too. So instead of riding me out of town on a rail, he gave me a job. I think he was hoping to prove I was the no-account hood he’d labeled me. But I was determined he wasn’t going to defeat me.”

  “What sort of job was it?”

  “Construction. I sweated more that summer than I ever have in my life, helping Johnson build his lake house. He let me stay in a little trailer on his property too, so I could get away from home.”

  Lana shuddered, remembering the awful place he’d grown up, the parents who cared more about beer and cigarettes than their own kid.

  “By the end of the summer I had some skills and a letter of recommendation. Johnson told me to shake the dust of Destiny off my boots and find opportunity elsewhere, and I did.”

  “And what about Nicole?” Lana couldn’t help asking.

  Sloan smiled slyly. “Johnson kept me so busy and so exhausted, my little fling with Nicole died a natural death.” He shrugged. “It was all very amicable. We’re still friends.”

  Lana digested this. What was that unpleasant feeling in the pit of her stomach? Surely not jealousy. Surely not after all these years.

  TWO

  Sloan dropped Lana off at the front door of the hotel. She wouldn’t have minded walking with him from the parking lot. The rain had stopped completely. But he hadn’t shown any interest in her beyond providing polite assistance, so she extended her thanks—again—and got out.

  For the next couple of hours she was tied up with posing for photos and standing in the receiving line. But standing next to Callie in the line, she did manage a few discreet words with the bride.

  “Callie Calloway Sanger, you’ve been holding out on me,” she whispered out of the side of her mouth even as she managed to smile and shake hands with yet another of Callie’s relatives. “Why didn’t you tell me you were friends with Sloan Bennett?”

  “Not friends, exactly,” Callie whispered back with a sly smile. “Associates. You remember him, then?”

  “Who wouldn’t?”

  “Interested?” She hugged an older man with an unlit cigar clenched in his teeth. “Oh, Uncle George, so happy you could make it.”

  “He’s gorgeous,” Lana whispered as she shook hands with Uncle George.

  “And single. Aunt Marian! You look great.”

  A sudden memory flashed through Lana’s mind. Theodora had predicted that she would marry a cop. Lana had never put a whole lot of stock in what that long-ago fortune-teller had said, but so many of her predictions had come true over the years. Callie had become a reporter, and here she was marrying her cowboy. Millicent had buried her husband. Lana’s own husband had “roved.”

  She still kept that cheap tin cop’s badge, a souvenir from Theodora, in her jewelry box.

  “I’m not ready to date anyone seriously,” Lana said when there was a lull in the receiving line.

  “Who said it had to be serious? Weren’t you complaining a few weeks ago that you were tired of being dateless?”

  Lana nodded, but she wasn’t sure she could date Sloan on a casual basis, even if he was interested. Maybe she wasn’t the uncontrolled teenager she’d been ten years before, but her heart beat like a sledgehammer every time she laid eyes on him. That wasn’t how a “casual” relationship normally started.

  She didn’t see him at all during the rest of the reception. She danced halfheartedly with Callie’s cousin, who tried to sell her an insurance policy. She watched from the sidelines as Nicole Johnson caught Callie’s bouquet, earning a few catcalls and wolf whistles. She waved with a tear in her eye as the couple left in a flurry of birdseed for their honeymoon.

  Before long, Lana was alone again. Even Rob had deserted her when Millicent’s middle child, Will, had asked him to sleep over. She was about to put her quarter in the pay phone, when she heard a familiar voice behind her.

  “Still stranded?”

  She nearly jumped out of her pumps. “Not as long as I have twenty-five cents to call a cab,” she said. Though
she knew he hadn’t meant anything by it, it rubbed her the wrong way when anyone, even Sloan Bennett, intimated that she couldn’t take care of herself.

  “Don’t waste a perfectly good quarter; I can take you home. Anyway, shouldn’t I leave with the girl I came with? Isn’t that what Miss Manners would recommend?”

  “Look, you’ve performed duty above and beyond,” Lana said with deliberate detachment, “and I’m grateful, but I can take it from here.” She turned her back to him and dropped the quarter into the phone.

  A tanned hand reached in front of her and hit the release on the phone. “Hey, Lana, I seem to remember you once had a sense of humor.” His voice was gentle, coaxing. Not terse, like earlier.

  His nearness confounded her. It would have been a lot easier to argue with him. The last thing she wanted was to reminisce. “I don’t have as much to laugh about these days.”

  “But that’s when you need to laugh the most. What’s so wrong with your life? I remember you as the prettiest, most popular girl in high school.”

  She leaned against the wall and folded her arms. “You thought I was rich, pampered, spoiled, and snobby. A real Southern belle.” He’d used those very words the day they’d broken up. Like she thought she was too good for him. It wasn’t that at all, but she hadn’t known how to explain. A show of anger had been so much easier.

  She knew now that she’d handled things all wrong back in high school, but there was no way to undo it. They would have to forget it, get past it, if this conversation was going one word further.

  “Okay, so prove me wrong,” he challenged. “Let a boy from the wrong side of the tracks take you home—in full view of whoever might be watching.” He smiled then, not just a wry twist of his lips, but a full-blown dazzler that revealed his straight white teeth and a dimple at the right corner of his mouth.

  Lord, the smile was even more compelling than his brooding bad-boy look. And he smelled good, as fresh as the rain-washed air but somehow more masculine, more distinct. She was powerless to resist his will, and that worried her.

  But not enough.

  “All right.” She reclaimed her quarter and tucked it into her pocketbook. “But no more assumptions. When you see where I live, you’ll swallow any notions you might have about me being pampered, spoiled, or rich.”

  Sloan couldn’t say she hadn’t warned him, but he was still surprised by the neighborhood where Lana lived. The tiny frame houses with their detached garages and cracked driveways screamed “working class.”

  Not that there was anything wrong with that. Sloan’s own neighborhood wasn’t that much snazzier. It was just that he expected Lana Gaston, former wife of a prominent banker’s son-slash-attorney, would have set herself up somewhere classier.

  “It’s the next house on the right,” Lana said, “the one with the green shutters.”

  “I see it.” Now he was really surprised. Lana’s was the smallest house on the block—and the shabbiest. It wasn’t a hovel, certainly, but it needed new paint. And some yardwork. And the garage roof was sagging so drastically that he wondered if she could get her Mercedes in there at all. He pulled into the driveway.

  “I appreciate your help, I really do,” Lana said almost grudgingly.

  “No charge. Your car is at Cartwright’s Garage, by the way. You know where that is? It’s on—”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Your Benz. I called a tow truck for you. Cartwright’s a good mechanic.”

  She stared at him, her mouth hanging open.

  “You’ll have to call him tomorrow so you can get an estimate on the damage.”

  “I … I have my own mechanic.”

  “I see.” He hadn’t thought of that. But he supposed that most people who drove high-performance cars, even older ones, were picky about who worked on them. “Cartwright does a lot of work on German and Japanese cars. Charges a fair price too. You won’t get ripped off.”

  “Um, okay.” She still appeared oddly unsettled. “I’ll call him tomorrow, I guess. He’s in the phone book?”

  “Yeah. Cartwright’s, on West Brookshire. Tomorrow’s Sunday, but he’ll be there.”

  She nodded and started to reach for the door handle.

  “Lana. Your garage roof is sagging pretty badly.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m off tomorrow. If you want, I could bring over my tools—”

  “I don’t want.” The sharpness of her reaction silenced him in a hurry. “Look, I’m well aware of the problem with the roof. I’ve already gotten an estimate and I’m saving up to have it fixed.”

  Sloan tipped his head back and studied her. He could have accepted her burst of temper as a clear sign to back off, that she didn’t want him around under any circumstances. She wasn’t interested. But somehow he knew it wasn’t that. The sexual bond they’d formed ten years before was still there, like a thin silver cord pulling them toward each other.

  Lana was fighting it, but not because she wasn’t attracted. Something else was going on.

  “How long before you can fix it?”

  “You mean, when will I have the money?” She stared in disbelief once again. “Not that it’s any of your business, but I was planning to have the repairs done next month.”

  “But that roof might be dangerous. I could fix it for free.”

  “Sloan,” she said, stretching his name out to three syllables, “I can take care of my own home repairs, thank you very much. And I can make my own arrangements to have my car towed and fixed. I’ve had my fill of people treating me like a total incompetent. I’m a big girl.”

  Not a very big girl, he caught himself thinking. Probably didn’t top five foot two. The crown of her head would tuck right under his chin, and her lush curves would fit against—

  “Did you hear me?”

  “Yeah.” He shrugged and corralled his wayward thoughts. “Thought I could be helpful. Sorry.”

  His apology had been terse and not very sincere, but she softened a fraction anyway. “You’ve been helpful. I don’t mean to sound ungrateful. But I can take it from here, okay?”

  He nodded. “Sure thing.” It was on the tip of his tongue to ask her if it would be against her principles if he came over without his tools. To visit. To take her and her son to a movie. Or bring over a bucket of fried chicken.

  But he stopped himself, feeling suddenly like that troublemaking kid from the wrong side of town he’d once been. Maybe Lana wasn’t wealthy anymore. Maybe she’d left her most-popular-girl-cheerleader days behind. But he couldn’t escape the feeling that she lived on a different plane than he did.

  That he’d never be good enough.

  Stupid, stupid, stupid. He hadn’t suffered from low self-esteem in a very long time, not since that summer.

  Now Lana, with her haughty little speech, had chipped away at a confidence he’d foolishly assumed was inviolate.

  This time when she reached for the door, he let her go. He watched her swish her green-velvet way to the front door, waited until he was sure she was safe inside. Then he backed out of her driveway with a deliberate screech of tires.

  “C’mon, Bennett,” he said aloud. “Get real. Things have changed, but they haven’t changed that much.”

  Lana moped around for the next couple of days, not sure why. Post-best-friend’s-wedding blues, maybe, she told herself. Then why did her thoughts return so often to Sloan Bennett? She re-created in her mind every word of the conversations they’d shared the night of Callie’s wedding. She dissected them to death, theorized, relived her feelings of that night.

  She understood why he’d been so stiff-jawed with her at first. She hadn’t exactly “done him right” in high school. But she had to wonder why later he’d gone out of his way to help her.

  There hadn’t been anything overtly flirtatious in his manner. Maybe he’d simply wanted to prove that he didn’t hold a grudge, that the past didn’t really matter because they’d been just a couple of kids.

  Oh, but they
’d done things kids weren’t supposed to do, she reminded herself. Her stomach tightened at the memory of what his touch could do to her.

  Some of the attraction remained, she acknowledged as she dropped a handful of spaghetti into boiling water. She couldn’t deny that she was still drawn to, fascinated by him. At the same time she was worried, even scared, by the power of that draw. Maybe he’d been thrown off by it too.

  But surely not by much. He seemed so darn … in control. And something in her was oh-so-tempted to simply go limp and let him take control of her.

  But, as she’d told him, she’d had enough of surrendering her life to someone else. She was the boss now, and she was determined to keep it that way. Let a man like Sloan into her life—even innocently, like allowing him to repair the garage roof—and before she knew it her every decision would be yanked out of her hands.

  In high school that loss of control she’d felt around Sloan had been heady, exciting at first. But then he’d started to frighten her. Not that he was anything but kind and gentle with her. But with the rest of the world … He’d been so angry. And she’d felt on the verge of total surrender, not just her body but her soul. Like maybe her whole identity could be sucked up inside his and she would never be herself again.

  That’s why she’d bolted. But she hadn’t been able to explain it to him. He’d accused her of thinking she was too good for him. And she’d tearfully agreed, because the truth was so elusive and complicated.

  She’d put it behind her, and for years she’d convinced herself she’d done the right thing. They hadn’t been right for each other then, and there was no reason to think things were any different now, despite the changes they’d both undergone.

  So why couldn’t she stop thinking about him?

  Lana looked out the window. Dusk was settling on her overgrown backyard, and she hadn’t heard a peep out of Rob since he’d gone outside with his football a couple of hours earlier. She adjusted the heat on the stove and walked to the front door.

  A gust of cool autumn air hit her as she opened the door. “Rob?” she called out.