The Sheriff of Heartbreak County

by Kathleen Creighton

  Mary’s breath caught, and as the child moved reluctantly into the room, she felt the earth shudder under her feet. Thirty years fell away in an instant, and she found herself looking through a window into her own past-or was it a mirror? Except for the scars that puckered and crinkled the skin on the little girl’s neck and chin and one side of her face, Mary was gazing at herself…the child she had once been.

  Chapter 9

  “My daughter, Susan.”

  It was the sound of Roan’s voice, clipped and cool rather than his usual throaty rumble, that finally pulled Mary’s gaze away from the child. Throwing him a guilty glance, she saw that his mouth had tightened, and she realized he must have completely misinterpreted the look on her face, realized he must think it was the child’s scars that had made her go shocked and still. Dismayed, she caught a quick breath to steady herself and returned the little girl’s sulky glare with a smile.

  “Come on in here,” her father said impatiently. “This is Miss Mary. She’s not gonna bite you.”

  “Hi, Susan,” Mary said, putting out her hand, “I’m very glad to meet you. Your dad has told-”

  She was interrupted by the trilling of a cellular phone. Muttering under his breath, Roan snatched it from his belt and flipped it open. “Yeah.” He turned a shoulder to his audience of two, and then, after a brief pause, looked back at Mary, his eyes bright and intense. He gestured with the cell phone toward the salon’s back door. “I’m gonna have to…uh, I’ll just step outside for a minute, if that’s…”

  “Yes, sure,” Mary murmured, tearing her gaze from his daughter’s face…and those coppery braids, so much like her own, once. “Go ahead.”

  The sheriff vanished behind the swaying curtain, abandoning her to the company of his sullen and distrustful child. She listened to his footsteps thump through the storage room, and the outer door creak open, then click shut.

  There was a brief, vibrant silence, and then Susie Grace’s small scarred chin lifted a notch. “Go ahead and stare if you want to,” she said valiantly. “Everybody does. I don’t care.”

  Mary’s stomach gave a queer little lurch. “I wouldn’t do that, Susie Grace-it would be rude.”

  “Well,” Susie Grace returned with a shrug, “you were.”

  “I was looking at you. Because I just met you. That’s natural. But I think it’s natural that I would want to know what happened to give you those scars. Don’t you?”

  Susie Grace wrinkled her nose and eyed her skeptically. “Don’t you know?”

  “Maybe I heard something,” Mary said with an offhand shrug. “But I’d rather you told me.”

  The child cocked her head and did a sort of half pirouette, the way Mary had seen children do when they felt self-conscious. “I got burned in a fire. So did my Grampa Boyd. So did my mom, but she died.” She threw Mary a resentful look over her shoulder. “I suppose you’re going to feel sorry for me now. Or else try to be really nice to me, so my dad will like you.”

  Wow, Mary thought, and decided she might be forgiven a lie. “Actually, I don’t care whether your dad likes me or not,” she said with an airy toss of her head as she turned back to the work station she’d been setting up. “And why would I feel sorry for you? I was thinking what a lucky little girl you are.” She was startled to realize that last part, at least, wasn’t a lie.

  And she was pleased when, watching from under her lashes, she saw the little girl’s expressive features register first surprise and then uncertainty. “What do you mean?”

  Mary cleared her throat, which had grown unexpectedly tight. “Well, you’ve got a nice home, with a father and grampa who love and take care of you-I think that makes you very lucky.” She turned to study the little girl’s upturned face-drawn by curiosity, perhaps, she had cautiously crept close to her side. “Plus, you have gorgeous blue eyes, and I’ll bet you have a nice smile, too, when you want to use it.” Casually, she reached out to touch one coppery braid, then lifted and drew it over the child’s shoulder. “And, you have beautiful hair.”

  Susie Grace jerked her head, flipping the braid back over her shoulder. “I hate my hair.”

  Unperturbed, Mary laughed softly. “I used to have to wear my hair in pigtails when I was a little girl.”

  “You did?” Susie Grace was doing the suspicious, wrinkled-up-nose thing again.

  “Yeah-I hated them, too.”

  Susie Grace giggled, clapping a hand over her mouth and ducking her head the way little girls do when they share delicious secrets with each other, and Mary shivered inside with something she hadn’t felt in a very long time. Sheer delight.

  Roan wasn’t in the best of moods when he finished his call and returned the cell phone to his belt. The U.S. Marshal’s Office, apparently overwhelmed and in a state of reorganization due to some personnel shortages and recent scandals, still hadn’t been able to locate either a case file for Mary Owen, or the marshal assigned to her case. Never thrilled to be dealing with federal bureaucracy at the best of times, right now his inability to make any headway in solving the mystery of his murder suspect’s identity had him ready to spit bullets.

  He also wasn’t happy about the way that particular murder suspect had been occupying his mind of late…her face, those shimmering green-gold eyes coming into his thoughts in the dark of night when he lay alone in the bed he’d shared with Erin. It had been a long time since he’d shared his bed with a woman-any woman. He hoped that was all this was about. Guilt…the notion that he was betraying his wife. Lust…the natural awareness a man has for an attractive woman. Those he could handle.

  He for sure wasn’t happy, though, about the pain that had knifed through his belly this morning and turned his blood to ice and his heart to stone when he’d arrived at her house to pick her up and found her gone.

  All those things were on his mind as he made his way back through the storeroom, flicked aside the curtain and stepped into the powder-pink salon. All that, plus a niggling measure of guilt at having left his murder suspect to babysit Susie Grace, who Lord knew didn’t care for strangers at the best of times, and in the mood she was in this morning…

  He halted. His jaw went slack and that and every other intelligent thought flew right out of his head.

  Momentum had carried him several long strides into the salon before his brain registered what he was seeing: Susie Grace, his ornery tomboy daughter, sitting high in one of Mary’s chairs with a pink drape around her neck. She had her eyes all squinched up, closed tight, and most of what had been her long braids was lying in a copper-colored pile at Mary’s feet.

  He must have made some sound, because although she didn’t open her eyes, Susie Grace’s face lit up with a grin. “Hi, Dad.”

  He cleared his throat, stalling while he collected his wits-though his first attempt at speech didn’t show much evidence of success in that respect. “Uh…what’s goin’ on? What’ve you guys been up to?” The answer to which was pretty damned obvious, even to a man not much accustomed to the mysteries of beauty salons.

  “I’m getting my hair cut,” said Susie Grace.

  “I can see that,” said Roan, nodding. “How come your eyes are shut?”

  “Mary told me to keep them closed ’til she’s done. But it’s okay, ’cause I’m scared to look anyway.” She gave a theatrical shiver.

  Mary glanced at him, pushed her glasses up on the bridge of her nose and went on with what she was doing. Roan winced as he watched another wet hank of red hair tumble to the floor.

  “I’m giving her a layered cut,” Mary explained. “When it’s dry it’s going to feather around her face and neck, see?” She managed, with subtle motions of her hands and the scissors, to show him what she wouldn’t say aloud: And it will hide and soften the effect of the scars. “And,” she added, tilting Susie Grace’s head in order to reach a new spot, “it should be short enough so it won’t get in her way.”

  “Yeah, ’cause I don’t like hair in my face,” said Susie Grace, scrunching up her
face again in disgust.

  Mary laid the scissors aside and picked up a blow dryer. She turned it on and blew away the stray locks of hair that had fallen on Susie Grace’s face and on the shoulders of the pink drape. Then Roan watched, with emotions he couldn’t name quivering in his stomach, while hands that seemed almost magical tousled and fluffed and coaxed the damp strands that remained into soft shining waves that swung and floated…then settled like the petals of a flower against the puckered, silvery skin that marred his little girl’s cheek and neck.

  Mary turned off the dryer, laid it aside, then turned the chair to face the mirror. “Open your eyes, Susie Grace.”

  Roan held his breath. Susie Grace slowly opened her eyes. She looked at herself for what seemed like forever…with absolutely no expression on her face, in a silence so complete he wondered why they all couldn’t hear his heart pounding.

  Then she stuck out her lower lip. “I look like a girl.”

  “A very pretty girl,” Mary said softly.

  Susie Grace, being…well, Susie Grace, stubbornly shook her head. But her eyes were glowing, and her face…

  It was suddenly too much. Roan pivoted sharply away to hide the emotions that must have been visible on his face…coughed to ease the ache in his throat…rubbed at the back of his neck where it burned with the embarrassment of so much emotion.

  “Don’t you like it, Dad?”

  The doubt and disappointment in her voice tore at him. He didn’t know how he managed to come up with a smile before he turned back to her, but he did. “Yeah, peanut, of course I like it. You look real pretty. You look-” he had to cough again to get the words through his throat “-just like your mother.”

  He hurled one desperate look at Mary, then yanked his sunglasses out of his pocket and shoved them onto his face. Damned if he was going to let his murder suspect catch him with tears in his eyes.

  But where did he go from here? His shocked mind was casting wildly about for an answer to that when he was saved, literally, by the bell-the one on the salon’s front door. It jangled merrily as several high-school girls burst in, bringing with them the cool spring air and all the noise and laughter and brightness only a bunch of teenage girls can.

  They turned the volume down considerably when they saw the sheriff standing there.

  To put them at ease Roan nodded and smiled and said affably, “Mornin’, ladies.”

  Having got his feet back square on the ground again, he turned to his daughter and the woman who’d knocked them out from under him in the first place. He held out his hand to Susie Grace, who ignored it and hopped down from the chair without help, brushing at her face and shaking her head to feel the way her hair moved on her neck. Her eyes were shining like it was Christmas morning.

  “We’d best be getting on,” he said gruffly, before he could get choked up again. “Looks like Miss Mary needs to get to work.” He looked at her, glad he had the sunglasses to hide behind. “How much do I owe you?”

  She made a startled, distracted gesture. “Oh-just call it even for the gas.” A smile flickered, then quickly died. She didn’t have the benefit of dark glasses like he did; behind the transparent lenses her eyes seemed uncommonly bright.

  “We’re going horseback riding,” Susie Grace announced, oblivious to rampaging adult emotions. Roan saw her glance warily at the high-school girls, but at least she didn’t try to hide behind his legs, as she usually did. Instead, she reached for Mary’s hand and said shyly, “You could come with us.”

  He wasn’t surprised she didn’t answer. He thought she must be more than a little bit distracted, though, because she sort of strolled along beside them as they walked outside, letting Susie Grace lead her by the hand.

  So there they were-his daughter holding Mary’s hand on one side and his on the other-like one little happy family. He didn’t know what to feel about that picture-whether it made him happy, or angry, or sad, or just confused as hell.

  When they were outside in the alley, Susie Grace tried again, wheedling the way she did when she was trying to get her way and knew it wasn’t going to happen. “Come with us? Please?”

  Mary gave a little gurgle of a laugh. “Oh, honey, I can’t-I have a lot of other girls’ hair to fix today.” She shot Roan a look with more than laughter in her eyes, the kind of look that passes between a man and a woman when they share secret thoughts without saying a word-and he knew then she was remembering what she’d told him about her feelings about horses.

  And he didn’t know how to feel about that, either.

  “We’ll be back in time to take you home,” he said, bringing himself back to earth and a warning note into his tone.

  She nodded and wrapped her arms across her waist. Her smile was merely wry now. “No rush-I’m sure I’ll be here until late.”

  “Tomorrow’s Sunday,” Susie Grace said hopefully, looking from one grownup to the other and back again, fidgeting in the natural way of little kids, now that they were away from curious eyes. “Nobody works Sunday, right? You could come with us tomorrow! Right, Dad? Can she come?”

  “Well, I don’t-” Mary sucked in a breath and shot Roan a look of pure panic, and once again he knew right away what she was thinking.

  “Not horseback riding,” he assured her dryly. “Shopping.”

  “We’re going to the mall in Bozeman to buy me clothes ’cause I outgrowed all my old ones,” Susie Grace explained, hopping excitedly. “Can she come with us, Dad? Please?”

  Roan looked at Mary, and she looked back at him, and her eyes seemed to shimmer in the soft spring sunlight. The same sun touched her cheeks with a warm ivory glow, and her lips slowly parted and grew lush…and ripe, and he swore he could see a pulse beating in her long, slender throat. Standing right there in that alley he could feel his own pulse thumping low down in his belly, where a ball of heat had formed and was growing hotter and heavier by the second, making him feel scorched from his scalp to his toes.

  He for damn sure knew how he felt about that, and he was not so sure he was going to be able to handle it after all.

  Because what he felt was scared to death.

  “Don’t know when I’ve seen her so happy,” Roan said, narrowed eyes following his daughter’s progress through the food court tables on her way to the video arcade. He coughed and frowned at the coffee-flavored ice cream cone in his hand. “It was a nice thing you did, fixing her hair like that. Don’t know if I said thank you or not, but…thank you.”

  Mary smiled, the cool sweet miracle of pistachio almond ice cream lingering on her tongue. “No thanks necessary. Every girl needs to feel pretty.”

  He threw her a look, bright with a father’s anguish. “Yeah, I know. That’s why I…I mean, how can she-”

  Without thinking, she reached across the table to put her hand on his arm, and the sensation of warm wiry muscle beneath a soft cotton shirtsleeve sent a flash of tingling heat through her fingers and hand. It had already spread into every part of her before she could snatch the hand away, and she laid her palm against her chest in a vain effort to still the turmoil it had kindled there.

  “Roan, feeling pretty isn’t about what’s on the outside-it’s in here.” The quiver of emotion in her voice wasn’t only from the words, or the memories they recalled. “It doesn’t matter how pretty she is, if she doesn’t feel pretty…and vice versa, of course,” she finished in a more casual tone, when she saw he was studying her with bright and unreadable eyes.

  To avoid that scrutiny, she turned her attention to her ice cream cone, turning it to find the spot most in need of licking. But she found licking it only intensified her awareness of that keen blue gaze…

  Then, having taken care of all incipient drips, she didn’t know what to do with the cone. If she lowered it, which would be the natural thing to do, it would expose her lips, which all of a sudden felt ridiculously swollen, to his discerning gaze. She would feel…naked. And her lips were glazed, now, and sticky with the ice cream’s sweetness; yet lickin
g them while he watched seemed almost unbearably seductive. What if he thought…

  “Another way of sayin’ kids need to feel good about themselves.” He licked his cone unselfconsciously. Above it his eyes grew lazy and soft, as if behind the cone his mouth was smiling.

  Out of the blue it occurred to Mary what his deep rumbling drawl reminded her of. There’d always been something about it…the tone, the pitch…that set pleasure vibrations humming inside her. It was like Cat’s purring. His voice made her feel happy and warm and safe.

  “Yes,” she said, and smiled.

  Roan frowned at his ice cream cone to hide the fact that he felt like he’d just been bucked off a horse. Oh Lord, that smile…

  He thought it probably hadn’t occurred to her what she must look like when she did that. Or that she wasn’t supposed to be beautiful.

  “Well, shoot,” he said belligerently, “I think Susie’s pretty, even with her scars. I’ve told her, but I don’t think she believes me. She just tells me, ‘Oh, Dad…’”

  Mary nodded, and he watched her smile grow crooked. “That’s because everybody knows all dads are supposed to think their little girls are beautiful. It’s a question little girls ask their mothers: ‘Mommy, am I pretty?’” She studied her almost empty cone as if she’d lost her appetite for it. The sadness was in her eyes, now, too.

  “Did you ask yours?” He smiled at her, wanting to bring the lovely green light back into her eyes.

  She bit into her cone with a soft crunch and nodded. “Sooner or later we all do.”

  “And what did she say?”

  Her throat moved as if it was rocks she’d swallowed instead of a bite of sugar cookie ice cream cone. After a pause, looking past him she said in a voice without expression, “She told me the devil loves a pretty face. Then she told my father. He made me kneel on the church floor-I don’t know for how long…hours, I guess. Maybe all day. I remember the floor was hard…I remember my knees hurt, and my back. I remember being cold and hungry. I remember crying.”