The Lawman Lassoes A Family (Conard County: The Next Generation Book 24) (Contemporary Romance)

by Rachel Lee

  Startled, Vicki looked at Dan, who just shrugged, as if he didn’t get it, either. But there was a warm light in his eyes, and his gaze seemed to pass over her appreciatively. She was startled again by the strong tug of attraction she felt toward him, but this time didn’t evade it. She trusted him now not to get out of line, and it did her ego some good to know the attraction wasn’t one-sided. She also liked him far better in jeans and a fleece shirt than in his uniform.

  Outside on the street, this time with a royal-blue hoodie to ward of the evening chill, Vicki asked, “What did she mean by that?”

  “You’ll have to ask her,” Dan answered. “I’m just following orders.”

  Vicki might have taken umbrage, except that he sounded so amused. She had to laugh. “Is that what we’re doing?”

  “So it appears. A woman tells me to get out of her house and take a hike, I go.”

  Vicki laughed even harder. “It almost sounded like that.”

  “Maybe Lena needs some quiet after today. We sure made enough of a ruckus.”

  “But you were helping us out.”

  “Doesn’t mean the helpers don’t wear out the helpee.”

  “True.” A shadow seemed to pass through Vicki, saddening her somehow and leaving her feeling a little cold inside. “Dan?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Do you know why I moved here?”

  “Are you asking me or do you want to tell me?”

  She hesitated. “I don’t want to offend you. And I wondered how much Lena told you. Heck, I’m not even sure how much I told Lena.”

  “All she told me was that she’d been asking you to come, and that you started to feel a need to move on. Beyond that, I’m in the dark.”

  “Okay.”

  They walked in silence. He didn’t press her, and Vicki was grateful for that. But he also didn’t give her the feeling that he didn’t care. She could feel his attention as surely as if he wore a sign, but he wasn’t going to push her. Hal would have pushed her. Hal had hated it when he’d sensed she was thinking about something but wasn’t sharing it. For the first time she realized how much that had annoyed her.

  “Sometimes,” she said, “I just need to think things through on my own.”

  “Understandable.” They had reached the park. “Do you want to warm a bench for a while, or keep walking?”

  “The walking feels good.” So they kept on. Twilight was beginning to fade into night, and a gentle breeze whispered in the trees.

  “Hal always wanted to know what I thinking,” she said. “And sometimes I just wasn’t ready to talk about it. I wasn’t sure what I was feeling, wasn’t sure where it was going, it was just something working around in my head, you know? A lot of the time it was about some child in one of my classes, but sometimes it was about other things. Regardless, I get quiet when I’m working something through.”

  “And he didn’t like that.”

  “Not at all.”

  “Well, it’s not my place to offer an opinion on that.”

  “Oh, go ahead.”

  Dan laughed quietly. “I’ve found it’s best to keep my thoughts to myself until I understand them.”

  She halted sharply and looked at him. Overhead, a streetlight winked on, making him look strange, yet still familiar. “Exactly!”

  His smile widened. “A meeting of minds?”

  “Oh, yeah. Hal wasn’t like that. Well, not exactly. When something from work really troubled him, he could turn into a clam. I’d know it only from the way he acted, and if I got any details it was from the newspaper. He was trying to protect me, I guess. But he could clam up.”

  “And you never could?”

  “He didn’t like it.”

  “So feel free to be a clam with me. I can take it.”

  She bet he could. She wrapped her arms around herself. “So I’m going to tell you something, and I don’t want you to think it’s in any way about you, because it’s not.”

  He paused before responding. “Maybe we should have taken one of those benches.” His tone conveyed humor.

  “Oh, cut it out,” she said, a tremor of laughter in her voice. “It’s not about you. It’s about a cop thing.”

  “Well, I’m a cop.”

  “Not in the way I’m going to talk about.”

  “Have at it, then.”

  But still she hesitated. When she thought about the subject, it felt one way, but she suspected she was going to sound like an ungrateful witch when she said it out loud. Steeling herself, she took the leap.

  “I left Austin because I was feeling smothered.”

  He waited, letting her find her own way through. They approached the downtown area, but he waved his hand and they turned along another residential street. A Conard City police car started rolling slowly by, then came to a halt beside them. “Hey, Dan,” said a voice from inside.

  “How’s it going, Jake?” Dan asked, pausing to face the car.

  “Boring. As usual. Even the kids are behaving tonight.”

  “Vicki Templeton, this is Jake Madison, our chief of police.”

  “Nice to meet you.”

  “I’d heard you moved to town,” the chief said. “I’d have helped except I’m holding down two jobs.”

  “Jake ranches, too,” Dan explained.

  “That’s a lot to do,” Vicki remarked.

  “Keeps me out of trouble. You two enjoy your walk. Vicki, I’ll tell my wife, Nora, to give you a call sometime. Or you can stop in the library and meet her. She works there three days a week. See you around.”

  Then the vehicle continued down the street.

  Vicki didn’t move for a minute. “Was that a cop thing?” she asked finally.

  “What? Suggesting you meet his wife?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t know. I doubt it. Why?”

  God, this was going to sound awful. Maybe she shouldn’t even bring it up. But then Dan astonished her. Reaching out, he gripped her hand gently and tugged until she started walking with him again. The warmth of his touch triggered an instant heat deep within her, and for a few moments she wanted to pull herself out of her thoughts and take a different direction.

  Avoid the whole thing.

  “You wanna tell me about it?”

  Then it struck her that she needed to test her reaction against someone like Dan. Someone who could understand and maybe explain, and maybe tell her whether it would be the same here, or if that friendly little conversation had been just that, a friendly little conversation.

  “I felt smothered back home.” She repeated the claim, this time more vehemently.

  “By what?”

  “By Hal’s colleagues and their families. Oh, God, I sound awful. It’s just that... I never had a weekend to myself. My teacher friends gave me more space, but Hal’s friends...it was like they were afraid that if I had to deal with a weekend alone, I might do something drastic.”

  Dan tightened his hold on her hand. “That’s how they made you feel?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, man. Maybe they went a little overboard.”

  “More than a little. I understand the point of the blue wall, and I was grateful, especially at first. But then it was as if I had to keep dancing or I’d have one of the women on my doorstep, wondering if I was all right. Oh, this is so hard to explain. But eventually, I got to thinking that I’d never be able to move on if I didn’t move away. I was surrounded by so much caring I felt like I couldn’t breathe. And it sounds just awful to say it.”

  She waited for his reaction, and glanced at him repeatedly, trying to read some reaction on his face. But as she had noted before, Dan’s face revealed very little unless he chose to let it. Right now it was a mask, not stony, just unrevealing.

  “After Callie died,” he said, “I got the same sort of treatment. I appreciated it. Sometimes I wonder what I would have done during those last few months of her life if I hadn’t had that support. It was different for me because we knew Callie was
dying. And maybe because I’m a guy and people felt they couldn’t push too hard. I don’t know. The thing that irritated me most was that afterward, nobody seemed to want to talk about her. But we mentioned that last time we took a walk. I needed to talk about her, Vicki.”

  “Of course you did. I needed to talk about Hal. I still do sometimes.”

  “So, I kind of get it. I felt silenced. You felt smothered. And all of it with the best intentions in the world.”

  She nodded. “Exactly. The best intentions. Which makes it hard to say to somebody ‘I don’t want to come to your barbecue this weekend because I really need some time alone.’”

  “Yeah.”

  Dan turned at another corner, and Vicki realized they were wandering even farther from Lena’s. Good, because she wasn’t ready to head back. She needed this break, and oddly, Dan’s presence was giving her something, letting her lance an old emotional sore.

  “Maybe I’m being unfair,” she said after a bit.

  “I don’t think fairness applies to how we feel.”

  “No, of course it doesn’t. But they are all good people, Dan. It’s just that I started to feel as if I was always going to be Hal’s widow. The person everyone felt an obligation to look after, but...oh, I don’t know. Of course I’m Hal’s widow. But I’m other things, too, and those other things were vanishing under the weight of being Hal’s widow. I can’t explain it any better than that.”

  “Frozen in time,” he remarked.

  “Or frozen in a role.” She had certainly begun to feel that she’d have no other future, the way things were going. And she was equally positive no one had meant to make her feel that way. “I guess I should have just told them, instead of running away. Stood up to it. At the very least I wouldn’t have put Krystal through all this.”

  “Krystal’s going to be fine. At her age, you’re the major stability in her life. If she were older, it might be different.”

  Vicki thought about that and decided at least to some extent he was right. Even at Krys’s preschool the kids had been changing constantly. She hadn’t had one friend who’d remained for an entire year. Young families moving up tended to move a lot. Or look for a more convenient day care, or whatever. Among Hal’s friends and Vicki’s teacher friends, there had been no other girls Krystal’s age. Odd, but there it was.

  So maybe here in this town, where change came slowly, Krys could find that kind of stability, as well. Certainly she and Peggy had become best buds. Whether that would last, who knew, but the start had been made.

  Then there was Vicki herself. This was an odd kind of place to come make a new life, but she loved Lena, and the chance to move in with her had proved impossible to resist. She’d applied for her state teaching license and was sure she could find a job eventually, at some level, as a teacher around here. In the meantime she had plenty to do getting herself and Krys settled into life here.

  Then, of course, there was Dan, who was still holding her hand as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world. Once again she noticed the warmth of his palm clasped to hers, the strength of the fingers tangled with hers. Damn, something about him called to her, but it could never be, simply because he was a cop.

  “I’m not making you feel smothered, am I?”

  Startled, she looked at him. “No. How could you think that? You’ve been helpful, but you haven’t been hovering.”

  He laughed quietly. “Good. When you first arrived I had two thoughts. You were Lena’s niece and I’m crazy about Lena, so I wanted to make you feel at home. The second was...wait for it...”

  “Duty,” she answered. “Caring for the cop’s widow and kid.” She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. It was everywhere.

  “Of course,” he answered easily. “Nothing wrong with it. Even around here where the job is rarely dangerous, we all like knowing that we can depend on the others to keep an eye on our families. Nothing wrong with that. But I can see how it might go too far. And everyone’s different, with different needs.”

  She sidestepped a little to avoid a place where the sidewalk was cracked and had heaved up. His hand seemed to steady her.

  “Promise me something,” he said.

  “If I can.”

  “If I start to smother you, you’ll tell me. I wouldn’t want to do that.”

  “I’m not sure you could,” she answered honestly. “But I promise.”

  He seemed to hesitate, very unlike him. “There was a third reason I wanted to help out,” he said slowly.

  “What was that?”

  He surprised her. He stopped walking, and when she turned to face him, he took her gently by the shoulders. Before she understood what he was doing, he leaned in and kissed her lightly on the lips. Just a gentle kiss, the merest touching of their mouths, but she felt an electric shock run through her, felt something long quiescent spring to heated life.

  Instantly, fear slammed her. No. Not with him. Not with a cop.

  But he let go of her before she could react, and resumed their walk. “Reason number three. You’re a wonderfully attractive woman. But don’t worry about it. That was just an experiment.”

  An experiment? God, now she felt utterly confused. The warring emotions inside her were bad enough, but now she had to wonder how his experiment had turned out. Good? Bad? Indifferent?

  Surprisingly, she hoped she hadn’t left him cold.

  “Dan?”

  He paused again, touched her lips lightly with his fingertip. “You don’t need to say anything. Like I said, you’re an attractive woman. Nice kiss. But you’re not ready, are you.”

  He could tell all that? What, had she been sending out smoke signals? She couldn’t even remember if she’d reacted to his kiss in any way other than to experience an astonishing flood of sexual longing, something that had been buried for a long time now. Then she remembered she had stiffened. Embarrassment flooded her, but she couldn’t say anything.

  “So tell me more about Hal,” Dan said.

  All of a sudden, she didn’t want to talk about Hal. She wanted to talk about herself, about all the difficulties, about her fears, about her unexpected new yearnings. Or maybe not talk, but certainly think it all through again.

  Maybe that was part of her problem, though. Initially paralyzed by shock and grief, she had drifted like a leaf on the breeze. But as she’d come out of shock, she’d turned to activity, to busyness, to focusing on everything outside herself. Then she had become concerned that no matter how busy she got, nothing was changing. She was taking no step in any direction to start a new life. Not one.

  For a while, concern about Krystal had been her excuse, but finally Vicki had realized that the way she was existing couldn’t possibly be good for her daughter. Not one new or interesting thing had entered their lives. They had settled into a routine within the comforting walls provided by Hal’s friends. That was when she had realized that she was beginning to feel constricted. Smothered.

  She blamed Hal’s friends, but the truth was she had let them build that cocoon around her. Invited it. She could have stopped them at any time, could have created her own space, sought out her own friends.

  But no, it had been easy just to drift. The easiest way to deal. Until finally the only solution she could see was to uproot herself and her daughter?

  “Vicki?”

  They were getting closer to home now, and part of her wanted to run away, just run away and hide in a cave. But she’d been doing that for more than a year now, until some survival instinct had brought her here.

  “Vicki, are you okay?”

  Of course he was wondering. He’d kissed her, she’d become outwardly stiff despite the inner firestorm of response, then he’d asked her about Hal and she hadn’t answered. Dan must be wondering if she was furious with him.

  “I’m mad at myself.”

  “Whatever for?” he asked.

  “Because I just realized... Hal’s friends weren’t smothering me. I let them. I wanted them to. I was hiding in
them.”

  Dan walked a bit before responding. She had noticed how unwilling he seemed to be to comment on her. She wondered if that was because he figured she was entitled to her own thoughts and reactions, or if it was because he just didn’t know what to say.

  Funny, she’d never thought of herself as some kind of puzzle box.

  “I don’t see anything wrong with that,” he said finally. They could see the front porch of Lena’s house now. Lights glowed from within as the summer night slowly deepened. “Healing is a very individual process. I don’t think it’s wrong to lean on others for whatever we need at the time, not if they’re willing.”

  “Maybe not, but I think I took it to an extreme. And then when I realized I needed to make some changes, I practically threw it all in their faces by leaving town.”

  “I would bet they didn’t take it that way. They were probably glad to see you ready to move on.”

  “Relieved, probably.”

  “Dang, Vicki.”

  “What? I must have been a drag.”

  “Just tell me one thing. Have you heard from any of them since you left?”

  She thought immediately of all the texts she had been receiving. “I get text messages. Several a day.”

  “If they really wanted to be shed of you, they wouldn’t be doing that.”

  He was right. She shook her head at herself, and wondered what other parts of her had vanished with Hal. His death had changed her inalterably. Maybe it was time to take a measure of the ways.

  “Darn it,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Just everything. I’ve screwed it all up and now I have to figure out how to fix it.”

  “Fix what?” They stopped in front of Lena’s house, alone on a quiet street, the porch only six paces away.

  “I took a huge leap into the unknown out of a manufactured sense of desperation, and I took my daughter with me. I may have been reacting more than reasoning.”

  “I don’t know,” he answered.

  She gave him points for honesty. No calm, soothing words or aphorisms.