by Tami Hoag
“Then you met Trace’s father,” he said.
“Yep,” she murmured, still looking inward, looking back, smiling at the thought of the first time she had set eyes on Bobby Lee, with his thousand-watt smile and wicked green eyes. “Bobby Lee Breland, third best calf roper on the circuit, first-class Romeo. That boy could have sold charm by the gallon and still have buckets left over. We had us a time,” she said, but her smile faded as the memories turned sour. “Until we got married, that is. I was seventeen and pregnant and Bobby, he didn’t care much for being committed to one woman.”
Dane developed an instant loathing for Elizabeth’s first husband. He couldn’t stand a man who shirked his responsibilities. He damn well would have stood by Elizabeth if she had been carrying his baby. The mental image of her heavy with his child brought a strong sense of possessiveness rising inside him. He tamped it down and turned his full attention back to her story. “Were you scared?”
“Spitless.” She laughed at that and shook her head. “I let on like I had the world by the tail, but the truth was I didn’t know nothing ’bout birthin’ no babies. And Bobby Lee was about as much good as tits on a boar hog. His expertise was the part that came before the baby. Everything after that was not his department.”
“’Course, the great thing about nature is that babies will get born whether their mamas know what to do or not.” A stillness came over her as her words sunk in. A frown pulled at the corners of her mouth as she stared out toward the woods. “Maybe Mother Nature ought to think about reworking that one. Could save a lot of babies a lot of grief.”
“What happened with Bobby Lee?” Dane asked, needing to pull her back from the emotional ledge she was looking down from.
“He had a fatal attraction to rodeo queens. Which was fine when I was one. After I started to look more like the barrel than the girls who raced around them, his pretty head started turning this way and that until you’d’a thought he’d’a got himself a whiplash. I hung on to him for a while, just out of stubbornness, but it wasn’t worth it. Finally, he saddled one filly too many and I left him. The rest, as they say, is history.”
She gave him another of her sardonic smiles. Another that didn’t come anywhere near banishing the shadows of the past from her eyes. Dane had a feeling the history she was leaving untold was long and unhappy. It couldn’t have been easy to strike out on her own with a small child. His gaze caught on the little scar that hooked down from the corner of her mouth, and he reached out and traced it with his thumb.
“How’d you get this?” he asked quietly, his gaze holding hers.
Elizabeth didn’t want to tell him. She felt as if he were reaching into her soul and taking little bits of her, pieces he wouldn’t bother to return when he left her. But she answered him anyway, not able to escape that steady blue gaze or the need inside her to make some kind of emotional contact with him. “I went home from work early one day and caught Bobby Lee riding Miss Panhandle Rodeo Days. I took after him with a pellet gun we used to shoot rats with and peppered his gorgeous little ass. Then his temper kicked in and he got the pistol away from me and smacked me a good one with it.”
“Jesus,” Dane whispered, anger knotting like a fist in his gut. He could tell by the matter-of-fact way she related the tale that it was but one of many.
“Trace slept through the whole thing,” she said with a sad smile. “He was an awful good baby.”
God, Dane thought, she’d been little more than a child herself, dealing with a baby and a husband who treated her like dirt. That unwelcome, unwanted tide of protectiveness rose up inside him again. He let it. He cupped her cheek with his hand and leaned down to kiss the scar.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered.
Sorry for what? Elizabeth wondered. For her past or for the future he wouldn’t give her? She crushed the thought. Falling in love with him was just an unforeseen hitch she would have to get over on her own.
“Your turn,” she said, throwing the ball in his court.
He pulled back, poker-faced. “My turn for what?”
“Details,” Elizabeth said, cranking a hand around like a director prompting for action. “I’m not gonna be the only one sitting here with my figurative pants down around my ankles. Spill something, Jantzen.”
“Like what?” he asked, scowling at her.
“Like what happened with you and Mrs. Jantzen.”
Dane turned his head to look toward the pastureland to the east. His pastureland, where a small herd of Hereford cattle grazed contentedly on the sweet clover and grass. He didn’t like having the tables turned, didn’t like the idea of sharing parts of himself other than those he had designated for this relationship.
“It didn’t work out,” he said shortly, paring the story down to its bare bones. “When I was forced to stop playing ball, I decided to come back here. She stayed in L.A. and found someone who could keep her in the style to which she had grown accustomed.”
He left out the bitter details. The feelings of betrayal and rejection. The awful sensation of falling from the heights of stardom to the depths of despair, to become an object of pity and ridicule and have even his own wife turn on him. Those were feelings he didn’t share ever, not with anyone.
He might have been stingy with his words, but Elizabeth caught the echo of bitterness in his voice. She saw the muscles tense in his square jaw, watched the way his shoulders stiffened. He was a proud man, a man who was accustomed to being in control. She could imagine he wouldn’t take well to the idea of dissension in his personal life any more than he did in his professional life, and he wouldn’t take well to rejection either.
What kind of woman rejected a man when he needed her most, when he was vulnerable, lost? The kind who deserved to have her hair ripped out by the roots, she decided. She wondered if he was still in love with his ex-wife, but she didn’t ask. She didn’t want to think of him loving anyone except her, and that was just plain foolish to think about at all.
Of course, that didn’t stop her from thinking about it. Dane Jantzen didn’t love her, didn’t want anything from her but sex. She couldn’t make him love her, but she could pretend he did. For a little while. Just long enough to feel something other than loneliness.
“Let’s go inside,” she whispered.
The house was so quiet it seemed to be holding its breath as the sunlight faded and the day’s dust settled on the furniture. Elizabeth led the way upstairs.
Dane suspected what she wanted had little to do with sex—at least not the kind of sex he was used to—hard, wild, recreational sex. This had to do with comfort, with losing yourself in another person’s arms for a while. He wanted to give her this time. Not just because he was aching with arousal, but because he was aching in a corner of his heart he had deliberately closed off, a corner Elizabeth had somehow managed to touch when no one else had gotten near.
The cynic in him warned against it. He didn’t want anything permanent, and he couldn’t see it happening with Elizabeth at any rate. She wouldn’t want to stick around here, especially after the kind of welcome she’d been given, and he didn’t want to be anyplace else. But he couldn’t keep from responding to her, couldn’t keep from touching her, tasting her. He could have that, he allowed, as long as he maintained his objectivity.
Keep your head in the game and your heart out of it.
He let the message sink in, then he shut off the voice, shut out everything but Elizabeth and the incredible heat that burned through him every time he touched her.
In the aftermath it came to him. That need he had denied over and over with other women. As he lay in that big brass bed with Elizabeth hugging him, the need stole through him like a thief.
He looked down at her and tried to deny it again. She wasn’t for him. Not in any permanent way. They were too different. What was drawing them together had more to do with circumstance than anything. They had been thrown together in a situation where emotions ran high and natural chemistry sparked and ignited
a flash fire. Once the case was solved, things would cool off, they would drift apart. Elizabeth would go her own way and his life would fall back into its usual routine.
“There’ll be a deputy in your yard tonight,” he said, easing out from under her, easing out of bed.
Elizabeth sat up, hair in her eyes, sheet clutched above her breasts in one fist. “Fine,” she murmured, watching as Dane zipped his jeans. Her time was up. They had had their interlude of friendship, their hour of sex. Now he went back to being a cop. Such an orderly life he led. She both envied and resented him for it. Her life was a tangled mess, like a ball of yarn, like a snare of vines, like her hair, every strand hopelessly intertwined.
He gave her a look that struck her as being more like pity than regret. “I have to go.”
Pride bumped her chin up a notch. Her eyes flashed with anger to hide the pain. “I didn’t ask you not to.”
She slipped out of bed on the other side and went to the window, the sheet draped around her like a Grecian gown. It was getting dark outside. The farm buildings loomed beyond the yard, their sad gray facades taking on a sinister cast as the sun slipped away. She looked down at the black interior of the open shed and felt a little quiver at the base of her neck. The feeling of being watched crept over her like fingers. Residual creeps, she thought, drawing back from the window.
She found a cigarette on the nightstand and dug a lighter out of the drawer. “Thanks for going easy on Trace,” she said, blowing a stream of smoke up at the ceiling.
“I didn’t have anything to hold him with,” he said, tucking his shirt in.
“You didn’t have to give him a job either,” she pointed out.
“If he’s a good kid, then he deserves a chance to prove it.”
Elizabeth forced a smile and looked at her feet. A part of her wanted to hold on to the hope that he had been good to Trace because he cared about her. Silly. Selfish.
She needed a pedicure, she noted absently. Too bad she wasn’t going to be able to afford one for another twenty years or so. From the corner of her eye she could see Dane’s boots as he moved toward the door. He hesitated, turned back, hesitated again. She didn’t look up at him. She didn’t want to see that look in his eyes. She didn’t want him feeling sorry for her, she thought stubbornly. She didn’t want anyone feeling sorry for her, including herself. She took another deep drag on her cigarette and walked back toward the window, trailing a plume of smoke like a plane with a blown engine.
Dane watched her for a minute, at a loss for words. Damn. He never had this kind of trouble leaving Ann Markham, but then, he never wanted to spend the night just holding Ann either. He never much cared how she was feeling, never wondered if she was lonely after he was gone. He looked at Elizabeth, with her chin up and her gaze directed out the window, and he felt the pang of her emptiness as acutely as if it were his own.
Dangerous stuff, emotion. He had played that game before and lost. He was better off without it.
Elizabeth stood at the window, listening to his footfalls on the stairs, listening to the distant slap of the screen door. She watched him walk across the yard, get in the Bronco and drive away, taillights glowing through the dust as he headed into a blazing sunset. She stood there for a long while, staring out into the gathering darkness, never aware that someone was staring back.
Chapter Eighteen
BY THE VIEW THROUGH THE BIG PLATE GLASS WINDOW facing Main Street, Dane could see the Coffee Cup was doing its usual breakfast business and then some. He wedged the Bronco into a parking spot behind Yeager’s pickup. Yeager parked the way he dressed. His old dirt-brown Ford half-ton had one rear wheel on the curb and a front fender nosing up to a fire hydrant. Boozer hung his head out the open passenger window and woofed softly at Dane as he crossed the sidewalk and climbed the steps to the restaurant.
A blast of sound hit him as he opened the door and stepped inside—conversation, flatware hitting china, the groan and scrape of chairs, the hiss of the grill. And with the sounds came the smells—bacon frying, hot coffee, cinnamon rolls. His gaze scanned the mob for Yeager, who waved at him from a back booth.
A reporter from the Pioneer Press popped up from his chair at a front table and attempted to fall into step beside Dane as he wound his way through the maze of tables and harried waitresses. “Sheriff, have you got any new leads—”
“No comment.”
“What about the attack on the local paper—”
Dane shot the man a look and the reporter heaved a sigh and fell back. As Dane turned to continue on his path, an arm reached out in front of him like a roadblock at a toll booth. He pulled himself up short, scowling down at Charlie Wilder and Bidy Masters, who were sharing a booth and their concerns over stacks of Phyllis’s pancakes. Charlie’s round face split with one of his nervous smiles.
“Any word, Dane?”
“You’ll be the first to know, Charlie.”
Bidy’s frown carved an extra pair of lines into his long, lean face. “What’s this business Garth Shafer is talking about this morning? That Stuart kid wrecked his business and you didn’t arrest him?”
Charlie gave a belly-jiggling chuckle, intended to pretty-up the feelings behind his words. “Those Stuarts are sure stirring up trouble. That woman—”
“I need evidence to make charges stick,” Dane said shortly, his temper already fraying and it wasn’t even eight o’clock yet. He gave the town fathers a look that had them sliding down a little in their seats. “You tell Garth if he comes up with some hard proof, I’ll arrest anyone it points to.”
Charlie forced another laugh, drumming his sausage fingers on the tabletop beside his plate of half-eaten pancakes. “Well, jeez, Dane, we didn’t mean to cause hard feelings—”
Dane didn’t stick around for the platitudes. He ducked around Renita Henning, who had both arms lined with heaping breakfast plates, and slid into the booth across the table from Yeager.
“It’s a goddamn obstacle course in here.”
Yeager grinned at him. “Spoken like a man in dire need of a cup of Joe.” He caught the waitress’s eye and beamed a smile at her as well. “Renita honey, could you send someone on back here with a sweet smile and a hot pot of coffee?”
Renita returned his grin. “You bet.”
“Aren’t you the picture of hospitality this morning,” Dane growled.
Yeager shrugged expansively. “Hey, I’m in love. The world is a wonderful place.”
“With a killer running around loose in it.”
“We’re gonna handle that, son. We just got to come at it from a different angle, is all.” He swallowed a gulp of orange juice, managing to dribble it on the front of his wrinkled plaid sport shirt.
Dane scowled at him. “Jesus, you’re a mess. Don’t you own an iron?”
Another idiotic grin. “Nope. Life needs a few wrinkles in it to make it interesting.” He sat back while Millicent Witt topped off his coffee and poured a cup for Dane. “You got that rabid-wolf look on you, boy. What’d you get up on the wrong side of the bed this morning?” He shot a wink at Millicent. Her cheeks bloomed red and she moved off with her coffeepot, chuckling.
Dane snarled a little under his breath and lifted his cup, breathing in the vapor like smelling salts. He had gotten up from the wrong bed, after a restless night spent thinking about Elizabeth and the awkward way they had parted. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d lost sleep over a woman. It was damned irritating, especially now, when he needed his wits about him and no distractions. He didn’t have anything to feel guilty about, he reminded himself. Christ, she had invited him into her bed—twice—without exacting any promises from him.
Phyllis stepped up to the table with a slice of lemon meringue pie for Yeager and a plate of bacon and eggs for Dane. He held a hand up. “Nothing for me, Phyllis. Just coffee.”
Her wide thin mouth—painted ruby this morning—twisted into a knot of disapproval. “By the look on your face, I can see I should have brought the s
tewed prunes and oatmeal,” she said, sliding the plate in front of him. She scratched the eraser end of her pencil through her Brillo-pad hair and patted Dane’s shoulder with the other gnarled hand. “You can’t run on coffee and orneriness. Only I can manage that. Eat up.”
Yeager chuckled and dove into his pie as Phyllis swished away on her air-pillow shoes. “She’s a trip.”
Dane pushed his plate aside and regarded the BCA agent with disgust. “How can you eat that for breakfast?”