"Of course! Absolutely. I'll just run down there and get things taken care of then run right back. One weekend. That's all it'll take."
"You know I'm playing golf with Gordon Bennett, our company CEO, next Saturday so I won't be able to go with you."
"I know." Thank goodness! She didn't want Spencer to see her father like this. Papa had always been such a strong, proud man. "This will be a good time for a father-daughter visit. I'm sure it's a shock to him that his little girl's getting married." Maybe that was it. The shock had temporarily scattered his wits. He'd be okay once he had a chance to get used to the idea of her getting married.
But Papa had never been the type to be shocked by anything.
Spencer nodded. "Of course. Well, are you ready to go shopping for rings?"
She wasn't. Not now. She needed to be alone for a little while, to replay Papa's conversation in her head, to see if she could make any sense of it. "Actually, I seem to have developed a bit of a headache. Maybe we could reschedule for next weekend. No, that won't work. I'll be at Papa's. Weekend after next, then."
Spencer's lips tightened slightly. He hated having his schedules changed, but there was no way she could focus on wedding rings right now when her head was filled with chaos and fear.
"I really don't feel well," she added. "Let me lie down for a couple of hours. Maybe we can squeeze in some shopping before dinner."
"All right. I'll pick you up about six." He leaned over and gave her a quick, dry kiss. She could count on him not to pry, to give her privacy, not insist on getting too close. It was one of the things she valued about Spencer, one of the reasons she'd agreed to marry him.
"I'll be ready then."
But as she closed the front door behind him, she wondered if she would be ready.
Was Papa losing his grip on reality? Had he taken the first step toward senility? The fear of that possibility pushed everything else out of her head.
She went into the kitchen and poured a glass of wine then returned to her chair. She took a sip, set the glass on the lamp table beside the phone and wrapped her arms around herself. Her apartment was no longer hot but had turned freezing cold. There was, she realized, nothing wrong with the air conditioning. It was her internal thermostat. She was terrified.
Papa was her rock, her world, the only person she'd ever been able to count on one hundred percent. She loved him with all her heart and even though he was pushing seventy—probably from the far side if he'd only admit it—she'd never thought of him as old. Until today.
The possibility of losing him—the knowledge that one day she would lose him—hit her full force.
She lifted the glass of wine again and stared at the pale liquid as it shimmered and shook...shook because her hand was shaking.
"Not yet, Papa, please."
Then when? Next month? Next year? Ten years from now?
Never.
She drained the glass without tasting it.
***
"She's awful worried about me, Emma. I hope we're doing the right thing, letting her know about you and think I'm losing my marbles so she'll come running down here." The Sheriff of Briar Creek County ran a hand through his thinning hair.
"We are, Jerome," his wife said firmly. "I love our Katie every bit as much as you do, and it breaks my heart to have to worry her. But this is like the time when she was just a little thing and you had to restrain her from eating that entire chocolate cake. We have to get her down here immediately, before she can have that surgery, and we have to get her here without that Spencer person. That man is so wrong for her."
"What is our Katie thinking, wanting to marry a man with a yard-stick stuck to his spine?" Jerome Fallon shook his head and leaned back on his comfortable old sofa. "Did you hear the way she talked about the wedding? They're going to be sensible and invest their money instead of going on a honeymoon."
"I heard that and I heard what she said about my dress. The reason she doesn't want to wear my dress is because she knows this is all wrong. Deep in her heart, she doesn't want to marry that Spencer. She'll thank us for this one day."
Emma laid an affectionate hand on his leg. Well, in his leg probably described the action more accurately. She was upset about Kate, not paying close enough attention to form, and her hand sank in about an inch. He experienced the familiar tingling sensation. It felt pleasant, just as it had been many years ago when they were young and she was alive. Well, today she was still alive, so that wasn't the right word. Physical. That was the best way he could describe it. When she'd still been physical and had laid her hand on his leg.
"Emma, you're sinking."
"Oh, sorry, dear." Emma pulled her hand back to skin level. "I really hope I can make contact with our Katie again. If we can just get her to open her heart, I know I can. At a time like this, a girl really needs her mother."
"No more than I need her." Jerome leaned over and kissed his wife on her translucent cheek. After so many years of practice, he got it just right, barely touching the surface of what Emma insisted on calling her body. Jerome didn't understand a lot about atoms and electricity or any of that sort of stuff, but it seemed to him his wife's body now consisted of the sparkling, electrical energy she'd possessed when she'd been physical.
A large white cat with gold markings and blue eyes leaped onto the sofa beside Emma, rubbed alongside her arm and purred.
"Well, Leo, it's about time you got up." Emma stroked his head and back, causing the fur to rise slightly wherever she touched. "Our Katie's coming to see us." As if he understood her words, Leo lifted his head to look at her with his perpetual feline grin, meowed and purred even more loudly.
"Do you think we should tell Luke she's coming?" Jerome asked.
Emma ran her hand along Leo's tail as it lifted and curled in the air. "I think not. I remember when he was little how much he liked surprises."
Chapter Two
Kate pulled up in front of the sheriff's office on Main Street in Briar Creek, Texas, just before noon the following Friday. Her hands clutching the steering wheel were damp though she'd driven from Dallas with the air conditioning blasting all the way.
She turned off the engine and sat in her small, compact car for several minutes as the noon sun beat through the windows, driving out the artificial cool and turning the interior into an oven. For the first time in her life, she was reluctant to see her father. Seeing him today might confirm that something was wrong, and she didn't know how she could stand if it that were true.
The day after her conversation with her father she'd convinced herself that pre-wedding jitters combined with the knowledge that Papa was getting older had caused her imagination to run rampant. She hadn't heard her father correctly. He hadn't really been talking to Mama.
She'd called him again that evening after work. Papa had been his usual cheerful, easy-going self, aware and alert, except for that one tiny little quirk. Though he hadn't offered to put Mama on the phone, he had relayed information from Mama in an upbeat, three-way conversation.
The next day Kate had requested and been given a week of vacation starting that Friday. She had to see her father. If something really was wrong...well, she'd face that when and if she had to.
Possibly it was only the news of her impending marriage that had sent Papa out into temporary lala land. Maybe it would help if she could reassure him that this change in her life would be minimal, would in no way affect her close relationship with him.
The heat in the car became unbearable, and she had to get out, go inside, face reality, whatever that reality was.
An icy fist wrapped around her heart as she climbed from the car, crossed the sidewalk and pushed open the door, uncertain what she'd find in the familiar office where her father had presided as sheriff for as long as she could remember.
The reception area was empty. Evelyn had probably already gone to lunch. She strode across the room toward the offices on one side occupied by Papa and his deputy, Pete.
"Pap
a?"
A quick scan of the first small room told her he wasn't there. In the second, the deputy—someone new, definitely not Pete—glanced up from sifting through a chaotic collection of papers on the old wooden desk while carrying on a phone conversation. When the man's gaze fastened on her, his brown eyes widened and his lips came to a sudden halt in the middle of a word.
Kate ran a self-conscious hand through her hair, checking to see if she'd suddenly sprouted horns, and backed out of the doorway.
The deputy picked up his phone conversation again, but his eyes never left her.
She sank down in a chair in the reception area, out of range of that unnerving scrutiny. Even so, she had to admit she was little flattered at being admired by someone as attractive as the new deputy.
Well, actually, attractive didn't have quite the right ring to it. The word was too bland. His tanned face was craggy, all angles, his black hair unruly, his eyes dark with unexplored depths. There was nothing smooth about the man, but there was something familiar and strange and overwhelmingly intriguing.
Sexy.
That word fit a lot better.
A pang of guilt niggled at her, but she brushed it away.
So she was engaged. That didn't mean she couldn't look and appreciate. And Papa's new deputy was certainly not anyone she'd do more than look at. Even one glance at him told her he was the opposite of everything she valued in Spencer.
Where the heck was Papa?
She got up and paced impatiently around the reception area. As she passed the deputy's door, her gaze was drawn to him again.
His broad shoulders did amazing things to that crisp, tan uniform. Black hairs escaped from the open neck, and the short sleeves revealed tanned, well-muscled arms.
Again his gaze met hers and something in the depths of his eyes—depths that swirled into spaceless infinity yet reflected back her image—seemed to reach out to her as if to someone familiar. She ought to turn away, sit down, stop acting like a school girl. Instead she stood there staring at him, mesmerized by his eyes.
The long fingers of his big hand curled around the phone in a somehow intimate fashion, and she stopped herself from running one of her own hands up her arm as if his gaze was a physical touch on her skin.
What on earth was the matter with her?
She had never been given to drooling over strange men even before she became engaged. The shock of worrying about Papa's sanity, his sudden relationship with Mama's ghost, must be affecting her equilibrium.
The deputy hung up the phone, and Kate settled her lips into a prim smile. "I'm—" she began.
"Katie?" He slid the chair back, rising to an impressive height.
Kate blinked, clutching at the elusive memory the single word evoked. He could have heard her childhood name from her father, she told herself, and she'd come in calling for Papa. That was easy to figure.
But there was something about the voice that teased at the edges of her memory, taunting her then flitting away before she could grasp it.
His lips stretched into a lazy, sexy smile as he went around the desk and came toward her. "Katie Fallon? Is that really you? You're—" He stopped inches away and spread his hands as if suddenly seized with awkwardness. "You're all grown up. It's me, Luke Rodgers."
Kate went cold then hot as a thousand emotions swept over her at once, emotions that ran the gamut from joy to anger and fear.
"Luke?" She clapped her hands to her cheeks, wishing she could cover the blush she knew stained her whole face.
Of course his voice was familiar. She'd heard him call her name a thousand times when they were children...and a thousand more in sad, poignant dreams after he'd moved away when she was eleven.
And she'd just been having sexual thoughts about him! That was perverted! Luke had been like a brother. She really was losing her equilibrium. Maybe her sanity.
"Luke?" she repeated. "I don't believe it. What are you doing here?"
He spread his arms wide, showing off the uniform as well as the breadth of his chest. "I'm the new deputy sheriff. I'm surprised Sheriff didn't mention it." She noticed that he called her father by the nickname the town had given him over the years, shortened from Sheriff of Briar Creek. When they were young, more often than not, he'd called her father Papa, just as she had...just as she'd often called his parents Mom and Dad in imitation of him.
But that was long ago and far away.
"No. No, he didn't mention it." How could Papa have failed to tell her something that important? Was this further evidence of his mental deterioration?
For a moment she thought Luke was going to pull her into his open arms, hold her the way they'd held each other when they were children...a lifetime ago. For a moment she wanted him to, desperately needing the innocent comfort and friendship they'd once shared.
But they'd lost that years ago, lost it irretrievably. Besides, it wasn't innocent friendship she'd been feeling only a few moments ago. It wasn't innocent friendship that made her want to bolt into his arms.
He hesitated as if reading her mind. It was only for a fraction of a second, and someone who knew him less well would have missed it.
He took her hands in his and smiled down at her. "It really is you. Did you just get into town? Did Sheriff know you were coming?"
Of course her father knew she was coming. Why hadn't he told Luke? Had he forgotten? Kate's fingers clenched Luke's, holding on more tightly than she should, an automatic gesture of need she thought she'd left far behind.
"I talked to Papa this morning. Didn't he tell you?" Gently she took her hands from Luke and was dismayed to find that her palms were clammy.
"No, he never said a word. Maybe he wanted to surprise both of us."
Surely that was it. A surprise reunion party, like a surprise birthday party. "That's probably it."
Luke checked the large, utilitarian watch on his left wrist. "It's almost noon. Have you had lunch? I was just getting ready to run over to Dodie's Diner for a burger. Why don't you come with me?"
"I can't do that. Papa asked me to meet him here and go to lunch with him." Luke could be right about Papa wanting to surprise them. It would be just like him to have set up the whole thing so the three of them could go to lunch together.
Luke's forehead creased in a brief frown. "That's funny. Sheriff left half an hour ago to check out a vandalism report. Somebody painted a big, round face with a frown on Homer Grimes's barn. Kind of appropriate from what I remember of Homer Grimes. I offered to go, but Sheriff insisted on doing it himself. Said he'd known Homer for a lot of years and knew how to deal with him. It must have slipped his mind that you were coming. He'll be gone at least another hour."
People forget appointments all the time, Kate told herself, trying to push aside the chill. "Yes, it must have slipped his mind."
She forced a smile and restrained herself from an urge to run out of the office as fast as she could, away from this man she'd once blindly trusted in a way that only a child could trust, to go home and wait for Papa in the safety of the old house.
But that was silly. What happened between Luke and her when they were children was long ago and far away. Of no consequence now. Luke was Papa's deputy, worked with her father every day. He could tell her if Papa was all right, if he ever mentioned Mama, how many things he forgot and, putting aside her selfish concerns for his welfare, whether he should be allowed to run around town carrying a badge and a gun.
If he was talking to Mama, would he soon be talking to Billy the Kid and Jesse James? Shooting Billy the Kid and Jesse James?
"Then let's go get one of Dodie's burgers with her special sauce," she said brightly.
Luke caught her arm as she headed out the door. She turned back and was again sucked into that intense gaze.
"Katie, I'm sorry I never answered any of your letters. I was going through a rough time."
She slid her arm from his grasp. "It doesn't matter. We were just children." His apology, rather than taking away the tra
nsgression, recalled the haunting, unbearable pain of loss she'd moved to the dark corners of her mind years ago.
She shook off the unpleasant sensation aside. She'd been eleven years old. She was, as Luke had said, all grown up now, no longer a child. It had been an eternity, more than half her lifetime, since a little boy who no longer existed broke the heart of a little girl who also no longer existed.
"Of course it matters," he said softly. "You sent me those long, wonderful letters full of life and energy and—" He shrugged and grimaced. "I'm sorry. It wasn't because I forgot you or because I didn't miss you—"
"It's okay," she interrupted, wanting him to stop dredging up things that no longer had any relevance in her life, things that were over and done and couldn't be changed. Apparently Luke shared the trendy preoccupation of some people for exhuming and examining, ad infinitum, events whose resurrection served no purpose except to upset them all over again. "I'm starved. Let's go get those burgers." And forget the past. She had plenty to worry about in the present.
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