It was kind of like being a teenager all over again. He'd dated several women since his divorce and had found the experience quite different from the days of high school with his sweaty palms and clumsy kisses. As an adult, he'd found it much easier to relate to women, to relax and enjoy their company.
But Katie had just set him back about fifteen years.
He showered, shaved, dressed and went downstairs to put on some coffee. While it brewed, he rummaged around in the kitchen until he found a can of sardines in mustard sauce and some crackers. That would do for breakfast.
He stood at the counter, eating, swigging bad coffee and surveying his home.
He'd put in a lot of work restoring the place, but there was still a lot to be done. Structural work, plumbing and electrical, paint inside and out, sanding floors...all those things were priority and he'd completed them first.
However, the only furniture he'd acquired was a bed, nightstand and chest of drawers for his room upstairs. The necessities. He could get along for the time being without a table or a sofa or paintings on the walls.
Though the place did look kind of bare. Not much like it had when he and his mom and dad had lived there, when he and Katie had raced up and down the stairs and played stick ball in the back yard.
Katie wasn't the same as she'd been in those days, either.
And it wasn't just that she was a woman now, and a darned sexy one. She'd lost her spontaneity. She had a reserve that she hadn't had when she was young.
He supposed some of that was a natural result of becoming an adult.
But not all of it.
When he'd left Briar Creek, she'd written him almost every day, lengthy letters penned in her precise, rounded handwriting, pouring out her heart.
He'd treasured every word.
But he'd never been able to answer a single one.
He'd hurt her badly, and now she didn't consider him her friend anymore.
And he didn't blame her.
It had taken him a lot of years to come to terms with his dad's death and the changes in his life. His divorce from Cindy and his mother's remarriage had forced him to take stock and evaluate, to return to his roots, to try to reclaim all those things he'd shut away when his dad died, those things that were so sweet he hadn't even been able to think about them without feeling again the gut-wrenching pain of their loss.
Katie was one of those things. He'd never meant to hurt her. He'd cared for her so much he'd had to relegate her to the shadowy corners of his mind along with all of Briar Creek—Sheriff, his home, his friends and his dad's memory. Now he wanted to retrieve the things he'd lost, the things he'd closed his heart to for all those years.
Katie was at the top of that list, but being attracted to her, desiring her the way a man desires a woman, wasn't on that list at all, not even on the very bottom. He'd already done that with Cindy. She'd been his Katie-replacement, or so he'd thought at the time. She had red hair and a big smile. She was outgoing and vivacious. Over the years they'd made the gradual transition from friends to dating to going steady to marriage to complete indifference.
Friends were forever, but lovers were temporary.
During all those years, he'd never stopped loving and missing Katie.
He had to make up to her for all the pain he'd caused her by his abandonment.
And if he had any chance of doing that, he was going to have to ignore his raging hormones. Every time she got close to him...hell, every time he thought about her...he wanted to touch her soft skin, hold her body against his, feel the weight and roundness of her breasts in his hands, taste her lips.
Damn!
He opened the pantry and tossed the empty sardine can in the trash.
While Sheriff and Katie were gone to Dallas today, he would figure out some way to deal with all that.
He drained the last of the pot of coffee into his cup, turned off the switch and was locking the front door behind himself when the phone rang.
He considered not answering it. He'd be at the office in ten minutes. If it was an emergency, he could take the call then.
But it might be his mother.
He twisted the key to unlock the door, turned the knob, pushed on the door which still stuck in spite of his efforts to repair it, and spilled coffee on his right pants leg when the door finally gave and opened. With a heartfelt curse, he strode across the living room to where the phone sat on the polished floor.
"Hello?"
"Luke, this is Sheriff. How you doing this morning?"
"Fine, Sheriff, just fine. How about yourself?"
"Fair to middling. But I don't feel like making that long trip to Dallas. You wouldn't mind going with Katie, would you?"
A two hour drive to Dallas and two hours back, trapped in the relatively small confines of his car with Katie. Heaven and hell along I-20.
"Of course I don't mind, Sheriff. I'll be right over to get her." He looked down at the stain on his pants leg. "I'll be over in fifteen minutes."
"I'll call the court house, and they'll have the documents waiting for you. I sure do appreciate it, Luke."
"No problem." Yet. But he had a feeling there'd be a lot of those before the day was over. "Sheriff, you never did say what these documents are...Sheriff? Hello?"
***
"I hope Sheriff's all right," Luke said as he pulled onto the highway with Katie beside him and her elusive scent of honeysuckle flowing around and through him. The interior of the big old car seemed small and intimate.
"Papa'll be fine," she said.
"Did he tell you what was wrong? All he said to me when he called was that he didn't feel like making the trip."
"I know. That's all he told me. I think he just didn't want to go to Dallas. He felt fine at breakfast. I made him a toasted bagel with cream cheese, and he got out the skillet and made bacon and eggs to go with that bagel."
Luke laughed. "That sounds like Sheriff. He didn't seem sick when I talked to him on the phone, then at your house when he came out on the porch to say good-bye, he didn't look sick. Still, it's not like him to ask anybody to do anything for him. Usually it's the other way around. He wants to do everything himself."
"He likes to take charge."
She'd been distant from the time he'd picked her up. Now she hugged the passenger door as if she didn't dare get too close to him.
For several minutes they sped along the concrete ribbon in silence. The highway was six lanes wide, but even so the trees and hills on each side, the confines of the car, his own thoughts, made him feel suddenly claustrophobic.
"Katie, will you stop sitting on the door handle? You act like you're afraid of me."
"Don't call me that," she said.
"Don't call you what?" he asked in exasperation.
"Katie. My name is Kathleen. My friends call me Kate. Only my father calls me Katie."
"Damn it, I've always called you Katie! Why should I stop now?"
"Because it sounds like a little girl's name, and I'm not a little girl anymore."
He knew that only too well. Maybe that was why he refused to stop calling her by the diminutive. Maybe he thought somehow he could convince himself she was still that little girl he'd loved with the uncomplicated love of children.
"You're acting pretty childish right now," he said.
With his gaze fixed on the highway, Luke could only see Katie peripherally, so he felt as much as saw her glare at him.
But then the atmosphere inside the car seemed to lighten. Katie smiled. Again it was something he sensed more than saw.
"Yeah," she said, "I guess I am. Sorry. I've had a lot on my mind lately."
She'd finally admitted what he'd known all along, something was bothering her. "I hope you know you can always talk to me. You used to tell me everything."
She shook her head slowly, sadly. "That was a little boy and a little girl who don't exist anymore."
He couldn't argue that point with her. If they were still those same children, his
libido wouldn't go into overdrive every time he got close to her. "I'd still like to be your friend."
She didn't say anything, and he could feel the tension building again.
"Katie, I'm more sorry than you can ever know that I didn't answer your letters."
"Luke, I told you, that was a long time ago and it doesn't matter anymore." Her voice was dignified and smooth on the surface, but he could hear the soft underbelly of her words. He knew her too well for her to be able to fool him. It did matter.
He licked his suddenly dry lips. "I guess we need to talk about it."
She looked out the window, away from him. He thought he heard her whisper the single word Don't, and something shifted inside him.
He felt callous for daring to expect her to forgive and forget. He'd hurt her. A lot. More than he'd realized. However difficult it might be for him to talk about it, he had to do it.
"I've never been good at this sort of thing, expressing my feelings, I mean. So I probably won't do this too well."
"Then don't say anything. We don't need to do this. I don't want to do this."
Her words were tough, verging on harsh, and that told him how much it still bothered her. He was going to have to open himself up as he hadn't done since he and Katie were kids, expose himself in a way he'd never done for anybody.
But this wasn't just anybody. This was his Katie. For her, he'd been in fights with boys bigger than he was. He'd tried to take all the blame when the two of them broke his mother's favorite lamp, though Katie hadn't let him. He'd visited her when she had chicken pox and she'd done the same for him when he caught it from her.
Then ultimately he'd let her down.
He leaned forward in the seat. "When I first made up my mind to come back to Briar Creek, I wanted to see you and make things right, ask you to forgive me. I guess I thought you could absolve me of guilt for what I did to you and make me feel okay again. Well, today, right now, that's not as important as making you feel better. I was a jerk. You were wonderful and giving and caring, and I was a jerk."
She didn't contradict him.
He had no choice but to continue.
"When my dad died and we left Briar Creek, I wanted to die, too. I'd never heard the term depressed in those days, but that's what I was. So depressed I didn't want to get out of bed in the mornings or eat or talk to people. I was twelve years old. I didn't know what to do. My mother was doing all she could just to hang on. She had to get a job which meant she left early in the morning and came home late at night. Aunt Myrtle kept telling me if I loved my mother, I'd be strong, be a man, and stop worrying her by being sad all the time. She said I was the man of the family, and I had to take care of my mother and grow up."
"Let it go, Luke. It was a long time ago. We were kids. It's no big deal." She kept her head turned away from him, and her tone was as impersonal as if she were talking to the scenery rushing past them.
"Yes," he insisted, "it is a big deal. You may never be able to forgive me, but I need you to understand. I managed to send all the pain to a dark corner of my mind so I could be strong and not worry Mom. But the only way I could do that was to put everything related to that part of my life into that corner, too. If I thought about you or Sheriff or Briar Creek, I'd think about my father and everything I'd lost, and I'd get depressed again. I suppose in today's psycho-babble terms, you'd say I blocked everything."
"Blocked," Katie repeated softly. "I've never understood why a process that saves your sanity should be considered harmful. I've always thought it's a good thing if you can get away from something that hurts. If we have a headache, we don't focus on it and concentrate on the pain. We take an aspirin and try to divert our attention so we won't notice the pain so much until it's gone."
"You're right. Unless that headache turns out to be a stroke and you've ignored it until it's too late. I did such a good job of ignoring my pain that I lost the best part of my life. My best friend."
He thought her shoulders quivered a little, and his heart sank. Had he made her cry?
It was hard to tell. He couldn't look away from the road for longer than a quick glance. She was holding herself so tautly upright, it could have been a quiver from the tension of her muscles.
He wanted to stop the car, get out, go around, haul her into his arms, hug her and make all the pain he'd caused her go away.
Instead he continued to drive down the highway at seventy miles an hour, his hopes sinking with every mile, with every heartbeat. Katie was not going to forgive him. Could not forgive him. Should not forgive him.
Finally she turned in her seat and faced forward again. "Luke, I understand." Her voice was quiet with none of the distance he'd heard in it earlier. "If you need my forgiveness, you have it. If you want to resume our friendship, that's not so easy. We've both changed a lot. Our lives only move in one direction. Forward. We can never go back. I lost my mother, you lost your father, we lost each other, and we moved on. We found other people. You married Cindy, I'm going to marry Spencer. We're both very different than we were seventeen years ago."
He couldn't argue with that. Seventeen years ago she'd been a skinny little thing with eyes too big for her face and freckles across the bridge of her nose. Today she was a beautiful woman with curves in all the right places.
Seventeen years ago she could have been another guy for all the difference her sex made in their relationship. Today he was only too aware that she was a woman. She made it difficult for him to remember she was engaged to another man, that his only interest in her was friendship. At least, friendship should be his only interest.
"I know all that, Katie. But in spite of those early efforts to put everything behind me, I don't think there's been a day I haven't thought about you. I'd really like to start over and see if these new people we are can become friends."
She was silent for several minutes. The only sound in the car was the hum of the engine and the muffled thumps as the tires traveled over the highway. Luke had plenty of time to think of how important this was to him, how desperately he wanted Katie back in his life, how much he'd missed her.
He also had plenty of time to wonder how he would keep his desire for her tamped down and how he would deal with her impending marriage.
"Of course we can start over," she finally said. But she hadn't mentioned resuming their friendship, and her voice had a distant echo, as though she spoke to mollify him, to end the discussion.
Still, it was a beginning. That's all he'd asked for.
For the rest of the trip, they made small talk. Finally they arrived in Dallas, and she directed him through the downtown mix-master of highways to the exit that led to the Dallas County Courthouse.
Their trip was half over, and he wasn't sure how much he'd accomplished with his time alone with her.
When they entered the courthouse, they found that the clerk knew nothing about any legal documents for the sheriff of Briar Creek County.
Chapter Ten
"Obviously there's been some sort of a mix-up," Kate said smoothly, though she felt anything but smooth inside. Was this one more piece of evidence of her father's confused mental state? "I'll just call the sheriff and find out what's going on."
Luke's words, his offer of a renewal of their friendship, had been uncomfortably seductive. She certainly needed a friend right now. But something inside refused to break down, to let her get close to him again.
She moved to a corner of the room, took out her phone and called Papa's office.
Evelyn answered. "Sheriff's not here right now, Katie. I heard you were in town for a few days. How's everything going?"
"Pretty good." Compared to a national disaster, anyway. "Did Papa say when he'd return?"
"Oh, honey, you know how these things go. No telling when he'll come dragging back in here. Now you be sure and come by to say hi before you leave town. I'll show you pictures of all my grandkids. I've got five now."
"I'll do that. Did Papa leave a message? He asked Luke and m
e to pick up some documents from the Dallas County Courthouse, but we're there, and they don't know anything about it. He didn't tell us what those documents are. Did he tell you anything?"
Evelyn laughed. "No, he never said a word to me. That's just like Sheriff. I swear, he'd forget his head if it wasn't attached to the end of his neck."
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