Small-town life definitely had certain advantages over living in a big city. But the endless buzzing grapevine—where everyone thought they had a God-given right to dabble in everybody else’s business—wasn’t among them.
Most people in Star Valley still believed Zack Slater had run off the week before their wedding with her brother’s wife. What would they think when they saw the two of them together?
Trying not to pay attention to the butterflies step kicking in her stomach, she folded her hands tightly together. She didn’t care what anyone said. She was strong. She could handle a few stares and whispers.
If she was going to show up in the middle of the Independence Day parade with Zack Slater, she wasn’t going to have much of a choice.
CHAPTER 9
It wasn’t quite as bad as she had feared.
Once they’d walked the short distance from their parking space to the parade route, her nerves had settled somewhat. They still received their share of raised eyebrows, and she could hear more than a few whispers behind their backs. But no one was outright rude to them.
Either Zack didn’t notice or he didn’t care. He placed a hand at the small of her back as they looked for a spot to watch the parade, both to guide her and to stake his claim, she suspected.
He looked gorgeous, as usual, in weathered boots, faded jeans and a tailored short-sleeved navy cotton shirt that stretched over the hard muscles of his chest. Her mouth watered just looking at him as he set up the folding lawn chairs they had borrowed from the Lost Creek at an empty spot in front of the grocery store.
She settled into the chair and tried to put the murmurs and prying looks out of her mind, content just to bask in the moment.
She enjoyed all of Salt River’s little celebrations—from the summer concerts in the park to the homecoming football game to the Valentine’s Day carnival at the elementary school—but the Independence Day parade was always a highlight.
Folks here took their patriotism seriously. They hadn’t been sitting for five minutes when one of the elderly American Legion members rushed over with a couple of small flags for them to wave along with everyone else.
Cassie smiled as she took it, scanning the crowd for some sign of her brothers. She couldn’t see them and wasn’t sure if that little fact relieved her or disappointed her.
Jesse would be busy directing traffic away from Main Street, she remembered. But Matt and Ellie and the girls were probably planted somewhere along the crowded parade route, Sarah watching along with them.
She hadn’t seen them in a week. Guilt pinched at her as she realized how isolated she had become from them, how she had ducked out of their regular Sunday barbecue and had declined Ellie’s invitation to go to the annual rodeo with them later that night.
Although she winced at the realization, she was too terrified about their reaction if they saw her with Zack. She still hadn’t told her family the two of them were in the slow process of renewing their relationship. She couldn’t. Not yet.
She might have forgiven Zack for walking away ten years ago but she was fairly certain her overprotective brothers wouldn’t be so quick to let bygones be bygones.
Not when it came to Zack Slater.
But since they were nowhere in sight, she didn’t have to worry about it right this minute. She had a parade to enjoy.
Half an hour later she was smiling at the antics of a couple of clowns who looked remarkably like Reverend Whitaker and his wife when she happened to glance at Zack. He was watching her intently, an odd light in his hazel eyes.
Heat soaked her cheeks. “What’s the matter?”
He gave her one of those soft, beautiful smiles that made her catch her breath and feel more than a little light-headed. “Nothing. I just like watching you.”
What was she supposed to say to that? She could feel more heat crawl up her cheekbones and figured she was probably as red as the stripes on her little flag.
“You belong here, don’t you?” he asked quietly.
“Jeppson’s? Well, I do spend plenty of time inside yelling out my produce order.”
He smiled, then turned serious again. “No, I mean all of it. Salt River. The whole small-town thing. You’re very lucky.”
“Lucky? Because I’ve never been anywhere in my life?”
“Because you’re part of this and it’s a part of you. You belong,” he repeated.
She narrowed her gaze, giving him a closer look. That odd light in his eyes was envy, she realized. He was envious of her? A woman whose entire life had been spent within a sixty-mile radius? Who couldn’t walk a block through town without having to stop and visit with at least three or four people along the way and who had to schedule at least an extra half hour for any shopping trip just because she knew she was bound to run into someone who wanted to chat?
Zack had never had any of that. She was barely aware of the high school band passing by with its enthusiastic rendition of “Stars and Stripes Forever.” Instead she remembered his childhood. His drunk saddle bum of a father with the itchy feet, who had dragged his young son from ranch to ranch across the West, never content to stick long in any place.
Zack had gone to nine different elementary schools, he had told her, in six different states.
He had never experienced this. The sense of continuity, of community. Of being inextricably linked with something bigger than yourself. A wave of pity for him crashed over her, and she wanted to gather him close in her arms right there in front of everyone and cradle him against her.
“You belong in Denver now,” she offered. “You have a big apartment there and your business. Oh, and your ranch in the San Juans. You belong there.”
He was quiet for a moment, then he gave her another of those slow, serious smiles. “I’ve never felt as much at home in either of those places as I do right here in Salt River when I’m with you.”
Unbearably touched, she felt the hot sting of tears welling up in her eyes. She blinked them back and reached across the width between them to place her hand on his where it rested on the arm of his lawn chair. He turned his hand over and clasped hers, and they stayed that way, fingers locked together, for the rest of the parade.
She always grew a little melancholy when the last float passed by, when people gathered up their little flags and their lawn chairs and headed home. It was the same ache that always settled in her chest as she watched the last leaf fall from the big sycamore outside her window at the Diamond Harte at the knowledge that she wouldn’t see another until spring.
Where would she be a year from now when the parade again marched down Main Street? Would the man who sat beside her still be a part in her life? Or would he march on just like the parade?
Her chest felt tight and achy at the thought. She knew she was going to have to face that possibility, but right now she didn’t want to think about anything beyond the moment.
“So what’s next?” he asked as they packed up their own chairs and began the trek back to his Range Rover. “Do you have to hurry on back to the ranch to fix dinner?”
“No. Jean told all the guests they were on their own today. I think most of them were coming into town for the Lions Club barbecue later.”
“So you’re free for the rest of the day?”
She nodded. “What did you have in mind?”
His grin somehow managed to be mischievous and seductive at the same time, something only Slater could pull off. “Well, if I had a pickup truck, we could always take a picnic up in the mountains later and make out while we watch the fireworks.”
An instant image of their first time together flashed through her mind and an answering heat curled through her stomach. Drat the man for stirring her up like this right on crowded Main Street!
“What’s that old saying? If wishes were horses then beggars would ride?”
He laughed. “Not a horse. A pickup. I have this sudden, overwhelming compulsion to buy a truck. Where’s the nearest dealership?”
“Matt alwa
ys buys his ranch vehicles in Idaho Falls. It shouldn’t take more than an hour to pick out a truck, right? I should think we can make it there and back before the fireworks show with time to spare.”
He stopped dead and stared at her. She met his gaze squarely, wondering if he could correctly read the message in her eyes. She was ready to move forward, to take the next step with him. The sooner the better, as far as she was concerned.
“Are you sure?” he murmured, as if he could read her thoughts.
With a slow smile she nodded. An instant later he dropped the folded lawn chairs and yanked her into his arms, right in the middle of town, and lowered his head for a fiery kiss.
She would have stood there all afternoon just basking in the hot promise of that kiss—with no thought at all for where they were and who might be watching—if a carload of teenagers hadn’t chosen that moment to drive past honking and catcalling.
With a flustered laugh she broke the kiss. “Whoa.” That was the only coherent thought she could put into words.
Before he could answer, she saw his gaze sharpen on something behind her. Fearing one of her brothers had stumbled onto them, she turned and saw with relief that it was only Wade Lowry.
Her relief was short-lived.
Wade stepped forward, his hands clenched into fists and his handsome face twisted with anger. “I heard the rumors but I couldn’t believe they were true. How can you stand to be seen with this…this son of a bitch after what he did to you?”
She blinked, stunned by his words, his animosity. A regular churchgoer, Wade hardly ever used profanity. It was so out of character that she didn’t know how to answer him.
Why would he be so furious? Was it jealousy? Maybe he thought they had more of a relationship than they did. She went out with him occasionally but she had always tried to be clear that she wasn’t interested in anything more serious with him. He was her friend. She hated the idea that she might have hurt him.
“Wade—” she began, but he cut her off.
“He took Melanie away! She never would have left if it hadn’t been for him.”
She blinked, disoriented by his words. Melanie? This was about Melanie? Had Wade been one of the many men ensnared in her sister-in-law’s twisted, sticky web of destruction?
She couldn’t believe it. The man she knew was far too decent and principled to sleep with another man’s wife, no matter how alluring she might be. But the emotions in his eyes told a different story. Of betrayal and loss and something else she couldn’t recognize.
“Wade, he didn’t leave with Melanie,” she said gently.
He turned his anger toward her, and she drew in a shaky breath at the force of it blazing at her. “Of course he did! Everybody knows that! People saw the two of them go. Your own brother saw them leave together!”
Zack stepped forward. “You know exactly why I left town ten years ago, don’t you, Lowry? And it wasn’t because of some imaginary tryst with Melanie Harte.” Zack’s voice was sharp, his eyes suddenly as hard as granite.
Wade stiffened. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I’m sure if you put your mind to it and thought real hard, you could probably figure it out.”
“You’re crazy. Everybody knows you ran off with Melanie. The only mystery is why a woman like her would be willing to settle for a no-account drifter like you.”
“That’s what I might have been then,” Zack murmured, pure ice against Wade’s fiery anger. “But not anymore. Now I have money and power. And a very long memory.”
Wade flexed his hands into fists, looking as though he was ready to lash out any second and turn the verbal confrontation physical.
She could just imagine Jesse’s reaction as Salt River chief of police if he had to come break up a fight between the two men. She huffed out a breath, furious with both of them—Wade for starting it and Zack for tossing fuel onto the fire.
“This is ridiculous. You two are not going to brawl in the middle of Main Street. Not if I have anything to say about it. I’m sorry you’re upset, Wade. I don’t know what was between you and Melanie. That’s your business. Just as what is between Zack and me is mine.”
She didn’t give him time to respond, just grabbed on tightly to Zack’s arm. “Come on, Slater. If we’re going to make it to Idaho Falls and back, we had better hurry.”
He looked down at her as if just remembering her presence. With one last stony look at Wade, he opened the door to his glossy Range Rover for Cassie, then climbed in and drove away, leaving the other man standing in the street glaring after them.
They were almost to Tin Cup Pass before she finally lost patience with his continued silence. “Okay. Spill it. What was that all about.”
He gripped the wheel. “You tell me. He’s your boyfriend.”
She barely refrained from slugging him while he was driving. “He’s my friend. You want to tell me what you have against him?”
He said nothing for several moments while yellow lines passed in a blur. “I’m fairly certain he was one of the men I saw that night unloading that airplane full of drugs,” he finally said.
She stared at him. “Wade? You’re telling me you think Wade Lowry was part of some vicious criminal operation? A drug smuggler? That’s impossible! You must be mistaken.”
“Why?”
She could give him a hundred reasons. A thousand! Wade was a kind and gentle man. A little stuffy, maybe, but generally considered to be one of the nicest men in town.
She was struggling to put it into words when she suddenly remembered something else. “It’s impossible! Ten years ago he was on the other side of the law. He was an officer with the Salt River PD.”
He kept his eyes on the road but his mouth hardened. “So were the rest of them.”
Her jaw sagged. “What? You’re telling me the Salt River Police Department was running drugs?”
“I don’t know about all of them. There were only four men there that night, all wearing masks. The only one I recognized for sure was Chief Briggs. He was the one giving the orders.”
She didn’t find that such a stretch of the imagination. Jesse had told her enough horror stories about his predecessor that she could certainly believe Carl Briggs would have been capable of anything. He had been completely dirty, as crooked as a snake in a cactus patch.
Briggs had been under indictment on multiple counts of corruption five years earlier when he’d dropped dead of a heart attack.
Jesse was still trying to repair the damage Briggs had done to the small police department’s reputation during his tenure.
But Wade? The image of him involved in any kind of criminal enterprise just didn’t fit the man she knew. “You said they were all wearing masks,” she said slowly. “So you can’t be sure Wade was there.”
“Not one hundred percent,” he admitted. Damn, he wished he could remember that night more vividly, could put faces and names to the men who had so gleefully taken turns beating him.
If he could, he would find a way to even the score now that he was no longer that no-account drifter Lowry had called him. What was the saying? Vengeance was sweeter when it was savored. He would love to be able to savor a little delayed justice.
His memories were just too hazy, though. He only had vague impressions of Briggs ordering one of the men to cuff him. Then the chief had circled around him a few times, just for intimidation’s sake, before offering him three choices that were really no choices at all.
They could kill him right then and bury him deep in the mountains surrounding Star Valley where nobody would ever find him.
They could let him take the rap for the drugs.
Or he could leave Salt River and never come back.
Cocky bastard that he’d been a decade earlier, he had spat in the chief’s face. Briggs had eased back on his heels, his pale blue eyes narrowed.
“Boy, you just made a big mistake,” he murmured softly, then had ordered the other men to finish him off.
They had all taken turns beating on “Cassie Harte’s pretty-boy boyfriend” who stuck his nose in the wrong place.
He must have passed out from one too many kicks in the head. His last thought before he had surrendered to the pain had been for Cassie.
When he regained consciousness, he’d been alone. No plane, no handcuffs, no Briggs. Only his beat-up truck and a note staked to the ground in front of him that said only five words. “Jail or bail. Your choice.”
He had no doubt in the world Briggs could make a charge of drug smuggling stick against him. He wanted to stay and fight it. But then he thought of the expression he would see on Cassie’s face if she saw him behind bars. The hurt and the dismay. The disillusionment.
He couldn’t make her endure that kind of shame. She deserved better than to have to go through that.
She deserved better than him.
It had taken him a good fifteen minutes to make his shaky way into the driver’s seat of his old truck and start it up, pain shrieking through him with every second from what he would later learn had been a half-dozen broken ribs, a concussion and a shattered elbow.
He had a vague memory of that drive out of town, how he’d decided to head south toward Utah. He had known he was leaving Cassie forever, and his heart had cracked into sharp little pieces that gouged him just as painfully as his broken ribs.
“Where did you go?”
He blinked back to the present, to the soft, beautiful woman beside him who had suffered the consequences of that decision. “What?”
“Just now. You looked like you were miles away.”
“I was remembering. Regretting. I should never have left. I should have stayed and fought Briggs.”
Her eyes softened and she reached across the vehicle and touched his arm. “You would have lost. He might have killed you.”
“Maybe. But at least I would have known I tried.”
“Small consolation that would have been to you in your grave. No. I can’t believe I’m actually saying this, but I’m glad you made the choice you did.”
He stared at her, taking his eyes off the road for several beats too long. When he realized he had just narrowly missed hitting a reflector pole, he yanked the Range Rover into the nearest pullout and shoved it into Park.
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