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Sophie’s alarmed eyes met his in the rearview mirror; the car shot dangerously fast around one of the switchback curves. She slammed her foot on the brake, sending the back end fishtailing into a soft sandy spot on the shoulder of the road.
“Take it easy,” Luke said, just before he was flung across the seat as she bumped back onto the road. By the time he’d awkwardly righted himself, pushing himself up with his hands cuffed behind his back, she’d gotten the car under control and was proceeding as if he hadn’t spoken, her lips tightly pursed. He sought her eyes in the mirror, but she wouldn’t look at him.
“A boy,” he said.
Her fingers clenched on the wheel. “Let’s keep this strictly business.”
“Not possible.”
Her head jerked sideways and he caught a glimpse of her pale face and stormy eyes, brimmed by thick brown lashes. “What did you say?”
“You and I will never be strictly business.”
“Fourteen years without contact certainly indicates otherwise.”
“Nope. Fourteen years without contact only means that we both went cold turkey. Now that I’m back…” He let the smoldering heat inside him flow into his intense stare. It was amazing how physical desire could blot out one’s doubts. “Things are bound to be different. There’s a wicked temptation in proximity.” If she hadn’t cuffed him, he could have run his finger along her exposed nape to remind her of the sparks that flew between them. It was obvious that maturity had only deepened the attraction.
His fingers flexed. Was her skin still as smooth as satin? He’d always been astonished by how soft she was beneath her rough cotton blouses and cheap denim jeans. His sweet little Sophie had been a pink rose bristling with thorns.
She caught her breath. “Don’t—” She exhaled noisily. “Don’t you even think of starting up with me again, Luke Salinger. I’m not interested.”
“Well, well. Little Sophie’s learned to stand up for herself.”
“I finally figured out that no one else would do it for me.”
“Yeah.” He remembered the patrol car parked in her driveway on that fateful night. With all her defiance, why hadn’t she stood up for him? Although he’d never have dreamed of asking her to lie, it had turned out that he’d wanted her unflinching support. Had counted on it. Discovering that not even Sophie was prepared to back him up had seemed like the final cruel blow.
Years later, he understood that the situation hadn’t been so black-and-white. He’d made mistakes himself. Bad ones. Perhaps even irreparable.
“Life sure is a bitch, huh, Little Soph?” he said coaxingly.
“Don’t call me that,” she snapped, uncoaxed. “May I remind you that I’m your arresting officer?”
“Something you’ve been waiting to do for a long time, I’d wager.” He kept his tone nonchalant. Even so, he could tell by the way she cocked her head that she’d caught the underlying accusation.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked, softly menacing.
“Only that a jail cell’s where you think I belong. Maybe you always did.”
She didn’t answer. Didn’t speak for a long while. When finally she did, he couldn’t tell if the quaver in her voice indicated guilt or regret or maybe even longing. “Oh, Luke,” she said. “Why’d you come back?”
“Hey, babe, you don’t sound happy to see me.”
She slammed the flat of her hand on the steering wheel. “Try to be serious, please. I need to know why you’ve come back after so long. What made you—” A shudder coursed through her. “Why?”
He hesitated, wondering about the worry in her voice. It was as if she feared him. And that didn’t make sense.
“Haven’t you heard?” he said mildly, settling on the easiest of his reasons for returning to Wyoming. “The Lucases are having a family reunion at the ranch. A black sheep is just what they need to complete the happy get-together.”
Watching her face in the mirror, he caught the relief that flashed over her features. It was gone before he could fully weigh it. “And that’s all?” she prodded, her brows beetled.
He shifted, trying to find a comfortable position. The links of the cuffs jingled. “Looks like I’m going to have a date in the courts as well. Thanks to you, Deputy Ryan.”
“I’m sure the family lawyer will take care of the problem in a snap.” She’d probably meant to sound gruff, unaware that a hint of concern had crept into her voice. “Judge Entwhistle is tough but fair. She’ll take into account your clean record.” Sophie cleared her throat. “As long as it’s completely clean, that is.”
“You mean, have I been carrying out a lawless rampage for the past fourteen years?” He shrugged. “Nope. I’m squeaky clean. Other than for a recent speeding ticket.”
She smiled. Then quickly sobered. “So what have you been doing all this time?”
“A little bit of everything.”
“In the old days, that meant carousing, disturbing the peace, malicious mischief…”
“A guy learns to be more discreet when he’s on the lam.”
“On the lam for fourteen years?” Sophie braked at the highway intersection. “Some life.”
“Yeah, it’s been real fulfilling,” he growled, taunting her. What did she care? She’d cast him aside, hadn’t she?
“You always did suit your name,” she said softly. “Apparently you’re still an untamed maverick.” Her chin tilted, showing him her narrowed eyes. “When are you going to grow up, huh?”
“Like you? Little Sophie Ryan with her uniform and her handcuffs and her big, bad gun?”
She twisted around in the seat. “At least I’ve stayed in one place and built something good and lasting for myself! I’ve lived up to my responsibilities!”
Luke was taken aback. “Sophie?” he said quietly, puzzled by her vehemence.
A truck stacked with hay bales rattled past. She stepped on the gas and pulled out behind it with a spin of the tires—obviously her driving hadn’t improved just because she was now piloting a patrol car. “Forget I said that. I was only blowing off steam.”
He insisted. “What responsibility have I shirked?”
She hunched her shoulders. “I expect your family could answer that better than me.”
“Maybe.” But he didn’t think that was what she’d meant. He went silent for a few minutes, trying to evaluate the situation from Sophie’s viewpoint, with the aid of years of hindsight. If she’d been as angry and mixed-up as he, shouldn’t he be able to find enough compassion to forgive her own lapse—or lapses, according to Heath—of good judgment?
I don’t know if I can. He’d been Sophie’s first lover; his possessiveness had run strong. The shock of her betrayal had been the only way he’d made the break, and still his unreasoning desire for her had remained—a torturous emotion to live with, driving him to dangerously escalating extremes in his work as a stuntman, all part of the effort to get her out of his mind until he’d finally smartened up and realized that seeing her again was the only way to know for sure.
“I left you,” he said. “You’re still holding a grudge about that?”
She gave a short, hard, dismissive laugh. No answer.
They were passing Punch’s place, nearing the town. In a short while Sophie would turn back into Deputy Ryan and Luke would have missed his chance. He had to speak now—or forever hold his peace.
“I wanted to take you with me, you know.”
She went as quiet and watchful as an owl, her rounded eyes reflected in the mirror.
“My brown-eyed girl,” he whispered, lost in a sudden swirl of bittersweet memory. Slow dancing with Sophie in the gravel parking lot of the Thunderhead since she was too young to go inside, her head flung back, her dark eyes on his. Speeding on his motorcycle, taking the switchback at a reckless speed, her arms wrapped tight around his waist. Hours spent lying together in the long grass of the Boyer’s Rock pasture, the sun-warmed earth their refuge, their cradle. Trading kisses, whispering confessions, studying the stars.
Sophie blinked. Several times. “Sure you wanted to take me. So much so that you left town without even saying goodbye.” Her voice was clotted with wary resentment.
Yet hopeful? he wondered, then deliberately reminded himself of why he’d left her behind in the first place. According to Heath—and other walking, talking evidence in the form of her son—she’d not only spilled her guts to the sheriff, she’d quickly found “consolation” with a string of other men.
Luke refused to let her see how badly that tore at his insides. Ice water in my veins. “Well, jeez, Sophie, I guess I figured that if you were willing to turn me in to the sheriff, keeping me as your boyfriend was not a top priority.”
She stopped the car in the middle of Granite Street, two blocks from the police station. Luckily there was very little traffic, as was usually the case in Treetop.
“Luke…” she said, turning to stare at him over the top of the car seat. Slowly she shook her head. “I didn’t.”
Anguish clawed at his gut. “You didn’t?”
She was adamant, proud, passionate—his Sophie, his brown-eyed girl. “No, Luke. I most certainly did not turn you in to the sheriff!”
SOPHIE TURNED THE KEY and sat dully in her thirteen-year-old hatchback—same age as her son—waiting for the engine to stop rattling. A wisp of smoke rose from the tailpipe.
She sighed. There was no way she could afford a new car this year, not if she intended to heat the house during the long, cold winter, keep Joey in jeans, sneakers and pizza, plus pay tuition for the last two courses she needed to complete her degree in social work. If going to college part-time had given her any smarts at all, she’d have chosen a field that paid better. Having a career that meant something to her and the world at large was more important to her happiness in the long run, but in the short run, her old car was ready to plunk its last ker-plunkety plunk.
Sophie’s head throbbed. Maybe her dad could work on the engine again, keep it going a little longer with another bubblegum-and-rubber-band miracle.
She pushed the door open with a creak and stepped out, tired to her bones. Aside from the wicked headache, it wasn’t a physical exhaustion as much as a mental one. The psychological trauma of Maverick’s return had done her in.
Facing her father and son was what she dreaded next. If Archie “Buzzsaw” Ryan had made his rounds to the Thunderhead and the liquor store instead of moldering in his trailer out back, he’d have heard the news. Word wouldn’t have reached Joey as fast. Even if it had, he wouldn’t really care about an adult he’d never met. Unless some busybody had started up with the old rumor about Luke Salinger being Joe Ryan’s father…
Rolling her head to ease the tight muscles in her neck and shoulders, Sophie clumped up the porch steps of her two-bedroom wood frame cottage. Coming home usually gave her a boost. The small house wasn’t much, but it was hers—at least the mortgage was—and she’d worked hard to make it into the kind of safe, cozy home she’d never known, growing up. Today it just looked like a money pit—a conglomeration of loose shingles, dripping faucets, crumbling plaster and buckling linoleum. If she hadn’t splashed bright jewel-toned coats of paint on every surface to distract the eye, there’d be no disguising that the place was coming down around their ears.
“Hey, Joe?” she called from the pumpkin-colored front hall, even though the silence told her that her son wasn’t home. She checked the clock. Time for a bath before she had to start dinner. If ever there was a day when she needed to be cleansed of her cares and woes, it was today.
Luke already knows about Joey.
The thought had pulsed at the back of her mind all day, a red-for-danger strobe that had given her the vicious headache. As the tub filled, she popped a couple of aspirin, staring at her face in the mirror over the sink.
“He doesn’t know everything,” she told her bleak reflection.
But he soon will—someone’s bound to repeat the rumor, argued the voice that had taken control of her pounding skull. What will you do when he shows up, asking if it’s true?
How badly did she want Joey to have a father?
“I can’t think about it now.” Sophie stripped off her uniform and dropped it in the hamper. She’d have to remember to bring the ruined shirt to the dry cleaner’s tomorrow morning—another expense she could do without.
As if it mattered in the larger scheme of things. After this morning, she had worse problems than coffee stains to think about. Confronting them made her headache intensify. She could have sworn it was gnawing away her brain.
Luke suspects.
She winced in pain.
Heath Salinger knows.
The townspeople think they know.
Gad, her head was going to explode.
But everyone’s wrong—including me.
CHAPTER THREE
TYPICALLY, JOE RYAN came home with a clatter and crash—backpack flung to the floor, high-top sneakers kicked off against the wall, a brief stop to power up the TV at top volume, a noisy forage through the kitchen, gabbing loudly all the while whether or not there was a response from Sophie. Only his garrulousness had abated recently as he took more and more to locking himself in his attic bedroom, rap music pounding the slanted walls, immune to his mother’s entreaties for either a little bit of peace and quiet or a return of their old rapport. While Sophie figured Joe’s moods were the usual teenage funk, she missed the boy he used to be: sweet, funny, affectionate—a chatterbox.
“Hey, Mom, what’s for supper?” Joe hollered from the kitchen, sounding as though his head was buried in the refrigerator.
Sophie had left the bathroom door open a wide crack. “Casserole,” she yelled, which was what she always said when she hadn’t planned a menu or shopped for ingredients. There was usually something on hand that could be made into a casserole.
Joe groaned. “Not again.”
“Unless you want to fire up the barbecue?”
He groaned louder to be sure that she’d heard.
She muttered. “Then don’t complain about the casserole.”
A creaking sound followed by the shushing slide of stocking-clad feet in the short hallway told her that Joey was trying to creep upstairs without her hearing. “Joe,” she called. “Stop and say hello before you go up to your room.”
“’Lo,” he mumbled from outside the bathroom door.
A few years back—more like four, Sophie realized with a pang—Joe used to sit with her while she soaked in the bathtub. He’d chatter about his day at school and why the pond changed color and how come Grandpa only had one arm and what he’d dreamed about last night, which at the time was usually spaceships or vampires. Now she was lucky if she could get a “’lo” out of him.
Today she needed more. “Can you talk to me, please, Joey? Tell me that you got an A on your first biology quiz and that you and Grandpa cleaned out the garden shed like you were supposed to all summer.”
“I got a B+, and Grandpa wasn’t here when I got home from school so I went over to Fletcher’s and played basketball. Okay?”
“You’ll do the shed this weekend.”
“Yeah.” Agitated, Joe rattled a bag of tortilla chips in time with his jiggling leg. He was all twitches and fidgets these days, a perpetual motion machine. “Can I go now?”
The silhouette he made hovering in the dim hallway was disturbing to Sophie’s tenuous peace of mind. Anyone looking for it would see her son’s familiarity to the Salinger brothers—the lanky frame, the handsomely carved profile, the height. Luckily Joe’s eyes were brown like hers and not Luke’s steel blue. That would have been a dead giveaway.
Joe raked one hand through the scruff of dark hair that flopped over his forehead. “Huh, Mom? Can I pleeeze go to my room now?”
Sophie squirmed in the bathtub, rubbing at the goose flesh that had sprung up on her arms despite the steamy water. “Then nothing interesting happened today?”
“Mo-o-om…”
“Okay, you can leave,” she said, relieved. “Way to go on that B+.” But Joe was already gone, galloping up the twisting steps like a gangly runaway colt. His door slammed. Two seconds later, music blared. Sophie listened for a few minutes to be sure he hadn’t sneaked in a banned CD—she knew more about gangsta rap than she wanted—before tuning out.
Reprieve. She closed her eyes and slid lower in the tub. She had time to think of what—if anything—she should tell her son about his father.
Gradually the hot bath eased her tight muscles. Total relaxation beckoned, but one thought kept intruding. Joey had said that his grandfather was gone. Which meant that Archie would return knowing of Luke’s reappearance. The Lucases—even though the younger generation carried the name Salinger, they were still considered Lucases through and through—were the kind of family that the citizens of Treetop loved to gossip about. Every lurid detail of Sophie’s chase and arrest of the black sheep would be dissected over dinner tables all over town. Archie would glare at her across the table and wave his stump around, dredging up his ancient complaints about the Lucases and how they’d done the Ryans wrong. It would be the Montagues versus the Capulets all over again, and Sophie was exhausted just imagining it.
“Nuts.” She hoisted herself out of the tub. One way or another, Maverick’s return was going to force her into a showdown with everyone in her life. And out of it, she supposed, thinking of Luke with an unwelcome but nonetheless compelling fascination. She shivered.
