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Her brown hair was long, thick and straight as a stick—the same haircut she’d had in high school, which she trimmed herself when she remembered. Usually her hair was either swept up in a ponytail or thrust under a hat, so she paid little attention to it. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d worn her hair down, let alone curled it.
“Stop acting foolish,” she snapped at her image in the mirror as she snatched up an elastic band and pulled her drooping curls up into a ponytail.
She took off the dress she’d spent too much money on, tears welling in her eyes as she recalled how cute it had looked on the hanger.
“What did you expect?” she asked herself, sounding just like her mother. Her mother, even dead for years, was right. “Can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.”
Arlene hurriedly washed the makeup she’d experimented with from her face and changed into a shirt, jeans and boots. She was what she was, and this date with Hank Monroe was a one-time shot.
She thought about the first time she’d seen him and couldn’t help but smile. He’d called about signing up for her rural Internet dating service. His voice had been deep and soft and had a strange thrilling effect on her.
They’d agreed to meet at a local café so she could get him signed up. She’d been nervous about meeting him because he wasn’t like most of her clients—twenty- to thirtysomething. He was forty-eight—mature, like herself.
The minute she’d walked into the café, she’d spotted him. He’d looked up and their eyes had met.
It sounded ridiculous, she knew, but her heart had begun to pound wildly. Hank Monroe wasn’t handsome, but there was a masculine strength in his features and in the broad shoulders, slim hips and long legs cased in denim. He looked like a man who could wrestle grizzly bears if he had a mind to.
And, her smile growing as she remembered the first time he’d laughed, he’d made her laugh, surprising them both since hers resembled a donkey’s bray.
Hank Monroe had made her feel young and beautiful—all the things she wasn’t.
Which should be a clue.
Her mother again. But it was true. Hank had signed up for her dating service to meet women, not date the owner of the service. Who knows why he’d asked her out? Just being polite, she could only assume, suddenly glad she hadn’t dressed up. No reason to act like this was a real date after all.
As she came out of her bedroom, she found her son Bo sitting on the couch, watching television, a huge bag of potato chips in his lap, his bare feet up on her coffee table.
With a frown, she brushed his feet off the table and took the bag of chips from him even as he protested.
“Hey! What am I supposed to eat for dinner?” he groused.
“There are leftovers in the fridge,” she said, putting a clip on the chips and taking a cloth back to the living room to wipe the smudges from the coffee table.
“Leftovers?” he demanded indignantly.
She turned down the television volume and straightened to look at her twenty-three-year-old son. He’d been her pride and joy. In her eyes he could do no wrong. She shuddered as she recalled when that had changed.
“Where is your sister?” she asked, determined not to get into an argument with him. Not before her date, anyway.
He shrugged.
Arlene realized she hadn’t seen Charlotte since her almost-nineteen-year-old had left for her doctor’s appointment earlier that afternoon. Charlotte’s old blue sedan wasn’t parked out front, and Arlene realized she hadn’t heard Bo and Charlotte arguing for hours.
“She should be back from her doctor’s appointment by now. Did she call?”
Bo’s attention was back on the television. “Nope.”
Arlene frowned, hoping the appointment had gone well. Charlotte had been more irritable than usual before she’d left. Arlene remembered how uncomfortable it was being pregnant the last few months. She wondered if Charlotte wasn’t having second thoughts about keeping the baby. She could only hope.
“Well, when your sister gets home. make sure she eats something besides potato chips and candy bars. Remind her she’s feeding a baby who needs something nutritious to eat.”
For a moment Arlene thought about canceling her date. If she didn’t cook something, she was afraid neither Bo nor Charlotte would eat properly.
“Promise me you’ll eat and make sure Charlotte does.”
Bo rolled his eyes. He’d heard this enough times. For months she’d harped on Charlotte to take care of herself for the baby’s sake. Not that Charlotte had any business being pregnant, Arlene thought as she headed for her car—and her date.
Her date. What had she been thinking? Dating was for people half her age who still had the stamina—and the optimism. She had neither.
She’d made a point of insisting she would meet Hank Monroe at the restaurant. He’d wanted to pick her up at her house, but the last thing she wanted was for him to meet her family. She knew that once he did, it would be the kiss of death, and she just wanted to enjoy this moment in time knowing it couldn’t last anyway.
Why shoot herself in the foot before she even got out of the starting gate?
HANK MONROE LOOKED up as his date came through the restaurant door. He smiled, recalling the first time he’d laid eyes on her. What was it about Arlene that had resonated with his own life? He couldn’t be sure. Something in her soft brown eyes. In the determined set of her shoulders. In her hesitant, shy smile.
And that laugh…
Now, as he watched her tug her shirt down over her slim jeans and saw how uncomfortable she looked as she glanced around the restaurant, he felt his heart go out to her again.
Arlene was tall and rangy like a lot of Montana ranch women. Nothing like his petite, classically pretty ex-wife Bitsy. He tried not to see Arlene through Bitsy’s eyes. Bitsy took everything at face value. She would never have understood what he saw in this woman. But then, Bitsy had never understood him, had she?
Nor would Bitsy appreciate a woman like Arlene Evans. Few people would, he realized. Bitsy had always been comfortable in her skin. Arlene, he suspected, never had.
He rose quickly, his smile broadening, hoping to reassure her. “You look wonderful.” It was true, although he saw she didn’t believe it.
Her cheeks flared. “I didn’t know what to wear.”
“Your choice was perfect.” He pulled out the chair for her and mentally kicked himself. He shouldn’t have picked a fancy restaurant for their first date.
As he took the chair across from her, he watched her try to relax. Something else that didn’t come easy for Arlene. The woman had an energy that was like being close to a live electrical wire.
“I haven’t been on a date in a while,” she said.
He smiled. “Me either. Feels odd, huh?”
“Yes. But…nice.”
It did feel nice. “So tell me how the matchmaking business is going,” he said, leaning toward her.
She brightened and told him she had a half dozen new clients just this week alone. “I still can’t believe it.”
“You had a great idea and you’ve made it happen. You should be very proud of yourself.”
“Knock on wood,” she said, lightly tapping the table.
She didn’t seem the superstitious type. He wondered what had her worried. Or if, like him, she was leery when things seemed to be going too well.
LATER THAT NIGHT, after their date, Hank had that exact feeling as he checked the perimeter of the ranch house, as he always did before he entered the house. Old habits died hard. Other people would have thought it paranoid. For him it was merely prudent and part of his life. The life he’d once chosen and had only recently escaped from.
He’d had a great time tonight. That alone worried him. He’d signed up for the dating service on a whim. Once he’d met Arlene, he hadn’t wanted to meet any other women. He wasn’t even sure he was ready to date. It felt too dangerous. But he’d asked Arlene out. And he couldn’t say he was sorry. Just worried.
There were some things that were inescapable. Guilt. Regret. And his old life. It dwarfed the other two in comparison.
That was the reason he never bothered to lock his house. He knew from experience how easy it was to get into any house, even those with expensive security systems. He had bought the ranch from a corporation that had used the house for conferences.
Because of that, the place was way too large for him. But he’d fallen in love with the view of the Little Rockies and he’d told himself that with all the land surrounding the place he would be as safe here as anywhere.
As he stepped into the house, he found himself whistling. He couldn’t remember a night he’d enjoyed more. Arlene was a fun date—once she relaxed.
They’d had dinner, then gone to the movie—the only one in Whitehorse. A comedy had been showing. That was something else he had in common with Arlene—the way they laughed.
“You bray like a donkey,” Bitsy had told him when they’d first gotten together. “You really need to do something about that.”
He’d quit laughing around her.
During the movie, he’d found himself simply enjoying the sound of Arlene’s laugh. It had felt so good, so natural.
Later, he’d thought about kissing her good-night but had chickened out. Coward. The desire had been there. He’d told himself he was just afraid of scaring her off. Clearly this dating thing was as alien to her as it was to him.
But he knew that he was the one who wanted to take it slow. That was another thing they shared—the feeling that when things were going too well, something was bound to happen to jinx it.
As he passed his office, he saw that the message light on his answering machine was flashing. He preferred an answering machine with small disposable tapes over voice mail. Just as he’d always periodically checked his house and car for listening devices. Even here on the ranch in Montana.
He would have liked to believe he’d dropped off his former associates’ radar. But he’d worked for the agency too long to pretend that was even possible.
Still, as he pushed the play button, he was startled to hear a familiar voice.
“Hank, it’s Cameron. Call me. We need to catch up. It’s been too long.”
He stared down at the machine, shaken. By the unexpected sound of his old friend and former boss’s voice as much as by the calmness of the words—and the underlying threat. Code words. They brought it all back, and for a moment it was as if he’d never left the agency.
He didn’t need to replay the message. He quickly deleted it, knowing it was futile to think that would be the end of it. The words echoed in his head. Code words that informed him there’s been a breach in security. He was in danger.
ARLENE EVANS WOKE smiling. That alone shocked her. Normally the blare of Bo’s music down the hall or the sound of Charlotte clamoring around in the kitchen started her day off wrong.
But this morning, after her date with Hank Monroe, nothing could ruin her good mood. They’d had a nice dinner. He’d been easy to talk to. The movie had been enjoyable. They’d stood out in the moonlight and talked afterward.
She been afraid he’d kiss her. And afraid he wouldn’t. He didn’t. But he’d asked her out again. She felt like a schoolgirl.
Just the thought seemed…foolish. She was too old to be having these feelings. Especially the ones Hank Monroe had sparked with just the brush of his fingers when they’d both reached for the popcorn at the same time. Or when he’d put his arm around her. Or touched her back with the palm of his hand as they’d left the theater. Desire after all these years of feeling nothing?
She rose and dressed, wrapped in the memory of the night before and the prospect of another date tonight. He’d also invited her to the county fair this coming weekend—his first county fair, he’d said.
She hadn’t told him, but she planned to enter in the baking division and almost always took blue ribbons. It was the one thing she excelled in, and normally she would be a nervous wreck worrying that she might not win this year. That she’d lost her touch.
But Hank Monroe had taken her mind off the fair this year.
Which, she reminded herself sternly, wasn’t good. Baking lasted. Men didn’t. “Stick to what you’re good at,” her mother had always said. “It’s little enough.”
Arlene felt her smile slip. She was making too much of one date with the man. Getting her hopes up was always a mistake.
She’d learned that the hard way, she thought, remembering high school dates that never showed while she waited by the window and her mother berated her for opening herself up to that kind of humiliation.
By the time Arlene reached the kitchen, she was no longer smiling. She yelled down the hall for Bo to turn down the music. He didn’t. She started to tell Charlotte to go down the hall and tell him when she noticed her daughter wasn’t lying on the couch, where she usually was this time of the morning. Nor was the television on or the kitchen counter a mess from where Charlotte had made herself a snack before breakfast.
More puzzled than worried, Arlene walked down the hall to her daughter’s bedroom and pushed open the door. The bed was just as it had been when Arlene made it the previous morning.
Charlotte hadn’t come home last night.
Stepping across the hall, she opened her son’s bedroom door. The room was bedlam—just the way he apparently liked it. He’d barred her from cleaning it, which she should have been grateful for. Instead the room was an embarrassment, a reflection on her.
“What if someone comes by and sees this mess?” she’d demanded time after time.
“No one comes by,” he’d said.
“Well, if anyone did, they’d think I was a terrible mother.”
Bo had laughed at that.
“Have you seen your sister?” she mouthed now over the horrible music blasting from his stereo.
He was sprawled on his bed, frowning at her and motioning for her to go away and close the door.
She reached over and grabbed the cord on the stereo and pulled hard. The music stopped, filling the room with an abrupt deafening silence.
“What?” he demanded.
“Your sister. She didn’t come home last night.”
“So?”
“She’s eight months pregnant.”
“I noticed. But I’m not my sister’s keeper.” He reached to plug the stereo back in, but she still held the cord and jerked it back out of his grasp.
“I want you to clean your room.”
He looked at her as if she’d lost her mind.
“I’m serious, Bo.”
He mugged a face at her.
“I also want you to get a job.”
He let out a surprised laugh. “I have a job. I help you with your Internet dating service.”
“No, you don’t.” She tossed him the end of the cord and closed the door behind her, telling herself she shouldn’t be worried about Charlotte.
