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The word “love” caught in the air, and Sam just let it hang, knowing it would always be out of his reach.
He cleared his throat. “Speaking of tender feelings, because I know how much your brother loves mine, how is Chad?”
Ashlyn’s voice seemed drained of its amused energy. “He’s hardly changed since you played football in high school. Still in Switzerland, married to a very forgiving wife. Coming back someday, I’m sure.”
Again, Sam thought about the rumors concerning Chad and Meg Cassidy. But that was tired news in Kane’s Crossing. His brother ignored it, and Sam did, as well.
“So,” she continued, switching the subject. “I know I asked before, but why did you decide to come back to town? I heard you lived in D.C.”
The new conversational topic put him on guard, not only because she’d done it so jarringly, but because he was doing his best to forget about the past.
Flashes of crying children, an explosion lighting their eyes, haunted him. Echoes of screeching tires racked his brain.
“It was time for a change,” he answered gruffly.
And she didn’t push it. She must have sensed his disquietude, because she shifted her position, turning to stare out the window at the passing night. A closed-down filling station and gnarled trees streaked past, all a part of the shaded world that probably held a lot more colors and excitement for her than it did for him.
Ashlyn watched the world go by. Kane’s Crossing and the town’s Saturday Evening Post ambience could have fooled anyone with its innocence—the pristine picket fences, the daisy-petaled flower gardens, the creaking porch swings moaning about darker stories underneath their perfect facades.
The sheriff was right. It was time for a change.
But she’d never be brave enough to take a chance, to move out of her big, expensive house to explore everything outside her gates.
It was safer at home, with her own wing of the mansion, her own studio where she could create sculptures and design jewelry without anyone to tell her it was second-rate or useless. Her self-esteem wasn’t ready to face the big, bad world. Besides, she couldn’t leave her mother, not with the way she begged her only daughter to stay by her bedside, to help her get through countless illnesses.
Sometimes Ashlyn disgusted herself. Yeah, she was Ms. Muscle when it came to tearing down signs welcoming her brother home when he’d last returned from Europe. Yet, she didn’t have the guts to admit that she wanted to help someone in need. Someone like Emma Trainor.
If she had any gumption whatsoever, she’d tell her father how much it hurt every time she came in second place to Chad. Every time he glowed when he introduced the favorite son. Every time his face fell when he introduced her, if he bothered.
Stewing about it wouldn’t help. She’d known that for years. That’s why she’d gotten into the habit of ingratiating herself with the townsfolk by poking fun at her family’s royal image, cracking jokes with the old men on the general store porch while sipping bottled sodas, running with her girlfriends in the nearby creek with her dress hiked over her knees. All so very un-Spencer-like.
What they didn’t know is how the flippancy had left her feeling a little dead inside.
“Miss Spencer?”
Sam. Sam Reno. She hadn’t forgotten he was in the same car with her. And how could she forget, with his woodsy cologne faintly lingering in the air? A mix of freshly fallen leaves and spice mingling to disturb her thoughts.
“You can call me Ashlyn,” she said, still facing the window, looking to her heart’s content at his reflection. She slowly turned to face him, cuddling into the seat, seeing if he reacted to her movements.
Of course he didn’t. Had his expression always been so stony, so devoid of animation?
She sat up a little straighter, game lost. At least she’d get a response from her father tonight, whether or not it was for the best.
He bit back his words with the tightening of his mouth, and she thought about how much moving to D.C. had changed him. His Doc Martens were too new, hadn’t been broken in just yet. The same went for his clean lawman-brown jacket, his unfaded blue jeans. He looked like a city boy who’d forgotten the small town part of himself.
Through the windshield she caught sight of the Reno Center for Children as it whizzed by, lights out for the night. Then they pulled up to the sheriff’s office, where the lamp was always burning.
He set the brake on the car and cut the ignition, turning to shoot a miffed gaze her way. And, in the car’s dim light, she saw what he’d been hiding at Emma Trainor’s.
Eyes the dead-hazel shade of desolation, like the muted colors of a predawn day when nothing stirs, nothing lives.
Sam Reno was hurting, no doubt about it.
Chapter Two
In the sterile light of the sheriff’s office, Ashlyn noticed that Sam echoed the faded colors of a Remington painting, as well—the dusty oranges, browns and blues that spoke of still life and times gone by.
He led her to a seat in front of his hardwood desk, the top resembling a desert landscape with a minimum of papers and clutter. Well, if she had a desk in this place, it’d look like that, too, she supposed. All the sheriff of Kane’s Crossing usually did was baby-sit drunks and chase around Spencer’s wayward daughter anyway. The town hadn’t seen any major action since… Her heart took a swan dive.
Since Sam’s father had died in her family’s factory.
As he sat at his desk and shucked off the jacket, she noticed that his badge had rusted around the edges.
He leaned back in his chair, propping his boots on the desk, reclining his head into his hands, surveying her with detachment. “Ashlyn Spencer, I don’t know what the hell to do with you. Trespassing is illegal, no matter how honorable your intentions are.”
She started to correct his assumption about her being a good person, but was cut off.
“Lock her up,” rasped an inebriated entity from around the corner and in the back, where the holding cells were kept.
Ashlyn recognized the voice. “Not your business, Junior.”
From the deputy’s desk, the scanner came to life, putting in its two cents with an explosion of static.
Unfazed, Sam kept his gaze on Ashlyn. “I guess I could put you behind bars with Junior Crabbe, just for the fun of it.”
She couldn’t help her tart smile. “Definitely my idea of Shangri-la, Sheriff.”
Junior Crabbe and his absent Siamese trouble twin, Sonny Jenks, had hung around her brother in their younger years. They were the bane of every peace-loving citizen’s existence with their frequent drinking, brawling and carousing.
Problem was, she thought the sheriff just might put her in a cell with Junior. For fun. To teach her a lesson. To make up for the loss of Sam’s father. Whatever the reason, she deserved it for her stubbornness.
Would that ever blow her father’s top.
A whoosh of frigid air shivered over her back as the door burst open. She turned to see the new deputy, Gary Joanson, struggle in under the weight of another drunk, Sonny Jenks.
Gary’s voice reflected his strain. “Evenin’, Ashlyn. Sheriff.”
“Joanson,” said the sheriff, nodding a greeting, still eyeing his own problem for the night.
Gary, just a speck of a man, dragged the burly Sonny Jenks down the hall, where a happy Junior Crabbe’s rebel yell greeted his buddy. Cries of “Traitor!” preceded the clank of jail bars, reflecting how Gary had befriended Nick Cassidy last year and turned against his bully-brained cronies.
Ashlyn was growing nervous under the sheriff’s stare. She absently fingered her necklace, a piece of her own creation that, at times, pricked her skin with the edges of its incomplete circles.
“So,” she said, wishing she could relieve the tension that had settled over the room, “aren’t you glad to be back in Kane’s Crossing?”
His face was expressionless. “Some days more than others.”
Ashlyn slid her elbows onto the desk, one hand nestled under her chin as she smiled at him. “From what I hear, Meg Cassidy is making a lot of her blueberry ‘boyfriend’ pies over at the bakery.”
“Meaning what?” He lowered his arms, sat forward in his chair.
Tread carefully. She didn’t know him well enough to be flirting like this, but what did she have to lose? Maybe she could even talk her way out of trouble if she said the right words. “You know your sister-in-law and all the gossip about her baking. Eat an angel food cake of hers, you’ll get married. Eat her chocolate cake, you’ll get pregnant. I’m just saying she’s been making a lot of blueberry pies since you came to town.”
The sheriff didn’t even bother to comment, just suddenly became very preoccupied with a slim pile of papers on the corner of his desk. “How thick is your file here in the sheriff’s office, Ashlyn?”
“Pretty huge.” Maybe some flattery would be useful right about now. “At any rate, since you became sheriff, women have been experiencing all sorts of emergencies in town, haven’t they? False alarms, cookies that need to be eaten…”
His face got ruddy at this comment. Ashlyn decided to lean back in her chair, to put a cork in the cake conversation. This was obviously not a man who preened under the onslaught of compliments.
She recalled when his foster brother, Nick, had first come back to town, how he’d rarely smiled, either. But Meg, his wife, sure had him smiling now. Nick had fallen in love with Meg’s surefire optimism and sense of self-worth. They were the happiest married people Ashlyn had ever seen.
She watched Sheriff Reno simmer down as he stood and ambled to the file cabinet. Ever so slowly, as if he had all the time in the world at his disposal, he thumbed through the manila folders, retrieving a War and Peace-thick collection. He tossed it onto the desk, the file thumping in her ears like a slap upside the head.
“Mine?” she asked, pointing at the folder.
“All fifty pounds of it. I have to admire your perseverance, I suppose.”
She poked at it, remembering the contents without even having to look. Wait until he saw how idiot-stupid she could be. When it came to making her father angry, she was a very creative camper. Everything from decorating the factory’s outside wall with pictures symbolizing workers’ rights, to hiring a neighboring county’s high school band to march in Spencer High’s homecoming parade playing Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It.” Unfortunately, Horatio Spencer had appreciated none of this.
As she looked into Sam Reno’s lifeless gaze, she saw a reflection, a young girl who needed to grow up, to let go of this bitterness she’d lived with since the age of seven, to get past her “bad girl” reputation and make a new life for herself.
She sat back in her chair, hands folded in her lap, head down. “I won’t make your job harder than it needs to be.”
“Thank you,” he said, his voice wry enough to make her wonder if he was kidding.
She glanced at him, but he was still expressionless.
He continued. “Town pride isn’t a bad thing to have, Miss Spencer.”
Guffaws ricocheted through the holding cell, where Junior and Sonny were obviously listening.
“Yeah, Ashlyn, town pride!”
“Be a good neighbor! Come on back here and—”
A door slammed, and Gary Joanson’s tinny voice rose above the taunts, quieting the drunks.
The sheriff shook his head, taking a step nearer to her. “Sorry about that.”
“No, you’re right,” said Ashlyn. His thigh just about brushed her arm, and her skin actually buzzed from the almost-contact. “No more games, Sheriff. I’ve turned over a new leaf.”
“Sounds sincere enough.”
She met his gaze and almost fell into the bottomless depths of his eyes. What had happened in life to make him so sad? “Not to say I won’t still have my fun, you understand.”
He merely raised his brows.
“What I mean,” she added, her protective shield of tough talk rising to the surface, “is that we come from utterly different places. This is my time to be carefree. You’re Generation X and I’m Generation Why-Me…”
What was she trying to say? His stare, his brooding, was tangling her thoughts. Great, now she felt even younger, even more stupid.
When she looked at him again, a ghost of a smile lit over his mouth. A slanted grin, just as rusty as his badge. She wanted to use her fingertips to brush over his full lower lip, to test its softness.
Admit it, she thought. You’ve been dying to touch him since he hauled you away from Emma Trainor’s porch.
Ashlyn sighed out loud, grinning in a heated flush when she caught the sheriff’s still-cocked brow. “At any rate, you have my word. No more trouble.”
Deputy Joanson walked into the office room, proud as a rooster. “How do, folks?”
Sam, smooth as still water, watched Ashlyn as he addressed his deputy. “You took my car tonight.”
Ashlyn didn’t break eye contact with Sam. Her pulse thudded in her ears, Gary Joanson’s voice becoming nothing but background chatter.
“I thought you wouldn’t mind—”
“—I mind.”
Gary stepped into Ashlyn’s view, dwarfed next to Sam Reno’s sturdy frame. “I kinda like the Bronco, Sam.”
Slowly, Sam turned to Gary, who took an unsteady step backward.
“Okay,” said the deputy. “I’ll take the grandma car.”
That done, Gary tipped his cop hat to Ashlyn. “I was wondering when you’d make your first trip here, Ashlyn. What were you up to?”
She had the grace to look ashamed. “It depends on your point of view, I suppose.”
“Isn’t that always the case with you?” Gary slapped his knee in mirth. “Sheriff Carson would’ve been beet red by now.”
Gary addressed Sam, who’d returned to staring at Ashlyn dispassionately. “This gal used to be a real firecracker, Sam. Before you hired me on, the other deputies would talk about how she kept Sheriff Carson busy and blowin’ steam. Did ya decorate the town with some jokes tonight, Ashlyn?”
She kept her tongue. This night was becoming more humiliating by the second, but she wouldn’t lose her cool in front of Sheriff Reno. She’d never let anyone—especially this man—know that she was crying inside. When people laughed at her jokes they were laughing at her and her family.
Sometimes it hurt to be laughed at.
“Deputy, do you have work to do?” asked Sam.
Gary hesitated, then, slump-shouldered, sat at the scanner desk, shuffling through papers.
Ashlyn heard Sam move closer to her again, felt him looming over her. The breath caught in her throat.
“Up, Ashlyn,” he said softly, his drawl lazing over her skin with the warmth of slow molasses.
She stood, almost body to body, eyes at the level of his corded throat. She’d always been considered a tall girl, gawky as a forest creature, all elbows and knees, but standing next to Sam Reno made her feel as if she were a normal person. As if she didn’t stand out in a crowd.
He took her elbow, walking her near the door. When he let go, she wanted to seize his hand and put it right back. She didn’t mind that her knees were turning to liquid, that she was all but clawing for breath inside.
After a pause, Sam took a step backward. He lifted up a finger, a wall between them. “I don’t want to be called out on account of your wild schemes.”
