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“Okay, what’s the complaint?” He sat down behind his desk.
She, however, didn’t sit. She crossed her arms, looking at him with a schoolmarm look that probably did wonders for straightening up mischievous third-grade boys.
For a thirty-five-year-old man, it did not have the desired effect.
“Just because you loathed my father, and dumped me the second you’d finished with me, does not give you the right to harass me about what I choose to do or not do with his house, or to dictate what I do with my time while I’m here!”
“I didn’t dump you.” He kept his voice low. His conscience, however, was screaming at him with the ferocity of a freight train.
Her eyes went even chillier. “There may be some things I don’t remember, Sheriff, but I remember that quite well.”
He wished she’d sit. Or pace. Do anything but stand there the way she was, looking as cold and brittle as a narrow icicle. An icicle that could snap in two as easily as a whisper.
“I didn’t know how much you remembered.” He’d been an ass. An ass who’d been old enough to know better than to get involved with her. Eighteen or not, she’d still been too young and innocent.
Neither fact had stopped him back then.
He hoped to hell he’d learned something in the years since.
Her expression remained glacial. “Not remembering what I saw the night my mother died does not mean I cannot remember the exact details of how you dumped me an hour before it happened.” Her chin lifted a little. “Therapy,” she clipped, “does wonders for enabling a person to state…unpleasant…facts. And the unpleasant fact is that you don’t want me in Lucius at all. You probably figured that with my father’s death, your town was finally free of Runyans.”
He leaned back in his chair. The springs squeaked slightly. “That therapy may have done you a world of good, but you are way off the mark when it comes to reading me.”
“Really. You can’t wait for me to sell my father’s house. To dump it, really. You nearly came unglued when Evie was talking about someone—me—replacing Mrs. Cuthwater. And then this festival business? What’s the matter? Are you afraid a Runyan will bring rack and ruin to the innocent children of Lucius?”
“No. I’m afraid Lucius will bring rack and ruin to you.” He exhaled roughly, wanting to rip out his tongue. Where the hell was his control?
Her lips parted, and all the color drained from her cheeks.
He went around to her, taking her arms. “Sit.”
She shook off his hold. “I don’t need to sit.”
An icicle. Too easily snapped in two. “Laurel, please. I didn’t intend to upset you.”
“Of course not. Heaven forbid you upset the crazy lady. She might just lose her mind again.”
“I never said you were crazy.” Maybe he was. Maybe that was why he sometimes still—all these years later—woke up sweating in the middle of the night with the vision of her inside that room at Fernwood, rocking herself to sleep, her eyes roiling pools of despair.
“You didn’t have to say it,” she whispered. “When everything you do makes it obvious you think it.”
Then she turned on her heel and walked out of his office.
Chapter Four
The next day, Laurel took the bus back to Lucius from Billings after returning the rental car there. Keeping it longer was simply an excuse she couldn’t afford. But standing in the depot, she very nearly changed her mind about climbing on the bus.
Wouldn’t returning to Colorado be preferable to returning to Lucius?
She could find another teaching position. She did have good credentials, after all. She’d left her last school on good terms. Had even helped find her replacement. She’d been planning on marrying. Martin had wanted to travel. See the world. He was forty-five and more than financially able to take an early retirement. Giving up her job had been perfectly understandable, considering the circumstances.
There was no earthly reason why she had to return to Lucius. The junior choir would survive without her intervention. Mrs. Cuthwater could keep on substituting for third grade. Laurel could contact that attorney—Mr. Newsome—and put him in charge of disposing of her father’s house and personal effects.
She didn’t have to go back.
The worst memories of her life lived in Lucius.
But so did the very best memories.
When she went up the ramp of plywood that covered the perilous porch steps at her father’s house, she couldn’t pretend that she hadn’t chosen to return willingly.
None of it had anything to do with Shane, of course. Heavenly days, no. Where would be the sense in that?
Whether or not he admitted it, at worst the man thought she had a screw loose. At best he thought she needed coddling to make sure her screws didn’t come loose.
So she unlocked the flimsy lock and went inside, leaving the door open for the fresh summer air. Even after only a half a day of being closed up, the house felt stuffy and close.
In her marathon cleaning sessions before the funeral, she’d managed to rid the house of its suffocating layer of dust, but instead of making the house look better, she’d only managed to make its rundown condition more evident. Yes, the windows were clean and shining again, but the cracks only glistened more. Yes, the cobwebs were gone, but the walls and ceilings now screamed for fresh plaster and paint.
She dropped her suitcase on the couch. She knew she needed to get to work on the place. She’d done enough vacillating. Whether she fixed the house up to remain in it or fixed it up to sell it, either way the work needed to be done.
While in Billings, she’d called Martin and asked him to sell her car. It wasn’t worth much, but it had been reliable enough for her needs. Going all the way to Denver to retrieve it though seemed more effort and expense than it was worth. His son from his first marriage—a high school senior—had been begging for a car for a year. Now he’d have one. She’d hung up feeling better and worse. Better that she’d made a productive decision. Worse because Martin was simply too good. He hadn’t deserved her treatment, and she still felt badly about it.
But not badly enough to go through with a marriage that had put her in the worst panic attack she’d had since she’d been a patient at Fernwood
She’d left Denver. She had no intention of going back. She’d had friends, but no one—other than Martin—who’d been truly close. Aside from him, she’d spent nearly all of her time teaching. Teaching during the regular year. Teaching during the summers.
And dwelling on it all accomplished nothing.
Martin was sending her money for her car, and she’d find something economical in Lucius. On Monday she would open a bank account in town, have her funds transferred from Colorado. She’d have enough to tide her through the summer, hopefully enough to accomplish the most necessary repairs on the house, if she was careful. And then…and then, she would see.
Concrete plans. Achievable goals. Such behavior had gotten her through a lot of years. She could do this.
She would do this.
“Laurel?”
She started, pressing her hand to her heart when it jolted. She turned to the doorway. She hadn’t seen Shane since she’d gone to his office. “What do you want, Sheriff?”
She didn’t need to see his expression clearly through the screen to know he was irritated. The way he yanked open the door and stepped inside told her that quite well enough.
He swept off his dark-brown cowboy hat and tapped it against the side of his leg. “What are you doing here?”
“Where else would I be?”
“You left town this morning.”
“How’d you know that?”
“The grapevine is as active now as it was when you were a girl. More so, I ’spose, considering half the town has cell phones now. You drove out of town and word spread.”
“And I wasn’t allowed back?”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
She felt herself flush when she realized she was staring at his legs, strong and long and clad in fading blue jeans that fit extremely well. He looked delectable and she looked…as if she’d just spent a few hours on a bus. “I had to return the rental car in Billings.”
“How’d you get back to Lucius?”
“The bus.” Looking at his dark-blue pullover didn’t help her any, either, because the fabric did little to disguise the massively wide chest beneath.
She settled for focusing on the faint dent in his stubbornly square chin.
He tossed his hat and it landed unerringly on the corner of the coffee table, right next to a footed glass bowl of ugly plastic purple grapes. “For crissakes, Laurel. You could have called someone.”
She sank her teeth into her tongue for a moment. “Is it the bus you object to, or the fact that I didn’t remain out of town?”
“I never wanted you to leave town in the first place.”
“No, leaving was what you liked to do.” Her words seemed to hang in the air, giving her mortification plenty of time to set in good and deep.
If she’d wanted to prove that the brief past they’d shared was completely irrelevant to her now, she was doing a miserable job of it.
“Leaving is what I had to do,” he said finally. “If I’d have stayed, I wouldn’t have been able to keep my hands to myself again. Not after we’d—”
“Stop.” Heat filled her face. She had only herself to blame for opening up the matter, but she really didn’t want to go into those details. “It was a long time ago. No need to rehash it.”
“Maybe not for you. I always meant to tell you that I was—”
“Please, this isn’t—”
“Sorry.”
“—necessary.”
He frowned at her, looking very much as if he had plenty more to say. After a moment, though, he just raked one long-fingered hand through his hair, ruffling the deep gold into soft spikes. “So you really do mean to stay while you work on this house.”
She could feel her scalp tightening. “Yes.”
“Despite what happened here.”
There was no possibility of pretending she didn’t know what he referred to.
“Was Holly in the hospital when she died?” she asked.
His eyes narrowed. “No.”
“Hospice care?”
“She was at home.” His voice was clipped.
“With your father.”
“Yes.”
“Did he leave his house after? Sell it?”
A muscle flexed in his jaw. “No.”
“And you still visit your dad there. At the house where you and your brother and sisters grew up.”
“Apples and oranges, Laurel. My father didn’t—” His teeth snapped together. “God. What is it about you that pushes me right off the edge of reason?”
She crossed her arms, stung. “Why don’t you just finish it, Sheriff? Your father didn’t kill your mother. And you believe—just like your predecessor, Sheriff Wicks—that my father killed mine. Well, he didn’t. Her death was an accident.” She dropped her arms and stepped closer to him, forcing the words past her tight throat. “I may have been stuck in a straitjacket five-hundred miles away, but even I knew the charges against my father were dropped. Sheriff Wicks obviously changed his mind. So why can’t you?”
“You were never in a straitjacket.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I visited you there.”
Shock reared her back. “I…what?”
He stepped past her, pacing the close confines between the faded couch and the equally faded rocking chair. He rounded the back of the couch. Stopped. Closed his palms over the back of it. “Guess I don’t have to ask if you remember that.”
She stared at him. His fingertips were white where they sunk into the faded floral upholstery.
“You…saw me there. At Fernwood.”
“Three times a week for three months.”
She couldn’t breathe. Her lips parted, but she simply could not draw a breath. She sat down on the rocker and pressed her forehead to her hands.
Everything she’d thought about him for all these years tilted.
She finally dragged oxygen into her lungs. “I didn’t know.”
“There was a sunroom there. Plenty of windows. A lot of fake palm trees planted in pots.”
She didn’t even have to close her eyes to recall the room. To this day she preferred any tree other than a palm. “It overlooked a parking lot. The nurses tried to brighten it up with the plants.”
“Right.”
She remembered the room, remembered so much of Fernwood.
But not his visits.
Which meant he’d been there only at the first. She knew, because she’d been told, that she’d been moved to Fernwood within a month of her mother’s death. But the time between that and the wintry morning when she’d sat looking out at the falling snow and her mind had just…clicked on again…had been nearly six months.
