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She put it in gear.
Funny how she had to force herself to drive off.
CHAPTER TWO
LARKVILLE was lovely. Larkville was kind. Larkville was extremely interested in who she was and why she’d come and clearly disappointed by her not sharing. But no one in the small, old Texas town had been able to find a bed for her. Despite their honest best efforts.
Remember the Alamo…
Sheriff Jackson’s voice had wafted uninvited through her head a few times in the afternoon since her sojourn with the cows but—for reasons she was still trying to figure out—she didn’t want to take his advice. The Alamo might be a charming B & B run by the most delightful old Texan grandmother with handmade quilts, but she’d developed an almost pathological resistance to the idea of driving across town to check it out.
Although three others had suggested she try there.
Instead she’d steadfastly ignored the pressing nature of her lack of accommodation and she’d lost herself in Larkville’s loveliest antique and craft shops as the sun crawled across the sky. She’d had half a nut-bread sandwich for a late lunch in the town’s pretty monument square. She’d grabbed a few pictures on her phone.
None of which would help her when the sun set and she had nowhere to go but back to New York.
No. Not going to happen.
She’d sleep in her car before doing that. She had a credit card full of funds, a heart full of regrets back in New York and a possible sister to meet in Texas. She turned her head to the west and stared off in the direction of the Alamo and tuned in to the confusion roiling in her usually uncluttered mind.
She didn’t want to discover that Texan grandmother had room for one more. She didn’t want Sheriff Jed Jackson to be right.
Because his being right about that might cast a different light on other decisions she’d made about coming here. About keeping Jessica Calhoun’s extraordinary letter secret from everyone but her mother. From her siblings. From her twin—the other Patterson so immediately affected. Maybe more so than her because Matt was their father’s heir.
She drew in a soft breath.
Or maybe he wasn’t, now.
Dread washed through her. Poor Matt. How lost was he going to be when he found out? The two of them might have lost the closeness they’d enjoyed as children but he was still her twin. They’d spent nine months entwined and embracing in their mother’s womb. Now they’d be lucky to speak to each other once in that time.
She didn’t always like Matt but she absolutely loved him.
She owed it to him, if not herself, to find out the truth. To protect him from it, if it was lies, and to break it to him gently if it wasn’t.
A sigh shuddered through her.
It wasn’t. Deep down Ellie knew that. Her mother’s carefully schooled candor slammed the door on the last bit of hope she’d had that Jessica Calhoun had mixed her up with someone else.
Of their own accord, her feet started taking her back towards her car, back towards the one last hope she had of staying in Larkville. Back towards her vision of kindly grandmothers, open stoves and steaming pots full of home-cooked soup.
Back to the Alamo.
There were worse places to wait out a few days.
‘Well, well…’
Ellie’s shock was as much for the fact that the big, solid door opened to a big, solid man as it was for the fact that County Sheriff Jed Jackson had no reason to wear his sunglasses disguise indoors.
For a man so large, she wasn’t expecting eyes like this. As pale as his faded tan T-shirt, framed by low, dark eyebrows and fringed with long lashes. His brown hair was dishevelled when not covered by a hat, flecked with grey and his five-o’clock shadow was right on time.
Coherent thoughts scattered on the evening breeze and all she could do was stare into those amazing eyes.
He slid one long arm up the doorframe and leaned casually into it. It only made him seem larger. ‘I thought you’d have gone with Nan’s Bunk’n’Grill out of sheer stubbornness,’ he murmured.
Ellie tried to see past him, looking for signs of the hand-hewn craft and that pot of soup she’d convinced herself would be waiting. ‘You’re staying here?’
No wonder the tourists of Larkville couldn’t find a place to sleep if the locals took up all the rooms.
His dark brows dipped. ‘I live here.’
She heard his words but her brain just wouldn’t compute. It was still completely zazzled by those eyes and by the butterfly beating its way out of her heart. ‘In a B & B?’
‘This is my house.’
Oh.
She stepped back to look at the number above the door. Seriously, how had she made it to thirty in one piece?
‘You have the right place, Ellie.’ Ellie. It sounded so much better in his voice. More like a breath than a word. ‘This is the Alamo.’
‘I can’t stay with you!’ And just like that her social skills fluttered off after her sense on the stiff breeze.
But Texans had thick hides, apparently, because he only smiled. ‘I rent out the room at the back.’ And then, when her feet didn’t move, he added, ‘It’s fully self-contained.’ And when she still didn’t move… ‘Ellie, I’m the sheriff. You’ll be fine.’
Desperation warred with disappointment and more than a little unease. There was no lovely Texan nana preparing soup for her, but he was offering a private—warm, as her skin prickled up again at the wind’s caress—place to spend the night, and she’d be his customer so she’d set the boundaries for their dealings with each other.
Though if her galloping heart was any indication that wasn’t necessarily advisable.
‘Can I see it?’
His smile twisted and took her insides with it. ‘I’d wager you wouldn’t be here if you’d found so much as an empty washroom. Just take it. It’s clean and comfortable.’
And just meters from you…
She tossed her hair back and met his gaze. ‘I’d like to see it, please.’
He inclined his head and stepped out onto the porch, crowding her back against a soft-looking Texan outdoor setting. She dropped her eyes. The house’s comforting warmth disappeared as he pulled the door closed behind him and she rubbed her hands along her bare, slim arms. This cotton blouse was one of her girliest, and prettiest, and she’d been pathetically keen to make a good impression on Jessica Calhoun.
She hadn’t really imagined still being outdoors in it as the sun set behind the Texan hills.
She followed him off the porch, around the side of the house and down a long pathway between his stone house and the neighbors’.
It was hard not to be distracted by the view.
Her fingers trailed along the stonework walls as they reached the end of the path. Jed reached up and snaffled a key from the doorframe.
‘Pretty poor security for a county sheriff.’ Or was it actually true what they said about small-town America? She couldn’t imagine living anywhere you didn’t have double deadlocks and movement sensors.
As he pushed the timber door open, he grunted. ‘I figure anyone breaking in is probably only in need of somewhere safe to spend the night.’
‘What if they trash the place?’
He turned and stared at her. ‘Where are you from?’
The unease returned and, until then, she hadn’t noticed it had dissipated. She stiffened her spine against it. ‘New York.’
He nodded as if congratulating himself on his instincts. He looked like he wanted to say something else but finally settled on, ‘Larkville is nothing like the city.’
‘Clearly.’ She couldn’t help the mutter. Manhattan didn’t produce men like this one.
She shut that thought down hard and followed him into the darkened room and stared around her as he switched on the lights. It was smaller than her own bathroom back home, but somehow he’d squeezed everything anyone would need for a comfortable night into it. A thick, masculine sofa draped in patchwork throws, a small two-person timber table that looked like it might once have been part of a forge, a rustic kitchenette. And upstairs, in what must once have been a hayloft…
She moved quickly up the stairs.
Bright, woven rugs crisscrossed a ridiculously comfortable-looking bed. The exhaustion of the past week suddenly made its presence felt.
‘They’re handcrafted by the people native to this area,’ he said. ‘Amazingly warm.’
‘They look it. They suit the room.’
‘This was the original barn on the back of the building back in 1885.’
‘It’s…’ So perfect. So amazing. ‘It looks very comfortable.’
He looked down on her in the warm timber surrounds of the loft bedroom. The low roof line only served to make him seem more of a giant crowded into the tiny space.
She regretted coming up here instantly.
‘It is. I lived here for months when my place was being renovated.’
She was distracted by the thought that she’d be sleeping in Sheriff Jed Jackson’s bed tonight, but she stumbled out the first response that came to her. ‘But it’s so small….’
His lips tightened immediately. ‘Size isn’t everything, Ms. Patterson.’
What happened to ‘Ellie’? He turned and negotiated his descent quickly and she hurried after him, hating the fact that she was hurrying. She forced her feet to slow. ‘This will be very nice, Sheriff, thank you.’
He turned and stared directly at her. ‘Jed. I’m not the sheriff when I’m out of uniform.’
Great. And now she was imagining him out of uniform.
Unfamiliar panic set in as her mind warmed to the topic. It was an instant flashback to her childhood when she’d struggled so hard to be mature and collected in the company of her parents’ sophisticated friends, and feared she’d failed miserably. Back then she had other methods of controlling her body; now, she just folded her manicured nails into her palm and concentrated on how they felt digging into her flesh.
Hard enough to distract, soft enough not to scar.
It did vaguely occur to her that maybe she’d just swapped one self-harm for another.
‘You haven’t asked the price,’ he said.
‘Price isn’t an issue.’ She cringed at how superior it sounded here—standing in a barn, out of context of the Patterson billions.
His stare went on a tiny bit too long to be polite. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I can see that.’
Silence fell.
Limped on.
And then they both chose the exact same moment to break it.
‘I’ll get a fire started—’
‘I’ll just get my bags—’
She opened the door to the pathway and the icy air from outside streamed in and stopped her dead.
A hard body stepped past her. ‘I’ll get your bags, you stay in the warm.’
His tone said he’d rather she froze to death, but his country courtesy wouldn’t let that happen.
‘But I—’
He didn’t even bother turning around. ‘You can get the fire going if you want to be useful.’
And then he closed the door in her face.
Useful. The magic word. If there was one thing Eleanor Patterson was, it was useful. Capable. A doer. Nothing she couldn’t master.
She took a deep breath, turned from the timber door just inches from her face and stared at the small, freestanding wood fire and the basket of timber next to it, releasing her breath slowly.
Nothing she couldn’t master…
The night air was as good as a cold shower. Jed’s body had begun humming the moment he opened his door to Ellie Patterson, and tailing those jeans up the steep steps to the loft hadn’t reduced it. He had to work hard not to imagine himself throwing the Comanche blankets aside and plumping up the quilt so she could stretch her supermodel limbs out on it and sleep.
Sleep. Yeah, that’s what he was throwing the blankets aside for.
Pervert.
She was now his tenant and she was a visitor to one of the towns under his authority, a guest of the Calhouns. Ellie Patterson and feather quilts had no place in his imagination. Together or apart.
She just needed a place to stay and he had one sitting there going to waste. He’d dressed it up real nice on arrival in Larkville and had left the whole place pretty much intact—a few extra girlie touches for his gram when she came to visit, but otherwise the same as when he’d used it.
It might not be to New York standards—especially for a woman who didn’t need to ask the price of a room—but she’d have no complaints. No reasonable ones anyway. It was insulated, sealed and furnished, and it smelled good.
Not as good as Ellie Patterson did, but good enough.
He opened her unlocked car to pop the trunk.
He’d watched her rental trundle off down the long, straight road from the Calhoun ranch until it disappeared against the sky, and he’d wondered if he would see her again. Logic said yes; it was a small town. His heart said no, not a good idea.
