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“We had our moments,” he said, repositioning the dark shades on the bridge of his nose, cutting off her view of his deep green eyes.
“I’ll bet you did.”
They were both quiet, caught up in their own thoughts, the rest of the way to the house. Molly couldn’t help but notice that Dan wore a goofy little half grin that she suspected had something to do with Raylene. For some strange reason, she found herself envying the hairdresser for that. Heaven knows, nobody had such fondly amusing memories of Kathryn Claiborn. Not even her fiancé.
She had stopped at the post office after she left Raylene’s, and picked up another letter from Ethan Ambrose, her longtime fiancé. He knew she was under the protection of WITSEC, but he didn’t know where. All of his letters to her from New York were filtered through Washington and Houston before they ever arrived in Moonglow. Molly picked them up each week, read them and put them in a desk drawer. For some reason she couldn’t begin to understand, she hadn’t written Ethan back. She just didn’t know what to say. She just didn’t feel like his Kathryn anymore.
They had reached the end of the driveway and were at the back door when Dan reached into the pocket of his palm-tree-studded shirt.
“Your new keys,” he said.
“Thanks.” Molly was wondering if she should invite him in for a glass of lemonade or something. She chided herself for not picking up a six-pack at the store.
“Guess I’ll knock off for today,” Dan said, already heading for the rear of the house. “See you tomorrow.”
“See you,” Molly said, fitting the shiny key into the shiny new lock, thinking of course he didn’t want to spend any time with her after his work was done. Who did she think she was, anyway? Raylene?
Dan stabbed a fork in the steak and flipped it, taking a moment to appreciate the fine parallel burn marks from the grill. It was the first time in a long time he wasn’t drinking his dinner with a bag of pretzels on the side. Smoke from the fire filtered up through the leaves of the live oak. Too bad there wasn’t a nice little breeze to blow it toward the house, he thought. Who could resist a steak on the grill?
Don’t, he cautioned himself. Easy as this job is, you can’t afford the distraction. You screw this up and it’s so long, Dan. When you were good, you were very, very good. When you went off the rails, you were gone.
He heard the screen door in back squeak open. He wouldn’t fix that, he thought. It was as good as any alarm.
What it signaled now was Molly, coming around the corner and sauntering barefoot across the lawn while the sunset tinted her hair a reddish gold.
“Smells good,” she said.
“Doesn’t it, though?” He jabbed at the steak with the fork. “Just about done, too.”
“Mmm.”
Her deep-throated murmur was so sensual, Dan nearly stabbed himself with the damn fork. He took a swallow of his beer to cool himself off. “There’s plenty here. Want to join me?”
“Oh, I… Well, I just made a Greek salad.”
He thought that was more of a yes than a no, but he didn’t want to press his luck. “They’re selling feta cheese in Moonglow? What is this world coming to?”
She laughed softly. “Would you like some?”
“Bring her on out,” he said.
By the time Molly was back with her big wooden salad bowl and—smart girl that she was—two steak knives, Dan had unfolded a second lawn chair, put half of the steak on each of two paper plates and popped open another bottle of beer. He opened one more when she said that sounded good.
“This is nice,” she said, digging into her steak. “I mean, it’s nice not having to eat alone.”
“Amen to that.”
For a minute, just on the edge of sundown, sharing a good meal with a pretty woman, Dan was nearly feeling human again. And then the big Crown Victoria cruiser with the Moonglow Sheriff’s Department insignia on the door swung into Molly’s driveway.
It figured, Dan thought. You couldn’t come home without a homecoming party.
Molly didn’t like the set of Sheriff Gil Watson’s thick jaw as he lumbered across the lawn, or the half-dare, half-smirk tilt of his lips. The man took his job way too seriously in her opinion. Moonglow wasn’t exactly the South Bronx.
Watson aimed a little nudge of his cap in her direction, mouthed a curt “Howdy, ma’am,” then stuck out one of his huge, hammy hands toward Dan.
“Heard you were back, Danny,” he said. “It’s been a while.”
“Gil,” Dan said. “Looks like you took over your old man’s business.”
Done shaking hands, the sheriff hooked his thumbs through his big black gun belt. “Dad retired five years ago. Just seemed natural then, me taking up where he left off. Folks were used to saying Sheriff Watson.”
“Hell, I know I was. Your daddy picked me up by the scruff of the neck and threw my butt in jail more times than I like to remember.”
There was a brittle edge to Dan’s laughter that was apparently lost on the lawman, but not on Molly. She swore she could feel static electricity coming from the handyman. It almost made the hair stand up on her arms.
The sheriff lifted a hand to run it across his jawline. “Been in town long?”
“Just got in today.”
“Doing some repair work on Miss Hansen’s house?”
“Yep.” Dan shifted his weight and took a long pull from his beer.
“Is that what you’ve been doing all these years?” Watson asked, shifting his considerable weight, too, and somehow looking down at Dan even though the two were roughly the same height. “Working as a handyman?”
“More or less.”
“In Texas?”
“Pretty much.”
“Plenty of work, I’d expect.”
“Enough.”
Molly could almost smell the testosterone. The evening air reeked of it. It was definitely time for a bit of feminine sweet talk.
“We were just having some dinner, Sheriff. Steak and Greek salad. Would you care to join us?”
Watson touched the brim of his hat again. “Oh, no, ma’am. I’ve got evening rounds to make. I just stopped by to say hi to Danny here.” He took a step back, adjusting his gun belt over his ample gut. “I’ll be going now. Nice seeing you, Miss Hansen. Danny, you, too. You keep your nose clean, you hear?”
My God. In all of her thirty-one years, Molly had never actually heard somebody seethe, but that was precisely what Dan Shackelford was doing at the moment. He was hot enough to cook a steak on. She could almost hear his temper crackle, so it surprised her when his voice emerged fairly level and calm.
“See you around, Gil.”
It was only after the cruiser had pulled out of the driveway and moved on down the street that Dan swore harshly and tossed his paper plate with all its contents into the glowing coals of the grill.
“I lost my appetite,” he said.
“Don’t mind him, Dan,” Molly said. “Big fish. Little pond. You know. Watson just likes to make waves. And there’s no shame in being a handyman. God knows we need more of those than self-important lawmen.”
He just looked at her then for the longest while, shaking his head kind of sadly, before he said, “Good night, Molly. I’ll see you in the morning.”
Then he disappeared into his trailer.
Chapter 2
The next morning Molly kept to her usual routine of waking early and getting to her desk by eight o’clock. The regular hours helped keep a sense of normalcy in her disrupted life. And that life promised to be even more disrupted now that Dan was going to be there, measuring, hammering, generally getting in her way, not to mention taking up more of her thoughts than she wanted to admit.
By nine o’clock, she had read and graded six essays entitled “My Favorite Season,” with summer the hands-down winner, in spite of the fact that she had spent half the time looking out the window for signs of life under the live oak.
By ten o’clock, she was worried in addition to being ticked off. Just when was all this measuring and hammering and getting in her way supposed to begin? She wasn’t running a trailer park or a campground, for heaven’s sake, and she certainly wasn’t running a retirement home for handymen, although that looked to be the case.
She poured a mug of coffee, then trudged across the yard and pounded on the Airstream’s door. She stood there, tapping her foot for what seemed like half an hour before the door finally swung open.
“You look terrible,” she said, offering the first words that came to mind when she saw the rumpled hair, the red eyes like flags at half-mast, the stained T-shirt and the ratty boxer shorts with their wrinkled happy faces.
“Is that coffee?”
Molly looked down at the mug she had almost forgotten was in her hand. “Coffee? Oh, yes. It is.”
“Is it for me?”
“Oh. Sure. Here.” She pressed it into Dan’s not-so-steady hand, then watched him swallow at least half of it before she asked, “What time were you planning to start work? I’ve made a list.”
He winced. “A list?”
“Things that really need to be done.” She reached into the pocket of her skirt and withdrew the piece of paper she had scribbled on earlier. “The showerhead in the bathroom needs to be replaced. And the sink drips in there, too. You already know about the roof leaking, right?”
He nodded as he sipped the coffee.
“The wallpaper is peeling in the bedroom, too, but I wasn’t sure if you were just supposed to make structural repairs or—”
“Just give me the list.”
“You probably can’t read my writing. Number three looks like kitchen flower but it’s really floor. There’s a spot near the pantry where—”
“Just give me the goddamned list,” he barked, nearly ripping it out of her hand, then slapping the empty mug in her open palm while Molly stood there blinking.
“I’m sorry,” he said immediately.
“You should be,” she snapped. “I was only trying to help.”
“I got up on the wrong side of the bed, that’s all.”
Molly snorted. “Yeah. The underside.”
“Okay. Look, give me a couple minutes to get cleaned up and then we’ll go over this list of yours and work up some kind of a plan. How does that sound?”
“All right, I guess. Fine.”
“Fine.”
“Fine,” Dan snarled into the mirror mounted over the Airstream’s minuscule bathroom sink where he’d just narrowly escaped slashing his carotid artery while he shaved. “Fine and dandy.”
Posing as a handyman had seemed like a good idea at the time, considering that his official presence was supposed to be kept under wraps. The Marshals Service couldn’t afford to create panic in several thousand witnesses, not to mention the agency’s devout wish to avoid bad publicity. But after installing the window and door locks, Dan realized he’d reached the limit of his do-it-yourself expertise. For somebody who could break down and reassemble just about any weapon ever made, he was at a loss when it came to domestic nuts and bolts. Molly was a smart woman. She’d have his number—zero!—before he could hammer a single nail.
She was a sweet woman, too. God bless her for trying to step between him and that no-neck, ham-handed Gil Watson last night, and then attempting to bolster his wounded handyman ego as if she weren’t some hotshot East Coast financial whiz. If she was miserable here in the armpit of Texas, she was much too gracious to let it show.
He’d been miserable here, but not because he’d been leading some secret, lesser life. He’d been miserable because he had to spend every waking minute proving himself to a couple hundred people to whom the name Shackelford was synonymous with white trash. Catching a last glimpse of his face in the mirror, Dan wasn’t at all sure they weren’t right.
He knocked on Molly’s back door and mumbled another apology when she finally let him in.
“I thought I’d run down to Cooley’s Hardware and pick up some of the things on your list,” he said, digging the paper out of his shirt pocket.
“Let me get my handbag and drag a quick brush through my hair.”
Dan started to tell her she didn’t need to come along, but as he watched the sway of her backside and the soft swing of her hair on her shoulders, he changed his mind. He didn’t even try to convince himself it was because his job was to protect her from unseen terrorists. Hell. As if he even could.
“I’m ready.” She was back, all blue-eyed and smiley, with a floppy straw hat on her head and a big straw bag hooked over one shoulder.
Dan slid his dark glasses in place, pushed his headache to the back of his brain, and said, “Okay. Let’s go.”
Molly had only been in Cooley’s Hardware on Main Street once. Her brain became so overloaded from the narrow aisles with their crammed shelves that she’d left without purchasing what she’d gone there to get. She felt the same today, on the verge of short-circuiting as she wandered along behind Dan who was pitching odds and ends into a shopping cart.
“This place hasn’t changed a bit,” he said, reaching over her head for something on a shelf. “Almost feels as if I never left. Scary.” He feigned a shiver, then lobbed whatever he’d retrieved into the cart.
“How long ago did you leave?” Molly asked, continuing to trail along behind him.
“Nearly twenty years. Hell, a lifetime.”
“Hmm. That young man working at the cash register probably wasn’t even born then. Just think. In the time you’ve been gone, an entire generation has been born, graduated from high school, probably even gotten married and started families of their own.”
Dan must have stopped the cart suddenly because Molly walked right into him, her breath whooshing out in an audible oof.
“Are you trying to make me feel old, Molly?” he asked irritably. “Trying to push me into some kind of midlife, male-menopausal crisis? ’Cause if you are, I can tell you right now you’re doing a bang-up job.”
“No. I wasn’t. For heaven’s sake, I was only…”
But before Molly got another word out, a shrill, very familiar voice called out, “Well, bless my stars and all the planets, if it isn’t Danny Shackelford.”
Raylene Earl was sidling toward them, wearing a pair of the tightest jeans Molly had ever seen, and an orange-and-white striped tank top that did amazing things to her chest. Her breasts sort of preceded her down the narrow aisle, then smushed into Dan when Raylene nearly hugged the life out of him.
“Danny. My Lord,” she exclaimed, stepping back on her spike-heeled sandals. “You haven’t changed one little bit. Not one teensy-weensy bit.”
“Neither have you, Raylene.” His grin wobbled somewhere between downright embarrassment and outright lust.
The hairdresser rolled her eyes in Molly’s direction. “Did you hear that, hon? What a sweet thing to say. But then you always did have a silver tongue, Danny. My Lord. I can’t believe you’re back. Molly said so, but it just didn’t seem to sink in until I laid my very own eyes on you five seconds ago.”
