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“Both.”
Whoa, Alana thought. “Glad you made it back—and in one piece.”
He turned away to look out the passenger window, but she took no offense; after all, she had just given him some life-altering news. What’s more, not everyone appreciated the “thank you for your service” attitude. She’d concluded more that some just wanted to fulfill their obligation and get on with their lives. On the other hand, a simple “Thanks” in return wouldn’t rupture his spleen.
“I’m not trying to be chatty.”
“I’m glad to hear that.”
Lifting her eyebrows at the borderline-rude response, Alana knew there was no way she was going to be quiet and circumspect now. “Ah. You’re the strong, silent type. Then you’d better prepare yourself for Bunny. She’s our night-shift dispatcher. I’m quite shy, in comparison. In fact, I became a cop to force myself to be more outgoing.”
She felt his sidelong look, but kept her eyes on the road. None of what she’d said was accurate, but she didn’t care. He’d made up his mind about her from the moment she approached him, and it irked that the news about Fred hadn’t softened his edges one bit.
“Doesn’t your family worry when you go out playing commando after dark?”
There it was, Alana thought with a wry twist of her lips. The derision she’d felt from him at first glance. But if he thought he was going to make her cower, he’d misjudged her more than he could imagine.
“I don’t see any part of being a cop as playing,” she replied, maintaining her pleasant tone. “Security checks on strangers in the park included. And as far as family is concerned, Uncle Duke is it, all two-hundred-fifty pounds, six feet four of him. Since he’s the chief of police, and before that was a state trooper, and before that a marine himself, if he didn’t feel that I’d been fully trained to do my job, I wouldn’t be sitting here talking to you right now.”
Mack’s soft groan and the way he dropped his head against the headrest had her lips curling into a satisfied smile.
What she failed to add to all that was that Duke hated that she’d become a police officer and had been doing his best to marry her off or otherwise get her off the force from her first day on the job. The only thing that helped keep him semiquiet about it was the knowledge that if he didn’t allow her to be a member of their hometown department, she would go elsewhere...or take on a career that was even more demanding and dangerous.
“Don’t worry, gyrene,” she drawled, using the marines’ favorite expression for themselves. Uncle Duke had told her about how it had evolved back in World War II. The hard-fighting U.S. soldiers had been dubbed GIs, but marines considered themselves tougher yet, and wanted to be called marines. So the term GI and marine became gyrene. “You’re not in trouble with him...or me, for that matter. Attitudes like yours are as common as scales on a fish.”
She pulled into the station located on the other side of the cemetery—barely a half mile from the park. Parking by the front sidewalk in the otherwise-empty lot, she invited Mack to keep his duffel bag where it was, then she escorted him inside.
“Ally—darn it!” Bunny declared the second they came through the door. “You turned off your radio, didn’t you? And you didn’t radio back. I was about to call Ed even though you said not to.”
The strawberry-blonde with the corkscrew curls and baby voice leaped to her feet exposing more of a zaftig body stuffed in a half-size-too-small blue shirt and jeans. It was a good try at claiming indignation, but Alana knew the divorcée, who served as a civilian clerk and dispatcher, had already spotted Mack and was really showing off her five-foot-two frame in case he wasn’t into “brunette amazons,” as she’d dubbed her.
“Buns, the door was unlocked” was all Alana said to the woman who was six years her senior. But the look she sent her reminded her of department policy when no “badges” were on the premises.
“Ally.” Bunny shot her a look that went from withering to pleading before offering Mack a dimpled smile. “Is everything okay?”
“Everything is fine,” Alana intoned. Then she added evenly, “This is Mack Graves, Fred’s son.”
“Oh! Aw.” Bunny’s big, brown calf eyes went soft with sympathy. “Condolences for your loss.”
“Our dispatcher, Barbara Jayne Dodd,” Alana told Mack with a wave. To Bunny, she continued, “We’re going to take care of some paperwork. Then I’m taking him up to the ranch. Now you can call Ed. Tell him that I expect to be back in about a half hour. Only Ed,” Alana added. “Let’s assure Mr. Graves at least one night of peace before the press and the gossip hounds start salivating.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Fluorescent lighting wasn’t complimentary to anyone, but when Alana led Mack to her desk at the far corner of the room and finally faced him, she saw how gaunt he looked, and wondered if he wasn’t dehydrated, as well as in need of food. “Can I offer you a soda? Water? Coffee? When did you last eat?”
“I’m fine.”
“I appreciate that you’d like to get out of here, pronto, and be alone again, but while the refrigerator at your house is running, the contents are wanting—unless you’re into condiments. I should add that the supermarket doesn’t reopen until six o’clock. We can stop at the twenty-four-hour convenience store, even if the selection is iffy and ridiculously expensive, or we can stop at our place, which is actually next door to Last Call. If you like, I can fix you up with a few essentials to get you through the next day or two.”
“I take it that’s where your uncle—the chief—is?” At her nod, Mack shook his head. “Far be it from me to disrupt his sleep.”
“Smart decision,” she replied with a cheeky grin. “But that means you’re getting either a cola with all the sugar, or coffee with creamer and sweetener. Pick your poison.”
“Coffee.”
“Good choice. It’s my machine and great stuff. No blending nonsense, powdered milk or artificial sweeteners. Sit tight.” With a smart turn on her heel that sent her ponytail swinging, she went to get it. She was acutely aware of his narrow-eyed stare all the while she worked, and when she returned, she set the big mug before him, then took a power bar from her center desk drawer, and slid it at him. “Here, that will help, too.”
“Are you always this bossy?”
“You’ll have to try harder than that to get under this skin, gyrene,” she countered, all pleasantness. “The truth is that I’m nowhere near the sweetheart Bunny is, but kids and stray animals do tend to cling to me like Velcro. Go figure.”
Mack Graves glanced up from stirring his coffee to eye her from beneath dense lashes a shade darker than his hair. In the bright light, Alana finally saw that his eyes were an odd green-gray, the shade of Southern moss. She’d never seen anyone with that coloring before and quickly reached for the rubber-banded bulky envelope in the bottom drawer of her desk.
“Here we are,” she said, setting it on her blotter. “I have a number of keys, copies of his death certificate, and his will. As I said, you’re his sole beneficiary. One thing l need to remind you of—in case you’re not aware of it—is that in Texas there’s a ninety-day survivorship clause before you can probate his estate, so I hope you’re planning to stick around.”
“I wasn’t.”
His answer didn’t surprise Alana. Fred had spoken of his son enough to worry about ever finding him, let alone passing on all this responsibility. But she’d made promises. Slipping out a single sheet that declared he was accepting possession of the package, she marked an X where she wanted Mack to sign, then slid it over to him.
She placed the pen on top as a precursor to what she was about to say.
“I hope you’ll rethink that. Oak Grove may be a small town in the middle of dozens of small, even dying, towns, but Last Call is a wonderful place. On the other hand, if you want to sell it, I’m sure there are several people who would make you an offer soon enough. The property continues to be on a paved farm-to-market road. Fred was a fine fence builder, and the pastures are some of the best in the county. Our two properties share a creek, but more importantly, the darned place sits on an aquifer and there are three deep wells to keep ponds full regardless of the weather trends. Fred wasn’t as particular about the house, but what it lacks in style, it makes up for in sturdiness. As for the barn, it’s big enough to protect the machinery from the elements and to store feed. Behind it are the horse stables. There are only two horses these days—Fred’s mount, Rooster, who’s pretty old and is kept as a pet, and Eberardo’s horse, Blanco. The rest of the pens are used to tend to injured or orphaned stock.”
“Do you sell real estate during the day?”
Understanding what he was insinuating, Alana shrugged. “Yeah, I’m kind of attached to the place, as I am to my own home.” Remembering something, Alana glanced at her watch, which read nearly two in the morning—winced—and reached for her phone. “Eberardo Chavez is the hand who still lives on the property. You’ll see his trailer on the side of the barn and sheds. I’m going to call him to let him know not to worry if he sees me pull in and the house light up. More likely, Two Dog would announce our arrival as soon as the front gate opens.”
“Who the hell is that?”
“Eberardo’s dog. His second dog since working at Last Call. He’s a good man and hard worker, but he’s no cowboy poet.”
Moments later, she heard Eberardo’s groggy voice.
“Sí, Señorita Ally. ¿Es todo lo correcto?”
Aware that he had caller ID, Alana replied, “Lo siento. Sorry to disturb you, Eberardo. Everything is fine. I just wanted you to know that Two Dog may start barking shortly, and you might see lights at the house. I’m letting Mr. Fred’s son, Mack, in.”
“Ah, he has come. Mr. Fred would be much happy.”
“Pienso tan, también,” Ally replied, telling him that she thought so, too. “We’ll talk more tomorrow. Go back to sleep.”
“To happy dreams. We wait for this day, eh? Gracias, Señorita Ally.”
As Alana disconnected, hoping he was right, she saw Mack pick up the pen and scrawl his signature across the bottom of the paper. When finished, he pushed it and the pen back toward her. Finally, he took a tentative sip of coffee, followed by a more appreciative gulp.
“Anything else?” he asked.
“You can admit it’s good coffee,” she said, amusement and challenge in her gaze.
“Why waste my breath telling you what you already know?”
He was Fred’s son all right, Alana thought. Mule-headed, confident and all man with those penetrating eyes letting a woman know that no matter what, sex was always in the mindset. She shoved the paper into the top drawer of her desk and handed over the banded bundle. “You can take the coffee and protein bar with you. Consider the mug a housewarming gift.”
* * *
Minutes later, back at the patrol car, Mack gingerly took his seat. As he fastened his seat belt, he tried to ignore Alana’s open stare.
“You okay?”
“Yeah, why?”
“You’re moving like someone ten or fifteen years older than you are.”
“Hitching and hiking can do that to you.”
Alana seemed to accept that and exited the parking lot. She turned onto Main Street for the turn north that would take them to the farm-to-market road and Last Call Ranch. In all honesty, that’s all Mack remembered of the directions to the place. But his back hurt so much from carrying the duffel bag—even though he changed shoulders frequently—that he mentally kissed her for insisting on driving him. At least none of his wounds had busted open. He’d fingered the spots when she’d gone to get him coffee.
The town was literally ghostlike with not another vehicle in sight, until he caught a glimpse of lights and spotted a patrol car in his side-view mirror as it left the convenience store and turned toward the station. No doubt the other night-shift cop, Ed, coming to catch up on the excitement with dispatcher Bunny.
Buns, he thought with a silent snort, remembering Alana’s personal nickname for her. The woman had certainly earned that one, too, although she seemed pretty harmless and sweet—and again, all wrong for a police station. And how the devil did females sit for hours in clothes that tight without losing consciousness? But at least she wasn’t in a uniform.
Mack had never cared for the idea of women in uniform, although he’d had his butt saved twice by female chopper pilots and had since adjusted his opinion to a degree. However, he wasn’t changing his mind about Alana Anders. Maybe she seemed to know what she was doing, but she was too feminine, too much woman for what she did for a living. That annoyed him as much as it did to realize that his gaze was drawn to her whenever he thought she wasn’t looking.
Face it, you don’t care if she’s noticing or not.
Fine, he amended, if things were different, he would be coming after her, staking his claim like the red-blooded male he was. He may have been shot twice, but as far as he could tell, all of his equipment still worked, and he was going to prove that as soon as he regained a little more strength. In the meantime, he was going to dream about Officer Anders’s long legs out of those uniform blues. He would bet a month’s pay that she had the legs of a swimsuit model and that her breasts weren’t filled with silicone. That face could be on a magazine cover, too, but the fools would want to airbrush away the small scar above her left eyebrow, and put too much greasy stuff on those succulent lips. He would like to taste them wet from a bite of strawberry or a lush peach, as he lost himself in those deceptively soft brown eyes.
Nuts, he thought.
Deceptive was the key word. There was a lot going on inside her and he wasn’t sure of a fraction of it. One minute she was all business, the next she was giving him a look so honest and bold, he felt as though he’d taken an electric shock to his groin, and the next he could swear her heart was fracturing. What the hell was going on with her?
At least it seemed that she’d been decent to the old man. Mack thought his father had been a lucky stiff if he’d checked out while gazing at Alana’s high-cheekboned face, especially if that luscious hair wasn’t tied back as it was now.
“How long have you been at this?” They were at least a mile outside town, and security lights were growing fewer and farther between, and Mack figured her mind was cranking away questions, too. He’d rather have her answering than asking them.
“You mean law enforcement? I went into the academy straight from college.”
“So you’re a rookie?” He suspected she was slightly older than that, but not by much.
“Hilarious. This is my seventh year. I just turned thirty.”
Mentally, he gave her another point for being honest. At thirty, some women started counting backward. “So this is really what you always wanted to do?”
“You didn’t hear me say that. I wanted to be a fighter pilot. I caught the flying bug from my older brother. He would be your age now.”
“Would be?”
“He was flying my parents to the Gulf to catch a cruise for their twentieth wedding anniversary, but there was mechanical trouble. They didn’t make it.”
“That’s rough.” She’d managed to keep her voice steady, but Mack didn’t miss how her hands worked the steering wheel and how tight her grip got.
“It was. Is. But coming back to the world, as you service people tend to say, has to be a challenge, too.” Alana’s voice grew huskier. “And then to have this news that you weren’t expecting...”
She didn’t really want to talk about the past any more than he did. That was another thing he couldn’t help but find appealing about her. He’d OD’d on drama queens years before finally freeing himself of his mother. “I am curious as to why my father didn’t hire an attorney to handle this,” he said, shifting the envelope between his hands.
“His longtime lawyer passed away last year and he didn’t like the other two in town. I tried to help him find someone else, but he kept putting it off until it was too late.”
“So his death wasn’t sudden?”
“No, there’s nothing fast about lung cancer.” Alana shook her head as though trying to shake off something. “He never could quit smoking. Heaven knows, we all tried to help.”
“He’d known you all of your life?”
“Fred and Duke went to school together. After Fred’s divorce and losing you, he became part of our family. I don’t remember a holiday get-together when he wasn’t there. Or funeral. After—after the accident, you could say he and Uncle Duke finished raising me. Fred taught me everything I know about horses and cattle, and the chief added most of what they didn’t teach me in the police academy.”
“Did Fred like anyone besides you and your uncle?” Mack asked the question for an excuse to continue studying her profile and admire the perfection of her skin in the surreal light. The answer was almost irrelevant.
“Of course. But he didn’t trust easily. That’s probably something you two would have found you had in common.” As they passed the entryway of a ranch with an electronic gate and pole fencing freshly painted green, she nodded. “That’s us. Pretty Pines.”
The visuals failed to trigger even the slightest memory in Mack. “Did we ever meet? I have to admit I remember less than I thought I did.”
“I’m guessing you and your mother left about the time that I was born. I may have been all of six when you last visited as a teenager. That would have made me invisible to you. And the pole fence wouldn’t have been there yet. We still used barbed and ranch wire back then. Here we are,” she added, turning into the next driveway.
As she parked before the simple gate with the metal letters Last Call Ranch bolted to it, Mack remembered his father’s irreverent humor in naming the place and his mother’s chastising him for making them the town trash. Her protests had seemed hypocritical even to a kid of eight who’d witnessed how much both of his parents drank—and the fights that followed. Now they struck him as doubly so, considering the line of work she’d ended up in.
“You have the keys.”
Pulled back to the present, Mack dug out two sets from the envelope. There were about a dozen keys on each ring. Alana pointed to the correct set and, once he handed it to her, deftly flipped to the sturdy stainless key.
“All of the house keys and the front-gate key are on this one. You’ll soon memorize them because I color coded them. The other ring is for the barn, truck and equipment.”
Accepting the handful, Mack went to open the gate, attempting to move as normally as possible. He would definitely look into getting an electronic gate system like the Anderses had, and not just because of the convenience. He had to shift to use the patrol car’s headlights to get the lock released, which would be more of a pain in bad weather than it already was. Besides, the fancier gizmo might help sell the place faster—not that he was planning to do that.
Oh, yes, you are.
Back in the car, he saw a front-door light and a security light by the barn. When they came to the ranch house, he saw it would take more than a fancy front gate to entice a buyer. The house was white brick with plain windows adorned with cheap miniblinds and a white metal roof. There were no shrubs around the place, and maybe the pastures were well tended, but the yard looked like it was nothing but weeds. He’d seen military barracks that looked more inviting.
“Home sweet home,” he muttered with a sinking feeling.
“It could be. It just needs a little TLC. Eberardo has had his hands full with the animals.” Alana put the vehicle in Park. “Do you want me to show you where the important things are?”
“I shouldn’t take up any more of your time.”
As he began to reach for the door handle again, Alana touched his arm. “Wait.”
Mack turned back in surprise. When he saw her pensive look, curiosity got the best of him.
“You need to know something, and I’d like you to hear it from me rather than just reading it cold and misunderstanding. In the will,” she said, nodding to the envelope in his grasp, “Fred was concerned that something might have happened to you before he actually passed—or that somehow the place would end up on the auction block, or worse.”
