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“Yep. County maintenance is on it.”
“Good.”
The reception area was fairly large, with the dispatcher’s desk in the middle of the room, and flanked on both sides by a low-railing fence with a swinging gate. To the right stood a row of straight-back chairs and the door to the lockup; to the left, Jake’s private office. Above the waist-high wood paneling, the walls were pale municipal green and needed a fresh coat of paint.
Jake hung his hat on a peg by the door, then walked to the desk and nodded at the stack of messages that hadn’t been there an hour ago. “Some of those for me?”
“Nope, all of them. Nothing too pressing. Judge Quinn wants you to stop by his office at the courthouse sometime this week—but not Friday, he’s going fishing. And there’s a town council meeting on Friday that you’re required to attend. The list of topics to be discussed is in the computer. I’ll print it out for you.”
A teasing grin lit her eyes. “Oh. And the mayor wants you to join her for dinner before the meeting.”
“What’s the grin for?”
“Was I grinning? Gee, I didn’t mean to.” Still fighting a smile, she handed him his messages. “The rest are mostly well-wishes from businessmen. They’d like you to return their calls when you get time.”
Jake sifted through them, deciding that whatever had tickled her fancy was destined to remain a secret. “Anything else?”
“Your uniforms arrived. I put them in your office.”
“Thanks. I’ll change before I start my shift.”
His deputy was a pretty woman in her late twenties with a long black braid and brown eyes, and from the little he’d seen, organized, focused and good at her job. A jittery feeling pooled in his belly. She was also Ross Dalton’s brand-new wife. He’d been stunned—and pleased—to receive an invitation to their wedding at the Brokenstraw Ranch when he’d toured the town a week ago. Life was full of surprises.
“So, did you get a room at Miss Lillian’s?” Maggie asked. “Or did your male pride balk at living in a pink house?”
“The color was fine.” In fact, he’d found it striking with all the curlicued white gingerbread and spindled railings on the wraparound porch. He even liked the lace curtains and tiny candle-lights in the front windows. “Unfortunately,” he said, frowning, “the owners are closing it.”
Maggie blinked in surprise. “After just having it painted? I spoke to Sarah yesterday, and she never mentioned it.”
No surprise there. The way she’d acted, he’d bet a month’s salary that she hadn’t planned to do any such thing until he’d shown up. He’d also bet she’d reopen the instant he found a permanent residence.
“Did Sarah say why she was closing?”
“No, she just told me to check the want ads. Maybe she and her husband don’t want strangers roaming the house with their daughter being so young.”
Maggie clicked on the computer to her right and scanned a file list. “Interesting theory, but Sarah’s not married.”
Jake froze for several seconds, then tucked his messages in his breast pocket. His blood clipped along a little faster.
“In fact,” Maggie added, “if she hadn’t divorced Vince Harper a few years ago, technically she’d be a widow.”
He was so startled, he couldn’t keep his shock from showing. “Sar—the woman I just spoke to was married to Vince Harper?”
Maggie punched a key on the keyboard, and the printer started spitting out data. “I take it you’ve heard the name?”
Headlines hyping Harper’s notorious diamond theft blazed through Jake’s mind, complete with a mug shot of a smirking man with a long blond ponytail. “Oh, yeah,” he said, scowling. “I’ve heard it. Somehow, I can’t imagine…”
“Sarah with him?”
Jake nodded. If he remembered correctly, Harper had been a bona fide loser for most of his adult life. No wonder Sarah had said the things she had the night they met. He pictured the three of them together—Harper, Sarah and that cute little girl—and held back another scowl. No way did that picture look right.
Maggie ripped a sheet from the printer. “Here’s the topic list for Friday’s meeting.”
“Thanks. Now, if you can just find me a place to hang my hat…”
“Sorry, the best I can do is bring in the paper when it comes.”
“Good enough.” He grinned, then crossed the floor to his office, sank into his swivel chair and stared into space.
Sarah had been married to Vince Harper? The smalltime hood who’d knocked over a Florida jeweler and gotten away with the gems? Unbelievable.
Jake had been working in Glacier County when it happened, but most lawmen in Montana knew the case well. The feds had put out an urgent APB, figuring that Harper would head for home. Agents had ended up apprehending the jerk while he was meeting his needs at a brothel a few miles outside of Comfort. After finding only a few diamonds on him, they’d searched the premises, without success. Then they’d learned that he’d spent time at his ex-wife’s home the previous night, and they’d searched Sarah’s house, too.
The remaining diamonds had never been recovered.
Jake eased back in his chair. Now that he remembered the time frame, the scandal had occurred right around when he’d found Sarah crying in that grassy overflow parking lot. But she hadn’t mentioned the diamonds or feds that night. She’d only told him that her divorce had just become final, and she was through with marriage. Or anything close to it.
He’d understood. Fate, or karma or whatever power ruled the worlds of the romantically unlucky had handed him a big fat heartache only a week before.
The carnival aromas of cotton candy and French fries drifted in from Jake’s memory, and suddenly he could smell them, and hear the music floating down from the Founder’s Day celebration two streets away. He caught the faint perfume of the summer cottonwoods, too, and the stirring fragrance of the teary woman in his arms. They’d emptied their souls, and had danced. Because nothing comforted better than a human touch….
“Don’t cry,” he whispered, trying to keep his attraction under wraps as they moved together in the calf-high grass. “Believe me, you’re better off without a cheat and a liar.”
“I know,” she answered in a ragged voice. “It’s not that I still care about him—I don’t. I don’t ever want to see him again. But I’ll miss being in love.”
“You won’t miss it for long. You’re a beautiful woman. There’ll be someone else.”
Sarah shook her head. “No, I don’t trust my judgment anymore. I was so sure he was good, and decent, and… And he was none of those things. I won’t chance marriage again.”
“You’re prepared to be alone for the rest of your life?”
“It’s better than hurting all the time.”
Jake had to agree. Since Heather, he’d adopted a new philosophy. Don’t expect too much from a relationship and you won’t be disappointed. But God, he thought, shortening his steps to a gentle rock and sway, it still felt good to hold someone.
He’d thought he couldn’t feel any lower when he’d found out Heather was sleeping around. He’d been wrong. On the heels of that, he’d learned that the father he’d never known—the father he’d imagined and hoped for as a child—had died. But his dad had sired two other sons. That’s why Jake had traveled three hundred miles to Comfort, Montana. He’d come to meet his brothers.
“You should tell your brothers who you are,” Sarah murmured, seeming to read his mind. “It’s too late to do anything about your dad, but you do have other family.”
“I tried. Walked right up to them tonight at the food booth and lost my nerve. I didn’t want them thinking I was looking for money or a chunk of their ranch. I don’t have any proof that we’re related.”
“Maybe your mother could talk to them.”
“Nope,” he said, and forced a smile. “Emily’s gone, too. But considering that she never even told me who my father was, I doubt she’d get involved even if she were alive. If I hadn’t run into a friend of hers last week, I still wouldn’t know.”
“Oh,” she said softly. “Oh, I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, me too,” he said. “Would’ve been nice to know the guy responsible for my being here.”
Sarah’s compassionate gaze gentled on his. And suddenly, there was something so special and giving about her—something so good—that he needed to take a tiny bit of it for himself. Swallowing the lump in his throat, he cupped her face, lowered his head and kissed her. Softly. Briefly. Then, not so briefly.
Slowly, Jake eased away, feeling his blood pump harder, feeling the stirrings he’d been trying to ignore for the past hour finally surface.
Sarah touched his face.
He searched her eyes.
Then hungry lips found each other, and dancing became sweet, needy friction.
Maggie rapped sharply on the door, shattering his thoughts as she breezed inside. “Here’s the paper. Hope there’s something promising in there.”
Jake almost stood, then realized with a start that he’d gotten far too involved in his memory. “Thanks.” Taking the paper, he opened it to the want ads to cover his embarrassment. “Seems like that’s all I ever say to you.”
“No reason to. I haven’t done anything.”
“Right. You’re only helping me find a place to live, and boarding Blackjack at your ranch.”
“Not mine, my family’s. And it doesn’t take a lot of time to feed and water one more horse.”
“I’m still grateful.”
“And you’re still welcome.” Maggie paused for a moment, then spoke hesitantly. “Any chance you’ll be here for a while?”
Jake glanced up from the disappointing listings. “I plan to be. Do you have errands to run?”
“No, but I need to talk to Ross. We have tentative plans to meet at Aunt Ruby’s at eleven-thirty, but I can stay until Joe gets back if there’s something in the paper that piques your interest.”
“Go,” he said. “Have lunch with your husband. From the looks of it, I’m out of luck unless I want to buy a used washer and dryer, or baby-sit from eight to four. If a crime wave hits, I’ll phone you at the café.”
“Great,” she said with a bright smile. “See you later.”
But as the door closed in the outer office, Jake’s thoughts returned to Sarah.
Shoving the paper aside, he went to his office window, remembering again how extraordinary their lovemaking had been. An illogical stab of jealousy followed as he imagined her with Vince Harper.
Turning from the window, he started back to his desk. How could she have let Harper touch her, feeling the way she did about the pony-tailed creep? Worse, how could she have let herself get preg—
Jake froze in his tracks as that family picture he’d conjured earlier formed again in his mind and he realized why, aside from obvious reasons, it had looked all wrong.
Vince Harper had had blond hair.
Jake stopped breathing as his mind played a cautious game of connect the dots. First he ticked off the months since he’d made love with Sarah. Then he took a guess at her daughter’s age.
Hair color didn’t necessarily prove parentage, he told himself as his heart pounded. Eye color didn’t, either, unless you had enough family history to factor in. But Sarah Harper was a brown-eyed blonde, and her ex-husband’s hair had been light.
Kylie Harper had blue eyes, and her hair was black.
Every adrenaline-juiced nerve, muscle and cell in Jake’s body sprang to life, and he damned Maggie’s early lunch. He had to see Sarah again.
She’s becoming a little person, Sarah thought, shooing Kylie into the single bed in the first-floor toy room. But she still had that precious baby voice. That sweet, trusting baby squeak that often replaced L and R sounds with Ws, but managed to make herself understood very well, anyway. For a child who wasn’t yet two and a half, Kylie had an amazing vocabulary.
“Mommy, I’n not tired yet.”
Sarah kissed the tip of her nose and covered her with a thin blanket. Then she squeezed into the narrow bed with her daughter, dodging half a dozen stuffed animals, a green dinosaur and a naked Barbie doll with wild hair.
“I know you’re not,” Sarah murmured. “But Mommy and Pooh are, so we’re all going to take a nap before we start supper. Now, you close your eyes and I’ll close mine, and before you know it, it’ll be time to wake up.”
“Let’s look at Kylie pictures!”
Sarah smiled. “Nope, we’ll look at the photo album later. It’s time to dream.” In only a few minutes, dark-lashed lids closed over blue eyes like her daddy’s, and Kylie was asleep.
Sarah felt her heart break.
Time to dream? If she ever slept again, her sleep would be filled with nightmares. One indiscretion. One terrible, wonderful mistake three years ago had given her the child she’d always wanted. But it had also given her the greatest fear she’d ever known. He would be living here now, seeing them at the market and church, bumping into them on the street.
He had a right to know. A man like Jake—who’d been raised by a rootless single mother then shuffled from foster home to foster home when she died—deserved to know he had a daughter. But if she told him, what then?
Even joint custody would be a horror, and it could happen, given the courts’ near-manic sympathy for fathers’ rights lately. Just last week, a friend of Sarah’s had lost a custody battle that should never have been decided in the father’s favor. If that happened, and Kylie was taken from her…
Sarah tried to contain her panic. Maybe they should leave—just pack up and move. It wouldn’t be easy to establish her catering business in another town, and her dad would miss them, as they would miss him. But he had friends, didn’t he? He and Judge Quinn were always doing something together.
Tears welled, and Sarah touched her forehead to her sleeping child’s. No, she couldn’t do that to her father. With her mother’s death still a raw ache after nearly two years, he depended on Sarah for love and support. But Kylie was another matter. Kylie’s laughter and kisses had become his lifeline. She couldn’t take that from him, just as she couldn’t deprive Kylie of the grandfather she adored.
Blinking back tears, Sarah slid her arm out from under Kylie’s neck, backed out of the bed below the protective side rail, then moved silently into the hall and closed the door to within a crack.
She would not cry, she told herself. She would not be a weak, blubbering wreck ever again. The last time she’d allowed that to happen, a lonely deputy sheriff on holiday to meet the brothers he’d never known had found her by Cotton Creek, and Kylie had been conceived.
She would pull herself together and tell herself she was overreacting. She would make the meatballs and sauce for the Tully girl’s nuptials and put some aside for tonight’s supper. She would not let Jake Russell’s threatening presence get to her. And she would not cry.
All right, she decided as her tears rolled, anyway, she would cry. But she would do it quietly.
Chapter 2
Keyed up and irked that he had to wait for oncoming traffic, Jake stopped the department’s white Jeep opposite Sarah’s house and waited for a battered red truck to go by. He was startled when the grizzled old man behind the wheel sent him a cold, hard look as he drove past.
“You have a nice day, too,” Jake muttered, wondering what he’d done to tick the man off already. Was the driver a fan of Comfort’s ousted ex-sheriff? Or had the official vehicle and Jake’s uniform made him wonder what Sarah had done to earn a visit from a lawman?
Easy answer, he thought, hitting the gas pedal and making a squealing left turn. She just might have given birth to his daughter.
Much of her pink Victorian home was hidden from the road by a thick stand of pines. Jake’s heart leapt as he left them behind and moved up the steep, paved driveway. Sarah was just descending the porch steps.
The instant she saw the car, her spine stiffened, and Jake knew their meeting wasn’t going to go well. But that knowledge didn’t prevent him from admiring her long tanned legs and cutoff denim shorts as she strode to the middle of the yard. A length of wide black plastic fluttered from her right hand, and a roll of silver duct tape circled her wrist, bracelet-style.
He swore as he realized what she was about to do, then cut the engine, got out and quickly crossed the lawn. By the time he reached her, she’d already draped the plastic over her sign and was fighting the wind to secure it to the post.
“Why are you doing this?” he demanded.
“Why am I doing what?”
