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She lowered the naturally dark lashes with their enticing curl at the ends, shielding her eyes from his gaze. “You’ll get used to them,” she said in an offhand manner. “Are you ready?”
“Yes.”
A groan forced its way between his clenched lips as he put weight on his throbbing knee. The run, then the sudden stop and his full weight coming down on the rebuilt bone and the synthetic replacement kneecap had probably undone a month’s worth of healing. He cursed silently, the sensual hunger at last beaten into submission by the pain of movement.
A cynical wisdom murmured that her guilt over his pain might be the best way into the apartment over the garage. He stumbled a bit as they struggled up the short set of stairs and wasn’t sure if it was deliberate or due to the weakness in his leg. She tightened her grip and cast him a worried glance as they eased into the house.
“There,” the widow said, lowering her arms to let him settle on a comfortable maple kitchen chair.
He didn’t let his arm trail across her back or hips as they disengaged, but he had a sudden, surprising sensation about how it might feel. Clenching his teeth, he tried to overcome the thoughts that stabbed at him as relentlessly as the hot needles in his leg.
“Would you like a glass of tea?” she asked.
“You have anything stronger?”
“Bourbon.”
“A double.” He wiped water and the sweat of painful effort off his face with a hand that shook. “Nothing like being as weak as a baby in front of a woman.”
He tried to smile in order to wipe the concern out of her eyes. Pity was the one thing he didn’t need and wouldn’t accept from anyone.
“That’s okay. Shall I fix an ice bag for your knee?”
“No, it’ll be okay.” He laid his gun on a pink-and-green-striped place mat on the table and leaned back with a bone-weary sigh against a cushion tied to the chair.
A chintz-and-china type, he decided, glancing around the spotless kitchen with its bright floral touches. Down-to-earth, too. She had the soft Western drawl he’d noticed in the female police detective. It was pleasant—
“Dad?”
Jess jerked around with a frown. Jeremy stood with his nose an inch from the screen door, gazing in at them.
“I thought I told you to stay in the truck,” he said, the sharp edge of his anger and pain boiling over.
The widow gave him a puzzled frown, then turned a dazzling smile toward the door. “Hi, come on in. It’s open.”
Jeremy stood on the step, his bony kid’s face set in a mulish scowl, and stared at him through the screen. Jess tamped down his temper. “You heard the lady. Come in.”
The boy slid inside and stood a foot from the door like a wild creature staying near his escape hole.
Jess felt the regret rise all at once, bitter with his own resentment in acknowledgment of lost opportunities with this person who was a carbon copy of his younger, once idealistic self. Pain hit him again, this time in his heart. No one had ever told him regret was so hard to live with.
His gaze collided with the woman’s. Her incredible eyes filled with pity. The cold shield of past humiliations snapped shut around him. He might be a has-been cop, but at least he wasn’t a falling-down drunk the way his own father had been. Saturday-night brawls had been the order of life in his youth. His son had never had to face that. The boy had had it easy compared to the neighborhood where he’d grown up.
He shook off the memories of the past and concentrated on the pain of the present. He struggled to pull the jeans leg up, but it was hopeless. The material was too tight, his knee too swollen.
“I’ll help, Dad. You’d better get some ice on that. Remember what the doctor said.”
Jess was surprised at his son’s concern, then doubly so when Jeremy dropped to his haunches in front of him and tried to help. “It’s okay, son. I’ll take care of it later.”
He glanced up to find his hostess observing him with a slight frown line between her eyes. A sense of her uneasiness came to him. “You’ll need an ice pack,” she said, and set to work with an unnecessary show of industry.
He hesitated, then retrieved a knife from his pocket and proceeded to split the jeans along the seam. The scar tissue, when exposed, was an angry red welt along the top and side of his knee. The flesh puffed out like an adder about to strike. So much for taking it easy for three months.
“Damn,” he said softly.
She turned to face him and dropped the container of ice she’d removed from the freezer. Ice cubes hit and skittered across the shining green-and-white kitchen floor.
“Oh, shoot,” she said in aggrieved tones, not looking his way. She scooped some cubes into a plastic bag, added some water and zipped it closed. Her face was pale.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.”
He was puzzled at the tremor in her hand when she handed the bag to him. He saw her glance at his knee, then away. It was the scars that bothered her. Funny, but he wouldn’t have taken her for the squeamish sort.
While he placed the ice pack on his leg, she swept the icy debris out the back door. None of the wary humor he’d noticed earlier was visible. What was it with a woman who could face down a stranger with a gun but was profoundly disturbed at the sight of a few scars?
A woman who had been terribly frightened by something in her past, the cop in him answered. He hated it when women and children were hurt, often by the very men who were supposed to look after and protect them. Which was why he’d become a cop, he supposed.
“I won’t hurt you,” he said in the same soothing tone he used with victims of domestic violence, the same tone she’d used with him while facing his weapon.
“Of course not. I never thought you would.” She replaced the broom in the closet. Her eyes met his for a second.
The sparkle was back, and he breathed deeply as the tension in his stomach uncoiled. “The ice is helping. The swelling seems to have stopped, and the pain is easing up.”
“Good.” She poured a double shot of bourbon and set the glass on the place mat near the gun. “Would you excuse me? I need to change clothes.”
“Sure. We’ll be here.” He wasn’t going anywhere fast on that knee.
She smiled and nodded, then hurried out. He heard her footsteps on the stairs a second later.
Kate locked her bedroom door and dashed to the bedside phone. She called the number that went straight to Shannon’s line at the police department.
“Bannock, here.”
“Shannon—”
“Hi, Kate. No, I have not forgotten your birthday luncheon tomorrow. I even got you a card.”
“I’m expecting homemade cookies, too. Lots of ’em.”
“Oh, all right,” Shannon replied with pretend grumpiness.
“Shannon, did you send a policeman out to my place? A guy by the name of…” She couldn’t remember.
“Jess Fargo. Yeah. He needs a place to recuperate from an injury, wants to fish and relax in the country with his son, he said. I take it they arrived safely?”
Kate thought of the hose and the gun. “Well, yes. I just wanted to follow up on his credentials. I hadn’t planned on renting the apartment now that Valerie has married and moved out. I thought I’d have the summer to myself.”
Val, a local elementary school teacher, had snagged the only eligible doctor in town, much to several other citiziens’ chagrin. She and the doctor were on their honeymoon.
‘You’re turning into a hermit,” her cousin teased before turning serious once more. “About the cop. He really needs a place. He’s been driving for a couple of days and realized he was getting too tired to continue. He thought the fishing might be good around here.”
“Okay, that checks out. Thanks. I guess only a black-hearted witch would throw out an injured officer of the law.”
“Right. He’s handsome in a sort of world-weary, seen-it-all manner, huh?”
Kate heard the laughter in Shannon’s voice. “He’s cynical and probably hard-hearted. Talk to you later,” she promised and hung up. She headed for the shower.
The sight that greeted her in the full-length mirror on the door caused her to gasp and throw her arms across her chest in shock.
Even as she made the gesture, she realized the futility of it. Jess Fargo, and his son, had already seen her. Slowly she released the hold she had across her chest and sighed in dismay at the near transparency of her shirt and bra. Even her nipples were visible as two distinct dark pebbles under the wet cloth.
She sank down on the bed and pressed her hands over her face. The detective would think…he must think the worst.
But it wasn’t as if she had exposed herself on purpose. She hadn’t known he was coming.
Kate stood and muttered an expletive. She had spent eighteen months in therapy after her husband’s death, trying to get over the sense of shame he had forced onto her. If she so much as glanced at another man or spoke to a male friend, he’d accused her of vile acts—
No! She wouldn’t go back to that time and those feelings of helplessness and despair. She was not at fault here.
After taking a quick shower, she dressed in a broadcloth shirt, leaving the tails untucked, and blue slacks with an elastic waist. She pulled her damp hair through a stretchy band and secured it at the base of her neck. With pink lip gloss and a pair of white sandals she was ready.
Taking a calming breath, she marched down the steps. It wasn’t her fault, she repeated on the way, her mantra during the days, weeks, months, after Kris’s death.
Jess Fargo was where she had left him. That was a relief. She liked people who did as expected. His son had again taken up a position near the door. She felt the underlying tension between the father and son as her eyes met those of the boy.
It was like looking into her own soul. She recognized the resentment, the need to be wanted and, with it, the hope that still lingered in his young and bruised heart. Pain stitched through her in painful jabs even as she looked away and told herself she was imagining things.
Sympathy rose in her. The youngster needed something more from the man, perhaps more visible signs of his father’s love.
No! It wasn’t her business. She wouldn’t get sucked into their problems. She had found contentment. She wanted only to be left in peace. But she hated to see the boy so lost and unsure and resentful.
She sighed. There she went again—Kate, the tenderhearted, caretaker to wounded dogs, cats, humans.
Her throat closed. She had to swallow a couple of times before she could talk. “I spoke to my cousin, the police detective. She says you need a place to stay for a few days.”
“Yeah. Maybe a month.”
She frowned, then shrugged. A month wasn’t so long that their lives would become entangled. “There’s an apartment over the garage. You’ll want to see it first—”
“It’ll be fine.”
His interruption told her he didn’t care what it looked like. He needed a place to rest. Sympathy stirred again.
Jess Fargo’s problems were his own, she reminded herself sternly. Maybe this trip would work for him and his son, maybe not. She would keep her nose out of their troubles.
“I didn’t catch your name,” she said to the boy.
“Jeremy Fargo.”
“You in high school yet?” she asked. Actually, he looked to be about eleven, maybe twelve.
His smile was quick and shy and pleased. “I’ll be in sixth grade this fall.”
“He’s tall for his age,” his father put in. She watched him adjust the ice pack on his knee, then take a sip of iced tea after a glance at the empty bourbon glass.
Kate didn’t offer him more. She figured he’d had a medicinal dose and that was enough.
The words were on the tip of her tongue to invite them to dinner, though. She doubted the tough cop had shopped for groceries, and the ranch was a long way from Wind River and even farther from Medicine Bow, where a larger supermarket was located. She suppressed the invitation, knowing instinctively that this man was dangerous to her peace of mind. Hadn’t she learned anything from her marriage?
The memory of other summers flooded her heart with the bitter sadness of loss. It was a pain that never seemed to diminish but lingered always at the edges of her emotions, ready to catch her at moments of weakness.
Such as when she’d seen the scars on the detective’s knee.
Gunshot wounds. She knew them well. She knew the terror, the pain that tore through the flesh, and with it the knowledge that she had lost something more precious than her own life. She laid a hand over her abdomen where another heart had once beat with the quick expectancy of the very young.
Her child. Her son that would never be.
The emptiness rose like bile to her throat. Her arms, her heart, her home—empty of that sweet life that should have been.
Dear God, she silently pleaded, seeking relief from that terrible, terrible memory. She couldn’t go back to thinking about what might have been. With control learned at a price, she forced her thoughts to the guests in her kitchen.
Like Jess Fargo, there were scars on her flesh, but they didn’t compare to the ones in her soul.
“Come,” she said, standing abruptly, “I’ll take you to the apartment and let you get settled in.”
“I’ll get your cane, Dad,” Jeremy volunteered. He ran out, leaving a wake of silence behind him.
He was back in less than a minute. She headed out the door, leaving father and son to follow at their own pace.
Coolness eddied around her when she opened the door to the apartment. She turned on the refrigerator and hot water heater. After opening the sliding glass doors on to the deck over the garage, she stood there, letting the breeze blow over her as she gazed at the peaceful scene.
The deck commanded a wonderful view of the stock lake to the south of them, where cattle had gathered for an afternoon drink, and of snow-tipped Medicine Bow Peak to the southwest of them. Walnut trees shaded the area from the afternoon sun.
Hearing the hesitant step and the thump of the cane on the stairs, Kate again felt a tug of pity. The handsome, brooding Jess Fargo would once have bounded up those steps two at a time with the ease of a mountain elk.
Turning from the view, she noted the brief clenching of his teeth as he maneuvered up the final step and across the threshold, his grip on the cane evident. She wondered if he would ever move easily and swiftly again.
He paused, taking in everything about the apartment—the roomy kitchen, the living room through an archway, the homey furniture that had been handed down for generations.
There were also two bedrooms down a short hallway. The bathroom was tucked under the eaves at the end of the hall.
“It’s small,” she said, feeling a need to apologize.
“It’ll do.” He pulled out a chair and sat at the pine table that had belonged to her great-grandmother, his legs extended out in front of him.
“There are dishes, but I’ll have to bring you towels and linens—”
“We have sleeping bags and towels,” he cut in.
