Читать книгу The Sheriff With The Wyoming-Size Heart - Kara Larkin - Страница 10

Chapter Two

On a block of light-filled houses, hers looked dark and lonely. A single square of yellow illuminated a room on the ground floor, but it held no life. Instead, it gave the impression of no one home, as if the lights were controlled by a timer. Riley strode up the walk and punched the doorbell.

Ariel had been on him all afternoon to visit her lady friend. It had been one of those days when he hadn’t been able to find anyone. to take care of her, so she’d spent the afternoon at the station, and she’d lauded their new neighbor to everyone who would listen. It had been “she” said this, and “she” did that, until his entire staff had joined her crusade. He was damn glad he had Ariel’s missing shoe as an excuse for this visit.

With Ariel praising the woman nonstop, he’d replayed his encounter with her at least a dozen times. He should have thanked her for her concern for Ariel, instead of reacting like some kind of Neanderthal defending his territory. He must have seemed pretty formidable, for her to back down so quickly. But he’d been too determined to drum some sense into Ariel’s head to think about much else.

He wished he could believe he’d made some progress with his daughter.

Since he hadn’t heard the doorbell ring, Riley punched it again. Still nothing. Through the sheer curtain that covered the window in the door, he saw no movement. Maybe the bell was broken. Or maybe she wasn’t home. He rapped on the door frame, but no one stirred inside. She could be anywhere. Shopping. Taking a walk. At a movie. He pushed the bell one more time for good measure then turned to go.

He was halfway down the walk when the porch light came on, pouring a bluish white glow across the front lawn. He wheeled around in surprise.

She stood behind a screen door with her face in shadow. “Hello?”

Her voice sounded more tentative than he remembered, huskier, sexier. Different circumstances, but the same woman. Yet not the same. In daylight, she’d seemed challenging, austere, remote. In the cool quiet evening, she seemed vulnerable.

“It’s Ariel’s dad.”

“Oh.” She didn’t invite him in, or even unlatch the door.

Not one to be put off by an attitude, especially one he’d had a hand in creating, Riley returned to the porch. “Have I come at a bad time?”

“What do you want?”

He tried to put his impressions of her into perspective. This was Laramie, a friendly little town where most people believed, as Kendra had, that harm would never touch them; most folks still didn’t lock their doors at night. She had none of that affability. He wondered if he’d killed it with his gruff manner that afternoon.

Or maybe her caution was instinctive, gained in a bigger, meaner city. It was exactly the kind of restraint he’d give half a year’s salary to instill in Ariel.

But directed at himself, he hated it. It acted as a barrier between him and this new neighbor, even though they lived within hailing distance of each other. All his life he’d enjoyed the security of trust among his neighbors. Now the sudden comparison between what he wanted for Ariel and what he wanted for himself annoyed him.

The way this woman wrapped reserve around her like a cloak challenged him.

With a grin, he relaxed his stance to put her more at ease. “I’m sorry to bother you, but Ariel lost her shoe this afternoon, and I’m trying to track it down.”

Her reticence turned to concern in an instant. “Oh, goodness. It’s probably still in the fence. Please come in. I saw a flashlight this morning when I unpacked the kitchen, and with any luck I should be able to find where I put it. We can go straight out back from there.”

She found the flashlight in a kitchen drawer, and by its weak glow she led him into the yard, across the lawn, through the gate, and out into the alley. She played the light across her rickety trellis fence, and when it came to rest on Ariel’s shoe, Riley’s gut clenched.

Three feet off the ground, the shoe was wedged almost to the instep. If Ariel had fallen with her foot caught that high, her leg could have snapped like a dry twig.

Riley jerked the shoe free, half scared, half angry, needing to vent. But he’d been a cop too long to lash out.

“I caught her before she fell.”

Neither the woman’s words nor her calm tone reassured him. For the shoe to have remained forgotten in the fence, she must have caught Ariel as she fell. She’d saved his daughter from a broken leg. Or worse.

Because of her, Ariel was home safe, ready for bed and reading stories with her favorite teenage sitter. The alternatives made him shudder. The debt he owed this woman opened his heart, and he wanted to let her know the depth of his appreciation. He wanted to tear down the barriers and start to build the friendship that made for good neighbors.

He didn’t want her to dismiss him before he’d accomplished his full errand. “I don’t know how to thank you.”

She shrugged. “I was glad to be close enough to help.”

He smiled, although she wouldn’t be able to see it in the dark. “Look, do you think it would be okay if I came in for a minute? Ariel’s been begging me all afternoon to visit you again, but maybe you’d feel more comfortable with that if you felt more comfortable with me.”

She hesitated, but in the dark he couldn’t tell if she was assessing him or trying to come up with an excuse. Just as he’d given up hope, her voice broke into the still night.

“Okay. For a few minutes.”

Smiling to himself, he followed her back inside.

She ushered him straight into the living room. On his first pass through her house, he’d been too focused on Ariel’s shoe to pay much attention. Now what he saw brought him up short. The room screamed of loneliness.

A stack of cartons lined one wall, waiting to be unpacked. Against an opposite wall, several stacks of books eight or ten high formed an irregular border on the floor. The scuffed hardwood floor had no rugs; the drapes looked as if they’d hung at the windows for fifty years, and pale squares on the empty walls showed where someone else had hung their pictures. Two mismatched armchairs bracketed a hearth where a fire crackled, the only settled aspect in the room.

The intensity of her isolation tightened around his lungs like a clamp. When Kendra died, he’d felt the way this room looked.

“Can I get you something to drink? Coffee? Juice? White wine?”

He wanted more than ever to know her better. “You don’t need to go to any trouble.”

“I have water on tap, orange juice in the refrigerator, and the coffee’s decaf but fairly fresh. I’d have to open the wine.” She didn’t smile, but she recited the options with a graciousness that inclined him to believe she didn’t regret her decision to let him come in.

Coffee seemed too businesslike. Water too mundane. Wine too intimate. “Orange juice, please.”

She wore jeans, a long pale sweater that molded to her waist and hips, and sneakers without socks. He added defenseless to his expanding impression of her—still as remote as she’d seemed that afternoon, but fragile rather than hard.

She served the juice in heavy deep-bowled goblets with short stems and thin gold rims. Crystal, for all he knew, and so inconsistent with the sorry state of her furnishings that he found himself staring at her.

She drew herself straighter. “Please, sit down.”

A little embarrassed, he sat and offered a grin he hoped would convey the favorable feelings he had for her. She curled into her chair with one leg under her and the other knee to her chest. He couldn’t decide whether she looked relaxed or defensive. Even the way she watched him over the rim of her goblet could be either speculative or cautious.

“Maybe it’s time we introduced ourselves. I’m Riley Corbett.”

“Margo Haynes.” She sipped her juice, then lowered her goblet with a slight smile. The firelight flickered over her face and highlighted her hair. She looked delicate and beautiful—and younger than she’d seemed that afternoon. It must have been the stark sunlight that had made him think she knew how to deal with life head-on.

He forced his attention back to the conversation. “I’d like to explain about this afternoon.”

“There’s no need.”

“I think there is. I lost my housekeeper a couple of weeks ago, and haven’t been able to replace her. Without a sitter, I try to be at the school when Ariel gets out, but sometimes I don’t make it by the bell. I’ve explained to her how important it is to wait until I get there, but she’s got a mind of her own. This isn’t the first time I’ve had to hunt her down.”

To keep the edge of anxiety from his voice as much as to relieve the sudden dryness in his mouth, he drank deeply. In the pause, he realized Margo Haynes was staring past him, at something more in her mind than in the room.

The lull only lasted a second before she blinked it away. “I can only guess how much you must worry.”

“Yeah.” But it didn’t seem like a guess. Somewhere in her tone or in her expressions, he sensed she knew the same concern. “I’d never forgive myself if anything ever happened to her.”

“No parent would.” She met his eyes over the rim of her goblet.

Something in her eyes rippled across the room and spread warmth across his skin. Not humor. Not invitation. Not even empathy. Unable to identify it, he let it slide over him like a breeze. He’d come for his daughter’s sake, and he’d expected his daughter to be their only common ground. “Ariel really liked visiting you today.”

“So did I. Very much.”

“You gave. her something I didn’t know she needed.”

A brief hesitation played across Margo’s features and lengthened into a pause before she spoke. “Maybe it was a fair trade.”

“Her mother died two years ago. It hasn’t been easy for either of us.”

“No.”

In the murmur of that single word Riley recognized the landscape of longing. The dark, empty paths he’d traveled since Kendra’s death had taken him to places he never wanted to visit again. Reminded of them by this woman’s tone, he searched her face.

She spoke before he could think of the right thing to say. “I wanted to read you the riot act for letting her wander around alone.”

He remembered. “I’d say you had a pretty good start on one. What slowed you down?”

With a debut of a smile that shimmered too briefly, she lifted her glass and met his eyes over the rim. “A strong self-preservation instinct.”

With a self-conscious laugh, he settled back and propped one ankle on the opposite knee. “Sorry about that.”

“Actually, your worry reassured me. I didn’t like to think of her straying around like that because nobody cared enough to be sure she didn’t.”

True concern for his daughter radiated from Margo Haynes, although Riley couldn’t say how. But she had an intensity—interest, warmth, something--that he hadn’t gotten from even those friends who’d helped him fill in the gaps after Kendra died. Or more recently, since Mrs. Whittaker left.

Far stronger than the brief impact of her smile, it resonated through him with an almost sensuous cadence, in an undertone like the low thrum of a city heard from a distance. Determined to ignore whatever it was, he stretched out his legs and polished off his juice. “So, what brought you to Laramie? Work?”

She shook her head and shifted her eyes to the fire. “The university library.” Her smile stayed fixed, but the vibration between them changed, not in speed but in timbre. No longer smooth, it took on a raspy, discordant quality.

In a lifetime of meeting people, confronting them, interrogating them, rescuing them and soothing them, Riley had never experienced anything like the rhythm pulsing between them. He wanted to know its cause, understand it, maybe explore it.

“Librarian?”

She shook her head. “Writer.”

“I guess writers need access to a good library.”

“It helps us keep our facts straight.”

As an outdoor type guy, he couldn’t imagine a job that could only be done while sitting down. The amount of desk work he had to do pushed the limits of his tolerance. “And where did you move from?”

“Texas.” The way she kept her eyes fixed on the fire made him wonder what she saw—how far away and how long ago. “I came here from Texas.”

“Just in time to enjoy winter in Wyoming.”

She shrugged. “I was tired of the heat.”

In the firelight, her eyes glinted, but he couldn’t tell if the sparkle was a trick of the blaze or came from within. It disconcerted him not to be able to read her. Interpreting people was a big part of his job, and he was good at it. He had a sixth sense that worked about ninety-five percent of the time. He could usually tell if someone was lying, or planning to pull a fast one, or sucking up, or scared, or willing to cooperate. He got none of those impressions from her.

The lack of tension in her expression made him wonder what the hell caused that unfamiliar vibration that continued between them. It had to be coming from her, yet it beat through him like his pulse.

As if oblivious to it, she sipped from her goblet. “Are you from here?”

“Upstate. My folks live in Powell.”

She stood and crossed to the fireplace. Orange light danced across half her face, throwing the other half into soft shadow. “I hear it’s beautiful country up there.”

Almost as beautiful as the view from where he sat.

He quelled the emotion behind the thought. Margo Haynes was a stranger. Twenty minutes ago he hadn’t even known her name. Ten hours ago he hadn’t known she existed. He had to concentrate on why he’d come. For Ariel. This had nothing to do with Margo’s beauty, her loneliness, her vulnerability, or her damn radiance. But hell, she was exquisite.

“Ariel and I go up as often as we can. You’d like it in early summer, when the wildflowers are at their peak.”

“Probably.”

Another tremor warped the rhythm, again without an outward sign that what either of them said affected her in any way. Riley backtracked through the conversation, but he couldn’t find a pattern.

Margo finished her juice. Serenely. Wasn’t the pulse vibrating through her as strong and baffling as it throbbed through him?

“Are your parents both still alive?” she asked.

“Yeah. They own a store, and are going as strong as ever. Yours?”

“I lost them both a long time ago. I’ll bet yours dote on Ariel.”

“Every chance they get.”

“She’s a lucky girl.”

“She has a knack for winning hearts. She’s got everyone in my department wrapped around her little finger. My parents think she walks on water.”

“I can see why. She’s delightful.”

Drawn before he realized it, Riley joined her at the fireplace. “She’d like to visit you again.”

Excitement played across Margo’s face as if she were a kid at a carnival, and her eyes grew brighter. “I’d like that. If it’s all right with you.”

The rhythm pulsed faster, denser, sweeter. It pulled through his nerve endings until his hands trembled with it. With the need to touch her.

Suddenly he knew he couldn’t stay. Not another minute. Not another second. Or he’d take her in his arms, press his lips to hers, consume her if necessary to ease the heat and tension that stretched between them—whether it existed for her or not.

“I’d better go. I have Ariel’s shoe, and that’s what I came for.”

“Yes.”

Resisting the pull that drew him to her, Riley backed to the middle of the room.

As calm as a doe in a spring meadow, she followed him with her eyes. “Thank you for coming, Mr. Corbett.”

“Riley,” he insisted, though he didn’t know why. Whatever resonated between them might beat like the drum of an ancient mating dance, but he recognized it as the rhythm of danger.

Margo stood at the window and watched Riley Corbett leave her yard for the second time that day. God, what an ordeal.

Since first realizing how runaway emotions had propelled her into every bad decision she’d ever made, she’d concentrated on controlling her feelings. And she’d learned how. She could hold her temper in the face of provocation. She no longer wept during sentimental movies. She’d learned to listen to the troubles of others without jumping in to help. She let insults skim across her like water off a waxed surface. She’d become a stranger to rampant feelings, and she liked it that way.

At least that had been true until today. Until Ariel Corbett and her father had exploded into her life.

How long had he been in her living room? Less than forty-five minutes. Forty-five minutes of torture, with emotions clawing inside her like rats for release. Concern. Envy. Excitement. Compassion. Anticipation. Desire.

Lord, not to mention desire.

It had zipped between them like electricity on an ungrounded wire. Hot and deadly. Ignoring it had been impossible. Leaving it unacknowledged had taken all the strength she possessed.

She should have shown him the door the second she sensed the attraction. But loneliness and longing—deadly emotions both—had driven her to prolong his visit.

She hadn’t had a friend in more than a dozen years, not since taking up with Nick. Almost from their first date, Nick had separated her from her small circle of girlfriends. She’d been so in love with him, she hadn’t noticed. Back then she’d believed love could heal every wound and fill every empty space, and she’d loved too fiercely to see it wasn’t so.

Love was a vain promise. Desire made one crazy. Emotions tromped good common sense into the ground. She knew those things to be true as surely as she breathed. So how had the demons broken free? How difficult was it going to be to lock them away again?

Did she need friends now as desperately as she’d once needed Nick’s love?

The possibility terrified her.

Yet she’d made Riley Corbett welcome in her home. She hoped he’d let her befriend his daughter. For the first time in years, she dared hope the awful ache left from when she’d lost Holly could be eased.

With her hand gripping the window frame, she forced deep, steadying breaths into her lungs and focused on Ariel. Margo wanted nothing from Riley beyond an agreement that his daughter could visit once in a while. And maybe she wanted that too much for her own well-being. Maybe she should shut herself off from any contact at all with that little girl.

But how could she? With Ariel, she’d experienced joy for the first time since giving Holly away. The desert of her soul had started to bloom again. Just the merest opening of the first blossom, but she couldn’t turn away from it.

No matter how terrifying the current that rippled between herself and Riley Corbett, she would open herself to his child.

Unable to sleep, Riley pulled on a sweat suit and running shoes. At 3:00 a.m. the streets would be empty and the silence might calm his thoughts. When he checked in on Ariel, his heart swelled against his ribs. He loved her beyond thought, and he would fight the world to keep her safe.

And yesterday he’d met someone eager to join him in the battle. He knew it without a doubt, although he’d never be able to explain to anyone else how he knew.

Leaving the hall light burning, he slipped silently out of the house. By confining his run to laps around the block, he could check on Ariel every few minutes.

When he passed Margo’s house, he slowed his pace a bit. No doubt she slept as peacefully as Ariel, since that strange vibration hadn’t seemed to touch her at all.

For him it echoed as strongly as the conversation. And the conversation had been playing like a subliminal tape nonstop.

Since leaving her house, the entire visit kept running through his head. Every word, every action, every glance that passed between them. And the more he rehearsed his visit, the more one fact became startlingly clear. He’d learned damn little about her.

She was a writer, she came from Texas, and neither of her parents was still alive. That was it. He’d asked questions. He’d offered facts about his own life. The conversation had not suffered from awkward pauses. As smooth as silk, she’d slid away from telling him anything about herself.

Why?

In little more than an hour, spread across two separate encounters, both he and Ariel had connected with Margo Haynes in deep, emotional, compelling ways. She’d given Ariel more welcome and solace than Ariel had known since Kendra’s death. To him, she’d offered concern for his daughter, opened the doors to friendship and infused him with desire.

He wanted more of her. Much more.

In the two years since Kendra’s death, he’d made Ariel the core of his life, and they’d done just fine together with Mrs. Whittaker’s help. So had everything changed three weeks ago when he’d lost his live-in housekeeper? Or only this afternoon, when Ariel first met Margo Haynes?

As he passed Margo’s house again, a sense of destiny infused him. He didn’t know anything about her, except that her concern and devotion for his daughter transcended logic. But he knew himself; and for himself, he wanted to get to know her better.

From her back window Margo could see Riley Corbett’s house. It was yellow, with white trim and shutters and a dark green roof. With a shake of her head, she leaned against the window frame. Riley Corbett seemed as friendly and guileless as any boy next door. But he was a cop. What would he think of her if he knew the truth? Did she have an obligation to tell him?

She shouldn’t have to. She’d paid her debt to society with three years in prison and seven more on parole. Finally free, she’d shaken the dust of the past from her feet, chosen a new name, closed her eyes and stuck her finger on the map. She’d picked the closest city with a university, and moved to Laramie. Approximately fifteen hundred miles from the gulf coast of Texas.

No one, not even the sheriff of her new town, needed to know of her past. Being his neighbor included no duty to reveal the deep dark secrets of her past. What was the point in creating a new life if she blurted out the truth the first time she felt a qualm?

Ever since the robbery she’d dealt with the consequences of her choices, never once turning away from the legal and logical repercussions. She hadn’t known Nick intended to hold up the convenience store. She hadn’t known he killed the clerk. But when he rushed out, pointed his gun at Holly and yelled at her to drive, she’d punched the gas for all she was worth. And from that moment until she’d moved away from Texas, Margo’s life had been hell.

At first she’d imagined that once she paid the penalty exacted by society, her slate would be wiped clean and she could move forward freely. Since her release from prison, however, she’d learned that regardless of the penalty, some things were never forgiven.

Serving her parole in her hometown, she’d been shunned, harassed, held up for public exhibition, and used as a cautionary tale for teenage girls. Her past followed wherever she went, no matter how straight a line she walked.

No one ever stopped to imagine her own personal grief over her role in the murder Nick committed. No one ever took into account that she’d lost her daughter as a result of her complicity.

Now she intended to start anew, and she wanted this new life more than she cared about her career or her immediate happiness. She couldn’t imagine a situation in which she would put it at risk. Certainly she wouldn’t jeopardize it because some man jump-started her libido after eleven years on hold.

Turning to the sink, she filled a glass with water and drank deeply. More than a decade had passed since that blackest point in her life, and she’d paid dearly for her mistakes. By honoring the law to the letter and by building a good strong career as a novelist, she’d proven to herself how completely she’d overcome her past. When her last book hit the best-seller list, she’d gained an independence that reinforced her freedom.

She had spent the seven years since her release from prison working to recreate herself. As a final step, she’d adapted her given name, using Margo instead of Maggie, and taken her mother’s maiden name to reinforce the new person she’d become. After so much work, she didn’t intend to risk everything just because some wayward twinge of conscience kept reminding her Margo Haynes was a lie. Especially when that twinge sprang from an emotion as dangerous as desire.