Confessions of a Small-Town Girl Page 11

  “You would do that?”

  “I have over two months before I can go back on the force. Since I’ll be finished with my sister’s place in half that time, I can use the project.” He’d go stir-crazy without something definite to do. Getting this place into shape for her would be an excellent way to fill the rest of the time. “As for your mom,” he warned, “you’ll have to handle her yourself.”

  He had no advice to offer her there. When it came to family, he tended to cut a fairly wide swath around certain matters himself.

  The thought brought a frown, along with the reminder that he’d been invited out to the farm. He really hadn’t planned to go. He’d thought he’d work for a while then take his fishing pole downstream to try the new lure Charlie swore by. But he really didn’t feel like being alone. He felt even less like letting Kelsey and her fantasies go.

  “Look,” he said, before she recovered enough from his suggestion to say anything herself. “I’m supposed to be at my aunt and uncle’s in an hour. If you want to come with me, we can talk about what needs to be done on the way. I’d be grateful if you would come,” he admitted, refusing to worry about the pull he felt toward her. She would be gone in a matter of days. Even if she wasn’t, he soon would be gone himself. “If you’re there, Aunt Janelle and my female cousins won’t drop their usual dozen hints about me finding myself a woman. They’ve been on that mission for years.”

  Kelsey had no business entertaining the idea of refurbishing the mill. She knew that. She also didn’t believe for a moment that anything would come of their discussion about marketing her imaginary products. She was only fantasizing about possibilities, something she’d obviously once been rather good at and feared she’d almost forgotten how to do. Fantasizing with Sam rather than about him was a new twist, but as she accompanied him across the bridge to his truck and they ultimately headed along the winding mountain road to the Colliers’ farm, she didn’t let minor details get in the way.

  Given what Sam had read in her diary, he already knew more about her old dreams than any man ever had. The way he’d encouraged those thoughts rather than finding fault with them meant more to her than it probably should have, but there was another reason she’d accepted his invitation.

  She’d suspected before that he kept much of himself hidden, that she saw only what he wanted people to see. There were parts of himself that he simply didn’t share, that he’d shut away. Or shut down. She’d never been so conscious of that as she had since he’d said it would be a month after he finished his sister’s house before he could return to the force. Before I can return, he’d said, as if his leave wasn’t as voluntary as everyone thought.

  “May I ask you something?”

  He sat behind the wheel of his truck, one hand resting atop it, his dark hair fluttering over his forehead in the breeze from the open window. His only concession to the fact that they were about to be someone’s company had been to change into a blue chambray shirt that did amazing things for his shoulders.

  “This leave you’re on,” she began, pulling her glance from the sleeves he’d rolled to below his elbows to brush at the worn knee of her jeans. There wasn’t a hole there. But the fabric was worn enough that she’d been concerned about being dressed inappropriately for the occasion.

  He hadn’t even looked at her as he’d pushed the comb she’d borrowed into the back pocket of his own jeans. As if he were already aware of exactly what she wore, he’d said she was fine, told her it was just a picnic, and headed off to change his shirt.

  Typical male, she’d thought at the time. But that was where her comparison had ended. She suspected now there was little typical about him at all.

  “Are you having to take it because of an incident like those I’ve read about in the paper?” she continued. “The kind where you’re put on probation or whatever it’s called because something went wrong when you were arresting someone?”

  His glance slid to where she sat watching him. “What makes you think I’m not taking time off on my own?”

  “Are you?” she asked.

  Sam had always kept much about his work to himself. Or, at least, he’d kept it within the ranks. Mostly because he’d learned that only another detective could understand another officer’s mindset. But partly, too, because much of what he did or learned was classified.

  Then, there were the nightmarish things he’d seen and dealt with that he simply didn’t want to relive by relating them. They haunted him enough without having to drag up the gory details.

  That odd empathy he’d felt for her hit again as he conceded a quiet, “No.” In the kitchen at the diner, she’d told him she needed him to know she wasn’t as wild as her writings might have led him to believe. He didn’t know if it was his admittedly healthy ego or something more forgivable prodding him just then, but just as she hadn’t wanted him to have the wrong idea about her, he didn’t want her to have the wrong idea about him, either.

  “I’ve definitely screwed up before,” he acknowledged, thinking of how close he’d come to official reprimands on occasion. He wasn’t a lose cannon. He had too much control for that. But he had been known for not always waiting for backup when seconds made the difference between catching a suspect and letting him escape. “Just not this time.”

  Her glance moved over his shoulder, his chest, then fixed on the underside of his carved jaw. “Were you injured?” Again, she might as well have asked.

  She’d seen his scars. He’d forgotten about that.

  “I was just undercover longer than usual,” he told her, not caring to think about how he’d earned the badges of honor slashing his chest and puckering the skin on his arm. He wasn’t supposed to be thinking about work, anyway. “I’m supposed to be doing normal stuff.”

  “Normal stuff?”

  “They called it ‘decompressing.’”

  “You make it sound as if you had the bends.”

  He thought her amazingly astute. That had been the analogy the department shrink had used. “It is something like that,” he admitted. A diver who descended below a certain point in the ocean had to rise slowly to avoid the effects of the water pressure on his body. If he came up too quickly, or without benefit of a decompression chamber, nitrogen bubbles formed in his blood, turning it into a sort of plasma-and-cellular soda pop that brought on the bends. The resulting internal damage could be deadly.

  He was certainly in no physical danger, but he’d come out from deep cover as quickly as a diver racing for the surface. It was his psychological health his bosses were interested in. But he’d tuned out the psychobabble. As far as he was concerned, his only problem was that he hadn’t been willing to allow himself time to readjust.

  “I’d been on a job that ran fourteen months. Some people in the department thought I should take a vacation.”

  “You were undercover all that time?”

  “I had to be,” he told her, when he would have much preferred to talk about how to get the old waterwheel hooked up to the grinding stone. They’d discussed replacing the shaft, since it was split, but they hadn’t gotten any farther. “It was the only way to gain the credibility I needed for us to make the operation work.”

  There wasn’t much else he could say. Even less that he really wanted, too.

  “What did you do all that time?”

  That, he could tell her. “I lived and worked as a bartender in an area you truly wouldn’t want to be in. It was the only way to make the contacts we needed.”

  “Can you say what kind of operation it was?”

  “Drugs.”

  “And you weren’t injured?” she repeated, as if wanting to be sure.

  Anyone else would have asked about his alias, or what it was like pretending to be something he wasn’t day after day. All she seemed to care about was that he hadn’t been hurt.

  “Not that time. Honest,” he said, when she looked as if she wasn’t sure she believed him. “The sting went perfectly. The only people who got hurt were t
he bad guys. I’m on leave only because I was under for so long, and everything was over so fast. I guess it takes time to readjust.”

  Or so he’d been told. He’d never been under that long before. One month. Six, max. He’d had no trouble moving on from those assignments. He’d had no reason to think this time would be any different.

  Except for the inability to sleep without waking a couple dozen times a night, and the restlessness he felt to get back to work, it really hadn’t been.

  “How long ago was this?”

  “Three weeks.”

  It had actually been a little longer than that now. By a few days, anyway. Yet, he could still envision how it had all gone down. He needed to remember those details even though he’d written everything down in case the D.A. wouldn’t take a plea bargain and he was called upon to testify. All he told Kelsey, though, was that one minute he’d been Rick, a bartender, playing the role of an intermediary for a buyer and getting ready to trade a hefty chunk of change in marked bills for a briefcase full of cocaine. The next, the surveillance team listening to the transaction from a van on the street had sent in the SWAT team that had been set in place and all hell had broken lose.

  Within the hour, the parties to the transaction who hadn’t been present had been picked up. Two hours after that, he’d been back at the station, filling out his report and pacing like a caged panther because the adrenaline was still flowing.

  He’d reported at the precinct the next morning to tie up any loose ends on the case and get his next assignment. It was then that his supervisor, who also happened to be a friend of his dad, had reminded him that his sister had lost her husband six months ago and that he might want to take some time for family. He’d agreed to a couple of days and gone to see his sister in Jersey for the weekend. When he’d returned, the fact that he hadn’t wanted any more time off had apparently sent up some sort of red flag. He’d been sent to see the department psychologist and a couple of days off had turned into three months.

  Kelsey listened quietly as they drove through deep woods, past the lake and farms lush with wheat and corn. It amazed her how easily he’d described his role, and how much annoyance slipped into his tone when he’d mentioned his forced break.

  She couldn’t begin to imagine how he immersed himself in such a dark and unfamiliar world, or what he must have seen or done over the years. More than anything else, she couldn’t imagine how he could stand to be so disconnected from his family for such long periods of time, or what it was that pushed him to avoid everything she and everyone she knew would consider normal—such as a job that didn’t involve getting himself into situations most sane people would avoid, and a home and family of his own.

  According to his comment about his relatives’ quest to get him married again, he’d been avoiding the latter for years.

  “I can see why they thought you might need a leave,” she confided.

  A muscle in his jaw jerked. “I’d have been fine going back to work.”

  Aware of the quick tension she sensed in him, she started to ask why he was so anxious to go back. But he turned just then from the blacktopped lane they’d taken to an even narrower road of ruts and gravel. With the ride turning bumpy, she looked out the front window and promptly swallowed her question.

  They’d reached the farmhouse.

  His aunt was already on the front porch, waving for them to come in.

  Chapter Six

  Ted and Janelle Collier’s dairy farm sat among hills as green as the hay in the fields and the forest of trees surrounding it. A gleaming aluminum silo stood guard near a cherry-red barn and a half a dozen smaller outbuildings. Miles of fencing surrounded livestock grazing acres of pasture. In the middle of it all rose a white dormered house that had been added onto with abandon over the years.

  It was the sort of bucolic setting Kelsey had grown up taking for granted, and tended to forget existed, living as she did with freeways and shopping malls. It was also the sort of place that would have tugged harder at the totally impractical longing she felt for her home had it not been for the man walking with her from his truck.

  I’d have been fine going back.

  There’d been no mistaking Sam’s certainty when he’d claimed that, or the displeasure he felt with the leave he’d been forced to take. She just had no idea why that displeasure should be there. After fourteen months without a vacation, any sane person would be begging for time off, no matter what it was they did for a living.

  Or so it seemed to her as his quiet tension brushed over her nerves and she considered that she should have given a little more thought to coming with him.

  This was his family’s gathering. Kelsey knew many of the Colliers, but she hadn’t seen any of them in well over ten years. Because their farm was so far out of town, their paths simply hadn’t crossed on her visits home. And she’d never met Sam’s sister before at all. She knew from talk at the diner that Megan’s husband had been killed in a road-rage incident in New Jersey, and that the young widow was anxious to move her sons to a safer, quieter environment. But that minimal knowledge only added to the sense that she would be encroaching on family time. She’d just been so caught up in the little daydream Sam had encouraged—and in him—that she hadn’t considered much else.

  “Oh, Sam. I’m so glad you’re here!”

  Janelle Collier’s salt-and-pepper bob bounced against her rounded cheeks as she crossed the long porch with its overflowing pots of petunias and wicker rocking chairs. Dressed in denims and a red T-shirt embellished with a waving flag, Sam’s fiftysomething aunt bounded down the stairs with the energy of a twenty-year-old.

  Lines earned by worry and laughter crinkled as she offered a smile as wide as the stretch of her arms.

  “I thought for sure you’d cancel on us,” she announced, wrapping him in a quick hug.

  His deceptively easy smile once more in place, Sam hugged her back. As big as he was, the small, squat woman practically disappeared in his arms.

  “And Kelsey!” She stepped back, little flag earrings dangling from her ears. Curiosity fairly danced in her eyes. “What a nice surprise. I’d heard you’d come to help your mom, but I didn’t know I’d get a chance to see you.”

  “I hope you don’t mind me coming along, Mrs. Collier.” Aware of Sam restively shoving his hands into the pockets of his jeans, her uncertainty compounded itself. “I didn’t think to ask Sam to see if you’d mind an extra guest…”

  “Of course I don’t mind.” Looking as if she couldn’t imagine why she’d think she would—neighbors were neighbors, after all—she motioned her to follow her up the steps. “Sam’s sister and the boys are out back shucking corn. Come on and I’ll introduce you.

  “Sam,” she called, still smiling as she opened the screen door. “Your uncle wants you in the barn. He can use some help changing the clutch on the tractor. Tell him you have someone with you and he won’t keep you down there all day.”

  From the way Sam hung back, Kelsey thought for certain he was about to abandon her and head for the barn. Or for his truck. Moments ago, she’d thought his displeasure had been with the leave he hadn’t wanted to take. Now, considering his aunt’s comment about having expected him to cancel, she wondered if he wasn’t balking because he didn’t want to be there at all.

  She was leaning heavily toward the latter when he started up the steps.

  “I’ll say hi to sis and the boys first.” He hesitated, something that looked like concern battling unmistakable reluctance. “How’s she doing? I only saw her for a while yesterday.”

  “I think she’s doing better since she bought that house and you started working on it for her. It gives her something positive to focus on.” Mrs. Collier glanced over her shoulder, her tone at once sympathetic and good-natured. “She didn’t really think you’d come today, either,” she admitted blithely, leading them through the comfortable living room with its slip-covered furniture and family photographs. “She’ll be glad you did. “

>   Sam’s only response was the almost imperceptible jerk of his jaw. Kelsey caught it an instant before she heard a door slam open in the kitchen. They had barely stepped into the bright room itself when two towheaded boys in the three-foot-tall range barreled across the shiny floor in a blur of red, white and blue and into the arms of the man who’d just crouched like a baseball player to catch them.

  She had no idea how Sam kept himself from landing flat on his back.

  The boys, both blue-eyed future heartbreakers, were grinning as he easily scooped up the weight that would have had most people straining, and rose with one on each arm.

  “Mom!” the older one hollered, his little hand on Sam’s broad shoulder. “Uncle Sam’s here!”

  A slender young woman with a dark ponytail and eyes as gray as her brother’s appeared in the doorway. Their Aunt Janelle was apparently responsible for the boy’s patriotic dress. Sam’s sister looked as if she couldn’t have cared less what day it was. She wore no makeup and had dressed in a short black T-shirt and low-riding, gray sweatpants. She was also positively stunning.

  “I see that,” she replied, affection in her tired-looking smile. Her glance shifted to Kelsey. “Hi,” she murmured. “I’m the monsters’ mother. They’ve been into the cupcakes we made this morning.”

  Kelsey smiled, partly at the woman’s friendliness, partly at the relaxing effect her exuberant offspring had on her brother. “Sugar high?”

  “Stratospheric.”

  “Megan, this is Kelsey.” Sam’s dark head dipped toward his sister. “Kelsey. Megan.”

  The curiosity in Megan’s expression mirrored that of the older woman whose glance kept bouncing between the two of them. Both clearly wanted to know why she was with the man neither had expected to show up. Or, more specifically, what their relationship was for him to have shown up with her. Whatever Megan started to say to hint in that direction, however, was overridden by the chatter of her sons.