The Sheriff With The Wyoming-Size Heart
“That lady knew I was scared I’d forget, so she told me just to sing. Then she made Jelly stop hiding. I like her.”
“I can see that, but—”
“Please let me go back, Daddy.”
Ariel’s plea took Riley back another couple of steps. She wanted to visit their new neighbor. In this, he had no muddled feelings. “What have I always taught you about talking to strangers?”
Ariel widened her eyes artlessly, indicating she thought she had him licked. “People who live in the same neighborhood can’t be strangers.”
“We don’t know anything about her.”
“We can ask.”
Ariel was right. Sort of. In Laramie, so far, neighbors were not strangers to each other. But the horrors endemic to other, bigger cities were moving in. And sometimes danger hid in unlikely places. He cupped Ariel’s face in his palm. “Promise me you won’t go over there alone.”
“Then come with me. Please. Because she might die, like Mommy did, and I don’t have a way to remember her.”
Riley cuddled Ariel against his chest. A child should not have to deal with the unpredictability of life. She shouldn’t have to play little games to remember the face of someone she loved. And she shouldn’t be deprived of kindness just because one icy night her mother died in an automobile accident and left her father leery of the unknown.
“Let me think about it. In the meantime, don’t go over there alone.”
“Thanks, Daddy.” Ariel gave him a noisy, giggly kiss. Then she grew solemn again and pulled back to look at him earnestly. “Daddy, will I ever have a mommy again?”
“I don’t know.” He thought about it occasionally, especially when he didn’t know how he could give his daughter everything she needed. Or when she seemed too much child for one person to handle. He’d thought about it today, when she’d disappeared from the school before he could pick her up.
But marrying again didn’t mean Ariel would automatically have a full-time mother—or that he would find a woman who could curb Ariel’s recklessness. And more than that, he wasn’t sure he could add the anxiety he’d feel for a wife to his worry for his daughter. Before Kendra’s death, he’d taken life’s risks as a matter of course, as part of his job. Now he measured every aspect of his life against them.
“When Whiskers got lost and I missed her so much, we got another kitten.”
Not quite sure what she needed, Riley folded his daughter in his arms. “We were really lucky to find another kitten that was just right.”
“Can we look for another mommy?”
“I’m afraid it’s not that easy, Scooter.”
She wriggled free of his embrace and giggled. “But, Daddy, it is. I wished for Jelly and I got him. So I’ll just wish for a new mommy.”
She slid off his lap, picked up the can of cat food and skipped across the room to empty it into Jelly’s dish. Great. Now Ariel was wishing for a new mommy, as if people gave them away through the Want Ads, like a kitten. Free to good home. Box trained.
Ariel was a terrific kid, and he’d give her the moon if he could. She’d adjusted to losing Kendra better than anyone expected. In spite of being one of the youngest in her class, she did well in school. She might be too adventuresome for his comfort, but her spunk made her popular with the other kids. So why couldn’t they go on as they were?
She’d just thrown him a curveball he couldn’t possibly hit, and now she knelt on the floor, petting Jelly as if—
The bottom of her left sock was dirty and grass-stained. “Ariel, where’s your shoe?”
She sat back, stretched out her legs and wiggled her shoeless foot. Hunching her shoulders, she looked up at him solemnly. “I don’t know.”
“When was the last time you saw it?”
She pondered for a while, but he didn’t hold much hope she would remember, since she hadn’t even realized it was missing.
“I had it when I came home from school.”
“Did you have it when you came home here?”
“Maybe.”
“Did you have it on when you were visiting the lady?”
She lifted her shoulders again. “I don’t remember.”
“Sheesh, Ariel. How could you forget losing your shoe?”
Sticking out her bottom lip, she examined her foot again. “It has to be somewhere.”
Yeah. Anywhere between the kitchen and the school. Which covered about two square miles, since he doubted she’d taken a direct route or could retrace whatever way she’d come. It wasn’t worth a full-scale search, but he could check with their new neighbor.
In fact, the missing shoe would be a very good excuse to pursue Ariel’s request. He could pay their new neighbor a visit. Learn her name. See if he could depend on her concern for Ariel. Because at the very least, it never hurt to have as many people as possible keeping an eye out for his headstrong little girl.
Margo couldn’t get Ariel—or Ariel’s father—out of her head. Between the two of them, they’d left her mind in a whirl, and nothing she’d tried had restored her equilibrium.
Not a shower, not fixing supper, not unpacking a couple more boxes. Even her heroine’s next exploit couldn’t hold her concentration. Finally she gave up the effort.
She brewed a pot of decaf, put some melancholy music on the stereo and wrapped herself in an afghan by the fire.
She wasn’t sure who had affected her most, the girl or her father. The father was a sheriff. And so what if he was? Past was past, right? With her new identity, she had a spotless record, a clear conscience, and a limitless future.
Unfortunately, she also knew both people and the system too well to be neutral. With people, a hint of suspicion would lead to judgment, an impression too quickly became a fact, and past sins were never forgotten. With the system, a single misstep could tumble a person into a legal landslide, and from then on you could kiss a normal life goodbye.
She sipped her coffee, leaned back and closed her eyes. No, society wasn’t perfect, and most people did the best they could. She had no one to blame but herself.
Looking back, her fault had lain in how recklessly she’d followed where her emotions led. She’d let grief after her grandmother’s death lead her into a relationship with Nick. She’d let herself need him so much that she did anything he wanted and made excuses for his abuse. Her love for their baby had made her blind to the downward spiral of her relationship with Holly’s father.
Since coming to that conclusion, she’d worked at self-discipline. She’d practiced deliberating alternatives and thinking before she acted. She’d learned to look ahead and imagine where different alternatives would lead. She thought she’d mastered control.
Ha!
Just today, so many emotions had erupted in such a short space of time, she couldn’t catalog them all. Starting with feelings she hadn’t experienced since losing Holly.
She hadn’t been a part of her daughter’s life since Holly was eight months old. She hadn’t watched Holly learn to walk or count or tell time. She didn’t know if Holly took music lessons or played soccer or could ride a horse. She had never heard Holly sing a song. In giving her daughter a chance for security, she’d forfeited any right to ever be a part of Holly’s life.
Could anyone blame her for enjoying Ariel’s company for a little while?
The girl’s father could. He obviously did.
Margo sighed. It was just as well. She couldn’t picture herself becoming very well acquainted with a cop—no matter how close they might live as neighbors. No matter how much she might like to know his daughter better.
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.