Rebel In A Small Town

“I wasn’t stealing anything. I had a reason for being in this store,” she said, and her husky voice sent a shiver down James’s spine. He knew that voice. Even after two years, he knew it.

“Mara?” He turned his shocked gaze to her. She’d let her hair grow, and she wasn’t the stick-thin girl he remembered either from high school or the day she’d walked out on him two years ago.

“I swear,” she said, reaching into the bag and pulling out a box of cookies and a small carton of milk, “I have a really good explanation for this.”

Well, that much, at least, was familiar. Mara Tyler always had a good explanation, both before she acted and after the fact. While in high school, the six of them—he and Mara, her brother Collin, Levi Walters and the twins, Aiden and Adam Buchanan—had pulled a number of pranks on the town. They’d painted Simone Grainger’s phone number on the water tower after she dumped Aiden before the last basketball game of their senior year. They’d all brought dogs to school on the same day, and had switched the cables from the principal’s computer to the secretary’s. They repainted the downtown parking spaces and put up Tractors Only parking signs. There were countless other pranks, but each one had been orchestrated by Mara, and every single one of them he’d gone along with because he would rather have been with her than without her.

Whenever Mara came around, his law-abiding side warred with his reckless side, and usually the reckless side won, leaving his law-abiding self to clean up the mess.

Like the mess the two of them made graduation night.

Correction: the mess he’d made all by himself when he took one of her pranks to a whole other level.

No one except him and Mara knew exactly what happened that night, and he planned to keep it that way.

“Yeah, it just figures Mara Tyler would set off the store alarm.” CarlaAnn had joined them. “I thought I recognized her when she walked in, but I wasn’t sure until the alarms went off.” She shook her head, her shoulder-length, salt-and-pepper hair shaking from side to side. “This alarm system isn’t good for much, but it finally caught her in the act.” She stabbed a finger toward Mara’s chest. James stepped between them.

CarlaAnn was Simone’s mother, and she’d always blamed their group for the water tower incident—with just cause. A few weeks after that incident, Simone ran off with the biker she’d dumped Aiden for, and she had never returned to Slippery Rock. CarlaAnn blamed only Mara for that offense, and her blame had turned into a raging hatred before the six of them graduated.

“I have a perfectly good explanation for being here, and for setting off the alarms. I tried to tell you that through the glass,” Mara said, stepping around James’s arm. “I need to speak with Mike.” She glanced at her watch, and she tapped the toe of her shoe against the tile.

CarlaAnn crossed her arms over her chest. “Mike is on vacation. You’ll have to deal with me.”

Mara kept her gaze trained on the other woman for a long moment. CarlaAnn was the first to look away. “Then I need a phone number or email address where he can be reached.”

CarlaAnn pressed her lips together and scowled. “I don’t have either of those,” she finally said.

James noticed the crowd of shoppers gradually inching closer to Mara and CarlaAnn, probably expecting some kind of girl fight now that Mara had been identified. Small towns meant there was always a helping hand around, but they also meant long memories. Everyone remembered the water tower prank, among others. The love-hate relationship between Mara and the town had turned to flat-out hate after the fiasco of graduation night, though.

Since then, James had done his best to prove he was a man worthy of being the next sheriff. Mara setting off alarm bells at the grocery store would only reinforce their belief that she was a felony charge away from jail time.

He knew she wasn’t a felon, and their pranks had been generated out of boredom rather than malice, but that wouldn’t matter. Nor would the fact that James graduated at the top of his class in both college and the police academy. His anonymous restitution to the school would be irrelevant. None of those things would matter to the townspeople, just as those things didn’t truly assuage his conscience. He could only hope that someday the man he’d become would matter more than the boy he’d been. Maybe that was how Mara felt, too.

“We’ll take care of this, everyone.” He motioned to the crowd to continue shopping, then turned to Mara. “Why don’t you and I go into the office area and talk this through?”

Mara checked her watch again. “Can we make it quick? I, um, have an important, uh, conference call in fifteen minutes.”

“Don’t you need my statement, too, Deputy Calhoun? Or is this a purely cursory investigation?”

James thought he heard a silent too on the end of CarlaAnn’s last question, as well, and remembered his mother confronting his father after CarlaAnn accused him of conducting a “cursory investigation” into Simone’s disappearance with the biker. James took Mara’s arm and pushed past CarlaAnn.

“Hey,” Mara said in protest, but he ignored her until the door to the back office closed behind them. “I’m not a criminal. And I have another appointment.”

“No, you’re a mischief maker. And important conference call or not, I’m going to investigate why you’re setting off alarm bells at my grocery store.”

“I thought it still belonged to the Mallard family, or have the Calhouns gone into groceries as well as law enforcement?”

“You know what I meant. This is my town, and the people here are my friends, my family. The businesses they run, I protect.”

“They were mine once, too.”

“Until the day you ran out on everything.”

Mara jerked her arm from his grasp. “You, of all people, know why I left.”

James clenched his jaw. Yeah, he knew. Only it hadn’t been her leaving ten years ago that he’d been talking about. She didn’t need to know that, though. He opened the door to the room that held the security equipment and motioned her inside. “Want to show me your reasonable explanation for stealing five dollars in snacks when I know for a fact that you don’t eat generic cookies and are lactose intolerant?”

“I can’t.” Mara looked uncomfortable. “But if you would let me get to my—”

“You’d better, or CarlaAnn out there is going to do her damnedest to make sure this misdemeanor offense not only lands on the crime blotter of the Slippery Rock Gazette but also sounds like a felony.” God, but she was cute when she was upset. Her face took on a pretty pink hue, and she wrung her hands together nervously. Mara was almost never nervous, so seeing her this out of balance was nice. Especially since she was so good at putting him off balance.

Mara motioned to the equipment on the counter. “The system doesn’t catch where I was in the store, and it misses a lot of the parking lot.” She pulled an ID badge from her bag, the move pulling her top taut over her breasts. James’s mouth went dry. Stupid reaction. He’d been hung up on Mara Tyler for most of his life, but he was not going to let himself get hung up on her again. He was a responsible adult with a responsible job, and she’d walked out on him two years ago without so much as a goodbye. He was over her.

“I work for Cannon Security.” She named a firm he had heard about during his training in Jefferson City a few years before. “Mike hired us to do a security overhaul, and I was here to conduct a cursory check before telling him what needed to be done. No one told me he was on vacation. I have emails on my computer at the B and B.”

“You work for a security company?” That was new. He had always figured Mara had gone into hacking or some other not-quite-legal profession. Although they’d had an on-again, off-again relationship, they never talked about anything important. She’d seen his badge, and knew he had always wanted to become the sheriff, but they had never talked about her plans. Or dreams. Hell, he couldn’t really call what they’d had a relationship. It was more like a five-year series of booty calls when she was near Slippery Rock or when he went to law-enforcement conferences in the cities where she worked. “I didn’t realize you were one of the good guys now.”

“Well, I don’t wear a cape, but I do have a lot of really cool techy toys that come in handy from time to time.”

Great, now he was picturing her in tights and a cape, and in his imagination her body looked so much better than any of the good guys from the comic books. Not that she was one of the good guys. Er, girls. Women. Whatever. He refocused as she continued talking.

“I do camera and detector installs, but I also write specific programs for some of our clients.” She sat at the counter and ran through the tapes from the ancient camera system.

The images were grainy and fuzzy, but he could tell they focused on the check stand and the front of the store. He moved closer, putting his hand over hers. Warmth from the touch spread up his arm, but Mara didn’t seem to notice. He shook himself. He was not going down this road, not again. Mara only ever saw him as a friend or a booty call, and even if that changed, his job didn’t. Her reputation wouldn’t. Getting tangled up with her again would be...irresponsible. James hadn’t been irresponsible, at least not inside the Slippery Rock city limits, since graduation night.

“This was to be a custom job because Mallard’s is the only store on this particular block. He has specific needs.”

So did James, not that his needs had anything to do with the images on the screens before them. Those needs had everything to do with the heat that seemed to seep into his skin from hers. He stepped back. “Like more cameras and a new door.”

“Yes, as well as computerized entry codes and new systems for opening and closing the registers. The store has lost a lot of revenue from shoplifters, but Mike also mentioned something about registers not adding up. It’s a big job.”

“And they picked you to run it.” He was impressed. Mara Tyler was not only a good guy but also a good-at-her-job good guy.

“Actually, I volunteered.” She stood. “I needed to make sure my family was okay after the tornado, and...” She paused. “It seemed like a good time to come home for more than a day at a time.” She twisted her mouth to the side as if she might say more.

James waited a long moment, but she didn’t continue. “I thought you hated Slippery Rock.”

“Sometimes the things you hate the most as a kid are the things you miss the most as an adult.” There was something in her voice that made him look at her more closely. This wasn’t personal—that couldn’t be it. But there was something different about Mara. Something had changed over the past two years, and that change was interesting.

Not that he would act on interesting. Still, it might be nice to have her around for a while, if for no other reason than to give uptight old CarlaAnn a hard time.

“Are you ready to face the music with CarlaAnn?” He checked his watch. “By my count, you have ten more minutes before the big conference call.”

Mara shrugged. “I kind of figured her antipathy toward me would have lessened.”

“You’ve forgotten how small towns work, haven’t you?”

Together they returned to the check stand, where CarlaAnn was scanning a woman’s groceries while the teenager bagged them. Once the woman had paid, James motioned CarlaAnn to the side.

“Meet the new security consultant for Mallard’s Grocery.”

“Well, doesn’t that just figure?” CarlaAnn said, annoyance in her voice. “Mike didn’t say anything about security changes.”

“I’m sure he’ll tell you all about it when he gets back.”

Mara moved to the check stand and took the cookies and milk from her bag. “To show there are no hard feelings, I’ll pay for these. It really was part of the initial security check.”

Reluctantly CarlaAnn scanned the items and slid them onto the conveyor belt. The teen put them in a small plastic bag.

“I’ll see you Monday morning,” Mara said, “and I’ll have my boss call your boss, just to let him know we’ve gotten acquainted.”

CarlaAnn harrumphed. James walked out of the store with Mara.

“It’s Tuesday,” he said. “Why wait until Monday?”

“Just an assumption that I won’t be able to get much done until Mike returns. And another assumption that he’ll come back to work on a Monday. My boss at Cannon will have contact information for him. If he isn’t back Monday, I’ll wait a little longer. I can do a lot of the programming from my computer at the B and B.”

“You aren’t staying at the orchard?” Usually only tourists stayed at the motel or B and Bs in town. He’d been so focused on his reaction to her, he’d ignored those other references to staying in town rather than at her family’s farm.

That uncomfortable look flitted over her face again. “I, ah, thought it might be simpler to be closer to Mallard’s.” She reached into her bag and pulled out a set of keys, which she began fiddling with. “You know, glitches and things.”

They arrived at her car, and James wasn’t sure what to say. He wanted to ask how she’d gotten involved in the security industry. Wanted to ask why she hadn’t come back to town before now. Wanted to know what she’d been doing for the past two years.

He didn’t believe for a second that glitches and things were the real reason she was staying at the Slippery Rock Bed-and-Breakfast in town rather than in the ample space of the farmhouse at the orchard.

If she were a friend, he would push the issue. But she wasn’t a friend. Friends didn’t cut friends out of their lives the way she’d cut him out. James decided to let it drop. Mara might make his blood run hotter than Bud’s Fourth of July chili from Guy’s Market, but James was through allowing her to make him do irresponsible things, like trying to push his way into her life.

“I guess I’ll see you around, then. Try not to set off any more alarms, okay?”

She grinned, but that uneasy look remained in her clear blue eyes. James fought the urge to try to make that look leave her face. “I’ll do my best,” she said and slid behind the wheel of a navy SUV with darkly tinted rear windows. She gave him a finger wave as she pulled out of the parking lot.

Asking any of those questions would imply he was interested, and he wasn’t. Was not interested in Mara Tyler. At least, he shouldn’t be.

CHAPTER TWO

MARA HAD RENTED a suite at the Slippery Rock B and B. Well, suite was a bit of an exaggeration, but there were two rooms with an adjoining door. It was the best option she had. The only other hotel in town looked like it had been through a war, and she didn’t think it was entirely due to the tornado. This B and B was one of the few buildings on the west side of the downtown area that hadn’t been hit hard by the tornado. Joann, the new owner who had moved to town a couple years before, told her they lost the roof and a little bit of siding, but that was the extent of the damage. She didn’t question Mara about why she was staying at the B and B instead of the orchard—the question Mara knew James had been dying to ask at Mallard’s.

Mara opened the door to her suite with her happy mommy smile plastered to her face, ten minutes after Zeke’s usual wake-up. When Mara started to say something, Cheryl Johnson, Zeke’s nanny, shook her head.

“Still sleeping,” she whispered. “I think the drive tuckered him out.”

Mara crossed the room to the small Pack ’n Play she traveled with, wishing for the thousandth time that Zeke had a proper crib. Cribs didn’t transport well, not even in an SUV. Since her work required regular travel, this was the best solution. She ran her fingers lightly over the little boy’s brown hair. It was soft and silky and baby-fine, unlike the thick mass of hair his father had.

She blew out a breath. The office of Mallard’s Grocery hadn’t been the right place to tell James about Zeke. She knew that. So why did she feel so guilty about her silence? She’d come here to tell him about his son, to introduce them, and she would do it. But not when she was on the verge of being arrested for stealing a carton of milk and a box of generic cookies.

Mara took the items from her bag, put the milk in the small fridge inside the oversize bureau and tossed the cookies on top.

“Thanks for sticking around until I got back. You didn’t have to do that.”

“Are you kidding me? If today and tomorrow are the last days I have with Zeke, I’m going to pack as much of his sweet baby face as I can into them. Are you sure you don’t need me to stay? My contract with the school district in Tulsa doesn’t start for another two months—”

Mara held up her hand. “And you’re going to spend two of those weeks helping your sister plan her wedding, and after the wedding, you’re taking your father on that trip to Ireland he’s always wanted. Zeke and I will be fine.” She couldn’t ignore the little spike of fear that hit her belly, though.

She’d hired Cheryl to be Zeke’s nanny when he was three weeks old. Cheryl had traveled with them all over the United States, but earlier this year her father had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s. Cheryl wanted to be closer to her family, and Mara couldn’t blame her, especially with a wedding coming up and a parent whose health was in decline. She might not have the close familial ties her nanny had, but Mara could empathize.

Part of her hope for this trip was that she would be able to repair those ties with her own family. That, and tell James he had a son. She also planned to tell him she could raise Zeke on her own so he could continue with his postcard-perfect, fairy-tale life as the heir apparent to the Slippery Rock Sheriff’s Department and forget he’d ever been so reckless as to have an affair with her.

“But you’ll send me pictures, right?” Cheryl’s hazel eyes clouded with tears, and her voice cracked. Mara wrapped her arms around the woman who was her only friend.

“Are you kidding? Who else is going to understand just how cute the little monster is when he’s destroying his dinner like Godzilla destroyed Tokyo?”

“Okay. Okay then.” Cheryl pulled back, grabbed a tissue from the box on the bureau and dabbed at her eyes. “I swore I wasn’t going to get choked up. This isn’t forever. The contract is only for a year, and then, who knows? Dad will be settled by then. He might not need as much attention.”

“Sure,” Mara said, pushing more confidence into her voice than she felt. She had no doubt that she and Cheryl would stay in touch, but she was very doubtful this sabbatical would last only for the length of the school year. Cheryl’s father wouldn’t get better, and her sister would begin having children. Unlike Mara, normal people weren’t made to live out of suitcases in a series of boring hotel rooms. “Until you come back, I’ll text and email more pictures than you ever wanted to see. You’ll have to block my numbers to stop the flow of toddler silliness.”

Cheryl dabbed at her eyes again, but she seemed to have regained her equilibrium. “I’m going to collect those takeout menus the manager promised when we checked in.” She closed the door, and Mara was alone with her son.

She sat on the edge of the bed and sighed. She could do this. She’d taken all the parenting courses, enrolled herself in therapy to deal finally with the baggage from her childhood. She was now in the same town with her baby’s father, and she was ready to tell him that he could have a place in his child’s life or not. Either way, she and Zeke would be just fine. Simple enough conversation.

Zeke made a small noise, and his little fingers began their usual scrape-scrape-scrape down the mesh sides of the playpen. His favorite stuffed toy, an ugly black-and-brown lemur, was wedged under his hip, but he wrestled it free and began talking in mumbles to it.

She was stronger now than she had ever been. She could do this.

* * *

“BUT WHY ISN’T she staying at the orchard?” James called himself ten kinds of fool for asking Collin the question, but he couldn’t resist.

He’d stopped by his house to change out of his uniform, but somehow the old jeans and gray T-shirt weren’t any more comfortable than the layers of stiff, starched cotton, body armor and gun belt he wore to work every day. The fact that Collin, Mara’s brother and one of his best friends, looked incredibly relaxed in a pair of cargo shorts and a similar T-shirt only made him more uncomfortable. He, Collin and Levi were sitting at their usual Wednesday night booth in The Slippery Slope, the waterfront bar. It still felt odd not to see Adam across the booth, but he was in the hospital recovering from the injuries he sustained in the tornado. The doctors weren’t certain he would walk again.

“She says it’ll make things easier with the odd hours she’s keeping working on the security system at Mallard’s,” Collin said. “And to be honest, I don’t need the distraction of my sister underfoot. I’ve got enough to do with the new plantings.”

Tyler Orchard had been hit hard by the tornado. Collin had lost about half of their apple trees and several peach and pear trees, too. Still, when family members visited Slippery Rock, they didn’t stay at a B and B.

“The orchard is all of a ten-minute drive to town,” James said. “Don’t you think that’s odd?”

James hadn’t seen Mara since Tuesday morning—apparently she’d had no more run-ins with the wonky security doors at the grocery store—but he couldn’t get her out of his head. He’d worked with one of the construction crews this afternoon, putting up the new roof of the farmers’ market just down the street, and he could have sworn he saw her standing on the corner. Of course, when he took a closer look, he’d seen Mrs. Bailey, the Methodist minister’s wife. Mrs. Bailey was short, had iron-gray hair and carried a pocketbook from 1959. No sane man would mix her up with the tall, thin Mara Tyler carrying a canvas tote bag.

“What’s with the third degree over where Mara chooses to stay while she’s on a business trip?” Levi asked, coming to the table with a tray of beers and a bucket of peanuts.

James sat back as if he hadn’t just been interrogating one of his best friends about said best friend’s sister, while the best friend was unaware that James had been having an affair with that same sister. “No third degree, just curiosity,” he said, hoping neither Levi nor Collin would push the issue.

“Look, you have the black-and-white sitcom version of the perfect family. Having family stay with you is normal. The Tylers have never been anyone’s version of normal,” Collin said, but his words didn’t hold their usual rancor. Since he’d fallen for Levi’s sister, Savannah, Collin’s anger at his parents seemed to have dissipated. “If Mara says it’s easier to stay in town, I’m fine with that. If she decides to come to the orchard, we have plenty of room.”

“She hasn’t even been to the orchard yet?” Not going to see her family was weirder than weird. Who came home for work and didn’t immediately check in with the family? Sure, she’d been only a sporadic visitor, but he knew Mara loved her grandmother and her siblings. None of this made sense.

Collin, who emanated that happy-in-love countenance usually seen only on the guy characters in chick flicks, shrugged. “She called to let us know she was in town. She’ll probably be out this weekend.” He popped a peanut into his mouth and chewed.

“And you don’t find that just a little bit strange?”

“Not really. You know Mara. She does things at her own pace.”

“Usually that pace rivals the Indy 500 drivers,” James said, sipping his beer. It was one thing for Mara to check into the Slippery Rock B and B, but not even to go to the orchard to see her family? That was unlike the woman he’d known.

Of course, he’d never envisioned that woman walking out on him, changing her phone number or ignoring his emails, and she had done all of those things. Maybe he didn’t know Mara Tyler at all. James opened his mouth to say something, anything to get Collin to tell him what was going on, but Levi spoke.