A Weaver Christmas Gift

She set the water bottle aside and thumped her hand on the side of the computer, pushing away the memory. The computer gave out a little hiccupping sound and a fan somewhere inside it whirred to life. A few moments later, the screen finally lit up, and she set about updating her books. It didn’t take her long, because she kept up with the task almost daily even though she detested it. It might be overkill—her accountant, her ex-husband and Casey had all independently accused her of it—but she liked knowing to the penny where she was at any given time.

She used to think it came from watching her mother scrimp and save and worry about every dime right up until she died before Jane moved to Weaver. But Julia had come out of their childhood without sharing this particular obsession of Jane’s.

“Pregnant yet?”

Startled, she swiveled in her chair, knocking the water bottle into the computer keyboard with her elbow. She gave Casey an annoyed look as she hastily yanked the keyboard off the desk, trying to protect it from the spilled water. “Ever hear of knocking?”

“Door wasn’t closed.” He was leaning casually against the doorjamb. “Wouldn’t worry too much about that keyboard. It’s already a decade past its life expectancy.”

She used the hem of her sweater to swipe up the spreading puddle with one hand and held the keyboard aloft with the other. It was awkward because of the cords tethering it in place; though she’d never admit it, she wished she had the nifty wireless things that Casey had tried to equip her with. “What are you doing here?”

“Grabbing a bite.”

The grill usually closed at ten on weeknights and it was still well before that. “Then get to it,” she said waspishly. “Jerry’s cooking alone tonight.” During their busier times, her main cook was joined by his son, Jerry Junior.

Casey sighed noisily and grabbed the keyboard out of her hand, holding it high when she tried to take it back. “There’s no crime in asking for help.”

“I don’t need help. I need a towel.” More annoyed with the way her stomach was jumping around at the sight of him than she was the minor spill, she scooted past him and grabbed a neatly folded towel from a stack of them in the storeroom. It was only a matter of seconds, but when she reentered the office, he was already sitting down in her chair, boots propped on the corner of her desk while he tapped away at the keyboard resting on his lap.

“Stop that!” She tried shoving at his legs, but he was immovable. There was no room to get around him, so she reached across him to wipe the towel over the desktop, drying what was left of the water. She didn’t have the computer hooked up to an internet connection—another source of contention between them—nor did she have any little computer games to amuse him. She needed the computer for one thing and one thing only: keeping her business records. “You’re snooping.”

“Nope.” His fingers flew over the keyboard with enviable ease. “Just doing a little maintenance. When’s the last time you backed up your data?”

She glared at the back of his head, controlling the urge to swat him with the towel even though it was mighty tempting. “Last week,” she lied.

He snorted. “Last month, you mean.” He tapped some more. “You need to be on an automatic backup. You’re maxing out your memory. You won’t let me add more. You keep everything that’s important about Colbys on this thing.” He looked over his shoulder up at her. “If you’re not careful, you could lose it all.”

He was the only person she’d ever met who had honest-to-goodness gray eyes. If she hadn’t spent as many hours in his arms as she had, she would have suspected the distinctive color came from contact lenses rather than nature. But she was the one whose imperfect vision required the aid of contact lenses, not Casey.

His eyebrow rose and she realized she was standing there like an idiot, staring into his eyes. “Fine,” she agreed abruptly. “I’ll get a new computer. Update it all.” She barely waited a beat. “I will get it,” she emphasized. “I don’t need you doing it for me.”

“I swear, if you needed your own appendix taken out, you’d insist on holding the scalpel.” He turned his attention back to the computer. “Still amazes me that you’re willing to let someone else contribute their gene pool to this kid you want.”

“You’re just annoyed because I’m not letting you take over and do whatever you want.”

He glanced at her again and sudden heat slid through her veins at the look in his eyes. “A month might have passed since you announced your little ‘plan—’” he air-quoted the word “—but I’m pretty sure there’re a few things I do that you still want, Janie.”

She exhaled noisily and tossed the towel over his head. “Cool your jets, Clay.” Because it was her own jets she was worried about, she backed out of the small office and headed out front to the bar. He wouldn’t say or do anything in front of other people that would give any hint they were lovers.

Had been lovers, she mentally corrected herself.

Past tense.

Merilee was mixing up a round of frozen margaritas when Jane moved behind the bar. The noise of the blender was familiar and welcome. There were a few orders waiting, and she tied a black apron around her hips, then washed her hands before starting to fill them.

Casey appeared soon after but rather than going over to the grill as she expected, he slid onto one of the bar stools near where she was working. “Think I’ll eat in here,” he said.

She wanted to gnash her teeth. Instead, without missing a beat on the Long Island iced tea she was concocting, she slid a menu in front of him.

He flipped the laminated card between his fingers. “I’ve got this thing memorized,” he pointed out.

“Which only proves the fact that you spend too much time in a bar. Beer?”

He nodded. “You’re the proprietress of said bar. I wouldn’t complain about having regular customers if I were you. Bad for business.”

She topped off the cocktail with a dash of cola, then moved down to the taps and drew his beer. She set the mug in front of him. “What’s it going to be? No, wait. Let me guess. Meat loaf and mashed or the bacon cheeseburger with onion rings?”

“Janie.” He gave her a lazy grin. “I’m touched. You know me so well.”

“I know you never order a steak when you’re here,” she said drily.

“Considering my family’s Double-C beefsteaks are the best around, why would I pay someone else for one?” He suddenly stretched across the bar toward her, but only to stick the menu back on the little pile beneath the bar.

She was glad she’d managed to control the urge to take a step back. “So which is it? Meat loaf or burger?”

“Spaghetti and meatballs.”

She shrugged. “You’re just saying that to be contrary, but it makes no difference to me. You’re the one who’ll regret it.” She turned to the register and punched in the order, then started loading glasses into a dishwasher tray.

“Where’s the fishbowl?”

Something in his tone made her neck prickle. She glanced at him. He wasn’t smiling, but there was a definite smirk of amusement lurking in his gray eyes.

“I put it away.”

“No takers in the win-a-date-with-Janie contest?”

“Actually, I had more entries than I knew what to do with. But I didn’t need them after I met Keith. You must know him from Cee-Vid. Keith Lambert?” She folded her arms on the bar top and leaned toward him conspiratorially. “He’s the perfect candidate. Intelligent. And that bow tie.” She smiled slowly. “Once that comes off, he’s very...energetic.”

Casey’s eyes narrowed. “I know you better than that, sport. Max isn’t going to find Keith’s body cut into pieces and left on the side of the road somewhere, is he? I’d hate to have to bail you out of jail.”

Max was Max Scalise, the sheriff and Casey’s cousin by marriage. There were times when Jane speculated that one out of every three people in Weaver was somehow related to the wealthy Clay family. “Why would I want to get rid of Keith?” Just because he was duller than dishwater? “He could turn out to be the—”

“Next Mr. Janie?”

“—man of my dreams.”

Casey’s lips twitched as he twisted his beer mug against the wooden surface of the bar. “In his dreams, maybe. A little young for you, isn’t he?”

Jane looked up from his hand. Why was it that his hands were callused, suntanned and very masculine, when Keith’s had been white as snow and softer than hers? The two men did the same sort of work, for Pete’s sake.

Olive, one of the servers from the grill, arrived with his order of spaghetti and meatballs. She was nineteen and made quite a production over setting the plate in front of him, along with a napkin-wrapped set of flatware and a heaping helping of nubile come-hither smiles on the side.

“Thank ya, darlin’,” Casey drawled.

Olive looked ready to swoon as she went through the archway back to the restaurant.

Jane pulled off her apron and set Casey’s bill beside his plate. “A little young for you, isn’t she?”

He laughed soundlessly. “Say the word, sport, and we can go right back to the way things were.”

Fortunately, where he was concerned, she’d had lots of practice overlooking the way he made her stomach lurch, so she was reasonably confident she didn’t display the same besotted expression as Olive.

“Oh, yeah?” She angled her head and batted her lashes comically. “You gonna put a ring on it and donate some genetic material?” She patted his cheek dismissively and walked away before she had to witness his response.

“Merilee,” she called as she headed toward the exit, “make sure Casey Clay doesn’t skip out on his bill. Don’t want anyone around here thinking they can get things for free.”

Casey watched Jane sail through the door, then glanced at Merilee, who was giving him a wry look.

“Think she had another bad date,” Merilee shared, moving down to his end of the bar.

Casey would bet on it. But he could play ignorant when he wanted. He twirled his fork in the spaghetti noodles. “What makes you say that?”

Merilee grinned. She was a little younger than Jane and lived over in Braden. Casey’d heard somewhere that she was engaged to a fireman. “If you had a good dinner date, would you be hanging around your workplace an hour after appetizers?” She poured herself a cup of coffee and shook her head. “Not me, my friend. How’s that pasta?”

“Not as good as the meat loaf would have been.”

Merilee grinned. “Not one of Jerry’s best dishes, that’s for sure. Jane’s been trying to get him to use her recipe, but he says the kitchen’s his domain and unless she wants him to quit, to leave him to it.”

Casey figured the only reason Jane allowed Jerry any leeway at all was because she couldn’t easily replace him. When it came to her business, like her personal life, she wanted to control every damn little detail.

He didn’t begrudge her that particular right—he called plenty of his own shots, too—but it definitely made dealing with her a challenge. “You said another bad date.” He gave up on the watery spaghetti and bullet-hard meatballs and picked up the beer. It was just the way he liked. A little dark. A little toasty. And not too heavy on the hops. “She having a lot of ’em?”

Merilee obviously saw nothing odd in the question. There was a reason why gossip was Weaver’s number-one sport. Everyone talked about everyone. “I know she’s had a date every Thursday night for the past month with a different guy each time. Far as I can tell, none of them led to a second date. The rest of the time, she’s here working.”

He did have to give Jane props for being a hard worker. She might bust his chops about getting called into Cee-Vid at all hours, but she wasn’t much better.

It was a good thing they’d never tried moving their relationship out of the bedroom. Even if she’d never been struck with baby fever, it still would have been a recipe for disaster.

Knowing it didn’t make the thought particularly welcome, though.

“You can take that away,” Casey told Merilee, nudging the still-full plate toward her.

“Want me to get you something else?”

He shook his head as he slid off the bar stool. He drained the last mouthful of beer and pulled some cash from his wallet that he dropped on the check. “Catch ya later, Merilee.”

She scooped up the money with a smile and turned to the register. He left the bar and headed toward his truck, parked in the lot that was situated between Colbys and the dance studio.

Even at that hour of the evening, there was still activity over there. Business was obviously going well for his cousin.

He drove out of the lot but was too restless to head home. He briefly considered dropping by his parents’ place. Maggie and Daniel Clay still lived in the house where Casey had been born and raised. But he decided against it. He enjoyed his folks’ company, but he wasn’t in the mood for a dose of happy hearth and home. For the same reason, he didn’t drop by J.D.’s place. His sister and her husband, Jake, were always welcoming, too. Jake’s twin boys—preteen hellions that they were—would be chasing around while two-year-old Tucker did his level best to keep up with his big brothers.

He rubbed his fingers absently over the gnawing in his chest and drove without stopping right past his own house—a hundred-and-twenty-year-old farmhouse that he’d moved from the country into town and restored with his dad’s help—all the way to Shop-World, which was on the other side of Weaver.

His excuse was he needed to pick up some groceries for his empty refrigerator. That Janie lived out by the big-box store was just a coincidence.

Her bright and shiny silver pickup was parked in front of her condo when he trolled past. She’d turned on her porch light. He looked up at the still-dark window on the second floor directly above the door. Her bedroom. He doubted she’d gone to bed. She was probably puttering around in her kitchen or the walled-in yard she had out back, where he’d always parked before when he’d come calling. It was rare for her to just sit and chill. She always seemed to need to be doing something.

He circled the block, giving up the pretense altogether that he cared about groceries when he passed Shop-World for the second time without a glance, and slowly drove past her condo again. The light had gone on in her bedroom window, and she was standing in front of the window looking out.

Dammit.

No way she’d fail to see his dusty black pickup truck creeping, two miles an hour, down her street when there was a big ol’ streetlamp overhead. Speeding up would make him look even more stupid. Stopping altogether wasn’t an option.

She wanted things he couldn’t give her, he reminded himself.

Then she lifted her arms and closed the white plantation shutters, cutting herself off from view.

Another needless reminder. She wanted things, but not from him.

His jaw tight, he turned around and drove home.

Chapter Four

“Arlo Bellamy.”

Jane turned her attention from the strawberry daiquiris she was mixing for a trio of young women she’d just carded to Hayley, who was sitting at the end of the bar. “What?”

Hayley tucked her hair behind her ear. She was nodding. “Arlo Bellamy. I don’t know why I didn’t think of him before. He’s my neighbor. You should go out with him.”

Despite herself, Jane’s gaze flicked toward the pool tables.

It was Saturday night and the Clay contingent was out in force. Casey was there, wielding his personal pool cue with his typical expertise. He had at least a dozen relatives with him. With a group that large, she would have assumed they were celebrating something special. But experience had already shown her that when it came to the Clay family, they didn’t seem to need any special reason to socialize en masse.

“He’s thirty-eight,” Hayley was saying. “He’s the estate lawyer who has that office down on Second Street.”

Jane focused with an effort on her friend’s voice rather than Casey. “The one who has that bronze horse statue out in front?”

Hayley nodded. “I think you’d have a lot in common.”

“Never met him.” She couldn’t recall the lawyer ever stepping foot in Colbys.

“So? He’s nice.”

“How do you know? Just because he’s a lawyer?” She flipped on the blender and assembled three glasses in front of her. “Guy could be a stalker.” She thought of Casey driving past her house the other evening.

She’d been dangerously close to beckoning him to come inside.

And where would that have gotten her?

Certainly no closer to marriage and a baby.

“I doubt he’s a stalker,” Hayley said drily. “He’d have chosen to live somewhere other than Weaver where he’d have a larger pool of pickings.”

Jane killed the blender and poured out the sweet drinks. Personally, she found the daiquiri concoctions sickening, but they never failed to appeal to a good portion of her patrons. She swirled whipped cream on top of the pink drinks and set them on a tray for her server to pick up, then started on the next order. She’d been tending bar for so many years that the motions were routine. Comfortable. “If he’s so nice, why haven’t you dated him?”

Hayley gave her a look. “Girlfriend, you are the one who says she’s on the hunt for a husband. Not me.”

“Nor me,” Sam Dawson said as she stepped up to the bar and slid onto the stool that Hayley had been saving for her. “Sorry I’m late.”

Unconcerned, Hayley waved her hand toward Jane. “You’ve met Arlo,” she said to Sam. “Tell her he’s a nice guy.”

“He’s a nice guy,” Sam said obediently. Her dark blond hair was pulled into the usual knot at the back of her head. “No arrests since I’ve been here.”

Hayley grinned. “See, Jane? No arrests.”

Jane set a bottle of light beer in front of Sam and flipped off the bottle cap in the same motion before turning back to her order. “High praise, all right.” She wondered if Casey had ever been arrested.

Probably not. From all appearances, as a general rule the Clays seemed to be a highly upstanding lot.

“Arlo might not want to go out with me, then.” She pulled the bottle of Grey Goose down from the shelf behind her and poured it liberally over ice. “I have been.” She followed the vodka with a splash of freshly squeezed grapefruit juice and set the drink on another tray. For whatever reason, cocktails seemed to be the order of the evening among the crowd. Usually beer and margaritas were the heavy favorites but that night she was serving up everything from Manhattans to Slippery Nipples.

“No way.” Both Hayley and Sam looked agog.

She paused in front of them, long enough to pull another steaming rack of glasses out of the dishwasher. “That’s how I met Gage in college. A couple dozen of us were protesting the unfair firing of a professor and we all got picked up.” She set the rack on the rubberized mat next to the small sink and moved down to the taps. “Eventually, the charges were dismissed.”

A burst of laughter came from the crowd of Clays surrounding the pool tables, drawing more eyes than just Jane’s. Which was fortunate for her, because she had no witnesses to the way she managed to spill Guinness over her hand while she watched Casey’s fine, fine behind as he leaned over for his shot. She shut off the tap and swiped her hand over her apron, then loaded up another tray. She had three cocktail waitresses on hand that night, and they were stretched to the max. Pulling someone over from the restaurant wasn’t an option. Every table there was full, too, with a line of people stretching out the door, waiting.

A fine October night in Weaver. The weather was good, no snow yet, and people were out for a good time.

Rather than let the orders keep stacking up, she stepped out from behind the bar and delivered several herself and collected quite a few empties on her way back. Some young guy was trying to chat up Hayley and Sam, and her friends looked amused and happily occupied.

Everything was exactly as she’d planned when Gage had given her the money five years ago to buy Colbys, and she couldn’t help smiling to herself as she went behind the glossy wood bar again and pulled up the next order.

One root beer. One designer microbrew that she ordered from Montana. The microbrew that she’d begun carrying only because it was Casey’s favorite.

The combination was what Casey and his cousin Erik usually ordered and she figured now was no exception. She glanced over at the pool tables. Only this time, instead of seeing Casey’s rear end, she saw him leaning against the wall, staring boldly back at her.

Heat shot through her, and she tore her gaze away from his. She pulled out an icy bottle of root beer along with a frosted mug, filled another with Casey’s beer and stuck them on a tray before going back over to her girlfriends.

She had a plan and she was sticking to it.

“Give your neighbor my number,” she told Hayley. She had to raise her voice, because the jukebox was blaring, billiard balls were clacking, and the crowd gave off a general blur of chatter and laughter.

Hayley’s eyebrows lifted. She glanced from Jane’s face across the room toward the pool tables. Then she nodded.

Satisfied, Jane washed her sticky hands and reached for the next order.

She didn’t allow herself any more glances toward the pool tables and the very unreachable Casey Clay.

* * *

Even though Casey saw Jane play server several times, she didn’t play server to his party. And when he was called into work just before ten o’clock, he was glad for the excuse to escape. Glad, at least, until he got to his office and spent the next twelve hours studying satellite feeds and reports regarding three agents who’d gone missing in Central America.

By the next night, the situation had escalated even more, and the next thing he knew, he found himself sitting beside Tristan on a plane to Hollins-Winword’s headquarters in Connecticut.

Four days later, he was watching two caskets being carried off a plane while rain poured down on their heads.

“This isn’t your fault.” Tristan stood next to him on the tarmac, looking as grim as Casey had ever seen.

“Feels like it,” Casey returned flatly. “I was the last one in communication with them.”

“And their status was still clear,” Tristan pointed out.

“Was still my watch,” he said. It didn’t matter that there’d been others on shift, as well. Casey was their commander. He was supposed to be the one who could find a gnat on a wall eight thousand miles away.

“At least we had something to recover. There was a time we wouldn’t have even been able to retrieve their bodies.” Tristan’s boss, Coleman Black, stood on the other side of Casey. Coleman was a hard-looking older man with gray hair and a face lined from sun and responsibility. The only time Casey had ever seen him really smile had been on the rare occasions he was around Casey’s sister Angeline and her husband, Brody Paine. Casey’s brother-in-law was Cole’s son—a rarely acknowledged fact because of the inherent dangers that went along with that—and his visits were extremely rare; Casey could count them on one hand.

But in his role with Hollins-Winword, Casey had had many more encounters with the agency’s head.

“Back when your uncle here was a young buck,” Cole was saying, “we wouldn’t have been able to do a lot of the things we can now.” He shook his head as they watched the caskets being loaded into a waiting black hearse.

“Jefferson’d be the first to confirm that,” Tristan murmured.

Tristan’s older brother Jefferson had been an HW field agent back in the day. During an especially tricky assignment, he’d landed in a third-world prison; ultimately, he’d escaped, but his partner hadn’t. Even though Jefferson had returned to Weaver to become a horse breeder, had gotten married, had two grown kids and an ever-growing herd of grandchildren, the experience all those years ago still colored his life. When his son, Axel, had followed in his footsteps with the agency, he had not been particularly thrilled.