Forever After

  “It never occurred to me that you might.”

  “You’re as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a roomful of rockers. Admit it.”

  She pushed to her feet, regretting it almost as soon as she parted company with the chair. Her head began to spin, forcing her to grab the tabletop to catch her balance.

  “Meredith, for God’s sake, sit back down.”

  She had little choice. The cheap plastic cushion squeaked under her weight, air rushing out through a rent in one seam. Silence. She searched for something to say.

  “You’re, um…right about this weather. It’s been really warm, hasn’t it?”

  He gave a low chuckle. “Yeah, it sure has.”

  She knew he was laughing at her lame attempt to make conversation. Disgusted with herself for letting him rattle her, she forced herself to meet his gaze. “Your turn.”

  “Let’s talk about you.”

  “Me?” That was the last topic she wanted to discuss.

  His eyes searched hers. “Where are you from?”

  “I’ve lived in lots of places.”

  “That cute drawl says you’re from somewhere south of the Mason-Dixon Line.”

  After living in the North for so many years, Meredith had hoped her drawl was barely noticeable. “Arkansas,” she blurted.

  “Ah, Arkansas.” He seemed to consider that. “Little Rock?”

  The hair on her nape prickled. He had at his disposal the means to check on anything she told him. “No. I, um…” She flipped through the pages of her memory for the name of another town in that state. “Actually, we moved a lot, like I said.”

  “We?”

  “My folks and I. Tallahassee, Monroe, Porterville.” Hopefully, if she named enough towns, he wouldn’t be able to remember any specific one. She glanced at his hatless dark head. “Stetson.” She nearly threw in “Levis” for good measure, but decided that would be pushing her luck. The hamburger patties in the skillet had begun to sizzle, the faint aroma drifting across the kitchen. She named a few more towns. “We lived all over the state.”

  “I thought Tallahassee was in Florida.”

  Panic. Why did he have to start riddling her with questions when she couldn’t think very clearly? “There’s a town of that name in Arkansas, too.”

  He got up to check on the meat and potatoes. After fitting the lids back on the pots, he laid the spatula on the counter. “Was your dad into chickens?”

  “Chickens?”

  His mouth drew up at one corner. “That is what Arkansas’s famous for.”

  “Oh.” She gave a weak laugh. “Chickens. Of course. Actually, no. He, um, sells cars. Used cars. That’s why we moved so much, because he went from job to job.” A picture of her big, lumbering father in faded overalls flashed through her head.

  “I thought you said he was a farmer?”

  Meredith couldn’t remember saying that. “You must have misunderstood. No, used cars are my dad’s specialty.”

  He nodded. “A slick talker, polyester slacks, a fancy gold watch?”

  “My dad wouldn’t be caught dead in polyester.” That much wasn’t a lie, at least. Meredith drummed the fingertips of her uninjured hand on her knee. She avoided Heath’s gaze, unable to shake the feeling he was peeling away her layers, one by one. “But he’s definitely got the gold watch.” An heirloom pocket watch, passed down to him from his father. “He’s very good at what he does.” There, again, she’d told the truth.

  “And you’re driving a tin can held together by hope and a prayer?”

  “Yes, well…it’s been a while since I went home.”

  He resumed his seat across from her, once again propping a booted foot on his knee. “What brought you clear out here? You’re a long way from Arkansas.”

  “I needed a change.”

  “From what?”

  She dug her nails into the denim of her jeans. “Sheriff, I feel as if you’re grilling me.”

  “I’m just trying to make conversation.” The lazy smile he flashed belied the interested gleam in his eyes. “I’d just like to know a little more about you, that’s all.”

  Meredith decided it was high time she turned the tables. She’d never met a man yet who didn’t like to talk about himself, and as muddled as she felt, the less she said, the better. “I lead a pretty boring existence. Let’s talk about you.”

  “Me?”

  “I’ve read about your work with teenagers in the newspaper.” She tried to remember what she’d read. “You’ve reduced the alcohol-related highway fatalities by a very large percentage. Haven’t you?”

  “Only thirty-seven.”

  “Thirty-seven percent, and you call that ‘only’?”

  “When you’re the guy who has to tell a mother that your deputies are still picking up pieces of her child at milepost 348, that doesn’t seem like much.”

  “I still think it’s impressive. I read you were asked to do an interview on national television and turned it down.”

  He shrugged.

  “So it’s true. I’d think you’d want other counties to hear about your programs.”

  “Spreading the word isn’t what the media is after.”

  “What are they after?”

  “My ass.”

  She circled that. “Your what?”

  He chuckled. “I don’t play by the rules, and a lot of people don’t like it. As for the drum rolls, making a name for myself was never my goal.”

  He glanced at his watch and pushed to his feet to check on the food again. Stymied, Meredith stared at his broad back. Just like that, he’d ended the subject. Wasn’t it her luck? The one time she needed to keep a man talking, and he had to be the first she’d ever met who didn’t have, Me, myself, and I, branded on his forehead. Not only that, but now he had her curiosity piqued. What made this man tick? His job was on the line, yet he still refused to go by the book and didn’t seem to care about all the controversy surrounding him. He was either the most stubborn individual she’d ever met or the most passionate for a cause. She had a feeling he was a combination of both, the latter his driving force.

  After turning the patties, he said, “Meredith, I have a favor to ask.”

  She marshaled her straying thoughts. “What’s that?”

  “If I kept Goliath tied, would you mind if I brought him over here while I work? Until the kennel is built, keeping him confined in the house all day and into the evening will be awfully hard on him.”

  Remembering how the dog had snarled at her last night, her first impulse was to say no. But in good conscience, how could she? Heath was going to be working on her house. The least she could do was let him bring his dog.

  “If you promise never to let him get loose,” she conceded. “But you’ll have to tie him out front. I don’t want him in Sammy’s play area.”

  “No problem. He’s really a great dog, you know. Once you get to know him better, you won’t be afraid of him.”

  Meredith doubted that, and she had no intention of getting better acquainted.

  With his back still toward her, he said, “Another thing. If I’m going to be cooking for you this week, it will be easier for me to just eat over here. Otherwise, I’ll still have to fix dinner when I go home. Is that all right with you?”

  She felt as if she had stepped off into deep water. She couldn’t very well let him fix their meals, then refuse to welcome him at their table. The southern hospitality that had been ingrained in her since birth wouldn’t allow her to be that rude.

  She settled for saying, “You’re more than welcome to share supper with us, Sheriff Masters. But before we make any definite plans, let’s wait to see how things work out. I really do think I’ll be able to manage on my own.”

  He flashed her a grin over his shoulder. “I want to help. I shouldn’t have poked my head in your window like that.”

  “It really wasn’t your fault. Hollering through the window was a perfectly natural thing to do. You just caught me off guard and startled me.
”

  He didn’t argue the point. “On the way to work in the morning, I’ll drop off some food from my place. I have a big appetite, and I don’t want to clean you out.”

  “I have plenty of food, and if—”

  “I can see that you have plenty,” he cut in. “But that doesn’t mean you took me on to raise. I won’t feel right about eating here unless I pitch in.”

  Meredith had a feeling that he was going to be a permanent fixture around here for at least the next week, no matter what she said. She could continue to protest, ad nauseam, or give in gracefully.

  Wasn’t that a fine kettle of fish? He was a law officer, and from the things he had just told her, she could only conclude he was more dedicated than most. If she forgot that, even for a second, she’d be sorry.

  And her little girl would be the one who suffered for it.

  Chapter 7

  Heath swung the hammer with enough force to drive the nail clear through the board. The entire porch frame vibrated at the impact. Wiping sweat from his brow with a shirt sleeve, he straightened to take stock of his progress and rest his back for a moment. Half of the new planks on Meredith’s front porch were finally in place, and he’d soon have them nailed to the joists. Given the fact that he’d been working on the damned thing for nearly four hours, he hadn’t accomplished very much, but at least now no one would step out the front door and do a four-foot free fall.

  Grimly, he stepped back to survey the overall picture. It wasn’t good. To get the porch in tiptop shape, he’d had to scrap practically the whole thing and start over from scratch. What was worse, now that he had the framework finished, the carefully plumbed angles looked oddly out of line with the house, which was as crooked as a bookie at a cockfight. That meant every repair project was going to take him twice to three times longer than planned.

  When he shared that news with Meredith, she wouldn’t be pleased. He had a feeling that the sooner she got him out of her hair, the happier she would be.

  He cut a glance at the drawn curtains over her living room windows. Since his arrival at three, she’d been hiding out in there. At least, that was how it seemed. How the hell was he supposed to make any headway with her if she dove for a foxhole every time she saw him coming?

  God, he was thirsty. Maybe he expected too much, but it seemed to him the least she could do was offer him a drink of water. Fat chance. Unless of course, she decided to lace it with strychnine.

  With a grunt of disgust, he tossed the hammer on the porch, tugged off his leather gloves, then circled the house to get a drink from the outside faucet. Goliath, tethered in the shade of a billowy oak, whined pathetically for attention.

  Poor dog. Heath had kept him confined all day, and now he’d be tied up all evening.

  “Sorry, buddy,” Heath said softly as he detoured to give the dog a scratch behind the ears. “Keeping you tied is part of the deal. Otherwise, you’d have to stay home.”

  Goliath whined again, his soulful brown eyes pleading for a reprieve. As Heath straightened, he glimpsed a flash of red in the overgrown tangle of shrubbery along the pasture fence. His gaze became riveted to the spot. Sammy.

  Seeing her outdoors came as no big surprise. Several times this afternoon, he’d caught her spying on him from the living room windows. It had made him feel like a freak in a sideshow.

  Judging by her scramble for cover, he’d nearly caught her in the act of visiting with Goliath, a turn of events that would undoubtedly send Meredith into cardiac arrest if she knew. He glanced at the panel of hog wire he’d jerked loose from the house yesterday, a slight smile tugging at his mouth. So, Sammy had sneaked out of her backyard prison, had she?

  “Hi, there!” Heath called. “How are you today?”

  The patch of red in the bushes went absolutely still. Heath saw one blue eye peering out at him from behind a fan of leaves. An electrical tension filled the air, the taste of it almost metallic at the back of his tongue.

  After their ordeal at the hospital, Heath hadn’t expected Sammy to still be afraid of him. Some really bad shit must have happened to the kid, that was all he could say. Meredith could deny it until hell froze over, but a little girl didn’t act this way without some kind of reason.

  The thought grabbed him by the throat, an awful, strangling sensation. If he scared her so much, why had she come out here? To be near Goliath, he guessed. Yeah, that was probably it. Even so, he couldn’t help but wish her reasons ran deeper than that. Fragile and fleeting though it had been, a friendship had been forged between them yesterday. Wasn’t it possible that Sammy remembered and felt drawn to him? That in her little-girl fashion, she was trying to reestablish the bond, but simply wasn’t brave enough to approach him?

  It took all Heath’s self-control not to wade into the shrubbery after her. What did he plan to do, drag her out by the scruff of her neck? No. He had to bide his time, let her call the shots. She’d make a move when she felt ready.

  He sauntered over to the side of the house where the faucet protruded. Trying not to think about the rusty residue he would undoubtedly be drinking, he opened the spigot and bent to catch water in his cupped hands. After drinking his fill, he crouched lower to stick his head under the stream. The iciness made his skull ache. Pushing erect, he gave himself a hard shake, shuddering as frigid rivulets ran down his spine and soaked his shirt.

  From her hiding place in the dense foliage, Sammy was gaping at him as if she’d never clapped eyes on a man before. He reached up to feel his hair. It was standing on end, the wet spikes going in all directions. He raked his fingers through it. No help. Giving up, he swiped the water from his eyes.

  “I’ll bet you’ve never seen such friendly hair,” he called.

  Her blank expression told him she’d never heard the joke. Damn. Learning how to communicate with a four-year-old was a whole new ball game for him. He rubbed his hand back and forth over his head to make his hair stand back up.

  “See? It waves at people.”

  No smile. Okay. So he’d better keep his day job.

  “You want a drink, honey? It’s nice and cold.”

  Through the web of branches, he watched her do a belly crawl deeper into the bushes. As answers went, he guessed that was clear enough.

  Finger-combing his hair, he cut back around the house to resume his work. After jerking his gloves back on, he grabbed a handful of nails and stuck them in his mouth, clenching the heads between his teeth. As he picked up his hammer, he glanced back at the spot of red in the bushes. She was watching him again.

  He wondered what she was thinking, then decided he probably didn’t want to know because it obviously wasn’t good.

  If only he could coax her out of the bushes, she might discover he wasn’t so bad. Right, Masters. Like mother, like daughter. Besides, even if, by some stroke of genius, he did coax Sammy closer, what then? He knew next to nothing about little girls. As best he could recall, all he’d cared about at her age was toy trucks and catching frogs.

  Sammy was undoubtedly interested in more dignified pursuits, like playing with dolls and reciting nursery rhymes, or learning to count and say her ABCs.

  Heath was about to start hammering again when sudden inspiration struck. Four years old or eighty, he’d never met a female who could resist correcting a man.

  He spat out the nails, laid them on the porch, and belted out the first few lines of the alphabet song, deliberately saying the letters in the wrong order. No response.

  Abandoning his erroneous version of the alphabet, he began singing, “Old McIntyre had a farm, eeyie, eeyie, oh-hh-h. And the cows went ‘quack.’ And the horses went ‘baaaa-ah.’”

  Sammy’s head emerged from the evergreen boughs.

  “Old McIntyre had a farm, eeyie, eeyie, oh-hh-h. And the cat went, ‘woof, woof, woof!’ And the lamb went”—he broke off to throw back his head and give his best impersonation of a collicky horse—“and the dog went, ‘meow, meow, meow.’”

  Pretending to be a
bsorbed with his work, Heath drifted from song into nursery rhyme, from nursery rhyme back into song, his selection limited because he couldn’t remember all that many childhood ditties or poems, at least not the kind Sammy was probably familiar with. There again, as a little boy, he’d been more interested in learning dirty words than sissy stuff like Mother Goose.

  He purposely made mistake after mistake, all the while watching her from the corner of his eye. If anyone drove by and heard him, they’d think he was a frigging lunatic. The cat that jumped over the moon? God, he was losing it, really losing it. Any minute now, the guys in white coats would pull up in their paddy wagon and advance on him with a straightjacket.

  Lunacy or not, the ploy was working. Sammy’s head and shoulders had emerged from the bushes, and there was no mistaking the scandalized expression on her small face, particularly when he made the dog sound like a cat. She was definitely a stickler for details, just like every other woman he’d ever known.

  He started all over again with the alphabet song. With each incorrect rendition, the child crept closer, at first venturing only a few feet from her hiding place, then clear out into the yard, then nearer and nearer to the porch. Each step she took was so hesitant, her body language conveying such trepidation that it nearly broke his heart. For the dozenth time, he wished he had the bastard who’d done this to her by the throat.

  Come on, sweetheart, take a chance, Heath thought. At one point, he became so focused on the child that he forgot and said the letters of the alphabet in the correct order. Sammy didn’t seem to catch the slip.

  Finally, she came to sit a safe distance away from him on a porch joist, one of her red canvas sneakers swinging rapidly back and forth, short white laces dangling.

  “C-D-F-A,” he bellowed before hauling in more air. “B-G—”

  “It’s A-B-C-D!” she called to him, her expression indignant.

  Heath pretended not to hear her. “E-M-O—”

  “You’re sayin’ ’em wrong!” she cried.

  Struggling not to smile, Heath feigned an exaggerated start. “Sammy! Where’d you come from? You scared me out of a year’s growth.”