Lawless

“Why?” Crissy asked curiously.

“Don’t be rude,” Maude chided. “He’s barely got in the house. Give him some coffee and pie. Then grill him!” she added with a chuckle.

Grier had two slices of pie, actually, and two cups of coffee. “You’re a good cook,” he told Crissy while he sipped at his second cup.

“I learned early,” she replied, twirling her cup around under her hands. “My mother was an invalid until her death. I learned to cook when I was ten.”

He sensed a history there, and he wondered about her relationship with Judd Dunn. He’d heard rumors of all sorts about the odd couple who shared the D bar G Ranch.

She looked up, noting the curious look in his dark eyes. “You’re curious about us, aren’t you?” she asked. “Judd’s uncle and my father were partners in this ranch for ten years. Circumstances,” she said, boiling down the tragedy of her life into one word, “left us with a half interest each. I’m good with computers and math, so I do most of the bookkeeping. Judd is good with livestock, so he takes care of buying and selling and logistics.”

“What happens if one of you gets married?”

“Oh, but we already...” She stopped dead. Her eyes held apprehension and self-condemnation in equal parts.

He glanced at her left hand with the man’s signet ring cut down to fit her finger. His eyes lifted back to hers. There was keen intelligence in them. “I never tell what I know,” he told her. “Governments would topple.” He grinned.

She smiled back at him. “You don’t know anything,” she informed him deliberately.

His gaze was speculative. “Is it real, or just on paper?”

“I was sixteen at the time,” she replied. “It’s just on paper. He...doesn’t feel like that.”

His eyebrows lifted. “But, you do?”

She averted her gaze. “What I feel doesn’t matter. He saved more than the ranch. He saved me. And that’s all I’m going to tell you,” she added when he stared at her. “In November I turn twenty-one and I’m a free woman.”

He pursed his lips and studied her face. “I’m thirty-eight. Years too old for you...” His voice trailed off, like a question.

It had never occurred to her that a man would find her attractive. Judd treated her like a sore foot. Maude ordered her around. Boys at school were interested in the pretty, feminine girls who flirted. Crissy was friendly but she didn’t flirt or dress suggestively. In fact, she was much more at home around horses and cattle and the cowboys she’d known most of her life. She was shy with most men.

She flushed. “I...I...don’t interest men,” she blurted out.

He put his coffee cup down slowly. “Excuse me?”

“Do you want some more coffee?” she asked, flustered.

He was fascinated. The women who filed through his life had been sophisticated, as worldly as he was, chic and urbane and sensuous. They thought nothing of coming on to him with all sorts of physical and verbal sensuality. This woman was untouched, uncorrupted. She had a freshness, a vibrancy, that made him wish he was young again, that he’d never had the experiences that had turned him bitter and cold inside. She was like a jonquil blooming in the snow, a stubborn flash of optimism in a cynical cold landscape.

He frowned, studying her.

The flush grew worse. “You’re intimidating when you scowl. Just like Judd,” she said uneasily.

“Blame it on a jaded past,” he said, biting off the words. He pushed his chair back, still frowning. “Tell Judd I’ve put a note on our bulletin board about the site security job. So far we’ve got over a hundred applications. We only have twenty cops,” he added on a sigh. “My own secretary signed up.”

“Your secretary?”

He nodded, pushing the chair back under the table slowly. “She says if they hire her to do security, they’ll have to give her a badge and a gun, and she can arrest me anytime she feels like it if I make her work late.”

She laughed in spite of herself. He’d gone far away for a minute there, and she’d felt uncomfortable.

“Are you a bad boss?”

“I’m temperamental.”

It showed, but she wasn’t going to say so.

“Thanks for the coffee and pie,” he said quietly.

“You’re very welcome.”

He turned and went down the hall. His back, she noted, was arrow-straight. He walked with a peculiar gait, a softness of step that was vaguely disquieting. He walked like a man who hunted.

He got to the front steps and turned so suddenly that she went off balance and had to catch one of the porch posts to save herself.

“Do you like pizza?” he asked abruptly.

She was still reeling from his sudden stop. “Uh, yes.”

“Friday night,” he persisted, dark eyes narrowed. “There’s a band. Do you dance?”

“I do,” she said.

“What will Judd do, if you go out with another man?”

She was uneasy. “I...well, I don’t really know. I don’t think he’d mind,” she added. “It isn’t that sort of relationship.”

“He may mind having you go out with me,” he said flatly. “He knows more about me than most people do around here.”

She was shocked and intrigued. “Are you a bad man?”

Something terrible flashed in his dark eyes. “I have been,” he said. “Not anymore.”

Her face softened as she looked at him. She wondered if he realized how much his eyes gave away. There were nightmares in them.

She let go of the post and moved a step closer to him. “We all have scars,” she said, understanding what Judd had been saying to her that day in the kitchen. “Some show, some don’t, but we all have them.”

His eyes narrowed. “Mine are deep.”

She began to smile. “Mine, too. But all of a sudden, I don’t mind them so much. They seem less conspicuous.”

His broad chest rose and fell. He felt light. “Funny. So do mine.” He smiled.

“The only place that serves pizza and beer and has a dance band is Shea’s Roadhouse and Bar, out on the Victoria road,” she told him. “Judd never goes there. I’m afraid he won’t like me going there.”

“I’ll take care of you,” he told her.

She sighed. “People have been taking care of me all my life, and I’ll be a grown woman in less than two months.” She studied his face. “I have to learn how to take care of myself.”