Just Give In...

Because, duh, it was her own heart.

She told herself it didn’t matter if she didn’t land this job with this homespun couple. It didn’t matter if her brothers didn’t welcome her with open arms. It didn’t matter if the lawyer had made a mistake.

She told herself that none of it mattered.

All her life Brooke had told herself that none of it mattered, but it always did.

Her hands grasped the counter, locking on the small tin can. “What do you say?”

Gladys patted her cheek for a second time. Soft, warm…sorrowful.

“I’m sorry, honey. We just can’t.”

As rejections went, it was very pleasant, but Brooke’s heart still crawled somewhere below the floor. They had been so friendly, the store was so cute with its handpainted Hinkle’s Grocery sign over the door. She’d been so sure. Realizing that there was nothing left for her in this place, Brooke walked out the door, opportunity slamming her in the butt.

Her first day in Tin Cup. No job, no lawyer, an uneasy brother who didn’t know she was here, and—she glanced down at the can of peas still stuck in her hand—she’d just shoplifted a can of peas. Brooke fished in her jeans pocket for some cash, brought out two crumbled dollars, an old Metro Card and a lint-covered peppermint—slightly used.

Two dollars. It was her last two dollars, until she found a job, of course. All she had to do was go back inside, slap the money on the counter and leave as if she didn’t care. As if they hadn’t shouted down her best “Pick me!” plea.

Brooke turned away from the store with its cute homespun sign and restashed her money. Better to be branded a thief than a reject. It wasn’t the most honorable decision, but Brooke had more pride than many would expect from a homeless woman that lived out of her car.

Once she was gainfully employed, she’d pay back Gladys and Henry. They’d understand.

And was that really, truly how she wanted to kick off her new life in her new home? As some light-fingered Lulu, which apparently all the Harts were supposed to be, anyway?

After taking another peek through the window, she sighed. No, she wasn’t going to be a light-fingered Lulu, no matter how tempting it might be. And especially not for a can of peas.

In the distance a freckle-faced little girl on a skateboard careened down the sidewalk. Eagerly, Brooke waved her down, hoping to recruit an unwitting accomplice so that Brooke Hart wouldn’t be another unflattering mug shot on the Post Office wall.

“Hello,” she said, when the little girl skidded to a stop and then Brooke held out her hand. “Can you give this to Gladys? Tell her it’s for the peas.”

The girl examined the proffered money, then Brooke, innocent eyes alight with purpose. “You going to tip me for the delivery?”

Yes, the entrepreneurial spirit was strong in this one. Who knew that honesty was such a huge pain in the butt? And expensive, too. After jamming her hand in her pocket, Brooke pulled out her last seventeen cents. Reluctantly, she handed it to the kid, who stood there, apparently expecting more.

“Please?” asked Brooke, still wearing her non-stranger-danger smile. At last, the little girl sighed.

“Whatever,” she said and kicked a foot at the end of the skateboard, flipping it up into her hand.

“That’s pretty cool,” Brooke told her, and the girl rolled her eyes, but her mouth curled up a bit and Brooke knew that she’d made her first friend in Tin Cup. Sure, she’d had to pay for the privilege, but still, a friend was a friend, no matter how pricey, no matter how small.

“Whatever,” the girl repeated, then pulled open the screen door.

Now that Brooke’s fledging reputation was somewhat restored, or about to be, her job here was done. She dashed across the street, leaping into her eyesore of a car before anyone could see. She had big plans before she showed up on Austen’s doorstep, and it wasn’t going to be without a job, without any money and in a car that should be condemned.

Once safely behind the wheel, she tossed the can of peas onto the backseat, the afternoon sun winking happily on the metal. It fit right in with the hodge-podge of things. A portable cooler, one beat-up gym bag, her collection of real estate magazines, the plastic water jug and now peas.

Peas.

What the heck was she supposed to do with peas?

2

THE LED WAS blinking a steady green over his front porch, the motion detector nearly hidden beneath the old wood doorframe. From inside, he could hear the sound of a dog barking.

All clear.

Not that anyone was going to break into his less than fancy house, but old habits were hard to break. There was no dog, only a pimped out robotic vacuum cleaner with two golden LEDs for eyes and a mechanical tail that wagged. Not the cutest puppy, but Jason Kincaid had invented the only canine in the world that cleaned up after itself.

While Dog wheeled around the floor, Jason put down his keys, pulled on his faded Orioles cap and went outside to work. The missing can of peas didn’t concern him. Jason hated peas, but every Monday he went to the Hinkle’s store to shop. He hated shopping, too, but his father had told him he needed to get out more, so every Tuesday when his dad called, he could tell the old man—with complete honesty—that he’d been out shopping only yesterday.

Outside the house, the flat terrain was exactly the same. The front yard, the backyard, the four storage sheds and even the detached one car garage were filled with lawn mowers, vacuum cleaners, small engines, large engines, lumber and scrap metal.

He’d never invited his family to visit because the house looked too much like a junkyard, like the long neglected habitat of a man who needed to live alone.

Which it was.

Jason pulled down the socket wrench from the upright mattress springs that had been recycled into his Wall O’ Tools and got to work.

The current project was a five horsepower lawnmower in desperate need of a new carburetor or a humane burial, but Jason wasn’t ready to give it up for dead. Not yet.

He’d just gotten air to blow clean through the tube when the red LED on the porch began to glow. Motion detectors had been strategically placed across the ten acres of his land, wired to let him know whenever anyone decided to intrude—like now. Jason glanced toward the road and noticed the cloud of dust.

A HAV, or, in layman’s terms, a car still unidentified.

Salesmen didn’t come out this far. He’d never met the neighbors, which were four acres away on either side, so when people showed up at his gate, they were usually lost.

After pulling his cap down a little lower, Jason made his way to the front gate, an eight foot, black, metal monster that he’d rescued from an old sanitarium. It looked exactly like it belonged at the front entrance of a sanitarium, which was why Jason had wanted it, and why the sanitarium didn’t.

From behind the iron bars, he watched the beaten-up Impala approach. The rear door was black, the driver’s side door was red, and the hood was sunshine-yellow. If Henry Ford and Picasso had gone out on a bender, that car was what the hangover would have looked like.

Jason stayed steady and impassive, not angry or unfriendly, but stood and watched as a woman exited the world’s worst excuse for a car.

Her.

She still had the same never-say-die smile, which, considering the state of her transport, was just flat-out stupid. Once she was at the gate, a mere two feet from him, she held up the can of peas.

“You left these.” Her voice was nice, not high and birdlike, but no cigarette smoke, either. Sonya had a low, husky voice. At one point, Jason had thought it was sexy.

“You didn’t have to bring them all the way out here.” He probably should thank her for it, but he was distracted by the beads of sweat on her neck, and the green sweater had to be hot. Judging from the way it was clinging to her curves, the Hell-Car didn’t have air-conditioning. He didn’t like that she was sweating for him. He didn’t like the way his one good eye kept locking on her chest, like some reconnaissance tracking system doped up on Viagra.

“I don’t mind,” she told him, then put the can to the bars, as if she expected the can to slip through. Nope. Jason could have told her that metal didn’t work that way. It took five hundred pounds of force to dislodge metal, or eight hundred degrees of heat. Sometimes both.

However, Jason stayed silent because he had learned that people never liked to work too hard at a conversation. Eventually, they always gave up.

“Are you going to open the gate, or should I toss this sucker over the top?”

His instinctive response was to instruct her to go ahead and throw, but two things kept him from going with the default. The knowledge that he would have crossed the crazy-lonely-man line in his head, and the beat-up sedan. Frankly, that car out-crazied his crazy-line anyway, so while she might not notice, he would.