On Dean's Watch

He nodded.

Reva glanced down at Cooper and his more tranquil friend. “Y’all run on home. Terrance, your mother is going to be worried about you. She made y’all an after-school snack half an hour ago.”

“We better go before she starts to get mad,” Terrance said, and then he and Cooper both ran for the restaurant, after a quick glance both ways on the quiet street.

“Terrance’s mother works for you?” Sinclair asked.

Reva nodded, turning her attention to him as soon as the children entered the house and slammed the door behind them. “Tewanda Hardy. I couldn’t run the place without her.” She took a deep breath. “Look, about dessert—”

“Don’t feel obligated,” Sinclair interrupted. “Kids seem to have a way of putting their folks between a rock and a hard place,” he added with a half smile.

It was her chance to walk away, to play it safe. To turn her back on the only man who had made her feel this way in years. Just as well. Nothing could come of her attraction to him. She didn’t need the complication of Dean Sinclair in her life. All she had to do was smile and walk across the street, and the danger, the awkwardness, would be over.

The chance came and went. “You’re welcome to come,” she said. “If you’d like.”

“Strawberry shortcake,” he said. “What red-blooded man could turn down an offer like that?”

“I really would like to talk to you about your plans,” Reva said. Why did the way this man said strawberry send a chill up her spine? “Goodness knows I could use a handyman around the house. If you do decide to locate your business here, I can throw a lot of work your way.”

“So, it’s actually a business meeting you’re suggesting.”

Sounded good to her. Safe. Distant. “Seven o’clock. You can bring your business partner along if you like.”

He shook his head. “He’s not very sociable.”

She turned on him and headed for home. In the middle of the street, she spun around to face him again. He hadn’t made a move toward his own home. He still watched her. “And Mr. Sinclair—”

“Dean,” he said quickly. “Call me Dean.”

“When you come to my house for dessert, Dean, please don’t wear a suit.”

Once again he was without his weapon. As Dean walked past the antebellum home that had been transformed into Miss Reva’s, he tried not to worry about the fact that he’d been disarmed. Reva had asked—no she’d ordered—that he not wear a suit tonight. And there was no way he could conceal his pistol while wearing jeans and a John Deere T-shirt that fit snugly across the chest. Even the ankle holster added a too-obvious bulge with every step. That, too, had been left behind.

Still, if Eddie arrived in the middle of strawberry shortcake, he’d be in a heap of trouble.

Somehow Dean didn’t believe that Eddie would arrive while he had dessert with Reva and Cooper Macklin and discussed his bogus business plans. Tonight’s dangers did not call for a weapon.

But there were dangers all the same.

Alan had laughingly told Dean, as he’d dressed for the evening, that he needed to get laid—but not here and not while he was on the job. That was a recipe for disaster. If Dean really and truly wanted to quit being a deputy marshal and become a handyman, sleeping with Reva Macklin would be a good way to start.

So she was pretty, and sexy in an old-fashioned way, and she smelled great. Just because he was attracted to her, that didn’t mean he had to make a move.

Like she would let him make a move. The only reason she’d repeated Cooper’s invitation for tonight was that she was in desperate need of a hired man for odd jobs around her old house.

As he knocked on the door of her cottage, he asked himself, How desperate?

Dean shook off the inappropriate thoughts as the door flew open. He steeled his resolve for nothing; it was Cooper who answered the door.

“Come in!” the kid said, throwing the door open wide.

Dean stepped inside. The cottage was of the same era as the main house, but was smaller. Cozier. The furnishings were more modern, though Reva had managed to retain some of the old Southern charm. Filmy, white curtains, an old, well-cared-for rug with a pattern of cabbage roses, fat furniture with afghans tossed across the backs, all of which made the place inviting, comfortable.

Reva swept into the room from a short hallway. “Hi,” she said, smiling. She’d changed clothes, too, and now wore faded blue jeans and a pink cotton shirt. Her hair was pulled up and back again, so that nothing, not a single curling strand, interfered with the perfect lines of her face.

“We’ll eat in the kitchen,” she said, motioning for Dean and Cooper to follow her.

Cooper skipped along and Dean followed, pursuing Reva and the kid and the aroma of strawberries and coffee. His landlady made terrible coffee, but if Reva was as talented at brewing coffee as she was at everything else, he was in for a treat.

The kitchen was bright, more modern than the main room of the guest house, and decorated in a fresh-looking white and pale green. The appliances were all fairly new, the tile floor spotless. Overall, the atmosphere was cluttered but clean. It was the kind of room a person could live in, warm and friendly in an indefinable way. It reminded Dean of Shea’s kitchen, though goodness knows his sister had never been able to cook.

A small round oak table was situated to one side, an area much cozier than the dining room he glimpsed through the doorway beyond that table. Places were set, along with three huge pieces of strawberry shortcake, two cups of coffee and one glass of milk.

Cooper quickly jumped into his seat—his usual, Dean surmised—leaving Dean and Reva seats that faced each other. Good. Sitting next to her at lunch today had been more than enough strain for one day. Here, with a table between them, he wasn’t likely to accidentally brush her leg or her arm, or see much too clearly and closely the rise and fall of her chest as she breathed. Across the table was good.

Before Dean had a chance to lift his coffee cup, Cooper began, “Mama says you fix things. What kinds of things? I have a remote-control car that’s broken. Can you fix it? And last year, when I didn’t know any better, I accidentally ripped the head off one of my favorite action figures. Can you fix that, too? Terrance has a dinosaur that used to talk, but now it just makes funny noises. Can you fix that?” He never paused long enough for Dean to answer.

“Cooper,” Reva said sternly, but with a touch of a smile that softened her interruption. “Eat.” She cast Dean a quick, apologetic glance. “So,” she said to him as she forked up a small piece of strawberry shortcake. “What do you think of Somerset so far?”

“It’s very nice,” Dean said honestly. “And very different from Atlanta.”

Reva laughed lightly. “It is that. You should know, before you get yourself in too deep, that there are definite drawbacks to living in a small town.”

“Such as?”

“You can’t get away with anything here.”

Dean wondered just for a second if his ruse had already been discovered. “Like trespassing after dark?”

She didn’t respond to his reminder of last night, but she did blush. “It’s tough to hide anything in a small town. If you sneeze, three offerings of chicken soup, homemade of course, arrive within the hour. Anything and everything you say will get around town before sunset, if it’s at all interesting. There are no secrets here.”

“I’m sure there are advantages to living in a small town,” Dean said.

Reva smiled. Soft and contented, her face was transformed by that smile. “Of course there are. If you sneeze, three offerings of homemade soup arrive within the hour. By sunset, you know anything of importance that happened that day.” Her dark eyes softened. “There are no secrets here.”

It struck Dean like a thunderbolt that if Eddie Pinchon was headed here, Reva had no idea he was coming. She wasn’t the same woman she’d been seven years ago when Eddie had been sent to a Florida prison and out of her life. She was innocent and good… Dammit, this would never do. Should he tell her everything? Now?

“What’s a telecarpenter?” Cooper asked exuberantly.

Dean turned his gaze to the kid. So did Reva. “What?” Dean asked.

“A telecarpenter. That’s what my teacher said I should be when I grow up. But I don’t know what that is. She said I’m…I’m tenacious. I don’t know what that means, either.”

“Telemarketer,” Reva said with a grin.

“Is it good? Mrs. Berry wouldn’t tell me. I don’t know if I want to be a telecarpenter. I mean, a telemarketer. I want to be a baseball player. Or a tax man.”

Dean almost swallowed his coffee the wrong way. He sputtered slightly before asking, “A tax man?”