Slow Dance with the Sheriff

‘Try me,’ she countered.

Another man might have argued. The sheriff just plonked the box unceremoniously into her arms. It was hard to know if that reflected his confidence in her ability or some twisted desire to see her fail.

She fixed her expression, shifted her feet just slightly and let her spine take the full brunt of the heavy supplies. It didn’t fail her. You don’t dance for twelve years without building up a pretty decent core strength. Just for good measure she didn’t rush the box straight over to the counter and, since it was doing a pretty good job of preserving her modesty, she had no real urgency. ‘Okay, well… Thanks again.’

B’bye now.

He didn’t look fooled. Or chagrined. If anything, he looked amused. Like he knew exactly what she was doing. The corners of that gorgeous mouth kicked up just slightly. He flicked his index finger at the brim of his sheriff’s hat in farewell and turned to walk away.

She could have closed the door and heaved the box over to the kitchen. She probably should have done that. But instead she made herself take its weight a little longer, and she watched him saunter up the pathway towards his SUV, law-enforcement accoutrements hanging off both sides of his hips, lending a sexy kind of emphasis to the loping motion of his strong legs.

Then, just as he hit the sidewalk—just as she convinced herself he wasn’t going to—he turned and glanced back down the lane and smiled like he knew all along that she was still watching. Though it nearly killed her arms to do it, she even managed to return his brief salute by lifting three fingers off her death grip on the heavy box in a faux-casual farewell flick.

Then she kicked the door shut between them and hurried to the counter before she had fruit and ham and eggs splattered all over her chilly barn floor.

Jed slid in beside Deputy and waited until the tinted window of his driver’s door was one hundred per cent closed before he let himself release his breath on a long, slow hiss.

Okay…

So…

His little self-pep talk last night amounted to exactly nothing this morning. One look at Little Miss Rumpled Independence and he was right back to wanting to muscle his way into that barn and never leave. No matter how contrary she was. In fact, maybe because she was so contrary.

And, boy, was she ever. She would have hefted all one hundred and twenty pounds of Deputy and held him in her slender arms if he suggested she couldn’t.

But she had done it. Thank goodness, too, because a man could only stare at the wall so long to avoid staring somewhere infinitely less appropriate. It wasn’t her fault he’d had a flash of conscience while jogging at 6:00 a.m. about how empty the refrigerator in his barn conversion was. Her mortification at being caught unprepared for company was totally genuine.

So she might be snappish and belligerent, but she wasn’t some kind of exhibitionist.

Which meant she was only two parts like Maggie, he thought as he pulled the SUV out into the quiet street. Maggie and her sexual confidence had him twisted up in so many knots he could barely see straight by the time she’d worn him down. It was never his plan to date someone in his own department but it was certainly her plan and Maggie was nothing if not determined.

But he was practically a different man back then. A boy. He’d taken that legacy scholarship straight out of school and gone to the Big Smoke to reinvent himself and he’d done a bang-up job.

He just wished he could have become a man that he liked a little bit more.

Still…done was done. He walked away from the NYPD after fifteen years with a bunch of salvaged scruples, a firm set of rules about relationships and a front seat full of canine squad flunky.

Not a bad starting point for his third try at life.

One block ahead he saw Danny McGovern’s battered pickup shoot a red intersection and he reached automatically for the switch for his roof lights. Pulling traffic was just a tiny bit too close to Ellie Patterson’s jibe about the kinds of low-end tasks she’d seen him run as sheriff but, if he didn’t do it, then that damned kid was going to run every light between Larkville and Austin and, eventually, get himself killed.

And since one of those fine scruples he’d blown his other life to pieces over involved protection of hotshot dumb-asses like McGovern, he figured he owed it to himself to at least try. He’d been negligent enough with the lives of others for one lifetime.

His finger connected with the activation switch and a sequenced flash of red and blue lit the waking streets.

Time to get to work.

CHAPTER FOUR

ELLIE pulled her knees up closer to her chest, cupped her chamomile tea and listened to the sounds of the storm raging over Larkville. The awesome power of nature always soothed her, when the noise from the heavens outgunned the busy, conflicting noise inside her head—the clamoring expectations, her secret fears, the voice telling her how much better she should be doing.

The sky’s thundering downpour was closer to mental silence than anything she could ever create.

Her eyes drifted open.

The crackle of the roasting fire was muted beneath the rain hammering on the barn’s tin roof but its orange glow flickered out across the darkened room, dancing. The flames writhed and twisted in the inferno of the stove, elegant and pure, the way the best of the performers in her company had been able to do.

The way she never had. Despite everything she’d done to be good enough, despite sacrificing her entire childhood to the God of Dance. Her entire body.

One particularly spectacular flame twisted in a helix and reached high above the burning timber before folding and darting back into itself.

Still her body yearned to move like those flames. It craved the freedom and raw expression. She hadn’t really danced in the nine years since walking away from the corps and the truth was she hadn’t really danced in the twelve years before it. The regimented structure of ballet suited her linear mind. Steps, sequences, choreographed verse. She’d excelled technically but, ultimately, lacked heart.

And then she’d discovered that one of her father’s corporations was a silent patron for the company, and what heart she had for dance withered completely.

The place she thought she’d earned with brutal hard work and commitment to her craft… The place she knew two dozen desperate artists would crawl over her rotting corpse to have…

Her father had bought that place with cold, hard cash.

Two air pockets crashed together right overhead and the little barn rattled at the percussion. Ellie didn’t even flinch. She shifted against the sofa cushions to dislodge the old pain of memory. She’d run from that chapter in her life with a soul as gaunt as her body, searching for something more meaningful to take its place. But she didn’t find it in the thousands of hours of charity work she put in over the past decade raising funds for Alzheimer’s research. And she didn’t find it in the company of some man. No matter how many she’d dated to appease her mother.

And—finally—she opened her eyes one morning and realised that her inability to find something meaningful in her life said a whole lot more about her than it did about the city she lived in.

The rolling thunder morphed into the rhythmic pounding of a fist on her door, though it took a few moments for Ellie to realise. She tossed back the blanket and hurried the few steps to the front door, taking a moment to make sure her hair was neatly back.

‘Are you okay?’

The sheriff stood there, water streaming off his wide-brimmed hat and three-quarter slicker, soaked through from the knee down. A bedraggled Deputy shadowed him.

Surprise had her stumbling backwards and man and dog took that as an invitation to enter. They stepped just inside her door, out of the steady rain, though Jed took off his hat and left it hanging on the external doorknob. He produced a small, yellow box.

‘Matches?’ she said, her tranquil haze making her slow to connect the dots.

‘There’s candles in the bottom kitchen drawer.’

‘What for?’

He looked at her like she was infirm. ‘Light.’ Then he flicked her light switch up and down a few times. ‘Power’s out.’

‘Oh. I didn’t notice. I had the lights out anyway.’

Maybe people didn’t do that in Texas because the look he threw her was baffled. ‘You were sitting here in the dark?’

Was that truly so strange? She rather liked the dark. ‘I was sitting here staring into the fire and enjoying the storm.’

‘Enjoying it?’ The idea seemed to appall him. He did look like he’d been through the wringer, though not thoroughly enough to stop water dripping from his trousers onto the brick floor of the old barn.

‘I’m curled up safe and sound on your sofa, not out there getting saturated.’ He still didn’t seem to understand so she made it simpler. ‘I like storms.’