Cassidy Harte and the Comeback Kid

The egg she had just picked up slid out of her fingers and landed on the floor. She made no move to clean it up, just stood across the kitchen staring at him with her eyes murky and dark.

He only meant to make a casual inquiry. What had he said? “Was that the wrong question?”

“Coming from you, yeah, I’d say it’s the wrong question.” With color again high on her cheekbones, she snapped a handful of paper towels off a roll and bent to clean up the egg mess.

He set the knife down carefully on the cutting board and frowned at her. “What’s that supposed to mean? I’m not allowed to ask how your brothers are doing these days?”

She rose, her eyes hard, angry. “I will not let you do this to me, Slater. I can’t believe you have the gall to show up here after all these years and act like nothing happened.”

While he was still trying to figure out how to answer that fierce statement, she shoved the paper towel in the garbage, then returned to cracking eggs with far more force than necessary.

“My brothers are fine.” Her voice was as clipped as her movements. “Great. Jess is the police chief in Salt River. He and his fiancé are planning a late July wedding. Matt remarried a few months ago, and he and his new wife are deliriously happy together. She’s a vet in town and she’s absolutely perfect for him.”

He wondered about the defiant lift to her chin as she said this, as if daring him to say something about it. “So he and—what was her name? Melanie, wasn’t it?—aren’t together anymore?”

She didn’t say anything for several moments. At her continued silence, he looked up from the cutting board and saw with some shock that she was livid. Not just angry, but quaking with fury.

The woman he’d known a decade ago rarely lost her temper, but when she did, it was a fierce and terrible thing. He only had a second to wonder what had sparked this sudden firestorm when she turned on him.

“No, they’re not together anymore.” Her voice sounded as if it was coated with ground glass. “They haven’t been together since you ran off with her.”

He blinked at the cold fury in her eyes. “Since I what?”

She turned away from him. “I’m really not in the mood for this, Slater. I have too much to do this morning if I’m going to feed your guests.”

His own temper began to spiral. “The hell with the guests. I want to know what you’re talking about. Why would you say I ran off with Melanie?”

“Hmm. Let me think. Maybe because you did?”

“The hell I did!”

“Drop the innocent act, Zack. People saw you. Jesse saw you. The two of you were making out in the parking lot of the Renegade. There are variations on the story but from what numerous people told me, she was climbing all over you like the bitch in heat that she was, and you weren’t doing much to fight her off. Before Jess could beat the living daylights out of you, you and my darling ex-sister-in-law climbed into your truck and drove off into the sunset, never to be seen in Star Valley again.”

His mind reeling, he scrambled to come up with something to say to that stunning accusation.

Before he could think past the shock, the side door swung open and the teenager who had greeted him the day before with such dumbstruck inadequacy whirled in, tucking a T-shirt into her jeans as she came.

“Sorry I’m late, Cassie. I slept through my alarm again.”

The kitchen simmered with tension, with the fading echoes of her ridiculous claims. The idea that he would take up with that she-devil Melanie Harte was so ludicrous he didn’t know where to start defending himself.

“No problem, Greta. You can take over for Mr. Slater. He was just leaving. Isn’t that right?” she challenged him, her lush mouth set into hard lines.

He wanted to stay and have this out, to assure her he would rather have been hog-tied and dragged behind a pickup truck for a couple hundred miles than go anywhere with Melanie. He didn’t want to do it in front of an audience, though. And since he couldn’t figure out a polite way to order the poor girl out of the kitchen, he decided their shoot-out could wait.

“This isn’t over,” he growled.

Her eyes were still hot and angry. “Yes, it is, Zack. It was over ten years ago. You made sure of that.”

He studied her for a few moments, then set the knife down carefully on the cutting board and walked out of the room before he said something he knew he would regret.

As Cassie watched him leave, a vague unease settled on her shoulders like a sudden summer downpour.

Why did he seem so astonished when she told him she knew he left with Melanie? Was he honestly dense enough to think they could both disappear on the same night and nobody would be smart enough to put two and two together and come up with four?

He had definitely been shocked, though. That much was obvious. He couldn’t have been faking that dazed, dismayed expression.

She shrugged off the unease. She had too much work waiting for her, to sit here trying to figure out what was going through the mind of a man who was a virtual stranger to her now.

“Do you want more green peppers?” Greta asked.

She saw that Slater had diced a half dozen, far more than she really needed for the huevos rancheros. “No. That’s plenty. Why don’t you start putting together the fruit bowl?”

While Greta moved around the kitchen gathering bananas and strawberries and grapes, she kept sending curious little looks her way. Cassie ignored them as long as she could, then finally gave a loud sigh. “What?”

Greta yanked a grape off a cluster and popped it into the bowl. “Just wondering what that was all about. What’s the story with you and the new boss?”

For a moment she was surprised at the question, then she realized the teenager would have been only a child a decade ago, too young to hear about the biggest scandal in town. “Nothing. No story.”

Greta raised her eyebrows doubtfully. “What were you saying has been over for ten years, then?”

She didn’t want to talk about this. Especially not with someone who had a reputation for garbling stories until they had no resemblance whatsoever to the original.

On the other hand, Slater’s return was a rock-solid guarantee that the whole ugly business was going to be dredged up all over town, anyway. She might as well get used to answering questions about him. “It was a long time ago,” she said tersely. “We were engaged, but it didn’t work out.”

There. That was a nice, succinct—if wildly understated—version. It seemed enough for Greta. “You were engaged to the CEO of Maverick Enterprises?”

“Like I said. A long time ago.”

“Wow! That’s so romantic. Maybe he came back to try to win your heart again.”

When pigs fly.

“I strongly doubt it,” she murmured, then tried desperately to change the subject. “When you’re done there, you can start squeezing the orange juice.”

Greta wasn’t so easily distracted. “For what it’s worth, I think he’s gorgeous. Like some kind of movie star or something.”

Gorgeous he might be. But Cassie didn’t have the heart to tell the starry-eyed teenager that beyond that pretty face, Zack Slater was nothing but trouble.

She was telling the truth.

Two hours later Zack poked at a runny omelette and half-cooked hash browns with his fork, trying hard to pretend he didn’t notice the sullen whispers and the not-so-subtle glares being thrown his way by the Salt River locals.

When he had lived here before, Murphy had a well-earned reputation for good, hearty meals. Either the service and the menu had drastically gone downhill or Murphy was saving all the edible food for his other customers.

He supposed he was lucky to get anything, given the overwhelmingly hostile atmosphere in the diner.

When he walked into the café—with its red vinyl booths and mismatched paneling—the breakfast conversation of the summer crowd had ground to an awkward halt like a kid cartwheeling down a hill and hitting the bottom way too fast.