One True Thing

He liked not working for the first time in his life. Not having to get up at five-thirty to run before work, not spending more time at the shooting range each week than he did on dates, not dealing with lowlifes and lawyers, not carrying a gun with him everywhere he went. He liked not being a target for scorn and disdain, or for nutcases with weapons, and not spending more time frustrated than not.

He liked being a bum, sleeping until noon and not seeing a solitary soul unless he wanted. He’d told his parents, Reese and Neely so repeatedly. They didn’t believe him, but that didn’t make it any less true. They thought he was burned out. Brooding. Bored. In serious need of a badge and a gun.

Burned out? Maybe. Brooding? Nah, he’d gotten over what happened in Kansas City. Now he was just bitter. In need of another cop job? Never.

What about bored?

His gaze shifted to the window and the Davison place. Cassidy McRae had pulled up out front around ten-thirty. It was now six-fifteen, and he’d spent way too many of those hours watching the place, even though he hadn’t caught more than a glimpse of her passing a window. It wasn’t as if he didn’t have other things to do, like…clean house. Take Granddad’s old john boat out on the lake and catch some fish for his mother to fry. Drive into town and replenish his supply of frozen dinners. Mow the little patch of grass out front that he hadn’t yet managed to kill.

But why be productive when he could kick back on the couch and watch the neighbor’s place during commercials on TV? Being curious took little energy and less incentive and, as a bum, he considered the less energy and incentive expended, the better.

Besides, she was the first woman he’d really looked at since Amanda had moved out of his apartment and his life. She was the first woman he’d noticed as a woman, with all the possibilities and risks that entailed—the first who had reminded him of how long he’d been alone. Granted, he didn’t know anything about her—whether she was married, where she was from, what she did, whether she was aloof because she was shy or preoccupied or disagreeable by nature.

What he did know was minimal. That she drove a red Honda with Arizona tags and a heavy coat of dust—a two-door that blended in easily with thousands of other little red two-doors on the road. There were no bumper stickers, no college affiliations or radio station advertising on the windows, no American flag or novelty toy flying from the antenna, no air-freshening pine tree hanging from the inside mirror. It was about as unremarkable as a car could get.

He knew she was far from unremarkable. She was pretty, slender, five-eight, maybe five-nine, with short blond hair and pale golden skin. He hadn’t gotten close enough to identify the color of her eyes, but hoped they were brown. He’d always been a sucker for brown-eyed blondes, especially ones with long legs and full lips and an innocent sensuality about them.

He knew next to nothing, but affairs and relationships and almost-engagements had been built on nothing more. As long as she wasn’t married, a cop or too needy, he could enjoy having her next door. He didn’t lust after married people, he’d had enough of cops to last a lifetime and enough of people who needed something from him to last two lifetimes.

He couldn’t help but wonder, though, what had brought her to Buffalo Plains, and why she was staying all the way out here. She’d said she was here to work, but people didn’t come to Buffalo Plains to work. They came for reasons like Neely’s—hiding out from an ex-con who’d thought killing her was fair punishment for his going to prison. Or her sister, Hallie Marshall, escaping a life that had become unbearable. Or Hallie’s stepdaughter, Lexy, who’d run away from home to find the father she’d never known.

But to work? When any work she could do over there in Junior’s cabin could just as easily be done someplace else? Someplace better?

Maybe she was hiding, escaping or running away, too.

He wouldn’t even wonder from what.

He was debating between SpaghettiOs and a sandwich for supper when the sound of an engine drew his gaze to the window. Reese parked his truck under the big oak nearest the cabin, then he and Neely got out, each carrying a grocery bag. By the time they reached the deck, Jace was opening the screen door. He stood there, arms folded over his chest. “Hey, bubba. Don’t you know it’s rude to drop in on someone without calling first?”

“We tried to call,” Reese replied, “and all we got was voice mail. You have your cell phone shut off again, don’t you? And you don’t check your voice mail, so you leave us no choice but to drive all the way out here.”

In spite of his scowl, Jace wasn’t really pissed. Reese was his only close cousin, and they’d been raised more like brothers. They’d been buddies and partners in crime since they were in diapers. They’d gone to school together, kindergarten through twelfth grade, and attended the same university. When a shoulder injury had ended Reese’s pro baseball career, he’d gone into law enforcement in part because Jace was doing it.

Now Reese was the sheriff hereabouts…and Jace was a disgraced ex-cop.

Though he hadn’t invited them in, Neely nudged him aside and crossed the threshold. “We come bearing mail and food, and we’re staying for dinner.” Retrieving a rubber-banded packet of letters from the bag, she handed them over, then continued to the kitchen.

Stepping back so Reese could enter, too, Jace thumbed through the mail sent in care of his folks. Bills for the necessities of life—electric, gas, cell phone, car insurance. He didn’t have to pay rent because he and Reese had inherited this place when their grandfather died. He’d never relied on plastic much even in Kansas City, and had even less use for it holed up out here. His only other expenses were groceries and an occasional tank of gas, plus his one luxury—satellite TV. A man had to do something day after day.

Reese left the grocery sack in the kitchen, then helped himself to a beer from the refrigerator—fair enough, since he’d brought them the last time he’d visited. After brushing his hand against Neely’s shoulder, he returned to the living room and dropped into a chair. “What have you been up to?”

Jace shrugged. “The usual.”

“Exciting life,” Reese said, his tone as dry as the Sahara in summer.

“I’m not looking for excitement.” Truth was, he wasn’t looking for anything, and he wasn’t sure that would ever change. For as long as he could remember, all he’d ever wanted to be was a cop. Since he couldn’t be that anymore, he didn’t have a clue what he could be.

“You give any thought to coming to work for the sheriff’s department?”

“Nope.”

“You give any thought to anything?” Now there was an irritated edge to Reese’s voice that had appeared somewhere around the tenth or twentieth time they’d had this conversation. Reese thought Jace had had plenty of time to get his life back on track, and he wouldn’t accept that Jace’s only plans for the future dealt with sleeping, eating and fishing. He didn’t believe Jace could walk away from being a cop.

The hell of it was, Jace couldn’t even accuse him of not understanding, because Reese had been through it before. All he’d ever wanted to do was to play baseball, and he’d lived the dream—made it to the big leagues—then had it taken away from him.

But Reese had found something else he wanted—two other things, Jace amended with a glance at Neely. The only thing Jace wanted was for life to go back to the way it had been a year ago. And since he couldn’t turn back the clock…

“You looking for an answer that doesn’t suck or just ignoring me?” Reese asked.

“I think about a lot of things.” But being a cop again wasn’t one of them.

Reese watched him for a moment, his gaze narrowed, then apparently decided to drop the matter for the time being. “Whose red car is that out there?”

“Her name’s Cassidy McRae. She’s renting Junior’s cabin.”

“Oh, yeah, I heard about her from Paulette.”

“What did you hear?” Jace could find out anything he wanted to know about his neighbor with a little effort. But he knew from experience it was better to keep Reese’s mind on something other than him, or the conversation would inevitably drift back to old discussions they were both tired of having.

“Not much. She’s from Alabama, she’s a writer, and she’s working on a book. Wanted someplace quiet where she wouldn’t be bothered.”

Alabama, huh? That wasn’t a Southern accent he’d heard this morning. But living someplace at the present time didn’t mean she’d been born there. He’d lived nearly half his life in Kansas City even though he’d been born and raised right here in Canyon County. Most of the people he knew had gotten where they were from someplace else.

What kind of book was she writing and why had she come all the way to Oklahoma to do it? Surely she had an office at home where she wouldn’t be bothered. And why did she have Arizona tags on her car if she was from Alabama?

He let the aromas from the kitchen distract him for a moment. Tomatoes, onions, beef and cheese…his mother’s lasagna. For an Osage married to an Okie, Rozena made damn good lasagna. That for supper, along with leftovers for tomorrow, was worth putting up with Reese’s bitching.

“Want to eat inside or out?” Neely asked, standing in the kitchen doorway with plates and silverware. When both men shrugged, she made the decision by heading for the door. She returned for a clean sheet from the linen closet, disappeared again, then came back once more for a bowl of salad. “Why don’t you invite your neighbor over for dinner?”

Oh, yeah, that would go over well with Ms. I’m-not-here-to-make-small-talk-with-the-neighbors. Dinner with said neighbor, his cousin the sheriff, and his cousin-by-marriage, who would need only one look at her to start visions of matchmaking dancing through her head.

“She’s not particularly neighborly.”

“Oh, she’s probably just a little shy or busy getting settled in. But she has to eat, and we have plenty of wonderful food. Go on. You be neighborly. Show her how it’s done.” Then Neely gave him a suddenly sly look. “Unless there’s some reason you don’t want us to meet her. Is she pretty?”

Matchmaking, he reminded himself. She’d tried it a dozen or so times when they’d both lived in Kansas City, with often painful results. She nagged him as much as Reese did, just in a gentler fashion, about giving up the vegetating and getting back to living, and she thought a romance with a pretty woman the perfect solution to his problem.

So he lied. “She’s old enough to be our mother. This tall.” He held his hand about four feet above the floor. “Round. Wears thick-soled shoes and nerdy glasses. Not my type.”

Apparently she thought she’d been more subtle because the look she gave him was reproving and the words she said an outright lie. “I’m not trying to get you a date, Jace. I’m talking about inviting a woman who’s new in town to share the dinner your mother so generously made for us. Do you have a problem with that?”

Not trying to get me a date, my ass. She’d tried to set him up with the checker at the grocery store just last week. Two weeks before that, it had been her secretary’s visiting niece, and the month before that, it had been the new waitress at Shay Rafferty’s café in Heartbreak. Neely wanted to fix his life, whether he was willing or not.

Scowling, he rose from his chair. “Jeez, she bosses me around in my own house. All right, I’ll invite her to dinner, but she’s gonna say no.”

“But you’ll feel better for having made the effort,” Neely sweetly called after him.

After checking out McRae that morning, he had eventually put on a shirt, but he’d never made it to shoes. He winced as he stepped on a rock on her side of the bridge, then again when he walked onto the deck. Where his was sheltered by the cabin from midafternoon on, hers got full sunlight until dusk. The weathered boards were uncomfortably hot underfoot.

From across the inlet came the sound of his screen door banging—Neely making another delivery to the patio table—so he deliberately stood at an angle that would block her view of the door, then knocked. The Unplugged version of “Layla” was playing inside—the only sound at all until suddenly the door opened a few inches. Cassidy McRae looked none too happy to be disturbed.

He wouldn’t mind being disturbed a whole lot more.

She had changed from this morning’s jeans and T-shirt into shorts and a tank top in shades of blue. Her feet were in flip-flops edged with a row of gaudy blue flowers, and her toenails were painted purplish blue. She would have looked depressingly young if not for the glasses she wore. The blue metal frames added a few years to her baby-owl look and made her eyes look twice their size.

She pushed the glasses up with one fingertip. “Yes?”

Brown eyes, he noticed. Dark, chocolatey brown, staring at him with only a hint of impatience that made him remember his reason for bothering her. “My mother sent dinner—the best lasagna outside of Italy. Want to join us?”

“Who is ‘us’?”

“My cousin Reese and his wife Neely. He’s the sheriff here, and she’s a lawyer over in Buffalo Plains.” He wasn’t sure why he’d offered the extra info. To assure her that they were respectable, which might make him respectable by association?

She glanced in the direction of the kitchen. Looking over her shoulder, he saw the laptop open on the table, the word processing screen filled with text. Her book? He wondered what it was about, how she sat and pulled coherent thoughts and sentences from her brain and transferred them to the screen. He would rather face a short drunk with a bad attitude than sit at a computer all day trying to be creative.

“I’m working,” she said at last when she looked back. “I shouldn’t stop.”

There—that was easy. He could accept her reply and go home. Reese and Neely wouldn’t see her and find out he’d lied in his description. Neely wouldn’t get that evil gleam in her eye and, with her none the wiser, he would save himself a lot of future hassle.

But instead of saying goodbye and leaving, he shifted to lean against the jamb. “You have to eat.”

“I’ve got food.”

“Already cooked and ready to dish up? The best lasagna in the English-speaking world?”

For a moment her clear gaze remained fixed on him, as if she was wavering. Then she glanced at the computer again and went stiff all over. “I appreciate the invitation, but I can’t accept. I have to get back to work.”

Definitely no Southern accent. No accent at all, in fact. Had she consciously gotten rid of it, or had she lost it by living in a lot of places?

“Okay. It’s your loss. You won’t find such good company for…oh, a few miles, at least, the food can’t be beat, and there’s probably something incredible for dessert.”

“Sorry,” she murmured.

He was supposed to feel relieved. Neely and Reese would return home, none the wiser about his neighbor. He wouldn’t have to spend the evening hiding any hint that he thought she was gorgeous from prying eyes or have to deal with Neely’s inevitable attempts to get them together. He wouldn’t have to explain why he’d lied when describing her.

But mostly what he felt was disappointment. It was no great loss, no matter what he’d told Cassidy. Sitting across the table from a pretty woman would have been a nice change from the way he’d spent his last one hundred and eighty-plus evenings. Being tempted to spend his night differently would have been damn nice. But not tonight, apparently.

When he reached the bottom of the steps, he turned, walking backward for parting words. “If you change your mind, you know where to find us.”

She gave no response—no nod or murmured thanks or sorry. She simply stood there and watched.

He was on his own side of the bridge before she finally closed the door.

Chapter 2

She watched him leave, unaware of the wistfulness that marred her face. How she would have liked to walk across the bridge with him, to sit down at the small round table and enjoy the cool evening air, the savory aromatic food and the company of strangers. She was tired of being alone, tired of having no friends, tired of having to be on guard all the time. She was tired, tired, tired, tired.

Besides, she hadn’t had lasagna in a long time.

Wednesday morning found Cassidy stretched out on the couch, the television turned on but the sound muted. The picture was filled with snow and the static made the audio unbearable—and this was the channel that came in the best. She’d noticed the satellite dish on the neighboring cabin’s roof with some envy while washing the breakfast dishes. Too bad she couldn’t run a cable over there and tap into his better reception, but that would be illegal. Besides, she had no clue how to do such a thing. Inserting a plug into an outlet was the extent of her electronic abilities.

On the dining table, the laptop made a faint hum as the fan came on. The screen was dark, but if she walked over and moved the cursor, the WordPerfect screen would pop up with the same lines that had been on it last evening when Jace Barnett had knocked. She’d been lying on the sofa then, too, trying to read a magazine but finding concentration too difficult to come by. She had tiptoed to the door, turned down his dinner invitation, then watched until he’d crossed the bridge. After closing the door she’d peeked through the blinds as he’d joined the man and woman on the deck. They had talked and laughed and eaten…and she had watched. Like the little match girl in the story her mother had read her long ago, on the outside looking in.

Except she was inside looking out. More like a prisoner locked away for her crimes. But the crimes that made her a prisoner weren’t her own. She was the victim, but she was getting all the punishment.

Unable to stand the flickering TV any longer, she surged to her feet, shut it off, then went to the window. The other cabin was still and quiet. She’d heard a boat putt past more than an hour ago, sounding as if it were coming from that way. If Jace Barnett was out on the lake, there couldn’t be any harm in her spending a little time outside in the sun, could there?

She got a sheet from her bedroom, a pair of sunglasses and a book, and headed outside. After another trip back in for the boom box and a glass of water, she spread the sheet over the grass, settled on her stomach and started reading to the accompaniment of B. B. King.

It was a peaceful, easy way to spend a morning, with the sun warm on her skin, the soft lap of the water against the shore, the buzz of bees among the wildflowers. Trade the sheet on the ground for a rope hammock and the glass of water for lemonade, and she would be as contented as a fat cat drinking cream in a sunbeam. As it was, she was almost contented enough to doze off. If she wasn’t careful, she would wake up with the sunburn to end all sunburns, and then what would she do?

Gradually she became aware that the music had stopped. The sun’s pleasant warmth had become uncomfortably hot, and the bees’ buzzing had been replaced by slow, steady breathing…and it wasn’t her own.

She opened her eyes and tried to focus on the lush embossed floral depiction an inch from the tip of her nose. She had dozed off, using the novel for a pillow, knocking her sunglasses askew. All the moisture had been sucked out of her skin that was exposed to the sun and redeposited in places that weren’t, dampening her clothes and making her feel icky.

And there was that breathing.

She lifted her head, sliding the glasses back into place, and saw her neighbor sitting a few feet away. He wore cutoffs, a ragged Kansas City Chiefs T-shirt and tennis shoes without socks, and he looked as if he hardly even noticed the heat. His own shades were darker than hers, hiding his eyes completely, but she didn’t need to see them to know his gaze was fixed on her. The shiver sliding down her spine told her so.

“Working hard?”

Hoping the embossed cover wasn’t outlined on her cheek, Cassidy slowly sat up, rubbed her face, then combed her fingers through her hair. “Doing research,” she said, holding up the book, then laying it aside.

“Checking out the competition?”

She shrugged.

“So you write—”

“Watch it,” she warned.

“I was just going to say—”

“I know what you were going to say. It was the way you were going to say it.” She picked up her glass, its contents lukewarm now, and took a sip. “‘So you write romance novels.’ Or ‘So you write trashy books.’ Or ‘So you write sex books.’ Wink, wink, leer.” Her gaze narrowed. “I didn’t tell you I write anything.”

“Reese did—my cousin. He got it from Paulette.”

Cassidy was half surprised the real estate agent had remembered long enough to pass the information on. The woman had shown little interest, other than to remark that she was going to write a book someday. Everybody was, Cassidy had learned in her short career.

“Paulette says you’re from Alabama.”

“California,” she lied without hesitation.

“You have Arizona tags.”

“It’s on the way here from California.”

He didn’t seem to appreciate her logic. “I can see confusing Alabama and Arizona, both of them starting and ending with A. But Alabama and California?”

“They both have ‘al’ in them. Besides, when people talk, Paulette listens for the silence that indicates it’s her turn to speak, not for content.”

“That’s true. She does like to share her vast knowledge with everyone.”

“Sounds like you know her well.”

“She’s my cousin, three or four times removed.”

It must be nice to have family around. She had relatives, too, but she hadn’t seen them in six years. No visits, no phone calls, no letters. It was worse than having no family at all, and so she pretended that was the case. Fate had decreed she should be all alone in the world, and there was no use trying to fight it.

“Then you’re from around here,” she said, then shrugged when his gaze intensified. “You said yesterday you’d just moved out here a while ago.”

“I was staying with my folks outside Buffalo Plains.”

“Why move?”

“Because I’m too old to live with my parents any longer than necessary.”

Why had it been necessary? she wanted to ask. Had he lost his job? Gone through a lousy divorce that left him with nothing? Been recovering from a serious illness? Offhand, she couldn’t think of any other reasons an able-bodied adult male would move in with Mom and Dad.

But instead of asking such a personal question, she asked another that was too personal. “Do you work?”

Again his hidden gaze seemed to sharpen. “Nope. I occasionally help Guthrie Harris with his cattle, or Easy Rafferty with his horses, but that’s about it.”

“Easy Rafferty. What a name.”

“You heard of him?”

She shook her head.

“He used to be a world champion roper until he lost a couple fingers in an accident. Now he raises the best paints in this part of the country. He could teach that horse whisperer guy a few things.”

A rodeo cowboy. She knew nothing about them—had never been to a rodeo or gotten closer to any horse than passing a mounted police patrol in the city—but they were popular in the books boxed up inside. So were Indians of all types, including cowboys. Though she had no trouble picturing Jace Barnett in faded Wranglers, a pearl-snapped shirt and a Stetson, something about the image didn’t feel quite right. She had no reason to think he was lying to her—other than the fact that she usually lied herself—but the man was more than a part-time cowboy.

“Are you researching this area?”

She was still imagining him in jeans and scuffed boots, with a big championship buckle on his belt. The question caught her off guard, leaving her blinking a couple of times until her brain caught up. Research, the area, her book—remember? Her reason for being here?

“Oh…no…not really. I just wanted someplace quiet to write.”