Kitabı oku: «True Heart»

“Kaley, you’re not cut out for this life,” Tripp told her.

“It takes a tough heart. That’s why I want you to sell out to me. You’re better off without this.”

“Better off with—”

The same thing he’d said in his kiss-off letter nine years ago! You’ll be better off without me.

She jerked upright in his arms. “Who the hell are you to tell me that?”

His tender half smile faded to bewilderment. “Hey, I’m just trying to—”

She brought her hands to his chest and shoved, arching her back against his hold. “That’s right! You’re doing this all for my own good. Taking my ranch from me. You’re such a considerate guy!” She shoved him again, but still he held on. For just a moment there—oh, she was such a fool to feel safe and loved in his arms! Nothing but her old longings betraying her—just as they’d betrayed her the first time all those years ago. It isn’t me he gives a damn about! Tripp takes what he needs for himself, then tells you he’s done you a favor!

Well, not this time, Kaley vowed….

Dear Reader,

Have you ever dreamed about living in the perfect little town? Some place small and friendly enough that people know your face. Where the menfolk tip their Stetsons at you when they drive by. Where the women remember if you take after your mama’s side of the family or your daddy’s.

A town just big enough that a few inquiring strangers wander through every year, then are beguiled by its warmth and charm into staying. A town rich in beauty, with snow-capped mountains looming on the horizon, and cattle ranches spreading out all around, and a white church on a hilltop perfect for storybook weddings.

Trueheart, Colorado, first took shape in my mind with the book Don’t Mess With Texans, when my heroine, Susannah Mack, hid out from her vengeful ex-husband there. I couldn’t resist revisiting the place in The Baby Bargain, to help widowed ranch owner Dana Kershaw find a new soul mate while she doubled her family.

And now, in True Heart, we return for the third time, when Kaley Cotter comes back to have her baby, save the family ranch—and rediscover the love of her life.

So welcome to my town—or welcome back! Slide into a booth at Mo’s Truckstop and order a steakburger and fries to go with your story. Or maybe you’ll want to try the new café in Trueheart, where Michelle serves cassoulet to the ladies, and French chili to the men—and it’s all from the same pot.

As always, thanks for reading!

Peggy Nicholson

True Heart
Peggy Nicholson

www.millsandboon.co.uk

To Christina Canham, fearless on the foredeck,

fearless in the kitchen, frequently admirable,

perpetually amusing. Closest to a little sister

I’ll ever have. Chrisso, how I’ll miss our

Girls’ Nights Out. Sail on, kid, but don’t be a stranger.

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

PROLOGUE

KALEY BOSWORTH DANCED straight out of the doctor’s office that afternoon and bought a double armload of sunflowers. And beeswax candles—every last tall, creamy-white fragrant candle that the florist had in stock. Fifty-seven, in all.

Now they stood in unlit readiness on the counters to either side of the door that led from her kitchen to the attached garage. From there they spread out over the other counters, the marble-topped central work island, the table in the breakfast nook. She’d even set candlesticks at the doorway to the butler’s pantry.

More candles beckoned the eye into the pass-through pantry, then on to the dining room, to its long, lace-covered mahogany table, where the remaining tapers stood in two silver candelabra. Between the candelabra on the table, she’d placed a cut-crystal punch bowl, filled to overflowing with the sunflowers, entwined with pink honeysuckle and roses from her own garden. Color and a blaze of light to match her mood.

The table was laid with their best sterling and china. Champagne stood iced in a wine bucket for Richard, along with a bottle of sparkling cider for herself.

All she needed was her husband to help her celebrate. Richard was only ninety minutes later than he’d said he’d be that morning—still well within his self-imposed margin of two hours, after which he’d usually phone to say that some case had delayed him and she shouldn’t wait supper.

But tonight he hadn’t called.

“So, any minute now,” Kaley half sang as she stood by a window in her darkened living room, hugging herself, bouncing on her toes with impatience as she peered down to the distant street corner.

Headlights knifed through the summer dusk with swift assurance. Streetlights rippled over a sleek, sliding shape—a dark blue convertible swung around the bend and arrowed straight for the house. “Yes!” Kaley snatched up a box of matches and ran for the back door.

She lit the first half-dozen candles, then, as their flames grew, she threw the light switch. She bit her lip as she heard the rumble of the garage door rising. Hurry! Another dozen candles leaped into flame, washing the walls in flickering gold. Hurry, hurry! She tossed a spent match in the sink, struck another, laughing breathlessly at her own foolishness—too many candles!

Yet, a thousand wouldn’t have been too many.

Fire touched wick after wick as the garage door rumbled down. She set the candles in the breakfast nook ablaze. A scent of warm wax and honey wafted upward—incense of thanks and joy.

Two dozen or more to go; she’d never finish in time! Kaley knelt to light the candles on the floor as the back door opened.

“Huh?” Richard Bosworth stopped short in the doorway. “Good God, Kaley.” He frowned. “What’s all this?”

“Oh, this…?” She twinkled up at him. “Guess you’d call it a celebration.” Touching a match to another candle, she shared a smiling secret with its kindling flame. Kindling, yes—exactly so. Such beauty! Such a miracle!

“Looks more like a three-alarm disaster waiting to happen. Candles on the floor? Is that really necessary?”

She felt her smile tighten ever so slightly and drew a slow breath. “Ran out of counter space.” She backed away into the pantry, lit the candles on the sideboards.

He dropped his briefcase on a chair and followed. “What am I missing? It’s not our anniversary. Nobody’s birthday.” He paused in the door to the dining room, taking in the flowers, the lavish table set for two, the blue velvet dress she wore. She lit the tapers in the first candelabrum. The flames struck his fair hair to ruddy gold, picked out the chiseled planes of his handsome face.

Showed her his lips thinning and his eyebrows drawing together.

“So?”

“So…” She looked up at him over the flames that mirrored her inward glow. “Something wonderful happened today.”

“Yes, I gathered that. What?”

If only, just this once, he’d go along with her mood. Especially this once. “I’ll tell you, but first, if you’d open that bottle?”

“Dom Perignon,” he noted, lifting the bottle from the ice. “Whatever your news, isn’t this a bit over budget?”

He’d treated himself to two cases the year before, when he’d made partner at his law firm. And now it was her turn to rejoice. “For this occasion? I don’t think so.”

“Your department head—what’s the old bat’s name? Henley? She decided to retire,” Richard guessed. “You’re next in line for the job.”

“I am, but this has nothing to do with teaching. Nothing like that.”

“Then tell me. You know how I hate surprises.” He covered the bottle’s cork with a napkin, drew it with a deft flick of his thumbs. The soft pop promised bubbles, but something somewhere, had gone flat.

She held the crystal flutes for him to fill, biting her lip as she studied his impatient frown. He did hate surprises, much as she loved them. Her fault, this. She should have told him the instant he walked in the door. Now she stood torn between blurting out her news and waiting for a happier moment, perhaps after his first glass?

“Come on, spit it out.” He lifted his flute. “What should I toast?”

Why was she worrying? Once he’d heard… At least, once he’d gotten used to the idea… She rallied her smile. “Kiss me first?”

“That bad?” Still, he kissed her—a wary, closemouthed kiss, precisely measured. “Tell me.”

“Well…” She took a breath. “You know I had an appointment this afternoon, with my gynecologist.”

His eyes swept from the candles, to the flowers, back to her radiant face. No one could ever say that Richard was slow. He shook his head. “No.”

“Yes! I told him I was a week late. That’s unusual for me, so he tested and—and—” Her words jumbled into breathless, pleading laughter. Come on, share this with me. All the worries and setbacks she’d suffered through at his side, all the ambitions she’d applauded, the triumphs she’d celebrated. She’d been there for Richard every step of the way, and now couldn’t he just—

“Shit.” He tipped his glass back and gulped, blew out a breath, then smacked the flute down on the table.

She stared at the champagne splash marks darkening the lace, she ought to get a cloth and dab them dry before they soaked through and marred the perfect, polished mahogany beneath.

“I’m pregnant, Richard. We are. And you know how long I’ve been wanting this. You said once you made partner—”

“You’re on the Pill! How could this have happened? Did you stop without telling me?”

“Of course not! I’d never—”

“So you forgot—skipped a couple. Of all the careless, idiotic things to—”

“I didn’t! I didn’t forget a one.” She set down her own glass untasted. “I had that awful earache—five weeks ago, remember? I couldn’t get an appointment soon enough with my GP, so I stopped by a walk-in clinic and the doctor prescribed tetracycline.”

“So?” Richard turned his back on her to pace down the length of the table, then swung on his heel to glare. “What’s that got to do with—”

“Some antibiotics interfere with contraception. I never knew that, and the doctor didn’t tell me.”

“I’ll sue him. And the pharmacist, too—negligence pure and simple. By God, they’re going to regret—”

“Oh, no.” Shaking her head, she met him halfway down the table—clamped her hands over the forearms he’d crossed on his chest. “No. Maybe they were careless, but we’re not suing anyone. Not when the results were just what we wanted anyway.”

“Who says—”

“You said! I wanted to start our family the year I finished college, but you said we should wait. That our condo wasn’t big enough, remember? You said it was no place to raise rugrats.” She shook him gently, smiling pleadingly up into his face, trying to spark some warmth in return. “Then when we moved to our house on Cottonwood I asked you again. And you didn’t tell me no, Richard. You just said we should wait. That you were so close to making partner, that you needed all your concentration and energy to focus on that. That if I’d only wait till you made it, we’d be rolling in bucks and you’d have more time to help me with midnight feedings.”

“I never—”

“You did! That’s exactly what you said… So I did. I waited again.”

He twisted away from her to resume pacing, yanking at the knot in his tie as if it was strangling him.

“Then once you made partner last year,” she said to his back, “you know I said it was time. And remember what you said? You said that now that you’d made partner, they’d want to see you perform.”

“That’s precisely right.” Richard ripped off his tie and dropped it onto a chair back, from which it slithered to the floor. “I’d made it to the big time, but that meant I had to bring in business if I wanted a place at the trough. It meant cultivating the right people, throwing the right kind of parties. I needed you beside me and I needed you to sparkle. It’s hard to wow anybody, babe, if you look like a little blimp.”

“So you asked me to give it another year,” Kaley agreed levelly. “Which I did. But now I’m pregnant and I’ve been waiting eight years. Now it’s my turn. Our turn for family—or what’s it all been for? What good is all this, without family to fill it?” She swept a hand to include the whole house, so much bigger and grander than anything she would have chosen.

Richard stood not listening to her but staring off at the far wall. “You said you took tetracycline…. A drug—a powerful drug, Kaley. Did you happen to ask your gynecologist about side effects?”

She closed her eyes for a moment. Oh, no. Please, please, don’t go there. “I…w-what do you mean?”

“You were on it at conception. What’s tetracycline do to a developing fetus? Did you ask him that?”

Yes, they’d gone over that. She swallowed around the jagged lump in her throat, clasped her hands before her and said huskily, “He said that the odds were g-good—much better than good—that our baby is developing normally. That no…no permanent damage had been done.”

“Ah!” Richard’s finger came up to jab the air between them. “That’s what he said, no damage? But will he guarantee it? No? No, of course he won’t! He’s not entirely a fool. He knows that if anything went wrong, I’d sue him for everything but the fillings in his back teeth—and he knows I’d win.”

“Richard, please.” Her knees were trembling; she was trembling all over. Kaley pulled out a chair from the table and sat. “Nobody could ever guarantee that—”

“Well, if he won’t guarantee a healthy baby, ask Dr. No Problem if he’ll agree to support it for the rest of its life if it’s hopelessly retarded.” He leaned down to look into her brimming eyes. “No? He won’t do that, either? Then why should I—should we—risk it, babe, if he won’t?”

“Because it’s ours!” Kaley cried.

CHAPTER ONE

One month later

FEARFUL OF FALLING ASLEEP at the wheel, Kaley opened the car window to the cold rushing air. Now she stretched her gritty eyes wide and said softly, “Kaley Cotter.”

No. That sounded apologetic, and she owed apologies to no man. “Kaley Cotter,” she proclaimed, lifting her chin. The night wind sucked her name through the open window, sent it spinning and tumbling across the desert behind her humming wheels.

“Cotter, Cotter, Cotter,” she chanted, squinting into the headlights of an oncoming truck, the first vehicle she’d encountered for twenty miles or more. “My name is Kaley Cotter.” Again. After eight years as Kaley Bosworth. It would take practice before it sounded right. Her car shuddered in the truck’s slipstream, then surged on through the dark.

Roughly two hours to go. She’d reach Four Corners, where the southwest border of Colorado touched the borders of three other states, by dawn. “Then home before eight,” she comforted herself. She could make it. “Kaley Cotter’s coming home.”

Where she should have stayed all along.

“Kaley Cotter and daughter are coming home,” she amended, one hand slipping off the wheel to cup her flat—still utterly flat—belly.

Or possibly Cotter and son.

But something told her this baby would be a girl. “Love you either way,” she murmured, lashes drifting lower. Boy or girl, healthy or damaged, her baby would be welcome.

As she would be welcome at the Cotter family ranch. “Home,” she half whispered, stroking her stomach, “is where, when you’ve got no place else to go, they have to take you in.”

Suddenly, her head dropped forward with a sickening jolt. She gasped and jerked upright just as the off wheel bit into the roadside gravel. The car swerved wildly, then straightened to the road.

“Whew!” Kaley shuddered, rubbed a hand along a thigh roughened with goose bumps, and shook her head to clear it. That had been closer than close! If there had been an oncoming car… “Not good.” Las Vegas, where she’d obtained her quickie divorce this afternoon, was five hundred miles behind her. She should have stopped in Page for the night, but like a wounded rabbit intent on reaching its own burrow, she’d found that no intermediate bolt-hole had looked safe enough. She’d sped past every possible motel until there was nothing left but rock and sand and stars and the pale road beckoning her eastward, home to Trueheart, then the ranch in the foothills above it.

KALEY MADE IT into Four Corners without further mishap, and pulled in at a truck stop for a cup of coffee to go.

Coffee. She frowned down at her stomach as she turned away from the cash register. She’d sworn that no matter how she craved it, she wouldn’t drink another cup for eight months. Her baby had taken enough abuse already in the first four weeks of life, without having to put up with her mother’s caffeine habit.

On the other hand, any sensible baby would agree that sharing one last cup of stale brew beat running off the road at seventy miles an hour any day. Last one, I promise you. Let’s just limp on home, then I swear I’ll never touch another—

“Um, excuse me?” A woman loomed at Kaley’s elbow as she stiff-armed the exit door. She was tall and blond, with a rueful smile. “I saw you pull in and I noticed you seem to be heading east and I was wondering if…”

THE BLONDE’S NAME was Michelle Something; Kaley hadn’t caught the last half. Her car radiator had sprung a leak, she’d explained, forty miles back down the reservation road, and rather than stop in the middle of nowhere, she’d crept on to the truck stop, pausing to let it cool off each time the needle on her temperature gauge kissed red. She didn’t dare push on to Trueheart, but she had a restaurant there, customers who’d be expecting their breakfast, so if Kaley would be so kind? She could send somebody back to collect her car once the morning rush was over.

Kaley was glad for the company. “I’ve been driving on snooze control for the past hour. Just talk to me and it’s you who’ll be doing the favor.”

“Where are you headed,” Michelle asked as they swung out onto the highway. “Durango?”

“No, Trueheart. At least, that’s where I turn north. The Cotter ranch.” It warmed Kaley just to say the words. Four generations of Cotters had held that patch of upland valley and now her baby would make the fifth. Heading home. Once she was home, she could face anything. Let go of the protective numbness that had carried her this far, and collapse.

“You’re a friend of Jim Cotter’s?” Michelle turned to prop one elbow on the dash.

“His sister,” Kaley admitted. “So you know him?”

“Two eggs over easy with a double order of hash browns, half a bottle of ketchup, and if I were a cradle robber…”

Kaley stole a glance at her smiling passenger. Elegant rather than cowgirl-pretty like Jim’s usual sweethearts, the blonde was perhaps five years older than his twenty-seven. But there was a certain level of…sophistication? Experience? Whatever, the cool, wry confidence beneath Michelle’s surface warmth made her seem half a generation older than Kaley’s younger brother.

“You’re a teacher over in Phoenix, I think he told me. Married to—um—a lawyer?” Michelle continued.

Kaley winced. “Was…” Might as well say it. There was no keeping your life private in a small town like Trueheart. Still, she hadn’t expected to have to fess up so soon, or to a stranger; had yet to shape her explanation or polish her delivery. Gray as the fading night, a wave of desolation washed over her. Richard was history now, a story to be told, not a man to wait up for, supper cooling on the table night after night. Not always a considerate man, maybe, but still, her man. Was.

“Oops!” Michelle said lightly, though a ready sympathy lurked under her humor. “Was a teacher? Or was married to a lawyer? I’m sorry, don’t answer that. Either way, it’s none of my biz. Me and my runaway mouth!”

“No, it’s okay. I was married, but that’s all over now. I passed through Las Vegas yesterday.”

“Wham, bam, we’ll be happy to stamp that paper for you, ma’am,” Michelle said, “God bless them. And good for you. Once you decide to yank the bandage off, it’s best to do it fast.”

“Yes…” Kaley supposed it was. In her case, it certainly was, once Richard had given his ultimatum.

Abort it, Kaley, and let’s forget about this. We don’t want a defective child.

Or any child at all, Richard. Why had it taken her so long to see that?

Because I didn’t want to see. I was happier blind, living in hope. But once Richard had made it clear that no matter how she pleaded or argued, there’d be no marriage counseling, no compromise and no reprieve, that it was his way or the highway, she’d had only one choice. She’d chosen the road home to Colorado.

“So is this a short visit, to regroup and decide what next, or…?”

Kaley shook her head decisively, her straight dark auburn hair swinging from shoulder to shoulder. “No, I’m home for good.” Never should have left. “I own half the ranch, though Jim’s the active partner and I’m the silent one.” Despite Richard’s complaints, she’d contributed half her salary as a high-school English teacher these past eight years to keep the ranch operating. Jim had supplied the manpower and all the daily decisions; she, the vital cash. That was the very least she could do if she wanted the ranch to stay in the family. Jim had had the hard part after their father passed away, running a five-thousand-acre spread with little help. Not like the old days, when a ranch was a family enterprise and families were extended and capable.

She’d always assumed that if they could hang on through just a few hard years, Jim would choose one of his local sweethearts, a mate with ranching in her veins, and they’d start raising their own brood of cowhands. And when at last she and Richard started a family, she’d have sons and daughters to contribute to the tribe. Sons and daughters who’d happily summer at the family spread, learning to ride and rope and round ’em up as had so many Cotters before them.

So much for blithe assumptions. So much for dreams. Kaley grimaced.

Finally she’d had to face the reality that her husband didn’t want children. Never had. Never would. As Richard pictured the universe, he was the sun, and she the adoring planet that spun around him. Any lesser satellites would be, at best, distractions; at worst, costly and tragic nuisances.

“I see,” murmured Michelle into the bleak silence. “Well, to be perfectly selfish, I’m glad. I think Jim could use the help. Whenever I’ve seen him this past summer, he’s been looking frazzled. That hand of his is an absolute sweetheart, but he reminds me of a pet tortoise a roommate of mine had years ago—sort of dried up and deliberate. I have a hard time picturing him getting his boot up into a stirrup, much less catching a calf.”

Kaley glanced at her in surprise. “You’ve met Whitey, too? How long have you lived in Trueheart?” She’d tried to make it back for two or three weeks every summer. Alone, since Richard always begged off. But these past two years, she’d been working on the master’s degree she needed to maintain her teaching accreditation and her schedule of classes had prevented her visiting. Haven’t been home since Dad’s funeral, she realized with a pang of guilt. A lot could change in eighteen months.

“Just over a year,” Michelle said. “I bought Simpson’s café down on Main Street. It’s Michelle’s Place now—best breakfast in southwest Colorado, if I do say so. Gourmet suppers on Friday and Saturday nights, with plans to expand to six nights if I can ever find a decent sous chef.”

“Just what the town needs,” Kaley said approvingly. “A serious restaurant. When I lived here, a hot date was steakburgers for two at Mo’s Truckstop out on the highway.”

“Still is, for the older crowd,” Michelle admitted. “And most of the truckers and cowboys. But some of the younger set are giving me a chance. Then there are the yuppie commuters moving up from Durango, plus the dudes and the tourists.”

Whenever Kaley and Jim spoke on the phone, Jim complained about the way southwestern Colorado was changing. Five-acre ranchettes replacing working cattle ranches. Outsiders moving in with money that the locals couldn’t hope to match. Values they didn’t want to match. Ideas of ways to “improve” a country that the natives liked just the way it was and always had been.

So far the cattlemen north of Trueheart were holding their own, with most of the changes confined to the town, Jim had reported. Suntop Ranch, the largest outfit in this part of the state, seemed to exert some sort of gravitational pull, holding the smaller ranches like Kaley and Jim’s Circle C safe in its orbit. So far.

Still, as the land folded itself into deeper and greener valleys, steeper ridges that lifted toward massive peaks, looming dark against a rosy sky, Kaley looked fearfully for signs of change. She ticked off each familiar landmark as she came to it with a sigh of relief. On her left the sign to the Ribbon River Dude Ranch—guests still Welcome. Then to her right, the turnoff to the private airport with its bluff overlooking the distant town, where courting couples parked on summer nights to “watch the planes take off.” Then they were coasting down the foothills into Trueheart, past Mo’s Truckstop, past the tiny Congregationalist church with its modest white steeple, where, once upon a time, so long ago it almost seemed like a fairy tale, Kaley had planned to be married.

And if Tripp McGraw had really wanted to marry me? She touched her stomach and tipped up her chin. Well, he hadn’t. And if he had, she wouldn’t be carrying this precious passenger. Much as they’d hurt at the time, things worked out for the best. Would do so again, she told herself firmly.

Michelle glanced at her watch as they turned onto Main Street. “Speaking of breakfast, I hope you’ll let me feed you a magnificent one. Eggs Benedict maybe? Or buckwheat pancakes with native berries?”

“Some other time I would love that,” Kaley assured her. “But I want to catch Jim before he rides out for the day, so…”

Michelle made a ticking sound with her tongue. “He doesn’t know you’re coming?”

“No.” Kaley had hoped till the last day—till the very last hour—that she and Richard could work things out. She’d have felt disloyal airing their differences—temporary differences, she’d been so sure—before her younger brother. Especially since Jim had never, in all these years, quite warmed to his brother-in-law. Why give him further reasons to disapprove, when what she wanted was a larger, happier family, not a family divided?

“No, I didn’t tell him, but it doesn’t matter.” There’d always be a place for her and hers at the ranch. A wave of weary gratitude washed over her as she braked the car before Michelle’s Place. She was luckier than so many single mothers. Because no matter how desperately lonely she’d been this past month, she wasn’t alone. She could count on her brother, count on her welcome, count on her bedroom being there, bed made and pillows fluffed, her favorite childhood books lined up on her shelves, her great-grandmother’s old pine wardrobe standing ready for her clothes. Whether she deserved it or not, she had a place in the world, reserved in her name. While such a sanctuary waited, she’d count herself among the lucky.

“Well, if it turns out you miss him,” said Michelle, opening her door before the car had stopped, “don’t hesitate to come back into town and let me feed you.”

“Thanks.” Though if she missed Jim, it was bread, butter and milk, then she’d crawl upstairs for a hot shower and a round-the-clock collapse.

Michelle gathered up her purse and overnight bag, swung her long legs out of the car, slammed the door and leaned back in the open window. “Thanks again, Kaley.” She glanced aside as a red pickup tooted its horn and turned into her parking lot. “And here comes Sam Kerner, riding point. I’m going to get no end of grief that there’s no coffee waiting.”

The local vet, a big-animal specialist. Likely as not, Sam was stopping in to Michelle’s on his way home from tending a sick cow. Kaley smiled wearily. Her landmarks were all holding true.

“And Sheriff Naley,” Michelle added as a gray pickup followed the red into her lot. “Kaley, if you ever want to just…talk. About anything at all? Breakups are tough—I should know. Anyway…” She shrugged and smiled her wide, rueful smile. “I live upstairs here and the coffeepot’s always on. Stop by any ol’ time.” She glanced back the way they’d come. “Oh, now, here comes a customer to die for. Do you know Tripp McGraw?”

“Vaguely. Well, guess I should let you get cooking.” Kaley revved the engine, lifted a hand in farewell as Michelle hastily straightened. “See you!” She had barely time to swing out from the curb before Tripp’s oncoming truck. It loomed up in her rearview mirror, its driver a dim, wide-shouldered shape beyond the glass. He was towing a horse trailer behind, she noted, as she accelerated and he slowed for his turn. But no—oh, no—he’d only slowed to wave to Michelle and now he was driving on.

He followed her for a block or two, and Kaley drove with hunched shoulders, hands clenching her wheel, though she was being silly. There was no way Tripp could know this car was hers. She’d been dodging him successfully for years.

Still, she averted her face as she made her turn north toward the mountains, and she let out a pent breath when he drove toward the east. “Whew!” she whispered, and drew in a shaky breath. Downhearted and tired as she was this morning, he would have been one local landmark too many.