After returning from locking the gate, he used the front-door light to locate the correct key to the house. Once inside, he flipped on inside switches and set his duffel bag against an old buffet. He was in a breakfast nook that opened to the kitchen.
“Yeah,” he murmured, remembering. “But somebody washed the cherry pie and beer off the walls.”
It was also warmer than he preferred. Not summer in Iraq or Afghanistan warm, but the outdoors at this hour was almost more pleasant. No doubt Alana kept the air conditioner set higher to save on utility bills. He went in search of the thermostat, found it and dropped the gauge ten degrees.
Cripes, the place looked dated, he thought. Mack actually started to remember the layout of the furniture—the mud-brown recliner in front of the TV—although it was a flat-screen now, not the monster casing that looked like it would need the “jaws of life” to crack it open. However, the striped red-and-blue couch, the wrought-iron-and-glass coffee table, the gaudy lamps that looked like they’d been picked up at somebody’s idea of a flea market, were all unpleasantly familiar. Oddly enough, he doubted his mother couldn’t do worse even after all these years. At least there weren’t any bead curtains in doorways. He did, however, catch a lingering hint of cigar smoke.
A bonfire seemed to be in order. No doubt Alana would suggest a garage sale or donation to some charity. The thought came as soon as he caught sight of a photo of her on the side table beside the recliner...and another by one of the lamps.
“Whatever happens first,” he muttered to himself. “It’ll sell faster empty.”
Having ventured this far, he wandered from the living room down a hall, to an office-den where he noticed there were numerous photographs on display. Once again most were of Alana, or included her. Alana with both his father and what he suspected was her uncle. Alana and her horse, her dog, her first car...everything but brushing her teeth, Mack thought with mild sarcasm. There was no denying she was a heartbreaker—had been even as a baby—but by the time she was a teenager, she’d looked like a ghost of herself. He suspected they must have been taken soon after her brother and parents died. The more recent ones—photos of being awarded ribbons and trophies at rodeo and equestrian events—showed a perfected smile. Mack narrowed his eyes as he studied them more closely. No, he wasn’t wrong. None of the smiles quite reached her haunted brown eyes. Nevertheless, Mack thought as he felt a twist in his belly and tightening in his loins, she was something.
“Damn it,” he muttered, setting down the last photo.
A quick check of the rest of the house had him deciding to put his duffel bag in the second bedroom that he thought he remembered was his. At least he remembered the queen-size bed when he’d last been here. The thing was barely large enough to handle his growing body then. It wouldn’t provide a great sleep tonight, but he couldn’t think of sleeping in his father’s bed. Not tonight after what Alana had confessed. Maybe never.
All he wanted was a shower, a drink and a few hours’ escape from any more thinking, even though that’s what he’d also come here to do. But the future suddenly seemed as unpleasant as the past.
“You better not have drunk all the bourbon, you old buzzard,” he muttered, stripping off his T-shirt.
* * *
“On to the next chapter,” Alana murmured, as she turned her silver pickup into Pretty Pines Ranch the next morning. Not even her late aunt’s sweet coining of the property’s name could bring a smile to her lips as it usually did. She was running late and knew that Duke would be making breakfast, with one ear tuned to the police-scanner radio, an eye on the TV on the kitchen counter catching up on the morning news, and everything else directed at the driveway, waiting for her arrival. Nothing had changed since the accident—she could barely think the word crash, let alone say it—and that was mostly her fault. She’d given her uncle no reason to stop worrying about her. From the time she arrived for work at the station every afternoon, until she returned home in the morning—in fact, any minute that she wasn’t asleep in her own bed—he stressed. Countless sessions with doctors, psychiatrists...even lectures and threats from Duke hadn’t achieved much. She still lived with her torment and pain. But she did her best to make sure he knew that she did adore him.
The widower cop had been the center of her universe—more like her anchor—since their world turned inside out. That was saying something considering that he looked like your stereotypical drill instructor and had a personality to match, particularly when someone crossed him, or one of his officers caused him trouble or embarrassment. But even when she was the one on the receiving end of his wrath, Alana loved no one more; however, she still hoped that with Mack’s arrival, Duke would now take a little of that intensive watchfulness off her.
“Morning, handsome,” she called with determined brightness, upon entering the sun-filled white-on-white kitchen. Immediately, unfastening her paraphernalia-heavy belt, she beamed at him as she set it on the breakfast-table chair to the left of the one she would be using. Duke stood by the stove dressed in his summer blues with one of her aunt Sarah’s aprons over it. She could already smell his Brut cologne before she reached him to rise on tiptoe and kiss him just beside his ear. “You smell better than the bacon.”
Duke Anders pretended to swat at her as she stole a piece. “Don’t play me, young lady. You’re late. Imagine what I thought when I called the station to see what was keeping you, since there was nothing of importance happening on the radio. Then to learn that Eisley had taken his patrol car—on time and properly clean, lucky for you—and that you weren’t at your desk completing reports.”
Alana made a face at the mention of her day-shift counterpart and ripped a piece of bacon off the strip to pop it into her mouth. “Phil was born with the wrong chromosomes. He’s as finicky as some prissy Southern belle. Plus he won’t ever stop believing day-shift personnel have seniority over us night crawlers. Is he still whining about the bag with the bottle of water and empty bag of chips that I accidentally left in the car the other day?”
“Procedure is set for a purpose,” Duke recited in a tone that exposed he’d done it numerous times. “You leave the vehicle as clean and full of fuel as you found it.”
“It was water and a wrapper, not a box of tampons.”
He grimaced as though she’d uttered a vulgarity. “Do you mind? I’m cooking here.”
Alana popped the rest of the bacon into her mouth on her way to the coffeemaker where her red mug was set, waiting for her. She wasn’t about to tell him that she’d stopped at the grocery store and picked up a few things that she planned to carry next door as soon as he left for the station.
“I went to the cemetery.”
“Oh.”
It wasn’t a fib—she had gone, only not after her shift change. She’d done so under cover of darkness, which she often did because she didn’t like or need people spying on her and the gossips saying, “Did you hear? Ally was back at the cemetery. As much time as she spends there, you’d think she can’t wait to join her family.” She had touched her mom’s and dad’s and Chase’s gravestones, which were in the same row, but she’d gone to tell Fred what she hoped he already knew—that his son had returned.
“Are you okay?”
Filling her mug halfway from the machine that was the same as the one she’d put at the station, Alana returned to watch Duke work. “Sure. But I guess this is where you tell me that you already know something you think I’d hide from you?”
He flipped their hash browns a last time and then cracked one egg for her sunny-side-up preference and two for his over-easy choice. “Yeah, I’ll admit I thought you were going to try to sneak the news about the Graves boy by me. I should have known you felt Fred should hear the news first.”
And he did, Alana thought, smiling into her mug. “Mack is hardly a boy anymore. He’s thirty-eight and barely shorter than you, but he looks like he could bench press your weight with no problem.” At her uncle’s