The frightened look had disappeared from her eyes. Jennifer unclenched her hands, leaned forward, and helped herself to a cookie from the plate on the tray. “I saw her ad for an assistant in the Asheville paper.”
“Asheville? You mean Nashville?”
She had taken a bite of the cookie, but it must have gone down wrong, because she choked and coughed before answering. “Asheville. I’d come to North Carolina to see the mountains in their fall colors. I had planned to visit Casey’s Cove anyway, so Miss Bessie’s ad seemed like an answer to a prayer.”
Her attitude was too off-handed. The woman was hiding something, but he didn’t have a clue what it might be. He had to be certain she wasn’t a threat to Miss Bessie or the children at the day-care center.
“Isn’t there someone in Memphis I can contact for a reference?” he said.
She shifted uneasily, a movement not lost on his trained eye. “My former in-laws, but I left them off my reference list on purpose.”
“Why?”
“They never liked me. I hate to think what kind of recommendation they’d give me.”
Another indication of a less-than-perfect marriage. But lots of folks had unhappy unions. That didn’t make them unfit for employment. He wished he wasn’t getting mixed signals from his intuition. He liked the woman, and Miss Bessie with her amazing ability to instantly gauge a person’s character had hired her on the spot.
But he’d bet his pension Jennifer Reid was hiding something, something that caused her remarkable green eyes to darken with fear when certain aspects of her past were mentioned.
Stymied by his inability to put his finger on what had frightened her, he knew the interview was over. Jennifer wasn’t going to divulge information she didn’t want to, especially to a lawman sitting shirtless in her living room, whom she’d only just met.
“That’s all I need for now,” he said.
“For now? What else is there?” Her face flushed with dismay.
“Just the computer background checks, like I said before.” He noted the visible easing of tension in her muscles. “Now, if I can have my shirt, I’ll get out of your way.”
“If you’ll wait a few minutes, I’ll iron it for you.”
He shook his head. “I have a fresh one in my locker at the station. I’ll change when I get there.”
She retrieved his shirts from the kitchen and stood quietly while he donned them, still warm from the dryer. He headed for the door, then stopped. “Hope you’ll enjoy your time in Casey’s Cove, Ms. Reid.”
She had followed him to the door and held out one slender, well-shaped hand. “Thank you.”
He clasped her small hand in his own large one, enjoying the warm, soft sensation of her skin against his.
“And I’m sorry about your nose,” she added with obvious sincerity.
He dropped her hand and rubbed his aching nose ruefully. “Guess that comes with the territory.”
“Territory?” She cocked her head to one side in puzzlement, an appealing gesture that made him reluctant to leave.
“That’s what I get,” he said with a laugh, “for sticking my nose in other people’s business—even if it is my job.”
She smiled again, and before he changed his mind and lingered, he hurried out the door to his patrol car.
AT THE SOUND of the police car disappearing down the drive, Jennifer collapsed in the chair where Officer Dylan Blackburn had been sitting. She hadn’t counted on a run-in with the law, not on her first day in town.
She tried without success to will her knees to stop shaking. He’d scared her senseless, touching her shoulder when she’d thought she was alone in the house. It was a wonder her panicked scream hadn’t carried all the way up the mountain to Miss Bessie’s place.
And the sight of him had unnerved her as much as his touch. First, his uniform. Since last June, her defenses went on instant alert at the presence of any law-enforcement officer. Some might call it guilty conscience.
She called it self-preservation.
After the uniform, she had focused on the man. How could she not, when he’d been so big, six-foot-two at least, and muscled in a whipcord-lean way that left no question of his strength? Those deep brown eyes, like heat-seeking missiles, seemed to miss nothing, and she’d felt he could read every secret ever written on her soul, just by looking at her. The feeling wasn’t pleasant, not with the secrets she had to keep.
His face was too rugged to call handsome, but the strong lines of his forehead and jaw, the straight perfection of his nose—well, perfect before she’d bashed it with her head—combined to make him as appealing a man as she’d ever met.
And when he’d stripped to the skin, she’d been glad the bloodstained shirts had given her an excuse to leave the room or she might have stood gawking like an idiot in admiration of his powerful biceps and the well-formed muscles of his deeply tanned chest.
Yes, indeed, Officer Dylan Blackburn was one amazingly attractive man, and he had laughing eyes and a sense of humor to boot.
She sprang to her feet. What the devil was she thinking? The last thing she needed was involvement with a policeman, for Pete’s sake. She grabbed the Hoover attachment from where she’d dropped it earlier and was about to restart the cacophonous machine when a car pulled into her driveway.
Her heart thudded with alarm. Had Officer Blackburn returned with more probing questions?
“Yoo-hoo, Jennifer?” Miss Bessie’s soft, drawling voice floated up from the bottom of the front steps.
With a sigh of relief, Jennifer stepped onto the porch to greet her new employer. “Hi, Miss Bessie.”
“Mind if I come up?”
Jennifer descended the steps and assisted the older woman up the steep stairs. For a woman in her mid-nineties, Miss Bessie was extremely agile. She plopped into a wicker chair on the porch, placed her feet, shod in neon-laced sneakers, onto a footstool, and waved Jennifer into a chair opposite.
“It’s warming up.” The little woman, with bones fragile as a bird’s, fanned herself with a lace-trimmed handkerchief. “Indian summer.”
“Would you like something cool to drink?”
“No, child, I just came by to chat. Figured since you’re going to be in Casey’s Cove for a while, you ought to know something about the place.” Bessie studied her with bright blue eyes. “How much do you remember?”
Jennifer shook her head. She wished people would stop asking her questions she couldn’t answer. “Not much. My visits here were a long time ago.”
The old woman settled back in her chair, and the wicker creaked beneath her slight weight. She pointed to the panorama that stretched below them like a topographical map. “See how the town hugs the west shore of the lake?”
Jennifer nodded.
“When my daddy came to Casey’s Cove over a hundred years ago as the town’s first doctor, that area was several hundred feet up the mountain from Casey’s Creek.”
“Where was the lake?”
“Didn’t exist. Not until several decades later when one of FDR’s work projects dammed the creek and created Lake Casey. Underneath all that water,” Bessie waved her arm to take in the thousands of acres