“All right, all right!” Milt slapped the book into her outstretched hand. “You’ve got a snakish way of putting things, Tommy Rose. I’ll bet you get put out on your fanny job after job.”
“Au contraire! My last case proposed. He was the one with the triple bypass. A real sweetheart of a guy. No complaints from the gent before him, either.” Thomasina slipped the pack of cigarettes from the hollow book into her pocket. “But you’re still my all-time favorite.”
“You’re pulling my leg, right?”
Thomasina smiled. “That’s what I like—your crusty charm.”
“You and Mary.”
“Yep, you and Mary,” chimed Thomasina. “Still on speaking terms after all these years. That’s what makes you my favorite case.”
“Careful, you’re losing your snakish edge,” said Milt, grinning.
“Save your sweet talk. I’m busting you, mister, on your cigarette charades.”
Milt gave a bark of laughter.
Pleased she’d defused the situation without making him mad, Thomasina swung around to go, then pulled up short. Trace Austin stood in the door, two cups of steaming coffee in one hand. She surmised a gleam of admiration in his eye, and she flushed. So did he.
Trace moved to let her pass through the door, and sloshed his coffee doing so. But it wasn’t the brew dripping over his well-shaped hand she noticed so much as his eyes. They were startling blue. Her gaze dropped to his left hand—ringless.
Whatever had made her look for a ring? Thomasina chalked it up to sleep deprivation, returned his nod and called a farewell to Milt on her way out.
“Mornin’, Trace. You’re out bright and early,” Milt said, after Thomasina had left the room. “Got a cigarette?”
“Like I’d give it to you if I did!”
“It’s not bad enough I’m trembling over my grave. Now you and Tommy Rose are conspiring against me.”
“Tommy Rose now, is it?”
“It suits her, don’t you think? Or didn’t you notice?”
“I was busy burning my hand on your coffee.”
“Just as well,” said Milt, reaching for the cup. “Tommy isn’t the kind you can woo with your callow charm.”
“Says the guy who set me up. Tommy this, and Tommy that!” Trace grinned. “I should have known a male nurse wasn’t your style.”
“Why, thank you, Trace. You make me feel seventeen again. Which reminds me, I hear your old flame Deidre’s coming home on furlough.”
“Deidre O’Conley? I thought she was teaching school on the reservation.”
“It’s a mission school. Missionaries get furloughs now and then,” said Milt. “The church is having a Sunday night soup-supper fund-raiser for her while she’s here. Mary’s selling tickets. Can she put you down for one?”
“Make it two,” countered Trace.
“Taking a date?”
“Nope. Just being a nice guy.”
“You’re not going?” Milt’s crafty grin faded. “Trace, my boy, you ought to let go of your grudge. Why, there’s no shame in losing to your betters. Or was it someone besides God who came between you two?”
“You’re going to have to get out more, Milt. You’re turning into a professional meddler,” groused Trace.
Milt lost his breath cackling, and reached for his oxygen. Alarmed, Trace set his coffee aside, and came to his feet. “You need some help?”
Milt shook his head and motioned him down again. “Kind of early for a social call,” he said, when he’d caught his breath. “What’s on your mind?”
Trace explained about the tree, and waiting on Will.
“I’d call Will, but the phone and the alarm clock are all the same ring to him. He’s good at ignoring both,” said Milt. “Speaking of ring-a-dings—how are you and your renter getting along?”
“Which one?” asked Trace.
“Antoinette Penn.”
Trace stretched his legs and crossed his ankles. “If I had it to do over, I’d stick to my no-kids, no-pets and mow-your-own-grass rules. But her kids needed a roof over their head, and she caught me in a weak moment.”
“Watch your weak moments, or it’ll be your roof over her head, the same one you’re under.”
“That’s the least of my worries,” said Trace.
“Prickly, isn’t she?” drawled Milt with a knowing grin. “Rough, losing her husband that way. Of course, she’d take your hide off if she thought you were feeling sorry for her.”
“You can save your breath. I learned my lesson,” said Trace. After Antoinette’s husband died in an icy pile-up on I-55, he’d felt sorry enough to rent the little yellow house to her. Her kids spent more time in his yard than they did in their own, which generated the usual amount of smalltown gossip.
“That-a-boy,” said Milt. “Hold out for a girl like my Mary.”
Trace nursed his coffee and chatted with Milt awhile before giving up on Will.
Once home, he showered and fell into bed and slept hard until dreams edged him toward wakefulness.
“Do you take Deidre O’Conley to be your…”
Trace awoke before the preacher in his dream got the words out. Half a lifetime ago he would have taken Deidre to be his anything. She was a do-gooder and spiritually needy and all he needed was her. He had told her so at the drive-in theater.
“You’ve got less plot than the movie,” Deidre had told him. “And what there is of it, God didn’t put there.”
It had seemed to Trace at the time that there ought to be some middle ground. But Deidre disagreed. So he walked the straight and narrow, sure he’d win her heart in the end.
But he lost on that count, too, to the courage of her convictions. To his betters, as Milt put it. It was a gradual loss—first she left for Bible college, then four years later, for the mission field. The letters and phone calls had stopped by then. She met someone out in Arizona. He had since died. Trace bought a sympathy card, a religious one. But he never could bring himself to send it. Partly because the words seemed hypocritical, coming from a guy who hadn’t been in church since she left town. Partly for fear she’d read something other than sympathy in the gesture.
Trace kicked back the sheets, thinking of subsequent relationships and how they died on the vine with mild regret and none of the pain of Deidre. He had her to thank for that. She’d taught him to put his armor on and keep his heart well guarded.
Trace showered and shaved and ate cold leftovers, then started the needed painting. After a year and a half, cosmetic improvements were all that remained of turning the dilapidated eyesore he’d picked up for a song into a grand old lady of a house. He lived in one half. The other half he hoped to rent just as he had the other fixer-uppers he’d acquired over the past fourteen years.
Between good wages and rental properties, he was building a tidy nest egg while he waited for the place of his dreams to come on the market. A place with a fishing hole