“I don’t scare easily.”
“There’s not a man alive who can’t be flat-out terrified by the right woman.” Feeling cooler air coming out of her car, she tossed her purse into the passenger seat, then looked back at him. “Anyway, I did enjoy it, and that’s a reference only to the conversation we had today, nothing more. Like I said earlier, I don’t have any expectations.”
He studied her a moment before adjusting the cowboy hat lower over his eyes. “Maybe you should,” he said in a gravelly voice, then started off. At the edge of the street, he glanced back. “See you around.”
She watched until he’d disappeared inside the courthouse, then gave a shake of her head. She didn’t understand men, not for one minute, and she swore she was going to learn to live without them—except, of course, for the occasional temporary lover. But every feminine instinct she possessed suggested that was going to be a much harder proposition here in Buffalo Plains than it would have been in Beverly Hills.
And for that, she could thank Brady Marshall.
Climbing into her car, she backed out of the space, circled halfway around the block and headed south to Heartbreak. It was twenty miles of rolling hills and heavily wooded areas interspersed with pastures that didn’t appear to have anything left to feed the cattle and horses they held. She passed neat farmhouses, occasional trailers, more than a few shabby little places and one particularly ostentatious house just outside Heartbreak.
Heartbreak was not the town she imagined Neely spending the rest of her life in. It lacked the charm of Buffalo Plains, as well as most of the amenities. Downtown filled all of three blocks, and it was all shabby. She passed the Heartbreak Café—Café Shay, Neely called it, after its owner, Shay Rafferty. That was the place you went to find out what was going on in the town, the state and the world. Neely had also told Hallie about the doctor’s office across the street, where Heartbreak’s midwife practiced, who would someday deliver Neely’s babies, and she’d mentioned the hardware store up ahead, owned by Grace James and her husband, Ethan.
Truth was, Neely talked about the place as if she loved it and couldn’t imagine living anywhere else.
Hallie had never loved any of the cities where she’d lived. In fact, at the moment, she had no clue where she was going to live when she left Oklahoma. She hadn’t realized how desperately she wanted out of California until last week, when she’d driven across the state line into Arizona. The terrain hadn’t changed one bit—desert was desert no matter which state it belonged to—but her outlook had. In a matter of seconds, the tension knotting her shoulders had eased, and so had the tight, panicky feeling that had settled in her chest six months earlier and never gone away. Her fingers had loosened their grip on the steering wheel, and she’d sunk a little more easily into the seat.
She’d thought then that she might never go back, not even to pack the rest of her things and sell her house.
She just didn’t have a clue where she would go.
Following the directions Neely had given her, she soon came to a mailbox marked Barnett. She turned into the gravel drive, passed through a heavy stand of blackjack oaks, then pulled into a clearing that wasn’t particularly clear.
A fresh, raw area on the right side of the drive showed where Reese’s house had stood. For the first few weeks after the assault, he and Neely had intended simply to repair, replace and clean up, then move back into the house. When they realized they kept putting off the simple jobs that would make that possible, they decided to raze it and start over from scratch.
Hallie didn’t blame them as she pulled onto the grass beside a half-dozen pickups. All the clean-ups in the world couldn’t make a person forget that people had died there. It would be too creepy to share the house with those memories.
On both sides of the house was pasture, and out back was a huge old barn. Next time she came out, she would have to bring her camera and get some shots of both the barn and the horses outside it.
Across the driveway from the old house site was the new house. Work was progressing rapidly—a good thing, since Neely had already issued invitations to everyone in both the Madison and the Barnett families for Thanksgiving dinner. Hallie found her way inside, got a wolf whistle from a carpenter and another from an electrician—so there, Max—and found Dane Watson in the master bedroom.
Good, honest and single, Brady had said. He’d forgotten to mention tall, muscular and handsome, with surfer-boy blond hair, blue eyes and the biggest dimples Hallie had seen. He looked her over with obvious appreciation, and when they shook hands, he held her hand far longer than he should have…and Hallie didn’t feel a thing. He was gorgeous, funny, charming, and made her feel like the best part of his day, and all she could think was that she liked him, but that was the extent of it.
She felt a tremendous sense of relief when she left the site two hours later. Maybe she really was building up an immunity to men. Maybe, before long, she wouldn’t pay them any more notice than she would the lovely purple-blooming crape myrtle over in the side yard or the Irish setter, gleaming deep mahogany, in the shade of a tree across the street. Pretty objects to be appreciated, then forgotten.
Unbidden, the image of Brady Marshall popped into her mind and burst her bubble. When he’d walked into the sandwich shop, she had gotten the oddest quivery sensation all through her torso—not just butterflies, but butterflies doing acrobatics. Her palms had gotten damp, and she hadn’t been able to decide between sliding onto the floor under the table or making a quick dash for the door while he was facing the counter.
Maybe she was building up an immunity to men.
But apparently Brady Marshall was the exception to the rule.
She was afraid she would have to be dead to be immune to him.
Chapter 3
By the time Brady left the courthouse Monday evening, the sun hung low in the western sky. There was little traffic and no activity as he walked to his department SUV in the lot out back. All the shops and businesses downtown were closed by six o’clock, except on Thursdays, when most stores stayed open an extra two hours. The rest of the week, any money spent in Buffalo Plains at night was spent on food, alcohol, gasoline or at the small Wal-Mart on the edge of town.
Before heading home, he drove by the county maintenance facility in the north part of town and filled up his gas tank. It wouldn’t do to get called out on an emergency in the middle of the night and find out the gas tank was empty.
That done, he started home…and made it as far as the stop-light in front of the courthouse. It was red, and he stopped, wondering idly what he could fix for dinner that wouldn’t take long, paying little attention to the music on the radio, when something—he couldn’t even say what—caught his attention and made him look to his left.
There in front of the First National Bank of Buffalo Plains, fiddling with a camera and a tripod, was Hallie Madison. I imagine in a town like this, it will be impossible to avoid each other entirely, she’d said at lunch. No kidding. He wondered why that was. In spite of the town’s size, he rarely had any problem avoiding people, so why was she any different?
Maybe because she’d been on his mind ever since he’d seen her at the wedding.
Checking the rearview mirror and finding the street clear, he backed up far enough to pull into a parking space, then climbed out. When he crossed the street, Hallie was bent slightly, making adjustments to the camera. He kept his distance and remained silent until she straightened and took a step back.
“What are you doing?”
She automatically smiled when she saw him. “Taking a picture of the courthouse in the setting sun. You’re a master at asking the obvious, aren’t