Last Dance. Cait London

her cropped hair, spiking it. One look in a mirror revealed her pale face and the circles beneath her eyes. All she needed after a draining night of bad dreams and hearing about last night’s reunion of the Bachelor Club was Tanner outside her window. Here he was, starting up with her and she had work to do and deliveries to make. She glanced at the mugs she’d been carefully wrapping in newspaper and easing into a cardboard box to take to a tourist store in another town. The various shaped mugs, each stamped on the bottom with her trademark, provided a steady income, easy for tourists to pack and transport. Larger bowls, speckled in earth tones, were for Willa’s Café, perfect for her soups. Gwyneth had built a steady clientele and by raising cattle and potting, she’d hauled herself out of all debt except the mortgage used to pay her father’s medical expenses. And all without the help of an interfering ex-husband. She slapped her ball cap on her head, jerked on her battered denim jacket against the chilly April morning and glared at Penny and Rolf, who were whining to be let out. “You run to Tanner, grinning and drooling all over him, and you’re going back to that cheap dog food for a week. And you’re not going with me to make the deliveries today.”

      Undaunted by her threats, Penny and Rolf burst from the opened door, tails wagging on their way to Tanner.

      She marched across the field, across a plowed strip and stood in front of his tractor, her hands on her hips. Wearing only a T-shirt against the morning chill, Tanner scowled at her, braked the tractor to a stop and clicked off the ignition. In one lithe jump, he was on the freshly plowed ground and tramping toward her. Gwyneth tried to ignore the angry shiver running through her and noted briefly that she’d never feared Tanner, except that night.

      As he moved toward her, a tall powerful man she’d known all her life, his eyes flashing with anger, she shot at him, “You’re in a fine mood. So you played football on the high school field after the Silver Dollar closed. My phone has been ringing steadily—as if I’m responsible for you. Well, I’m not. I heard all your old chums were there, married and unmarried boys alike, waking up half the town with yells and turning on their headlights. Look at you…you’re bleary eyed, you’re wearing a beard and you look like you’d like to tangle with a bear. Nelda Waters wasn’t happy about Sam being invited to play at two o’clock in the morning, or about him having to drive their old tractor down to the high school ball field to sell to you. You could have waited until today. You’re not young anymore, Tanner, and you’ve given the town enough gossip fodder. Your mother would have—”

      You’ve got a fast mouth on overdrive. You sound like someone’s wife—but you’re an ex-wife, aren’t you?” He stood over her now, his grim expression sliding into a dark, wary, penetrating search of her face as though seeing beneath the surface. “You should have told me.”