Her shoulders slumped at the thought of trying to reconstruct everything.
“She’s a writer,” Rourke told the investigator.
“Really?” The man looked intrigued. “You don’t say. What do you write?”
Jenny felt sheepish. She always did when people asked about her writing. Her dream was so big, so impossible, that sometimes she felt she had no right to it. She—small-town, uneducated Jenny Majesky, wanted to be a writer. It was one thing to publish a weekly recipe column, fantasizing in private about something bigger and better, yet quite another to own up to her ambitions to a stranger.
“I do a recipe column for the local paper,” she mumbled.
“Come on, Jen,” Rourke prodded. “You always said you’d write a book one day. A bestseller.”
She couldn’t believe he remembered that—or that he’d say so in front of this guy.
“I’m working on it,” she said, her cheeks flushing.
“Yeah? I’ll have to look for it in the bookstore,” the adjuster remarked.
“You’ll be looking for a long time,” she told him ruefully. “I’m not published.” She sent Rourke a burning look. Blabbermouth. What was he thinking, telling her dreams to a total stranger?
She figured it was because Rourke didn’t take her seriously. Didn’t think she had a snowball’s chance. She was a bakery owner in a small mountain town. She would probably always be a bakery owner, hunched over the bookkeeping or growing old and crusty at the counter of the store, maybe even learning to call customers “doll” and “hon.”
“What?” Rourke demanded after the adjuster went to his car. “What’s that look?”
“You didn’t have to say anything about the book.”
“Why not?” His guileless expression was infuriating. “What’s got your panties in a twist?” he asked.
The fact that they were men’s boxers was one problem, but she didn’t say anything. “Bestseller,” she muttered. “How stupid would it look if I went around telling people, ‘I’m writing a bestseller.’“
He looked genuinely mystified. “What’s wrong with that?”
“It’s totally presumptuous. I write, okay? That’s all. It’s up to the people who buy books to make something a bestseller.”
“Now you’re splitting hairs. It’s giving me a headache. You once told me that publishing a book would be a dream come true for you.”
He really didn’t get it. “It is a dream,” she told him fiercely. “It’s the dream.”
“I didn’t know it was some big secret.”
“It’s not. It just isn’t something I go around blabbing to every Tom, Dick and Harry. It’s … to me, it’s something sacred. I don’t need to broadcast it.”
“I don’t see why not.”
“Because if it doesn’t happen, I’ll look like an idiot.”
He threw back his head and guffawed.
She had a clear memory of herself fresh out of school, poised to leave town, telling people, “Next time you see my face, it’ll be on a book jacket.” And she’d truly believed that. “This is not some joke,” she said tightly.
“Let me ask you something,” he said. “When was the last time you thought someone was an idiot for going for her dream?”
“I don’t think that way.”
He smiled at her. There was such kindness in his face that she felt her resentment fading. “Jenny. Nobody thinks that way. And the more people you tell your dream to, the more real it’s going to seem to you.”
She couldn’t help smiling back. “You sound like a greeting card.”
He chuckled. “Busted. It was on a card I got for my last birthday.”
There was something about the way he was sticking so close by her. “Don’t you have somewhere you need to be?” she asked. “Some police-chiefing to do here in Sin City?” She gestured at Maple Street, still pristine under its mantle of new-fallen snow.
“I need to be right here with you,” he said simply.
“To pick up the pieces if I fall apart.”
“You’re not going to fall apart.”
“How can you be so sure?”
He grinned again. “You’ve got a bestseller to write.”
She thought about the ruined, blistered laptop. “Uh-huh. Here’s the thing, Rourke. The project I’ve been working on … it wasn’t on a hard drive. It was all there.” She indicated the blackened skeleton of the house, now a smoldering ruin. She felt physically sick when she thought of the box of her grandmother’s recipes and writings, which Jenny had so carelessly left on the kitchen table. Now those one-of-a-kind papers were lost forever, along with photographs and mementos of her grandparents’ lives. “I might as well give up,” she said.
“Nope,” said Rourke. “If you quit writing because of a fire, then it probably wasn’t something you wanted that bad in the first place.” He took a step closer to her. He smelled of shaving soap and cold air. He was careful not to touch her here in broad daylight with people swarming everywhere. Yet the probing way he regarded her felt like an intimate caress. He was probably still mortified by the picture on the front page of the paper. She was not exactly lingerie model material.
Then he did touch her, though not to pull her into his embrace. Instead, he took her by the shoulders and turned her to look at the burned-out house. “Look, the stories you need to write aren’t there,” he said. “They never were. You’ve already got them in your head. You just need to write them down, the way you’ve always done.”
She nodded, trying her best to believe him, but the effort exhausted her. Everything exhausted her. She had a pounding headache that felt as though her brain was about to explode. “You weren’t kidding,” she said to Rourke, “about this being a busy day.”
“You doing all right?” he asked her. “Still a five?”
She was surprised he remembered that. “I’m too confused to feel anxious.”
“The good news is, everyone’s breaking for lunch.”
“Thank God.”
They got in the car and he said, “Where to? The bakery? Back home to rest?”
Home, she thought ruefully. “I’m homeless, remember?”
“No, you’re not. You’re staying with me, for as long as it takes.”
“Oh, that’ll look good. The chief of police shacking up with a homeless woman.”
He grinned and started the car. “I’ve heard worse gossip than that in this town.”
“I’m calling Nina. I can stay with her.”
“She’s out of town at that mayors’ seminar, remember?”
“I’ll call Laura.”
“Her place is the size of a postage stamp.”
He was right. Laura was content in a tiny apartment by the river, and Jenny didn’t relish the thought of squeezing in there. “Then I’ll use this debit card at a B&B—”
“Hey, will you cut it out? It’s not like I’m Norman Bates. You’re staying with me, end of story.”
She