But she didn’t want to hear another word about moving in with a man who could propose a loveless marriage and not understand why she turned it down.
With the subject closed—at least in her mind—she took Sammy’s hand to stop him from going farther into the messy kitchen.
“Why don’t you and Dexter go into the living room and watch TV while Mama cleans up?” she said to the upturned face. “Then I’ll make some dinner, and everything will be back to normal.”
Sammy wasn’t buying it. He stuck a thumb in his mouth and shook his head. He hadn’t sucked his thumb in a long time. Not since Ben’s funeral. Dexter didn’t move from his position next to Reed, but his gray eyes remained wide and worried.
Amy’s heart pinched. She crouched down to their level. “Boys, we’re okay. The bad guys are gone.”
Sammy’s wet thumb popped from his mouth. “Will they come back?”
Amy pressed her lips together and couldn’t keep from looking at Reed. If he said one word—
“Whoever broke in wasn’t kidding around, Amy. Look at this place.” Reed made a wide arc with one arm, taking in the scattered belongings, opened drawers and spilled foods.
“They will keep trying to find that treasure.”
“Thanks a lot, officer,” she said with a tinge of sarcasm. To the boys she said, “Tonight we’ll make a tent in your room and all of us will sleep together. Just like one of Mama’s wilderness tours. You can be the guides and I’ll be the cheechako. Okay?”
Sammy nodded at the idea of Mama behaving like a green-horn, but Dexter, wise and old at nearly five, was silent.
“I’m serious, Amy,” Reed said. “You can’t stay here. You have to let me help.”
Help was one thing. Moving into his house was quite another. “No thief is going to run me and my babies out of the only home we’ve ever known.”
She and Ben had spent blood, sweat and tears remodeling this old house that her ancestor, Mack Tanner, had built for his reluctant bride more than a hundred years ago. It was old and crotchety and drafty in the brutal months, but the place had character and was filled with love and wonderful memories.
Reed shifted heavily and it occurred to her, reluctantly, that he was as exhausted by the last few months as she was. Like her, Reed would not back down. His sense of duty was legendary. And it was that sense of duty that bothered Amy. She didn’t want to be anyone’s “duty.”
“What if they come back?” he asked.
Her blood chilled at the thought. She rubbed her palms along the arms of her sweater.
“I’ll manage,” she said, with more bravado than she felt. She was single-handedly running a business, booking tour guides, dealing with love-hungry women, directing the annual church Christmas pageant and raising two little boys. She might be tired, but she could handle anything. “I’m not helpless, you know.”
Dark eyes narrowed in Reed’s rugged, weather-tanned face. “Never said you were.”
She jammed a fist on one hip. “Same as.”
Reed rolled his eyes heavenward. “You are the most exasperating…”
Amy couldn’t help smiling. “Okay, tough man, why would your house be any safer than mine?”
“Granny is there. I’m there. Cy is there. We can protect you.”
Amy scoffed. “Cy wouldn’t hurt a hot biscuit.” The malamute was gentle as a kitten.
“And—” he held up a finger as if to stop her argument “—my place sits off the road, up an incline that requires a four-wheel drive and a lot of patience to climb. It’s backed by a mountain. No one can get to you there. Come on, Amy. Be reasonable.”
Amy softened. Reed really was trying to do the right thing. He was misguided but well intentioned. “I’m not afraid to stay here.” Not much anyway. “God has always taken care of me, and He won’t let me down now.”
Reed gave one grunt that let her know what he thought about that. His brown eyes glazed over and Amy suspected that he was thinking of Ben. Well, so was she. God had carried her through the nightmare of loss and the last year of struggling to make ends meet and to keep the town afloat. Without faith in God to sustain her, she would have given up.
Reed’s gaze came back to hers. Jaw tight, he said, “Ben would expect me to take care of you.”
Amy’s hackles jumped up like barking dogs. Reed’s twisted sense of loyalty to her dead husband was the final straw.
“I said no, Chief Truscott, and I meant it.”
Reed was still stewing as he guided his Explorer back to the police station.
“She’s going to get herself hurt, and then what?” If anything happened to Amy or her boys, he wasn’t sure what he would do. A man could only live with so much guilt.
For one minute there, he’d been tempted to snatch her up, toss her over his shoulder like some barbarian, and drag her kicking and screaming to his place. Amy brought out the worst in him.
He shifted in the seat. Amy brought out something else in him, too.
“She’s Ben’s wife. End of story.”
Only, Ben was gone.
The malamute in the passenger seat listened in silence, head cocked, his one good eye sympathetic. Reed reached across to ruffle the thick, dark fur. Cy was a lot easier to talk to than most humans, and a lot more dependable. A few years back, he’d given an eye to protect his owner, a fact that had earned him the right to sleep on the foot of Reed’s bed. Reed Truscott put a lot of stock in loyalty. It was what had gotten him into this dilemma with Amy in the first place. “Aw, Ben.”
As much as he missed his good friend Ben James, he couldn’t imagine how hard the man’s death was on Amy. But Amy was a whirlwind, staying so busy with saving the world—or at least with saving Treasure Creek—that she didn’t realize how much she needed a man’s help. She’d give him an ulcer if he wasn’t careful.
With a sigh, he ran a weary hand down his face. He hadn’t slept well since this mess over the treasure had started. Actually, he hadn’t slept well since Ben’s death. Nightmares brought him back to that moment on the rapids when Ben threw himself into the icy water to rescue a capsized tourist and never returned. Some friend Reed Truscott proved to be.
With a groan, he tried to focus on something else. Thinking of his part in Ben’s death drove him crazy. He’d been helpless then and he felt helpless now. But he still believed he should have done something.
He’d never told Amy about Ben’s final moments but he replayed them often in his thoughts. Reed could almost feel the icy, snow-laden wind of that horrible January day, the slippery, snowpacked rocks beneath his feet, and the taste of fear in his mouth as he ran toward the river, sliding, falling, only to scramble to his feet and fall some more. He knew the capsized kayak was too far out and the rapids too wild and frigid, but he tried anyway. Long after Ben disappeared beneath the foam, Reed had searched by raft and on foot, and with every step, every stroke of the oar, he’d chanted his promise to care for Ben’s family.
Though a search party eventually arrived, he’d been the one to find Ben’s broken body hours later, far downstream—a sight that was burned into his memory with painful clarity. While he’d held his friend in his arms, knowing he and no one else must take the news to Amy, he sobbed his grim promise one last time.
He’d told her that night, and in the process, he proposed marriage. He thought it was the right thing to do. The thing Ben wanted. Amy hadn’t agreed.
To make matters more insane, shortly thereafter Amy had been interviewed by Now Woman magazine.