lifted her gaze to meet his. “I’m just trying to get dinner finished up.”
“Tell me what I can do to help,” he suggested.
Go back to Echo Ridge.
The response immediately sprang to mind, but of course, she couldn’t say the words aloud without then explaining why his sudden and unexpected appearance in Haven complicated her life.
Instead, she only said, “For starters, you could give me back my hand.”
He loosened his grip so that she could pull her hand away without dropping the bottle. “What else?”
She gestured to the living area. “Go sit down.”
“You don’t trust me to help?”
“There’s really nothing you can do,” she told him.
“Do you want me to open the wine?”
She shook her head. “I’m going to stick with water—I’ve got work to do tonight.” Which was true, if not the whole truth.
He took his beer and moved around to the other side of the island. But instead of retreating to the living area and relaxing on the sofa, he chose one of the stools at the counter.
“So what do you think of Haven so far?” she asked, resigned to making small talk for eight minutes while the pasta cooked.
“I like it,” he said. “It’s a little smaller than Echo Ridge, but there’s a strong sense of community here.”
“There is,” she confirmed, lowering the heat on the burner beneath the sauce. “Even when I was away at school, I knew I’d come back here after graduation.”
“Summa cum laude from UCLA Law.”
She frowned. “How’d you know that?”
“I met your grandmother,” he confided.
“How? When?”
“Last weekend. I was walking down Main Street, trying to get a feel for the town, and our paths crossed. We had coffee together.”
“You had coffee with my grandmother?”
He nodded. “She introduced me to Donna Bradley at The Daily Grind.”
“You had coffee with my grandmother,” she said again.
He studied her as he tipped his bottle to his lips, swallowed. “Why does that bother you?”
“It doesn’t bother me,” she denied. “But it’s a little weird.”
“Why?”
“Because she’s my grandmother and you’re...”
“The guy you had lots of naked sweaty sex with?”
“Okay, yes,” she allowed.
“I didn’t tell her about the naked sweaty sex,” he promised.
“Thank you for that,” she said drily.
He just grinned.
And that smile did strange things to her pulse...or maybe it was the heat from standing so close to the stove.
“But I haven’t stopped thinking about it—or you,” he continued. “I applied for the job before I met you, but you were definitely a factor in my decision to accept it.”
“We weren’t ever supposed to see one another again,” she reminded him of the agreement they’d made in Boulder City.
“And yet, you went to Echo Ridge last weekend.” The surprise must have shown on her face because he explained, “You left a message with Deputy Ryker.”
She nodded. “A friend of mine from law school lives in Texas. Since I was there, I thought I’d stop by to say hi.”
“Texas is a pretty big state.”
“Chloe lives just outside of Dallas, so a side-trip to Echo Ridge wasn’t really out of my way.”
“Oh,” he said, sounding disappointed. “I was kind of hoping you’d made the trip to see me.”
The timer on the stove buzzed, granting her a temporary reprieve from the increasingly awkward conversation.
“Dinner’s ready.”
* * *
There was something on her mind.
Something more than concern about the client who’d brought her into his office a few hours earlier. When Luke Ryker told him that she’d shown up at the Sheriff’s Office, he’d hoped it was memories of the nights they’d spent together that inspired Katelyn to track him down. But she certainly wasn’t giving the impression of a woman motivated by carnal desires.
And though she kept up her end of the conversation while they ate, her thoughts were obviously elsewhere.
“Is it convenient or tiresome to live above your office?” he asked, attempting to engage her attention.
Katelyn twirled her fork in her pasta. “It’s convenient,” she said. “Certainly a lot more convenient than driving twenty miles into town from the Circle G Ranch every day.”
He’d heard of the Circle G—reputedly the biggest and most prosperous cattle ranch in all of Haven County. It was also, if he remembered the story correctly, half of the property that was the original source of friction between the Gilmore and Blake families when they settled in the area more than one hundred and fifty years before.
According to local folklore, back in the spring of 1855, a developer sold a 100,000-acre parcel of land in Nevada to Everett Gilmore, a struggling farmer from Plattsmouth, Nebraska. The same developer also sold 100,000 acres to Samuel Blake, a down-on-his-luck businessman from Omaha. Both men subsequently packed up their families and their worldly possessions and headed west for a fresh start.
Everett Gilmore arrived first, and it was only when Samuel Blake showed up with his deed in hand that the two men realized they’d been sold the exact same parcel of land. Since both title deeds were stamped with the same date, there was no way of knowing who was the legitimate owner of the land. Distrustful of the local magistrate’s ability to resolve the situation to anyone’s satisfaction—and not wanting to publicly admit that they’d been duped—the two men agreed to share the property between them, using the natural divide of Eighteen-Mile Creek as the boundary between their lands.
Because the Gilmores had already started to build their home in the valley—on the west side of the creek—the Blakes were relegated to the higher elevation on the east, where the land was mostly comprised of rocky hills and ridges. The Gilmores’ cattle immediately benefitted from grazing on more hospitable terrain, while the Blakes struggled for a lot of years to keep their herd viable—until silver and gold were found in the hills on their side of the creek and they gave up ranching in favor of mining.
“Is
