was obvious she couldn’t come up with a reasonable lie fast enough to account for a refusal. Her reluctance was a challenge. It wasn’t often a Dalton was refused by a woman. However this wasn’t the two-step of courtship.
“It’s business,” he assured her.
“Business?” she repeated, looking dubious.
Beau wondered if she was so used to mowing men down with a glance from those blue eyes and a toss of that flaming hair that she couldn’t comprehend a straightforward business offer. “Yes. If you’re available, I thought we could discuss it over lunch.”
She looked so relieved, he was almost insulted. He concluded he must be losing his touch. True, it had been a coon’s age since he’d dated. Opening the clinic here and turning over his office in Boise to another doctor had taken up a lot of time and energy. It was a move he’d been saving and planning for, for five years.
Thinking over the past week, he didn’t think he’d given the new nurse any reason to distrust him. He hadn’t made a single untoward move during the four meetings they’d had to set up the screening program for the schoolkids.
With rueful amusement, he wondered if that was the problem—she’d expected a pass and he hadn’t delivered. The town gossips tended to paint the Daltons with the broad brush of conjecture and innuendo, recounting every escapade from their youth with delighted indignation to newcomers.
“I suppose that would be all right,” she finally agreed after taking her own sweet time to think it over.
“Good. Let’s go. I’m starving.”
He escorted her to his old pickup. She glanced at the vehicle, then at him. He couldn’t help but grin at her surprise. “The royal chariot,” he intoned, opening the door for her with a grand sweep.
The August heat, trapped in the interior of the truck, rolled over them like a blast from a furnace.
“Whew, let’s let it cool out a bit first,” he suggested. He slid into the driver’s seat and started the engine, then flipped the air conditioner on to maximum air.
She got in, fastened the seat belt and looked at him without a hint of expression on her Madonna-perfect face.
For the first time since first or second grade, he felt rattled by a female’s stare. That she expected nothing and wanted nothing from him was obvious. Puzzling, too. He’d never had such a nonreaction from a member of the opposite sex. Well, so much for the famed Dalton charm.
Laughing silently at his somewhat dented ego, he slammed the pickup door and headed for the lake. He wondered if she’d accept his proposition.
“How quaint,” Shelby murmured, entering the restaurant with its rustic wooden interior when Beau held the screen door open for her.
“Sit anyplace you like,” a young woman advised, smiling at them from the cash register. “I’ll be with you in a jiffy.”
“There’s a place by the window,” her handsome companion said, gesturing across the plank floor to the opposite side of the room. Since it was after the main lunch hour, there were only three other occupied tables at present.
Beau took her arm and guided her to a table commanding a view of the Lost Valley reservoir and the mountains beyond. When they were settled, the hostess brought menus over. “The special is barbecued beans on cornbread with salad or coleslaw. It’s delicious,” she told them. “Your waitress is Emma. She’ll be with you shortly. May I bring you something to drink?”
“Iced tea, please,” Shelby said.
While he echoed her order, she observed the scene beyond the large window. The sun emblazoned diamond dust over every leaf, every blade of grass, every ruffle of water in the lake, so that the whole world seemed to sparkle.
She sighed, filled with a sort of nostalgia now instead of the intense grief. Like the endless sweep of the waves at the seashore where she grew up, the mountains had a therapeutic effect on her soul, easing the pain of loss and the hopes that had once filled her eighteen-year-old heart.
If there was one thing she had learned since that youthful time, it was that life was relentless. She’d only to live one day at a time, then the next, and the next, and then somehow, a year went by, and another, and another.
The heart does go on.
Her companion dug some change out of his pocket. He lined up a penny, nickel, dime and quarter on the table between them. When she raised her eyebrows in question, he flicked a finger toward the coins.
“However much your thoughts are worth,” he said. “Take your pick. Or all of them.”
After the waitress delivered tall glasses of iced tea, Shelby looked over the change and selected the quarter. “It’s the Kentucky commemorative quarter,” she told him, holding it up so he could see. “My mother came from there. Her parents had a farm and boarded horses. She loves to ride and still does to this day. We always had horses when I was growing up.”
“Do you like riding?”
She nodded, then added truthfully, “Not that I’ve done much for the past ten—no, eleven—years.”
“We’ll have to see if we can’t change that. My family has a ranch near here with plenty of horses just lazing around and getting fat.”
The low, sexy cadence of his words rippled with easy affection as he mentioned the ranch. She knew he’d grown up there, raised by his uncle Nick along with five other Dalton orphans, his mother having died in childbirth and his father in an avalanche that also claimed his cousin’s parents more than twenty-two years ago. Amelia at the B and B had told her this much.
The soft aura of regret enlarged to include him. He, too, had suffered loss. He, too, had gone on and made a life for himself.
Heavens, but she was sentimental today. She laid the quarter back in the line and turned her attention to a couple who strolled along the lake path.
Her companion pushed the quarter toward her and pocketed the rest of the change. “That was for sharing your thoughts. You’ve been pensive today. Do you miss your folks?”
She nodded, letting him think she might be homesick. Baring her soul to anyone wasn’t her way.
“So why did you leave the civilized east and come out here to the wilderness?”
“I’m looking for a cowboy, of course. Isn’t that the American icon of manly courage?” Her grin wasn’t exactly sincere, but she managed to hang on to it.
“Ready?” the waitress, who looked as if she might be sweet sixteen, inquired.
Shelby ordered the special. The doctor did, too, but added barbecued beef on the side. When the girl was gone, he eyed her for a minute.
There was something about his serious manner that was appealing. He had depth to him. And a solid presence that a person could depend on.
A slight shudder rippled through her. Her husband, as youthful as she, had deserted her and their child after the first month of sleepless nights and worry. He’d been the boy next door and she’d had a crush on him for as
