scene.
She smiled at him in a way that told him she was fully aware of his desire for her and reached for him, bringing his face close to hers. In a voice raw and seductive, she said, “Dinner can wait.”
They came together in a kiss that could have melted the polar ice caps. Taryn was fumbling with the buttons of his shirt when the phone rang.
Both stopped mid-caress. Forehead rested against forehead. Breaths came in short, heated bursts.
“Don’t answer,” she said, clutching his shirt collar with a frantic hold.
“I have to.”
The shrill sound was a counterpoint to their racing pulses. Then suddenly her eyes showed both disappointment and acceptance. “Tad’s on duty.”
“I’m on call.”
He nibbled the lobe of one ear, but the ring of the phone was fast cooling his ardor. “I’ll make it up to you.”
Taryn bussed his cheek with a stiff peck. “I’ll go check on dinner.”
Heart heavy with regret, he picked up the receiver on the small night table beside the bed.
Before he could say anything, RoAnn McGarrity’s cutting voice chimed in. “Chance? Are you there?”
“I’m here, RoAnn.” Taryn reached for her T-shirt and pulled it back on. Quietly, she left the room and a sinking feeling settled in his stomach. “If you think you’re sending me anywhere now that I’m home, you’d better think again.”
RoAnn acted as the local sheriff’s office dispatcher. Folks kept their band radios tuned to the station frequency just to hear all the local gossip she managed to air over the waves.
“I know it’s been a long day for you and I wouldn’t ask except Tad ain’t got your skill at dealin’ with an incendiary temper like Billy Ray Brett’s, and besides, he’s yankin’ old Ruby Kramer out of a ditch again.”
“What’s with Billy Ray this time?”
“He’s mutatin’ coyotes into wolves again. Swears he saw one sniffin’ at his herd.” She snorted. “As if his one mangy beast makes a herd. He needs your reassurance there ain’t no wolf-release program active in these parts. Before nightfall—if you know what I mean.”
Yeah, he knew. If he didn’t handle this now, he’d be up handling it in the dead of night, and he had other plans for his evening.
Resigned, he said, “I’ll go soothe Billy Ray.”
He found Taryn in the kitchen. She accepted his arms around her, his kiss, but a skin of cool distance had grown between them. “I’ve got to go talk Billy Ray Brett out of hallucinating wolves. I won’t be long.”
Her smile had a sad quality to it. “I’ll be waiting.”
He jostled her hips against his. “It’ll give you time to finish your surprise.”
She nodded and turned to the chili.
Reluctantly, he stepped into the late afternoon’s skin-drenching humidity and into his cruiser.
As sheriff, keeping Gabenburg safe was his job, and Chance took pride in what he did—just as his mentor, Angus Conover, had taught him. He owed Angus and he owed Gabenburg for taking him in, but it wasn’t gratitude that drove him to serve and protect as much as a genuine caring for the place and the people. Still, some days, like today when he was bone-weary tired and wanted nothing more than a quiet evening at home with his wife, he yearned for a simple nine-to-five occupation.
He shook his head and mumbled, “You’d go stark raving mad inside a week.”
He had a loving wife, a job that fulfilled him and friends who accepted him as he was. What more could a guy ask for? He and Taryn had even talked of making a baby—which would be the icing on an already sweet cake.
She was the blue sky in his life, and his greatest fear was that one day, without quite knowing how, he’d mess up, that the needs of others would take him from Taryn one time too many, that he would lose her and his life all over again.
“Sheriff One.” RoAnn’s voice squawked over the radio. “Chance, are you there?”
As good as RoAnn was at coordinating calls, he could never get her to use the proper radio lingo. Chance keyed the mike. “Sheriff One. Go ahead.”
“Sam Wentworth just buzzed me. He’s out by Gator Park and thinks he’s found the safe that was heisted from Leggett’s Antiques yesterday.”
“Tad can check it out when he’s done with Ruby.”
“You really ought to yank her license. Ruby’s a menace on the road. But does anyone ever listen to me? No. Look, Gator Park’s on your way to the Brett ranch, Chance, and Tad’s way out on the other side of town. Won’t take but a minute of your time. Oh, and since you’ll be going that way, might as well stop by Nancy Howell’s on your way home and pick up that blackberry jam she’s got for Taryn.”
Taryn would want the jam to sell at her little Bread and Butter bakery. Might as well give her another reason to smile at him when he finally made his way home again. “All right. Show me en route to Gator Park.”
“Don’t forget the jam.”
“I won’t.”
Gator Park, the Brett ranch, the Howell farm—then home. He couldn’t wait to watch Taryn’s face light up at the sight of him, to run his fingers through her soft brown hair, to get his arms around her once more.
Heading north, beyond the Gabenburg town-limit sign, land rolled into gentle hills and patches of pine forests. To the south, the terrain leveled out into grassy marshlands and drifted into the Gulf of Mexico. Ahead in a field, cattle and egrets clustered around a water tank. Here and there an oil derrick pumped. A flock of geese passed over low and honked as they crossed the highway.
The cruiser’s air-conditioning was on the fritz again, so Chance drove with the windows rolled down. The air was sticky and heavy with the odor of pine, cow dung and flood-swollen river. He took it all in and smiled. These sights and smells and sounds were all precious to him. Fifteen years ago, he’d been given a second chance at life and he wasn’t going to waste a moment of it regretting a past he couldn’t remember.
For a while he’d wondered at the blankness of his memory, at his missing childhood. Then, ten years ago when he’d joined the sheriff’s office, he’d run a set of his prints through the system. Nothing had matched. He’d felt a measure of comfort in that.
Chance signaled his exit off the highway. The Red Thunder River ran fast and hard in the spring, calmed enough to harvest tourist dollars in the summer, and turned uninviting again in the fall. Sam Wentworth claimed he was born on the river and spent most of his time on the water. If the suspects had dumped the safe in the river, it didn’t surprise Chance in the least that Sam would be the one to uncover the fact.
As Chance crested the hill off the ramp, the river appeared. The recent rains had swollen it to the top of its banks and it roared like an awakening giant, churning silt as it rushed to the Gulf. The sun
