But she did, and for long, pointed seconds neither one breathed, caught in the moment, her hand melded with his.
Lucia coughed again.
The sound brought Piper back to reality. He might be the nicest guy in the world, but she’d learned her lesson. Cops were in her “high risk” category, and flirting with a neighbor?
If things went bad, you still lived next door. No way could the situation end well.
She extricated her hand, stepped back and pasted a small, polite smile into place. “Have a good night.”
He swept her outfit a quick glance and a grin. “You, too.”
Tired and surprised by his unexpected visit, she’d forgotten the faded Scooby-Doo pajama pants and matching T-shirt.
Great. She looked like a twelve-year-old. And her hair was half wet, half dry, a bedraggled mess.
She shut the door and turned.
Lucia rose from the recliner in the adjoining living room. She shot a dark look toward the door as Zach’s engine rumbled to life outside. “You want trouble again? Another broken heart?”
“Luce—”
Lucia’s firm gaze stopped Piper’s argument. “I know, I am not your mother.”
She spoke the truth. Piper’s mother had divorced her father when Piper was still in grade school. She’d moved away with a massive share of the heritage farm in her pocket, a share that put the farm in the red from that day forward. She’d never looked back.
Her father married Luce months later, his quick remarriage inciting plenty of small-town talk. He adopted Rainey as a child, bringing the beautiful girl into the fold. But when Rainey went on her wild-child sprees as a teen, tongues wagged faster. Chas and Colin were in college by then, but Piper had been here, helping hold down the fort. It hadn’t been easy.
“We have had our differences,” Luce acknowledged. “But that does not change my love for you. You had your heart broken once by an officer. And I had mine broken when they took my daughter to jail.”
“Luce, you can’t blame the police for what Rainey did.” The last thing Piper wanted to do was hurt Luce’s feelings, but where Rainey was concerned, Luce’s judgment proved faulty. “She broke the law. But she paid her price, and who knows?” Piper closed the space between them and embraced the older woman. “Maybe she’s clean now. Maybe she’s gotten her act together and she’ll come back, ready to be part of the family again.”
Luce didn’t return the hug. She stood stiff and straight, fighting emotion. “And what do we do if this happens? Trust her? Welcome her? Hand the girls over as if it is okay to leave your babies for years?” Eyes wet, she stepped back. “I don’t know what to wish for. My daughter to return? Or my daughter to stay away and leave those babies in peace?”
Piper understood the dilemma. Rainey’s teenage antics had finally resulted in prison time. She’d straightened herself out and started her associate’s degree in prison. She’d stayed squeaky-clean, no drinking, no smoking, no drugs, obeying her parole. She’d gone to church and sang with them, her beautiful voice soaring on the words of ageless hymns.
Then something had pushed the headstrong girl beyond her limits. She got pregnant, had the twins, then disappeared before the girls’ second birthday, leaving only a short note.
They’d heard nothing since. Three years of not knowing. Was she alive? Safe? Straight? Or had she fallen back into the vicious cycle that had claimed her teen years?
Piper kept it simple. “We pray. God’s bigger and stronger than any force on earth. We pray for her and for the girls. And us.”
Luce nodded, fighting emotion. “All right.” She dashed an apron to her eyes and moved toward the kitchen. “If you and Berto need help in the morning, call me.”
She said that same thing every night, because she didn’t trust Piper’s brother to show up. Chas hated the farm.
He despised being in the fields, so she put him in charge of the milk production room, where fresh, ultrapasteurized dairy products were bottled for sale under cool conditions while she labored in the hot sun. He had two people working with him, and still whined about it all, the narrow profit margins, the uselessness of tempting people with vintage-style glass bottles of fresh milk products.
Piper knew that thin profit margins beat zero-profit margins. She bit her tongue on a regular basis, not wanting to fight with her older brothers.
She loved the farm.
They didn’t.
But they couldn’t sell without her permission. Unless she went under. And no way was she about to let that happen.
Chapter Two
“Missing something?”
Zach’s questioning voice rumbled, ripe with wry humor.
Piper forced herself to maintain an outer calm she didn’t feel and looked up from a tractor seal that seemed determined to give her a hard time. She saw Zach holding the girls’ Nigerian dwarf goat, a favored pet. The brown-and-white miniature creature looked quite content in the big man’s arms. “Beansy? Where did you find him?”
“In what used to be my vegetable garden.”
First the roosters. Now the goat. Piper winced until she read the humor in Zach’s eyes. “You haven’t lived there long enough to have a vegetable garden.”
“It appears he didn’t know that. How’d he get out?”
“The better question is, where are the twins? And did they engineer his escape or escape right along with him?” She jumped down from the huge wheel and strode toward the barn door as she spoke, using the sides of her jeans as grease rags. Thin streaks of motor oil left telltale marks. “He was in your yard? And before you answer that, why aren’t you sleeping? It’s after twelve. Too hot? Or did the roosters wake you? Because I penned them and I haven’t heard them crowing, but I can block the sound. Was it them? They wake you?”
“My current dilemma is which question to answer first,” he drawled, his slow talk making a valid point. She tended to jabber in stream-of-consciousness fashion. Maybe she’d slow down someday when she didn’t have to cram thirty hours of work into a twenty-four-hour day.
“Yes, he was in the yard,” Zach continued. “My father noticed him. And I did catch a quick nap, but something’s come up. I’m taking the next couple of weeks off, so I didn’t need to get more than that today.”
“You’ll be ruing that choice tonight,” Piper supposed over her shoulder. “Dorrie! Sonya? Where are you?”
Silence answered. She reached into her pocket and withdrew her cell phone. When Lucia answered, she put out an APB on the girls.
“Berto’s got them,” Lucia assured her. “He’s giving them a ride on the hay wagon before lunch. Why? What have they done now?”
Piper wasn’t sure they’d done anything, but from the look on Zach’s face, she figured
