Five minutes later she was back, this time wearing a sweat suit that looked relatively new, a gold one that emphasized the unusual color of her eyes. Peeking out beneath the sweats were fuzzy booties in an astonishing hot pink. He blinked.
“No fashion sense, I know,” she remarked. She waggled a foot at him. “But they’re warm. Very warm.”
That was when he smiled, genuinely smiled, for the first time in a long, long time. “I like them. I wouldn’t advise them if you don’t want to be noticed, though.”
A peal of laughter escaped her. “We need to get something straight.”
“What’s that?”
“I’m a flaky professor. And I like the flaky part. As well as the professor part.”
“Nothing wrong with being flaky.”
The coffee finished as she popped a frozen lasagna in the oven. It looked homemade, and the thought made him instantly hungry. She brought two mugs of coffee over to the table and joined him.
“There are some things I’m not flaky about,” she said, continuing the conversation. “Like my work. There I have to be very precise. No flakiness allowed.”
“So it bursts out other ways?”
Her eyes smiled at him over the rim of her cup. “Obviously.”
“What happens now with those samples?” he asked. “Do you test them?”
She shook her head. “The state lab is sending someone down to pick them up. I don’t know where they go from there. Could be Washington, for all I know. I just don’t have the facilities in my lab to test for something like this. It’s a community college with limited equipment.”
“Given what you told me about this toxin, can I say I’m glad to hear that?”
“I’m not real keen on working with it myself.”
“But you still collected the samples.”
She waved a hand. “It wasn’t the biggest of risks. I’ll need to collect some more, though, attack a bigger area. We don’t know where that bait came from. If it was a poisoned animal, there could be trouble elsewhere, like up in the mountains.”
“You’d need more than one person to search up there.”
“Well, I can circumscribe an area, guessing how far the bait animal could have traveled. Or how far something that ate some of it might have gone. That’s a good starting point. I’ll check for other carcasses, take a few samples as I go. Then we’ll see. By the time I do that, I should have some information back from the lab. This is going to be a priority. Those samples will get tested as soon as they reach the right person.”
He nodded.
She sighed and put her chin in her hand. “It’s going to be tough, though. We’re going to be relying a lot on hunters to report anything unusual.” She closed her eyes a moment. “Enough of that,” she said, snapping them open again. “If I think too hard about it I’ll feel overwhelmed.”
“But you’re fairly certain you won’t be able to source it?”
“Not likely. Now, if the bait were wearing a tag or collar...” She shrugged.
“Would someone have that kind of a grudge against Jake Madison?”
“Wow,” she murmured. “That’s scary to contemplate. It’s possible, though. He’s the chief of police, such as it is, and his fiancée’s dad is angry with him, I hear, but to do something like this?” She shook her head a little. “Is this how you think?”
He pulled back. Tendrils of ice filled him inside. Before he could say anything, however, she spoke quickly.
“I’m sorry. That didn’t sound like what I meant. You have to understand you’re talking to a small-town girl here. We almost never have things go to that extreme. But you’re right, it’s possible. I need to think about it.”
He relaxed again, muscle by muscle, and tried to do his part to smooth it over. Here he was enjoying a woman’s company for the first time in forever, and he’d stuck his foot in it.
But it was still possible. Like it or not, this could have been a directed attack. And if that was the case, Allison could be inserting herself in the middle of something that could be deadly.
He needed to gather intel, but how the hell was he supposed to do that? Nobody in this town was likely to share much with him. He was a stranger and a total unknown.
But he remembered that sense of being watched, both out on the rangeland, and then here on her street. He trusted that feeling. It had never yet failed him, and had probably saved his life more than once. He’d be a fool to dismiss it.
Allison might be wading into deeper trouble than she had any idea. He came from a world where such things were possible. She did not. Yet just being aware of such a possibility might make all the difference.
She sort of changed the subject then, as if she wasn’t ready to deal with what he had suggested.
“So,” she said, a twinkle in those sherry-brown eyes, “how miserable were you standing out there in the cold while I took the samples?”
“I’ve endured worse. But next time it would be nice if you’d let me help.”
“That might be arranged.”
“Good. I hate feeling useless.”
She studied him, and after a minute he started wondering what she was seeing, other than that knife slash across his cheek. He liked to think he was impenetrable unless he chose otherwise, but he had the uneasy feeling that she might be able to see right into him.
“You’re young,” she said suddenly.
“Young?” The idea didn’t fit his self-image at all.
“Agewise,” she explained. “Not experiencewise. I can already tell you’ve probably had a lifetime of experiences I’ll never know or even understand. No, I was just thinking you look maybe thirty?”
“Thirty-three.”
She nodded. “So you didn’t want to stay in the military until retirement?”
“It wasn’t a choice. Medical separation.”
She drew a breath. “Wounded?”
“Yeah.” No details. The last thing he wanted was sympathy. In life you made your choices and lived with the consequences. He’d made his.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “And that probably sounds empty. But I am. I hope you’re okay.”
“Okay enough.”
She frowned faintly. He wondered if she had any idea just how revealing her face was. He enjoyed the chase of expressions across it. “I suppose I can’t ask what that means?”
