heading off this early? You know a few dozen of these folks will be here until the early hours of the morning—including me.”
“I’m not much on parties.”
“Reese says you’ll be acting sheriff while he’s gone.”
“Yeah.” He’d never officially held the position—Reese wasn’t in the habit of taking vacations—but he’d been in charge every other weekend for the past two years. He could handle it for three weeks. It wasn’t as if Canyon County was likely to develop a rash of crimes the minute the sheriff left the state.
“Watch out,” Jace said good-naturedly as Brady reached his truck. “Don’t let the paperwork get to you.”
Something had already gotten to him, Brady thought as he climbed in, and it wasn’t work. He waved goodbye to Jace, then headed for Main Street.
It took five miles, and passing a half dozen cars, to catch up to the convertible with California tags. He got only close enough to be sure it was Hallie’s car, then dropped back a fair distance.
He wasn’t going to follow her to the motel, and there were a dozen reasons or more why. She was his boss’s sister-in-law, and anyone knew you didn’t mess with a man’s family. He’d be better off home alone. She’d been hurt before. He would just be using her, and she’d been used enough.
When they reached the Buffalo Plains town limits, she headed into downtown, where a right turn would take her to her motel on the east side of town. After a moment’s hesitation, he took the first right, onto Cedar Street, and drove the block and a half to his house.
Until two weeks ago, he’d spent his entire six years in Buffalo Plains in a six-hundred-square-foot apartment on the west end of town and had been satisfied there—satisfaction being relative, of course. Then one day while on patrol, he’d seen an old man hammering a For Sale sign in the yard that fronted a small neat house. He’d stopped to ask him about it and had driven away a half hour later with the keys in his pocket and a sales contract pending.
It wasn’t a great house. It was sixty years old, one story, painted white with dark green trim. There was a front porch wide enough for a swing and a back stoop barely big enough for a man to stand on. Inside was a living room, a dining room and kitchen, one bedroom and bathroom, and an additional room he planned someday to incorporate into the living room. The floors were wood, with cracked and peeling linoleum in the kitchen, and the walls needed painting, the bathroom updating, the roof reshingling. He’d paid cash for it, and could have done the same for a house ten times its price, but he hadn’t wanted a bigger, nicer place.
After all, he hadn’t been buying a house but a memory.
One of the few childhood memories he recalled with fondness.
He pulled into the gravel driveway and parked next to his sheriff’s department SUV, then shut off the engine. Nights were quiet in this part of town. The lots were several acres, the houses distant from each other, and behind them was pasture. Forty acres of it had come with the house, but the old man had leased it to a neighboring rancher, and Brady had continued the lease. Someday, though, he planned to put up a barn and buy a few horses from Easy Rafferty, one of Reese’s friends over in Heartbreak who raised damn fine paints.
He went inside the dark, empty house, turned on the TV and settled on the sofa with a beer. Welcome to his usual Saturday night.
Most of the time he didn’t care how alone he was. Hell, he’d been that way so long it had come to feel natural. Growing up, he and his kid brother, Logan, had pretty much been each other’s best—and only—friends. They’d known other kids at school, of course, but they’d kept to themselves. It had seemed safer that way.
Then Logan had disappeared without a trace nearly seventeen years ago. Brady had gone to bed one night and Logan was there in the next room, and he’d awakened the next morning and his brother was gone. He’d taken his clothes and left a note, one line that had just about killed Brady.
He didn’t let himself think about Logan very often, but tonight it somehow seemed appropriate. Where was he? Had he even survived the last seventeen years? Had he managed to make himself over into someone who could live a normal life, have friends, laugh, be happy? Had he ever married, had kids? Did he ever think about looking up his older brother?
Probably no more often than Brady thought about trying to find him. He had run a nationwide driver’s license check a few years ago and come up with a number of Logan Marshalls, but none whose birth date matched his brother’s. He’d even considered hiring a private investigator, but had discarded the idea. Logan had had his reasons for taking off the way he did. The least Brady could do was respect them.
He flipped through the channels, watched the clock and told himself that, barring any emergencies, he was home for the night. Bored with television, he went in and took a shower, then went into the bedroom to get a pair of boxers. He wasn’t getting dressed, he told himself, even as he took a clean pair of Levi’s from the closet, and he repeated it as he pulled a T-shirt from the dresser drawer. He absolutely wasn’t going anywhere, he insisted as he picked up his wallet, pager and keys from the dresser, then started toward the front door.
He wasn’t going to the motel.
Wasn’t parking beside her Mercedes in the back lot.
Wasn’t climbing the stairs.
Wasn’t standing in front of Room 22.
He stood there, trying desperately to talk himself out of knocking. But damn it, being accustomed to being alone didn’t mean it didn’t eat at him sometimes. Some days the need for somebody got under his skin and damn near drove him mad until he’d satisfied it. That was what had sent him to the bar Thursday night—what had made him come back to the motel with Hallie. Usually that one night would have been enough to fill the emptiness that sometimes consumed him and would enable him to go back to his life for a few more months.
But this time, God help him, he wanted more, and Hallie Madison was the perfect person to give it. They’d already filled each other’s needs once. He liked her, and she… He didn’t know whether she liked him, but at least she wasn’t intimidated by him.
And most important of all—she was leaving town the next morning. He would probably see her again, but not until she came back to visit Neely, and that could be months—even years. By then she might not even remember his name.
Raising his hand, he hesitated, then rapped sharply on the door.
Seconds ticked past with no sound from inside the room. He wouldn’t blame her if she refused to open the door—half wished she would do exactly that so he would have no choice but to go home. But after a minute, maybe two, there was a rustle inside, then the door swung open.
She’d obviously showered since the party. Her face was free of makeup and her hair, still damp, was slicked back from her face, and damned if she didn’t look as pretty as she had all dressed up. She was wearing something thin and satiny held up by tiny straps and ending somewhere around midthigh, and she was naked underneath it. She looked sexy and innocent and vulnerable, and he knew if he touched her again, he would be damned to hell with no way to redeem himself.
Even knowing that, he reached out.
And he touched her.
Chapter 2
Hallie
