kitchen.
Stepping back so Reese could enter, too, Jace thumbed through the mail sent in care of his folks. Bills for the necessities of life—electric, gas, cell phone, car insurance. He didn’t have to pay rent because he and Reese had inherited this place when their grandfather died. He’d never relied on plastic much even in Kansas City, and had even less use for it holed up out here. His only other expenses were groceries and an occasional tank of gas, plus his one luxury—satellite TV. A man had to do something day after day.
Reese left the grocery sack in the kitchen, then helped himself to a beer from the refrigerator—fair enough, since he’d brought them the last time he’d visited. After brushing his hand against Neely’s shoulder, he returned to the living room and dropped into a chair. “What have you been up to?”
Jace shrugged. “The usual.”
“Exciting life,” Reese said, his tone as dry as the Sahara in summer.
“I’m not looking for excitement.” Truth was, he wasn’t looking for anything, and he wasn’t sure that would ever change. For as long as he could remember, all he’d ever wanted to be was a cop. Since he couldn’t be that anymore, he didn’t have a clue what he could be.
“You give any thought to coming to work for the sheriff’s department?”
“Nope.”
“You give any thought to anything?” Now there was an irritated edge to Reese’s voice that had appeared somewhere around the tenth or twentieth time they’d had this conversation. Reese thought Jace had had plenty of time to get his life back on track, and he wouldn’t accept that Jace’s only plans for the future dealt with sleeping, eating and fishing. He didn’t believe Jace could walk away from being a cop.
The hell of it was, Jace couldn’t even accuse him of not understanding, because Reese had been through it before. All he’d ever wanted to do was to play baseball, and he’d lived the dream—made it to the big leagues—then had it taken away from him.
But Reese had found something else he wanted—two other things, Jace amended with a glance at Neely. The only thing Jace wanted was for life to go back to the way it had been a year ago. And since he couldn’t turn back the clock…
“You looking for an answer that doesn’t suck or just ignoring me?” Reese asked.
“I think about a lot of things.” But being a cop again wasn’t one of them.
Reese watched him for a moment, his gaze narrowed, then apparently decided to drop the matter for the time being. “Whose red car is that out there?”
“Her name’s Cassidy McRae. She’s renting Junior’s cabin.”
“Oh, yeah, I heard about her from Paulette.”
“What did you hear?” Jace could find out anything he wanted to know about his neighbor with a little effort. But he knew from experience it was better to keep Reese’s mind on something other than him, or the conversation would inevitably drift back to old discussions they were both tired of having.
“Not much. She’s from Alabama, she’s a writer, and she’s working on a book. Wanted someplace quiet where she wouldn’t be bothered.”
Alabama, huh? That wasn’t a Southern accent he’d heard this morning. But living someplace at the present time didn’t mean she’d been born there. He’d lived nearly half his life in Kansas City even though he’d been born and raised right here in Canyon County. Most of the people he knew had gotten where they were from someplace else.
What kind of book was she writing and why had she come all the way to Oklahoma to do it? Surely she had an office at home where she wouldn’t be bothered. And why did she have Arizona tags on her car if she was from Alabama?
He let the aromas from the kitchen distract him for a moment. Tomatoes, onions, beef and cheese…his mother’s lasagna. For an Osage married to an Okie, Rozena made damn good lasagna. That for supper, along with leftovers for tomorrow, was worth putting up with Reese’s bitching.
“Want to eat inside or out?” Neely asked, standing in the kitchen doorway with plates and silverware. When both men shrugged, she made the decision by heading for the door. She returned for a clean sheet from the linen closet, disappeared again, then came back once more for a bowl of salad. “Why don’t you invite your neighbor over for dinner?”
Oh, yeah, that would go over well with Ms. I’m-not-here-to-make-small-talk-with-the-neighbors. Dinner with said neighbor, his cousin the sheriff, and his cousin-by-marriage, who would need only one look at her to start visions of matchmaking dancing through her head.
“She’s not particularly neighborly.”
“Oh, she’s probably just a little shy or busy getting settled in. But she has to eat, and we have plenty of wonderful food. Go on. You be neighborly. Show her how it’s done.” Then Neely gave him a suddenly sly look. “Unless there’s some reason you don’t want us to meet her. Is she pretty?”
Matchmaking, he reminded himself. She’d tried it a dozen or so times when they’d both lived in Kansas City, with often painful results. She nagged him as much as Reese did, just in a gentler fashion, about giving up the vegetating and getting back to living, and she thought a romance with a pretty woman the perfect solution to his problem.
So he lied. “She’s old enough to be our mother. This tall.” He held his hand about four feet above the floor. “Round. Wears thick-soled shoes and nerdy glasses. Not my type.”
Apparently she thought she’d been more subtle because the look she gave him was reproving and the words she said an outright lie. “I’m not trying to get you a date, Jace. I’m talking about inviting a woman who’s new in town to share the dinner your mother so generously made for us. Do you have a problem with that?”
Not trying to get me a date, my ass. She’d tried to set him up with the checker at the grocery store just last week. Two weeks before that, it had been her secretary’s visiting niece, and the month before that, it had been the new waitress at Shay Rafferty’s café in Heartbreak. Neely wanted to fix his life, whether he was willing or not.
Scowling, he rose from his chair. “Jeez, she bosses me around in my own house. All right, I’ll invite her to dinner, but she’s gonna say no.”
“But you’ll feel better for having made the effort,” Neely sweetly called after him.
After checking out McRae that morning, he had eventually put on a shirt, but he’d never made it to shoes. He winced as he stepped on a rock on her side of the bridge, then again when he walked onto the deck. Where his was sheltered by the cabin from midafternoon on, hers got full sunlight until dusk. The weathered boards were uncomfortably hot underfoot.
From across the inlet came the sound of his screen door banging—Neely making another delivery to the patio table—so he deliberately stood at an angle that would block her view of the door, then knocked. The Unplugged version of “Layla” was playing inside—the only sound at all until suddenly the door opened a few inches. Cassidy McRae looked none too happy to be disturbed.
He wouldn’t mind being disturbed a whole lot more.
She had changed from this morning’s jeans and T-shirt into shorts and a tank top in shades of blue. Her feet were in flip-flops
