The Sheriff With The Wyoming-Size Heart. Kara Larkin

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СКАЧАТЬ but no one stirred inside. She could be anywhere. Shopping. Taking a walk. At a movie. He pushed the bell one more time for good measure then turned to go.

      He was halfway down the walk when the porch light came on, pouring a bluish white glow across the front lawn. He wheeled around in surprise.

      She stood behind a screen door with her face in shadow. “Hello?”

      Her voice sounded more tentative than he remembered, huskier, sexier. Different circumstances, but the same woman. Yet not the same. In daylight, she’d seemed challenging, austere, remote. In the cool quiet evening, she seemed vulnerable.

      “It’s Ariel’s dad.”

      “Oh.” She didn’t invite him in, or even unlatch the door.

      Not one to be put off by an attitude, especially one he’d had a hand in creating, Riley returned to the porch. “Have I come at a bad time?”

      “What do you want?”

      He tried to put his impressions of her into perspective. This was Laramie, a friendly little town where most people believed, as Kendra had, that harm would never touch them; most folks still didn’t lock their doors at night. She had none of that affability. He wondered if he’d killed it with his gruff manner that afternoon.

      Or maybe her caution was instinctive, gained in a bigger, meaner city. It was exactly the kind of restraint he’d give half a year’s salary to instill in Ariel.

      But directed at himself, he hated it. It acted as a barrier between him and this new neighbor, even though they lived within hailing distance of each other. All his life he’d enjoyed the security of trust among his neighbors. Now the sudden comparison between what he wanted for Ariel and what he wanted for himself annoyed him.

      The way this woman wrapped reserve around her like a cloak challenged him.

      With a grin, he relaxed his stance to put her more at ease. “I’m sorry to bother you, but Ariel lost her shoe this afternoon, and I’m trying to track it down.”

      Her reticence turned to concern in an instant. “Oh, goodness. It’s probably still in the fence. Please come in. I saw a flashlight this morning when I unpacked the kitchen, and with any luck I should be able to find where I put it. We can go straight out back from there.”

      She found the flashlight in a kitchen drawer, and by its weak glow she led him into the yard, across the lawn, through the gate, and out into the alley. She played the light across her rickety trellis fence, and when it came to rest on Ariel’s shoe, Riley’s gut clenched.

      Three feet off the ground, the shoe was wedged almost to the instep. If Ariel had fallen with her foot caught that high, her leg could have snapped like a dry twig.

      Riley jerked the shoe free, half scared, half angry, needing to vent. But he’d been a cop too long to lash out.

      “I caught her before she fell.”

      Neither the woman’s words nor her calm tone reassured him. For the shoe to have remained forgotten in the fence, she must have caught Ariel as she fell. She’d saved his daughter from a broken leg. Or worse.

      Because of her, Ariel was home safe, ready for bed and reading stories with her favorite teenage sitter. The alternatives made him shudder. The debt he owed this woman opened his heart, and he wanted to let her know the depth of his appreciation. He wanted to tear down the barriers and start to build the friendship that made for good neighbors.

      He didn’t want her to dismiss him before he’d accomplished his full errand. “I don’t know how to thank you.”

      She shrugged. “I was glad to be close enough to help.”

      He smiled, although she wouldn’t be able to see it in the dark. “Look, do you think it would be okay if I came in for a minute? Ariel’s been begging me all afternoon to visit you again, but maybe you’d feel more comfortable with that if you felt more comfortable with me.”

      She hesitated, but in the dark he couldn’t tell if she was assessing him or trying to come up with an excuse. Just as he’d given up hope, her voice broke into the still night.

      “Okay. For a few minutes.”

      Smiling to himself, he followed her back inside.

      She ushered him straight into the living room. On his first pass through her house, he’d been too focused on Ariel’s shoe to pay much attention. Now what he saw brought him up short. The room screamed of loneliness.

      A stack of cartons lined one wall, waiting to be unpacked. Against an opposite wall, several stacks of books eight or ten high formed an irregular border on the floor. The scuffed hardwood floor had no rugs; the drapes looked as if they’d hung at the windows for fifty years, and pale squares on the empty walls showed where someone else had hung their pictures. Two mismatched armchairs bracketed a hearth where a fire crackled, the only settled aspect in the room.

      The intensity of her isolation tightened around his lungs like a clamp. When Kendra died, he’d felt the way this room looked.

      “Can I get you something to drink? Coffee? Juice? White wine?”

      He wanted more than ever to know her better. “You don’t need to go to any trouble.”

      “I have water on tap, orange juice in the refrigerator, and the coffee’s decaf but fairly fresh. I’d have to open the wine.” She didn’t smile, but she recited the options with a graciousness that inclined him to believe she didn’t regret her decision to let him come in.

      Coffee seemed too businesslike. Water too mundane. Wine too intimate. “Orange juice, please.”

      She wore jeans, a long pale sweater that molded to her waist and hips, and sneakers without socks. He added defenseless to his expanding impression of her—still as remote as she’d seemed that afternoon, but fragile rather than hard.

      She served the juice in heavy deep-bowled goblets with short stems and thin gold rims. Crystal, for all he knew, and so inconsistent with the sorry state of her furnishings that he found himself staring at her.

      She drew herself straighter. “Please, sit down.”

      A little embarrassed, he sat and offered a grin he hoped would convey the favorable feelings he had for her. She curled into her chair with one leg under her and the other knee to her chest. He couldn’t decide whether she looked relaxed or defensive. Even the way she watched him over the rim of her goblet could be either speculative or cautious.

      “Maybe it’s time we introduced ourselves. I’m Riley Corbett.”

      “Margo Haynes.” She sipped her juice, then lowered her goblet with a slight smile. The firelight flickered over her face and highlighted her hair. She looked delicate and beautiful—and younger than she’d seemed that afternoon. It must have been the stark sunlight that had made him think she knew how to deal with life head-on.

      He forced his attention back to the conversation. “I’d like to explain about this afternoon.”

      “There’s no need.”

      “I think there is. I lost my housekeeper a couple of weeks ago, and haven’t been able СКАЧАТЬ