Killer's Prey. Rachel Lee

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      Maude straightened on the chair she had pushed behind the lunch counter, blinked as she saw her, then actually smiled. For Maude that was as unusual as Mount Rushmore moving to another state.

      “Well, ain’t you a sight for sore eyes, Nora.”

      She managed a smile. “Hi, Maude. Keeping busy?”

      “Enough to get by, which is more than some can say.” His eyes shifted as Jake entered behind her. “Evening, Chief.”

      Chief? In spite of herself, Nora turned to look at Jake. “Chief?” she repeated.

      “The town took a wild hair recently. Before you know it, we have a city police force,” Maude answered, her voice souring to her usual grumpy mood. She sniffed her disapproval.

      “Really.” Nora slid into a booth, absorbing this information, wondering if she had lost what was left of her mind. Having midnight coffee with a man who had crushed her ego and was now a police chief to boot? Yes, she must have lost the dregs of her sanity.

      “It’s no big deal,” Jake said. “The city council decided they needed a little more authority or something. I don’t know. I have six officers, is all, and we spend a lot of time cooperating with the sheriff.” He shrugged.

      “I thought you were a rancher.”

      “I still am. At the rate things are going, I may be back at it full-time soon.”

      “Why?”

      Jake smiled faintly. “It was a power grab by the city council. They didn’t like feeling that the sheriff was running everything, the town included. I sometimes think we’re a sort of auxiliary.”

      “Useful as teats on a bull,” Maude grumbled.

      Nora figured he was minimizing it but didn’t know why. “It must be expensive to have a police force.”

      “Not with federal grants. It helped swell the city budget. Maintaining it may prove to be different.”

      “So why did you do it?”

      “I was already a part-time deputy. This pays a little more. Ranching isn’t what it used to be.”

      Little was what it used to be. “Are the politics of it hard?”

      “Nah. Gage Dalton is a good man. He doesn’t mind that we help him patrol the streets in town. His budget is tight, too. And I give him someone else for the city council to holler at.”

      Maude brought them both coffee and thick slices of apple pie heavily laced with cinnamon. Nora looked around the diner, mostly to avoid looking at Jake, and felt the intervening years slip away. If it hadn’t been for some wear and tear around the edges, she could have believed she was still in high school. Red vinyl booths, a couple of battered wood tables, stools at the counter, some of which had been patched with duct tape.

      But finally she couldn’t avoid looking at Jake any longer. God, he was handsome, more handsome by far than in their youth when she had often been content to just stare at him. The years had favored him, and experience, good or bad, had etched a few faint lines.

      By contrast, she knew how she must look to him: emaciated, too pale, her once-thick blond hair now thin and lifeless. Stress and mistreatment could do that to a person. Her blue eyes, unfortunately like her dad’s, were three sizes too big for her shrunken face.

      “You’ve been through hell,” he said bluntly.

      “I don’t want to talk about it.”

      “I can understand why,” he answered. He picked up his mug and sipped his coffee. Apparently he still liked it black.

      She reached for a little container of half-and-half and poured it into hers. Then she added a second for safety’s sake. No telling how her stomach would react to the assault of Maude’s strong coffee at this time of night, especially when she was feeling wound as tight as a spring.

      Her hand was shaking, and Jake took the second creamer from her hand and poured it for her.

      “Look,” he said as he dropped the container on the saucer, “I know you have plenty of reasons to hate me. Hate this whole town, I guess, but most especially those of us you grew up with. We were merciless. But we’re not kids any longer, Nora. And most folks think you got a hell of a raw deal.”

      “Thanks,” she said shortly.

      From the corner of her eye, she saw him tilt his head. She didn’t want to look at him, didn’t want to feel again the impact of his good looks.

      He sighed audibly. “All I’m trying to say is that you may find folks here are easier to get along with than it must have seemed to you back in our school days.”

      “Really.” She tried to keep the tone noncommittal, even though she wanted to ask him what made him think she wanted to get along with anyone in this town. Funny how painful even the oldest scars could become when faced directly with their source again. In just this short period of time, her distant past had reared up to claw at her nearly as strongly as her recent past.

      But then, it all came down to the same source, didn’t it? Everything bad that had happened to her, far past and near past, had happened because she was different. Cursed, as her dad had said more than once.

      Jake sighed. Apparently the tone hadn’t been as noncommittal as she had hoped.

      “You’ve been hurt,” he said finally. “Badly. And I get as much blame as anyone. I’m sorry.”

      She glanced at him then and wished she hadn’t, because with that one look she remembered something she hadn’t allowed herself to think about in more than a decade: Jake had been one of the few kids she had grown up with who hadn’t picked on her throughout her childhood. In the end he had proved to be no better. But for many years he had refrained from the name-calling, the nasty pranks, the ugliness that had framed her days. Not until the very end had she realized that he’d thought the same hideous things about her.

      She said nothing, because she wasn’t going to ease his conscience and accept his apology. After what she had been through, apologies seemed like empty words.

      “Nora.”

      Her gazed skipped back to him, then away.

      “Nora,” he said again. “What would you think of me if we didn’t have a past? If we were meeting for the first time?”

      “I’d hate you,” she said flatly. “I’d hate you just because you’re a cop.”

      * * *

      Jake supposed he deserved that. Even without all that had happened to her in the past months, he would have deserved that. But leaving the past out of it, given what she had endured from the police in Minneapolis, he could well understand her reaction.

      He left her alone and began to eat his pie, trying to think his way through this, something he should have done before impulsively picking her up and bringing her here.

      He’d СКАЧАТЬ