He drove home in silence, and it felt like a heavy silence. She followed him into his house and he said, “Do you want a drink?”
“A drink? It’s after one. I have to get up in a couple of hours.”
He looked as though he wanted to argue, but merely nodded. “Come on. I’ll tuck you in.”
“No. I need to go.” From being one of the best evenings of her life this was fast turning into one of the worst.
She grabbed her bag. He stopped her before she got to the door. “Am I going too fast?” he asked her, looking both hurt and confused, and so seriously delectable that she wanted to drag him back into his bedroom and take things even faster.
But she couldn’t. She shook her head sadly, “Too complicated.”
He looked as frustrated as she felt. “Okay, so your dad deals drugs. I hate that he does. But he’s in a different country. Not my jurisdiction.”
“But if he gets busted, and finds out I’m seeing a cop? He’ll blame me.”
“He should blame himself for breaking the law and spreading misery and addiction.” His words were terse, his eyes the color of steel.
“What if they needed evidence to convict? How do I know you wouldn’t try and convince me?”
“I guess you’d have to trust me.”
She gnawed her lip. “My mom, my siblings, if any of them thought I’d betrayed Dad I’d lose them. Don’t you see?”
And the way he looked at her and nodded, she could see that he did.
She barely slept for what was left of the night and when she did it was to have one of those dreams where a dark force was chasing her and she couldn’t run fast enough. She woke with her heart pounding and a feeling of disorientation, then reality reasserted itself. She knew exactly where she was and how foolish she’d been.
She rehearsed a cool and professional morning greeting for James when he came into Sunflower, but all her rehearsals and orders to her cheeks not to blush were wasted.
James didn’t come in.
Not in the morning.
Not for lunch.
Not for an afternoon coffee.
Not once.
As she locked up, she felt the grittiness of fatigue behind her eyelids and the drag of sadness. She’d planned to stop by Iris’s house on her way home as she did most days but she didn’t have the energy for Iris’s kind eyes that missed nothing. Iris also had a quality about her that made a person want to unload their troubles. Since she was also James’s sister, she was the worst person for Kim to unload on. Besides, Kim never shared her troubles. She’d learned long ago to keep her head down and her mouth shut. Never get involved.
Until she came to this crazy town and somehow got tangled up with the Chances, that attitude had kept everybody she cared about safe. Now she’d gone and fallen for the sheriff, of all people, and love had made her crazy.
She heard the jangle of the Sunflower door chimes as she shut the door with more force than necessary, like someone laughing at her from inside the door.
Love?
Where had that word even come from?
She didn’t love James. He was a distraction, a gorgeous, kind, funny, strong, decent man who made her weak at the knees, but she didn’t love him.
Did she?
She’d never felt this way in her life. As she thought about moving on, never seeing James again, that familiar heaviness pressed on her chest. Oh, no. This feeling, this up and down, happy and sad, wanting to see him all the time, thinking about him, wondering what he was doing. Wanting to see that special expression in his eyes when he looked at her.
That wasn’t love, was it?
As she trudged to her car she had to accept the horrifying possibility that she, Kimberly Parker, whose father was a drug dealer, was in love with the sheriff.
Her shoulders hunched. There was no one around to hear her one word acknowledgement of finding herself in love for the first time in her life.
“Crap!”
Too complicated? What the hell was wrong with the woman? James couldn’t stop thinking about the way Kim had looked at him with big, guilty eyes as she was heading out of his door and told him being with him was too complicated.
What was complicated about two people who liked each other spending time together? What was complicated about two people who liked each other and had blisteringly good sex spending time together?
When he thought of the all-too brief time they’d spent in his bed, which he did far too often for a man with a jurisdiction to protect, he thought the sex was more than just physical. Made him feel like a fool to even think that way, but when they’d been naked and entwined together, moving as though they were dancing to the perfect melody, they’d shared more than skin to skin contact and earth-shattering climaxes. He felt that he’d reached her on a much deeper level.
You couldn’t hold a woman while she trembled in ecstasy, looking into her eyes, and not see into her deepest places. Most women he’d slept with closed their eyes or turned inward when they climaxed, but not Kim. She’d held his gaze with her own and he’d watched as her lips trembled on a cry, as her body had quaked and spasmed around his. Her eyes had grown brighter so he was reminded of stars, and, as his own climax started, he hadn’t been able to turn his gaze away, either, opening himself to her completely, letting her see everything he was and had been and ever would be.
At least, that’s how it had felt at the time. Now all he felt was a fool. He’d fallen for a woman who’d been skittish from the start. She’d looked so pretty and waif-like, so lost somehow that the need to protect had made him want to slay her dragons and ride her home on his white charger.
But the dragon was her own father. What would Kim do to protect her dad, even though he was on the wrong side of the law?
He wondered if she’d even stay around long enough for Iris to get back on her feet, or whether she’d pack her old heap of a car and hit the road one night, with nothing but the moon to guide her. If he saw her driving away, he half hoped he’d have the strength not to try and stop her.
One thing he could do was not spook her anymore, for Iris’s sake and that of his tiny niece and nephew. So, he drank the station coffee, and that was a sacrifice in itself. Instead of steaming fresh morning glory muffins, he hit the Old Mill diner and ate pancakes. Just wasn’t the same. Somehow, not following his usual morning routine with a stop at Sunflower threw off his whole day. He felt like he wasn’t quite firing on all cylinders.
July 4th was only a few days away so he drove to the fairground where the battle re-enactors were practicing. Sure enough, he found a straggling bunch of mostly old guys parading around with guns. One old boy gamely shouldered his musket, then moved his walker along a foot or two, then had to readjust his rifle. He was slightly concerned to see what looked like a black canon on wheels. He hadn’t reckoned on field artillery.
He was about to head closer and take a look when his radio sounded. Connie said, “I need to take my lunch hour and the deputy’s off somewhere. He’s not answering. You coming in or should I lock up?”
Hidden Falls’ Sheriff’s Office might not be the most advanced law enforcement operation in the country but he drew the line at locking up the place over lunch hour. Instead of heading down to see what was going on with the reenactment group, he said, “I’m on my way. Give me five minutes,” and headed back to the station.
July in the Pacific Northwest could be as rainy as November, and frequently was, but this year, July the fourth dawned sunny with not so much as a wisp of cloud in the sky. As James headed to the fairground, he tried not to think about how good a Sunflower coffee would taste right now. It was going to be a long day and the coffee he’d brewed himself hadn’t set him up the way Sunflower coffee did, especially when he added a couple of muffins.
But he was sticking to his guns. If Kim thought being with him was too complicated then he’d leave her be.
He was on hand to see the end of the 5K race, happy to see Geoff in the top ten finishers. The pancake breakfast, under Daphne’s direction, was running smoothly. He accepted a plate of pancakes and joined a table, making small talk with his community.
He had half of his attention on the day and half on Kim. He’d never, ever been the kind of man to pester a woman who’d turned him down.
The fact that Kim had turned him down after some of the best sex of his life definitely soured his mood. If they’d never become intimate he could put the entire incident down to unrequited lust. It happened. Not all that often, if he was honest with himself. Usually, in his life, when he’d felt lust it had been returned. With interest.
And Kim could throw up her hands and cry ‘complicated’ as much as she liked, but he’d been in that bed with her and experienced the almost magical connection between them and he knew she’d felt it too. Sex, the first time with someone new, was almost always a little awkward as each partner felt their way around the other.
He tried to make any woman who was kind enough to share his bed feel special, to put her pleasure first. He was fairly certain that he’d succeeded at least most of the time. But with Kim he hadn’t even had to work at it. The natural way they’d moved together, the unspoken connection, the held gazes, the explosive climaxes, that had been a whole new level of pleasure. If they’d been that good their first couple of times out, he couldn’t imagine how great they’d be together with a bit of practice.
Well, yes, he could. He had thought of little else since the sexiest baker he’d ever met had walked away from him.
Maybe, on some level, he was hoping that if he left her alone, she’d come to him. So far that hadn’t happened.
Why couldn’t her dad have chosen to be a plumber, a bricklayer, a fireman, an astronaut, any one of a thousand professions that would leave Kim free to love him? To trust him.
Loreen had taken her duties as media liaison seriously, he saw. Not only was a photographer from the Hidden Falls Gazette shooting pictures, but she had a cameraman from the local news station following her as she interviewed some of the runners and a family happily munching on pancakes.
His deputy was walking around the kids’ attractions so James decided to stroll over to where the battle re-enactment would take place in the big field behind the fair.
As he got closer, he heard the drums.
War drums.