THE FEED BAG DINER at lunchtime was nearly as full of people as speculation. As usual, all six booths and the bar stools at the counter were full, and every diner had an opinion on the topic at hand. Today the topic was the raffle Jim Loftus was having. Now that it appeared he’d snookered all the people he could get away with snookering, there were hundreds of essays to be read and a decision to be made.
“I don’t even know where to begin,” Jim moaned.
Standing sentry beside a row of burgers on the grill, Jerry Lufkin, the owner of the Feed Bag, flicked the brim of his green John Deere cap and gesticulated at Jim with his spatula. “I would think that’s obvious. You oughta decide who gets the house based on who has the best-written essay. Otherwise, what was the point in asking them to write anything at all?”
Jim scrunched his doughy face worriedly. He’d been so desperate to unload his house on a sucker, he hadn’t anticipated the conundrum of having to weed through prospective victims and choose the appropriate one. “Well, it ain’t exactly as easy as it sounds, Jerry. What criteria am I supposed to use?”
“Criteria, hooey. Just pick the one you like the best.”
Jim dismissed that suggestion with a sniff. “You obviously don’t know what I’m talkin’ about. Some of these people’d break your heart. They write all kinds of hard-luck stories.”
Merlie, who was sitting in a booth with Cody and Sam, let out a derisive whoop. “Well, for mercy’s sake, don’t pick one of those! There’s enough hard luck in this town without importing more in!”
Jerry frowned. “Maybe you should pick the most imaginative one, then.”
Jim lifted his hands in a gesture of surrender. “That would be a disaster, too. You wouldn’t believe the ideas people have! One guy who wants to turn Heartbreak Ridge into a nudist colony. A woman from Chicago thinks she can open a rest home for abandoned ferrets.”
Amos Trilby, the pharmacist, laughed. “You’re all the weasel this town needs, Jim.”
Jim swiveled on his bar seat and shot the man an indignant glare. “You’ll eat those words someday, I’ll bet. Think of the opportunity my scheme could mean for this town’s commerce and development. Depending on who wins my house, this raffle could put Heartbreak Ridge on the map!”
“Or else right smack in the center of a class-action lawsuit,” Merlie joked.
“Now there’s nothing wrong with holding a raffle!” Jim replied. “I looked it up, and it’s all perfectly legitimate.”
“If it’s legitimate, why didn’t you put a picture of the place in your ads, instead of that sketch? These people think they’re gonna be winning Windsor castle.”
“There’s a disclaimer written in plain English right in the ad,” Jim retorted. “No satisfaction guaranteed.”
“Yeah, but you’d need the Hubble telescope to read it,” Sam observed.
By the grill, Jerry was mulling over the problem of how to award the prize. “Maybe the way you should judge it is just on the writing itself. You know, grammar and that kind of thing.”
That bright idea brought forth a round of cackles. “Are you kidding?” Amos asked. “Jim probably hasn’t made a subject and a verb agree since nineteen seventy-three.”
“I resent that!” Jim snapped. “Besides, grammar doesn’t even apply to some of the stuff people wrote. Several people sent in poems.”
“No poems!” Merlie’s face twisted in distaste. “Better to have a whole nudist colony here than one wordy windbag.”
As the argument continued around him, Cody wondered at the type of people who would enter a raffle for a house they’d only seen a drawing of. It was a foolish idea, yes, but unlike everybody else, he was beginning to see the appeal of foolish ideas.
Good heavens! Maybe that proved he’d been hanging around Ruby Treadwell way too much. For three Fridays straight, they’d holed up in the sheriff’s office on the basis of stories they’d concocted. According to their fabrications, Ruby had driven recklessly, behaved licentiously and wantonly disturbed the peace. So far, no one had been surprised.
“I know,” Merlie exclaimed. “Maybe the town should pay Jim the hundred dollars and turn the house into a jail annex. With Ruby Treadwell taking up residence in the cell we’ve got now, the next person who gets arrested won’t have a place to stay.”
All eyes were suddenly on their booth, and Cody froze defensively. “Ruby hasn’t taken up residence. She’s just been unlucky getting caught lately.”
Snickers came from behind him in the general direction of Amos’s table. Times like these Cody wished there was someplace to eat where people had private conversations instead of hollering at each other across a diner.
“Some folks are speculatin’ that she’s hopin’ to get lucky with a certain sheriff’s deputy,” Jerry informed him as he flipped a grilled cheese.
Cody’s face burned. His uncle was staring at him assessingly. Was Sam suspicious?
Then again, how the heck could he not be suspicious?
“That’s pure foolishness,” Cody said.
Jim—no doubt ecstatic to have the diner’s attention turned away from that scam of his for once—sent Cody a sly smile. “Or maybe a certain shy sheriff’s deputy has discovered a yen for a woman with a wild streak….”
“Me and Ruby Treadwell?” What Cody had intended as a belly laugh came out as a nervous chuckle.
Sam attempted to calm everybody down. “Give the kid a break. Cody here is doing his duty.”
“Why, sure!” Amos added. “Merlie even said he told her he’d rather spend time with a mean old dog than Ruby Treadwell.”
Sometimes Heartbreak Ridge felt like a sciencefiction movie. You said one thing and your words came back to you in completely alien form.
Cody quickly gulped the rest of his burger.
Apparently, his and Ruby’s ruse wasn’t going over as well as he’d hoped. The two of them were going to have to quit or jaws would never stop flapping. Friday he’d tell her that this was absolutely the last night they could spend in jail together.
Funny, he should have been relieved at the idea of getting Ruby out of his hair, but he wasn’t. Not at all.
Of course, he didn’t see that their efforts were proving very useful, anyway, from Ruby’s point of view. Her brothers hadn’t loosened up or kicked her out of the house after three Fridays straight of being called in at three a.m. to pick her up. The brothers worked in shifts, so Cody never had to deal with the same brother twice. At this rate, it would take forever for the patience of any of them to tucker out. No wonder Ruby was so frustrated!
He got up and slapped his money next to the cigar box that doubled as Jerry’s cash register. Naturally, his departure did not go unnoticed.
“Gee, Cody, hope we didn’t hurt your feelings,” Amos hollered after him.
“Heck,” Jerry added, reaching over to slip the money into the box. “Nobody around here would think you’d seriously consider hooking up with that troublesome Treadwell gal, anyways.”
“She’s getting worse and worse,” Amos observed, causing Cody to slow his steps. “You know she came into my drugstore and asked for red hair dye? Not auburn, mind you.” Amos took pride in knowing exactly what was stocked on his shelves. “We’ve got plenty of attractive shades in auburn. But no, she wanted red. Now what would she want to dye that hair of hers red?”
“There isn’t much left of her hair anyway,” Merlie said. “And what’s there looks like she cut it off with nail scissors.”
Jim shook his head. “I pity the poor man who makes the mistake of falling in love with that gal.”
Jerry laughed. “That’d be a disaster, all right.”
“Especially in this town,” Merlie added.
Cody wanted to scream and was glad when his uncle stood and followed him to the counter.
“That heartbreak superstition bit is pure foolishness,” Sam said, “and don’t go enumerating the number of failed marriages and tragic accidents that have taken place here, either. Shelby and I are living proof that a romance can work out.”
Jerry’s gloom looked unrelieved. “You’ve only been married three months, Sheriff.”
“Three months and they’re still like newlyweds,” Merlie said with a laugh.
“Early days yet,” Jim said ominously.
Cody put his foot down. “Sam’s marriage is fine, and there’s nothing—I mean nothing—going on between Ruby and me.”
He and the sheriff walked out of the diner and parted ways. Cody was too shaken up to talk to Sam now. He feared his uncle might notice how nervous the speculation in the Feed Bag had made him.
Because the terrible fact of the matter was, he sometimes did think of Ruby in romantic terms—just in his daydreams, of course. Unguarded moments of pure lunacy. Then again, he’d had all sorts of crazy ideas flit through his head at one time or another. Surely his occasional illicit thoughts about Ruby weren’t any more psychologically worrisome than his having wanted to be an astronaut when he was ten.
He stood on the sidewalk of Main Street, staring at the drugstore. Did Ruby really want to dye her hair red? That would be a shame! He liked her dark unruly mop and how the short tendrils looked that time they had glistened when wet….
There he went again! Maybe everybody was right, and he was in more danger than he knew. It was probably a good thing he’d have to tell Ruby this would be their last Friday night in the jail. He needed to jump off the sinking ship while the lifeboat was still in swimming distance.
He looked down the street toward the grocery store. Speaking of lifeboats…Leila Birch would be working at the Stop-N-Shop today. If he went in and bought a pack of gum, he could probably talk to her, maybe flirt a little, even. He might get these fanciful thoughts of Ruby out of his head.
His feet started moving in the direction of the grocery, but before he’d covered two blocks, he was stopped by a wall of Treadwells. All four of Ruby’s brothers—Bill, Buck, Lucian and Farley—stood before him on the sidewalk, arms crossed, stony expressions on their faces.
“Hold it right there, Tucker,” Bill commanded.
Cody froze. For a moment, he felt as if he were stuck in an old West movie, facing down the Daltons or the James brothers on Main Street. But Ruby’s brothers weren’t outlaws; they were decent, law-abiding citizens…who all just happened to be ex-defensive linemen.
The four brawny siblings had the same dark coloring as Ruby, but how could the same family that produced petite Ruby also produce these four incredible hulks? It was even a little hard to tell them apart. Of course, Cody never forgot the face of a man who’d almost strangled him, so he was pretty good at picking out the oldest brother. Buck was the friendliest of the older two, but then he and Cody had played basketball together in school. Of the four, Lucian was the easiest to identify. Like a man living in perpetual hope of a duck hunt, Lucian always wore camouflage. Farley, the youngest, wasn’t distinguishable by his looks so much as by his personality. He was the hotheaded one, the argumentative one. Cody had pulled him out of fights before. Farley looked like he was spoiling for a fight with him.
Cody twisted his lips into a nervous smile. What could they want with him? He tried to think of the rosiest scenario. “Say, if ya’ll are wondering about your chickens, they’re all doing real well. Why, I’ve got more eggs than Carter’s has pills. In fact I—”
Buck, the second oldest, interrupted him. “There’s talk around town about you and Ruby.”
Cody’s face felt hot. Not this again! “Ruby can tell you it’s not true. Just gossip.”
Farley glowered. “What do you mean? That you don’t like our Ruby?”
“Oh, no,” Cody answered quickly. “Ruby’s a…well, she’s a very interesting young lady.”
“Good,” Buck, the second-in-command, said. “’Cause we’ve got a plan for you two.”
Cody gulped. “Plan?”
Bill nodded. As leader of his clan, he stepped forward and offered Cody their proposal. “We think Ruby’s seemed a lot better lately. We think maybe it’s on account of you.”
Cody felt the blood drain out of his face. This was definitely not the impression he and Ruby had hoped to make! “You guys have this all wrong. Ruby doesn’t seem to be doing well in Heartbreak Ridge at all. Haven’t you noticed all the trouble she’s been getting into? I think it’s a sign that she’s unhappy.”
Lucian smiled. “Really? We think it’s a sign that she likes you.”
“Me?” His voice was a squeak.
The four nodded in unison.
“Oh, no, that can’t be.” He began to sweat. How could he and Ruby have botched their plan so completely? “Ruby just sees me as some kind of Dudley Do-Right Boy Scout nerd. I’m not her type at all.”
Bill’s lips hinted at a smile. “We think she’s been raisin’ all this hell on weekends ’cause she wants to be around you.”
Cody shook his head violently. “Well, that’s just plain wrong,” he blurted, forgetting for a moment that he was arguing with four men whose combined muscle power would equal that of the Hoover Dam. “’Sides, you all don’t want her around the jail all the time. You never know what kind of rough sorts will be hanging out there.”
Farley crossed his beefy arms. “She told me you were usually the only one there.”
“Yeah, but what if someday we actually catch a real criminal, or even a serial killer?”
“In Heartbreak Ridge?” Buck laughed. “More likely you’ll find a serial cow tipper.”
Farley stepped forward, obviously tired of arguing. Or maybe he was just gearing up. “Are you saying you don’t like Ruby?”
Cody wasn’t sure which answer would be least likely to result in violence. “Of course I do, but—”
“Then what’s your problem?” Farley asked.
Cody was speechless. His problem? “I don’t even know—”
“Listen, Cody,” Bill said, cutting him off. “We’re not trying to pressure you or anything. We just want you to ask our sister out on a date.”
And the brothers Treadwell didn’t appear to be in a mood to argue the matter.
POOR CODY looked like a truck had hit him.
“Is something wrong?” Ruby asked.
“No, nothing,” he answered tersely.
He’d also been as prickly as a barbed-wire fence all night.
Ruby tilted her head and regarded him more closely, not that she didn’t know every angle of that good-looking mug of his by now. He was worried.
Seeing him unhappy made something tug deep inside her. In all her years, she’d never thought she’d develop a yen for a goody-goody like Cody Tucker, but every Friday night she came here and mooned at him. She had to admit, being in a cell with Cody a few hours a week took a little of the sting out of being stuck in Heartbreak Ridge. Not that she was in love with him or anything, but he was definitely easy on the eyes.
More surprisingly, he’d turned out to be the best friend she’d ever had in Heartbreak Ridge.
He laid down a card, the ten of clubs.
“There is something wrong,” she declared irritably. She hated secrets!
“Why?”
“Because any idiot could have guessed that I’ve been hoarding clubs, and yet you put down the ten of clubs anyway, and now I’ve won my fifth straight gin in a row!”
He winced as he watched her slap down her fistful of cards, which just proved that something fishy was going on. Cody was such a good loser he usually showed no reaction when she whopped him, unless it was admiration for her skill at cards. Being a graceful loser was probably right up there with good citizenship in the Scout manual.
“I’m sorry I haven’t been able to concentrate tonight.”
“Well, why not?”
She was beginning to feel a little prickly. All these weeks of sitting around on Friday nights, playing cards and eating sandwiches and laughing it up, Cody had never treated her as anything more than a pal. In fact, Cody Tucker was probably the first man she’d been around for any amount of time who didn’t try something gamy on her. Sure, his hand had bumped into her chest, but that certainly didn’t count. Of course, she didn’t exactly want him to pounce on her, but his gallantry in the face of their long Friday nights on the cozy jail cell cot wasn’t exactly building her ego to Olympian proportions, either.
“To tell you the truth,” he admitted, “I’ve had something else on my mind.” He rubbed a hand worriedly through his thick blond hair.
The hair her fingers still itched to gambol through.
“Well, spit it out. Even I get tired of winning all the time.”
He nodded, his face as sober as a judge’s when pronouncing a particularly unpleasant sentence. “You’re not going to like this, Ruby, but this has to be our last Friday night in the jail.”
Her heart stopped. The very idea of not coming here anymore left her panicky. “Why?”
He shrugged. “The thing is, people in town are talking.”
She deflated with relief. “Oh, is that all!”
“All?” Cody straightened.
“Heck, people have been talking about me since I wore my Big Bird print bikini to kindergarten on picture day.”
“Well, I’m not used to it,” Cody said. “I was in the Feed Bag the other day and people were saying all kinds of things about us. They think we’re doing this on purpose!”
“And what did you say?”
“I told them that was nonsense.”
She nodded approvingly. “Good. So what’s the problem?”
If thunderstruck had a face, it was his. “The problem is, we are doing this on purpose.”
“But why would anyone suspect that you’re helping me get out of town?”
He looked at her meaningfully. “That’s not what they’re thinking, Ruby.”
She tilted her head. “You mean…they all think we’re using the jail as a love nest?”
“Yup.”
She laughed.
Dark red stained his cheeks. “What’s so funny?”
“People! They get such crazy notions.”
“I don’t see what’s so crazy—it’s a logical assumption when you think about it. After all, you’re a good-looking woman, and I’m only human.”
She wondered about that. Last week she’d worn a halter top with a plunging neckline, and he’d barely seemed to notice her! “You really think I’m good-looking?”
“Because when I came in with my hair dyed orange I could swear you shuddered.”
“I did not…well, maybe just a little. I was expecting red, not orange.”
She moaned. “So was I.”
“I told you it looks really pretty.” He cocked his head and grinned. “Well, as pretty as orange hair could look. It’s not exactly natural.”
She sighed. “Not outside a big top, no.”
The hair was meant as a ploy to make her brothers think she was really going round the bend, or at least to make them want to get her out of town so she wouldn’t embarrass them further, but to her shock, they’d taken her Bozo dye job like champs. Farley had even said it fit her vibrant personality. And since she and Farley were the closest in age, he was usually the most touchy about her appearance, because he was the one who had borne the brunt of her oddball behavior during school.
“I thought you were pretty even before you turned your hair orange,” Cody blurted.
She was stunned. In fact, this belonged in the headlines. Straitlaced, upstanding Cody Tucker thought she was a dish?
He swallowed. “I think I’d better tell you something, Ruby.”
She leaned forward, practically giddy with anticipation. Was he going to tell her he liked her? Was he going to ask her out?
She knew she shouldn’t want him to. It didn’t really fit with her plan of escaping Heartbreak Ridge and embracing a whole new life…but right now an embrace with Cody seemed pretty tempting, too.
Ask me, she thought, signaling frantically with her mental radar. Just spit it out!
“Your brothers came to see me.”
His words stopped her cold. “My brothers?”
He nodded. “Bill, Buck, Lucian and Farley.” The whole crew, as if she could have forgotten their names! “They cornered me downtown and commanded me to ask you on a date!”
Her blood pressure spiked to danger levels. Of all the stunts her brothers had pulled, this had to be the most mortifying. “They what?”
“They think I would be a good influence on you,” he said miserably.
She planted her fists on her hips. “Those herring heads! No wonder they’ve been so complacent about me being stuck in jail every Friday night. They think you’re a gentleman!”
“I am a gentleman,” Cody retorted defensively.
She bristled. “I know that. We’ve been sitting on this bed for a month and you haven’t so much as touched me!”
A look almost like anger came over him. “Of course not.”
“Well, why not? Were you just spinning a yarn when you said you thought I was pretty?”
“I wasn’t lying.”
“Well, then?”
He lifted his chin. “A man doesn’t just paw a woman because he thinks she’s good-looking.”
“The ones I’ve known do.”
He rolled his eyes. “Apes out at the Chugalug, maybe. You shouldn’t be hanging around that place, anyway.”
She hooted. “Now you sound like my brothers! No wonder they want me to go out with you!”
“Well, now that I know about strange men groping you all the time, I don’t blame them.”
“Thanks for the concern, Cody, but the last thing in this world I need is another overbearing sibling.”
He grabbed her by the shoulders. “Will you stop getting all mad and prickly all the time and just listen? I have a plan that might actually get you out of the mess you’re in.”
She was trying to listen, but all she could think about was those hands encircling her arms. She’d never guessed the Boy Scout was so strong, or that a mere touch could make her go all noodly.
She swallowed with effort. “My first plan didn’t work out so well.”
“Well, plan B might just do the trick.”
“Plan B?” she asked, raising a brow in amused interest. “Okay, what’s your big idea?”
“Let’s give them what they want.”
“What?”
“Let’s go out on a date.”
So he was asking her…but only because her brothers had put the squeeze on him. Only because they needed a plan B.
The moment was less than a romantic thrill. Of course, it was hard to be swept off your feet by a man whose arm was being twisted.
“What would that solve?” she asked. “If you’re worried about people talking about us, the rumors will really be flying around town if we’re seen out together.”
He let go of her, got up and started pacing the length of the little cell. His businesslike manner caused another twinge of disappointment in her. “But that’s my point—people are talking anyway. Why not let them talk and use it to our advantage?”
She took a good gander at Cody’s broad shoulders and knew immediately what kind of advantage she could make of those, but she doubted that’s what he had in mind.
Or maybe he did. At that possibility, her heart skipped a beat.
“Suppose we did this,” she argued. “Doesn’t going out with you defeat my whole purpose? My brothers obviously have come to the conclusion that you’re Mr. Right. I’m not in this to make my brothers happy, you know.”
“No, you’re in it to make them loosen up and let you live your own life. So instead of rebelling so that they’re watching you all the time, why not do what they want for a change?”
“Ah, I see. So you think that after a date or two, they’ll chill out and leave me alone, and I can go flitting off to wherever I want without having to worry about them.”
“Right.”
“You don’t know my brothers! They might think you’re the bee’s knees, but they’re still going to watch us like hawks.”
“Why would they do that?” Cody asked.
She crossed her arms. “Because in high school I went out with all sorts of guys they hand-picked, and they still managed to foul up my every stab at romance. Imagine being at a drive-in with a guy you think is the greatest thing since sliced bread and then discovering that your four brothers are two cars behind you. It’s humiliating!”
Cody absorbed the information. “This would be different.”
“How?”
“For one thing, you’re not in high school any longer.”
She sputtered out a laugh. “Tell that to the fearsome foursome!”
“All right then, so they still think of you as their kid sister. But they can’t think of me that way.”
She smiled patiently. “No, but with your spit-and-polish reputation, they probably see you as the next best thing to a chastity belt.”
“Then they’re wrong.” Before she could wonder what he meant by that provocative assertion, he went on. “Besides, there’s another way that the situation is different than when you were in high school.”
She looked up, surprised to find him close enough that she could practically feel the heat emanating from his body. “What?”
“You don’t think I’m the greatest thing since sliced bread. Your brothers will eventually realize they don’t have to watch us because there’s not much chance that we would lose our heads.” He tipped her chin with his thumb. “Is there?”
She looked at his full lips and felt her heart flop uncomfortably in her chest. Her mouth was dry, and she darted out her tongue to moisten her lips.
He stared at her long and hard, so intently that his blue eyes seemed to see right through her.
Fighting off a feverish rush, she answered, “No, we won’t lose our heads.”
He dropped his arms. “That’s what I thought.”
She ducked her head, hoping he wouldn’t be able to detect the burning in her cheeks. Good Lord, she’d been around Cody too long—she was beginning to blush, too! She moved away on wobbly legs.
Cody leaned against the wall, looking more incredibly sexy than she could remember. She was supposed to go out on dates with that and restrain herself? It suddenly seemed like a tall order—like spending five hours staring at a banana split and not taking a bite.
She suddenly remembered something. “When you first suggested this plan, you said we should use it to our benefit.”
He nodded. “So?”
“So, I can see what I’m going to get out of it—my freedom, I hope. But what could you possibly have to gain by going out with me?”
He shrugged. “Don’t worry about it.”
“But I don’t want to make you feel used.”
He set his jaw rigidly and looked away. “Actually, I didn’t want to tell you this, but I’m sort of using you, too. See, there’s a girl out there who hasn’t noticed me, and so I thought if she saw me out and about…”
“I get it. The old the-grass-is-always-greener philosophy.” She looked at him with keen interest. “Is the woman Leila Birch?”
He lifted his shoulders. “I’d rather not name names.”
It wasn’t hard to guess anyway, since Leila was the only other single woman in town. She felt a tug of disappointment in her heart, but she supposed it was for the best that Cody had his eye on another woman since she was unavailable. Or would be soon, if plan B worked.
She reached out her hand to him. “Partners in crime?”
He grinned. “Then you’ll do it?”
“Sure,” she said. “What do I have to lose, except my virginity?”
His eyes widened in alarm.
“Not with you,” she added hastily. “I only meant…eventually.”
“Oh!” Looking unflatteringly relieved that he wasn’t the one she was counting on to relieve her of her maidenly burden, he reached out and grasped her small hand in his big warm one. Ruby had to grit her teeth to tamp down the fluttery feeling beating to life in her.
“Partners,” he said.
But the way her body reacted to his husky voice and innocent touch, she feared that keeping their outings strictly platonic was going to be next to impossible.