*Mark shoved his chair back from his desk in the cramped, single-room office. He looked up at Paul, who sat at the desk across from him.
“Well, so far there’s Everman, Evadale, Everwood, and Evers,” he said, tossing his pen down on the desk.
Paul shook his head. “That’s a lot of ground to cover when we don’t even know if the doctor knows where Laura is. Maybe we should check with Alec to see if he wants to spend that kind of money to hunt down a lead that’s thin, at best.”
Mark raised his hands. “Not it. I called him with the last bad news. Your turn, pal.”
Paul uttered a curse but picked up the phone to make the call. Neither of them liked dealing with Alec Hall. Dealing with that man was more dangerous than sleeping with a venomous snake in your bed, but he paid good money. A lot of it.
While Paul talked to Alec, Mark began to narrow down the search. He looked up each town, trying to decide if any could be ruled out. Two of the towns didn’t have a website, and the others’ sites didn’t give any clue as to whether it would be the kind of area that would have a ranch in or near it. All of them looked to be far enough away from the larger cities that a ranch was a possibility. So far, he wasn’t having any luck narrowing down their choices.
Paul put his phone down. “Wants us to check them all out. Every one of them.”
Mark groaned without taking his eyes off his computer screen. He opened a new window and began to buy plane tickets to Austin, Texas.
“I’ll get tickets. You book a rental car. We’ll fly into Austin and work our way across the state. Let’s start with Everman and Everwood. Those seem closest to what Pollyanna remembered. Evadale is Eva not Ever, but she could have gotten mixed up and if it was Evers, it seems like she would have remembered that and not thought it was Ever-something.”
Paul’s raised eyebrows said he didn’t believe Pollyanna was capable of that level of thought any more than Mark did.
*
Cade watched Laura laugh with his friends, and couldn’t believe how much she’d changed since she’d come to the ranch. As they sat at a corner table at Pies and Pints, he thought about how much more relaxed she’d been since the day they went into town. It seemed as though a wall had come tumbling down after Laura saw the support the town gave her. Even Cade had found himself forgetting there was anything unusual about her situation.
Well, except for the fact that she was drinking club soda because of the baby she was carrying when everyone else was sharing a pitcher of beer over their pizza. No one seemed to mind. Alice and Stacey, two women who hung out in the group of friends that Cade and Shane generally saw a few weekends a month, had asked Laura a bit about her plans for the baby when they first arrived. Baby names and plans for a nursery and so on.
Laura had ducked out of those questions tactfully. Cade knew she still wasn’t ready to commit to staying, much less painting the room May kept pushing on her as the nursery. But, he thought she was getting closer. She’d visited the clinic and seen the midwife for a checkup after being assured she wouldn’t have to show ID to anyone, or use her real name if she preferred not to have it recorded.
Watching her now, Laura was animated and happier looking than he’d ever seen her as she listened to Stacey’s boyfriend, Grant, tell a story about Cade and Shane’s propensity for cow tipping when they were younger. She turned wide eyes on him.
“You went cow tipping? I can’t believe you would do that!”
Cade winced. “We were young and stupid and completely convinced we could get away with it. When Dad found out, he sent us over to that farm to muck stalls and clean water troughs and do all the dirtiest chores they could think of for a month. Needless to say, it’s not something I’d do nowadays. Scares the poor cows half to death,” he finished with a cringe.
“Doesn’t stop teenagers from doing it now any more than when you did it back then,” came John Davies’ voice behind him.
Cade swiveled in the booth to see his friend watching him and Laura warily. “Am I forgiven for grilling Laura yet, or do I need to find somewhere else to sit?”
Laura stuck her tongue out at Cade before she answered for him, and Cade was torn between being relieved to see her so playful, and being distracted by thoughts of what that tongue could do. He shifted in his seat and tried to banish the images from his mind, but it was no use. Those images were seared in. Hell.
Cade couldn’t help but feel a twinge of jealousy as Laura turned a smile toward John. “You’re absolutely forgiven for doing your job, sheriff. I know you couldn’t just pretend you didn’t see me.”
Now Cade felt a lot more than a twinge. Why was she smiling at him so sweetly? And when had she become so danged confident? Cade knew women considered John attractive. John had more than enough single women—and even some married ones—throwing themselves at him. When he first moved to town years ago, the police station had received a fair number of calls at the station that weren’t really emergencies. They were thinly veiled attempts single women made to get his attention—or their mothers were trying to set them up. That had slowed down some, but it still happened often enough to entertain everyone other than John. Until now, Cade had taunted his friend about it whenever it happened.
The thought of Laura smiling at John wasn’t even remotely entertaining to Cade, and that, in and of itself, ticked him off. He had to find a way to get the feelings he had for Laura out of his head. She was trying to rebuild her life, and for the first time ever, she was trying to do that without the complication of adding a man to the mix. He’d heard her tell his mother she needed to learn to stand on her own two feet instead of leaning on a man.
And he needed her to do the same thing. Well, not exactly, but he needed to find a woman who didn’t need to lean on him. Who could stand on her own two feet, and who wouldn’t tie her entire existence to him as if she couldn’t have her own identity without him.
“Cade, you still with us?” John asked.
“Huh? Yeah, just…yeah.” Looking around the table it was clear he had missed something.
“I was just telling Laura the local officer I talked to in Connecticut was satisfied when I told him I saw her, and she seemed healthy, happy, and down here voluntarily.” Laura was beaming at him from across the table. “They didn’t seem at all concerned that anything had happened. The detective I spoke with said the family has been pressuring them and trying to get the police to begin a national manhunt for her, but when they looked at video footage from the hospital and the airport, there was no sign of foul play, and no sign that Laura was in any danger or was any danger to her baby. They’ve been telling the family for weeks now there’s no active case, and there’s nothing more they can do if Laura doesn’t want to come home.”
“You mean go back there. Not home. That’s not home. Laura’s home now,” Cade said, smiling at her.