“You promise me,” Taylor said, frowning now. Steve had the oddest desire to smooth the frown from her brow with a gentle kiss. He would press his lips just between her mobile eyebrows, right on that—
“We won’t,” three voices chorused.
“I mean it.”
“We promise,” Jonah—at least Steve thought it was Jonah—said, and received two sideways glares from his brothers, who apparently didn’t promise any such thing.
Steve let the door fall behind him and found he’d been waiting for the exact moment Taylor would look up at him and smile.
Just like that.
His heart seemed to skip a beat and he swore inwardly. If he was anticipating the way her smile would make him feel, his afternoon flight couldn’t come soon enough. He’d be asking her to marry him in less than five minutes, he thought sourly.
“Steve!”
“Hey, Steve, we’ve got a great plan.”
“Yeah, we’re going to do community service with Doc Jamison first. He goes everywhere.”
“See? And we’ll spread the word that we’re missing that nearly dead guy.”
“Yeah, like, people will start talking and looking for him and stuff—”
“And we’ll probably find him in time for dinner.”
“Doofus, we’re not going to eat him.”
“Ee-yuck, who said we wanted to do that?”
He felt his grin spreading. “A little ketchup might make him taste better,” he said.
“Good morning, Steve,” Taylor managed to interject over her sons’ lack of appreciation of a bloody, nearly dead guy for dinner. “Boys, let the man have some coffee before you talk him to death.”
“Yeah, but—”
“Scoot on outside. Run off some of that energy with the dogs.”
Human tornadoes couldn’t have contained more energy than the three bounding out the back door, calling for their faithful companions.
Taylor calmly closed the back door. “Coffee?”
“You bet,” he said, leaning against the refrigerator, careful not to displace various notes, drawings and photos.
“How do you take it?”
Funny, he thought, the night before they’d kissed like there was no tomorrow. He was lighting out of town because he was scared to death she’d somehow ensnare him in her warm, too comfortable world, and she didn’t even know how he took his coffee.
“Black,” he said. To match his ever shifting mood.
She handed him a large, steaming mug.
He sipped at it and signaled his appreciation.
“I feel like we’re doing a coffee commercial,” Taylor said, joining him at the table. “We can talk about Paris now, or something romantically nostalgic.”
He wanted to ask her if the boys had said anything about the impassioned kiss they’d witnessed the night before, but didn’t have the slightest clue how to bring it up, or what to say if she did. He settled for a grin.
Her answering smile seemed to exacerbate rather than ease the tension between them, though he couldn’t have begun to guess why. He was actually grateful when the telephone rang and she rose to answer it.
After a few perfunctory questions and answers, she laughed and said, “You’re sure you don’t mind having the pack riding with you this afternoon, Doc? I can always rope somebody else into coming up with chores for them. I suppose I could spring for another can of paint for the school playground. It can always use one.”
Watching her ease with this unknown veterinarian, Steve was conscious of a stab of what could only be jealousy. Sure, she’d told him the night before that she thought of Doc Jamison like a brother, but with the man on the other end of the phone she didn’t exhibit any of the uneasiness she did with him.
“Well, just don’t let them drive you too crazy,” she said, then, in response to something he said, she laughed again, a delicious, throaty chuckle that severely undermined Steve’s determination to run as far away from her as his two legs and an airplane would take him.
“Well, that’s one problem solved,” she said, rejoining him at the table. “Doc’s going to run straw boss for the community service stint today.”
Steve grinned uncertainly, again conscious of a stab of jealousy. The boys were a handful, sure, but somehow in his short stay in Almost, he’d already found he rather liked the heavy dose of hero worship they had for him. While he was in town, they were supposed to be his handful.
The telephone rang. This time it was for Steve from Doris Ledbetter at the Houston office. “So, how many more Almost dead bodies have you found?” she asked.
“Only the one,” he said. “And he’s still missing.”
Taylor rose and busied herself at the kitchen sink, creating a false impression that she couldn’t overhear his conversation. Steve briefly wondered if she was reacting to his laughing conversation with Doris as he had to Taylor’s camaraderie with the veterinarian.
“Almost triplets,” Doris said, chuckling. “Sounds like you have your hands full. Should I call Lubbock and rally the troops? You’ll be running for the nearest exit in minutes. I can already hear your feet in motion.”
Steve frowned slightly, wondering why the quip pricked him. Because he did always run? Because it was far too close to the truth?
“No, it’s not like that,” he said a bit too firmly. “If the guy doesn’t turn up before my flight, it’s pretty good odds he’s not in the area anymore. Somebody’ll patch him up somewhere and we’ll get a lead then. The boys are spreading the word that, as they put it, we’re missing a nearly dead guy.”
Doris chuckled. “Admit it, Steve, you’re having fun.”
“In a one-horse town in the middle of the high plains? You’ve gotta be kidding.” He wished he could take back the words when Taylor’s spine stiffened and she tossed her ponytail as if annoyed.
Doris said, “City life’s not all it’s cracked up to be. And you know you hate it.”
“Neither is living in the country,” he shot back, ignoring the truth of her second statement.
“Already running. Like I said, I can hear your big old feet. Okay, boss, but here’s hoping you trip. A pretty widow with three rambunctious kids could be exactly what the doctor ordered. I have to admit, I’d love to see the day when you fall. It would save me holding another dinner party with some dreary, anorexic excuse for a woman.”
Steve didn’t comment for the simple reason that he couldn’t formulate a retort. Anything he said in denial of her words would, at that moment, be a lie. And Doris had just admitted she’d never liked the women she was trying to fix him up with.
“So, see you in the morning?”
Steve’s frown deepened and a depression seemed to grab hold of him. Leaving Almost was exactly what he wanted to do, so why should Doris’s reminder that tomorrow he would be hundreds of miles away bother him so?
He hung up the phone and turned to find Taylor studying him. “What?” he asked.
“You’re leaving today,” she said. She voiced the words without a nuance of inflection.
He wanted to apologize for the sky being a bright, undying blue. But he wouldn’t. “If nothing turns up by midafternoon.”
“I see.”
Steve felt a familiar pang of guilt, for the kisses the night before, for his desire to leave, for leaving before everything was resolved. And the pang was followed by a stab of irritation. He’d told her he wasn’t the marrying kind. Why should he feel guilty about warning her ahead of time? Why should he feel guilty about not wanting the things she did?
Taylor felt slapped by him, by his rejection of her home, her town, but mostly by his blatant disregard of the kisses they’d shared the night before.
She told herself not to question it. She wasn’t the first woman to be kissed, then ignored, and she wouldn’t be the last. She told herself to be wise and let it go. Let him go without letting him know that the kiss had meant something to her, had left her soul-searching and hungry.
Doug had
often told her that her greatest fault was not knowing when to let well enough alone. “What are you doing?” she asked.
He stiffened, as if anticipating a blow. But he was the one dealing the blows.
She felt glued to her side of the floor. She wanted to walk over to him, touch him, if nothing more than to convince herself he was real. Or maybe to convince herself that the night before had really happened.
He turned away from her and stared out the kitchen window, watching her sons romping with their dogs. He sighed heavily. Then, without looking at her, he said, “I’ve been married twice, Taylor.”
She frowned, not at the news, but at his delivery of it.
He jerked away from the window as the back door banged open and her troupe of wild elephants thundered into the kitchen.
“Did you call Doc?”
“Are we going with him?”
“Did you find anything new, Steve?”
“How are we gonna find out who killed that dude?”
The boys seemed to sense the tension between the two adults, for they faltered to a silence unusual to them.
“Everything okay?” Jason asked.
“Uh, maybe we better feed the dogs or something.”
“Yeah, like they’re probably hungry.”
“Outside.”
“Yeah, outside.”
The three scuttled for the back door and went out, worried frowns volleying back and forth at Steve and her.
“What are you trying to tell me?” she asked when he didn’t say anything more.
The back door popped open. “Forgot something,” Jonah said, dashing inside and grabbing the huge sack of dog food. He wrestled it outside and slammed the door behind him.
“Steve?”
The telephone rang. Taylor swore aloud and yanked it from its cradle, barking a hello into the receiver, never taking her eyes from Steve’s back. “Oh, Aunt Sammie Jo. I’m sorry. No, everything’s fine. I just... what? When?”
Steve turned slightly, almost looking at her.
She listened awhile longer then covered the mouthpiece with her hand. “Kurt, Martha Thompson’s boy, found a gun in Charlie Hampton’s sorghum field.”
“Did he leave it there, I hope?” Steve asked, turning to look at her finally. But this was a different Steve, all business and hard Texas Ranger.
Taylor asked, and paled a little at Sammie Jo’s answer. She again covered the receiver. “No. Martha Thompson told Sammie Jo—she didn’t call here because her cell phone batteries are down and she lives close to Sammie Jo. Anyway, she said Kurt carried it all the way home by holding a number two pencil through the trigger.”
Steve closed his eyes for a second, but when he opened them he looked much more like the Steve she thought she’d come to know. A slight, nearly imperceptible smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. “Tell her I’ll be right there. And tell her not to touch the gun.”
Taylor did as instructed and hung up the phone.
“How do I get to her place?” Steve asked, reaching for the swinging door.
“By way of explaining what being married twice has anything to do with the price of eggs in Almost,” Taylor said.
He smiled crookedly. Sadly, she thought. “When you fail at something twice, you learn to leave it alone,” he said slowly, meeting her eyes directly now.
“I’m not a something,” she said.
“Oh, you are, Taylor. You’re very much something.” His smile was still sad.
The back door burst open. “You guys done talking yet?”
“You going somewhere, Steve?”
“Kurt found a gun,” Taylor said.
“Kurt Thompson?”
“Oh, man, he has all the luck.”
“We found the nearly dead guy.”
“Yeah, but he disappeared.”
“But we saw him first.”
“Yeah, that’s cool. But a gun...”
“You know this Kurt?” Steve asked.
“Yeah, he’s in our grade at the Almost School.”
“A friend of yours?”
The boys looked blank, then two of them shrugged. If Steve didn’t know what the blank looks sprang from, Taylor did. Almost was too small a town to designate people as friends or otherwise. To the boys, Kurt was simply a kid, like themselves, a part of the town, a piece of the whole.
“Hey, are you going over to Kurt’s house?”
“Can we come?”
“Yeah, we can translate for you.”
“Translate?” Steve asked. “Doesn’t he speak English?”
“Yeah, but not as good as us.”
Steve actually chuckled. Taylor felt the boulder resting on her heart shift slightly.
“So we can go with you?”
“Please, Steve?”
“Way, way please?”
Steve’s eyes softened and his grin seemed to relax. He lifted his eyes and met hers. In the split second before he apparently remembered what they hadn’t been discussing, he seemed to be sharing his enjoyment of her sons with her. Then his smile faded slightly, not an abrupt cessation, just a withdrawal. From her.
“Sure,” he said. “Why not?”
Sure, she thought, why not make them fall for you, too? Make it a clean sweep.
But then, they already had him pegged for their new father.
And he was already out the door with them.
Steve herded the Smithton triplets into his rental car with a strange reluctance to end what had probably been the most bizarre evidence-gathering mission he’d ever been on.
Doug would have loved it, he thought. Hell, he’d loved it. It was a scene right out of Monty Python. Four boys, three identical blondes, one dark and overexcited, all talking seventy-five miles to the second and killing off half the town with blithe insouciance, underscored the innocence of this town, the total naiveté of the inhabitants.
The gun Kurt found lay in a freezer-safe Ziploc plastic bag with a picture of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer on the front. The festive plastic, out of season and out of Steve’s context, only served to underscore his sense of unreality. What other case in the universe would have him placing recovered weapons in such an evidence bag?
But the gun was evidence. He had no doubt it had belonged to the boys’ fancily clothed nearly dead guy. A nickel-plated, pearl-handled .45, the weapon was an expensive dilettante’s toy, designed for more noise than damage, and looks rather than intent. A pretty thing, but largely ineffective if someone really needed to be stopped. It hadn’t been fired. Steve wondered if it ever had been. But it was a sure bet fingerprints could be lifted from the fancy handle.
“Are we going home—”
“Or gonna check out the crime scene—”
“Where, like, Kurt found the gun?”
The last place Steve wanted to be at that moment was inside Taylor’s too comfortable home. “The crime scene,” he said.
“Kurt said he found the gun in as far as his dad is tall.”
Steve blinked, trying to first unravel the sentence, then work out the mathematics.
“His dad is real short.”
“Yeah, like we’re gaining on him—”
“So, the gun had to be pretty close to where we saw the nearly dead guy.”
Steve grinned a little. Doug’s kids were pretty sharp. They had a clean, fresh way of analyzing situations that plenty a team of Rangers could have used. Good witnesses, good eyes and good regrouping skills.
Once out at Charlie Hampton’s place, the boys were suitably impressed with the crime tape blocking the road, extending from two fence posts. And they were nearly struck dumb by the footprints Steve had discovered inside the barn and exceedingly careful not to touch any of them.
And it was the boys who discovered a set of tire tracks on the front side of the barn, tracks that revealed no particular speed coming to the barn but considerable departing.
Damn, Steve thought, Doug would have been proud of these kids. He was proud of them and had only known t
hem twenty-four hours. And just as their father had years before and their mother now, they had a way of getting right under his skin.
Taylor’s hints on how to tell them apart helped enormously, and by the time they left the barn to head back to the house, then on to Levelland to have the gun fingerprinted, Steve prided himself on the notion that he could actually discern physical differences as well as those of personality.
And by the time they were driving back from Levelland, two hours later, Steve found he wasn’t seeing his old college roommate in the boys, he was seeing Taylor’s mobile eyebrows, her generous mouth and a myriad of small traits that she seemed to have passed directly to her sons.
Shortly after making the right-angled turn at Anton, the boys began yawning. The two in the back seat seemed to fold into each other, a loose tangle of arms, legs, tennis shoes and freckled faces. Jonah, holding out longer than his brothers, yawned hugely and slumped across the front seat. Hitching himself into a more comfortable position, he rested his head on Steve’s leg, sighed heavily, tucked a fist under his chin and fell deeply asleep.
Steve held his arm up awkwardly, not knowing where to rest his hand, not wanting to wake the boy, uncomfortable holding the wheel the remaining thirty miles. Finally, he gently placed his hand on Jonah’s shoulder. While his hand was nearly the same size as the boy’s entire upper arm, it seemed to fit there naturally.
He looked up at the road and corrected his erratic driving, even if he couldn’t do a thing about the hiccup in his heart.
Chapter 9
From the second Steve returned to her home with her three sleepy sons, the phone had rung incessantly, the doorbell had dingdonged repeatedly, the dogs had barked, the cats had yowled and her boys had been thoroughly rejuvenated by their run to town with their hero.
“Is it always this chaotic around here?” Steve demanded of her as the phone rang for the fifth time.
Taylor tried assessing his mood, the reason for his irritation. He’d returned in a quiet, pensive state. She didn’t know him well enough to know if this was common for him or if the boys’ enthusiasm had worn him to a frazzle. But he hadn’t looked harassed, simply contemplative.
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