by Kait Nolan
He wished he’d had time to walk the fence line before today. Chances were, there’d be multiple weak points in addition to the ones he knew about. But he’d made an educated guess when he’d picked up supplies at the co-op yesterday. He’d even brought his own tools. Ethan wasn’t taking chances that Chester would have what was needed to do the job right.
Horses milled in the paddock when he pulled up. Four beautiful animals in turnout coats that had him detouring to the rail to admire. Houdini lifted his head and bobbed it in the equine version of hey man. A pretty little chestnut mare wandered over to investigate and bumped her head against Ethan’s hand for pets. Obliging, he scratched her under the forelock and watched her ears twitch from pleasure.
“That there’s Miss Kitty.” Chester’s gravelly voice was muffled by the lingering fog.
Ethan found himself smiling as he turned to greet the crotchety old man. “You a Gunsmoke fan, Chester?”
“Damn straight. Good show.”
“This little lady have as much sass as her namesake?”
“More than. Spoiled rotten. She was my wife’s. Just got saddle broken right before Jeannie passed.”
Ethan pegged the mare at five or six years old. Chester had been on his own for a few years now.
He didn’t look at Ethan as he reached out to stroke a hand down the mare’s neck. “Thought about selling her, selling them all after that. But couldn’t do it. She loved these animals.”
Ethan felt a twinge of sorrow. Were these horses all the man had left of his wife? He thought about expressing condolences, but Chester’s manner didn’t invite them. Instead, he kept his tone matter-of-fact as he passed out scratches to the other two as they sidled up to the rail. “Well, we’ll do right by her today and see the fence is fixed properly so they stay on your property and safe.”
Chester finally looked at him. “You’re really gonna do this?”
“I really am.”
“Why?” The old man’s bushy brows drew together in confusion.
“Well, it’s clear you could use a hand with repairs or you’d have done them by now. The horses are a prospective danger to traffic, not to mention the traffic is a danger to them. And because I moved to Wishful for a slower pace than what I had in my last job. I don’t want to go ruining that by getting a call about a homicide because Mrs. Ramsey finally had enough.”
A muscle in Chester’s jaw twitched. “Well, I reckon there’s time for a cup of coffee before we get started. Let a little more of this cold burn off. I feel it in my bones.”
He could do that.
Ethan followed him back up to the house, his boots thudding across the floorboards of the porch. The interior smelled faintly of Bengay, with a lingering scent of bacon beneath the coffee. The furnishings were comfortable and dated, with a feminine edge that would’ve surprised him if he hadn’t just heard about Chester’s late wife. Everything had an air of being undisturbed, down to the fake flower arrangement gracing a table in the front hall, colors muted with a layer of dust. Wide-planked pine floors seemed to run through the whole first floor. They held a patina of age and wear that he knew people would pay good money to duplicate as a “distressed” look in new construction. Ethan preferred the real thing. It meant the house had been lived in.
In the kitchen, which seemed to have been updated sometime in the 1980s, Chester went straight to the coffee pot and poured two mugs. “How do you take it?”
“Black’s fine.”
He nudged a mug toward Ethan, then retrieved a bottle of hazelnut creamer from the fridge.
Ethan raised a brow as he dumped several healthy glugs into the mug. “You gonna have a little coffee with that creamer?”
“Like my coffee like I liked my women—blonde and sweet.” He sipped and studied Ethan over the rim. “Hear tell you got the same taste.”
Hell, even Chester had heard about his interest in Miranda? “Don’t know as ‘sweet’ is exactly the word I’d used to describe her.”
The old man threw back his head and laughed. “Doc Campbell’s a pistol, that’s for damned sure. Woman like her’ll keep a man on his toes.”
He didn’t want to discuss his prospective love life. “Got an appreciation for spirited women, Chester?”
“It’s a stupid man who doesn’t.”
“Your neighbor fits that description.”
“I know it. Maudie Bell was good friends with my Jeannie.” There was something in his tone that had Ethan’s curiosity pinging.
“Then why, exactly, are you going around pissing her off by not taking care of your fence problem? I can see you care about your property, your animals. So this doesn’t fit.”
A flush crawled up Chester’s neck. “I get it fixed, maybe she stops coming by.”
Ethan stared. “You’re doing all this to get her attention?”
The bony shoulders twitched, and he didn’t quite meet Ethan’s gaze. “Her coming over and ranting at me is kinda like having my Jeannie back a little bit. She gets a kick out of it, too, since her Melvin died. Not that she’ll admit it.”
“So, let me get this straight—this whole little feud y’all have going on is some kind of flirtation?”
“It passes the time.”
“Man, you can do better than that. You will do better than that. Today we’re fixing that fence. And next week, you’re going down to the nursery to pick up the replacement roses Cam ordered, and you’re gonna put them in for her. And maybe when you’re done with that, you’ll actually apologize and do something radical, like ask her to dinner.”
“What qualifies you to hand out advice on anybody’s love life?”
Given the divorce under his belt, probably not much. “Apparently a better sense of self preservation than you’ve got.”
Chester harrumphed. “You any better qualified to fix a fence?”
“Grew up on a ranch in West Texas. I was fixing fences from the time I was five years old.”
The old man’s eyes lit with interest. “Well, reckon we’ll see how good you are with the fence first. Maybe you’re worth listening to on the rest.”
Ethan’s lips twitched. “You don’t listen, I can fine you.”
“Same song, different verse, son. Let’s get to work.”
“This is not what I expected.” Despite the firm grip Ethan had on her hand, Miranda dragged her feet a little as he pulled her across the scuffed wooden floor of Speakeasy Pizza toward the little stage.
“You said you wanted to hear me sing.”
“Yeah, you. Not me.”
His eyes glinted with amusement. “Maybe I wanna see what you’re made of. Karaoke says a lot about a person.”
As they joined the short line beside the binder containing all possible song options, nerves kicked in her belly. “That a dealbreaker for you?”
He sobered, bending close to her ear to speak. “Not if you legitimately don’t want to do it. You don’t strike me as the nervous type.”
“I’m not usually totally sober when I do this. And the last time anybody managed to drag me up here was for my friend Piper’s bachelorette party.”
“How long ago was that?”
“Well, the baby just turned three weeks yesterday.”
Ethan crouched down just a little to look into her eyes, as if trying to determine whether he was gonna make her go through with this. It’d have been nice if she knew whether she wanted to do it.
“C’mon, Legs,” he coaxed. “I’ll let you pick the song.”
Bracing herself, Miranda stepped up to the book. “Fine. Let’s see what you’ve got.”
He peered over her shoulder as she made her selection of “Islands In The Stream.” Not close enough to touch, but near enough the heat of him distracted her.
“Old school. I dig it.” He punched the number into the machine himself, removing her last opportunity for escape.
And then they were on the stage and he was grinning at her as he launched into a damned fine impression of Kenny Rogers. H
er voice shook as she added her Dolly to the mix. She could carry a tune, but she was no performer, and this stage was generally ruled by the active community theater members who were. Ethan never once looked at the crowd. A funny thing happened under that complete and total focus—she lost her nerves. So by the time they wrapped the country classic, Miranda was grinning back and laughing.
Ethan swung an arm around her shoulders as they stepped down. “You give good Dolly. That definitely earned you pizza and beer.”
They nabbed a table far enough back from the stage they could talk without yelling and put in an order for a New York style pie with pepperoni and mushrooms. As they waited, they listened to the other performers—good, bad, and heinous—and Miranda entertained him with little anecdotes about each of them.
“Do you know everybody?” he asked.
“Seems like. Other than school and residency, I’ve lived here all my life.”
“Was that always the plan? Or did you want to stay in Chicago?”
She tipped her beer back and considered. “No. Chicago was a means to an end. But I did expect to be there longer than I was.”
“Surgical residency, wasn’t it?”
“Somebody was paying attention.”
“You had your hands on my ass at the time. Hard to pay attention to anything else.”
Miranda snorted and hoped she’d get the chance at that again under less professional circumstances. “Fair point. When I started up there, I fully intended to finish out my trauma surgeon training. But Chicago is one of the most violent cities in the country. It started to feel like I lost as many people as I saved. Some of them I managed to patch back together only to have them show up months later from some other thing and end up with a toe tag. It was wearing on me.”
“I can imagine.”
“I became a doctor because I wanted to make a difference in people’s lives. Wanted to see that that difference lasted. Most surgeons have only a peripheral kind of relationship with their patients. Bare minimum contact to do the procedure and follow up. Trauma surgeons often have even less because of the nature of the conditions being treated. My mentor constantly frowned on my desire to get involved beyond medical necessity. He considered me naive. I chalked it up to the fact that he’s been a practicing surgeon for nearly thirty years, and in all that time he’s developed a wall between himself and his patients out of self-preservation. But I just couldn’t live like he did. I give a damn, and that isn’t going to change. So I gave up my residency up there and came home to specialize in family medicine. Even now, he still hasn’t forgiven me for walking away. He thinks I’m wasting my skills in a small town clinic.”
“Do you feel like your skills are wasted?”
“No. I love what I do—most of the time. Small town medicine is about healing more than the body.”
“Do you miss the surgery?”
“Some. Our head of Emergency Medicine allows me to keep my hand in and assist as the need arises. Keeps my skills sharp.”
“Handy, I expect, when medical expertise is limited in the area.”
“Exactly.” She waited as the waitress slid their pizza onto a rack in the center of the table. “What about you? Why did you decide to become a Marshal instead of a country music heartthrob?”
He laughed, and it was such a heady thing, seeing the usually stoic chief of police unbend a little…for her.
“I grew up on a ranch in West Texas. My granddaddy was foreman—exactly what you imagine an old West cowboy to be. He knew cattle, horses, and men, and he wanted a different kind of life for his only daughter. But she fell in love with a bronc rider on the rodeo circuit, got married at nineteen, had me. So, Pop hired him on at the ranch, hoping he’d settle down. He did for a bit, but got it in his head he needed one last ride. The prize money would’ve made a nice little nest egg to put a downpayment on a house.”
“Would’ve?”
“He was thrown. Broke his neck. Died on impact.”
The idea of it broke her heart, both for him and for his mother. “Jesus, Ethan. I’m sorry.”
“I wasn’t even two, so I don’t remember him. Anyway, Mama and I moved back in with Pop and I grew up on the ranch. She didn’t date much after Daddy. But about the time I was ten years old, there was this guy who hired on. Ranches have a lot of seasonal work, so there’s a regular turnover in staff. This one guy—Ray Diffy—he took a shine to my mama. Pop didn’t like it, but it was the first time I’d seen her smile like that in forever, so I was predisposed to like the guy. I guess you could say he charmed us both.”
Ethan took a bite of the pizza, nodded in approval. “Ray was, as it turned out, a professional charmer. He was a con man on the run from a drug cartel out of New Mexico. He had multiple warrants out for his arrest, and the cartel itself was still looking for him, on account of the fact he stole a fair chunk of their product. They eventually tracked him down to the ranch and figured out they could use my mama for leverage. So they took her hostage.”
Pizza forgotten, Miranda leaned toward him. “Oh my God. What happened?”
“The Marshals came in. They had a whole cross agency task force put together for the bust. Deputy Marshal Phil Jenks was running the show, and he took the time in the middle of all the crazy, to assure me that they were gonna save my mama. I believed him. He was that kind of guy. Didn’t make promises he couldn’t make good on. And he did. They had her out within an hour. Safe and sound.”
“So you became a Marshal because that’s who rescued your mom?” Who wouldn’t have some hero worship going on after that?
“Not exactly. See, when the bust went down and they got inside the cookhouse—Mama was cook for the ranch—Phil found she’d gone after one of the cartel guys with a butcher knife. She’d been on the verge of breaking out when the task force broke in. I think he fell for her on the spot.”
“Marshal Jenks fell in love with your mother?”
“Yeah. He came back after, to check on her. But Mama, she’d had enough of men in dangerous professions, so she wouldn’t give him the time of day. He kept coming back, though. Kept checking on her—and me—for years. About ten years after it all went down, he retired and they got married, had my baby sister. They all moved to Florida a few years ago.”
“It’s nice your mom got a happy ending.”
Ethan’s lips curved and it was a different sort of smile than the one he used to flirt. Something quiet and powerful, that spoke to his love of family. “Yeah. She sure as hell deserved it. Anyway, I became a Marshal to chase down others like Ray, to get them off the streets before they could wreak more havoc on innocent people’s lives.”
“You loved it.” That wasn’t even a question.
“I did. I was good at it.”
“So why’d you stop? Why give all that up for small-town policing?”
The pleasure that had lit his face during the telling faded and he set his slice of pizza aside. “About eighteen months ago, I got shot. Wasn’t bad intel or carelessness. Just straight up bad luck and a cheap ass trailer. Perp shot through the wall from a closet in another room. The walls were so thin, they might as well have been paper. I came perilously close to dying right there. Mom, Phil, and Julie were there when I woke up in the hospital. Mom and Julie were worried to death, of course, and Phil asked me why I was still doing it. Why I was out there risking my neck. For the first time since I’d started, I didn’t have a good answer.” He shrugged. “I saw what it did to my mama to see me like that. I figured she’s lost enough people she cared about, so here I am.”
Miranda had to appreciate a man who regularly risked his life for others and held deep love and respect for his mother. She had to appreciate a lot of things about Ethan Greer.
After dinner, they strolled arm-in-arm across the town green. She watched the cop in him scanning the quiet streets, never fully relaxed, and her brain circled back around to their earlier conversation. “Do you miss it?”
“What?”
“Being
a Marshal. The chase. The need for constant vigilance?”
“Yeah. Slowing down is hard. I went full-tilt for a lot of years. But my fundamental job is still the same. Protect the innocent from the bad guys.”
They stopped at the fountain that was the centerpiece to town. The quiet murmur of the water cut through the night. “You want to make a difference, same as I do.”
“I suppose I do. But I’m less of an idealist than you. I’ve seen too much to have that kind of faith in humanity.”
God, it was so much like something Stephen would’ve said. In the wake of that disastrous relationship, she’d promised herself she’d never again get involved with someone who was so fundamentally different from her. It wasn’t worth the heartache. Why the hell did Ethan have to be so appealing on every other level?
Feeling a little brittle, she glanced at the constellation of glittering coins in the basin. The hundreds, maybe thousands of wishes people had made over the years. “I guess you think that kind of faith is foolish.”
“I think you make me want to do whatever’s necessary to protect this little corner of the world so you can keep looking at people like that.” He reached out to tuck a strand of her hair behind one ear.
Caught by the sincerity in his eyes, Miranda turned into the touch, so his fingers skimmed her cheek, lighting little fires of anticipation and rekindling the hope that Ethan Greer was different. He couldn’t know what that meant to her. “You’ve got a bit of a hero complex.”
“Guilty.”
“I find that works for me.”
“Yeah? How about this?” The hand at her cheek slid into her hair, tipping her face up to his.
Miranda flowed into him, wrapping an arm around his lean waist and hanging on as he sipped and savored her mouth because this was what she’d wanted. To taste him. To feel him. The unhurried play of his lips over hers made her sigh and press closer. His arm banded around her. Ruthlessly patient, he took the kiss deeper by degrees.
Patience had never been one of Miranda’s virtues. It had been so damned long since she’d felt any of this—attraction, arousal, and a heady, gleeful desire to be a little reckless. Opening her mouth beneath his, she dove into the kiss. She felt his pulse of surprise in the fingers that clenched in her hair and the momentary stillness in the body pressed to hers. Then he hauled her closer, devouring her mouth, his tongue stroking against hers in a way that had her wishing for skin on skin.
