by Liz Ireland
When he said the last words he tensed as though expecting lightning to strike him down on the spot.
Ruby half expected it, too. “I’m shocked! I always thought you were such a well-adjusted high-minded deputy type!”
His face fell. “Me? Heck, I’m a regular misfit as far as Heartbreak Ridge is concerned!”
“How do you figure that?”
He leaned confidentially toward Ruby. “You’re not the only one who dreams about cutting loose and running away.”
The excitement of discovery pulsed through her. Had she found a kindred spirit? Quiet, handsome Cody Tucker, a man with dreams just like hers. Still waters certainly ran deep!
“Where have you thought about going?”
He kept his voice low as he divulged his amazing secret. “To a nice little piece of property down the road about fifteen miles.”
For a moment, she gaped at him. Then, as his words sank in, her pulse slowed, and she let out a snort of laughter.
His face fell. “What’s so funny?”
She felt bad, laughing when he thought he’d just laid his heart bare. “I’m sorry, Cody, I can’t help it. I expected you to say you’d dreamed of running off to somewhere a little more exotic, like Tahiti.”
He drew back. “Why would I want to do something harebrained like that? I just want to find a good place to raise sheep.”
This time, he did surprise her. In fact, as a member of a cattle-ranching family, she was dumbfounded. “Sheep!”
He nodded. “I’ve been reading up on them, and I think raising sheep could work well out here. Maybe some exotics, too—llamas or alpacas.”
Her jaw dropped, and she knew she was ogling him as if he’d sprouted two heads. And by most standards around these parts, he had. Raising sheep in Texas was like growing oranges in Wyoming. It didn’t have the ring of common sense.
He apparently caught her skepticism. “It’s really not as outlandish as it sounds, Ruby. People in Texas raise all sorts of animals now, and at this elevation we have a good climate for woolly animals. The only trouble would be getting enough grass for them to eat. But with the right seed crop and modern irrigation—”
“Cody, wait.” She waved her hands to stop him and asked curiously, “What’s the matter with what you’re doing?”
He blinked uncomprehendingly.
“Aren’t you happy with this setup?”
The question sounded a little ridiculous as Cody stared around the dingy old sheriff’s office that hadn’t been renovated since 1952. “This isn’t exactly the NYPD Blue set here, Ruby. No gorgeous leggy police detectives are going to burst through the door.”
“But why risk your future on a bunch of sheep and goats when you’ve got a good job here? Believe me, if there’s one thing I know after twenty-one years of living with my brothers, it’s that livestock will never get you rich!”
He nearly choked on a slug of coffee. “Being a deputy isn’t exactly a gold mine, either.”
“But when your uncle retires, I’ll bet you could be sheriff.”
He stared at her in amazement. “My uncle’s ten years older than I am. He won’t retire for another four decades!”
“Still, it’s a steady job.”
“And here I thought you were the adventurous type!” he said with mock scorn.
“I am.”
He scoffed. “No, you’re not. You’re shocked by the idea of a few sheep.”
“Maybe if you’d said you were running off to the Himalayas to raise them I wouldn’t have been, but here? In Heartbreak Ridge?”
“It makes sense to me. I don’t have anything against my hometown. I like it here.” He sighed. “It’s sort of a pipe dream, anyway. I never can screw up the courage to tell my uncle I want to quit.”
“Why not? He seems a nice enough guy.” Correction: the nicest guy besides the one she was staring at.
“That’s the problem!” Cody shook his head in frustration. “How could I walk out on him, especially after my brother just flew the coop? There would be no one to take up the slack.”
“Heartbreak Ridge isn’t a hotbed of crime,” she reminded him.
“But I said I would do this job, and now it’s my responsibility. I guess I could try to take up ranching on the side….”
“And do two jobs at once?” Ruby asked. “That wouldn’t get you anywhere except maybe the loony bin!”
He nodded. “It’s already a stretch taking care of all those chickens.”
She grinned. “Maybe it wouldn’t be such a strain if you didn’t give them five-star-hotel service.”
He crossed his arms and sighed, and Ruby suddenly understood what a conundrum he was in. Cody Tucker wasn’t a man who could do a thing halfway. If he kept chickens, their coop would be the poultry equivalent of the Trump Towers. No doubt his bees feasted year-round on hothouse orchids. His sheep experiment would take equal time and care—and if the gamble failed, his failure would be very, very public.
That was another bad thing about living in a town whose population topped out in the lower sixties. You couldn’t sneeze without everyone knowing about it. And he probably wasn’t any more eager for his uncle to know that he harbored sheep-ranching dreams than she was for her brothers to learn that she dreamed of escaping Heartbreak Ridge and going through men like Zsa Zsa Gabor.
Suddenly, she had a yen to reach out and give Cody a pat on the shoulder…or better yet, run her fingers through all that thick blond hair of his. Even if his dream was only to run fifteen miles away, it probably seemed as impossible to him as hoofing it off to Paris with a lover seemed to her. She had found a kindred spirit, after all, albeit of the rather straitlaced variety.
He looked at her, blue eyes shining. “What should we do for the rest of the night?”
For a wild moment, the thought of cavorting with Cody Tucker all night on the jail-cell bed raced through her mind, and her knees practically buckled under her. Good heavens!
She bit her lip. “What would you suggest?”
He tilted his head. Was he thinking about that cot, too? His gaze burned into her until she wondered if he could see her trembling.
“Would you like to play cards?” he asked finally. “I’m sure Merlie has a deck in this desk.”
She let out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding and nodded eagerly. Cards probably weren’t as fun as kissing would be, but they were a lot safer!
Because if their efforts succeeded and she ever did make it out of Heartbreak Ridge, the last thing she needed was to be carrying a torch for a blue-eyed deputy in the town she left behind.
4
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.”
