by Sylvia Fox
“Yeah, I guess if you’re going to retire early, there are worse ways to go out,” he conceded. “How are your dad and your brother? I’m sorry, it’s been a few years, what was his name, Shawn?”
“Seth,” I corrected him. “He played football at the Citadel, down in Charleston. He’s coaching high school football in Charlotte now. My dad is still at PCHS. He’s never won another state championship, but he’s always had good teams. Still waiting for another quarterback like you to show up,” I joked.
“He’s a good man. I hated to let him down, to let my teammates down. I never wanted things to happen the way they did. I didn’t even get the chance to apologize. It tore me up,” he explained.
“I just can’t get over all this. That it’s really you. That I’m sitting here talking to you. To Cade Carter, or whatever your name is these days. Seven-year-old me would have fainted if you looked at her,” I confessed.
He laughed and squeezed a lemon into his sweet tea and stirred it with a long spoon.
“How did you wind up as a Ranger?” I asked.
“I’ve been both kinds of Ranger,” he answered. “First in the Army, now a Texas Ranger. Growing up the way I did, it’s practically inevitable that you fall on either the wrong side of the law, or you end up wearing a badge. This is what worked for me. After two tours in Afghanistan, I couldn’t do it anymore. I’d had enough of war.
“I came back here and started working for the local police and one thing led to another. With my military training, age, and the fact that I wasn’t married and didn’t have any kids, I was a natural to be recruited by the Texas Rangers.”
No wife? No kids? Interesting…
“Is your momma here in Lonely Pine?”
“She is. I buried her here last year.”
“I’m so sorry. I had no idea…” I was mortified, but he was stoic.
“She’d been sick a while. It was a mercy that she could finally let go. I was with her at the end,” he replied. “How about your momma? I used to look forward to when she and the other coaches’ wives would cook those Saturday morning breakfasts for the team and we’d eat before watching film of the game from the night before. Stacks of pancakes so high you could barely see over them. And all that bacon…”
His smile made me melt inside. He was right, my momma knew her way around a kitchen, and her pancakes were one of my favorite things she made.
“She’s still at it,” I answered. “Her pancakes are one of the perks of playing for PCHS, right up there with the lettermen’s jackets that double as cheerleader magnets.”
He laughed and drank his sweet tea. I pushed the food around on my plate, not wanting him to actually see me eat anything. If I remembered him as handsome, my girlhood recollection did him no justice; he was gorgeous. And something about that tiny star pinned to his chest magnified his hotness a thousand-fold. The cowboy hat didn’t hurt, either. I was smitten.
“So, that fella, what’s his name again,” he produced a small notebook and flipped through it. “Ah, here it is – Jake Henry? You called him what, ‘Turtle’? What’s the story there? I don’t mean to pry, it’s just that I have him locked up over in the jail, and he isn’t my direct problem anymore, the Lonely Pine Sheriff’s Office will handle him, but I just wanted to know if I should expect any further trouble from him.”
“He’s my…I don’t know what he is, exactly. We live together. He was my boyfriend, once, but it hasn’t been like that for a while. Now it’s a matter of convenience, I guess, more than anything. He followed me out to Phoenix after I finished school, and we had our time, but he’s a drunk and way too friendly with anything and everything in a skirt,” I explained. “He’s somebody I want to be part of my past, if I can figure out how to do it. It’s messy.”
Cade shook his head. “It’ll only get messier. Some unsolicited advice?”
I nodded.
“A man putting his hands on a woman is reprehensible. Inexcusable. Besides, even if he hadn’t gotten physical with you, somebody like you deserves better, much better, than trash like Jake Henry.”
Somebody like me? What did he mean by that?
“I was here to protect you this time, but the minute you go back to Phoenix, you can get all the restraining orders you want to, it won’t matter. He followed you here, he’ll find you there, or back home, or wherever you go. What do you do in Phoenix?”
“I work for an ad agency. Writing copy.”
He nodded.
“Afraid there aren’t any ad agencies around here, or I’d say you should stick around a while. Rosie seems fond of you, and we don’t get many new faces around here, especially pretty ones.”
I could feel myself blushing.
“Forgive me for asking a personal question, but if there’s a Mrs. Lincoln Sinclair, you haven’t mentioned her. But it seems unlikely that you’d be single.”
He took a long drink of his sweet tea and swished it around in his mouth, savoring it while he considered his response.
“I was trained, from an early age, never to get too close to anybody. And if ‘trained’ isn’t the right word, maybe ‘conditioned’ fits better. There was so much moving, so much distrust of anybody who wasn’t ‘family’, that I never let myself feel what other people, regular people, call love.
“And, more than that, the second I was eligible, I ran off and joined the Army. I poured myself into it. It was the first thing in my life that was real. That I knew couldn’t be taken away from me. Becoming a Ranger was hard, but it was all me, you know? Taking football away from me tore my guts out. Nobody could take being a soldier away from me. It was all on my terms.
“When it was over, I came back here and went into the academy. I was on the fast track to becoming what I am today. And the amount of territory I cover, the responsibilities I have, don’t leave much time for meeting anybody. Besides, the women I do meet all seem to be what we call badge bunnies. Or, a different term that I won’t share in polite company.”
I cocked my head, quizzically.
“I wear a star, so imagine a word that starts with the same letter as ‘star’, that’s not exactly complimentary to women.”
Star sluts?
He nodded his head as saw the light bulb over my head illuminate.
“The one indulgence I allow myself is Rosie’s. She’s really been the only lady in my life, especially since Momma passed.
“It’s been years since I’ve seen or heard from my old man. I’m sure he’s either dead or locked up somewhere. Don’t much care, if I’m being honest. We share DNA, but nothing else that I can see.”
The tale he told was so awful, but he spun it so matter-of-factly. I wanted to reach across the table and hug him. Again. For him and for me. To ease his pain, if he had any beneath his rugged exterior, and for me, so I could get close to his sculpted body again.
Rosie came over with two slices of pecan pie and set them in front of us. If I were to spend much more time in Lonely Pine, I’d need to start doing some serious cardio or my ass would be the size of Saskatchewan.
The Ranger held up his hands in surrender.
“Rosie, what are you trying to do to me? You know I’m trying to cut down. I’m not ready to be one of those flabby big city Rangers from Dallas or Houston just yet.”
“You shush and eat that pie. It ain’t just for when you’re sad, it’s also for when you’re happy. In case you didn’t know it, all this smiling you’ve been doing since Miss Darcy rolled into town means you’re happy. Now eat!”
She turned her attention to me.
“I’ve known Lincoln Sinclair for many years, and if you added up all the times I’ve seen him smile, they’d fit inside a thimble, with room to spare. But he hasn’t stopped smiling since the two of you walked in here together. Thank you for that.”
Cade/Lincoln’s face reddened slightly after Rosie’s admonishment, and he dug into his pie. I started with my ice cream. We ate together in silence, save for the sound of our forks hitting our p
lates.
The pie really was miraculously good.
And, God, he was gorgeous.
“I don’t know what you had planned for the rest of the afternoon,” he asked as we finished up. “But I’m off-duty now and was planning to head home. Would it be presumptuous to ask you to join me?”
If it was, I didn’t care. Whatever would allow me to spend more time with Lincoln Sinclair made perfect sense to me. He paid Rosie for our food and escorted me out to his truck. It almost felt like a date, a date for which I was woefully unprepared. I wore jeans and a t-shirt, my hair was piled up on top of my head, and my makeup was practically non-existent. I tried to avoid seeing my reflection in the window of his truck. I feared the ogre I’d encounter looking back at me.
But Lincoln not only opened the door for me, he extended a hand to assist me in climbing up into the cab. Whatever I was, or imagined I was, he seemed to like it. And whatever he was, quarterback, Army Ranger, Texas Ranger, or just plain old painfully handsome and owner of eyes that were “the bluest blue of all blues bluer than the deepest bluest part of the ocean and bluer than the bluest blue sky”, I definitely liked it. Still. Even after all these years.
9
We continued to catch up on happenings in Palmetto Creek and reminisce over his “Cade Carter” career as quarterback at PCHS as we drove out to Lincoln’s property west of town. The last ten minutes of the nearly forty-five-minute drive were spent traversing an unmarked, unpaved road.
A flash of green to the right caught my eye, and Lincoln turned his truck toward it, revealing trees scattered around a small single-story, ranch-style house.
“There’s a natural spring out here. It’s my own little private oasis, I suppose you could say,” he explained, about his emerald lawn and trees among all the endless desert brown. “Wish I could take credit for any of it, but I’m not much of a horticulturist.”
From one tree hung several tires, and footballs littered the ground. He noticed me staring and explained the pile of pigskin.
“When work stresses me out, or I just need to do some thinking, I head out here and take some ‘target practice’,” he said, parking the truck. After he opened the door and helped me down, he bent over and his large hands swallowed up two footballs. He considered the distance and the slight breeze and cocked his arm, firing a tight spiral thirty yards, dead center, through a tire hanging six feet off the ground. He flipped the other ball into the air and caught it, scrambling back three steps before setting his feet and drilling the bullseye on a second tire, a bit further down range. In a long-sleeved, button-down shirt. While wearing a cowboy hat.
It was one of the hottest things I’d ever witnessed.
“I need my pom-poms after watching a performance like that,” I joked, as he tipped his cap.
“I don’t know about pom-poms, but if you’ve got a cheerleading uniform in your room back at Rosie’s, we can turn right around and drive back for it right now,” he said, breaking out into a grin.
“Nobody wants to see ‘this’,” I patted my butt with both hands, “in a cheerleading uniform. Trust me.”
“You do that too much,” he said.
“What’s that?” I replied, as we climbed onto his porch and sat down on a pair of rocking chairs.
“Be so negative about yourself. You’re one hell of a fine-looking woman. You should be proud of every curve and every pound. There’s not a damn thing wrong with you that I can see. And I’m sworn to being honest and forthright. It’s all part of the deal,” he said, tapping his badge with his index finger and grinning at me.
I’d spent the past year with Turtle listening to him tell me I ought to get back in the gym and questioning anything I put in my mouth that wasn’t water or a vegetable. I’d gotten used to hiding my curves and dreading the scale. It was one of those stupid digital ones that thought it was doing me a favor by remembering my weight, when in reality it was just giving Turtle ammunition.
Yet here was a man who was weak-in-the-knees handsome, telling me I should revel in my looks? In my body? The way he stared at me, with those glacially-blue eyes, was almost enough to set me to trembling.
It was so peculiar – I desperately wanted him to look at me the way he was, but at the same time, his gaze was almost too intense, too much to take. I struggled to meet it.
“I guess you don’t have to worry about the neighbors throwing loud parties, right?” I asked, hating myself for being unable to resist my natural inclination to change the subject when the topic a man wanted to speak about was me.
“Only neighbors I worry about are rattlesnakes, darling. But we have an agreement. I leave them alone and they leave me alone. We speak the same language. I enjoy the solitude. I’ve built myself a shooting range out back to stay sharp, and I can use it anytime of day or night without worrying about waking anybody up. I’ve got some military-grade stuff; it gets to sounding like World War III sometimes. Hell, out here I can get naked and howl at the moon if I want to, and nobody’s bothered by it.”
I guess the country in me was to blame, but I couldn’t decide which turned me on more – the thought of Lincoln naked in the moonlight, or dressed in his Army Ranger gear and firing off his assault rifle.
“Sorry, I’m not used to having guests. Can I get you anything to drink? An Army buddy of mine owns a brew pub in Austin, The Blue Mule. He’s always sending me stuff to try. I have a keg of his latest, it’s an ale. I haven’t even tapped it yet. If you’re feeling adventuresome?”
“Don’t go to any trouble for me, but sure, if you’re having some, I’ll join you,” I replied.
He went inside and returned with two foamy mason jars. “Forgive the jars, this is kind of a bachelor pad. It was either these or plastic cups.”
“Cade… I’m sorry, Lincoln, don’t forget, I grew up in Bamberg County, South Carolina. I’m not too proud to drink out of a mason jar. I understand you Texas boys sometimes drink out of your boots – I might have to pass if that was the only alternative, but a jar suits me fine.”
He’d left his cowboy hat inside, and for the first time I saw his hair. It had been shaggy and sandy blonde during his high school days, but now he wore it closely cropped, almost military short, and it had darkened into a shadier brown. I’d need a larger sample size to decide whether he looked better with or without the hat.
He smiled and handed me a glass. Just as we were both about to try the newest Blue Mule concoction, he held up his hand and raised his jar, proposing a toast.
“To high school football and South Carolina,” he said, tapping my jar with his. “And to whatever I did to deserve you getting stranded in my jurisdiction.”
We made eye contact and I felt myself blush, yet again. I’d developed more a taste for wine than beer in recent years, but The Blue Mule’s latest was a winner. There was a faint pineapple flavor to it and it went down very smooth.
He took a long draw and then swished the jar, watching the amber liquid settle as he considered the flavor. “What is that?” he asked, taking a second drink. “Pineapple?”
“I think so. I like it. If I ever make it to Austin, I am putting The Blue Mule on my list.”
“It’s kind of a honky tonk, really. Lots of live music, which makes it one of about ten thousand such bars in Austin. But he does a nice job with his beer and the food is good. He’s a brother to me, so even if it was awful, I’d support him, but his stuff is good.”
I nodded and drank my beer, staring out over the desert, the sun just starting to fade over the hills.
“When your car’s finally running again, are you still planning to try for Austin, or it back to Phoenix, or what’s your plan?” Lincoln asked.
“I haven’t really thought too much about it. I’m not in any hurry to get back to Phoenix, except for the fact that I can’t just stay on an indefinite leave of absence from work. Turtle and I are over, and for good this time, but he still has all his stuff at the condo, and I’d be a liar if I said I wasn’t afraid of hi
m.”
“You’re right to be. He’s unstable. I’ve seen it too many times before; if he gets it in his head that he needs to do bad things to you, whether that’s hurting you or harassing you or worse, nothing is going to stop him from doing what he decides needs to happen to make things right, from his perspective.”
This seems like a safe place, I wanted to say, but it seemed incredibly forward, inappropriate, and borderline stalkerish.
So, you can understand why my jaw dropped when he said what he said next, joking or not.
“Hell, if I thought you’d accept, I’d invite you to stay here for a while. He’d never find you, or have the balls to try anything even if he did. Besides, this place could definitely use a woman’s touch.”
I was floored. His tone was somewhere south of serious, but one of the pearls of wisdom my grandma taught me when I was little, along with eating a spoonful of peanut butter to cure hiccups, was that all humor is rooted in the truth, even if just loosely; that all jokes have at least a kernel of genuineness in them.
Moving in with a guy I just met, no matter how handsome, would be sheer lunacy. But I’d met Cade Carter almost two decades ago. He’d changed his name and career, and somehow gotten even better-looking, but Lincoln Sinclair was the man who the boy I’d worshipped had become. He wasn’t a “stranger,” not in the strictest sense of the word.
Hell, with enough rationalization, he was an old friend.
The universe conspired to land me in his town. Fate had to have played a role. Random chance didn’t explain it.
Whatever the reason, however I’d wound up on this porch, miles from anywhere, sipping beer with this rugged Ranger, there was nowhere on Earth I’d rather have been.
10
Once our jars of beer were dry, Lincoln invited me inside his home.
“Why don’t I give you the ten-dollar tour of my humble abode?” he asked.
