LITMIR.BIZ

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bundle. “You can take the coffee and protein bar with you. Consider the mug a housewarming gift.”

      * * *

      Minutes later, back at the patrol car, Mack gingerly took his seat. As he fastened his seat belt, he tried to ignore Alana’s open stare.

      “You okay?”

      “Yeah, why?”

      “You’re moving like someone ten or fifteen years older than you are.”

      “Hitching and hiking can do that to you.”

      Alana seemed to accept that and exited the parking lot. She turned onto Main Street for the turn north that would take them to the farm-to-market road and Last Call Ranch. In all honesty, that’s all Mack remembered of the directions to the place. But his back hurt so much from carrying the duffel bag—even though he changed shoulders frequently—that he mentally kissed her for insisting on driving him. At least none of his wounds had busted open. He’d fingered the spots when she’d gone to get him coffee.

      The town was literally ghostlike with not another vehicle in sight, until he caught a glimpse of lights and spotted a patrol car in his side-view mirror as it left the convenience store and turned toward the station. No doubt the other night-shift cop, Ed, coming to catch up on the excitement with dispatcher Bunny.

      Buns, he thought with a silent snort, remembering Alana’s personal nickname for her. The woman had certainly earned that one, too, although she seemed pretty harmless and sweet—and again, all wrong for a police station. And how the devil did females sit for hours in clothes that tight without losing consciousness? But at least she wasn’t in a uniform.

      Mack had never cared for the idea of women in uniform, although he’d had his butt saved twice by female chopper pilots and had since adjusted his opinion to a degree. However, he wasn’t changing his mind about Alana Anders. Maybe she seemed to know what she was doing, but she was too feminine, too much woman for what she did for a living. That annoyed him as much as it did to realize that his gaze was drawn to her whenever he thought she wasn’t looking.

      Face it, you don’t care if she’s noticing or not.

      Fine, he amended, if things were different, he would be coming after her, staking his claim like the red-blooded male he was. He may have been shot twice, but as far as he could tell, all of his equipment still worked, and he was going to prove that as soon as he regained a little more strength. In the meantime, he was going to dream about Officer Anders’s long legs out of those uniform blues. He would bet a month’s pay that she had the legs of a swimsuit model and that her breasts weren’t filled with silicone. That face could be on a magazine cover, too, but the fools would want to airbrush away the small scar above her left eyebrow, and put too much greasy stuff on those succulent lips. He would like to taste them wet from a bite of strawberry or a lush peach, as he lost himself in those deceptively soft brown eyes.

      Nuts, he thought.

      Deceptive was the key word. There was a lot going on inside her and he wasn’t sure of a fraction of it. One minute she was all business, the next she was giving him a look so honest and bold, he felt as though he’d taken an electric shock to his groin, and the next he could swear her heart was fracturing. What the hell was going on with her?

      At least it seemed that she’d been decent to the old man. Mack thought his father had been a lucky stiff if he’d checked out while gazing at Alana’s high-cheekboned face, especially if that luscious hair wasn’t tied back as it was now.

      “How long have you been at this?” They were at least a mile outside town, and security lights were growing fewer and farther between, and Mack figured her mind was cranking away questions, too. He’d rather have her answering than asking them.

      “You mean law enforcement? I went into the academy straight from college.”

      “So you’re a rookie?” He suspected she was slightly older than that, but not by much.

      “Hilarious. This is my seventh year. I just turned thirty.”

      Mentally, he gave her another point for being honest. At thirty, some women started counting backward. “So this is really what you always wanted to do?”

      “You didn’t hear me say that. I wanted to be a fighter pilot. I caught the flying bug from my older brother. He would be your age now.”

      “Would be?”

      “He was flying my parents to the Gulf to catch a cruise for their twentieth wedding anniversary, but there was mechanical trouble. They didn’t make it.”

      “That’s rough.” She’d managed to keep her voice steady, but Mack didn’t miss how her hands worked the steering wheel and how tight her grip got.

      “It was. Is. But coming back to the world, as you service people tend to say, has to be a challenge, too.” Alana’s voice grew huskier. “And then to have this news that you weren’t expecting...”

      She didn’t really want to talk about the past any more than he did. That was another thing he couldn’t help but find appealing about her. He’d OD’d on drama queens years before finally freeing himself of his mother. “I am curious as to why my father didn’t hire an attorney to handle this,” he said, shifting the envelope between his hands.

      “His longtime lawyer passed away last year and he didn’t like the other two in town. I tried to help him find someone else, but he kept putting it off until it was too late.”

      “So his death wasn’t sudden?”

      “No, there’s nothing fast about lung cancer.” Alana shook her head as though trying to shake off something. “He never could quit smoking. Heaven knows, we all tried to help.”

      “He’d known you all of your life?”

      “Fred and Duke went to school together. After Fred’s divorce and losing you, he became part of our family. I don’t remember a holiday get-together when he wasn’t there. Or funeral. After—after the accident, you could say he and Uncle Duke finished raising me. Fred taught me everything I know about horses and cattle, and the chief added most of what they didn’t teach me in the police academy.”

      “Did Fred like anyone besides you and your uncle?” Mack asked the question for an excuse to continue studying her profile and admire the perfection of her skin in the surreal light. The answer was almost irrelevant.

      “Of course. But he didn’t trust easily. That’s probably something you two would have found you had in common.” As they passed the entryway of a ranch with an electronic gate and pole fencing freshly painted green, she nodded. “That’s us. Pretty Pines.”

      The visuals failed to trigger even the slightest memory in Mack. “Did we ever meet? I have to admit I remember less than I thought I did.”

      “I’m guessing you and your mother left about the time that I was born. I may have been all of six when you last visited as a teenager. That would have made me invisible to you. And the pole fence wouldn’t have been there yet. We still used barbed and ranch wire back then. Here we are,” she added, turning into the next driveway.

      As she parked before the simple gate with the metal letters Last Call Ranch bolted to it, Mack remembered his father’s irreverent humor in naming the place and his mother’s chastising him for making them the town trash. Her protests had seemed hypocritical even to a kid of eight who’d witnessed how much both of his parents drank—and the fights that followed. Now they struck him as doubly so, considering the line of work she’d ended up in.

      “You have the keys.”

      Pulled back to the present, Mack dug out two sets from the envelope. There were about a dozen keys on each ring. Alana pointed to the correct set and, once he handed it to her, deftly flipped to the sturdy stainless key.

      “All of the house keys and the front-gate key are on this one. You’ll soon memorize them because I color coded them. The other ring is for the barn, truck and equipment.”

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