Slow Dance with the Sheriff Read online

  ‘Don’t do this, Ellie.’

  ‘Why not? My flaws are so clearly up for discussion, why can’t yours be?’ She tossed her hair back.

  Aim…

  ‘Look, we gave it a shot, it didn’t work out. It happens.’

  She clenched her jaw and locked eyes with him. ‘I imagine it happens to you a lot.’

  His finger trembled on the trigger. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  Deputy dropped his snout flat to the floor and cast anxious eyes at them both, whining, as Ellie gave as good as she got.

  ‘It means that limiting yourself to meeting women outside of the county when you have no intention of going out of it is a convenient way to ensure that no relationship is ever going to work out, don’t you think?’

  She was fighting for her life and—God help him—he was starting to fold. He urgently fortified his resolve. The more she fought him the more he was going to hurt her.

  ‘You have a problem committing to women,’ she cried. ‘Just admit it and let’s deal with it.’

  He closed his eyes. ‘Why does it have to be a problem? Why can’t it just be because I don’t want you?’

  …Fire.

  Her sharp intake of air was the only clue that he’d struck her way, way down deep. Where she was the most raw and exposed.

  A prideful woman would have walked out. A bitter woman would have railed at him. A vengeful woman would have struck back. But Ellie just lifted her chin, to hide the devastation at the back of her defiant eyes.

  ‘Is that true?’

  Self-disgust burned and he spun away tossing the useless gun far away. ‘We’ve shared a few kisses, Ellie. And now you’re asking me for a commitment. That’s not normal.’

  Silence stretched out.

  And out.

  Deputy crawled closer to them on his belly.

  Not normal.

  Ellie had to make herself breathe. Jed probably had no idea how much more that last accusation hurt than any of the other things he’d said since this beautiful evening started to go so very, very wrong. All she ever wanted was to function like everyone else. To love and be loved just like everyone else.

  Was that really so much to ask?

  But she wasn’t like everyone else. She was all back to front. She needed the trust and respect and surety of a man before she could even do the simple things that usually fostered trust and respect and assurances.

  Like hand-holding.

  Kissing.

  Touching.

  No wonder it had taken her thirty years to even find one. What were the chances of ever finding another?

  Jed prowled around his tiny living room, his expression so crowded it was unreadable. ‘Believe me, I’m just saving us both a lot of time. The novelty of your physical response to me would have worn off sooner or later.’ He crossed his arms across his chest and clenched his jaw until it was pale. ‘You’re a good person, Ellie, but I’m not interested in a relationship with you. And I don’t think you’d be interested in anything less with me. What else is there to say?’

  She stepped forward. ‘Jed…’

  He barked his frustration. ‘Ellie, I don’t know how to be clearer. My life is complicated enough without having to make allowances for a high-maintenance princess with body issues.’

  She froze.

  Having her life—her illness—so summarily dismissed burned much more than it should have. She’d guarded herself her whole life against the judgment of others. And her own. But, sometime in the past two weeks, she’d lowered those shields. Opened herself up to hurt.

  And this is what hurt felt like. Amplified a thousand per cent by love.

  She stumbled against the arm of the sofa on the realisation.

  Love.

  Oh, God, was that what Jed could see in her eyes? Had she let it show? Somewhere between rescuing her from raging cattle, helping her fly with the bats and dancing with her as if they were making love she’d fallen head over heels for Sheriff Jerry Jackson. The woman who thought she wasn’t capable of feeling it.

  Of all the moments to realise she was wrong, discovering it just as he was rejecting her was the cruellest blow of all.

  Her whole body ached.

  Love.

  That was a mistake she’d be careful not to make again. Not if this was how it felt.

  ‘I need to go.’ The words came out as a croak. She turned and stumbled for the doorway. Deputy cringed and ducked as she passed him, then he circled around her, his shoulders low and tail tucked between his legs.

  Exactly how she felt.

  ‘Ellie—’

  She yanked the door open.

  ‘Ellie, wait…’

  Not compassion. Not from him. Not now. She couldn’t bare it. She turned back—heartsore—and said the only thing she knew would hurt him.

  ‘That’s Ms. Calhoun to you, Sheriff.’

  It hit its mark with shocking accuracy and every bit of colour drained from his tanned face. She was too numb to feel any triumph.

  She turned and lurched down the pathway to her own little haven, leaving the door gaping behind her as wide as her chest cavity.

  * * *

  Drinking was almost pointless.

  It didn’t even feel good. Like the calluses that formed on his weapon fingers during training, or the ones that formed on his thumb in his pen-pushing years, the liquor he’d hit so hard after losing Maggie only formed a hard, impenetrable casing over his stomach and his heart that meant he never got drunk…

  He only ever got numb.

  He resettled his cheek on the old leather cushion.

  Numb was good enough.

  He lay on his front on the sofa, head turned to the side, eyes lost in the orange glow of the dying fire he couldn’t be bothered stoking.

  Thinking.

  Trying not to.

  It had been hours since Ellie had stormed out of his house and he’d raged across the room and slammed the front door shut behind her. What followed was three hours of pent-up grief and denial. Latent stuff left over from New York that he’d never fully expressed. It had to be. He’d not let his emotions get that firm a hold on him…ever. The whole lot liberally lubricated with the bourbon he kept for when his gram visited.

  He’d stopped short of breaking stuff but only just. He had too much respect for his inherited furnishings and the many lifetimes they’d endured before his. Much harder lifetimes than his, too—war and drought and hardship and loss.

  Real, unimaginable, barely survivable loss.

  So he’d slammed and cursed and raged around instead, lecturing himself at half volume and doing a damned fine impersonation of his training sergeant until his legs got sore from being upright.

  And then he’d fallen into this exact position and not moved for the next hour. The luminosity of the fire held him transfixed. It glowed exactly the way Ellie’s eyes had as she’d stared up at him, offering herself.

  Back when she was still in his arms.

  He’d done the right thing. If he said it enough he might even start to believe it. He wasn’t about to repeat the mistakes of his past and stay with someone out of a sense of duty, because they needed him. That wouldn’t do anyone any favors, especially someone as damaged as Ellie.

  He got a flash of the extra damage he’d done tonight—patently reflected in her traumatised expression—and clenched his fists. Better a short, sharp pain now than longer and much worse later.

  Before he really hurt her.

  Then right behind that he got a flash of the same expression on the face of Maggie’s sister. She’d taken it on herself to clutch his hand by way of support, surrounded by all his girlfriend’s family and friends in their funereal black, as he heard over and over how happy Maggie had been with him and how in love they’d been.

  He’d stopped in at a liquor store on his way home.

  Limiting yourself to meeting women outside of the county when you have no intention of going out of it is a convenient way to ensure that
no relationship is ever going to work out, don’t you think?

  He did think. He’d been very cautious all this time to justify it that way. But Ellie had torn that careful excuse wide open and called it for the BS it was.

  He’d been so close to telling her what had really happened in New York. What kind of a man he really was. But something had stopped him. Maybe he thought Ellie would understand.

  And he didn’t deserve understanding.

  And he sure as hell didn’t deserve her acceptance.

  So he’d pushed her away with everything he had, and he’d done as thorough a job as he did with everything. You don’t keep people at a distance for years without developing some powerful strategies. Never committing, never letting yourself feel.

  You’ve committed to Deputy, to Larkville.

  His vow to his dog was more about atonement than anything else. As long as Deputy was alive and well—as long as he’d salvaged something worthwhile from that train wreck of a situation in New York—then he didn’t have to look too closely at his own demons.

  His eyes rolled sideways to Deputy’s mat expecting to see the big lug stretched out in his usual position. But the mat was vacant.

  Jed lifted his head. Squinted into the corners of the room.

  Silence.

  He pushed to his feet. ‘Deputy?’ He swung the bathroom door open, then took the steps up to the loft by twos.

  ‘Deputy?’ Loud enough to be heard by a sleeping dog but not so loud that he’d wake Ellie next door.

  Nothing—from this cottage or the old barn.

  Raw panic seethed through him and he had a sudden vision of slamming his front door closed. What if Deputy had gone out for a nature break and he’d locked him out? He sprinted back down the stairs and flung the door wide, emerging coatless into the chilly, empty street.

  He gave the whistle command that Deputy had been trained to respond to—a dog never forgot that primary signal, no matter what—and then held his breath for the galumph of approaching feet.

  Still nothing.

  Nausea washed through him and his mind served him up a fast-action replay of his fight with Ellie as it must have looked from a fragile dog’s perspective. The moment where he slammed that front door closed. The noise he was making for the hours that followed. If Deputy had come home, it would have scared him off again.

  Ellie…

  His body called straight out for her. Ellie would help him. She would hold him together as he lost it. She’d keep him grounded as his past fears threatened to rise up and swallow him. Because she had more strength than she realised and maybe he didn’t have as much as he liked people to believe.

  If ever there was a woman to understand weakness, wouldn’t it be a woman who’d battled her own dragon and survived? A woman who knew the many aspects of fear by their first names? If ever there was a woman who could help him, wouldn’t it be Ellie Patterson, with her insight and compassion and courage?

  But that spoke of so much more than just wanting her.

  That was needing her.

  And he didn’t do need. Needing was not something you could come back from.

  He gave it a moment more, then dashed back inside and reached for his coat and police-issue flashlight. Hadn’t Deputy been let down by humans enough times? And now he’d consumed too much liquor to even get behind the wheel and find him fast. Self-reproach oozed through the surges of adrenaline.

  Dogs. Hearts. Souls.

  He was so right not to trust himself with anything fragile. But still he burned to find Ellie and beg her help. Not just for Deputy’s sake, but for his own. Failing someone that needed him again would send him back to that place he’d been three years ago. To a much worse place than he’d let himself go because—all this time—he’d been holding on to his one, furry reminder of New York like a talisman.

  As long as he could love that stupid dog, then he could love. He caught himself on her doorstep just as his knuckle rapped once on the timber. He pressed his hand flat on the wood to stop it knocking again. Rousing Ellie to help him was not something he should be doing.

  It was three in the morning.

  He’d just evicted her from his life.

  He curled his fingers into the flaking paintwork. And he couldn’t bear to see her face when she realised what little care he took of things that he loved.

  He pushed away from her door, turned back up the laneway and switched on his flashlight, then jogged out into the cold night.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  ‘LEAVING so soon?’

  Ellie dragged her tired eyes back from the place on the horizon she’d let them drift and turned her head to the man wiping his wrinkled hands on an oily cloth. She’d vowed only yesterday never to bring her car to Gus’s Fillin’ Station, yet here she was. Fillin’ up.

  But she just wanted gas. She so wasn’t in the right emotional place for another stoush with someone. Last night had spoiled her for courage for…pretty much ever. And she had as little energy and drive for a fight as she had at the height of her sickness.

  She’d lain awake for hours after storming out of Jed’s place. She’d lain awake and listened to him through the paper-thin drywall between his cottage and hers—pacing, slamming, cursing. The intermittent yet all too frequent clank-clank of glass on glass.

  She’d lain awake, crying silently in the darkness for his pain as much as her own, and trying desperately to divine the truth from every footfall, every slam, every muttered phrase that she couldn’t quite make out.

  Barely breathing past the hope that the next noise she heard would be pounding on her front door to make all the pain go away.

  Dying by degrees every time it wasn’t.

  And then beating herself up for having dared to dream.

  Only when Jed had raged himself into an exhausted silence had she let herself follow, tumbling into the only place pain had never followed her.

  Oblivion.

  Even then she’d dreamed of one short, tortured rap on her door.

  ‘I have to get back to New York,’ she lied, dragging her gritty focus back to Gus. Although technically not a lie. She couldn’t stay here to wait for Jess. So home was pretty much the only place she could go.

  The path of least resistance. Letting down Sarah was easier than staying in Larkville and seeing Jed every single day. Running out on Jess was easier. Going home to face the mother she’d so cruelly stormed out on—the mother who’d lied to her daughter her whole life—was definitely easier.

  And that was saying something.

  Everything was going to be better than staying in Larkville with a man who didn’t want her. Or worse, didn’t want to want her.

  ‘Got yer business seen to?’

  ‘No.’ Not that her business was any of his.

  He nodded, and watched her surreptitiously from the corner of his vision. Finally, he bent down to her, placing both hands on the edge of her lowered window. Her heart clenched.

  Here it comes.

  ‘Reckon I owe y’all an apology.’ Her eyebrows lifted as he hurried on. ‘An’ I don’t do that very often or very easy so let me just get it out.’

  Something in Gus’s awkwardness spoke to her. Maybe it was the soul of one misfit calling to another.

  ‘You took me by surprise yesterday, sitting there all calm and unexpected. You reminded me of someone else and it put me out of sorts.’

  Ellie smiled inwardly at how much this apology sounded like him blaming her.

  ‘Anyways, my reaction didn’t really belong to you, so I’m sorry if my actions caused offence.’

  She smiled, though it wasn’t without effort. The last thing she felt like being today was civil, but she’d changed since getting to Larkville; opting out of dealing with the world was no longer an option.

  ‘Thank you, Gus. I’m sorry I let it get to me.’

  That should have been that, but just as he was about to step away, he rounded back, looking a decade younger. Yet older at the same time. �
��Your mother. Was she ever in Larkville?’

  She could play innocent, she could lie, she could do any number of things that would send Gus back into his office scratching his head and wondering until the day he died. Or she could treat him better than she’d so recently been treated and put him out of his misery. Because, she wasn’t sure why, but she knew unquestionably that this man was miserable way down deep inside.

  She nodded. ‘Fenella Groves, back then.’ Or Calhoun, really.

  He kept his feet but for one moment she feared he wouldn’t. His knuckles whitened on her lowered window. ‘I thought so. You look so like her. Sound just like her.’

  ‘You knew her?’

  ‘Yes. For the short time she was here. A lovely woman. How…’ He slid his hat off to reveal thinning grey hair. ‘How is she?’

  He feared she was dead, it was all there in the way he clutched his hat respectfully to his chest in readiness for the worst.

  ‘She’s fine. Healthy, happy, busy with my father’s business.’

  His eyes lit up. ‘A New York businesswoman. I should have guessed.’

  Drive away, Ellie. But something wouldn’t let her. The chance to salvage something valuable from this trip loomed large. ‘How did you know her?’

  ‘Through Clay Calhoun. We was friends and he and Fenella was—’ his eyes shaded ‘—friends.’

  He’s guessed. Not guessed that her mother was pregnant when he drove her seventeen hundred miles to Manhattan, necessarily, but that Ellie was here because of Clay. She should have figured; it was too big a coincidence in a country this size. She met his speculation head-on. ‘I came to meet Clay’s children.’

  ‘They’re all away.’

  ‘So I gathered. I’ll come back another time.’ But as soon as the words were out she realised she might not be able to. Even for the Fall Festival. Jed would still be here.

  Silence fell. Dirty boots shifted on the tarmac surface. Ellie glanced at the clock on her dash. ‘I should get going.’

  Gus stepped back. ‘Right. Sure. Y’all drive carefully.’

  But old pain was resurrecting in his eyes. Something was hurting him. And Ellie didn’t want to be responsible for more pain in under twenty-four hours. She blew out a breath. ‘Unless… Do you sell coffee?’