“Of course, it wasn’t difficult. I was the youngest of four and the only girl, so my parents were predisposed to think of me as the good kid whether I was or not.”
Where were those brothers when she’d gotten involved with Josh? While Josh liked a challenge, he also liked not getting his ass kicked for messing around with the wrong girl. He would have kissed her goodbye…and then Joe, with his regular job, arrest-free record and all-around good-guyness, might have had a chance.
“Did your brothers approve of Josh?”
“They didn’t meet him, but no, they wouldn’t have approved.”
Which had probably been part of Josh’s appeal. Always being the good girl had grown tedious, and what better way for a good girl to rebel than with a bad boy?
Had she had enough of him now? Was she willing to admit he was a lost cause?
She was in Georgia looking for him after he’d dumped her and run. That seemed a pretty loud No.
“Do they live in Chicago?”
She picked up the mug, glanced at the dregs inside, then set it down again before meeting his gaze. Joe had the clear blue eyes that people paid money to get with contact lenses, but he’d always been a sucker for brown eyes, especially big, deep brown ones that, even after a couple of tough years, still managed a hint of innocence.
“No. D.C., Miami, L.A.” After another pause, she added, “I guess we all wanted out of Kansas.”
A good girl looking to escape the Kansas farmland and run a little wild. How easy it must have been for Josh to wrap her around his finger.
“I never would have pegged you for a farm girl.”
She blinked, then laughed, an easy, natural sound that reminded him again of innocence. “I’ve never set foot on a farm in my life. Well, no, wait, there was the time in third grade that my parents took us to the pumpkin patch for Halloween. That
“I’ll keep that in mind in case I ever head out there. Do you go back often?”
“At least twice a year to see my parents.” As Esther approached with the coffee carafe again, Liz shook her head with a faint smile. “Do you get to see much of your parents?”
He shrugged. They’d settled in Savannah, only a few hours away, and he drove down at least once a month. He didn’t tell her that, though. How could he be sure that Josh hadn’t sent her here with a made-up story about looking for him just so he could find their folks? Mom and Dad might miss him like hell, but they were better off without him. Who knew what kind of trouble Josh would bring to their door if he could find it?
Because his thoughts had already taken a grim turn, he remarked, “Miss Abigail says you signed a month’s lease.” Twenty-nine more nights like last night, his gaze straying constantly to the windows, watching shadows as she moved from room to room. Twenty-nine more nights of getting to know her schedule, of catching unexpected glimpses of her, of seeing her both at home in casual clothes-those snug denim cutoffs from last night still made him sweat-and out and dressed up.
Twenty-nine more nights. God help him.
“Actually, my lease is for one month, with a month-by-month extension. I could be here one, two, four months. As long as it takes.” She made the announcement with an entirely too-sunny attitude. It turned his mouth down as if he’d just taken a hearty swallow of the used-up coffee grounds he provided Miss Abigail for her garden.
“If you’re really looking for Josh, Copper Lake isn’t the place to do it.”
“It’s the only place I have.” The airiness disappeared and something else crossed her face, flattening her voice. Panic? Despair? He’d taken something of value from her, she’d said. Sentimental value, like her grandmother’s opal ring she’d once worn? It was missing from her finger now.
Or financial value? Liz must have worked during the months they were together; someone had to support them, preferably in a way that didn’t bring them to the attention of the local cops. Had Josh wiped out her savings before he ran? Joe didn’t know what kind of work she did-Josh’s tastes usually ran toward waitresses-but it didn’t seem likely she could have saved an amount substantial enough to make her track him down.
What else could make a reasonably intelligent woman chase after a man she was well rid of? Love, he supposed, though he’d rather not think of Liz in love with his brother.
A knock on the plate glass window drew his gaze outside, and he waved. Anamaria Calloway, dressed in red with a bright Caribbean print shawl wrapped around her shoulders, was pushing the stroller that held young Will. The baby was sucking a pacifier and surveying the world around him with a lazy certainty that he was the center of its existence. He got both laziness and certainty, along with blue eyes, from his daddy and everything else, they hoped, from his ma-
He jerked his gaze back to Liz. “You aren’t-You didn’t-”
She looked from him to the baby, then back to him with nothing less than horror on her face. “Have a baby? With Josh? Dear God, no.”
Joe didn’t want to examine just how relieved he was by the answer. Knowing Josh had a kid would be tough enough. Knowing that he had a kid with Liz…Of all the things his brother had done in the last thirty years, that one would be the deal breaker. No more contact. Ever.
“I would never be so careless,” Liz said, her tone gone from shock to huffiness.
“People forget. They have accidents.”
“Not me. Never.”
“You never get so carried away that you don’t remember, or you don’t think it’ll be all right just this one time?”
“Never.”
Joe wasn’t smiling because he liked the emphatic nature of her answer. It wasn’t really a smile at all. He was just letting some of the tension ease from his muscles. “Do you ever wonder if maybe you’ve been sleeping with the wrong guys?”
Again, she blinked, but this time there was no tinkling laugh to follow it. “I think we got off track.”
“From the day we met,” he muttered. He couldn’t tell whether she’d heard. Her cheeks were flushed and she was looking just a bit disconcerted. Good. Making her lose her emotional balance might help him keep his.
“We were talking about the odds of my finding Josh here.”
“We hadn’t gotten to odds yet, but I’d guess they’re about a million to one against you. You familiar with the phrase ‘gone to ground’? Because Josh is. He’s had regular hideouts since he was three, and ‘with me’ has never been one of them, so you might as well move on.”
“You haven’t seen him.”
“Not since the day I got shot.”
“You haven’t talked to him.”
He shook his head.
“No e-mail. No contact with him at all.”
He held her gaze but didn’t speak. If she took his silence for a negative, if he’d deliberately misled her, well, that Thou shalt not lie stuff was between him and God. Certainly not him and Josh’s ex-maybe-wannabe-again-girlfriend. Besides, an unsolicited envelope in the mail with no return address didn’t count.
“See those two guys over there?” He gestured to the table closest to the door. “That’s Detective Tommy Maricci and Lieutenant A. J. Decker of the Copper Lake Police Department. If Josh showed up here, they’d be the first people I’d call. And he knows that. I’m fresh out of excuses, sympathy and family ties. He’d have to be beyond desperate to come to me because I’m not risking my ass for him ever again. So…” He shoved his chair back with a scrape. “You’re wasting your time hanging out here.”
“Well, it’s my time to be wasted, isn’t it?”
He couldn’t argue that point with her, so instead he picked up her cup and spoon and headed for the counter.
It was her time, Liz reflected as she stood up. And though she was there for the job, it left her an awful lot of nothing to do. Watching Joe chat with the two police officers he’d pointed out, she strolled across the cafe, then outside. The morning air was cool and damp and tinged with the promise of later heat. She could walk around the square and familiarize herself with the area. She could meet Joe’s business neighbors and see what they had to say about him. Most people, she’d found, told strangers way too much about others. Usually there was no malicious intent; they just forgot that they couldn’t trust strangers anymore.
How long had it been since she’d been so naive? She’d had a wonderful upbringing; there was no doubt about that. She’d loved her parents and her brothers, and they’d loved her. But discussions at the family dinner table had revolved around law and order, crime and punishment. She’d thought all little girls’ daddies wore suits, guns and badges to work; that all little girls’ mommies put bad people in prison; that all kids, even the good ones, borrowed Dad’s handcuffs for show-and-tell at least once and chained the prissiest girl in class to the teacher’s desk.
Your family’s weird, her best friend had told her in third grade, and Liz had put her in a wrist lock, forced her to her knees and made her apologize.
It had taken some time for her to realize they
She walked to the end of the block, passing neatly kept storefronts, a flower shop that smelled heavenly through the open door and Ellie’s Deli, with enticing scents drifting through her open door, too. The cold lo mein she’d had for breakfast seemed a long time ago, so Liz climbed the old-fashioned porch and stepped inside.
The place was charming: old to its very bones, with fresh paint and reproduction fabrics and a few good antiques. Even though a fair number of tables were occupied, the bulk of the deli’s morning rush centered on the takeout counter, a wavy-glassed cabinet that looked as if it might have displayed pies and pastries once upon a time.
“Table or takeout?” a waitress asked on her way to the kitchen with an armload of plates.
“Table, please.” Right in the middle of the gossips, if you don’t mind.
Instead of leading her toward the dozen old men sharing a country-fried breakfast and their opinions on everything, the waitress turned toward the back of the building. The broad hall opened into a smaller, quieter dining room. Only two tables were occupied there: one by the pretty black woman with the baby stroller and a man Liz assumed, by their matching gold bands, was her husband and the one person in town, after Joe, who most interested Liz.
Natalia Porter’s attention was riveted outside, where the two puppies, restrained by leashes attached to the fence, were digging furiously in the dirt. The tan one created a hole deep enough to plunge her entire head into it, withdrawing only to snap at the fuzzy one when he tried to join her. Chastened, he went back to his own
