She scooted away from him and raised the sheet to her arm pits. “I didn’t want to wake up here.”
He lifted his gaze to her face. “Why?”
“Because I always look like crap in the morning. I don’t have clean clothes or underwear, and my eyes are puffy.”
He would have laughed, but she appeared to be very serious. To him she looked so good he wanted to pounce on her and bury his face in her neck. He wanted to make her smile and sigh his name. Instead, he stood and walked over to his closet. He took out a terrycloth robe that was too short and which he never wore. Tossing it onto the end of the bed, he moved to his dresser. “These have never been worn,” he said after he found a pair of boxer shorts. “My mom bought them for me for Christmas, but I don’t wear underwear.” He tossed them by the robe. “She hasn’t given up on trying to reform me.” He slanted her a smile, but she didn’t say another word. So much for putting her at ease. “I’ll make you breakfast,” he said as he left the room, giving her a chance to dress by herself.
His bare feet didn’t make a sound when he moved down the hall, past Adam’s room and the bathroom. In the kitchen, the cake mess was still everywhere. Earlier, while he’d waited for the coffee to perk, he’d picked up the biggest hunks, but a lot of the frosting still smeared the table and floor.
Dylan opened the refrigerator door and looked inside. Since he hadn’t expected to come home for a few weeks, he’d cleaned it out and there wasn’t much inside. A tub of margarine, a jar of mustard, and some ketchup. In the cupboards he found boxes of macaroni and cheese, instant potatoes, and canned fruit and vegetables.
Down the hall, he heard the bathroom door open and shut, and then the water run in the sink. There was nothing in his house to eat, and he couldn’t take her to breakfast. Not when she was wearing his boxer shorts, and not when the news of them together would be served up at lunch.
Dylan took the broom and dustpan from the closet and swept up as much cake as possible. If this were any other town, if he were a man other than the sheriff trying to live down his own past and Hiram Donnelly’s, no one would have cared so much, but he wasn’t just any man and Hope didn’t exactly blend in with the locals.
He threw more cake into the trash and smiled to himself. The next time Paris asked him how he’d liked her cake, and she would, she always did, he could tell her in all honesty that it was the best damn cake he’d ever eaten.
Dylan put the broom and dustpan away, and when he turned, Hope stood in the doorway. Her hair was brushed, her face scrubbed. The edges of his boxer shorts hung just below the bottom of his robe.
“I’m afraid I don’t have anything for breakfast,” he said.
Her gaze slid from his and moved around the kitchen. “That’s okay. I never eat before noon anyway. Have you seen my clothes?”
He pulled out a kitchen chair and pointed to the bundle he’d folded earlier.
“You folded my clothes?”
He shrugged and watched her move to the table. He hadn’t known what to expect this morning; he hadn’t really thought about it. But even if he had, he wouldn’t have expected her to be chilly. She reminded him of the Hope who’d first driven her Porsche into town. Sometime during the night, between the time he’d pulled her against him and the time she’d opened her eyes, something had changed, and he didn’t even pretend to know what that something might be.
When she reached for her clothes, he reached for her hand. “What are your plans today?”
“I have to work. I’m really behind.”
“Did you get the police files yet?”
“Yes.”
“I could help you look them over.”
“Ah, no, thanks.” She looked somewhere over his left shoulder, and he placed the tips of his fingers against her jaw and brought her gaze to his. Her eyes gave nothing away, and in giving nothing, she told him what he needed to know. She was hiding from him, and he would have none of it. He lowered his lips to hers and lightly kissed her. She tried to take a step backward, but he cradled the nape of her neck in his palm. With his mouth poised just above hers, he ran the tip of his tongue across the seam of her lips and felt her relent by degrees. Her shoulders relaxed, her stance softened, then a light puff of a sigh and a silent “Ahh.” He kissed her more fully. He kissed her until her hands found the back of his head. Until she’d risen on the balls of her feet and pressed her breasts into his bare chest. He drew back and looked into her eyes. “Sorry about breakfast?”
“Mmm… I’m still full from all that cake.”
Dylan smiled. Damn, but he liked her.
Hope chose a photograph of a normal-looking grandmother from her computer files. She gave her purple hair and lipstick. As she made the alien’s eyes beneath the purple eyeshadow a little rounder and her fingers a bit too long, she wondered if Walter would think all the purple was too far-fetched and make her change it. In her wildest imagination, she’d never have thought to make up a character like Eden Hansen.
Not even she was that good.
She’d already sent two alien articles to her editor. He liked them both and wanted more. She clicked the send icon on her computer screen and shot her third story through cyberspace.
The first article had just hit the stores, and according to Walter, the preliminary reader response was positive. The paper wanted to run with the series as long as possible. Which was fine with Hope. She had enough material to last a while. And when she ran out, she’d just make a trip into town.
She was writing some of the best articles of her career, and she didn’t need a psychiatrist to tell her it was because she no longer felt empty, trying to create from a dry well.
By moving to Gospel, she’d inadvertently kick-started her career and her life. She was sleeping and feeling better than she had in a long time. She’d always known that her life and creativity were so intertwined that when one suffered, they both suffered. She supposed for a while she’d just tried to ignore the truth. She’d focused on something she’d thought she could control, her career, but she’d found herself hanging on by her fingernails.
Now she had a social life, and she had something else entirely different to work on besides her stories for
She reached for the large envelope she’d received in the mail a few days prior and removed the FBI report inside. From the sections that weren’t blacked out, she’d read that the FBI had been tipped off and provided proof of embezzlement by someone inside the sheriff’s office. An informant who had access to bookkeeping records. Hope wondered if that someone was Hazel Avery. Or perhaps even Dylan.
She leaned back in her chair and her gaze lowered to the telephone next to her computer screen. Dylan said he’d call. When he’d dropped her off that morning, he’d said he had some work to do at the Double T, but that he’d call her tonight. She glanced at the clock on her monitor. Five-fifteen. Officially evening.
Hope pushed back her chair and stood. When she thought of last night, she felt equal parts thrilled and terrified. Like she wanted to laugh one second and hide the next. She felt schizophrenic. Torn in two. Wonderfully alive and scared to death. Looking for meaning in a meaningless affair. Trying to protect herself while running toward a collision with something that was bound to hurt her. Completely out of control.
He’d licked frosting from her body and they’d been as intimate as two lovers could be, yet before he’d taken her home that morning, he’d given her a baseball cap and helped shove her hair up into it. He’d given her one of his big Levi’s jackets to wear so no one in town would recognize her and start rumors. That was what he’d said anyway, and she wondered if that was true, or if he was secretly embarrassed to be seen with her.
He’d asked about her scar. He’d finally noticed it as he’d bathed her in the shower. She’d told him her ex- husband had given her a tummy tuck, because it hadn’t been the time or the place for the truth. Then he’d kissed her old hysterectomy scar and made her feel bad for lying.
He’d folded her clothes. Such a small thing for him to do, yet it felt huge. While she’d slept, he’d folded her bra and panties in half and laid them with her skirt and tank top in a neat pile like they’d just come out of the dryer. And as she’d tried to draw away from him, tried to put some distance between them, he’d pulled her close and made her feel as if the sex the night before hadn’t been so meaningless after all.
Falling in love with Dylan would be easy. So easy and so stupid. He’d told her once that a girlfriend was the last
