“No warrants for indecent exposure?”
“No.”
“Sexual harassment?”
She laughed. “Not recently.”
He looked her over from head to toe, then back up again. “That’s a shame.”
She tucked in her chin and regarded him out of the corner of her eye. “Are you flirting with me, Sheriff Taber?”
“Honey, if you have to ask, then I must be getting old.”
“How old are you?”
“Almost thirty-eight.”
Her lips became a seductive smile that warmed his chest. “You look pretty good for such an old guy.”
“Ms. Spencer, are you flirting with me?”
“Maybe.” A wrinkle appeared between her pale brows. “It’s been a long time since I’ve flirted with anyone, but I think so.” The wrinkle smoothed. “I guess you got lucky.”
Lucky. He didn’t know if he should run like hell or push her down on the couch and show her lucky. He took a step back. “Did you send in a request for Hiram Donnelly’s old file?” he asked, again changing the subject and putting a distance between them.
She stared at him for a few moments as if she didn’t follow the sudden shift in conversation. “Ah, yeah,” she finally said. “Last week.”
“Good. Let me know if you need help making sense out of them.” She stood and he took another step back. “I better get the boys home and put them to bed.”
“Their shoes are upstairs. I’ll get them.” Hope moved toward the stairs and felt very much like she had the night in her kitchen when he’d kissed her. After one touch, he couldn’t get away from her fast enough, and like that night, she didn’t know what she’d done.
When she got to the top of the stairs, she headed down the hall and went into a room on her right. Maybe she shouldn’t have admitted that she hadn’t flirted for a long time.
Maybe she’d scared him.
Beside the bed in the spare room at the end of the hall, she found Wally’s cowboy boots and one of Adam’s blue sneakers. As she crawled on the floor looking for the other shoe, she wondered if she gave off some sort of desperate vibe that freaked him out. By admitting she hadn’t flirted in a while, maybe he thought there was something wrong with her, and maybe he was right to do that. She’d met Dylan just over a week ago. She really didn’t know him, but when he looked at her or smiled at her or talked to her, her chest got tight. And when he touched her, she didn’t think at all.
She walked into the closet and looked around. As she rummaged though the camping gear inside, she heard the heavy tread of Dylan’s bootheels enter the room. She found the sneaker next to some extra sleeping bags, and when she came back out of the closet, Dylan stood in front of the window, over six feet of hard man, looking out across the lake.
“I’ve never seen the view from over here.” His shoulders filled the window, and the weak sixty-watt bulb overhead picked out the buried layers of gold in his hair and emphasized the stark white of his T-shirt tucked inside his Levi’s.
Hope set the shoe by the others next to the bed, then moved to stand beside him. She really couldn’t see out the window, but she really wasn’t dying to, either. She still felt no awe for the beauty around her, but she had to admit that there was a certain stillness to it all. A sort of tranquility that couldn’t be found in the most expensive resort or bought at the trendiest spa.
“You can’t see it from here, but there’s my house,” he said, pointing to the left and sliding over so she could see. “Right over there beyond that biggest ponderosa. And see that bright star at about sixty degrees north?” When she didn’t move, he wrapped an arm around her waist and pulled her to stand in front of him. With her back pressed against the solid wall of his chest, and one hand resting on her hip, he pointed to the stars. “Look directly below to that pale spot. That’s Devil’s Chin rock. Right below that is the Double T Ranch. That’s where I grew up. My mother and my sister still live there. If my mother had her way, I’d live there, too.”
He smelled faintly of musk and cologne, and the scent of cool night air clung to his skin. She looked out into the night, but there was nothing to see. The window faced the empty lake, and not so much as a sliver of light for her porch or the Aberdeens’ yard penetrated the darkness. Instead of watching where Dylan pointed, she watched his reflection. “I take it you don’t want to live there.”
“No. I grew up herding cows and baling hay. It’s a hard life. One you better love. I don’t, but maybe Adam will someday.” He was silent for a moment, staring off into the distance as if he could see something that she could not. “I couldn’t wait to get out of this town. I left shortly after graduating high school.”
“But you came back.”
“Yeah. Sometimes you have to wander around until you find where you really belong. And sometimes it’s right where you started. I had to get really miserable before I wanted to come home.”
“Where were you living that you were so miserable?”
Within the window’s reflection, his gaze met hers and he smiled. “First I lived in Canoga Park, and then I moved to Chatsworth.”
“You lived in L.A.?”