B007S2Z1KC EBOK Page 14

  It was mostly men, six or eight. Matt supposed the excuse of creating a neighborhood playground allowed them to beg off Sunday worship. He recognized a couple of the crew who’d helped him move in, Isaac and the short guy, Benny. If Clare was miffed about losing the lot for garden acreage, she hadn’t let her disappointment discourage her project’s employees from lending a hand.

  Isaac settled his navy cap back on his head and picked up the other end of the ragged concrete slab. Together they hauled their burden down to the metal Dumpster and heaved it in.

  “How’s the eye?” Matt asked.

  Isaac squinted at him. “Okay.”

  “I had a chat with Eddie Boothe down at the station house the other day. He says he knows you.”

  Slowly, Isaac lowered his arms. “Eddie knows a lot of people.”

  Matt rubbed his jaw with the back of his hand. “So he says. You two tight?”

  “Once,” Isaac admitted. “I ran with his posse for a while.”

  “And now?”

  Isaac’s slow grin spread across his face. “Don’t guess Clare would much like it.”

  “No, I don’t guess she would,” Matt agreed. “You think your working for her ticked Eddie off?”

  “Might have.”

  “Enough for him to...make his feelings known?”

  Isaac looked away. “Yeah. Maybe.”

  They worked together in silence for long minutes. Red dust rose in spurts from the hard ground, powdering work boots and jeans. Slowly a rhythm and a bond developed out of shared sweat and a common goal.

  “Ticked enough for him to take those feelings out on someone else?” Matt asked at last, getting to the heart of his questioning. “On Clare?”

  Concern roiled his stomach as Isaac pondered his reply. “I don’t know,” the crew chief said at last. “Might be he holds a grudge, seeing it was her husband was prosecuting him when he got put away.”

  Matt practically dropped a rock on his foot. He should have known. Stewart should have told him. Hell, Clare should have told him. First thing tomorrow, he was going after some answers. And then he was going after Eddie.

  Isaac hefted another chunk of concrete. “He could’ve had me killed, though, and he didn’t. It might not have been, you know, personal against Clare. Maybe he just had to, like, get some respect back on the street. Me having run with him for a while.”

  And Matt had to be content with that answer. For now.

  The pale sun climbed higher, sharpening shadows and warming the air. Used to the society of the station house, Matt relaxed in the company of the work crew, in the joint tasks, the off-color jokes. His leg didn’t cripple him, at least not much, and the exertion took his mind off Clare and his troublesome response to her last night.

  With the ground cleared, they began to set landscape timbers along two sides of the empty lot.

  Matt hadn’t figured out where his relationship with Clare was headed. That bothered him. He liked to know things, to be in control, to have all the little pieces of a puzzle and put them together. It was one of the reasons he was a good cop. To reconstruct a crime, a detective needed both logic and imagination. But where Clare was concerned, Matt admitted, logic failed him and his imagination went too far.

  She kissed him, and his body took off like a patrol car on a high-speed chase—lights, sirens, the works. She looked at him with those whiskey brown eyes, and wild visions of Little League and white frame houses filled the empty space between his ears where his brain was supposed to be.

  Wrestling a twelve-foot timber into place, Matt stamped on it for good measure. The unthinking movement shot pain up his thigh.

  He couldn’t afford, he didn’t want, some big romantic complication in his life. If he opened to her... Matt shuddered. He couldn’t. Time and again, his mother’s uncomprehending demands on his father’s time and attention and emotions had broken against a wall of uncompromising professionalism. He’d seen his father’s frustration and his mother’s tears. He’d watched his own partner falter under the weight of a wife’s concern.

  “We’re too much alike,” Shirley Dickson had said when she broke with him. “We don’t let anybody in, and we don’t give anything up. Not a case, not control, and not the way we feel. It’s better if we stay just friends.”

  Friends. Matt spat into the dust.

  Clare wanted to be friends, too. Maybe that would be better. Simpler for him, and kinder to her. She was still getting over the loss of her husband. A walk on the wild side with a broken-down cop who ducked emotional involvement might not be what she needed just now.

  And then, as the sun caressed his back, the memory of her small, quick hands racing over him temporarily stopped his breath. Exhaling, Matt tamped earth around the base of the timber. Yeah, better, maybe. But not nearly as much fun.

  He knocked off work around noon to pick up a sackful of burgers and soft drinks for the volunteers. When he opened the truck door, Trigger leapt for the bench seat, big black nose quivering.

  Matt eyed the mutt with disfavor. Even the dog had expectations. “I’m not going hunting, you know. The meat comes already cooked.”

  Trigger watched him hopefully, a thin rim of white appearing around the bright gold eyes. Matt sighed and started the truck.

  By the time he got back to the lot, the church-going contingent had arrived, led by Reverend Ray in a white baseball cap and a sweatshirt that read Grace Saves. Matt scanned the Grace Church volunteers: three more men, twice that many women, and a handful of teens mobilized by Alma, the minister’s formidable wife. Richie was among them. Tyler, too, Matt noted with a frown. He climbed stiffly from the truck.

  He sensed Clare before he saw her, with that peculiar new hyperawareness he’d developed where she was concerned, like the hunch that used to warn him of trouble. He rubbed his jaw. Come to think of it, maybe it was the same old instinct at work after all. Because, striding toward him over the fertile red ground in her slim-hipped boys’ jeans, the woman was definitely Trouble.

  The temptation she’d posed for him last night still made him sweat.

  She smiled when she caught his eye, deliberately pleasant, carefully casual. Friendly, Matt thought with a lick of temper that surprised him.

  “I brought help,” she said.

  Propping back against the truck, he held up the big white bag. “I brought lunch.”

  She parked her tempting butt beside his against the warm cab of the truck and gazed over the lot. Her head barely came to his shoulder. He could smell the sun on her hair. “It looks good.”

  He lifted an eyebrow. “I didn’t figure greasy burgers were your style.”

  “I told you I can’t cook. If it weren’t for fast food, I’d starve. But I was talking about your playground, actually.”

  “I thought you wanted this lot to grow more cabbages or something.”

  “Tomatoes. That’s all right. You were right when you said the kids need a place to play. And the lot is a little small to cultivate anyway.” She looked at him sideways from under blond-tipped lashes, a faint smile touching her lips. “But if you still want to help me acquire that park space in White Oaks...”

  He felt an answering grin tug at his mouth. God save him from a hardheaded, softhearted woman. “I’ll put in a word for you with Collins.”

  In the warm glow that spread over her face, he saw that he’d pleased her, and tried not to like it so much.

  She bounced from her perch, breaking the tenuous connection between them, and held out her hand. “Can I help you pass out those sandwiches?”

  He gave in to impulse. “Yeah, sure. As long as you eat with me.”

  Awareness jittered between them as her eyes met his. “All right.”

  He handed her the bag he held and turned to pluck another through the open window of the truck. When their sacks were nearly empty, she came back to him. Matt lowered the tailgate, and they sat in the bed, finding space alongside three old tires and a stack of treated four-by-fours.

&nbs
p; “What’s all this?” Clare asked.

  Matt cleared his throat. “Playground equipment,” he explained. “I know a guy who runs a hardware store, practically gave it away.”

  Her eyes were warm and amused. “And of course you couldn’t say no.”

  He took refuge behind his burger.

  She took a bite of hers, chewed and looked away. “I wanted to thank you. For last night.”

  Uncomfortable with her openness, he tried to joke. “Sugar, I don’t usually get thanked unless something happens. Nothing did.”

  “Well, I wanted to thank you for that.” Her face was scarlet. “I don’t know what got into me. I acted like a...I didn’t act like myself at all.”

  Matt couldn’t let her think there was a single thing wrong with her behavior last night. Hell, he’d probably carry the impression of her sweet little body to his grave. He chose his words carefully.

  “You’re being kind of hard on yourself, aren’t you? Seems to me if a woman has a right to say ‘no,’ she sure as hell has a right to say ‘yes.’ ”

  Her soft lips pressed together. “Oh, great. Is that another variation of ‘a woman’s got needs’?”

  What was she getting at? “I guess she does, same as a man. You’ve been alone a while. It’s perfectly natural for you to be looking to go out with somebody now.”

  “Somebody like you?”

  Matt marshaled his good intentions. “Not exactly. No. I’m not right for you.”

  She crossed her arms in the defensive posture he was beginning to recognize. “So, who died and made you the big authority on what’s right for me? What’s wrong with you, anyway?”

  He was trying to protect her, and she was making him feel like a chump. He started to get angry, and stuffed his burger in his mouth before he said something rash. “You can do better, that’s all,” he mumbled.

  “Oh, this is interesting. Better how?”

  He swallowed. “Come off it, Clare. You were married to a lawyer.”

  Putting her head to one side like a bird, she regarded him brightly. “Gary’s a lawyer.”

  Even with his blood pressure rising, he had to smother a laugh. “Gary’s a horse’s ass.”

  “Finally, something we can agree on. I never should have asked him out.”

  “Wait a minute. You asked him?”

  “I said it was a mistake.”

  “But why him? Why not me?”

  For a minute, he didn’t think she would answer. She sucked on her drink. Putting it down, she dried her hands on the thighs of her jeans. “Because he was safe,” she said.

  Drop it, his mind warned him. But he couldn’t let it go. “Safe like familiar-safe?”

  Crumpling her sandwich wrapper, she tucked it away in the bag. “That, too, I’m sure. More like safe-I’m-not-attracted-to- him-safe.”

  As simply as that, she destroyed his emotional balance and rocked his self-control. She wanted him. He sure as hell wanted her. But not at the cost of her unhappiness. He’d never left a woman crying, and he wasn’t about to start with her. Even if she recovered, his self-respect wouldn’t.

  “I don’t like to take risks,” she added.

  Matt studied her as she sat cross-legged in the bed of his truck, still pleating the top of the paper bag. The sun reflected off her bent head, making a halo of her red-gold hair.

  He was no monk, never had been. The women he’d taken to his bed were generally no saints, either. What could he offer a woman like Clare, who deserved a safe future and a man’s whole heart and attention, a woman who’d already lost one husband to an assailant’s gun? But he couldn’t let her remark go unchallenged.

  “Sure you do,” he said.

  She shook her head.

  “Starting the Project was a risk. Living here is a risk. That kid, Tyler...” He jerked his chin toward the back of the lot where the teens were making jump shots with their napkins into the other paper sack. “He’s a risk.”

  “That’s different.”

  “Different, how?”

  She ignored him, climbing to her feet in the truck bed, wadding the trash in her hand. “We ought to get to work.”

  He caught at her wrist. Under his fingers, her pulse beat furiously. “Seems to me you’ve got your priorities backward, sugar. Maybe you should stop doing stuff that could get you hurt and take a chance on life for a change.”

  Matt knew the minute he’d said the words that they were a mistake.

  Clare’s whiskey colored eyes blazed like flamed brandy as she tugged her hand free. “Oh, that’s really something, coming from you. Are you implying that just because I’m grateful you didn’t jump into my bed last night, I’m afraid of life?”

  He reddened but would not back down. Maybe that made him the reactionary chauvinist Marcia had called him, but it was a crime a woman as warm and sweet and sexy as Clare should bury her heart with her husband. “Afraid of sex, maybe. Love.”

  “At least I’ve been in love,” she retorted. “In love and loved, Mr. Single Cop Afraid of Commitment.”

  Warm, sweet, sexy...and quick as a wasp. Awkwardly, Matt stood. In a minute he was going to either yell or kiss her, and they weren’t anywhere that would allow him to follow this argument to its natural conclusion. He was, he noted with disgust, already half-aroused. And their raised voices were beginning to attract an audience.

  Before he could figure what to say, Clare jumped from the truck and buzzed off toward Alma and the reverend. Matt watched her go with regret.

  “She sure is something to see when she gets going, huh?” Isaac commented, leaning on the handle of a shovel a few yards away.

  Matt glared, giving up when the other man only grinned. He rubbed his jaw. “I think I made her mad.”

  Isaac nodded. “But she’ll get over it quick.”

  If she did, Matt reflected a couple of hours later, she made sure he was the last to know. Clare worked with her crew banking the sides of the lot, putting in one-gallon pots of juniper and a triad of crepe myrtle trees. She attacked the dirt like a fenced-in puppy, fueled by nothing more than one greasy burger and indignation. Digging fence posts and drilling holes for the new playground equipment, Matt might as well have been invisible.

  He tolerated her avoidance policy for as long as it took to assemble a fourteen-by-four-by-twelve-foot climbing structure of treated wood. After screwing together the last platform, he and Isaac hoisted it between the play tower’s uprights while Reverend Ray grunted and secured it.

  Wiping his face with a dirty forearm, Matt stepped back to check the level.

  “Looks good,” he said.

  “It’s very good,” the reverend concurred. “Thank you, Matthew.”

  It was the first time Reverend Ray had used his Christian name. “Just doing my job, Reverend.”

  “I’d say you were doing the Lord’s work.”

  Matt shrugged, uncomfortable with the praise, uneasy with the satisfaction that spread through him. He was a detective, not a blasted social worker.

  He glanced across the lot to where Clare, on her knees, pressed dirt around the roots of a low-growing evergreen shrub. Straight, fine hair flopped forward onto her intent face. Denim stretched enticingly over her behind. It was a good thing the reverend couldn’t read his mind right then, because his thoughts were hardly godly.

  “Only for another month,” Matt said. “This is a temporary assignment, remember?”

  “I remember that’s what you told me.”

  Clare stood. And swayed.

  Matt’s jaw set. “Dammit. Doesn’t she know when to quit?” Striding stiffly across the pockmarked ground, he never heard the reverend’s reply.

  ***

  “You need a drink,” Matt said harshly behind her. “Water.”

  All afternoon, he’d loomed on the edge of Clare’s vision like a storm cloud. So, why should his rumbling voice startle her now? The electricity that crackled between them dizzied her.

  Oh, for goodness sake, she thought crossly. Of
course she was dizzy. She’d been in the sun for hours. Trying to immerse herself in work, she’d ignored her body’s need for fluids. But just because Matt was right about what she needed didn’t mean he could tell her what to do.

  She straightened her shoulders and lifted her chin. “Do you have a problem, Matt?”

  “No. You do, though. You’re dehydrated. Richie!” The boy, knotting rope to a tire, stood and turned at his command. “Get Clare a drink, okay?”

  Richie ran for the shade of the white oak tree where Alma had set out gallon jugs of sweet tea and a bag of cups.

  Clare watched him go, pressing her lips together. “Are you this bossy with everybody? Or is there just something about me that brings out that guard dog instinct?”

  Matt’s slow grin surprised her. “Both. You should sit down.”

  “I’m fine. I’m tougher than I look.”

  “Yeah, well, you look like the next puff of wind’s going to blow you over.” His hand, callused, warm and gentle, cupped her arm. “Here.”

  She let him support her as she took the cup, her indignation sapped by his concern. Oversweet, almost cool, the liquid felt delicious in her parched mouth. Matt stood over her as she drained the cup. She felt his gaze on her throat as she swallowed. Clare flushed, heat rising in her cheeks and swirling low deep inside.

  “More?” he urged.

  “No. I’m all right now, really. You should have some.”

  “I’m okay,” he said dismissively.

  She was going to have to watch this macho guy pose of his if they became lovers, Clare thought. And then realized that the idea, once planted, was as tenacious as bindweed. Lovers. The images the word evoked poked through her consciousness and twined delicate tendrils along all her nerve endings.

  “Richie, could you please get another drink for Sergeant Dunn?”

  The boy made a face. “What do I look like, your water boy?” But he took the cup and ambled back toward the jugs.

  Her head swam. Giving in to the lure of Matt’s strength, Clare rested her cheek briefly against his hard, muscled arm. He smelled of sweat and sun-warmed clay. Under her cheek, his cotton sleeve was damp. She saw the sudden rise of his chest, and then his broad, blunt fingers threaded through her bangs, stroking back an errant strand of hair. The tiny tug on her scalp made her close her eyes with pleasure.