Thirty-Two and a Half Complications (7 page)

I hurried up the steps to the covered porch and unlocked the front door while Muffy barked her fool head off inside. When I flung the door open, my little brown mutt burst through the open doorway and immediately jumped up on my legs. I leaned over to pet her. “I missed you too, girl, and I’m sorry I didn’t bring you with me. But it’s getting cold outside and I didn’t want you to get sick from being outside all day.” I knew I was an overprotective pet owner. Heavens only knew what kind of helicopter parent I’d be one day.

Ashley stood at the bottom of the porch steps, holding her little brother’s hand. “Why do you talk to her like she’s a real person, Aunt Rose?”

I shrugged. “Well, I guess because I think of her as a person.”

“But she doesn’t talk back.”

“She does in her own way.”

Having sufficiently greeted me, Muffy released a deadly wave of noxious gastrointestinal fumes and ran down the steps toward my niece and nephew. Mikey pulled himself loose from Ashley and clapped his hands. “Muppy.”

My little dog covered him with licks, and he tumbled onto his backside. Mikey squealed with excitement when she climbed onto his lap.

“See?” I said. “Muffy’s talking right now even if she isn’t using words. She’s giving Mikey kisses to say she missed him and she loves him.”

“Just like when you and Joe used to kiss.”

My stomach twisted. “Uh…yeah.” The kids had gotten used to seeing Joe on the weekends and he’d always taken time to play with my niece and nephew. They missed him after our breakup, and given that her own parents were in the process of splitting up, Ashley hadn’t taken it well. “But I’m not with Joe anymore. Remember?”

“I know,” she sighed. “You’re with Mason, but we still play with Joe sometimes.”

I’d been climbing down the steps to join them, but froze in my tracks. “You do?”

“Yeah.” Her head bobbed enthusiastically. “Sometimes he comes over and watches us when Mommy has to go to the store.”

“Huh.” Part of me wasn’t surprised. The kids had known Joe for months, after all, and he was once again living in the little house next door to my old house. The same one he’d lived in when he was undercover and going by the name Joe McAllister. But I
was
surprised Violet hadn’t told me. And I had to admit that I didn’t like it one bit. A couple of weeks ago she’d made it pretty clear she didn’t approve of Mason. Funny how she hadn’t approved of Joe either until after our breakup.

Muffy took off running toward the barn and we followed behind. Mikey struggled to keep up, so I picked him up and settled him on my hip.

“Are you gonna get horses, Aunt Rose?” Ashley asked as she watched Muffy duck under the wooden fence surrounding the horse pen. “Momma says she thinks Miss Dora had horses.”

“I don’t know. Horses are a lot of work and I can hardly take care of Muffy.”

Ashley giggled.

I let the kids play for another ten minutes before I said, “Come on. I need to get you guys back home.” I didn’t relish facing Joe, so a part of me wanted to ask Mike to pick the kids up from the farm. But I knew I’d have to see Joe at some point, especially if he agreed to Mason’s request about the mug shots.

The kids reluctantly climbed back into the truck, but I assured them they’d be out at the farm for Thanksgiving and promised we could take a walk down the road next to the fields if it wasn’t raining.

“What about the woods, Aunt Rose?” my niece asked, her voice high-pitched with excitement. “Can we go out in the woods?”

“No. Not the woods.” It was going to take a while before I was ready to walk in the woods again.

I drove through the short patch of trees lining the driveway and stopped at the edge of the highway that led to Henryetta. A shiny black pickup with a long scratch along the side drove past us, but just as I was getting ready to pull out, it did a U-turn and headed back the other direction.

“That truck’s not bein’ safe, Aunt Rose,” Ashley said in her mini-grownup voice.

“No. It’s not,” I agreed as I pulled out behind it. We followed it for half a mile before it turned left onto a narrow private drive. As erratic as the driver was behaving, I wasn’t sorry to see it go, but I had to stop and wonder if there was some truth to Mason’s observation—trouble seemed to surround me like a whirling dervish.

Ashley talked about school and how one of the boys in her class had cut another little girl’s hair with scissors. I listened absently, my mind combing through all my current dilemmas. The most pressing problem was our money situation, so I racked my brain trying to come up with a way to raise nine thousand dollars in case the insurance company didn’t reimburse us. No obvious solution jumped out at me.

But thinking about it helped get my mind off my second biggest dilemma, which I found sitting on my old front porch in a rocking chair, holding a bottle of beer.

“Joe!” Ashley and Mikey squealed while Muffy barked with excitement.

Traitors.

My niece threw open her door, abandoning her brother as she bolted for my ex-boyfriend, Muffy fast on her heels. Joe set his bottle on the table and stood to greet her. Ashley leaped for him, and he scooped her up into a hug, spinning her around.

“How’s my little Asherella?”

She giggled. “It’s not
Asher
ella, Joe. It’s
Cinder
ella.”

“Ashes. Cinders. Same thing.” He walked down the steps to the front yard and set her down. His huge grin faded as he watched me free Mikey from his car seat and deposit him on the ground.

“Joe!” Mikey shouted and ran for him.

Joe knelt and hugged the little boy a moment longer than I would have expected, then stood and took a step toward me. “Hi, Rose,” he finally said.

He was wearing jeans and a tan jacket. The brown thermal shirt he wore underneath made the natural copper highlights in his dark brown hair stand out. When we were together, the sight of him had always stolen my breath away. Today was no exception, but the reasons were much different than they’d been before.

I’d last seen Joe almost two weeks ago, when he’d pulled into the driveway of this house to tell me that he was moving back to Henryetta and taking the sheriff’s job. I’d handled that just fine. And the last time I’d seen him before that was four weeks ago in the woods after he’d shown up to save Mason and me from Daniel Crocker. But seeing him with the kids was my undoing. A lump burned in my throat as memories of all our dreams rushed into my head. We’d talked about a future that had included children, but it had all come crashing down when the time came for Joe to pay the piper—his father, who had gotten him out of jam after jam. Joe’s parents demanded that he cut all ties with me unless I gave up all the important, but socially unacceptable, people in my life so Joe could run for the state senate. In the end, we both knew I couldn’t do it, no matter how much we loved each other. And Joe couldn’t have told his father he wouldn’t cooperate because J.R. Simmons had trumped up some false charges against me, Violet, and Mike, and had threatened to make them public unless Joe played his game.

So Joe left me behind broken-hearted and had run off on the campaign trail with his long-time ex-girlfriend Hilary at his side. And in his bed. I could understand why he’d agree to a pretend engagement—Joe had told me that a single man had little chance of getting elected in our neck of the woods—but I couldn’t accept that he’d let Hilary snare him into a real relationship. Again. He’d fallen back into his toxic entanglement with her time and time again over the past ten years. In fact, Mason’s sister had paid the price with her life.

No, Joe McAllister—the man with whom I’d fallen in love—was not the man in front of me right now. He never had been. It had just taken me a while to figure it out.

I swallowed the lump. “What are you doing on my front porch?”

His mouth twisted into an ornery grin, but it was obvious his heart wasn’t in it. “If I remember correctly, this is no longer your front porch. Did you move back in?”

“No.”

Ashley tugged on his jacket. “Joe, can we play hide-and-seek?”

He looked down at her, his face softening. “Not right now. I need to talk to Rose for a minute and your daddy is coming to get you. Why don’t you make sure you have Mr. Snuffles in your bag?”

“All right,” she muttered in disappointment.

“And could you take your brother and Muffy with you? The DVD Mikey likes is ready for him to watch. Just press play.”

“Okay, Joe,” she said, taking Mikey’s hand and leading him inside, Muffy following obediently behind as if she’d understood Joe’s words.

How much time did he spend with my niece and nephew anyway? “You still have a key to my house?” It occurred to me that I’d never gotten it back.

“Yeah, Violet told me to keep it.”

“What are you doing here, Joe?” I asked with a firmer tone.

“I talked to Mason this afternoon.”

“So? You could have called me.”

“Would you have taken the call?”

Before this afternoon, probably not.

“See?” he said when I didn’t answer. “Look, Rose. I know you’re still angry with me, and you have every right to be, but I’d never let my feelings for you get in the way of protecting you or preventing a crime. Surely you won’t let your animosity for me get in the way of either of those things.”

I knew he was right, but the way he’d wormed his way back into Ashley and Mikey’s life pissed me off. And I was about to throttle Violet for letting him. When Joe realized I was never going back to him, he’d probably leave Henryetta and Fenton County the first chance he got, crushing their little hearts a second time.

But what did I expect? Joe Simmons left broken hearts everywhere he went. Sometimes literally.

I turned away and stared at the house where he was living again. It looked so much quieter now that my friend Heidi Joy and her brood of kids had moved out. But I had to admit that his car looked like it belonged in the gravel driveway.

My hair was still pulled back in a ponytail, but several strands had worked loose. The breeze swept them into my face, so I reached up and tucked them behind my ears before I turned back to him. “So Mason told you about the bank robbery?”

Anger filled his eyes and his hands clenched into fists. “What were you thinking by studying them like that, Rose? I called Taylor after I talked to Mason and he said one of the guys was about to take you in the back and kill you!”

“No, he wasn’t, Joe. He was taking me in the back to—”

His voice softened. “To hurt you, Rose. He was worried you could identify him. You’re at risk…again.”

I shook my head in dismay. “What would you have had me do, Joe? Bury my head into the floor?”

He closed the distance between us and grabbed my upper arms. “Yes. That’s exactly what you should have done. When will you learn to be more careful?”

I looked up at him, my eyes narrowing. “And is that what you would have done? Ignored them?”

Irritation flickered across his face. “No. Of course not. But I’m a law enforcement officer.”

“You don’t carry your gun everywhere you go. At least you didn’t when you were with me. What if you’d been in that bank with no gun? Would you have buried your head into the floor then?”

“No.”

I jerked my arms out of his grasp. “Then don’t ask me to do something you wouldn’t.”

He spun away, cursing under his breath, then turned back to me. “Well, here we are again.
You
stumbling into danger and getting your life threatened. How many times do we have to go through this same song and dance, Rose?”

I gasped and crossed my arms over my chest. “How
dare
you?
You
don’t have to go through
anything
. What happens to me has nothing to do with you because we are no longer together!”

“I still love you, Rose! Of course this affects me.”

Rage billowed in my chest. “
You love me?
You slept with Hilary! How many times did you sleep with her, Joe?” The words coming out of my mouth were black and ugly. And totally unlike me.

Joe’s eyes widened before he recovered. “We were split up, Rose. I thought you were with Jonah.”

And the fact that he’d actually believed I was sleeping with my friend Jonah was an insult. But I’d heard it all before…we were just rehashing the conversation we’d had when he visited the nursery for a campaign stop several weeks ago. Tears blurred my eyes and I shook my head. Pushing past him, I marched up the steps to the front porch. “I can’t do this right now. I have too much else on my plate.”

“You can’t walk away from me, Rose,” he called after me. “Your life is in danger.”

I spun around, my hands on my hips. “Then why didn’t you send the mug shots to Mason like he asked? If you really cared about me, you would have already done it.”

“It’s not just the mug shots. You’re out on that farm all alone—”

“I’m not alone! I have Mason.”

His face twisted into an ugly sneer. “You blast me for sleeping with someone else, when I thought there was no hope for us—”

“Not just someone.
Hilary
!”

“—but you didn’t waste any time setting up house with the assistant district attorney.”

“I didn’t start seeing Mason until after you confirmed you were sleeping with her. Besides, his condo was burned down by Daniel Crocker. He had no other place to stay.”

“
Really
?” he sneered. “He had no other place to stay?”

I looked up at the ceiling of the porch and took a deep breath before leveling my gaze on him. “What do you
want,
Joe?” My voice was calmer, making my words sound cold. “You’re standing here insulting me when you claim to want me back.
What do you want?
”

He bolted up the porch steps, not stopping until he was standing directly in front of me. “I want
you.
”

I bit my lip and shook my head. “
That
is a non-issue, so if you’re standing here hoping to plead your case, then turn around, pack up your car, and drive back to El Dorado.”

His face hardened, but he didn’t budge.

“So other than that, why are you here right now?”