Chapter 2
Reno limped the two blocks back to his truck and didn’t get in right away. His knee was screaming bloody murder at him and he needed a second before he attempted climbing into his truck on it.
He stood there with the pastry bag in one hand and the coffee in the other, registering that the brace was just loose enough for him to feel the joint wobbling inside it.
He stared at the truck’s side mirror, wishing it was magic and would tell him something wise about a woman in a flour-dusted apron.
A woman with light blue eyes and hair the color of unsalted butter and the kind of face Reno’s mother would call angelic and not be wrong.
He’d heard women’s skin referred to as porcelain before, but now he knew what folks meant by it.
Her skin was very fair, with the faintest blush of pink in her cheeks, and so smooth it actually did resemble the porcelain bisque that doll’s faces used to be made of.
His overall first impression of her was of an unearthly being too pure and fragile for this ugly, harsh world.
Which was ridiculous. She was a flesh and bones woman and clearly not helpless.
She ran her own bakery-slash-florist shop and, based on the flour liberally sprinkled over her clothes, did her own baking.
Still, his protective instincts had fired spectacularly when she mentioned finding strange sprigs of rosemary on the floor in her kitchen.
She hadn’t asked for his help, or even sympathy, but he’d felt compelled to suggest installing a security camera anyway, which had undoubtedly overstepped the bounds of politely minding his own business.
But for the first time in three years, he couldn’t help but believe he’d given her a piece of advice that might actually do somebody a piece of good, not the kind of advice that ended men’s lives and ruined other people’s.
An image of stricken faces, frozen in shock, flashed through his head. He’d seen those faces a thousand times; they’d shown up in his nightmares every night for the past three years.
He rubbed his thigh, willing his knee to heal faster so he could get back to the rodeo circuit.
Facing down angry, dangerous bulls determined to flatten him was the only thing he’d found that focused his mind sharply enough to erase the faces from his mind’s eye.
Unfortunately it only worked for the hour or so that he danced with death in the dirt ring of a rodeo, taunting and distracting bull after bull.
His brother, Hank, was quietly one of the top sports orthopedic doctors in the country, a specialist in rapidly rehabbing exactly the kind of injury Reno had.
And in his doctor’s office just down the street this very morning, Hank had warned him that his knee might never be strong enough again to risk going back into the bright lights and thrills of a rodeo arena.
It had to recover. It had to. He wasn’t ready to stop running from his demons.
That was why he’d defied his surgeon and Hank to walk two full blocks this morning to Main Street for a cinnamon roll and a cup of coffee at Buns ’N’ Roses, Cobbler Cove’s local bakery and florist shop in one.
He set the coffee on the hood of the truck and waited for the shooting pains radiating from his knee to pass. It took about as long as it usually took, which was longer than he wanted it to.
When it had passed, he picked up the coffee and got into the truck. He sat there, forcing himself to engage his brain and analyze his encounter with the angelic baker rationally.
The first moment he’d laid eyes on her, he’d felt as if he already knew her. He hadn’t been able to place her face, but surely he would have remembered meeting a woman as stunningly beautiful and ethereal as she was.
She did, however, remind him of one of the main faces from his nightmares, the innocent wife of a guilty man. Which must be why he’d felt that immediate and overpowering sense of déjà vu when he’d stepped into the bakery and seen her.
Of course, he hadn’t been attracted to the woman in his nightmares the way he was to the baker. He’d felt guilty and afraid and a thousand other things in the presence of the other woman years ago but never attraction.
What worried him now was the possibility that the small clean thing he’d felt back at the bakery when he suggested she get a camera was guilt disguised as a desire to help.
That his lizard brain, having spent three years unsuccessfully trying to undo the damage he’d wrought in other people’s lives, had decided to try again with somebody else.
He was even more worried that his subconscious was trying to call the guilt attraction because that was easier for him to stomach.
It was the kind of thing a man should sit with before he did anything stupid.
Like go back and ask the angel for her name and phone number.
He drove back to Dillon’s house west of Cobbler Cove in silence. Lake on the right. Pastures on the left. The spring sky overhead was such a deep, brilliant blue it took on the faint violet hue of twilight blue. The brace creaked when he shifted his foot.
Somewhere on the drive it dawned on him that he had met the woman behind the counter once before. Last Thanksgiving. He’d driven all night to get to the Foster Ranch from Las Vegas, where he’d picked up a three-night gig working as a rodeo clown.
He hadn’t been part of the main, three-man crew of bullfighters who actually kept the bulls away from the bull riders long enough for the cowboys to get to their feet and exit the arena safely.
He’d been the auxiliary guy there mainly to entertain the crowd.
He’d worn oversized jeans shorts, suspenders, and clown make-up.
He’d waved a huge red bandana at the bulls, taunting them into chasing him to padded barrels he jumped inside.
He then teased the bulls into trying to gore the barrels and kick them around the arena with him inside, to the delight of the crowd.
He’d been so tired he couldn’t see straight when he’d arrived just in time for Thanksgiving dinner.
There’d been over twenty people there. A bunch of widows who’d all lost their husbands in a fire four years previously.
Called themselves the Worn-out Widows Sisterhood.
And there’d been a bunch of single cowboys from the rodeo he’d worked with all last season.
They’d come to the Foster Ranch at the request of Sully Crawford, a long-time calf roper in the rodeo, to spend the winter when the rodeo circuit wasn’t down for its off season.
In return for free room and board, they’d helped him save the ranch from being repossessed by a bank.
The beautiful baker had been at that meal. She must be one of the widows, then.
He frowned, trying to remember her name and almost missed the turn off the Lake Road onto the side road Dillon lived on.
Her name came to him all at once.
Grace. Grace O’Donnell.
She’d sat at the other end of the long table from him, and he’d left the party as soon as he finished eating to go crash in the bunkhouse and sleep for about sixteen hours straight. That was why he didn’t recognize her right away today.
He pulled into Dillon’s driveway and killed the engine. Another name popped into his head unbidden.
Susannah.
He waited for the wave of crushing guilt to pass before he got out and hobbled slowly and painfully to the house. He refused to admit that Hank might know what he was talking about when he said the knee wasn’t ready more than a few dozen steps at a time. But his kneed begged to differ with him.
He limped to the kitchen, fetched the big, gel-filled leg wrap out of the freezer and carried it to the living room sofa. He took off the brace with a sigh of relief, wrapped his knee in the cold wrap, and propped it on the pile of pillows that lived on the sofa permanently these days.
The house was quiet. Dillon was at his vet clinic until late afternoon on Tuesdays. Dillon’s rescue mutt, a black lab named Walter whose age was undetermined other than “very old” came in through the doggie door and walked over to him with stiff dignity on his arthritic joints.
“Hey, Walter. Hope you’re feeling better than me, Man.”
The dog thumped his tail against the coffee table hard enough that Reno had to snatch his coffee cup off it to keep it from spilling.
The dog sniffed hopefully at the pastry bag still sitting on the low table.
“I dunno, Walt. I don’t think cinnamon or sugar is great for dogs.” He added, “They’re not great for humans either, but since when do we humans do what’s good for us? I’ll get you a biscuit when I’m done icing my knee.”
Another tail thump, this time banging the couch. He reached out and idly scratched the dog’s back while the cold wrap worked its magic and eased the deep ache in his knee.
After twenty minutes of icing, he hobbled back to the kitchen without his brace to put the cold wrap back in the freezer and get Walter his promised dog biscuit.
He made his way back to the living room and sat down on the rug in front of the woodstove.
The stretch routine Hank had shown him how to do was the most reliable structure in his life.
He’d been doing it four times a day like clockwork.
That and praying his knee would heal fast and well no less than a dozen times a day.
Rehabbing his knee was his sole job in life at the moment.
As for what job came next, particularly if his knee didn’t make it all the way back to one-hundred-percent, that was a topic he refused to think about at all. But the longer he put off facing it, the more pressure he felt building up in the mental drawer he’d locked the decision away in.
When he finished stretching, he showered, shaved, and put on clean dark jeans and a freshly laundered and starched charcoal-gray shirt. He sat down at the kitchen table and opened his laptop.