Chapter Four
Audra didn’t know why she let good manners put her in this situation.
Copeland Beckett in her house. Eating her food at her table.
And why? Because she couldn’t keep her mouth shut.
Because manners her parents had taught, but not employed themselves, still ruled her no matter how hard she might try to be more like Rosalie and not care about what people thought of her.
Oh, he’d only accepted the invitation to irritate her, no doubt. He was one of those people who lived to irritate.
She could recognize it when she saw it. She’d grown up with Rosalie. She even kind of respected it, because too often in her life she bent over backward for someone else, to her own detriment.
She’d promised herself she’d turn over a new leaf after Dad had died, after all his secrets came to light, and sometimes she managed. Telling Copeland they were going to ride horses had been a needling move.
But then he’d handled the horse just fine. And thinking about the horse had her thinking about the dismount from the horse.
She would have fallen. Even now, her hands were shaky and she didn’t feel remotely steady. She knew she needed food. She’d pushed herself too hard too many days in a row, and she knew better, but sometimes life just didn’t let a person take care of themselves.
But he’d grabbed her. Just snatched her and kept her from falling over. He was strong. Stronger than he looked. And that was saying something because he didn’t look like any kind of slouch.
She pushed into the front door, fighting between the instinct to say nothing and the desire to tell him to wipe his boots. Trying to shove down her ridiculously physical reaction to him helping her not face-plant because it had been a lot more than simple relief.
But he spoke first, after he wiped his boots on the mat and hung up his coat on the hook on the wall without her having to tell him.
“You don’t lock your doors?” he demanded.
She sighed. She usually did. When Vi had lived with them, after running away from her abusive ex-husband, they’d gotten in the habit of locking up to make Vi feel safer.
But Audra still sometimes forgot when she was stressed because it had never been a habit.
“No one came out this way” was the old mantra.
But someone had done that to her fence, hadn’t they?
“I do at night. During the day, I don’t always remember.”
“I’d start remembering.”
She didn’t bother to argue with him. Not when he was right.
Even if there wasn’t trouble, even if it was isolated out here, she had guns and cash and all sorts of things that could be easily swiped by some very intrepid thief wandering off the beaten path.
She was alone out here, and lots of people knew it.
But they were good people, her people. And they weren’t the ones playing these pranks now.
You hope. A horrible little thought, that voice in her head, the voice of doom.
She led Copeland straight from the front door into the kitchen and pointed to the kitchen table. “Go on and sit. It’ll just take a few minutes to throw things together.”
She moved to the sink to wash her hands, but Copeland just followed her, not taking instruction. Go figure.
But he held out his hands, like he was going to wash his too. “Put me to work. Or is that not the polite thing to do?” he asked with a grin she would not be fooled by. He was being irritating.
Not charming.
“Guests sit,” she said primly.
“I’m not a guest. I’m a cop.”
She didn’t know why that made her laugh, but he washed his hands, and she figured she’d eat faster if he helped. Then she’d feel steadier. Then she could deal with this better, more clearly.
“I’ve got some roast beef. We’re going to make sandwiches.” She grabbed a bread knife and handed it to him, then pointed at the loaf of bread she’d set out to thaw that morning. “Cut some slices of bread.”
“Sure.”
She moved to the fridge, getting out the meat from Natalie and a block of cheese.
The little tub of mayonnaise that had maybe enough for one sandwich.
She didn’t have much to offer in way of beverages.
She hadn’t gone to the store since Franny left, so she was out of milk, beer and soda.
There was a bottle of wine in the pantry, but she wasn’t about to suggest that.
Water would have to suffice. She sliced the cheese, then brought the sandwich fixings over to the counter, where Copeland had sliced the bread, but she stopped short at the mess he made of her loaf.
The bread slices were all over the place. One so thin it wasn’t even a full piece. One so thick it could have been three pieces.
“What on earth did you do?”
He scowled at her. “Normal bread comes pre-sliced.”
She shook her head. “Better bread comes homemade.” She put the plate of sandwich stuff next to the atrocity he’d made of the bread, then handed him a plate. “Assemble at will.”
He slapped everything together in the most haphazard manner she’d ever seen. Even Rosalie had more kitchen sense than this man.
“Don’t you live on your own?” she asked, appalled.
“Sure, but out in Fairmont. Where they have takeout.”
She wrinkled her nose. “You can’t look like that and eat takeout for every meal.”
His eyebrows raised in unison with the corners of his mouth. “Look like what exactly?”
She felt her entire face heat. What an idiotic thing to say. “You know. Like…” She waved a hand at him, but she knew he wasn’t going to let her off the hook. “Fit,” she finished lamely.
“Fit?”
She huffed, went back to assembling her sandwich and decidedly not looking at him. “Yes, fit.” Once she was done, she sailed to the table with her nose in the air. She would not be embarrassed in her own home.
At least while he was in it. She’d wait until after he left to curl up in a ball and curse her dumb mouth.
Copeland took the seat next to her, when he could have taken the seat on the opposite side. She kept her gaze expressly on her plate.
“Kind of a big place for one person.”
Audra shrugged. “It’s rarely just one person. Franny travels some, and it’s an adjustment not to have Rosalie underfoot, but they’re right next door. We miss having Vi and Magnolia around, but we all get together plenty.”
“But all those fields out there. Someone came in, damaged your fence, left, without you having any clue.”
Audra tried not to shift in discomfort. She didn’t like to think of it like that, though admittedly the past few years had brought home just how…vulnerable they were out here.
But that wasn’t just because she was a woman alone. Natalie and Norman had dealt with a murder on their ranch that had taken a while to solve. It was more the realization that no one was really ever safe.
“Yes, it’s impossible to secure a ranch this size.
But there’s not much I can do to change that.
It is what it is.” She sighed, frustrated with the entire situation.
“I don’t understand why anyone would want to mess with me.
I run my ranch. I help with the agricultural society.
If I’m not doing that, I’m helping the Kirks, or hanging out with my family.
I don’t date. I don’t party. I don’t stomp around town pissing people off. ”
He’d stopped with his sandwich halfway to his mouth. Slowly, he put it back down on the plate. Something in his gaze was a little too…intense for her to hold.
“You don’t date? Ever?”
She would not read in to that perfectly reasonable question.
She would simply answer it. While staring very hard at the mangled bread that made up the top of her sandwich.
“I did. Before my father died and my mother moved away. There was more time, more money, more…everything. I had a life back then. But not much of one since.”
“And how long has that been?”
“Four years.” She wouldn’t feel embarrassed about it. She was too tired to feel embarrassed.
“So angry ex-lovers are likely out. Unless you think someone would have held a grudge?”
She laughed, maybe harder than she should have.
“I did not leave a string of bitter, broken hearts in my wake, Copeland. I tended to be the dumpee over the dumper.” Which sounded just pathetic, and so beside the point.
She really needed to change the subject.
“Maybe someone Rosalie did a case against is targeting me to get to her?”
“Then why is it your name on the urn and the gravestone?”
“I’m her sister. Hurting the people someone loves might hurt them?”
“If she was still living with you, I might look into it. But she’s not even in the country.
If someone wanted to get to her, they’d wait until she was around to do something about it.
” Copeland shook his head. “It doesn’t add up, Audra.
This is about you, and we’re going to have to do some digging to figure out why. ”
COPELAND FINISHED OFF his sandwich, surprised at how much better it was with her fancy bread—even if he had botched slicing it. Growing up, his father had held pretty old-fashioned views about where a son belonged—and the kitchen wasn’t one of them.
Copeland had grown up and rebelled in his own way, he supposed, by adopting a modern sensibility about gender roles and the like. Hilariously, it backfired, because his parents had only followed suit, and had evolved themselves, along with him.
Still, Copeland had never felt like learning his way around a kitchen more than to survive.
Tonight wasn’t about him though.
He asked her more questions about people who might have something out for her. Ranching rivals. Someone in her agricultural group she’d slighted.
She was adamant she didn’t make anyone mad.
And he just kept going back to her saying she hadn’t dated or essentially had a life outside this ranch for four years. It should have sounded pathetic, but instead it stirred some long-buried sense of sympathy for her.
He knew all too well what it was like to feel so beaten down that life just became going through the motions to survive.
Once they were done eating, and he’d run out of questions, he helped her clear the table, then figured he’d overstayed what little welcome he had. She walked him to the front door.
“I’ve got some next steps,” he told her, shrugging on his coat. “I’ll be in touch.”
She nodded and opened the door for him. He stepped out into the cold night.
“Thanks,” she offered, leaning there against the doorframe. It was dark outside, but cozy light spilled around her from inside. Then she smiled, and he realized just how little she’d been doing that. Understandable, but it was a pretty smile and she should do it more. Feel it more.
“You’re not so bad, Copeland,” she said, with some humor.
But since she still looked a little sad behind it, he found himself trying to poke that sad away. “Hell, Audra, stop trying to flirt with me.”
She rolled her eyes and shook her head, but she didn’t seem quite so desolate. Not that it was any of his business what she felt. Not that he cared.
He started to make a move for his car, but something ate at him.
Mostly how damn secluded this little place was.
He’d been out to plenty of ranches over the course of the two years he’d lived here, and they were all like this.
Felt like tiny islands of complete and utter isolation.
Nothing but mountains and sky and animals, and the potential for danger in every lurking shadow.
Which he supposed was fine and dandy when someone was used to it. She was used to it. She’d grown up here. Been taking care of herself for years, clearly. Even if Rosalie had lived with her before, her private-investigator life probably had necessitated leaving Audra alone here plenty of nights.
And Audra had plenty of people who cared, so why the hell did he need to? He didn’t.
“You guys have security?” he demanded, irritated with himself. With her. With the whole damn situation.
She studied him from where she stood still leaning against the doorframe. He didn’t know what she found in that study, but he didn’t like it. Still, she responded. “Yeah.”
“Lock the doors and use it.” He barked it out like an order, when he probably should have softened his words. But he wasn’t a soften-it kind of guy anymore, if he ever had been.
She hugged herself, but she nodded. “Yeah, I will.”
He stomped off the porch to his car and got in. Drove down the lane. All the while he kept glancing into his rearview window. What was she doing living out here by herself? So far from any help. It was reckless, that’s what it was.
He should turn back and tell her so. Insist she head into town to stay with Thomas and Vi. Hell, get a hotel room if she didn’t want to put her pregnant cousin out.
But she didn’t want to worry the Harts, and he understood that in spite of himself. She probably couldn’t stay in a hotel with running a ranch solely on her own. And what other alternatives were there? What was he going to do? Stay? That hardly solved her problem.
Solving the case was the only way to do that. So that was just what he was going to do. And he was damn well going to trust the adult woman who’d spent her whole life on that isolated ranch to handle herself.
Because it was none of his business.
No matter how it scraped at him.