Rachel Gibson: True Confessions

Ms. Spencer raised the glass of tea to her lips. “Oh, how thrilling for you,” she murmured before she took a drink.

Paris’s brows lowered again. “My next order is up,” she said and turned on her heel.

Dylan tilted his head to one side and chuckled. “You’ve been in town less than twenty-four hours, and I see you’re already making friends.”

“This town hasn’t exactly sent out the Welcome Wagon.” She set the glass on the table and licked a corner of her lips. “Of course, it may have come but I wasn’t home. I was standing in the lobby of the Sandman Motel, getting abused by a woman in sponge rollers.”

“Ada Dover? What’d she do?”

Ms. Spencer leaned back and relaxed a little. “She practically needed my entire family history just to rent me a room. She wanted to know if I’d been convicted of any crime, and when I asked her if she wanted a urine sample, she told me I might not be so ornery if my jeans weren’t so tight.”

Dylan remembered those jeans. They’d been tight, all right, but there were several women in town whose Wranglers were downright painful to look at. “It’s probably not personal. Ada takes her job too serious sometimes. Like she’s renting out rooms at the White House.”

“Hopefully I’ll be out of there by tomorrow afternoon.”

His gaze lowered to her full lips, and for a brief moment he allowed himself to wonder if she would taste as good as she looked. He wondered what it would be like to eat the lip gloss from her mouth and bury his nose in her hair. “You still planning on staying for the whole six months?”

“Of course.”

He still had his doubts about her lasting more than a few days, but if she planned to stay, he figured he should let her know exactly what she was in for. “Then let me give you some advice that I’m sure you don’t want, and I’m equally sure you won’t take.” He raised his gaze and put an end to his mind’s wanderings before he embarrassed himself. “This isn’t California. People here don’t care if you’re from Westwood or South Central. They don’t care if you own a Mercedes or an old Buick, and they don’t care about where you shop. If you want to see a movie, you have to drive to Sun Valley, and unless you have a satellite dish, you get four television stations.

“We have two grocery stores, three gas stations, and two restaurants. You’re sitting in one. The other is down the street, but I would advise you not to eat at the Spuds and Suds. They were shut down twice last year on account of health violations. We have two different churches and a large Four-H Club.

“Gospel also has five bars and five gun-and-tackle stores. Now, that should tell you something.”

She reached for her tea and raised it to her lips. “What, that I’ve moved to a town of alcoholic, gun-toting, sheep-loving Four-H’ers?”

“Oh, boy,” he said as he shook his head. “That’s what I was afraid of. You’re going to be pain in the ass, aren’t you?”

“Me?” She set the glass back down and innocently placed a hand on her chest. “I swear to God, you aren’t even going to know I’m in town.”

“Somehow, I doubt that.” He rose from the booth and looked down at her. “If you need help with the Donnelly house, ask the Aberdeen boys. They’re about to turn eighteen and not doing anything this summer. They live right across the street from you out there on Timberline, but ask before noon or they’ll already be out on the lake.”

Hope gazed up at the man towering over her, at his deep green eyes and the lock of brown hair that fell in an arc over his forehead. The light from the windows picked out streaks of gold that Hope would bet her Porsche were put there by the sun and not a beautician’s brush. Too bad he had no sense of humor, but she supposed when a man looked like the sheriff, humor wasn’t essential. “Thank you.”

He smiled, and for the first time, she noticed that while he certainly could have been cast in a big-budget Western, his teeth weren’t movie-star straight. They were white enough, yes, but they were a little bit crowded on the bottom. “And good luck, Ms. Spencer,” he drawled.

She supposed he meant she needed luck finding someone to take care of her bat problem and she hoped she didn’t need luck. He headed toward the front of the diner and her gaze followed.

His tan shirt fit flat against his back and was tucked inside tan pants with a brown stripe running down the side of each leg. Those pants should have looked like a fashion nightmare, but on him they seemed to accentuate his tight glutes and long legs. He had a revolver strapped to his hip, a pair of handcuffs, and a variety of leather pouches and cases hooked to his service belt.

Even with all that leather and hardware, he managed to move with the easy grace of a man who was in no great hurry to be anywhere other than where he happened to be. He exuded the confidence and authority of a man who could take care of himself and the little woman in his life. A testosterone cocktail that some women might find irresistible. Not Hope.

She watched him reach for the cowboy hat on the counter with the same fluid motion he used to comb his fingers through his hair. He shoved the hat on his head and spoke to the older waitress near the cash register. The woman with the big hair giggled like a girl, and Hope glanced away. There had been a time in her life when she, too, might have melted just a bit beneath his slightly imperfect smile. Not anymore.

She looked back one last time at the sheriff and watched the rude waitress with the long braid hand him a paper sack. The journalist side of her brain churned with questions. She’d noticed the absence of a wedding ring on the man’s finger, not that that meant a damn thing, but by the conversation he’d had with the waitress, Hope would guess he wasn’t married. She would also hazard a rather obvious guess that the waitress had a thing for the good sheriff. Hope wondered if they were involved, but she doubted it. From just the few moments she’d witnessed them, any feeling beyond friendship seemed to be completely one-sided and rather pathetic. If the waitress had been nicer to Hope, she might have felt sorry for her. But the waitress wasn’t nice, and Hope had problems of her own.

The hard chair in her motel room put Hope’s behind to sleep. She stood, stretched her arms over her head, and yawned. Her eyes, fixed on the blank screen of her laptop, blurred and she rubbed them with the heels of her hands. Nothing. For three hours she’d sat in that chair, straining her gritty eyes, racking her tired brain for something to fill up the screen. Anything. Yet the screen remained empty. She didn’t have one idea. She hadn’t written one sentence. Not even one bad sentence she could expand into something better.

Hope dropped her hands and turned from the laptop. She flopped on the bed and stared up at the ceiling. If she were at home, she was sure she’d be scrubbing her spotless bathroom, ironing her T-shirts, or flipping her mattress. If she had her nail kit, she’d be giving herself a manicure. She’d gotten so good at it, she sometimes wondered if she should just give up writing and do nails for a living.

Giving herself manicures was only one of the many time-wasting contrivances she performed to avoid the reality of an empty screen.

One of the many time-consuming tricks she used to avoid the reality of her life. The painful reality that she had no one. No one to talk to when the nights got lonely. No one to hold her hand and tell her she was okay.

Her mother had died in the fall, and her father had remarried by spring. He’d moved to Sun City, Arizona, with his new wife to be near her family. He called. Hope called. It wasn’t the same. Her only sibling, Evan, was stationed in Germany. She wrote. He wrote. That wasn’t the same, either.