B.J. Daniels - Atonement

He gave a slight nod, his smile racing straight to her heart. “It feels good. I’m sorry I haven’t been by for so long—”

“You don’t have to do that,” she said as he made his way to her. “No apologies are necessary.”

“Yes, they are. You asked me to fix your office door months ago. Is it still sticking?”

She nodded and smiled. “I just don’t close it.”

“Otherwise you would be locked in?” He shook his head.

“It’s no big deal. I can always call Kate across the street to come get me out. Anyway, you’ve had more important things on your mind. The usual?” She was already getting him an orange soda from the cooler.

“I’ve missed you,” he said as she opened the bottle on an old-fashioned opener on the wall and handed it to him. Their fingers brushed and she felt that familiar thrill.

She didn’t want to tell him how much she’d missed him. Or how much she’d feared he would never come back. She’d survived on what he’d said before he left. He loved her.

“Is this your first day back at work?” she asked.

He nodded and took a drink.

He’d changed over the past six months. She couldn’t put her finger on what it was, though, but he seemed reconciled. A man like Frank Curry believed he could “fix” most anything—or at least should be able to. He’d blamed himself for Pam being the way she was.

“I’m so glad you gave up on finding Pam,” Nettie said.

Again he merely nodded.

She thought of the man who’d taken off out of the store, murder in his eye, to find Pam. So what had changed? she wondered as she studied him. Pam Chandler was still dangerous. She was still out there somewhere. Nettie lived with that knowledge every day. She didn’t cross the street to the post office or the Branding Iron Café without looking around for the crazy, vindictive woman. She no longer walked down to the store at night unless someone was with her. At the house, she locked all her doors, even in the daytime, something pretty much unheard of in most of rural Montana.

“I’d better be going,” Frank said. He had a deep voice. It had always sent heat racing through her blood. His gaze met hers and she felt a catch in her throat. “I was thinking you might want to go to a movie tomorrow night.”

He was asking her for a date? It had been so long in coming that she didn’t answer at first, out of shock.

“That is, if you’re free.” He sounded not so sure of things between them. Understandably, since it wasn’t that long ago that she’d given up on him and had spent some time with another man.

She shoved that thought away. “I would love to go,” she said, her voice cracking with emotion.

He smiled then and he was the Frank Curry she’d fallen so desperately in love with so many years ago. That love had lingered and only recently begun to bloom again, like a glacier lily coming up after a long, hard Montana winter.

Stepping down the hall, he took a look at her office door.

“Frank, I don’t want you to be late for work. The door can wait.”

“It looks as if I’m going to have to take it down and plane off some of the wood. The store must have shifted on its old foundation. I’ll fix the door this weekend. Just don’t get locked in.”

“I won’t.” His concern warmed her heart. She pushed aside her worries about him as he leaned over and kissed her softly on the mouth. He tasted of orange soda and smelled of the outdoors. She wanted to wrap her arms around him and hold him to her, but he was already drawing back, saying, “Don’t want to be late my first day back on the job.” And he was gone, the bell over the door jingling.

Nettie moved to the window to watch him leave, her fingers pressed to the glass, her heart pounding. She had waited so long for this.

Please don’t let anything spoil it.

* * *

TESSA STARTED AT the knock on her motel room door. Her first thought was, No one knows I’m here. No one but Ethan, or whatever the man wanted to call himself.

At the second knock, she moved to the door and asked, “Yes?”

“Ms. Winters, I’d like to have a word with you.” Ethan’s voice, though more authoritative. Just the sound of it hurt. “It’s Undersheriff Dillon Lawson.”

“I believe we said all we had to yesterday,” she called through the door.

“Not quite.”

She gritted her teeth and opened the door. For a moment she was taken aback by the uniformed man standing in her doorway. He wore a pale gray Stetson over his longish blond hair, a tan uniform shirt with his name tag and a gold star. A gun was strapped to his slim hips, over a pair of jeans that ran down his long legs to his boots.

Ethan was as handsome as any man she’d ever known, no matter what he was wearing. But in a uniform, he looked so responsible, so nice, so safe, that he threatened to break her heart all over again.

“What do you want?” she demanded.

“Just to talk. May I come in?”

Tessa hesitated. “I don’t see what talking—”

“Please.”

The break in his voice made her relent. She stepped aside to let him enter the room but left the door open. She’d made the bed, a habit her mother had taught her and one she couldn’t break even when it was a motel. The air smelled of pines and the Yellowstone River nearby. She breathed it in and braced herself for whatever was to happen next.

He saw the bed and looked surprised.

“I can’t stand an unmade bed and I wasn’t quite ready to leave yet.”

He’d removed his Stetson and now held the brim in his fingers. “Where are you going?”

“Not that it concerns you, but back to California. I have a job there, you might recall. I had a life there before I met you.”

“Do you have family there?”

She studied him. “Are you asking as undersheriff or as the father of my baby?”

He didn’t answer.

“As you already know, I don’t have family, but I have friends in California,” she said into the silence that stretched between them. She felt awkward standing in the small motel room. There weren’t a lot of places to sit in the room, other than the bed and one straight-backed chair by the desk. She wondered how long this was going to take. “I’ll be just fine, not that I think you honestly care about me or the baby.”

“You said you have a job. Where do you work?”

She eyed him suspiciously. “Why are you—”

“Please, just humor me, all right?”

Tessa sighed. “I work as a supervisor for a landscaping firm.”

He seemed surprised, which only annoyed her. “How much money did you say my brother took from you?”

She ignored the brother part, wondering what he was doing here. Apparently he wanted to continue this pretense. But to what end? Yesterday he’d threatened her with arrest for pulling a gun on him and trying to scam him. Surely he hadn’t come here today to do just that, had he?

“All of my savings. Just under five thousand dollars, as if you don’t know that, too.”

He looked down at his boots for a moment. “I was thinking...” He slowly raised his gaze. “If you really knew my brother, then you should have some way to prove it.”

She put her hands on her stomach. “The proof, as they say, is in the pudding. Anyway, why would I have come all the way to Montana looking for Ethan if I hadn’t known him? Or at least someone who’d pretended to be him?”

“That’s what I’m trying to figure out. Truthfully, I can’t see you with my brother. You seem to have too much going for you to get involved with him.”

She chuckled at that. “I should have been smarter. Neither of us is denying that.”

“I guess what I’m trying to say is that you and Ethan must have been together for a while before—” His gaze dropped to where her hands still rested on her stomach. “Before you say he left you.”