Cait London - Last Dance

Was it his right to read his mother’s journals? Her private thoughts should remain her own and yet, he ached for his mother and wanted to hold her close.

He inhaled sharply and gently with one finger and the sense that he was prying, Tanner eased open one journal. He gently stroked the dried lavender stalk she’d pressed within the journal, the delicate fragrance wafting around him like memories. My Life his mother had written on the title page, the date just one year ago. “That night three years ago is stormy, just as my thoughts remain about the evil those men did to a sweet girl. I have never felt such anger in my life as when Gwyneth ran to me that night. The sight of her, torn and bleeding by those men’s rough hands, just three days before she was to marry my son haunts me,” she’d written in her precise, feminine hand. “I begged her to tell him before the wedding, and she couldn’t bear to hurt Tanner. She talked to me of it, how she tried to push herself, and knew she should tell Tanner. Yet she couldn’t. I kept my promise not to tell my son, but knew it was so wrong.”

Tanner frowned and with a sense that his mother had reached out to him, to help him understand, sat down to read.

Men have dark sides, deep brooding creatures that they are, filled with arrogance and swaggering when they are proud of themselves. But if a woman can capture a good man, she can tame him with the softness of her heart. Men go in packs sometimes to protect themselves from being captured. They’re vulnerable creatures, needing petting and care, though they won’t admit it. The boy within the man wants to play, while the man has headier thoughts that can make a woman’s head spin.

—Anna Bennett

“Tanner Bennett, you are going to die,” Gwyneth muttered as she peered out her kitchen window into the stormy dawn. In the half-light, Tanner’s shaggy hair lifted in the wind and the powerful set of his broad shoulders stretched his T-shirt as he turned to set the plow’s tines into the earth. As if in rage, his metal tractor-monster tore by her ancient one, which had sputtered and died before finishing the new garden.

An experienced man from the country, Tanner knew how to tear away and open earth as though he were laying siege to her land…and this time there was no Leather to stand between Tanner and her. “I can deal with Tanner Bennett. And I will. I’ve dealt with everything else around here from mortgages to bad fences and dead tractors, and real-estate agents who wouldn’t take ‘no.’”

Gwyneth shook her head and ran her shaking fingers through her cropped hair, spiking it. One look in a mirror revealed her pale face and the circles beneath her eyes. All she needed after a draining night of bad dreams and hearing about last night’s reunion of the Bachelor Club was Tanner outside her window. Here he was, starting up with her and she had work to do and deliveries to make. She glanced at the mugs she’d been carefully wrapping in newspaper and easing into a cardboard box to take to a tourist store in another town. The various shaped mugs, each stamped on the bottom with her trademark, provided a steady income, easy for tourists to pack and transport. Larger bowls, speckled in earth tones, were for Willa’s Café, perfect for her soups. Gwyneth had built a steady clientele and by raising cattle and potting, she’d hauled herself out of all debt except the mortgage used to pay her father’s medical expenses. And all without the help of an interfering ex-husband. She slapped her ball cap on her head, jerked on her battered denim jacket against the chilly April morning and glared at Penny and Rolf, who were whining to be let out. “You run to Tanner, grinning and drooling all over him, and you’re going back to that cheap dog food for a week. And you’re not going with me to make the deliveries today.”

Undaunted by her threats, Penny and Rolf burst from the opened door, tails wagging on their way to Tanner.

She marched across the field, across a plowed strip and stood in front of his tractor, her hands on her hips. Wearing only a T-shirt against the morning chill, Tanner scowled at her, braked the tractor to a stop and clicked off the ignition. In one lithe jump, he was on the freshly plowed ground and tramping toward her. Gwyneth tried to ignore the angry shiver running through her and noted briefly that she’d never feared Tanner, except that night.

As he moved toward her, a tall powerful man she’d known all her life, his eyes flashing with anger, she shot at him, “You’re in a fine mood. So you played football on the high school field after the Silver Dollar closed. My phone has been ringing steadily—as if I’m responsible for you. Well, I’m not. I heard all your old chums were there, married and unmarried boys alike, waking up half the town with yells and turning on their headlights. Look at you…you’re bleary eyed, you’re wearing a beard and you look like you’d like to tangle with a bear. Nelda Waters wasn’t happy about Sam being invited to play at two o’clock in the morning, or about him having to drive their old tractor down to the high school ball field to sell to you. You could have waited until today. You’re not young anymore, Tanner, and you’ve given the town enough gossip fodder. Your mother would have—”

You’ve got a fast mouth on overdrive. You sound like someone’s wife—but you’re an ex-wife, aren’t you?” He stood over her now, his grim expression sliding into a dark, wary, penetrating search of her face as though seeing beneath the surface. “You should have told me.”

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