Mary Forbes - Red Wolf's Return

Ethan didn’t envy her the job. He’d heard the rumors, the gossip. Over the past year and a half, Meg McKee’s boy had transitioned into the classic badassed teenager.

The way he’d been once.

Old history, Ethan.

Except, people didn’t forget. Not in this town. Restless to leave, he took the pen and notepad she dug from a desk drawer.

“The room across the hall’s more private,” she said, and he saw something in her eyes. Something that had him wanting to reach over, touch her hair, that sleek short bob skimming to her chin. So different from when she’d been young. When touching had been easy and natural and they’d been crazy about each other.

Ethan shoved back his chair and stood. He’d seen the nameplate on the door of the interview room when he stood on the threshold of her office. The office of Meg, the cop. Meg, the woman he barely recognized.

She rose with him. Their eyes held. A long moment passed and all he could think was how nearly two decades had altered little of her physique. She retained those same long lean bones, but, tall as she was, the top of her head still remained below his chin.

He turned and walked across the hall, flicked on the light.

“Ethan,” she said as he rounded the small, stark table marred with dozens of scuffs and scratches and initials. “I’ll get to the bottom of this.”

“I know you will.”

She leaned in the doorway, her chief’s badge glinting in the ruthless lighting. She had something on her mind, he could see, something that bowed between them, eye to eye, and he remembered days long past when tension between them was as foreign as a bluebird nesting in winter.

“It’s…” she began. “It’s been a long time since…”

Since they’d stood within each other’s proximity. Since they’d talked, actually talked.

What do you want me to say, Meggie? That I haven’t forgotten what we had once? That I wish your best friend hadn’t died during prom week? That, God help me, I wanted so badly to soothe your grief, heal your heart?

“How’ve you been?” she asked softly, and he saw the question was genuine and came from a history long past.

“Good. Real good.” Same old mundane response.

Swallowing the sudden lump in his throat, he glanced at the paper in his hand, focusing on his reason for being here—because if he didn’t, he’d step across the confined space and haul her into his arms. “Look, I should get this done.”

She straightened from the doorjamb. “’Course. Just leave it with Sally when you’re finished. And Ethan? Thanks again.” With that, she walked across to her office and closed the door.

He stared at the page. In his chest, his heart hammered. Well, it was a start, this dialogue between them. The proverbial ice had been broken. So where did he take it from here?

Think about her later.

He set aside her pen, drew the ever-present pencil from his shirt pocket. Trouble was, he’d never stopped thinking about Meggie McKee.

In the sanctuary of her office, Meg sat at her desk, propped her elbows on its surface and put her face in her hands. Ethan.

Still the rescuer of wild creatures. Still healer of the hurt. A thousand memories besieged her of a teenage Ethan, holding a maimed squirrel, a fledgling robin with a crippled foot; working to save a carstruck doe.

Lord, the years. Here today, gone tomorrow, and before you knew it a chunk of life vanished.

He looked so familiar—yet not. Lines fanned around those quiet, earth-colored eyes she’d gazed into ten million times, eyes that understood pain and loss and bias, and had spoken to her heart from the moment they’d met when he was eight and she seven.

His hair was far longer than it had been at eighteen. Back then, he’d still been trying to squeeze into a world that often shunned him. Today, he was his own man and that hair was artfully cut into a shaggy, raven mane that touched the collar of his denim jacket. Her fingers tingled to dive into the thick mass, feel the silk slide against her fingers.

But she had no right to touch anymore. No right to him. She had made the choice two decades past.

Oh, the losses. She couldn’t begin to tally them.

Dropping her hands, she looked at her closed door, heard the soft scrape of his boots as he came from the interview room and stopped outside her office.

Would he knock? Call her name?

No, he walked away. Away, as she had at seventeen.

Ethan.

It wasn’t lost on Meg that he hadn’t used her name during the interview. Undoubtedly, she had been a stranger, a woman he no longer recognized.

Well, wasn’t that what she wanted when she’d returned to Sweet Creek six years ago, why she had not sought him out, rekindled their friendship, their love?

God, he’d been her best friend. She’d told Ethan things she never told a soul, not her best girlfriend, Farrah; not her brother, Ash. Not even her ex-husband.

A knock sounded. He’d returned, changed his mind. “Come in.”

Dispatcher and receptionist Sally Dunn poked her head around the door. “Chief, you might want to see this before I scan it into the computer.” She held a sheet of paper.

“What is it?”

“Ethan Red Wolf’s…statement.”

Meg tamped back a sigh. “You’re going to tell me he didn’t give one.”

“Uh, well, actually he did. Just not the way you’d expect.” The dispatcher set the page on the desk.

A drawing. He’d done a sketch, an intricately detailed sketch. For a second Meg closed her eyes. Oh, Ethan. This is so you. How on earth was she supposed to submit this to court, if the investigation reached that point?

“What should I do with it, Chief?” Sally toyed with the gold chain around her neck.

Meg picked up the page, tossed it onto the stack of files loading her In box. “Nothing, Sal. I’ll deal with it.” With him.

“He left his cell phone number. Should I call and have him come back?”

Meg shook her head. “I’ll be taking a look out that way this morning. Need to get some pictures of the scene and the eagle over at the clinic.” Deliberately changing topics in an effort to remove thoughts of Ethan in those long, lanky Wranglers, she asked, “Has Gilby left yet?” It was the deputy’s turn to pick up the bagels from Old Joe’s Bakery today.

“Five minutes ago.”

“Good, let me know when he’s back. I’m starving.”

Sally laughed. “You’re always starving. Sheesh, I wish I had your metabolism, grazing on carbs all day and never gaining an ounce.”

“It’s called being the mother of a teen, Sal. Takes a lot of stamina.”

“I hear ya. Thank goodness those days are over in my house.” Chuckling, the dispatcher headed out the door.

The instant she was alone again, Meg picked up Ethan’s “statement.” A time line wove over the page. Along it, he’d created more than a dozen sketches, each intricately detailed and described with notes. His spiky, slanted initials angled across the bottom right corner.

She identified her son and Randy Leland, read the time and date. She recognized Beau’s obstinate attitude in his down-turned mouth. Randy looked out of the page with some reluctance, exactly as the boy appeared whenever he came to her house two miles east of Sweet Creek.

And a quarter mile from Ethan’s place. Don’t forget that, Meg.

No, she never forgot the fact as she watched the sun rise and set, ate and slept and argued with her son, just over a small bluff from the man she once loved so much she’d believed their souls were attached at the heart.

And when she had learned a year ago about his inheritance of the O’Conner place, about his plans to move into the house on land separated from hers by a narrow creek…God, she had walked around with a clog of fear in her throat for weeks. It was one thing to see him from a distance on her brother’s ranch; it was another to be Ethan RedWolf’s direct and only neighbor.