I just stopped by to say hi to Danny here.” He took a step back, adjusting his gun belt over his ample gut. “I’ll be going now. Nice seeing you, Miss Hansen. Danny, you, too. You keep your nose clean, you hear?”
My God. In all of her thirty-one years, Molly had never actually heard somebody seethe, but that was precisely what Dan Shackelford was doing at the moment. He was hot enough to cook a steak on. She could almost hear his temper crackle, so it surprised her when his voice emerged fairly level and calm.
“See you around, Gil.”
It was only after the cruiser had pulled out of the driveway and moved on down the street that Dan swore harshly and tossed his paper plate with all its contents into the glowing coals of the grill.
“I lost my appetite,” he said.
“Don’t mind him, Dan,” Molly said. “Big fish. Little pond. You know. Watson just likes to make waves. And there’s no shame in being a handyman. God knows we need more of those than self-important lawmen.”
He just looked at her then for the longest while, shaking his head kind of sadly, before he said, “Good night, Molly. I’ll see you in the morning.”
Then he disappeared into his trailer.
Chapter 2
The next morning Molly kept to her usual routine of waking early and getting to her desk by eight o’clock. The regular hours helped keep a sense of normalcy in her disrupted life. And that life promised to be even more disrupted now that Dan was going to be there, measuring, hammering, generally getting in her way, not to mention taking up more of her thoughts than she wanted to admit.
By nine o’clock, she had read and graded six essays entitled “My Favorite Season,” with summer the hands-down winner, in spite of the fact that she had spent half the time looking out the window for signs of life under the live oak.
By ten o’clock, she was worried in addition to being ticked off. Just when was all this measuring and hammering and getting in her way supposed to begin? She wasn’t running a trailer park or a campground, for heaven’s sake, and she certainly wasn’t running a retirement home for handymen, although that looked to be the case.
She poured a mug of coffee, then trudged across the yard and pounded on the Airstream’s door. She stood there, tapping her foot for what seemed like half an hour before the door finally swung open.
“You look terrible,” she said, offering the first words that came to mind when she saw the rumpled hair, the red eyes like flags at half-mast, the stained T-shirt and the ratty boxer shorts with their wrinkled happy faces.
“Is that coffee?”
Molly looked down at the mug she had almost forgotten was in her hand. “Coffee? Oh, yes. It is.”
“Is it for me?”
“Oh. Sure. Here.” She pressed it into Dan’s not-so-steady hand, then watched him swallow at least half of it before she asked, “What time were you planning to start work? I’ve made a list.”
He winced. “A list?”
“Things that really need to be done.” She reached into the pocket of her skirt and withdrew the piece of paper she had scribbled on earlier. “The showerhead in the bathroom needs to be replaced. And the sink drips in there, too. You already know about the roof leaking, right?”
He nodded as he sipped the coffee.
“The wallpaper is peeling in the bedroom, too, but I wasn’t sure if you were just supposed to make structural repairs or—”
“Just give me the list.”
“You probably can’t read my writing. Number three looks like kitchen flower but it’s really floor. There’s a spot near the pantry where—”
“Just give me the goddamned list,” he barked, nearly ripping it out of her hand, then slapping the empty mug in her open palm while Molly stood there blinking.
“I’m sorry,” he said immediately.
“You should be,” she snapped. “I was only trying to help.”
“I got up on the wrong side of the bed, that’s all.”
Molly snorted. “Yeah. The underside.”
“Okay. Look, give me a couple minutes to get cleaned up and then we’ll go over this list of yours and work up some kind of a plan. How does that sound?”
“All right, I guess. Fine.”
“Fine.”
“Fine,” Dan snarled into the mirror mounted over the Airstream’s minuscule bathroom sink where he’d just narrowly escaped slashing his carotid artery while he shaved. “Fine and dandy.”
Posing as a handyman had seemed like a good idea at the time, considering that his official presence was supposed to be kept under wraps. The Marshals Service couldn’t afford to create panic in several thousand witnesses, not to mention the agency’s devout wish to avoid bad publicity. But after installing the window and door locks, Dan realized he’d reached the limit of his do-it-yourself expertise. For somebody who could break down and reassemble just about any weapon ever made, he was at a loss when it came to domestic nuts and bolts. Molly was a smart woman. She’d have his number—zero!—before he could hammer a single nail.
She was a sweet woman, too. God bless her for trying to step between him and that no-neck, ham-handed Gil Watson last night, and then attempting to bolster his wounded handyman ego as if she weren’t some hotshot East Coast financial whiz. If she was miserable here in the armpit of Texas, she was much too gracious to let it show.
He’d been miserable here, but not because he’d been leading some secret, lesser life. He’d been miserable because he had to spend every waking minute proving himself to a couple hundred people to whom the name Shackelford was synonymous with white trash. Catching a last glimpse of his face in the mirror, Dan wasn’t at all sure they weren’t right.
He knocked on Molly’s back door and mumbled another apology when she finally let him in.
“I thought I’d run down to Cooley’s Hardware and pick up some of the things on your list,” he said, digging the paper out of his shirt pocket.
“Let me get my handbag and drag a quick brush through my hair.”
Dan started to tell her she didn’t need to come along, but as he watched the sway of her backside and the soft swing of her hair on her shoulders, he changed his mind. He didn’t even try to convince himself it was because his job was to protect her from unseen terrorists. Hell. As if he even could.
“I’m ready.” She was back, all blue-eyed and smiley, with a floppy straw hat on her head and a big straw bag hooked over one shoulder.
Dan slid his dark glasses in place, pushed his headache to the back of his brain, and said, “Okay. Let’s go.”
Molly had only been in Cooley’s Hardware on Main Street once. Her brain became so overloaded from the narrow aisles with their crammed shelves that she’d left without purchasing what she’d gone there to get. She felt the same today, on the verge of short-circuiting as she wandered along behind Dan who was pitching odds and ends into a shopping cart.
“This place hasn’t changed a bit,” he said, reaching over her head for something on a shelf. “Almost feels as if I never left. Scary.” He feigned a shiver, then lobbed whatever he’d retrieved into the cart.
“How long ago did you leave?” Molly asked, continuing to trail along behind him.
“Nearly twenty years. Hell, a lifetime.”
“Hmm. That young man working at the cash register probably wasn’t even born then. Just think. In the time you’ve been gone, an entire generation has been born, graduated from high school, probably even gotten married and started