the steak, she actually offered him some information. “You’re right. I didn’t leave Lemon Grove with the intent of coming to Buffalo Lake. I knew I was coming to Oklahoma, but I didn’t decide on an exact destination until I got here.”
“Why here? Why not Shangri-La or one of the other resorts?”
“Do you know how much rent the Davison family is charging for the cabin? Two hundred bucks a month. Furnished. I can spend six months there for the cost of—what?—maybe a few weeks at one of those resorts. Besides, conveniences and luxuries are just a distraction I don’t need.”
“That’s redundant, isn’t it? Or is there a distraction you do need?”
Her face colored, making him wonder if she was remembering Shay calling him a distraction. Wants attention all the time, she’d said, which wasn’t exactly true. He didn’t want everyone’s attention—just Cassidy’s at the moment—and he didn’t even want that all the time.
Just more than was wise.
Without waiting for an answer that he really didn’t think was forthcoming, he polished off the last bite of his burger, then drained the last of his pop. “What do you do on a hot summer day in Lemon Grove?”
“I sit in my air-conditioned office and work.”
“All the time? You don’t go to the beach or into the mountains? No drives north to L.A. or south to Tijuana?”
“I’m not an outdoor sort of girl. What can I say? I’m dedicated to my job.” That much was one-hundred-percent true, Cassidy reflected. Her job was staying alive, and she was committed to it twenty-four hours a day.
She took one last bite of tender, battered steak, then pushed the plate away. As if alerted by some sixth sense, the waitress immediately appeared. “Did you save room for dessert? Manuel baked up some dewberry cobblers this morning.”
Though she didn’t know what dewberries were, Cassidy was tempted. “Cobbler” was enough to do that to her. Peach, cherry, blackberry—she wasn’t finicky. She loved them all, especially warm from the oven with a scoop or two of vanilla ice cream melting over them. But she’d stuffed herself on chicken-fried steak, potatoes and creamy cucumber salad and didn’t have room left for one single berry.
“None for me,” she said politely.
“How about a couple servings to go?” Jace suggested, giving the waitress a smile that made her melt like the ice cream Cassidy had been fantasizing about.
While the woman left to get his cobbler, Cassidy let her gaze slide around the restaurant. The fixtures showed a lot of hard wear, much like the customers. Even so, it held a certain homey appeal. It was a place to meet friends, to catch up on news, to enjoy good food at good prices, to connect with other people. Once upon a time she’d had favorite restaurants where she’d been greeted by name, where the waitresses knew her favorite dishes, where she’d connected.
She missed that.
“You ready?”
Refocusing her attention, she saw Jace was holding a foil pan and their ticket and was about to stand. As she slid to her feet and slung her purse over one shoulder, he dropped some ones on the table, then gestured for her to precede him to the cash register near the door. There she withdrew her wallet, but he gave a shake of his head.
“I can pay for my own lunch.”
“It was my invitation.” He handed a twenty to the waitress, pocketed his change, then followed her outside.
Though the grocery store was only half a block away, they drove. Jace parked in the shade of a huge oak, then glanced back across the street when he got out. “I need to make one stop,” he said when she joined him at the back of the truck. “Why don’t you go on in, and I’ll catch up with you.”
“Sure.” She was not disappointed, she told herself as she crossed the parking lot. She always did her grocery shopping alone and there was no reason to mind it today.
Always shop on a full stomach, her mother preached. The theory, as Cassidy recalled, was that she wouldn’t make impulse purchases based on hunger. The downside was that, with her stomach so full, she couldn’t work up much enthusiasm for any of the foods available.
It was going to be a salad kind of week, she decided as she gathered the ingredients for chicken salad, pasta salad, garden salad and potato salad. She added a few staples—cereal, milk, ice cream and chocolate—along with a paperback from the limited selection, and was finishing up on the pop-and-potato-chip aisle when a man near the checkout caught her attention. Jace, she thought with a rush of warmth that was more pleasurable than was good for her.
No, not Jace. The clothes were a match, but this man’s back was to her and there was no long, silky black ponytail to be seen. His hair was short, as short as hers.
Then he turned, saw her and started toward her.
“You cut your hair,” she blurted when he was still fifteen feet away. Damn! As if he hadn’t been handsome enough before. He was a dangerous man, she’d decided on their way into town. Now she amended that to very dangerous.
He combed his fingers through it, dislodging a few stray hairs. “It’s getting too hot to wear it long. I never liked it that way anyway.”
“Then why let it get so long?”
“It was easier than getting it cut.”
She wanted to ask when he’d last cut it. Back in the winter, she would bet, when he hadn’t wanted anyone’s attention. What had happened? Had he undergone some personal crisis, been depressed or sick or in trouble?
He would tell her…if she answered all his questions first.
She didn’t want to know that badly.
Instead of getting his own shopping cart, he turned hers back from the register and took it—and her by default—on a quick sweep through the store. Though he wasn’t working from a list, he knew what items he wanted and in what brands and sizes. He gathered twice the amount of food she had in less than half the time, then steered the cart to the checkout.
The cashier was a pretty woman with auburn hair and a name tag identifying her as Ginger pinned to a snug-fitting T-shirt. “Hi, Jace,” she said warmly before turning her attention to Cassidy. Her gaze narrowed and her smile slipped a bit, but when she finally greeted her, it was with almost the same warmth. She rang up Jace’s purchases first while a teenage boy in baggy denim shorts sacked them.
“Are you visiting Jace?” she asked as she started on Cassidy’s groceries.
Cassidy glanced at Jace, talking football with the bagger and paying them no mind. “No. I’m renting the Davison cabin out at the lake.”
“Oh, you’re the one—the writer from Alabama.” Ginger smiled. “I go out with Buddy Davison from time to time. He mentioned it.”
“Actually, it’s South Carolina,” Cassidy corrected her. Ask the same question ten times and she would give ten different answers. That was one of her methods of survival.
“No, I’m pretty sure Buddy said Alabama. He says you write history books.”
Had she told Paulette Fox that? Cassidy wondered. Maybe. Hell, she’d told the woman she was from Alabama, when she’d never set foot in the state. She’d gotten in the habit of not paying a great deal of attention to her lies. After all, she was rarely in one place long enough for her untruthfulness to catch up to her, and this place wasn’t likely to be any different. “Not history books. Historical novels.”
As soon as the words were out she inwardly grimaced. That was dumb. If she knew little about writing books in general, she knew nothing about writing historical books. The only history she was intimately familiar with was her own, and it had always been fairly innocuous…until six years ago. Then it had gotten interesting. Three years after that it had become movie-of-the-week material. Now it was boring