A Bad Day for Pretty (2 page)

Goat’s little house was built snug and tight, but she could still hear the winds whistling outside, the crackle of twigs blown up against the windows.

“So another one’s coming our way,” she said softly. That happened sometimes; they called it a swarm. “I surely don’t like tornadoes.”

“Is that right? A tough gal like you, Dusty?” Goat’s grin quirked up, teasing, but then he seemed to sense her apprehension and the smile faded. He set his fork and knife down and reached across the table for her hand, folding it in his, squeezing gently, and a strange thing happened: on top of the hot-hot gotta-get-me-some-of-that charge that generally accompanied every interaction with Goat, Stella felt something else, an unexpectedly tender something that for some reason caused her eyes to get all teary and her heart to lurch dangerously.

It was almost like … like he was offering her
safety
.

And safe was something she’d vowed never to take for granted again, something she had decided she’d rather live without than ever be lulled into a false sense of security. Trust was a door Stella had shut forever.

But Goat’s eyes in the candlelight were deep as an indigo ocean, and his fingers stroking hers were warm and strong and rough from hard work. “I mean, just because, you know, they’re such a pain …,” she stammered. “Power failures and trees getting knocked down and all that, you know?”

“I kind of like tornadoes,” Goat said. His voice, always deep and drawly, seemed to have gone a couple notches lower. “All that crazy energy? Like a front-row seat to the end of the world or something.”

That’s what it had been for Horace, all right. …
Daddy’s little brother, good with the ladies. They said he was better looking than Daddy, though Stella knew better. Horace loved to tie flies, but he hated to fish. Came for Sunday suppers, but never quite managed to get up in time for church. Brought Stella licorice and challenged her to watermelon-seed-spitting contests …

Stella realized Goat was waiting for her to say something, but nothing came to mind. Hell, she was quite a head case tonight. She’d thought about canceling, but she’d been looking forward to tonight—so she snapped off the radio once they announced the twister had blazed its path through town without injuring anyone, then gritted her teeth and driven over in the pouring rain, trying to keep her heartbeat under control.

Still, maybe a date was a bad idea. Her body might have recovered from the whole killing-spree thing, but it looked like her emotions might need a little more time in the airing cupboard before she took them on the road.

She hadn’t thought about Uncle Horace in years. And what was with the tears? She’d survived worse—way worse than a wayward little memory—without cracking like this. It was downright embarrassing.

Goat’s dining room suddenly seemed a little too small. She blinked a couple times and pulled her hand away from under Goat’s. Maybe she did want him bad, but she didn’t need his pity, or sympathy, or whatever the hell it was that was causing him to turn on the charm.

He sighed and tapped his fingers on the table. “Look, Dusty, you know what you need?”

Stella shook her head, helping herself to an oversize sip from her wine glass.

“You need a little meat on those bones. You’re looking awful skinny. Come on, now, try the chicken. It was my mom’s recipe.”

Stella couldn’t help it—she sat up a little straighter and inhaled a nice big breath that set off her bosoms to their best advantage.
Skinny
wasn’t a word she’d heard directed her way in a long time. Even shed of those fifteen hospital pounds, she was still on the generous side of womanly.

Well—some fellas liked that.

Maybe it would be possible to get this evening back on track after all. She gave Goat her best there’s-more-of-me-where-this-comes-from smile. “Why, thank you, Goat.”

“So—come on, just a bite.” Goat’s grin tilted to one side of that broad, sexy mouth.

“Um.” Stella picked up her knife and fork and carefully cut a dainty bite of chicken and slipped it in her mouth. Immediately a capsaicin-packing burst of heat rocketed across her lips and tongue, and Stella flapped her hands and mewled in pain, swallowing the mouthful and praying that it wouldn’t set her gut on fire. She grabbed her water glass and took a powerful swig, letting the water overflow out the corners of her lips and down her cheeks.

When she finally opened her eyes, gasping for breath, she saw that Goat was laughing.

He was covering it up pretty well, trying to keep a serious expression on his face, but his muscular shoulders were quaking with mirth, and his eyes were all crinkly with amusement.

“Darlin’, a little dab of that hot pepper’ll probably do the trick next time,” he finally said.

Stella glared and finished off her water. She set the glass down hard on Goat’s dining room table, making the candles jump and skitter in their brass holders. “I’ll try to remember that.”

“You’ve got a…” Goat reached out and carefully brushed at her lower lip, his fingertip caressing the tender spot above her chin in a way that caused a little shiver to shoot up from her toes to somewhere along her spine, leaving sparklers lit up all along the way. “A flake, I think.”

He showed her the tip of his finger, and sure enough there was a tiny little speck of pepper stuck to it. Stella picked up her napkin and dabbed daintily at her mouth.

“Oh,” she said. “Thanks.”

She set her napkin back on her lap and Goat kept his gaze fixed on her face and damn if she didn’t find herself staring back, and then a few seconds or maybe it was a few hours went by, Stella couldn’t be sure, and he slowly reached for her hand again, right there on the smooth pine surface of the dining room table, and this time Stella let him, and she had time to remark to herself on just how big Goat’s hand was compared to hers as he ran his thumb slowly over the sensitive skin on the inside of her wrist—and then the doorbell rang.

Stella blinked.

It rang again, three quick blasts, and Goat released her hand and she managed, barely, not to cuss out loud.

“Excuse me,” he said softly, and pushed his chair back. At least the man had the decency to sound disappointed.

He unfolded himself from the table, all six-foot-four of hard-muscled law enforcement pride of Sawyer County, and as he went to the door, Stella took the opportunity to scrape as much of the hot pepper off her chicken as she could, burying it in a little pool of sauce with her fork.

The ringing had turned to pounding by the time Goat got the door opened, and the rush of the wind and rain splatting against the house drowned out whatever the visitor had to say, though Stella could make out a high and rather desperate-sounding voice.

Stella turned in her chair just in time to see Goat stagger back and send the door banging against the wall.

“What the hell are you doing here, Brandy?” he demanded.

A generous five feet of womanly curves clattered into the house on ridiculously high heels and stood shaking a fuchsia umbrella out on the hardwood floor, touching bloodred-tipped fingers to a complicated platinum-blonde updo.

“I declare, Goat Jones,” she said. “That’s a fine way to greet your wife.”

TWO

Your
wife
?” Stella demanded, pushing back her chair and standing in order to view the full measure of this disturbing turn of events.

Goat’s gaze flicked from one woman to the other and back. He retreated from the front door, still holding a kitchen towel, which he waved in front of him like a matador confronting an angry bull.

“Uh, Stella, this is my ex-wife, Brandy Truax—”

“Not quite, babycakes,” the petite party-crasher said. She finished her hair-fluffing with a final pat or two and tugged at the bottom hem of her snug knit skirt. There wasn’t quite enough skirt to go around, and Brandy’s straightening efforts revealed a band of skin around her midriff. Her sweater was knit of thick pink yarn and might have kept her warm and toasty, except for the fact that it seemed to have been designed for a five-year-old and didn’t begin to cover the top half of a decidedly grown-up and almost certainly fake set of breasts. With her skyscraping platform shoes and her top-heavy mass of curls and her sparkly makeup and extra-long lashes, Brandy looked like she’d been hanging around Dolly Parton long enough to pick up some fashion tips. “You never quite got around to signing the documents, remember?”

“Me?”
Goat paused midshuffle. “It was
you
that wouldn’t sign, remember? I just paid that shyster Gordy Gates another six hundred bucks to drive the latest copy over to you back in January. He said you told him you needed to talk to your astrologer and figure out the right moon phase for signing, or some such load of crap.”

Brandy sighed dramatically and set her purse, a large gold oblong clutch tricked out with studs and metal trim, down on the table with a thunk. She didn’t seem to notice or care that she had nearly knocked over the bottle of wine from which Stella had consumed a mere half glass—a show of temperance that now seemed like it might have been wasted.

“You, me, does it really matter who it was?” Brandy asked no one in particular. “I swear, that’s what got us in trouble in the first place, Goat, all that finger-pointin’. Never does a bit of good, if you ask me.”

Stella made tracks for her own purse, a considerably more subdued number that she’d stowed carefully next to the front door along with her umbrella, which had mostly dried in the hour that she’d been at Goat’s. “My, my, look at the time,” she murmured. “Just delightful to meet you, Brandy, but tomorrow’s a work day, and, well, you know how these things go.”

“Oh, hell, Dusty—” Goat gave his own chair an angry shove, clacking it against the table. “No need to go off all half-cocked like this. Lemme just figure out what Brandy here needs and send her on her way and we can get back where we were.”

“I really don’t—,” Stella began. All the lovely shivery feelings from earlier in the evening were gone, as though the heavy cloud of perfume that Brandy brought in the door with her had doused the sparks that had been sparkling between Stella and the sheriff for months. Years, even.

Stella had become a bit of an expert in relationships, seeing as she was a member of the marital counseling profession, loosely speaking. At least, she did a lot of listening when women showed up at her door, looking to become members of the not-going-to-take-it-anymore club. Working with her clients took compassion and reasoning skills and coaching and encouraging and a heap of intuition and enough optimism for two, since generally the ladies didn’t bring much of that with them.

Over the years, Stella had learned a thing or two about what could go wrong in the marital union—and she’d never seen a lingering-spouse situation that turned out anything but messy. She’d assumed, along with everyone else in Prosper, that Goat’s marriage was a clean kill. Learning that it had popped up from the grave was not encouraging. Men whose baggage contained undead relationships were to be avoided.

There was the player, the man who’d tell you his marriage had been over for years, even while his wedding ring was cooling in his wallet. Well, Goat wasn’t one of those, Stella was sure, since she’d seen for herself that he’d been decidedly single for the three years since he moved to Prosper to head up the sheriff’s department. So single, in fact, that he’d felt free to show a number of the local ladies a nice time—or so the gossip went.

Then there were the never-quite-split ones. That’s what this situation looked like it might turn out to be.

Last January, Nora Romero had hired Stella to do some heavy-duty explaining to her boyfriend, Nick, that it was not okay to use her credit card to pay for long-distance conversations with special ladies on the other end of 900 numbers, but while Stella was doing her due diligence, she discovered that there was another mad-as-hell gal over in Brisbane, Ohio, who just happened to still be married to Nick and wondered if Stella could get him to pay back the $2,300 he’d run up on
her
credit card, making long-distance friends before he skipped town.

Not that she expected Goat was spending his public servant’s salary on heavy breathers whose pictures appeared in the back of men’s magazines. For one thing, he wouldn’t have to. She wasn’t the only filly in town who’d taken a shine to the man; it seemed that tall, sexy, righteous men in uniform were in short supply.

But that little crush, or whatever it was, needed to be laid to rest. Stella had entirely too much drama in her life already without getting dragged into a tug-of-war with a damp sexpot with questionable fashion sense and very poor timing.

“I need to run by the shop,” she said. Besides her unofficial side business, Stella ran the sewing machine repair and supply shop she’d inherited from Ollie. “Make sure everything’s okay.”

“You already checked,” Goat protested. He had called and offered to help her nail plywood over the windows before the tornado went through, but Stella turned him down, since they were predicting the storm would stay south of Prosper. Later, when darkness arrived earlier than usual and Ted Krass over at the Live Super Doppler One Thousand Weather Center got on the radio to announce that the funnel cloud had traced a route through the fairgrounds and skipped across Broadway before heading out the west side of town, she made a couple of calls to make sure the shop was still standing.