Redemption Road: Jackson Falls Book 5 (Jackson Falls Series) Read online

  She debated her next words, decided what the hell, she might as well go for it. “I have a proposition for you. I need a picture hung, and I figure you owe me. I washed your dishes. And your dog. You hang my picture, we’ll call it even. As an added bonus, I’ll throw in a cup of hot cocoa. I’d offer beer, but I don’t have any alcohol in the house.” She shoved her fists into the pockets of her new winter coat. “I don’t drink.”

  “On a night like this, hot cocoa will hit the spot. I’d be happy to oblige.”

  He followed her up the stairs to her apartment, waited while she unlocked the door. Inside the kitchen, she slipped out of her coat and hung it over the back of a chair. “The picture’s on the couch,” she said. “The hammer and nails are on the coffee table. I want it hung on the wall behind the couch, a little above eye level. My eye level. I trust your judgment. I’ll start the cocoa.”

  Harley removed his coat, kicked off his snowy shoes, and disappeared into the living room. Colleen took out a saucepan, poured in a little water from the tap, and set it on the burner. She took two mugs from the cupboard and found the box of instant cocoa mix she’d bought earlier, then tore open a pair of foil packets, poured the contents into the mugs, and waited for the water to boil.

  From the living room came the tap of the hammer she’d borrowed from her brother-in-law. Harley cussed once, a muffled oath, and she wondered, belatedly, just how much he knew about swinging a hammer. He probably hadn’t learned much about hammers in law school. “You all right in there?” she said.

  “Fine. I just had a slight difference of opinion with your hammer, that’s all.”

  “And the hammer won?”

  “I plead the Fifth.”

  The water in the saucepan was boiling. Colleen switched off the burner, picked up the pan with a pot holder, and carefully poured boiling water into each mug. With a teaspoon, she stirred both until the chocolate powder was thoroughly dissolved.

  Harley shouted, “You’ll have to come check, see if you’re happy with where it ended up.”

  “Be right there. The cocoa’s too hot to drink right now, anyway.”

  The piece of artwork she’d bought at the five-and-ten was kitschy and homey, not at all her style, a happy little house and barn made from pieces of brightly-colored calico fabric, collaged over a white background and framed under glass. She wasn’t even sure why she’d bought it. Usually, her tastes ran to minimalist pen-and-ink drawings and the occasional piece of abstract art. She would have been mortified to hang something like this in her home in Palm Beach. But there was something about it that drew her, and here, in Jackson Falls, it felt right.

  “This look okay to you?” he said.

  She critically eyed the piece, the placement. “As okay as it’s going to get.”

  “It’s cute.”

  “Cute. That’s a good word for it.”

  “Okay, so it’s not exactly gallery quality. But the pickings are pretty slim at the only department store in town.”

  She glanced at him, but he was focused on the artwork. If you could call it that. “Have you visited a lot of galleries?”

  “In New York, yes. My ex-wife was a collector.”

  “Of what?”

  Still focusing on the piece of homespun art, he said, “There was this up-and-coming young expressionist painter named Jaime Vasquez. She really liked his work, and she spent a chunk of money buying up his pieces as soon as they came off the easel.”

  “Why’d you get divorced?”

  He swung around to look at her, eyebrows raised, perhaps surprised by the audacity she displayed, asking such a personal question. “We didn’t agree on what we wanted from life.”

  “Such as?”

  “She wanted to sleep with my senior law partner. I disagreed.”

  “Ouch. How’d you end up with Annabel?”

  “You’re just full of nosy questions, aren’t you?”

  Unfazed, she said, “Mama always told me I didn’t know where to draw the line.”

  “Your Mama was a smart woman. And I have Annabel because Amy didn’t want her. In addition to the sleeping-with-the-boss thing, she was a barracuda. A greedy, driven workaholic with psychopathic tendencies. She didn’t have time to be a mother.”

  “Ah,” she said, instantly understanding. “Another lawyer.”

  “I did the corporate thing for as long as I could take it. But my heart was never in it. I’ve been happier these last six months than I ever was in the ten years I spent in Manhattan.”

  She crossed her arms. “My husband died,” she said. “Six months ago.”

  “I heard that. I’m sorry.”

  Studying the ridiculously tacky calico collage, she wet her lips. “I don’t know what the hell to do with myself now.”

  Hands in the pockets of his jeans, he said darkly, “There are times when I wish my ex-wife would just up and die.”

  A tear, salty and humiliating, flooded her right eye and trickled down her cheek. “No,” she said. “You don’t wish that. Not for Annabel, not even for you, not if you dig deep enough to reach the place where the hurt still lives.”

  “Shit. You’re right, and I’m sorry. I had no business saying that, especially to you.” Glancing once more at the artistic masterpiece on her living room wall, he blew out a breath. “You’re right about something else, too. That kind of hostility comes directly from the place you’re talking about. Where the hurt still lives.”

  “You still love her.”

  He considered her words. “I don’t think I’d go that far. But I’m still hurt. We built a life together, and she walked away from it. Away from me, away from Annabel, away from the future we’d envisioned as a young married couple. It appears I haven’t gotten past that yet.”

  She wondered if he’d heard the stories. From her family. The neighbors. Hell, everybody in Jackson Falls knew that Colleen Lindstrom had walked out on her husband and her son. “You have to give it time,” she said.

  “What about you? Did you have a good marriage?”

  “Irv was the only person who ever understood me. Really, truly understood who I was. And who I wasn’t.” She swiped at another maddening tear. “And he loved me anyway.”

  “Sounds like you had something not all of us find.”

  “Maybe, but it took me three tries before I found it. And then, it turned out to be so fleeting that it was gone almost before I realized what I had.”

  “My Great Aunt Lila had this philosophy she once shared with me: Grab happiness wherever and whenever you find it. Don’t worry about what anybody else will think, and don’t let it pass you by, no matter what. Because tomorrow, it might not be there.”

  “Is that supposed to make me feel better, Atkins?”

  Those blue eyes studied her somberly. And then he smiled. “Just an observation. Come on, let’s go see if that hot cocoa’s cooled off any.”

  Casey

  She was standing in front of the bedroom mirror, brushing her hair, when Rob came into the room. Casey set down the brush, turned into his arms and kissed him, sweetly, tenderly, breathlessly. They broke the kiss, and she brushed her lips along the solid line of his jaw, bristly with its evening growth of beard. Near her ear, he said, “I read ‘em the riot act.”

  “Oh?”

  “I laid down the law. No running up and down the stairs to the kitchen. No tee-heeing and giggling and keeping us awake. No loud music, no barking dogs, no pillow fights, no jumping on the beds, and if they wake up the baby, there’ll be hell to pay.”

  “I’m impressed, Flash. You put the fear of God into them.”

  He let out a breath, shrugged his shoulders. “Probably not, but at least I made the attempt. I remember sleepovers. I had five sisters. Meg was the worst. Her best friend had this god-awful, high-pitched giggle. Dad would be up three or four times in the night, threatening them both with bodily harm. Not that it ever did much good. They didn’t listen to him any better than Paige and Annabel will listen to me.”
/>   She leaned into him, touched her nose to his warm skin, pressed a kiss to his Adam’s apple. “Hi,” she said.

  He dipped his head down, rubbed his cheek against hers. “Hi, yourself. Sheep? Seriously?”

  “Yes. Seriously.” She moved her lips along the tendon that ran from his neck to his shoulder. Reached up to unfasten the top button of his shirt, shoved the material aside, and took a half-dozen tiny, gentle love bites from his shoulder.

  “Are you trying to manipulate me, Fiore?”

  “That depends, MacKenzie. Is it working?”

  He let out a soft snort of laughter, and she continued on, plying stubborn shirt buttons, one at a time, beseeching them to open and reveal that lovely hard chest beneath, with its dark triangle of hair.

  “Where would we even put sheep?” he argued, trying to win her over with logic. He should know better. She could out-logic him any day of the week.

  “They’re generally kept in a barn.” With her tongue, she traced a line down the center of his chest, felt him shudder, and smiled to herself.

  “Babe? We don’t have a barn.”

  “So? We’ll build one. We’ll fence off a section of the field that runs alongside the road for pasture, and we’ll build a little barn, with an attached facility for the shearing and dyeing and spinning.”

  “Jesus, Mary and Joseph. You really are serious.”

  Her searching mouth reached it at last, that sweet little indentation at the center of his chest where ribs met breastbone, where all that wonderful hair swirled and narrowed into a deep vee before plunging southward past his navel. That spot always made her go weak in the knees. Every damn time. She nuzzled it with her nose, tasted it with the tip of her tongue. He inhaled sharply, tangled the fingers of both hands in her hair and said in resignation, “This is going to cost me a fortune, isn’t it?”

  She continued southward, inch by delicious inch. “But just think, Flash. Now you’ll be able to add sheep farmer to your resume.”

  “I suppose it’ll be good to have something to fall back on. Just in case.”

  Against hard, warm skin, she smiled. She took a playful nip, then traced her tongue down the narrow vee of hair, past his navel, until she reached worn denim. Pausing, she looked up and into eyes that had gone a soft, smoky gray. “It’s always nice,” she said, freeing the button to his jeans, “to have something to fall back on.”

  “Right. Hah.”

  After that, neither of them said anything for a very long time.

  Colleen

  It didn’t take her more than five minutes to figure out that her brother-in-law was not the kind of boss to hover over her shoulder or micromanage. He gave her a quick tour of the building, showed her the recording studio and the restroom, pointed out the coffee pot, the fridge, the microwave, the telephone that was buried under a pile of mail on the reception desk, and left her to figure out the rest on her own.

  The first thing she did was make a pot of coffee. She poured herself a cup, then poured one for Rob, carried it to his private office, and knocked on the open door. Phone clasped to his ear, he swiveled in his chair, saw the cup, and his eyes lit up. Colleen handed it to him silently. He gave her a thumbs-up, said into the phone, “That’s not a high enough percentage. We need to negotiate for more,” and swiveled back around.

  She spent a half-hour sorting through six weeks of mail. Somebody had already made a halfhearted run-through, because a couple of the envelopes had been opened and their contents stuffed back inside. Most of it was junk mail. Sales flyers, electronics catalogs, random pieces addressed to Occupant. Thinking about all those trees who’d sacrificed their lives for this vast assortment of rubbish, she tossed out everything addressed to Occupant, along with all the junk mail, except for a couple of catalogs she thought he might want to hold onto.

  She took her time going through the rest of it, sorting it into neat little piles: one for him to read, another to be filed, a third she could deal with once she’d talked them over with him. She’d just finished her second cup of coffee when Rob emerged from his office. “Hey,” he said. “You doing okay?”

  “So far, so good.”

  “I forgot to mention that you need to go to the post office every morning and pick up the mail.” He dug around in his pocket and pulled out a set of car keys. “Here.” He tossed the keys and she caught them in midair. “Take the Explorer. Box 237. The key’s on the ring. The mail’s usually in the boxes by 8:30. It wouldn’t break my heart if you wanted to bring back doughnuts.”

  The post office was located in a tidy, post-WWII building that also housed the police station, where her cousin Teddy worked as one of the town’s two full-time officers. She parked the Explorer beside a muddy police cruiser and crossed the parking lot, the American flag whipping in the wind above her head. Hoping she wouldn’t run into Teddy, she entered the foyer of the police station, where the receptionist sat gossiping on the phone about somebody named Gloria. Spying her cousin at the far end of the corridor, Colleen took a hard left through a glass door and into the post office lobby.

  Had he seen her? The last thing she needed today was to run into Teddy. He was a royal pain in the ass, a know-it-all who could talk you into a coma. Teddy liked to throw his weight around, and she didn’t doubt that he was taking advantage of his position to spread his particular brand of sunshine all over the citizens of Jackson Falls.

  She managed to avoid the postmistress, Eleanor Hardy, whose dour face had been stationed behind that counter since dinosaurs roamed the earth. Colleen found Box 237, opened it with her key, and pulled out a stack of mail. She was sorting through the pile, discarding the junk mail in a trash can, when the glass door opened and an all-too-familiar voice said, “Well, I’ll be damned! It’s my little cousin Colleen. I thought you blew this town without ever looking back.”

  She straightened, took a breath to compose herself, then wheeled around to face him. “Hello, Teddy. The police department hasn’t fired you yet?”

  “Ha, ha. Real funny. What the hell are you doing back here in Jackson Falls?”

  “Maybe I got homesick.”

  He moved the toothpick he was chewing from the left side of his mouth to the right. “And maybe I have a piece of swampland in Arizona that I want to sell you. So, what, you got a post office box or something?”

  “Or something.”

  He leaned his considerable bulk over her, invading her personal space to peer at the stack of mail she held clasped to her bosom. “Two Dreamers Records,” he read aloud. “Hunh. You picking up Casey’s mail for her?”

  “Actually, I’m working for Rob. As his assistant.”

  “Her hippie-dippie freak of a husband? Waste of air space, that one, if you ask me.”

  Her smile oozed insincerity. “What a shame that I didn’t ask you.”

  He stood there, still too close, beefy arms swinging at his side. “I hear your husband died.”

  She raised her chin. “Yes,” she said flatly. “He did.”

  “So what number was this one? Your fifth? Sixth?”

  Rage swept through her. She clutched the mail more tightly and said, “You know what, Teddy? It’s been really great running into you. Next time, I’ll be sure I’m behind the wheel when I do it.”

  The fool actually grinned. “Good thing I know you don’t mean it. That could be construed as threatening a police officer.”

  “Take it any way you want to, big boy. Excuse me, but I have to get back to work before my hippie-dippie freak of a boss docks my pay.”

  She shoved past him, thrust open the glass door, felt his eyes on her as she exited. Just before the door closed behind her, he shouted, “Make sure he’s paying you what you’re worth!”

  ***

  She slammed her purse down on the desk and said grimly, “I want a raise.”

  His mouth wrapped around the honey-glazed doughnut he’d pulled from the bag she’d unceremoniously tossed at him ten seconds earlier, Rob reached for a tissue from the box
on her desk. “Already?” he said, wiping his mouth. “You just started two hours ago.”

  “I ran into my cousin Teddy at the post office.”

  “Oh, boy.”

  “If I have to put up with the likes of him five days a week, I think I deserve combat pay!” She pulled off her coat and hung it on the coat rack by her desk. Bent to unzip her boots. “He’s not exactly your biggest fan, by the way.”

  “That road runs both ways.” Her brother-in-law perched on the corner of her desk and lovingly eyed his doughnut. “What’d he say about me?”

  “Not much,” she said, lining up the boots neatly beside the coat rack. “Unless you consider being called a hippie-dippie freak to be much. Oh, and he also said you’re a waste of air space. What the hell is that all about?”

  “I don’t really know. All I can say is there’s no love lost between us. And he fawns over Casey like she’s the Queen of England. Why she lets him get away with it, I don’t know.”

  “Maybe he’s jealous.”

  Her brother-in-law raised his eyebrows. “He’s her first cousin, and if you’re implying what I think you are, that’s sick and twisted.”

  “I rest my case. And my sister needs to pull that stick out of her ass and stop being so damn polite to everyone. I don’t have time to be polite. I threatened to run over him the next time I see him.”

  He grinned. “You,” he said around a mouthful of doughnut, “are like the dark side of my wife. The yin to her yang.”

  She sniffed. “What’s Teddy doing hanging around the station, anyway? As an officer of the law, isn’t he supposed to be out on the street, solving crime?”

  “Not much crime to be solved here in this rural paradise.”

  “Then maybe he should move somewhere else to fight it. Some place far, far away. Miami’s a hotbed of illegal activity. On the other hand, that’s still too close for comfort. Maybe Los Angeles.” She smiled darkly. “Or Hong Kong.”

  “So I suppose this wouldn’t be the best time to say welcome home.”