“I heard about that. When he’s feeling better, bring him to town so people can meet him. I bet Miss Doris would bake something special for him.”
Oh, yes, she definitely had a headache. When Morgan was feeling better, he wouldn’t look so sick. That stood to reason, didn’t it? What would people see when they met him? Would they see what she saw, a man who chose to live his life on the razor’s edge of danger, a man who could and had killed in a number of ways? Perhaps it was because she knew he’d been shot, knew—vaguely—what he did for a living, but to her it was evident in the sharpness of his gaze, in the way he moved, the intense alertness about him even when he was doing nothing more dangerous than watching TV. Who would be so oblivious that they’d look at him and think he was nothing out of the ordinary?
Now Mayor Buddy was wanting to enfold Morgan in the town’s embrace, which to her was a little like putting a tiger in a petting zoo. And Miss Doris would bake the tiger a special cupcake.
God in heaven. She couldn’t keep Morgan secluded, or everyone would die of curiosity and she could just see a regular parade of visitors to her house on a pilgrimage to see the man she kept hidden there. Small towners were both nosy and brazen; they wouldn’t care if their excuses were flimsy as long as their goal was accomplished. Sooner or later—probably sooner—she would have to bring Morgan to town. What better way to spike Warren Gooding’s charges than to let people see for themselves what shape Morgan was in? Sooner would definitely be better, while he still looked sickly.
When she got home, Morgan was outside on the porch again, his chair in the sunshine. The late afternoon was feeling cool to her, but he didn’t have a jacket on over his tee shirt. Her laptop was open in his lap, and he was tapping at the track pad. Tricks woofed happily as soon as she saw him, and when Bo released her from her safety harness, she bounded out of the Jeep and raced to him, her tail wagging madly, her whole body wiggling in delight.
He stopped what he was doing to scratch her ears with both hands and ask how her day had gone. After a minute of that Tricks abandoned him to do some investigative sniffing. “Hi,” he said, glancing at Bo, and went back to the laptop.
Two seconds later he muttered, “Shit!” and closed the laptop.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, going to stand beside him while she kept an eye on Tricks.
“I saved seven of the little fuckers, you’d think that would count for something,” he growled. He shoved his hand restlessly through his hair. “Sorry. That slipped out.”
She had to laugh. Dragging another chair around, she sat and stretched out her legs. “Playing Pet Rescue, huh?”
“For about three hours now. I run out of lives, I play something else until I have more lives.” He slanted a look of blue fire at her. “No offense, but I’m going crazy with boredom. I’m not good at doing nothing.”
“None taken. I’d be bored too.” Privately she thought the timing couldn’t have worked out any better. “If you feel up to it, want to go to work with me tomorrow? I can’t guarantee sitting in the police station will be any more interesting than playing Pet Rescue, but it’ll be a change of scenery.”
“God, yes.”
“Things got a little interesting today.” She told him about Warren Gooding’s visit, and the standoff with Loretta, which elicited one of those rusty-sounding laughs from him. “Evidently people are already curious about you, so you can expect a steady parade of people coming by to look you over. But Mayor Buddy also said Miss Doris would probably bake something special for you, so I’d say it’ll be worth being stared at.”
“Hasn’t anyone in your town ever seen a stranger before?” he muttered.
“It’s a small town. Being nosy is required.” She smiled as she tilted her face toward the sun. The down time was . . . relaxing. It was oddly companionable, sitting here with him in the late afternoon, chatting while she watched Tricks. She never would have described him as companionable, but there it was.
“How did you end up here? This isn’t exactly on the beaten path.”
“Hubris,” she replied. The story wasn’t a pretty one, but what the hell, she wasn’t ashamed of it. She’d made some mistakes, and she’d worked hard and dug her way out of a hole. “I teamed up with a friend in California and flipped a house. It seemed like a fun thing to do, real estate was booming, and we each cleared about thirty thousand profit from it. In hindsight, that was the worst thing that could have happened because I decided I liked flipping houses better than tech writing and could make a lot more money from it. My friend didn’t like the work so much, though she did like the money, so she opted out of going in with me on the next house. I made money on it too. I thought I was an expert. The people who bought it had a friend who hired me to convert an old barn where he grew up, and here I am.”
“Weaseled out on you, huh?”
She appreciated his quick comprehension. “It got so I couldn’t get in touch with him very easily, and whenever I did he’d tell me to keep going, and he made the decisions on lighting fixtures, flooring, high-end kitchen appliances. To keep construction flowing, I used my money, and when that got low, I switched to my credit cards. Dumb. Real estate was tanking, big time. The barn was almost finished when he told me he couldn’t get financing, and on top of being stupid enough to use my own money, I hadn’t gotten a signed contract from him. He walked away clear, and I had a barn to live in and a mountain of debt.”