And if there was one thing she knew as certainly as she knew the sun would rise in the east and set in the west, it was that everyone had secrets. She had a few of her own. She just held hers closer to the vest than most people.

She raised the glass to her lips and her gaze was drawn to the end of the bar. A door in the back opened and a man stepped from the lit alley and into the dark hall.

Maddie knew him. Knew him before he walked from the shadows. Before the shadows slid up the wide chest and shoulders of his black T-shirt. Knew him before the light slipped across his chin and nose and shone in his hair as black as the night from which he’d come.

He moved behind the bar, wrapping a red bar apron around his hips and tying the strings above his fly. She’d never met him. Never been in the same room, but she knew he was thirty-five, a year older than herself. She knew he was six-two, one hundred and ninety pounds. For twelve years he’d served in the army, flying helicopters and raining Hellfire missiles. He’d been named after his father, Lochlyn Michael Hennessy, but he went by Mick. Like his father, he was an obscenely good-looking man. The kind of good-looking that turned heads, stopped hearts, and gave women bad thoughts. Thoughts of hot mouths and hands and tangled clothes. The whisper of warm breath against the arch of a woman’s throat and the touch of flesh in the backseat of a car.

Not that Maddie was susceptible to those thoughts.

He had an older sister, Meg, and he owned two bars in town, Mort’s and Hennessy’s. The latter had been in his family longer than he’d been alive. Hennessy’s, the bar where Maddie’s mother had worked. Where she’d met Loch Hennessy and where she’d died.

As if he felt her gaze, he glanced up from the strings of the apron. He stopped a few feet from Maddie and his eyes met hers. She choked on the gin that refused to go down her throat. From his driver’s license, she knew his eyes were blue, but they were more a deep turquoise. Like the Caribbean Sea, and seeing them looking back at her was a shock. She lowered her glass and raised a hand to her mouth.

The last strains of the honky-tonk song died out as he finished tying the strings, and he stepped closer until only a few feet of mahogany separated his gaze from hers. “You going to live?” His deep voice cut through the noise around them.

She swallowed and coughed one last time. “I believe so.”

“Hey, Mick,” the blonde on the next stool called out.

“Hey, Darla. How’re things?”

“Could be better.”

“Isn’t that always the case?” he said as he gazed at the woman. “Are you planning on behaving yourself?”

“You know me.” Darla laughed. “I always plan on it. Course, I can always be persuaded to misbehave.”

“You’re going to keep your underwear on tonight, though. Right?” he asked with a lift of one dark brow.

“You never can tell about me.” She leaned forward. “You never know what I might do. Sometimes I’m crazy.”

Just sometimes? Buying her own birthday card for her boyfriend to sign suggested a passive/ aggressive disorder that bordered on crazy as hell.

“Just keep your panties on so I don’t have to toss you out on your bare butt again.”

Again? Meaning it had happened before? Maddie took a drink and slid her gaze to Darla’s considerable behind squeezed into a pair of Wranglers.

“I just bet you all would love to see that!” Darla said with a toss of her hair.

For the second time that night, Maddie choked on her drink.

Mick’s deep chuckle drew Maddie’s attention to the amusement shining through his startling blue eyes. “Honey, do you need some water?” he asked.

She shook her head and cleared her throat.

“That drink too strong for you?”

“No. It’s fine.” She coughed one last time and set her glass on the bar. “I just got a horrifying visual.”

The corners of his lips turned up into a knowing smile that made two dents in his tan cheeks. “I haven’t seen you in here before. You just passing through?”

She forced the image of Darla’s big bare butt from her head and her mind back on the reason she was in Mort’s. She’d expected to dislike Mick Hennessy on sight. She didn’t. “No. I bought a house out on Red Squirrel Road.”

“Nice area. Are you on the lake?”

“Yes.” She wondered if Mick had inherited his father’s charm along with his looks. From what Maddie had been able to gather, Loch Hennessy had charmed women into the sack with little more than a look in their direction. He’d certainly charmed her mother.

“Are you here for the summer, then?”

“Yes.”

He tilted his head to one side and studied her face. His gaze slid from her eyes to her mouth and lingered for several heartbeats before he looked back up. “What’s your name, brown eyes?”

“Maddie,” she answered, holding a breath as she waited for him to connect her with the past. His past.

“Just Maddie?”

“Dupree,” she answered, using her pen name.

Someone down the bar called his name and he glanced away for a moment before returning his attention to her. He gave her an easy smile. One that brought out those dimples of his and softened his masculine face. He didn’t recognize her. “I’m Mick Hennessy.” The music started once more and he said, “Welcome to Truly. Maybe I’ll see you around.”

She watched him walk away without telling him the reason she was in town and why she was sitting in Mort’s. Now wasn’t the best time or place, but there was no “maybe” about it. He didn’t know it yet, but Mick Hennessy would be seeing a lot of her. Next time he might not be so welcoming.

The sounds and smells of the bar pressed in on her and she hung her purse over her shoulder. She slid from the stool and wove her way through the dimly lit crowd. At the door, she looked over her shoulder toward the bar and Mick. Beneath the lights above him, he tilted his head back a little and smiled. She paused and her grasp on the handle tightened as he turned and poured a beer from a row of spigots.

While she stood there, the juke playing something about whiskey for men and beer for horses, her gaze took in his dark hair at the back of his neck and his wide shoulders in his black T-shirt. He turned and placed a glass on the bar. As she watched him, he laughed at something, and until that moment Maddie hadn’t known what she’d expected of Mick Hennessy, but whatever it had been, this living, breathing man who laughed and smiled hadn’t been it.

Through the dark bar and cigarette haze, his gaze landed on her. She could almost feel it reach across the room and touch her, which she knew was pure illusion. She stood in the darkened entrance and it would be near impossible for him to distinguish her from the crowd. She opened the door and stepped outside into the cool evening air. While she’d been in Mort’s, night had descended on Truly like a heavy black curtain, the only relief a few lit business signs and the occasional streetlamp.

Her black Mercedes was parked across the street in front of Tina’s Mountain Skivvies and the Rock Hound Art Gallery. She waited for a yellow Hummer to pass before she stepped from the curb and walked from beneath the glow of Mort’s neon sign.

A keyless transponder in her purse unlocked the driver’s-side door as she approached, and she opened it and slid inside the cool leather interior. Normally, she wasn’t materialistic. She didn’t care about clothes or shoes. Since no one ever saw her underwear these days, she didn’t care if her bra matched her panties and she didn’t own expensive jewelry. Before purchasing the Mercedes two months ago, Maddie had put over two hundred thousand miles on her Nissan Sentra. She’d needed a new vehicle and had been looking at a Volvo SUV when she’d turned around and locked eyes on the black S600 sedan. The showroom lights had been shining down on the car like a signal from God, and she could have sworn she heard angels singing hallelujahs like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Who was she to ignore a message from the Lord? A few hours after walking into the dealership, she’d driven the car out of the showroom and into the garage of her home down in Boise.

She pressed the start button on the shifter and hit the lights. The CD in her stereo system filled the Mercedes with Warren Zevon’s Excitable Boy. She pulled away from the curb and flipped a U in the middle of Main Street. There was something brilliant and disturbing about Warren Zevon’s lyrics. A little like looking into the mind of someone who stood at the line between crazy and sane and occasionally pushed one toe over. Toying with the line, testing it, then pulling back just before getting sucked into looneyville. In Maddie’s line of work, there weren’t many who pulled back in time.

The Mercedes’ headlights cut through the inky night as she turned left at the only traffic signal in town. The very first car she’d ever owned had been a Volkswagen Rabbit, so battered the seats had been held together with duct tape. She’d come a long way since then. A long way from the Roundup Trailer Court where she’d lived with her mother, and the cramped little house in Boise where she’d been raised by her great-aunt Martha.

Until the day of her retirement, Martha had worked the front counter at Rexall Drug, and they’d lived off her small paycheck and Maddie’s Social Security checks. Money had always been tight, but Martha kept half a dozen cats at any given time. The house had always smelled like Friskies and litter boxes. To this day, Maddie hated cats. Well, maybe not her good friend Lucy’s cat, Mr. Snookums. Snookie was cool. For a cat.

She drove for a mile around the east side of the lake before turning into her driveway lined with thick towering pines and pulling to stop in front of the two-story home she’d bought a few months ago. She didn’t know how long she’d keep the house. One year. Three. Five. She’d bought rather than leased for the investment. Property around Truly was hot, and when or if she sold the place, she stood to make a nice profit.