“It’s okay,” he murmured. His fingers stroked the side of her neck…his warm palm massaged its base. “It’s okay. How ’bout if I go in and get you a sandwich? If you promise you won’t run off while I’m gone.” She could hear the ironic smile in his voice and gave a small answering spurt of hopeless laughter.

“Where would I go?” She shook her head and huffed in a shallow breath. “Thanks, but…I’m not really hungry. If you could just take me home…”

“I can do that-if you’re sure.” She could feel his eyes searching her face. She nodded, and felt the warmth and weight of his hand leave her neck as he turned and reached for the key.

She told herself she was relieved, and she was. Oh, she was. But then why, somewhere deep inside, did she feel a sharp bright tug of pain, as if something she’d become attached to had been roughly ripped away?

He drove her home in frowning silence, one hand clamped across the lower part of his face, the other tapping a restless cadence on the steering wheel, while Mary tried to watch him without letting him know, wondering what he might be thinking that had darkened his thoughts so. Wondering how it was that she should feel his silence as a kind of abandonment, and why she should feel this loneliness so acutely when she’d been accustomed to loneliness for years. Was it the contrast, perhaps, between this withdrawal and the unexpected intimacy they’d shared a few minutes ago? And who was this foolish stranger inside her recklessly crying, Yes-yes, I want more of that! Please, oh please…touch me again!

Seductive and dangerous thoughts…and she would put them out of her mind for good. She would.

But when the SUV drew to a gentle stop in front of Queenie’s small clapboard house, she didn’t get out right away, but sat with her hands clenched in her lap, staring up at the lighted front porch…at the lilac bush where Jason had crouched in ambush that night…

“Would you like me to come in with you for a minute?”

She almost laughed. Thankfully, she found the self-control to keep from it, and simply shook her head. If she laughed, how would she explain to him why? How could she tell him that, in her present vulnerable state, her greatest fear was that if she were alone with him she’d throw herself into his arms?

Instead, still gazing out of the window, she said softly, “What’s going to happen now? Do I just…go on about my life-as much as the news media will let me-as if nothing’s happened?”

She heard an exhalation…a small throat-clearing sound. “Well, the wheels of justice don’t grind quite as slowly here in Hartsville as they do in the big city, but it’s still apt to be a while before this comes to trial. Luckily for us, the media people have short attention spans. Most of ’em have already cleared out-except for the diehard paparazzi, maybe.” There was a pause, and a smile came back into his voice. “Guess it’s a good thing you have me to drive you back and forth to work.”

She turned to look at him. “How long are you going to keep doing this? Until the trial?”

In the darkness she couldn’t see his eyes, but the quiet voice had a silvery edge. “As long as I need to, Miss Mary.”

She gave him a small bitter smile. “Thanks for the ride, Sheriff.” She opened the door and climbed out of the car.

His voice stopped her before she could slam the door shut. “We’re gonna be seeing quite a bit of each other in the next few weeks. Do you think maybe you could call me Roan?”

She hesitated, holding the door and gazing into the deepening dusk where a few of last year’s leaves, caught by the breeze, were swirling in the SUV’s headlights. Her throat tightened. “Isn’t that unusual, considering who we are to each other?”

From inside the SUV came a short huff of laughter, and then the rumbling drawl: “Miss Mary, not one thing about you and me is usual.”

The motor fired. Mary closed the door and stepped back from the car. Folding her arms around herself, she watched as it rolled slowly away.

It was Saturday morning, and Roan was having an altercation with Susie Grace. This had been happening with some regularity of late, and it was beginning to be a concern to him. His relationship with his daughter had been a source of comfort and joy to him up to now, and he didn’t like to see that change. At least, he acknowledged, not any sooner than it had to.

The bone of contention on this particular occasion had to do with Boyd planning on taking some steers to the sale, and Roan feeling a compelling need to keep an eye on his murder suspect, and Susie Grace not wanting to accompany either one.

At the moment she had both elbows planted on the breakfast table and an expression on her face of the type that would have prompted Roan’s mother to tell him he’d better hope his face didn’t freeze that way. She’d eaten the middle out of a piece of toast and stuck her finger through the hole and was twirling it like a lasso in the vicinity of her left ear.

“I’ll stay here by myself,” she announced, in the manner of a queen issuing a royal proclamation.

Roan blew on his coffee, sipped it, said, “No, you won’t,” and watched his beloved child morph instantly from monarch into whiny seven-year-old.

“Da-ad, why? I’m old enough, I can take care of myself.”

“No, you’re not,” said Roan.

Susie Grace hurled the piece of toast across the table, tumbled from her chair and ran out of the room, bellowing like a just-branded calf.

Roan sighed and set his coffee cup down on the table. “What am I doing wrong?” he asked Boyd, who was standing at the stove tending to the last of a batch of hotcakes.

With his back to him, Boyd said, “It ain’t what you’re doin’, it’s what you’re not doin’.”

“Which is?”

His father-in-law flipped another hotcake. “Spendin’ time with her. You ain’t been home much since the Holbrook kid got killed. She’s missin’ you, is all.”

Roan’s snort of protest was prompted more by guilt than disagreement. “Well, there’s not much I can do about that,” he muttered into his coffee cup. “I’m doing the best I can.”

Boyd scooped up the hotcakes and stacked them on a plate, turned off the gas burner, then looked over at Roan. “How long you gonna shadow that little ol’ gal from the beauty shop?”

“I guess until a jury finds her innocent or guilty.” Roan looked at his coffee with distaste and set the cup back on the table, though he knew good and well it wasn’t Boyd’s coffee that tasted so bitter in his mouth.

“You tellin’ me you really think she did it?” Boyd’s sharp eyes speared him, and he shifted irritably under their gaze.

“Didn’t you already ask me that?”

The older man shrugged and turned back to the stove. “Just wonderin’, since you been spendin’ so much time with her…” He gathered up frying pans and dropped them into the sink full of soapy water. “Thought by now you mighta got to know her a little better, mighta changed your mind.”

“Ah, hell, I don’t know.” Roan gave a gusty sigh as he pushed back from the table, got up and carried his breakfast plate and coffee cup to the sink. “Truth is-and this goes no further than this room, you understand-I am having a hard time believing the woman could be guilty of killing anybody. But if not her, dammit, then who? Everything I’ve got points to her, and there isn’t anybody else around here that had a good enough reason to kill Jason-not like that, like it was a personal grudge. An execution, even.”

Boyd nodded and went on scrubbing at a frying pan. Roan clapped him on the shoulder and said with a breeziness he didn’t feel, “Good thing it’s not up to me to decide. I’m gonna let a jury do that. Listen, good luck at the sale. Right now I think I’m gonna go have a little talk with my daughter. You might want to wish me luck on that, too.”

Boyd grunted. “Yeah, you think she’s hard to get along with now, just wait till she hits puberty.” He looked at Roan and pointed a soapy spatula at him. “What that kid needs is a mother. You know that, don’t you?”

Roan said, “Huh,” and walked away. But as he headed down the hall to his daughter’s bedroom, he felt like he’d been kicked by a mule. What that kid needs is a mother. Dammit, he knew that, and he didn’t know why those words had hit him so hard just now. It wasn’t like he hadn’t said it himself a time or two before.

Maybe because it had come from Boyd, father of the woman any new mother of Susie’s would have to replace? Or because the face that had sprung unbidden and unwanted into his mind when Boyd said it was that of a woman he’d recently arrested for first-degree murder.

Saturday promised to be a busy day for Mary. It was prom weekend, and she was booked solid from opening in the morning until the last possible moment before the big night. She’d scheduled herself more tightly than she normally would, too, right through lunch and without even a coffee break. Maybe it was because she hadn’t had a prom of her own, but she felt a responsibility to make sure every single girl went off to the dance feeling beautiful.

Who knew better than she did what it was like to feel beautiful…and what it was like not to?

And so, when Cat woke her earlier than usual-in his customary fashion, landing on her bed with a thump that shook the mattress, and then, vibrating the very air with his grinding purr, plodding the full length of her body to bump his head against her chin hard enough to make her see stars-she was more than happy for the opportunity to get a head start on the day. The sun was shining, the cold spell had passed, and she saw no reason why she should wait for Sheriff Harley to drive her to work when she could just as easily walk the half-dozen blocks and spend an extra hour getting things organized and prepped for the onslaught to come.