The Lawman Takes a Wife by Anne Avery

Author:Anne Avery
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin Enterprises
Published: 2013-10-15T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

The minutes and hours crept past with excruciating slowness. By a quarter to seven, Molly had changed her mind at least two dozen times.

She would walk out with DeWitt Gavin. She absolutely wouldn’t. She would, but she’d demand an explanation. She wouldn’t say a word. What was past, was past, and the man had obviously only been doing his job, and it was none of her business, anyway.

When his knock sounded on the back door, she almost sent Dickie to tell him she was indisposed, but making her son lie for her was stooping a little low.

“Sheriff Gavin.” She forced a smile. “You’re very prompt.”

“Ma’am.” He’d swept his hat off the instant the door had swung open, and now he held it, two-fisted, in front of him like a shield. He looked, she thought, exactly like a man who wished he were somewhere else entirely.

“Let me just get my jacket and hat,” she said, and remembered only after she’d shut the door in his face that she should have invited him in.

When she emerged five minutes later, DeWitt Gavin was halfway down the long, narrow yard at the back of her house, bent over smelling the roses that edged her vegetable garden. She watched as he delicately cupped a blowsy red blossom, then buried his nose in its heart, and wondered what part of him was the man who’d shot and killed two people.

Slowly, thoughtfully, she picked her way down the narrow, wooden back steps. At the sound of her footsteps on the path, he straightened.

“Haven’t seen such pretty roses in a long, long while.” Gently, he ran the tip of his finger across one scarlet petal, then another.

Heat washed through her. She could so easily imagine that finger tracing a path across her naked skin. “My husband brought them from Denver when we first settled here. He knew how much I loved my roses.”

“Can’t be easy, having a garden this high in the mountains.”

“It’s not. Nothing’s easy to grow here. Late frosts, early snows, cold nights. They all work against a gardener. Some things I don’t even bother with anymore. Corn hardly even gets high enough to tassel before the first freeze gets it.”

He glanced at the neat garden rows that marched down the length of her yard. “You seem to manage pretty well, in spite of it all.”

“I try.” Then, impulsively, “Do you have a pocketknife, sheriff?”

That brought his head up. “What?”

“A pocketknife. May I borrow it, please?” She shouldn’t do this. She really shouldn’t do this. But when, clearly bewildered, he handed her his bone-handled folding knife, she took it and neatly cut off a half-open bloom, then trimmed away the thorns.

“There you are,” she said, extending the rose. Because she couldn’t help it, she smiled. “You can keep it in your water glass at the jail. Add a little color to the place.”

When he continued to stare at it, she stepped forward and shoved the stem into the top buttonhole on his lapel, tugging it into place.

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