Big Sky Mountain - By Linda Lael Miller Page 0,81

didn’t before, remember.”

“You do feel something for him, then,” Joslyn pointed out kindly, patting Kendra’s hand.

“I don’t know what I feel,” Kendra said. “Except that he scares me half to death.”

“Why?” Tara asked. Her tone was gentle.

“Once burned, twice shy, I guess,” Kendra answered. She glanced down at her watch, partly as a signal that she didn’t want to talk about Hutch anymore. “I’d better get back to the office,” she added, “before people decide I’ve gone out of business because I’m never there.”

Nobody argued. Both Tara and Joslyn rose to hug their friend goodbye.

Kendra called to Daisy and within minutes the two of them were on the road again.

When she reached the office and checked her voice mail, Kendra learned that three prospective new listings were in the works. She called back each of the people who’d decided to sell their property, arranging meetings for the afternoon, glad to be busy.

The first of the three was a modest ranch-style house with a big yard, a detached garage and plenty of space for flower beds and gardens. The owner, an aging widower named John Gerard, had decided to share a condo in Great Falls with his brother. The place had been impeccably maintained, but it needed some upgrading, too—it would make a good starter home for a young couple, with or without a family.

Kendra and Mr. Gerard agreed on an asking price and other details, and papers were signed.

The second property was commercial—a spooky old motel that would be difficult to sell, given the dilapidated state it was in, but Kendra liked challenges, so she took that listing on, too, mainly because it was in a good location, almost in the middle of town.

By the time she visited the third offering, a double-wide trailer in her grandmother’s old neighborhood, she was getting anxious. She had to be at the preschool by three o’clock to pick up Madison, that being the present arrangement, and she couldn’t be late.

The owner—in her distracted state Kendra hadn’t connected the dots—was Deputy Treat McQuillan. His face was still colorfully bruised from the set-to with Walker Parrish the other night at the Boot Scoot Tavern. By now the incident had assumed almost legendary proportions in and around Parable and she wondered, a little nervously, if Deputy McQuillan had followed through on his threat to press charges against Walker for assault.

In uniform, McQuillan was waiting on his add-on porch when Kendra pulled up in her car. She’d dropped Daisy off at home on her way over and, at the moment, she was glad. There was something about this man that made her feel slightly overprotective, of Madison and her dog.

“Hello,” she sang out pleasantly, a businesswoman through and through, leaving her purse in the car and unlatching the creaky wooden gate that opened onto the rather hardscrabble front yard. “I hope I haven’t kept you waiting.”

“Some things,” McQuillan drawled, letting his gaze drag over her in a way that was at once leisurely and sleazy, “are worth waiting for.”

Kendra felt profoundly uncomfortable and not just because her last encounter with this man, when he’d warned her about Hutch at the Butter Biscuit Café, still irritated her. Her grandmother’s old place was just two doors down, on the other side of the unpaved road, and the old sense of futility and sorrow settled over her as surely as if she’d stepped back in time and turned into her childhood self, abandoned and scared.

“You’re planning to move?” she asked sunnily, pretending this was business as usual. McQuillan was, after all, a sheriff’s deputy and, even if he had stepped over the line with Brylee over at the cowboy bar, there was no reason to paint him as a rapist on the prowl for his next victim.

“I’m not sure yet,” the deputy replied, keeping his eyes on her face now, instead of her breasts. “Maybe I’ll buy a patch of land and build a house, if I can get the right price for this double-wide.”

Kendra approached confidently, with her shoulders back and her spine straight. “I see,” she said. “What if it sells right away, though? Where would you live in the interim?”

He favored her with a slow grin that made her skin crawl a little and stepped down off the porch to put out a hand to her. “I haven’t thought that far ahead,” he admitted, gesturing toward the trailer behind him. “I’m just taking things as they come.” He glanced at his watch. “I’m on duty in a

readonlinefreenovel.com Copyright 2016 - 2024