that she’d been with him. The overwhelming pleasure he’d felt only minutes before had become incapacitating pain, the pain of knowing what she really thought of him. She said they’d talk tomorrow. Why? So she could tell him if he happened to pass her on the street, he’d better act as if they didn’t know each other? In that moment, he locked down his heart with yet one more layer of steel around it, so tightly nobody could ever get inside again.
Then, as he started to leave the hayloft, he looked down to see something glinting in the dim light. Leaning over, he picked up the diamond necklace he’d found for her, the one she’d dropped the moment he kissed her. He wondered why the sparkle of the diamond wavered as if he’d dipped it in water, only to realize he was looking at it through his own tears.
He left the necklace in the office where Shannon would find it. Then he packed up everything he owned in the world and blew out of town. The only person he told was Rita. She’d tried to stop him, but he was beyond listening. He had nowhere to go, but it didn’t matter. He didn’t care if he had to sleep in the street, as long as that street wasn’t in Rainbow Valley.
Now, eleven years later, Luke stood in the barn and looked up at that hayloft, feeling the pain of that night all over again. Back then he swore she would never know what had been going through his mind that night. How weak and pitiful he’d felt in the face of her rejection. How dumb he’d been to think it had meant something more to her.
Nothing had changed in that regard. No matter what happened between him and Shannon in the coming weeks, he’d make sure she never knew any of that. He’d spent his entire adult life getting past those kinds of feelings, the ones that told him he was just a few notches below the rest of the human race, and he’d be damned if he was going to stir them up all over again.
Chapter 11
On Monday morning, Russell went to the kitchen at his clinic to get a cup of coffee. Cynthia was grabbing a Diet Coke from the fridge, and Velma was washing her hands for the sixty-seventh time that day even though it was only nine o’clock. All weekend Russell had thought about how Luke was around Shannon every day and he wasn’t. He’d tried to stop obsessing about it, but it was a battle he was losing miserably.
Russell filled his mug with coffee. “I was at the shelter the other day,” he said nonchalantly. “While I was there, I met Luke Dawson, Shannon’s new caretaker.” He inserted a well-placed shrug of indifference. “He seems like a nice guy.”
Velma’s head swiveled around, her hands still dripping over the sink. “Nice guy? Luke Dawson?”
If either of them snapped at his bait, he’d expected it to be Cynthia. But Velma?
“So he’s not a nice guy?” Russell said.
“If you think he is, you obviously haven’t heard anything about him.”
“Well, I hear he does have a reputation…”
“He was one year ahead of my daughter in school,” Velma said, grabbing a paper towel and drying her hands. “One time he took shoe polish and painted curse words on the windows of the cars in the church parking lot on bingo night. The church parking lot.”
“Oh, my,” Cynthia said. “That’s terrible.” But for some reason there didn’t seem to be a lot of conviction in her voice.
“After that,” Velma went on, “I heard my daughter tell her best friend that Luke Dawson was all kinds of sin wrapped up in a smokin’ hot bod, and if he was going to hell, she might just skip heaven and go with him. I washed her mouth out with soap and grounded her for a month.”
Truth be told, Russell didn’t care about the cars and the shoe polish. It was the “smokin’ hot bod” thing he couldn’t get out of his mind.
“It was that father of his,” Velma said. “How could a boy raised by a man like Glenn Dawson turn out any other way?”
Velma tossed the paper towel into the trash and walked out of the room, her orthopedic shoes squeaking on the tile floor. Those might have been the most words she’d spoken in one stretch since she’d gone to work for him. What was it about Luke Dawson that drove even