Read Online Never Love a Lawman by Jo Goodman - Free Book Online Page B

kitchen—or anywhere else.”
    It was a firm dismissal. Wyatt considered his options and decided that ignoring her wishes was not the better course. He made a halfhearted attempt to see if he could turn her by pointing at the ceiling. She didn’t bite. Her dark eyes remained unwavering on his. The remnants of eggshell, albumen, and yolk would be there for a while, he supposed.
    His chair scraped the floor as he pushed away from the table. He swept his napkin off his lap and dropped it on the seat of his chair when he stood. “I’m sorry about your loss, Miss Bailey, but you should know you won’t be the only person in Reidsville grieving the passing of Clinton Maddox.” He saw her eyes widen marginally, so he knew she’d heard him; then he nodded once in her direction and showed himself out the same way he came in.
    Rachel resisted the urge to go to the window after she heard the back door close. With the lamplight behind her, he would have only had to glance up to see that she was watching him. She had to trust that he was leaving. The thought of him lingering nearby made her more uncomfortable than entertaining him in her kitchen. She didn’t need him to know that.
    She collected the items remaining on the table. Before she wiped it off, she used one of the chairs to comfortably and safely reach the tabletop; then she applied herself to removing every vestige of the morning egg mishap from the ceiling. If Wyatt Cooper thought she was going to supply him with an excuse to wriggle his way back into her house, he was mistaken. The mealworm.
    That image, which had curdled her stomach when she’d applied it to herself, had the opposite effect when she used it to describe him. This time, she smiled. The fact that it was a wildly inappropriate comparison appealed to her. It wasn’t as easy to know what he would think of it.
    Rachel could admit that she found him surprising in that regard. She hadn’t anticipated his rather sly sense of humor or the lengths he’d go to make his point. He could be self-deprecating as well, when it served him. He impressed her now as the kind of man who saw advantage in taking a few steps back to gain a better view of the end game.
    He was a chess player.
    Rachel’s legs were a little wobbly when she climbed down from the table. She realized that Wyatt Cooper was likely the source of his deputy’s earlier observation about checkers, chess, and Abe Dishman’s proposals. The lingering doubts she still harbored about the contract he’d signed vanished. Little that she’d done seemed to have escaped his notice.
    “You never breathed a word about that, Clinton Maddox. Canny old bastard.” In her mind’s eye, she imagined him smiling. Like Reidsville’s sheriff, he knew how to turn an epithet into a compliment.
     
    Rachel slept fitfully. Once she woke to discover she’d been crying. It didn’t seem possible she could have tears left, not when she’d begun mourning Clinton Maddox’s passing fifteen months earlier. His insistence that she could have no contact with him meant that for all intents and purposes he was dead to her, if not dead in fact. Only when she wanted to punish herself did she seek out any information about him, and it was hard to know if it was more blessing than curse that there was so precious little news to be had.
    Clinton Maddox had outlived her expectations and his own. Neither of them gave him as long as fifteen months once she left. He must have played the game like a master to hold on so long. She regretted that she couldn’t have seen it for herself, but that had always been their conundrum. If she’d stayed he couldn’t have maneuvered his pieces nearly so well.
    He’d been correct. Sacrificing her was the right strategy.
    Turning on her side, Rachel saw a needle’s width of light slipping between the curtains. It wasn’t dawn, just the precursor to it, when the margin of the ink-blue sky began to fade in narrow increments.
    She knew a certain