A Weaver Beginning Read online

  All he’d done was touch her shoulder and she wanted to shiver. “You went to more than one school while you were in kindergarten?” She’d known the same kids from kindergarten right through high-school graduation.

  He turned on the hot water and ran the perfectly clean plate under it. “Three.” His voice sounded short, and he didn’t look at her as he set the plate in the sink and turned toward Dillon.

  Abby’s breath came a little easier with his focus no longer on her. She poured olive oil into a pot and set it on the stove. Breathing might have been easier, but the man still occupied the kitchen with her, and the room had never felt smaller.

  He picked up one of the papers spread across the counter, glanced at it and set it back down. “What’re you going to draw for the contest at school, champ?”

  “I dunno.”

  Abby hesitated, ready to jump in, but Sloan leaned on the counter until he was down at Dillon’s height. “Figured you’d already have a lock on it.”

  Dillon didn’t even look at Abby. “Really?”

  “Sure,” Sloan said easily, as if he’d dealt with insecure, wishful children every day. “You made that badge for Frosty and it was great.”

  She slowly scraped her diced onions and celery into the pot, holding her breath as she listened. Dillon’s attitude toward the contest was considerably more positive with Sloan than it had been with her, and she didn’t want to mess with progress.

  “But I gotta draw more ’n a badge,” her little brother was saying.

  No mention whatsoever about Calvin Pierce and his weenie theory. She chewed the inside of her lip to keep a smile from forming.

  “Says who?” Sloan challenged lightly. “You heard what Sheriff Scalise said, didn’t you? If a badge means doing the right thing to you, then draw a badge.” He lowered his voice a notch. “You think Abby has any more of those chocolate cookies hanging around?”

  “Yup!” Dillon hopped off his chair again and dashed around the counter, dragging down the plastic container holding the cookies. “Deputy McCray says I can draw a badge for the contest,” he told her in a loud whisper.

  “I heard,” she whispered back. It was almost impossible to keep from glancing at Sloan, but she managed.

  While Dillon set the cookies on the counter and flipped off the lid, she reached in the cabinet and pulled out a squat crystal glass. She filled it with milk and set it in front of Sloan.

  “Thanks.” His long fingers slid around the glass.

  She returned to the stove and stirred the softly sizzling contents with a wooden spoon. It was a much safer occupation than imagining how his fingers would feel sliding over her.

  “Golly.” Dillon drew out the exclamation. “Abby never lets us use Grandma’s glasses.”

  “And you’re still not using Grandma’s glasses,” she said, sending him a wry smile. Dillon had an entire selection of plastic glasses patterned with dinosaurs. “One day, they’ll be yours, but only if they stay unbroken until then.”

  He wrinkled his nose. “I don’t want no fancy glasses. They’re for girls.”

  “Then someday you can give them to the girl you marry.”

  Looking even more horrified, he leaned over and made a loud retching sound.

  Sloan’s gaze caught hers, and she rolled her eyes. “Little boys,” she dismissed, as if that explained it all.

  “I’m not so ancient that I can’t remember being one myself.” His lips crooked and his gaze seemed to rove over her.

  She went breathless all over again, her hand tightening spasmodically around the spoon’s long handle. And when Sloan took a step closer, she froze altogether.

  “Good thing he doesn’t know all the things he has in store for him one day.” He lowered his voice a notch, and his breath whispered against her temple. “Kid would be taking cold showers in the middle of the night like I’ve been doing since you moved next door.”

  Her jaw loosened as she stared at him.

  Then the radio attached to his belt crackled noisily and she jumped. The spoon slid out of her fingers, falling into the pot.

  He looked from her face to the stove as he spoke into the radio, responding to the gibberish that she couldn’t begin to understand. In the span of seconds, he’d returned the radio to his belt. “Going to have to take a rain check on the spaghetti.” He reached around her to fish the spoon out of the pot and set it aside. “Better be careful.” His voice was low. “Don’t want to burn yourself.”

  Then he turned out of the kitchen, fist-bumping Dillon on the way to the door.

  She exhaled shakily.

  His warning came too late.

  She was already burning, and the cause of it had just walked out of her house.

  Chapter Six

  Sloan sat in the Pierces’ shabby living room with Lorraine after Max took Bobby away in handcuffs.

  There was no smell of fragrant cooking filling this house.

  He’d left that behind at Abby’s.

  In fact, it seemed to Sloan that he’d left behind everything warm and comfortable at Abby’s to spend the past four hours in a house that was cold and a helluva lot worse than uncomfortable.

  Even though he wanted to shake some sense into Lorraine, he didn’t. She was the victim here no matter what she claimed to the contrary. She was too thin. More ragged than any female her age should ever have to be.

  He remembered thinking the same thing about his mother when he was young. She hadn’t been an abused wife, but she damn sure hadn’t known what sort of life she’d be in for when she’d married Sloan’s dad.

  He blocked out the thoughts the way he always did and wished the counselor they’d called to come and talk with Lorraine would hurry up and get there.

  “Lorraine.” This was a close community. No point for Mr. and Mrs. when you were just as likely to sit next to the people you were serving and protecting at the local bar on Saturday night as in the church pew on Sunday morning. “You have more power than you think.” He sat forward on the threadbare chair, wishing to hell that he could convince her and knowing just as well that he probably never would.

  The Pierce home had been the first call he’d gone out on when he’d signed on with the sheriff’s department, and not a month had passed since when he hadn’t had to repeat the visit. Six months in Weaver. Six months of trying. Six months of failing.

  “You don’t have to keep taking this sort of thing from your husband,” he continued. “You’ll have support.”

  Lorraine looked away. Her arms were folded tightly across her thin chest. “Bobby takes care of me and Cal. And you and the sheriff got no right busting in here again just ’cause we got a couple of nosy neighbors.”

  He pinched the bridge of his nose. “The neighbors called because they were worried.” He gestured at what had once been the front picture window but was now covered over with the large sheet of plywood that he’d had put up to keep out the cold. “Somebody threw that kitchen chair out that window.” They’d found the chair stuck in a snowdrift glittering with broken glass. “It didn’t happen by itself. We’ve got probable cause, Lorraine. We don’t need for you to say Bobby’s a danger to you when we can see it for ourselves.”

  She angled her bony jaw and looked away. “I told you Calvin was the one who threw the chair. That’s why I sent him to his room.”

  Sloan grimaced. “Blaming it on your kid? That’s a new low, Lorraine.”

  She blinked a few times. But she didn’t recant.

  He rose, feeling hemmed in by the depressing aura that filled the room. He didn’t move too fast because moving at all seemed to make Lorraine even more nervous.

  He wanted to shake her. But mostly, he just wanted to protect her. Get her to protect herself and that boy of hers she seemed willing to throw under the bus to save her husband’s sorry hide. When he’d spoken with Calvin, the boy had been sullen and full of attitude. If he had tossed the chair through the window, he’d have bragged left and right about it. But Calvin had said
nothing.

  There was a small collection of photos in cheap picture frames hanging crookedly on the wall, and he studied them. No school pictures of Calvin. No family portraits. Just snapshots of Bobby, arm looped over the shoulders of one buddy or another. In all of them, the men were astride their Harleys. Like the Deuces, Bobby put more money into his ride than he did his home.

  He blocked the memories again, staring restlessly up the narrow staircase leading to the second floor, where Calvin had been banished to his room by his mother. The counselor was coming as much for the boy’s benefit as Lorraine’s.

  Again, Sloan wished that Dr. Templeton would hurry. When they’d called her, she’d been over in Braden dealing with an emergency there, but she’d promised to be there as soon as she could.

  “Bobby loves me, you know.”

  “Maybe he does, Lorraine—” a twisted version of it, in Sloan’s estimation “—but you shouldn’t have to go around being afraid in your own home of someone who loves you.”

  The doorbell rang then, and since he was close he answered the door himself and let in Dr. Templeton. She apologized for being so long as she unwound her knit scarf and peeled off her gloves. The doctor was about Sloan’s age, though she looked a lot younger, and if she felt the same stifling depressiveness inside the Pierce home that he did, she hid it well. She sat down next to Lorraine as if they were two girlfriends getting together to dish about their day.

  Sloan didn’t care what her approach was as long as it worked.

  With no official reason to remain, he left them to it and returned to the office, wrote up his report and headed back home.

  It was getting late, and golden light was shining from the front window of Abby’s house when he pulled into his driveway next door. If he went over and knocked on her door, he knew that she’d let him in. That her pretty eyes would be soft, and her lips would curve into a genuine smile.

  And they’d taste sweeter than anything he’d tasted in a long, long while.

  She was a lot more of a mother to Dillon than just a sister. Just as much a mother, in fact, as Lorraine was to Calvin. But there was no other comparison he could draw between them. Sloan, though, could have been looking at himself in those pictures on Lorraine’s wall.

  He’d helped take down the Deuces. He’d infiltrated them with the sole purpose of doing so. He’d befriended their leader, Johnny Diablo, until the man thought of him like a real brother. He’d prepped for his cover for more than a year then rode with them for more than three. And it had been another two after that before the case ever made it to court. Two years when he’d remained underground still, just to keep the Deuces from finding him.

  Nearly his entire adult life had been consumed by the deadly gang.

  But even now, after it was all said and done, Sloan wasn’t sure how much of himself he’d left behind with them.

  He sat there for a long while looking at the golden glow spreading over the front of Abby’s yard where the snowman stood sentry. He sat there until the still engine no longer ticked and the truck’s interior went cold.

  Then he climbed out, feeling stiff and older than his years, and went inside his own dark house.

  * * *

  “How’s life with Deputy Hottie?”

  Abby looked up from the first-aid supplies she was inventorying to see Dee Crowder strolling into her office. There was no point pretending she didn’t know who the teacher meant.

  Nor was there any point in pretending that Sloan hadn’t been avoiding her. It had been an entire week since he’d returned the cookie plate. A week since he’d implied that she’d been the cause of some sleepless nights for him.

  He did more than imply it.

  She ignored the voice inside her head and closed the metal supply cabinet. “I told you. We’re just neighbors.” She couldn’t even say they were neighbors who flirted. He may have made that comment, but he hadn’t so much as glanced toward their house during his comings and goings since then.

  She knew this because she’d spent a lot of her time surreptitiously watching for him.

  Dee set a foam cup on Abby’s desk. “Fresh coffee from the teacher’s lounge.” She leaned her hip on the corner of the desk. It was the middle of the afternoon, and she’d made a habit of stopping by Abby’s office during her prep period.

  Abby had quickly realized that Dee’s excuse for dropping by with coffee was just as much an excuse to smile and wave at the principal, whose office was next door to hers.

  The curly-haired teacher had it bad for Principal Gage but hid it behind impish smiles and a wolf whistle for any male beyond the age of consent.

  Abby pulled out her squeaky desk chair and sat down, gratefully taking a sip of the coffee. She grimaced, though, and looked up at Dee. “This is fresh?” The most she could say about it was that it was hot.

  “Made it myself.” Then Dee grinned. “Of course, the coffee maker in there probably hasn’t been cleaned in a decade. A bunch of us spinsters get together once a month for Friday-night poker. If you’re really just neighbors with Deputy McCray, then I guess you’re almost one of us. Tomorrow night at my place. Want to come?”

  “I would,” Abby said truthfully. “But I can’t leave Dillon.”

  “I can recommend a half-dozen sitters,” Dee coaxed.

  Abby didn’t doubt her. The other woman seemed to know every name in town. “I still wouldn’t want to leave him. He’s—” how could she describe her brother? “—still settling in here.” Dillon was the only one that Sloan didn’t seem to be avoiding. He’d done more than share the time of day with her little brother; he’d even helped Dillon make another snowman to keep Deputy Frosty company. But the second that Abby had gone out to join them, Sloan had made an excuse to leave.

  Dee looked thoughtful for a moment. “How ’bout if we meet at your place instead?” Then she grinned again. “Or is that too pushy of me?”

  It was, but Abby could only laugh. Dee’s good humor had that effect. And maybe with the distraction of a girls’ night—even a girls’ night in—Abby wouldn’t dwell so much on Sloan. “What time?”

  “Seven. You got a good table, or should we pack a few card tables and folding chairs?”

  “Chairs, I guess,” she started. “But what else—?”

  Dee waved her hand, hopping off the desk. “Nothing else. All the necessities will come to you.” She suddenly tugged a curl out of her face and hurried into the corridor. “Hi, there, Principal Gage,” she greeted.

  Abby sank her teeth into her lip, trying not to giggle.

  But really, was she any different than Dee? Dreaming about a man who didn’t seem to be all that interested after all?

  Joe barely looked at Dee and turned into Abby’s office instead. The serious look on his face ended any desire whatsoever that she had to giggle. “Ms. Marcum, would you mind coming into my office?”

  Alarm climbed up into her throat. She nodded and quickly stepped around her desk and followed him. Behind the man’s back, Dee caught her gaze, lifting her eyebrows, and Abby shrugged a little helplessly.

  “Call me,” the other woman mouthed.

  Abby nodded and turned into the school’s main office. Joe’s secretary, Viola Timms, was sitting at her desk. She looked thin-lipped and humorless, but since that was the way she always looked as she guarded the doorway to her boss’s office, Abby couldn’t take any clue from her. Feeling as if she’d done something wrong, and not knowing what, she passed by the older woman and went through the doorway.

  Then she stopped short.

  Dillon was sitting in the chair in front of Joe’s wide desk, hunched over and looking too small. “Dillon?” She hurried toward him and gasped when he turned to face her. He’d obviously been hit in the face. His nose and eye were swollen. She crouched next to him, lifting his chin with her fingers. “Who did this to you?”

  “Nobody,” Dillon mumbled. “Can’t we just go home now?”

  Abby gaped at her little brother. “Dillon!”r />
  Joe closed his office door and moved around to lean against the front of his desk. “Mr. Rasmussen found him in the boys’ room,” he told Abby. “Dillon.” His voice went a shade sterner. “I can tell your sister or you can.”

  More alarmed than ever, she squeezed Dillon’s cold hands. Rob Rasmussen was one of the sixth-grade teachers. “What happened, honey?” This was the hour that his class was supposed to be in chorus.

  Dillon flicked a gaze at the principal then ducked his chin again. “Was in a fight,” he said, almost inaudibly.

  Abby absorbed that. Dillon never acted out. In Braden, he’d been so introverted that she’d worried about him. Since coming to Weaver, though, he’d started to come out of his shell.

  Mostly with Sloan.

  “Who were you fighting with?”

  His lips clamped shut, and she looked up at Joe.

  “Calvin Pierce,” he provided.

  She looked back at her little brother. “Honey, if he’s picking on you, you need to tell me about it!”

  Joe stirred at that. “Dillon, I want you to go sit by Mrs. Timms’s desk and wait for your sister while we talk.”

  Without looking at her, Dillon slid off the chair and shuffled out of the office, dragging his coat and backpack behind him. Joe closed the door after him.

  “I don’t know what to say.” Abby felt bewildered and knew it sounded in her voice. “Dillon doesn’t like sitting at the same table with Calvin in class, but I had no idea it was this bad between them.”

  “Calvin is a challenge,” Joe said quietly. “I won’t deny that. But I’m not sure he was the one who started the fight. Not this time.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Mr. Rasmussen saw Dillon throw the first punch.”

  She stared. “I don’t believe it. That’s just not like him.”

  “And it is entirely like Calvin,” Joe agreed. “But it’s not like Rob to get the details wrong.” He gave her a regretful look. “Dillon won’t tell me what instigated the scuffle.”

  “Did Calvin?”

  His lips tightened a little. “Calvin actually claims he was the one who started it,” he allowed. But he still shook his head. “Forgive the expression, but he’s protecting his reputation as a hard-ass.”