Temptation is so close!

To protect her son, Mark, Ciara Malloy has moved to this rural area in Washington. The new beginning is off to a rocky start, however, when Mark gets too familiar with Gabe Tennert’s horses. It’s obvious their next-door neighbor prefers his solitude. Even so, he shows incredible patience with Mark. And when Gabe turns that intense gaze Ciara’s way…how can she resist such a good, sexy man?

But crossing the line between friends and something more is riskier than Ciara expects. As Gabe pushes for a commitment, she fears revealing the secret truths that could turn him away forever.

“You’re a good man, Gabe Tennert.”

Ciara met his gaze directly so he’d know how sincere her words were. “But that doesn’t mean you owe us anything. If you ever want to back off—”

She’d have sworn a hint of color touched his cheeks above the close-cropped beard. “I’ll tell you.” He nodded and started down the steps.

Before Ciara reached the kitchen, she heard the ripping sound of the first porch board being pulled up.

She wondered what Gabe would have done if she’d gone up on tiptoe and kissed his cheek. And whether his beard would be stiff and scratchy or more silky under her lips.

And, oh God, what would have happened if he’d turned his head at that precise moment, and her kiss fell on his lips instead?

She hadn’t felt this kind of honeyed warmth low in her belly in longer than she could remember.

It was foolish beyond words to let herself develop some kind of crush on her reclusive next-door neighbor, who would probably be appalled if he knew.

Dear Reader,

A friend of mine who was a school counselor said once, “There’s a leper in every classroom.” I knew immediately what she meant. There is always at least one child who is shunned, teased, even bullied. He may be overweight. She might come to school wearing dirty clothes and smelling because of her home situation. He could be hyperactive, she could be an easy victim because she cries instead of returning taunt for taunt. A girl may physically mature much earlier than the others, while boys are at risk if they mature too slowly. Any behavior that is even slightly “off” serves like a red cape to a bull. It’s a painful phenomenon that says much about human nature. Fortunately, many of the children who go along with the taunting grow into good people.

Many of the victims mature and learn to fit in—or find the niche in life where they can belong. As a fiercely protective mother myself, I’ve wondered what I would have done if one of my daughters had been that victim. Confronted with her helplessness to change the school dynamics, my heroine in More Than Neighbors decides to move far away from their previous school district, and to homeschool. She believes she can shield her son from all of life’s slings and arrows—which, of course, is impossible. Her new next-door neighbor is at the top of the list of people most unlikely to get involved in any way.

Fortunately, they’re both facing some big surprises! And, hey, who doesn’t love the gruff, quiet man suppressing a world of pain who is still incapable of being unkind? Trust me, Gabe’s a keeper!

Hope you enjoy getting to know this set of neighbors!

Janice Kay Johnson

More Than Neighbors

Janice Kay Johnson

www.millsandboon.co.uk

An author of more than eighty books for children and adults, USA TODAY bestselling author JANICE KAY JOHNSON is especially well-known for her Mills & Boon Superromance novels about love and family—about the way generations connect and the power our earliest experiences have on us throughout life. Her 2007 novel Snowbound won a RITA® Award from Romance Writers of America for Best Contemporary Series Romance. A former librarian, Janice raised two daughters in a small rural town north of Seattle, Washington. She loves to read and is an active volunteer and board member for Purrfect Pals, a no-kill cat shelter. Visit her online at janicekayjohnson.com.

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Introduction

Dear Reader

Title Page

About the Author

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Extract

Copyright

CHAPTER ONE

A FLASH OF movement over at the old Walker place caught Gabriel Tennert’s eye the moment he hopped out of the box truck he’d just backed up to the open doorway to his barn workshop.

He owned thirty acres himself, and the neighboring place was of similar size. The Walker house and land had been posted for sale a good three, four years now, with no taker. An occasional looker, that’s all. Gabe hadn’t minded Ephraim Walker as a neighbor, given that they’d spoken only when Gabe went over to check on the old man. Not being sociable, Gabe had been happy once Ephraim was gone to have the house sitting empty.

But, now that he was looking, he couldn’t miss the candy-apple-red van parked in front. Even squinting, though, he didn’t see a soul to go with the vehicle. Whoever had arrived in it must have gone in the house.

Lookers, he reassured himself. Or a new real-estate agent, checking out the property. One or the other came along now and again. Far as he knew, nobody ever made an offer. This small town north of Spokane, Washington, didn’t have much to draw newcomers. Once viable, farms like his and Ephraim Walker’s were good these days mainly for running a few head of cattle or keeping some horses, like he did. The hour drive to Spokane was fine for delivering finished cabinetry, but would be pushing it for a daily commute, and there weren’t many jobs in an almost entirely rural county. Winters were harsh in this northeast corner of the state, the landscape pretty but not spectacular enough to attract much in the way of tourism. The town of Goodwater had been deceptively named; the creek that curved around the town and along the back of his property was pretty enough, but dwindled to barely a rivulet by late summer.

Whoever those folks over at the Walker place were would go away like all the others had once they saw how run-down the old farmhouse was, he told himself.

Sure were here early in the morning, though.

Dismissing the unpleasant possibility of acquiring actual neighbors, Gabe went about loading the cabinets he would be installing in a handsome old house in Hillyard, once a town in its own right but now a neighborhood in Spokane. Gabe did a lot of work for homeowners in Hillyard and Corbin Park, both neighborhoods designated as historic. More in Corbin Park, although he’d seen an upswing in Hillyard, which was having a revival after years of deterioration. Because of the designation, homeowners of the handsome Victorian-era houses in both areas had to comply with some restrictions when they remodeled. Ready-made cabinetry wasn’t acceptable. His specialty was solid wood cabinetry built to 19th century quality. He could do a more modern look, but rarely chose to.

Once he was loaded and on his way, his day went smoothly. The remodeling contractor was on hand with a couple of his men to help with unloading and installation. Gabe had measured, cut and built to accommodate floors and walls subtly and not so subtly out of plumb, no surprise in an old lady that had passed her one hundred and thirtieth birthday. He approved the dark gray granite countertops. Although not historically proper, they would look fine with the richly stained cherry cabinets.

After gently running his hand along the satin surface of a tall pantry door, he left, feeling his usual mix of satisfaction and something like grief at letting go of his work. He’d started with raw wood, measurements, some ideas from the homeowner and his own conception, and then he’d put one hell of a lot of hours into those particular cabinets. Unless the house was featured in a magazine, he’d likely never see them again. He thought he was entitled to some goodbye pangs.

He stopped for a burger and fries in Mead before driving the rest of the way home. He was nodding along to Darius Rucker playing on a country station, his headlights picking out the narrow two-lane road ahead, when he came even with the Walker place and through the darkness saw something that shouldn’t be there. Lights.

His foot lifted from the gas, even tapped lightly on the brake. What the hell...?

But he knew. Somebody had moved in. New owners or renters, didn’t matter, not if their presence meant vehicles coming and going all hours, the possibility of loud music, kids yelling, dogs chasing his quarter horses. Goddamn it, his doorbell ringing with a friendly new neighbor standing on his not-so-welcome mat.

He shook his head, accelerated again and turned into his own long driveway a minute later. He had to get out to open the broad doors of the outbuilding he’d converted to a garage for the box truck, a horse trailer and his pickup. Soft nickers carried on the warm spring air, in case he’d forgotten he had hungry animals waiting for their oats. The welcome was enough to have him smiling as he unloaded his tools and hung them in their places in his workshop, then measured servings of a molasses-and-grain mix into two buckets that he carried to the open lean-to, where the mangers and water trough were.

His gelding and mare might have been looking forward to their evening treat, but they took the time to say hello with nudges and whuffles before plunging their noses into the buckets and crunching with enthusiasm. The air was redolent with hay, horse and manure. In another month, the lilacs around the house would come in bloom, adding their sweetness. After telling his horses what fine animals they were, Gabe leaned back against the fence and enjoyed the quiet of the night. He pondered the reality of new neighbors, but thought the absence of any racket coming from next door was a good sign. The evening was early enough; a herd of kids would surely be making some noise, wouldn’t they? Or teenagers would have cranked up their music. Maybe a young couple had rented the place and would move on when the solitude got to them. Hell, maybe Ephraim’s son and his wife, who had to be in their sixties if not seventies, had decided to sell their house in Seattle and move into Dad’s.

He felt his mouth curve at the unlikely thought. Ephraim’s son, whose name Gabe couldn’t recall, had spent years trying to persuade his father to move to assisted living on the west side of the mountains and cursed him for a stubborn old fool for refusing.

It did cross Gabe’s mind as he let himself into his house to wonder when he’d gotten so set in his own ways. He was closing in on forty, sure, but late thirties wasn’t middle-aged, was it? Yet here he’d become as staid in his habits as old Ephraim himself. He didn’t let the thought linger, though, because he knew to the day when it had happened. When in a searing minute he’d been left alone and known he’d never try to replace what he’d lost.

If the new people tried to intrude... Well, he’d have no trouble setting them straight. He knew what signals to give to hold people at a comfortable distance. He could be pleasant and still be read just fine.

He took a beer from the refrigerator and decided he wouldn’t waste any worry on problems that probably wouldn’t arise. Maybe he’d trailer Hoodoo up toward Calispell for a good ride come morning. He often took a few hours off work after finishing a major job.

Sleep came easily.

* * *

“MOM, I’M BORED.”

Ciara had been standing on tiptoes to set the empty case that had held her sewing machine on the shelf in the closet. Nudging it as far back as it would go, she sighed and turned to face her son, who was gazing at her expectantly. Lately she’d been disconcerted every time she looked at him. She swore he’d shot up three inches this year, and was now, at twelve years old and not far from his thirteenth birthday, lanky and several inches taller than she was.

“How can you be bored?” she asked. “You can’t possibly have put your own stuff away yet.”

He grimaced. “No, but that’s boring.”

She leveled a look at him. “You know how irritated you get when something isn’t where it belongs.”

“But nothing belongs anywhere yet,” he complained. “I don’t know where things should go.”

Hiding her exasperation, she escorted him to the bedroom he’d chosen and discovered that he’d barely begun to unpack. Apparently, it had been obvious to him that clothes did belong in dresser drawers, because most of what had been in his suitcase had made it that far. Otherwise, he’d opened boxes but not taken anything out. She should have realized he’d be paralyzed by so many decisions. He liked things to stay the same.

“We brought all your furniture,” she pointed out. The moving truck had arrived midmorning, as promised, and the movers had unloaded with astonishing haste. Furniture had all gone into the rooms she’d designated, but not necessarily in exactly the ideal spot. Maybe that was the problem for Mark. “Do you like where the bed is?”

He was strong enough to move his own furniture around, but dithered so much over where each piece went, an hour passed before he seemed to be satisfied. Then, of course, he was hungry.

Well, okay, she was, too. And really, what was the hurry? They could take their time unpacking. This move was their new start, and she wanted it to be a happy one.

As she dumped a can of soup into a saucepan on the stove, Mark gazed wistfully out the window toward the neighboring pasture. “I want to pet that horse. She’s real pretty.”

“What’s the rule?” Ciara pulled cold cuts out of the refrigerator. How did he know the horse was a she? Was it obvious even from a distance?

“I can’t go near the horse until the owner says it’s okay,” he repeated by rote. “But he can’t say it’s okay until we go talk to him.”

“Even then, I don’t want you to go into the pasture,” she said with a spurt of alarm. “You’ll have to wait until the horse comes to the fence.”

“Mo-om. Most horses are friendly.”

“They bite. They kick.”

He rolled his eyes, which she probably deserved. The truth was, she didn’t know anything about horses. The closest she’d come was to pat the neck of whatever pony Mark had been able to ride at the zoo or fair when he was much smaller. He was the one obsessed with animals in general and horses in particular. He read about them; he drew them; he talked about them. And now, a real, live specimen grazed in the pasture a bare stone’s throw away from his own house.

She eyed him suspiciously as she put together sandwiches, stirred the soup and poured it into bowls. Usually he was good at following the rules, as long as she made them specific enough. But the temptation this time...

“Sit down and eat,” she said.

He did as she asked, but paused between bites to inform her that horses liked carrots. “And sugar cubes. We could buy some, couldn’t we?”

She didn’t know if grocery stores stocked sugar cubes. They had never made an appearance on her list before.

Somehow or other, she’d have to work horses into the lesson plan. How, she couldn’t imagine. As had become her habit, she put off worrying about it to another day. Truthfully, she was apprehensive about the whole homeschooling deal. She’d graduated from high school what seemed like an awfully long time ago. Mark was particularly advanced in math, a subject she’d been weak in. Given his insistence on precision, that went with his personality.

She’d bought ready-made materials to meet state requirements for a seventh grader, though, so how hard could it be? And once the internet was hooked up, limitless resources would become available.

I can do this.

Her mantra usually calmed her. She had to do this, for Mark’s sake. The whole move was about Mark, reducing the stress that had had him coming home from school in tears half the time. She was still enraged when she thought about her last meeting with the middle-school principal, who had made it plain he thought Mark, the victim, was to blame for being bullied. If he’d respond differently to the little creeps who were taunting and beating him, they’d leave him alone, the principal had explained despite her mounting outrage.

She had risen to her feet and glared at him. “My son is kind, smart and gentle. And you’re saying he’s the one who should change? The boys who trip him, steal his lunch, rip up his schoolwork and beat him up, they’re just boys being boys?”

He’d stuttered and fumbled, but clearly the answer was yes. That was what he thought.

She had marched out, her mind made up in that instant. Not only would she homeschool, but she and Mark would move, too. Start over, where he wouldn’t already be pigeonholed. As it happened, she had been considering quitting her front counter job at a medical clinic and focusing full-time on a hobby that had somehow been transforming into a business.

Now was good.

It wouldn’t hurt to put more distance between Mark and his father, too. Mark’s constant disappointment at the excuses and cancellations could be moderated by the fact that regular weekends with his dad were clearly no longer possible, and obviously Jeff couldn’t come to sports games or any special happenings. Better than for Mark to be hammered by the knowledge that his dad didn’t want to see him.

She’d intended to give Mark a few days off before they started with the schoolwork—at the very least, she had to get her sewing room/studio unpacked before she could return to work. Orders for her custom pillows wouldn’t magically be filled unless she applied herself.

Reading and applying himself to worksheets and projects would keep Mark occupied so she could go back to work, though.

“We need to grocery shop,” she said. “We can stop at the neighbor’s going or coming, introduce ourselves and ask about the horse. Okay?”

“Yes!” her son said with satisfaction.

Once they had finished eating, she insisted he unpack at least one of his collections before they went anywhere.

If it hadn’t been for that blasted horse wandering so close to the property line, she’d have expected Mark to go for his rocks and minerals. He liked all the sciences, but especially biology and geology, including paleontology. He’d been excited about doing some fossil hunting in Eastern Washington. After a session on the internet, he’d informed her that trilobites could be found in Pend Oreille County a little to the north, fossil plants in Spokane County and graptolites—whatever those were—right here in Stevens County. Something else that could be worked into his science curriculum in the form of field trips. Ciara had been trying very hard not to let him guess how unenthusiastic she was about prowling dry, rocky ground or fresh road cuts in the hot sun. As excited as he was, he probably wouldn’t notice if she whined nonstop, though, or if they encountered a rattlesnake. Caught up in one of his interests, Mark tended to be oblivious to anything and everyone else.

Oh, God—were there rattlesnakes locally?

A number of Mark’s teachers had hinted that his intense focus was somehow abnormal, that he needed to learn to “moderate” his enthusiasms, to respond appropriately to his classmates rather than shutting them out or being astonished that they weren’t as captivated as he was by whatever currently interested him.

Gee, had it ever occurred to those teachers that his behavior meant he was exceptionally bright? And that those interests should be encouraged, not discouraged? Apparently not.

Her blood pressure rose just thinking about it. She found herself not folding fabrics as carefully as she should before piling them onto shelves.

New start. Who cared what those teachers had implied?

Once she felt calmer, she took a break to see how Mark was coming along, and found that he had chosen, big surprise, to get his animal figurines and books displayed rather than the rocks and minerals and his few precious fossils. The figurines had to be anatomically correct to join his collection, of course. He could and did pick any one up and talk endlessly about it. Only a few days ago, while he was carefully wrapping each before setting it in a box, he’d lectured her about what made an emu different from an ostrich.

Answer: emus were native to Australia, ostriches to Africa, the coloring was different, an ostrich was larger and faster. In fact, it was the world’s fastest two-legged animal, clocking in at forty miles an hour while emus trailed at only thirty miles an hour. And, he had added earnestly, just as he had the last time she heard the same lecture, ostriches only have two toes on each foot, while emus have three.

“Ostriches are the only members of the ratite family with two toes, Mom,” he had informed her, as if this was a fact that should make her shake her head in wonderment.

And yes, she already knew that kiwis, rheas and cassowaries also belonged to the family.

Ciara knew, God help her, a whole lot she wished she could forget.

And so what if he was fascinated by two-toed birds instead of who the current NBA leading scorer was? She couldn’t believe the mothers of most twelve-year-old boys shared their sons’ enthusiasms, whatever they were.

“Groceries,” she announced, after admiring the ranks of creatures displayed by species and family on the shelves of a tall bookcase.

“Yeah! But we can stop next door first, right?”

Ciara ruffled his hair. “Right.”

Which meant that, ten minutes later, she turned into the driveway just past the next mailbox on their rural road. Weirdly, it was paved, a blacktop smoother than the road. Hers, two dusty strips separated by a hillock of sturdy wild grasses, was more typical, from what she’d seen. This made for a nice change, though, and didn’t raise a plume of dust behind her Dodge Caravan.

She braked beside the farmhouse, which was in considerably better shape than the one she had just bought. Personally, Ciara thought it could be improved by a more imaginative use of color. Once she got around to having their house painted, it wouldn’t be white, that was for sure.

“We should ring the doorbell,” Mark said.

“It doesn’t look like anyone ever uses the front door,” Ciara said doubtfully.

“I’ll go ring it anyway.” Without waiting for an answer, he loped across the neatly mowed lawn and bounded onto the porch. A minute later, he came back. “No one is here.”

There weren’t any visible vehicles, it was true. The doors on both barns as well as a couple of outbuildings were closed.

“We’ll try again on our way home from town,” she suggested. “Maybe they’re at work.”

“Do you think they have kids?”

She glanced at him, trying to decide whether he sounded wary or hopeful. Given how much trouble he had making friends, she’d expect wary. She hadn’t said to him, Let’s move somewhere so isolated, you won’t have to interact with other kids your age at all, but that had been her goal. At least, until she could introduce him to others in a controlled way.

“No idea,” she said. “Mr. Garson didn’t say.” Mr. Garson was the Realtor she’d dealt with. She wished now she’d asked more about the nearest neighbors, but it was a little late. “Come on, let’s go do our shopping.”

Goodwater had a dusty charm and an old-fashioned Main Street with the type of independent businesses that had vanished from larger towns, including hardware, appliance and clothing stores, a pharmacy, a sporting-goods store with a large banner in the window promising Uniforms for All Local Teams and a special on soccer shoes. Ciara stole a look at Mark, who was gazing with interest at the sidewalks, stores and cafés. Would he like to play soccer? She couldn’t imagine. His feet had grown even faster than the rest of him. He literally tripped over them. Maybe something this fall...

The grocery store turned out to be adequate. More expensive than Ciara was used to, but that wasn’t unexpected. It might be smart to plan a trip every few weeks to stock up at a Costco or Sam’s Club or suchlike in Spokane. She could make an outing of it for both of them.

In the frozen-food aisle, a plump woman about Ciara’s age stopped her cart to smile at them. “You must be visitors. We don’t get many strangers here.”

“I just bought a house. I’m Ciara Malloy, and this is my son, Mark.”

“Hello, do you have a horse?” Mark asked.

The woman laughed. “No, but half the people hereabouts do. I’m Audrey Stevens. I live right in town. My husband is an attorney, if you come to need one.”

Ciara smiled. “Not yet, fortunately.”

“Do you have a dog?” Mark asked.

“Yes, a small one. Since our yard isn’t very big,” she explained, probably in response to his expression. Mark thought dogs ought to be large. He couldn’t understand why anyone had bred a perfectly good animal to be purse-size.

Since he tended to be literal, Ciara was pleasantly surprised that he’d held off reminding her that she’d promised they would get a dog as soon as they moved. After all, in his mind, the move had probably been complete the minute they drove up to the house last night.

“Which house did you buy?” the friendly woman asked, reclaiming her attention.

“It’s on acreage. We dealt with the former owner’s son. Um...something Walker. I think the owner was Ephraim Walker. The name stuck in my head.”

“So would Ephraim, if you’d known him. He was the original cranky old man. One of my husband’s best clients. Ephraim liked to sue people.”

Ciara chuckled at that, trying to imagine excuses to file a lawsuit. “He must have been popular.”

“Oh, he wasn’t so bad when he was younger,” Audrey said tolerantly. “Who wouldn’t get cranky if they lived into their nineties? I’ll bet the place needs work.”

“Yes. Can you recommend any local contractors?”

Audrey could. Seeing Mark’s restlessness, Ciara accepted Audrey’s phone number so that she could call later, when she had paper and a pen in hand. Maybe she could find someone to mow the pastures a couple of times a year, too. Or would anyone be interested in renting the pasture? Of course, it would be hard to keep Mark away from any four-footed creature who lived on their own property.

Pleased by the idea of making a friend, Ciara moved on, buying generously. As skinny as he was, her son had an enormous appetite.

They were no sooner in the car than Mark reminded her that they had to stop at the neighbor’s again. Wonderful.

They pulled into the black-topped driveway to find a pickup truck and horse trailer parked in front of the second barn.

Mark leaned forward. “Mom, look! There’s another horse!”

Ciara couldn’t have missed the fact that a man was backing a horse down the ramp. The one in the pasture was just plain brown; this one was a bright shade that was almost copper, with a lighter-colored mane and tail, two white ankles and, she saw as she got out, a white star on its nose.

“A chestnut,” Mark declared, having leaped out of the car faster than she could move. “And I’ll bet it’s a quarter horse. The other one is.”

Trust Mark to know the subtle difference between breeds, even though he’d probably never seen a quarter horse in real life.

“Mark,” she said sharply. “Wait.”

The horse’s hooves clomped on the pavement when he reached it. He shook his head, sending his mane flying, danced in place and trumpeted out a cry that made Ciara jump and brought an answering call from the pasture.

“Mo-om!” her son begged, all but dancing in place himself.

The man holding the rope barely glanced at them before turning his back and leading the horse around the side of the barn.

“Really friendly,” she mumbled.

“What?” Mark said.

“Nothing.”

“Can we go watch him turn his horse out to pasture?”

“No, we’ll wait here like the polite people we are.”

“But Mom—” he begged, expression anguished.

“No.”

It had to be five minutes before the man reappeared. He hadn’t bothered hurrying, that was for sure. He’d probably hoped they would go away if he took his time.

She felt a stir of something uncomfortable at the sight of him walking toward them, although she wasn’t sure why. He wasn’t incredibly handsome or anything like that. Nobody would look at him twice if he was standing next to her ex-husband, Ciara started to think. But as this man came closer, she changed her mind. If nothing else, he was...imposing.

Like the already-pastured horse, his hair was brown. Not sun-streaked, not dark, just brown. So was the close-cropped beard that made his face even more expressionless than it already was.

He was large, likely six foot two or even taller, and solidly built. Either he spent a lot of time in a gym, or he did something physical for a living. His stride was long and yet somehow collected, as if he controlled his every movement in a way most people couldn’t.

He was only a few feet away when he said, “May I help you?” in a deep, quiet voice that was civil while also sounding remote.

“That was a quarter horse, right?” Mark said eagerly. “I’ve read all about them in books. Why do you have quarter horses when you don’t have a ranch? They’re best for herding cattle, you know.”

To his credit, the man barely blinked. “I do know. In fact, both mine are trained for cutting.”

“Is that what you were doing today? Why don’t you keep some cows here to practice on?”

Was that a smile glinting in eyes that Ciara decided were gray? “The next-door neighbor—” he nodded to the north “—runs a herd and lets me, er, practice on his.” He held up a hand to stop her son’s next barrage of questions. “And today I went on a trail ride.”

“Oh. What I wanted to know is—”

Ciara cut him off. “That’s enough, Mark.” She met the neighbor’s eyes. “We stopped by to introduce ourselves. We bought the place next door.”

“I saw lights last night.” He didn’t sound thrilled.

“We arrived late yesterday. The moving truck came and went this morning.”

“I see.”

“My name is Ciara Malloy, and this is my son, Mark. He really likes horses and is hoping you won’t mind if he pets yours if and when they come to our fence line.”

She sensed more than heard a sigh. “That’s fine.”

“Do they bite?” she had to ask.

“Only if they think your fingers are carrots.”

Mark lit up. “Do they like carrots? I wanted Mom to buy sugar cubes ’cuz horses like them, but she didn’t. Maybe they’ll come to the fence if I give them something to eat.”

“An occasional treat is fine,” the man said. “And I do mean occasional. Sugar isn’t healthy in large quantities for horses. A carrot or two a day won’t hurt anything.”

“Cool!” Mark exclaimed.

“Do you know how to give a horse a treat so he doesn’t mistake your fingers for food?”

“I can just hold it out like that, can’t I?” Mark demonstrated.

Another near-soundless sigh. “No, you have to remember that horses can’t see your hand when you hold something out. If you have a minute—” he glanced at Ciara with his eyebrows raised “—I’ll give you a demonstration.”

“You mean I can pet them now?” Mark bounced like an excited puppy. “Mom, did you hear?”

“I heard. Yes, that’s fine.”

“Give me a minute.” The man disappeared into the barn briefly, reappearing with a fistful of carrots. Maybe he was nicer than he appeared; he’d obviously guessed that feeding one measly carrot wasn’t going to cut it for her son.

She trailed man and boy around the corner of the barn, seeing the fence ahead and a kind of lean-to with a big enameled bathtub filled with water and a wooden manger beside it. The horses currently stood side by side, both grinding hay in their mouths.

Mark raced forward. One of the horses swung away in apparent alarm, and the other threw up his head.

“Gently,” the neighbor said. “You have to be quiet and calm or you’ll scare them. Keep your voice down. Make your movements slow.”

“Oh. I can do that.” Mark tripped, fell forward and had to grab the fence to keep from going down. Both horses shied and ended up twenty feet away.

Their owner cast a look at Ciara in which she read understandable desperation. If he wasn’t used to kids—

“Gently,” he repeated.

“I’m sorry.” Mark quivered with passionate intensity. “They’ll still come to me, won’t they? So I can feed them?”

“Greed will overcome them,” the man said drily. He whistled and held up the carrots. As speedily as they’d departed, the horses returned.

Ciara stayed a few feet back, watching as Mark learned how to hold out a treat on the palm of his hand, where horses liked to be stroked and how and what they didn’t like. He laughed when their soft lips tickled his hand as they whisked pieces of carrot off it, and laughed again when one blew out a breath with slimy orange bits of carrot that got on his face. He asked what their names were and nodded solemnly at the answer: Hoodoo and Aurora. Both apparently had long, unintelligible names under which they were registered with the Quarter Horse Association, but they didn’t know them. The man had come up with Hoodoo; Aurora was used to that name when he’d bought her. He corrected Mark when he described Hoodoo as a chestnut; for some reason, that coloration was called sorrel when it came to quarter horses.

“Hoodoo is prettier than Aurora.” After a sidelong glance, Mark placed one foot on the bottom rail and his elbows on the top rail in exact imitation of the neighbor. “Do you think she minds?”

“I doubt horses think in terms of pretty. And Hoodoo is actually her son. I did have her bred the once.”

“Will you again? That would be amazing.” Her son swiveled enough to look over his shoulder. “Wouldn’t it be amazing, Mom?”

“I’m sure it would. Now, say thank you, Mark. We need to get those groceries home.”

“Do we have to?” His shoulders slumped when he saw her face. “Okay. Now they know me, I’ll bet they’ll come when they see me with a carrot.”

She mouthed the words “thank you” at Mark.

“Thank you, mister,” he said obediently. “You didn’t tell us what your name is, did you?”

“Didn’t I? That was rude. I’m Gabe Tennert.”

“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” Ciara said, holding out a hand.

He looked at it for longer than was polite before gently engulfing it in his much larger hand. The rough texture of his calluses sent a tingle through her and, she suspected, warmed her cheeks.

“Thank you for stopping by,” he said, leaving her in no doubt whatsoever that he wasn’t at all glad for their visit.

“We’re going to get a dog,” Mark told him as they walked back to the van. “Mom said we could as soon as we moved.”

“If you do, please make sure it’s one that won’t chase horses or cattle.” There was no flexibility whatsoever in that deep voice now.

That was reasonable, Ciara supposed.

Mark got in, and she circled to her side.

“Do you have other children?” Gabe Tennert asked.

She paused. Somehow, she didn’t think he was hoping she’d say yes. “No, only Mark.”

He nodded brusquely. “Good day.”

Before she had so much as gotten the key in the ignition, he had hopped into his pickup truck and began maneuvering to back the trailer into an empty slot inside one of the barns. He didn’t even glance their way as she turned in a circle and started down the driveway.

Ciara surprised herself by wondering whether he had a wife.

CHAPTER TWO

ALWAYS AN EARLY RISER, Gabe was outside forking hay into the manger when the school bus passed the next morning. Without thinking about it, he’d known it was coming; the brakes squealed at every stop, and the Ohlers a couple of properties past the old Walker place had two kids that rode the bus.

Now he turned, thoughtful, when the bus lumbered on past without stopping next door. Would have made sense, when Ms. Malloy and her boy were in town yesterday, for her to have registered him for school, wouldn’t it? Today was Wednesday, though; maybe she meant to give him the rest of the week to settle in before he started.

April was a funny time of year to move, when it meant pulling a kid out of school and him having to start in a new one at the tail end of the year, Gabe reflected. Usually people with kids tried to move during the summer. Maybe this was following a divorce?

He shook his head as he unlocked the big double doors and let himself into his workshop. Why was he bothering to wonder about the new neighbors? All he cared was that they stayed on their side of the property line.

He always had several projects going at various stages. Today he settled down immediately to measure and mark what would be the pins and tails of dovetail joints, these particular panels to be sides and backs of drawers. He almost never used any other kind of joint but dovetail for drawers, liking the solidity and elegant appearance. Although they could be cut with router and jig, he preferred to use traditional hand tools.

Securing a solid board of alder with a vise, he reached for a dovetail square and pencil. Despite the care required, long practice meant he was able to let his mind wander as he worked to mark where cuts would be made.

That boy—Mark—was an odd duck. The mother hadn’t said how old he was, but he had to be almost a teenager. Middle school, at a guess. What had he been? Five foot nine or ten, Gabe thought. Clumsy, but a lot of boys were at that age. Gabe’s mouth twitched. God knew he’d been a walking disaster for several years in there, when he was outgrowing pants and shirts so fast, his mother despaired. Sometimes he’d felt as if those gigantic feet had been transplanted onto his legs during the night. He had to stare at his feet when he was walking to make sure he was setting them down where they belonged. Unfortunately, that didn’t work when he wanted to run or climb a ladder or even race up the bleachers in the gymnasium.

It wasn’t the clumsiness that suggested the boy was a little off. And maybe Gabe was wrong—but he didn’t think so. Mark’s excitement was more like a younger kid’s than a near-teenager’s. The way his mother seemed to be coaching him, too, as if he were a kindergartener who hadn’t yet learned to say please or thank you.

Grudgingly, Gabe conceded the kid had been nice enough, though. And he had known a surprising amount about horses and the breed of quarter horse in particular for someone who obviously had done his learning from books or on the computer rather than real-life exposure. Was the mother thinking of buying a horse for her son? Gabe hoped she wouldn’t rush to do so without seeing that he get some lessons first. And making sure the enthusiasm wouldn’t wear out three months down the line.

He continued to work methodically, out of habit marking the “waste” sections—the parts he’d be cutting out and discarding—with Xs, then, finally, reached for a dovetail saw as his thoughts reverted to yesterday’s two visitors.

The mom had an unusual name. Ciara. Irish? Probably. She was exceptionally pretty, he had to admit. Eyes so blue, a man more susceptible than he might liken them to the sky just before twilight or the vivid gleam of sapphire. Hair darker and not quite as bright as Hoodoo’s sleek sorrel coat. Envisioning it, he thought, bubinga. Bubinga was an exotic hardwood he liked and used on occasion. Harvested in West Africa, it was a reddish-brown with fine, dark lines that created interesting patterns, as if the coloration was made up of distinct strands. Yeah, that was it, he thought, pleased with the comparison.

She had the complexion of a redhead even if her hair wasn’t quite the classic red or auburn. Creamy pale, with a scattering of freckles on her nose and cheeks. A pretty mouth—not too thin, not too plump. She was a couple inches shorter than her son, five foot six or so, at a guess, and willowy. Long legs and long fingers, too. Gabe wasn’t sure why he’d noticed that, but he had, when she laid her hand briefly on her son’s shoulder in a sort of gentle caution. Seeing her do that had sent an odd little shiver through him, as though—

He frowned, discovering that his own hands had gone still, and he was staring into space, his attention no longer split. Ciara Malloy had filled his head, and he didn’t like it.

—as though she’d been touching him. The sensation had been eerily real. Her hand could have been resting on him. He’d liked her touch.

Too long without a woman, he thought irritably, while knowing he wasn’t going to do anything about it. He missed sex—damn, but he missed it. The idea of bar pickups and one-night stands held no appeal, though, and his couple attempts since Ginny’s death at having an ongoing lover hadn’t ended so well. Maybe in the big city there were women who only wanted a casual lover, but here in Goodwater, anyone he hooked up with started envisioning diamond rings and moving in. Since he couldn’t imagine wanting that again, well, he’d decided he could survive living celibate, as long as he avoided temptation.

Which meant it would be safest all around if he had as little to do with these new neighbors as possible.

Comfortable with his conclusion, Gabe reached for the saw. No reason the pretty mom and boy would be interested in him. They’d make friends soon enough, and he’d be nothing but the reclusive man next door, whose horses they happened to see out their kitchen window.

There might be a whisper of sadness when he thought of himself that way, knowing he’d end up like Ephraim Walker, a man who, toward the end, had had to depend on the distant kindness of people who didn’t even much like him. And Ephraim, at least he’d had a son.

But Gabe knew himself well enough to be sure he didn’t want to risk again the kind of devastation he’d barely survived once. He let the brief sadness go and concentrated on something that did give him pleasure—the texture and smell of fine woods, the miracles his hard work and skill wrought from plain-looking beginnings.

He was like the most ordinary of boards, he decided, solid, reliable, but nothing astonishing likely to spring out at the touch of stain or linseed oil, and that was fine by him.

* * *

CIARA REACHED THE end of a seam and grabbed her small scissors to snip the threads. Without the whir of the machine going, the silence of the house struck her.

If Mark had finished the reading she’d assigned him, he was capable of concentrating by the hour on drawing or looking up something that interested him on the internet. Still...it was awfully quiet.

“Mark?”

No answer, which meant he wasn’t in his room. She left the pillow cover she was working on sitting in a small heap on her worktable and went to check Mark’s bedroom anyway. Empty. So neat, it belonged in a model home, but that was just Mark. One argument she’d never have to have with him was over cleaning his room.

She headed downstairs, calling his name but receiving no response. The social-studies book lay closed on the kitchen table, neatly aligned with the square corners of the table. The worksheet beside it appeared to be filled out. She flipped it over to be sure he really had finished. Yep. Ciara felt a twinge of worry that it had been way too easy for him. And boring. If she found some reading on local Indian tribes, or early white settlement in Eastern Washington, maybe that would be more gripping than standard stuff about the executive branch of the federal government. But he did have to learn the basic stuff, she reminded herself, and she had to be sure he’d pass end-of-the-grade-level tests, which meant sticking to the standard curriculum, didn’t it?

A worry for later. All she had to do right now was get him through the last couple months of the year. Then she could plan better for eighth grade.

There was no reason to be concerned because he’d gone outside. It was a nice day, and he was mostly sensible. She could guess just fine where he was. Those damn horses fascinated him, despite the fact that they were refusing to come to the fence no matter how he waved carrots at them or tried to whistle like their owner did.

But when she stepped out onto the porch, she saw them peacefully grazing down the slope toward their own barn, and no sign whatsoever of her son.

“Mark?” she called again.

She gave brief thought to returning to work. What kind of trouble could he get in? Even if he’d wandered as far as the road—and why would he?—no more than a vehicle or two an hour went by. More likely he’d wanted to explore the back section of their land, including the creek, which should be safe enough. Yesterday she’d looked up the distribution of rattlesnakes in Eastern Washington and been relieved to find they were rare to nonexistent in this upper corner of the state.

Ciara went back into the kitchen, grabbed a soda from the refrigerator and popped it open. Maybe she’d walk toward the creek herself, just to be sure. She’d feel better to definitely know that he hadn’t left their property.

* * *

“HI. ARE YOU BUSY?”

Gabe straightened from the bin of boards he’d been sorting through and saw Mark Malloy standing at the entrance to his timber store. This corner of the barn, walled off from the rest but for a wide doorway, held his supply of solid boards, veneers and smaller pieces of exotic woods. This space had a ceiling, unlike the rest of the barn with its high rafters and loft that hung over what had been stalls. A dehumidifier protected his stock of wood.

“This barn is my workshop,” he said. “Yes, I’m working.”

“You don’t look like you’re working.”

“I’m choosing some pieces of maple for a particular job.” He didn’t know why he was explaining, but did.

“Oh.” The boy came to his side and gazed into the bin. Right away, he asked why Gabe didn’t just grab a bunch of boards.

Gabe found himself explaining his criteria for this and other jobs, again without entirely understanding himself. He didn’t want to hurt the kid’s feelings, he told himself, but wasn’t sure that was exactly it.

Mark helped him carry half a dozen boards to his Felder saw.

“Your mom know where you are?”

“She was working.”

Lucky Mom.

“But she wouldn’t mind. She said I couldn’t go into the pasture, but she didn’t say I couldn’t visit you,” Mark confided with a winning smile.

“Shouldn’t you be in school?” Gabe asked, leaning one hip against a workbench. Or had school already let out? It occurred to him belatedly that Ciara might have driven her son today.

“I’m homeschooling.” The kid’s tone was odd, maybe stilted. “I went to school back where we used to live—you know, near Seattle—but Mom got mad at the school so she said she could be my teacher.”

Gabe knew he shouldn’t raise questions; all that would do was encourage the boy. But he was curious enough to risk it. “What grade are you in?”

“Seventh.”

“I see.” No, he didn’t. Did the mom want to give Mark an education steeped in religion? Or did she just not think it was fair for him to have to start at a new school so late in the year? “If you’re not going to school, you’ll have to find a way to make friends around here,” he commented. “It’s probably too late to sign up for Little League.”

Mark grimaced horribly. “I’m not very good at baseball.”

“Basketball? You’re tall for your age, aren’t you?”

“I guess, but I’m not very good at that, either. I hated PE.”

“You’ll grow into your feet,” Gabe said, nodding at them.

“How do you grow into feet?” Mark laughed nervously. “That sounds weird.”

“It’s a saying.” Gabe did some more explaining, this time about how bodies grow in fits and starts, and not always in a well-coordinated fashion. His own feet had reached their final size—a twelve—long before he’d attained his current height.

“Is that why baby horses—I mean, foals—look so different?”

“That’s right. They have to have long enough legs to reach their mother’s teats to nurse and to keep up with her when she runs. In the wild, they wouldn’t survive if they couldn’t run as fast as the herd. But it takes time for the rest of their bodies to mature so they’re in proportion.”

“Oh.” The boy shuffled his feet and hung his head. “I don’t think Hoodoo and Aurora like me. They won’t even take a carrot from me.”

Gabe knew why; he’d seen the kid a couple of times at the fence, jumping up and down and waving his arms and yelling to get the horses’ attention. God knows what kind of strange creature they thought he was, but it was unlikely to be a flattering conclusion on their parts.

“Did you remember what I said about staying quiet and moving slowly?”

His expression became mulish. “But if I just stand there, they ignore me!”

Smart horses. Gabe wished he could ignore the kid, too.

* * *

CIARA WENT OUT the kitchen door and made her way toward the creek that ran at the back of the property. In front, the land was all pasture, but sloping down behind the house was the beginning of a kind of open, dry woods that continued as far as she could see. The trees were evergreen, but there was no understory like there’d be in Western Washington, with ferns and salal and salmonberries, all encouraged by the generous rainfall. Instead there was thin grass and otherwise bare ground that she imagined would be really dusty once summer came.

Were there fish in the creek? She speculated about whether Mark would enjoy fishing. After a moment she made a face. She couldn’t picture him being willing to knock a wriggling trout he’d caught on the head to kill it. Or doing something as gruesome as cutting off the head. And Lord knows she didn’t want to do that part.

She ought to let him wander in peace. That was part of the beauty of owning a good-size piece of land, wasn’t it? If there was a raging river back here, that would be different, but he couldn’t drown in the creek, not unless he slipped, cracked his head on a rock and ended up unconscious and facedown in the water.

Her steps quickened. He did trip an awful lot. Still— Mostly, she just wanted him to let her know when he went outside and when he came back in the house. Plus, she didn’t know the dangers here. This was so different from any place she’d ever lived.

The day felt pleasantly like spring, blue sky arching overhead. Trees she thought might be cottonwoods clustered along the creek. Even so, it didn’t take her long to determine that Mark wasn’t here, either.

She cupped her hands and yelled, “Mark!”

There wasn’t any answer this time, either. Mild concern morphed into the beginnings of apprehension. She was running by the time she reached the house again. After bounding up the steps, she called his name one more time, but the same quiet met her. Damn it, where could he be?

Had somebody come by that she hadn’t heard? Would Mark have gone with anyone without having told her?

She grabbed her purse and car keys then raced back out. She’d go from neighbor’s to neighbor’s, driving slowly in between. She wouldn’t panic yet. A boy Mark’s age had no reason to feel a need to check in constantly with his mother. He wasn’t inconsiderate, exactly, but the idea of her worrying wouldn’t cross his mind.

Gabe Tennert’s first, she decided. Mark had been intrigued by him. Neither of them had yet met the people on the other side or the ones across the road. Although there were obviously some kids at the house a little ways down. Maybe—

She drove down her long driveway faster than she should have, dust pluming behind, turned right on the two-lane road then right without even signaling into Mr. Tennert’s driveway. As cool as he’d been, she was trying not to think of him as Gabe. That was too...friendly.

And friendly was the last emotion she’d feel if she found out he’d been letting Mark hang out without insisting her son call home first.

* * *

GABE KNEW MAD when he saw it, and there it was, vibrating in front of him, in the person of Ciara Malloy.

Mark didn’t seem to have noticed. “Mom! Look at all these cool tools Mr. Tennert has. And he’s like me. See? He has a place for everything, and he says he never quits work without putting every single tool away and cleaning up every scrap of wood and even sawdust.” He sounded pleased and awed. He hadn’t been as impressed by the huge band resaw or the pillar drill, grinder and sanding machines as he’d been by Gabe’s regimented ranks of clamps and the rolling chest with multiple drawers that held his tools, each placed as precisely in a slot designed just for it as a surgeon’s tools might be in the operating room.

“You disobeyed my direct order,” his mother said from between tight lips. She shot a fiery look at Gabe.

“I didn’t!” her son cried. “You said I couldn’t go in the pasture, and I didn’t.”

She stared at him. “If you didn’t cut through the pasture—”

“I went down the driveway and along the road. Didn’t you see my bike? Though it would be a lot faster if I could go through the pasture, Mom. Then I wouldn’t have to ride my bike on the road. The horses wouldn’t hurt me.” Momentary chagrin crossed his face. “They won’t even come near me.”

She planted her hands on her hips. “Okay, new rule. You need to tell me if you are going to leave our property. Always. No exceptions.”

“But Mom! You say I can’t interrupt you when you’re working. That’s already a rule.”

“Then you wait until I take a break.”

“But Mom—!” Even he seemed finally to notice she was steaming. “Are you mad?”

“I was scared when I couldn’t find you.” She transferred her gaze to Gabe. “Didn’t it occur to you I’d be worried?”

“I did ask if you knew where he was,” Gabe said mildly. “He said...” He frowned, unable to remember exactly what Mark had said. “I’m right next door,” he added.

“He knows better than to bother you, especially in the middle of a working day.”

“I’m not bothering Mr. Tennert,” Mark assured her. “Am I?” Eyes as blue as his mother’s met Gabe’s. The beseeching expression was his downfall. Damn it, the kid was a bother. Gabe would really like it if Ciara forbade him visiting. But looking into those eyes, he couldn’t bring himself to be that blunt. It would feel like kicking a puppy.

“Ah...a little break didn’t hurt anything. I’d have kicked him out pretty soon.”

“I wish you’d show me how to use your tools,” the boy said wistfully.

Gabe cringed at the idea of those uncoordinated limbs anywhere near a whirring saw blade. Hand tools, though...

“Whatever he says, you cannot pop over here whenever you feel like it and bother Mr. Tennert,” Ciara said. Her sigh was almost surreptitious. Did she have as hard a time crushing the kid’s hopes as he did? Gabe wondered.

“Make it Gabe,” he suggested, glancing at the boy. “Both of you.”

They beamed at him. “Oh,” the mother said. “My name’s Ciara. Did I tell you that?” She spelled it for his benefit, and he nodded. Spelling never had been his strong suit.

“I could give Mark a few lessons in using hand tools,” Gabe suggested, even as he thought, What the hell? “Unless you’re hiring someone to come in and do a sweeping remodel of your house, maybe he could take on a project or two. Learn how to strip and sand windowsills and moldings, say. The doorknob on the front door could use to be replaced.”

Her expression changed slowly to one of suspicion. “How do you know?”

“When Ephraim got old, he needed somebody to check up on him.” He shrugged. “Make sure he hadn’t fallen, that he’d gotten out of bed, looked like he’d been eating. I drove him to some doctor appointments, too.”

“Oh.” She looked almost disappointed, but her face had softened, too. “That was nice of you.”

“I’d known him a lot of years,” he said simply, although that wasn’t all there was to it. Ephraim had expressed gruff sympathy after Ginny and Abby were killed, then went back to treating Gabe the way he always had. He didn’t stare at Gabe every time he saw him with pity or avid curiosity, which made seeing him tolerable at a time when Gabe was avoiding everyone else.

“If you mean it,” she said slowly.

Mean what? Then he remembered. Oh, hell. He’d offered to teach her son to swing a hammer and apply a scraper and use sandpaper and maybe a handsaw. He considered himself a decent man; he didn’t hurt people’s feelings on purpose, and was rarely rude. Mostly, he limited the amount of time he had to spend with them, which allowed him to be polite when he was forced into company.

Well, this time he’d give a lesson or two then make excuses. Maybe start closing the barn doors when he was working instead of leaving them standing wide open. Or tell Ciara that he didn’t want to be bothered. She could be the bad guy so he didn’t have to be.

“A little time with Mark won’t kill me,” he said, and couldn’t help wondering at the expression of astonishment she wiped quickly from her face.

“Why don’t you give us your phone number, so Mark can call and find out a good time instead of just showing up?” she suggested.

He had some business cards in a drawer and took one out. He handed it to Mark, who stood closer. “You won’t lose that?”

“It’s really your phone number?” The kid inspected the card then turned it over as if he expected it to squirt water at him or produce a toy gun with a flag that said, Bang. What was with these two?

“It’s really my phone number.” He glanced at the boy’s pretty mother. “You might want to post it when you get home, in case you have an emergency.”

She thanked him. He escorted them out, reminding himself he was being neighborly, that’s all. Not so different than with old Ephraim. A single woman and a twelve-year-old boy might have a crisis they didn’t know how to deal with. He got the feeling they were coming from a very different environment than a county with barely over forty thousand residents. Most Seattle suburbs probably had that many people. Here, those forty thousand people were spread over one hell of a lot of empty land. Seemed to him Colville, the biggest city in the county, didn’t even have a population of five thousand. Goodwater claimed a grand total of 1,373 people, which put it in the largest few cities in Stevens County. That didn’t include the homeowners outside the city limits, of course, but still, living here wouldn’t be anything like what these two knew. Gabe had to wonder why in hell they’d made a move so drastic. Had Ciara even seen the house before she bought it?

Gabe watched them leave, hoping he hadn’t bitten off more than he was willing to chew. As he walked back into his workshop, he frowned, trying to figure out why he’d made an exception to his usual No Trespassing philosophy.

Maybe it was because the boy seemed so...needy. Yeah, that was it. And yes, he was odd, no question, but seemed unaware of it. At least, he’d shown no sign of being aware until Gabe had expressed his willingness to give him some time. Then he’d seemed perplexed, as if he wasn’t used to anyone welcoming him.

Gabe gusted out a sigh. Yeah, that had to be it. His offer had nothing to do with the boy’s mother. In fact, he stood by his belief that he’d be better off not seeing her any more than he could help.

* * *

IT DIDN’T TAKE Gabe twenty-four hours to regret his offer.

That happened when, late morning, his mobile phone rang. Unfamiliar number, but local. He always tried to answer in case he was going to pick up a new contractor or client.

“Can I come over now?” an eager voice asked. “This is Mark,” he tacked on belatedly. “You know. I live next door.”

Gabe almost groaned. But...hell. He was at a logical stopping point. “Sure,” he said. “But this is a working day for me, so you can’t stay long.”

“Okay!”

“Make sure you tell—” Realizing he was talking to dead air, Gabe gave up.

Because he was paying attention today, he heard the soft sound of bicycle tires on the asphalt not five minutes later. The kid popped into the barn. Nothing unusual about his attire for a boy his age: jeans, a plain T-shirt and, in his case, red canvas Converse shoes. His sandy hair was spiky and disheveled.

“I want to learn to make something,” he announced.

Not what Gabe had had in mind, but he reluctantly conceded that it wasn’t a bad idea. It would give the boy a sense of achievement. The high point of Gabe’s day in high school had been shop class, where he’d been introduced to woodcrafting. Mark wouldn’t get anything like that as long as his mother insisted on homeschooling.

“We can aim for that,” he agreed.

“But what can I make?” The boy gazed trustingly at him.

“A box.” That had been his first project in shop class, and thanks to a good instructor and his own perfectionist nature, it had ended up beautifully constructed. He kept it in his bedroom and was still proud of it.

Mark brightened. “You mean a wood box? I like boxes. I could keep stuff in it.”

“That’s the idea. But we won’t start on it today. You need to practice on scrap wood first.”

He was a little surprised to discover how quickly Mark took to measuring and how much pleasure he took in the tools Gabe showed him. Most kids that age would want to be slap-dash. When Gabe gave him a challenge, Mark measured and remeasured, his concentration intense.

He knew rulers and tape measures, of course, but was fascinated by the LDM—laser distance measuring—something Gabe rarely used but owned. His favorite was the angle gauge, which looked like two straight-edge rulers hinged together at one end, and was designed to measure the angle between adjacent surfaces. The kid understood the concepts right away, too, and Gabe began to suspect he might be good at math, as Gabe had been himself.

He let Mark do a little sawing by hand, but they hadn’t gotten far when Mark asked if he was hungry.

“Because I am. Do you have anything to eat here?”

Apparently, he was inviting himself to lunch. Gabe hesitated, not wanting to set a precedent, but decided feeding the kid a sandwich wouldn’t hurt anything. He’d send him home afterward.

“Yes, but let’s clean up first.”

That wasn’t a concept this boy had any trouble with, either, as it turned out. He remembered where each of the tools had been kept, and wiped them clean with a rag and put them away as carefully as Gabe would have. Apparently, yesterday’s admiration for Gabe’s meticulous storage had been genuine. He used a small hand broom to clean up his minimal amount of sawdust and then looked at Gabe expectantly.

His phone rang while the two of them were putting together sandwiches.

“Gabe? This is Ciara. I’m just checking to be sure Mark is still with you.”

“Yes, we’re having lunch right now. I’ll send him home as soon as he’s eaten.”

“You didn’t have to feed him.”

“I won’t make it a habit,” he said, thinking that he liked her voice, which had a lilt to it. It made him think of the creek out back, when the water rippled over rocks.

“All right.” Suddenly, she sounded awkward. “Um, just let me know if—”

“If?” he prompted after she fell silent.

“If he’s bugging you.”

He didn’t say, “Pretty sure that’ll happen soon. Any minute, in fact.” He had a bad feeling his patience today had created a monster. He settled for “I’ll do that” and ended the call, thoughtful.

Parents said that kind of thing all the time. He was sure his own mother had. But Ciara sounded more...resigned than he’d expected. Because she knew her son was a little unusual?

Mark chattered unaffectedly all through the meal. He wanted to know when he could start his box.

“After you learn some basic skills.”

“Can I ride one of the horses?”

“Maybe.”

“When?”

“Someday.”

“Can I today?”

“No. I have to work.”

Thanks to his mother, he did seem to understand that adults had to apply themselves to their jobs. But when Gabe asked what his mother did for a living, he was vague.

“She used to work at a doctor’s office. You know. She made appointments and stuff.”

“What about now?” Gabe didn’t even know why he was curious, but he was.

“She sews.” His forehead crinkled. “Sometimes people send her something and she uses it to sew, like, I don’t know, a pillow or something. It’s boring,” he concluded.

Gabe laughed, raised his eyebrows at the boy’s empty plate and said, “Time for you to go home now.”

“You don’t have cookies or anything?”

“Afraid not.” Desserts for Gabe were store-bought, and therefore rarely worth the bother. Sometimes he thought nostalgically about his mother’s home-baked cookies, but not often.

“Can I come again tomorrow?” Mark asked eagerly.

Precedents, Gabe reminded himself. “Depends how involved I get. Check with me tomorrow.”

“You mean, I have to call every time?”

“Unless we’ve made arrangements in advance.”

“Like, today you say I can come tomorrow.”

“Right. But I’m not saying that today.”

“Oh.” His shoulders sagged a little, but he let Gabe steer him toward the door without further protest.

Nonetheless, it seemed like forever before Mark finally got on his bike and pedaled back down the driveway.

Gabe shook his head and made his way to the barn.

His generosity today was going to bite him in the ass. He knew it. As he set up to get back to working, he practiced nice ways of saying no.

CHAPTER THREE

“CAN’T YOU TAKE a break yet?” Ciara’s son asked from where he stood in the doorway.

Oh, why not? She reached the end of the seam, lifted her foot from the sewing machine pedal and turned with a smile. “What’s up?”

“Gabe says I can’t come today.”

His despondency was all too familiar, as was the starburst of frustration and hurt for him that filled her chest. He had come home so excited yesterday, so...proud, as if he’d done something right. And now—

She wanted, quite fiercely, to detest Gabe Tennert, but in fairness couldn’t. He’d been nice. That didn’t mean he was obligated to become her son’s best buddy.

“I’m sorry, honey,” she said gently. “He’s a busy man.”

Mark’s expression brightened. “But he says I can come tomorrow. That I don’t have to call or anything. He said ten-thirty. We made an appointment.” He savored the concept. “Maybe he’ll let me have lunch with him again.”

“Really?” Ciara hoped he hadn’t noticed how amazed she sounded.

“Yeah. So what I was wondering is... You promised we could get a dog. So can we go today? Please, Mom?”

Oh, Lord. She was never going to get anything done.

“Why don’t we wait for the weekend?” she suggested in an automatic delaying tactic.

He looked at her as if she had a screw loose. “But tomorrow is Saturday, and that is weekend. And I’m already going to Gabe’s.” He paused in apparent pleasure at the idea and then continued. “And they might not be open on Sunday.”

She supposed that was a distinct possibility. Ciara had done some research on animal shelters and rescue groups after she’d bought this house, and decided the Spokane Humane Society would offer the largest selection of dogs and puppies to choose from. Plus, she and Mark could be pretty sure they’d be saving an animal from euthanasia, although she didn’t plan to mention that to Mark if it hadn’t already occurred to him.

“I can check online—”

“But why not today?”

She leveled a look at him. Her tolerance for whining was low. The hope in his eyes was her undoing, though.

“Oh, what the heck.” She smiled. “Today it is.”

“Yeah, Mom!” He jumped, spun in what might have been intended to be a sort of breakdance, crashed into the door frame and almost fell down. “Ouch!”

Laughing, Ciara swept him into a quick hug, about all he’d tolerate in the way of physical affection, and said, “Let me change shirts, at least. We’ll have lunch while we’re out.”

“And we have to get dog food and stuff, too.”

“Right.” She reflected on that. “Before we pick out a dog. We don’t want one to have to sit in the car, all by himself, while we’re shopping.”

It had turned out that the one balmy day was pure trickery; late April in Stevens County was cold, not springlike at all. A new puppy would be more likely to freeze than overheat if left for any length of time in a car. There were other dire possibilities, though. She wouldn’t be thrilled if their new dog ripped up the upholstery of the van. Howling nonstop wouldn’t be great, either.

“Lots of stores you can take your dog in, you know,” he informed her, trailing her to her bedroom.

She could just imagine. Odds were he’d choose a puppy. One that didn’t know how to walk on a leash yet. Oh, and would piddle anywhere and everywhere. Part of her really wanted to insist they bring home an adult dog, but she’d already made up her mind to let Mark make the decision, within reason. He was a kid; kids were entitled to experience the fun of owning a puppy.

“Let’s shop first anyway,” she said.

* * *

CIARA SNEAKED ANOTHER look in her rearview mirror, which revealed the same astounding sight as the last peek had, ten seconds before.

She and Mark were going home with not one dog, but two. And it was her fault.

At least both were adults, she consoled herself, snapping her gaze back to the unwinding road ahead. Theoretically potty trained.

Horse trained, now that was another story.

Watson’s information suggested he was a Labrador retriever-hound mix. Read: mutt. He was short-haired, chocolate-brown, with a white chin, chest and three white paws. The history—or maybe it was a wild guess—said he was two and a half years old. In theory, past the chewing-everything-up stage. He clearly had plenty of youthful energy, though. The moment Mark was allowed inside the kennel with Watson, he’d leaped up high enough to cover Mark’s face with his tongue. Mark had erupted in giggles.

“He’s supposed to be great with cats and definitely is with other dogs,” the attendant told her encouragingly. “A little obedience training wouldn’t be a bad thing, but he really wants to please. I suspect if he’s told what’s not acceptable firmly enough, he’ll learn quickly. Our volunteers who walk the dogs have been pleased with his attitude.”

“What about horses?” Ciara had asked, remembering the steel in Gabe Tennert’s voice saying, Please make sure it’s one that won’t chase horses or cattle. No flexibility there. She wasn’t sure he’d understand the concept of a learning curve.

The attendant gazed at the same information Ciara could see. “I’m afraid we have no idea,” she admitted.

Ciara had retreated to let Mark get better acquainted with Watson, and shortly found herself back in front of a kennel where an elderly dog named Daisy lay with her chin resting on her front paws, her eyes, slightly clouded with cataracts, fixed on each visitor who stopped. Upon seeing Ciara back for a second time, she thumped her tail a couple of times but didn’t bother getting up. Ciara wasn’t sure whether that was because she’d lost hope, or because her obvious arthritis and excessive weight made heaving herself up more effort than she went to without a clear reward.

The attendant had trailed her. “Daisy is such a sweetie. But given her age...”

She didn’t have to finish the sentence. Daisy was a shepherd mix. At eleven-plus years, she wouldn’t appeal to many potential adopters.

Ciara found her gaze fixed on the card that said, Good with cats and dogs.

No, she told herself. The dog was for Mark, not her. He needed a pet that could keep up with him, that was fun.

Daisy’s tail thumped a couple more times, and she hoisted herself to her feet. Her gait was rather stiff when she came forward to allow herself to be patted.

“She’d do well on glucosamine,” the other woman said. “Her owner was elderly, and I suspect she didn’t have much chance for exercise.”

This is too big a commitment to make out of pity, Ciara told herself, with what she hoped was resolution.

“I want Watson,” Mark said, right behind her.

The attendant started. “Oh! Did you latch the kennel door?”

“Yes, but he didn’t like it when I left.”

A mournful howl rose, which started a sympathetic barrage of barks and howls from other shelter dogs. Daisy’s ears twitched, but she only wagged her tail a couple more times.

“Crap,” Ciara mumbled.

“Mom! You won’t let me say that.”

And that’s when the attendant suggested craftily, “You know, dogs are pack animals. They love having a dog companion as well as a human family. If you’d consider taking two, I’m sure we can waive Daisy’s adoption fee, given that she’s a senior and her chances—” She took a quick look at Mark and changed her mind about what she was saying. “Given her age.”

And so it was that Mark was buckled into the middle of the backseat and had not one, but two dogs draped over him. Watson had bounded into the car. It had taken two of them to lift Daisy so high.

A little late, it occurred to Ciara that they’d bought a reasonable amount of food for one dog. For two, they should have bought more. Plus, Daisy should probably be on a diet formulated specifically for seniors, and Ciara could already envision the hassle of getting each dog to eat his or her own food instead of the other’s.

She sighed.

Daisy’s tail thumped against the door. Or maybe it was Watson’s. Or both.

Mark laughed, and Ciara’s mouth curved into a reluctant smile.

Hey, on the good-news front: one of the two dogs crowded on the backseat wouldn’t be interested in tearing around the pasture chasing horses.

* * *

GOD DAMN IT.

The sharp sound of a whinny had brought Gabe out onto his back porch Saturday morning before he’d had more than a couple swallows of his coffee.

Both horses bolted across the pasture, manes and tails flying, and right behind them came a brown bullet.

A dog.

An expletive came out of his mouth even as he took off at a run for the pasture.

He didn’t bother with the gate, instead planting a hand on the top rail and vaulting over. Hoodoo and Aurora spun past him, the dog in close pursuit. He whistled sharply, and the dog actually hesitated then stopped. The animal’s whole body swung with its tail. A long, pink tongue lolled out.

“Come,” Gabe snapped, and to his mild surprise the dog obeyed. Gabe was able to wrap his fingers around what appeared to be a brand-new collar, from which two shiny, silver-colored tags dangled. One was the expected rabies tag; the other, bone-shaped, gave the dog’s name as Watson and his owner’s name as Mark Malloy. The phone number was now familiar to Gabe.

Not letting go of the collar, Gabe walked the dog out of the pasture, in the side door of his garage and popped him into the cab of his pickup. Hoping like hell the damn animal wasn’t still young enough to want to chew whatever was in front of him—say, the seat upholstery—Gabe hurried back to the house to grab his wallet and keys.

When he returned to the pickup, Watson barked happily, slopped a big kiss on his face before he could evade it and thrust his nose out the window when Gabe lowered it a few inches to entertain him during the short drive.

His jaw ached from clenching his teeth by the time he pulled up in front of the neighboring house. Ciara burst out the front door before he could get out.

“Oh, no!” she said. “Watson went to your house?”

Despite his severe aggravation, he couldn’t help noticing how gracefully she moved, and how much he liked her long, slim body in tight jeans and form-fitting T-shirt.

Do not get distracted, he ordered himself.

“What was the one thing I said?” It came out as a roar. “Don’t get a dog that’ll chase livestock!”

“Oh, no,” she said again, more softly.

Watson, still in the cab, barked at her.

She tore her gaze from the dog and fastened it on Gabe. “The thing is the shelter doesn’t know how most of the dogs do with horses or cows. When I asked, they gave me blank looks. Probably Watson has never seen a horse before. I...I’m sure he can learn.”

She kept talking. There was something about a potential obedience class, and a learning curve—he tried to imagine how that would work—and she concluded by saying maybe she could pay to have wire mesh fencing added to his board fence along their property line.

He shook his head. “That’s a mighty long property line. Unless you’re made of money...”

The alarm that widened her eyes was answer enough.

They both fell silent for a moment, looking at each other. Her expression was oddly defenseless. Maybe because it was so early in the morning. At least she was dressed, but the hair he’d so far seen captured in a braid hung loose and was tousled enough, he had to wonder if she’d brushed it yet. Sunlight caught fire in the curls.

“I didn’t think,” she admitted at last. “I let them out when I first got up—”

“Them?”

He swung around, expecting to see another dog tearing through his pasture. The Hound of the Baskervilles.

“You won’t have to worry about Daisy.” She turned, too. “I wonder where she is.”

A second dog toddled around the corner of the house. Her legs were stiff, and the effect with her too-well-rounded body was more of a waddle than a walk. As she got closer, Gabe saw the milky film in her eyes that went with her graying muzzle.

He crouched and held out his hand. “Here, girl.”

Her tail swung a few times, and she came right to him, accepting his scratches and soft words.

Finally, he straightened. “Her, I’m okay with.”

Ciara’s face became mutinous. “You’re not telling me we have to take Watson back. That would kill Mark!”

Gabe groaned and let his head fall back. This was every bit as bad as he’d imagined. No, there weren’t little kids next door running around screaming, but the one kid who was here didn’t disappear daily to school, either. Instead, he wanted to be friends. He wanted lessons. He’d be calling every damn day if Gabe didn’t shut him down. And now a cheerful young dog with no manners at all had been added to the mix.

He lowered his head to see Ciara watching him anxiously.

“If he attacks one of the horses or Henry Beem’s cattle, you have to either find him a home where there’s no livestock around, or you’ll need to have him put down. Do you understand?”

Her chin trembled a little bit. “I understand.”

The foundations of his anger began to crumble. Damn it, he thought again. This felt like kicking a puppy, too, even though she was now glaring at him.

“All right,” he said abruptly, wheeled and opened his door.

The dog exploded out, jumping and barking in delight because he was free, and now there were two people to love him. No, the front door was opening. Mark came out on the porch, and now there were three. Jubilant, Watson leaped up the steps to greet his boy then sprang back down and headed for Gabe.

“Sit!” he snapped.

The dog looked astonished, but his butt did momentarily touch the ground. Didn’t last long—next minute he was jumping on Gabe, trying to kiss his face again.

“Sit,” he repeated, this time laying his hand on the dog’s head to quell his quivering desire to spring back up.

“He knows how to sit.” Mark grinned in delight. “See, Mom? He’s already trained.”

“Do you have a leash?” Gabe asked grimly.

He looked puzzled. “Yeah.”

“Go get it.”

While her son was gone, Ciara said, “I’m so sorry. I did ask.”

“You ever think of checking in town? Somebody around here probably has puppies that have been raised around animals.”

“No-o.” She drew the word out. “I researched shelters. We got Watson and Daisy at the Spokane Humane Society. I meant to get only one. You know, for Mark. But I was afraid nobody would take Daisy, and I thought maybe she’d have a calming influence on Watson.”

Daisy had planted herself at Ciara’s feet, appearing completely content.

“They already have those names?”

“Yes. I asked if they’d been named at the shelter, but those are the names they came with, so I thought...”

Gabe nodded. “It’s something familiar. They should be able to keep them.”

Her smile brought something to life inside him he’d never wanted to feel again. “That’s what I thought, too.”

Gabe tore his gaze away, concentrating on the dog squirming in front of him. He released him from the sitting position but whistled sharply every time he got too far away. When Mark returned with a short red leash, Gabe had him fasten it to the collar. “Now go get some carrots, if you have any.”

“Mom bought lots!” Mark raced back into the house, almost falling halfway up the porch steps.

Gabe winced in sympathy despite his irritation. I am still irritated, he assured himself, although his emotions had already become way more complicated than that, as seemed to happen every time he got close to these new neighbors. Either of them.

Once the boy returned with carrots in hand, Gabe led a parade to the pasture fence. Even Daisy roused herself to toddle along behind.

Gabe was far from sure the horses could be persuaded to come, but eventually they got near enough to be sure one of those humans was Gabe, and that there were carrots in the offing. Every time Watson barked, Hoodoo and Aurora neighed and shied away, but Gabe had Mark put his hand around the dog’s muzzle while reminding him sternly to “Sit,” and eventually he was able to persuade the two horses to come to the fence for their treat.

There was a lot of backing and shying, but finally Watson touched his nose to each of theirs, and Gabe made sure they all stood there long enough for the animals to develop some level of comfort with each other. He knew damn well it wouldn’t last, but it was a start. He just hoped the dog was high-spirited rather than having a killer streak. He didn’t think Mark would take it well if the dog he’d picked out to be his had to be put down.

“Use the leash a lot these first days,” he instructed him. “If your mom is okay with it, you can walk him in the pasture, as long as he’s always on the leash.”

After a moment, she nodded. Reluctantly, he thought, but she must have been able to see the sense in his suggestion, and had surely become convinced his quarter horses were too scared of her son to want to trample him to death.

“Why don’t you pet them?” he suggested, having noticed she was hanging back like she had last time.

He stayed where he was to gentle the horses, which might have been a mistake. She stepped close enough to allow a citrus scent to rise to his nose. Probably shampoo. He studied her fingers as she tentatively stroked one sleek neck and then the other, giving a surprised squeak when Aurora lipped her fingers.

“Her mouth is so soft!” Ciara exclaimed.

He couldn’t help thinking her lips looked soft, too. So did her skin. It was exceptionally fine-pored, more like a young child’s than an adult’s. In self-defense, he began to scratch Hoodoo’s poll. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been so tempted to touch a woman. Hell, if he laid a hand on her, she’d probably jump six inches and shy away just like one of the horses did to an unwelcome surprise, he thought ruefully.

But the face she turned up to him was alight with pleasure. “They’re so friendly! They’re just like dogs.”

For that moment, all the guardedness he’d seen in her was gone. Those eyes, huge and bright, shone with delight. And the way her mouth curved...

He’d have sworn he heard a cracking sound, the first ominous fissure in the Grand Coulee Dam, holding back the weight of enough water to wreak havoc through the whole Columbia River basin. Nobody else seemed to hear the sound, originating in his chest, where he’d built walls he would have sworn were rock solid.

Panic spiked, and he took a step back.

Irritable, that was his defense.

“Just so you remember, horses weigh two thousand pounds,” he reminded her and her son.

She shot a worried look at the boy before fixing her gaze on Gabe again. “Do they ever, well, step on you?”

“Yeah, I’ve had horses step on a foot. Sometimes they don’t even notice. That’s why it’s a good idea to wear boots around them.” He glanced at Mark. “You have any?”

“Uh-uh. Maybe I should get some, Mom.”

“Is leather really good enough?” she asked Gabe. “Or do you get steel-toed or what?”

Amusement eased his panic. “You ever seen a cowboy boot coated in steel?”

“Is that what I should get him? Cowboy boots?”

“Yeah, probably,” he said in resignation. Sure as hell, he’d be putting the kid up in the saddle before he knew it. Might have to do it on a lead line, if Mark didn’t turn out to have any more ability to center his weight when sitting than he did on his feet. Quarter horses had been bred to turn on a dime, whether their rider went with them or not.

“Well, okay.” Ciara gave him another sunny smile that had him backing up yet another step. “Thank you for...well...”

His eyebrows climbed. “Not shooting the dog?”

The boy grabbed his dog’s collar. “You wouldn’t!”

His mom’s smile turned to a glare. “Don’t say things like that!”

Gabe chose not to say anything.

Her eyes narrowed. “Do you have a gun?”

“A rifle. Yes, I do, ma’am.” Ma’am—that was good. Distancing.

“You hunt?” Her voice spiked with disapproval.

“I was raised hunting,” he said. “My family needed that meat on the table. But no, actually, I don’t.”

“Then why—?”

“Do I keep the Remington on hand?” He hesitated, not wanting to tell her it had been a gift from his dad, which at the time had meant something. In these parts, giving your son a fine rifle was a way to acknowledge he’d reached manhood. His father hadn’t been very good with words, but sometimes he’d done something that had made Gabe glow with pride. Not often, which is maybe why those rare moments stuck with him. “Anyone with livestock has to worry about coyotes or wolves,” he said instead. “If I heard someone breaking into my workshop, I’d reach for it, too.”

She looked shocked, giving him an idea how she’d cast her ballots. His mouth twitched. If he was right, she’d be in a minority in this corner of the state. The thought made him wonder anew what she’d been thinking, a woman raising her child alone, buying a house so isolated, in a county where she and her son might both have trouble fitting in with what neighbors they did have.

He glanced from her outraged face to Mark’s. The kid was kind of dorky-looking to go with his personality. Lips a little too big and loose, expression too open. Gabe’s amusement faded. Sure as hell, Ciara Malloy had gone for isolated on purpose. He just hoped she hadn’t made one hell of a mistake.

He dipped his head. “I need to be getting back.” He met Mark’s gaze. “You want a dog, teaching him what’s acceptable and what isn’t is your responsibility. You understand, son?”

The boy nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“All right, then.” Gabe walked back to his truck, not allowing himself any softening chitchat. Whatever that strange feeling he’d had when Ciara smiled, he had to have imagined it.

He was going to be pissed if he was back here in two hours because the damn dog was already in the pasture nipping at his horses’ heels again.

“Sir? I mean, mister...I mean, Gabe?”

The driver’s-side door was open; he didn’t have a lot of choice but to glance back.

Neither woman nor boy had moved. The old dog had settled her butt and looked as if she’d be content never to move. The young dog, however, was getting antsy.

“Yes?”

“I can still come to your place this morning, right?”

Oh, hell. In his exasperation, he’d forgotten. He wanted to say, You’ve already wasted enough of my day, but the apprehension coupled with hope that the boy couldn’t hide stopped the words in Gabe’s mouth.

“Yeah,” he said gruffly. “I’ll be expecting you.”

He took one last look as he started the engine, bothered by the knowledge that he wanted to see warmth again on Ciara’s face. That it would be easy for a man to get to crave the sight of that expression.

And there it was, just as he’d envisioned it, and the crack in his protective wall groaned a little as the damage done to it allowed further weakening.

He drove faster than he should have down their long, dusty driveway.

* * *

STARING IN DISMAY at the math problem Mark didn’t understand, Ciara wished she’d escaped to her workroom immediately after breakfast instead of making the mistake of lingering to ask if he needed any help. She’d mostly been okay with the seventh-grade math in the original curriculum, but once she downloaded the kind of work he’d already been doing in his advanced class, she was lost.

What’s more, this was the first major download she’d tried since discovering high-speed internet wasn’t available. In moving to such a rural location, they’d apparently lost a decade or two. Dial-up was torturous.

“This is geometry, isn’t it?” she said unhappily.

“Um...yeah.”

“Sarcasm is not appreciated.”

“Well, it’s about angles.”

“I can see that,” she snapped. It showed a shape—God help her, she didn’t even know what the shape was called—and wanted to know the sum of the angle measures in it. She’d taken geometry in high school and hated it. “You know, if you’re going to work on this stuff, I’ll have to review it in advance to be any help to you.”

“But Mom, it’s only eighth-grade math!” her son exclaimed.

Gee, and she hadn’t already felt stupid enough.

“Do you know how many years it’s been since I took this stuff?” she asked. “Things like percentages I use once in a while in real life. Geometry, never.”

“Oh.”

They both stared at the peculiar shape.

“Maybe Gabe knows the answer,” he suggested.

Because you had to know angles to shoot a Remington rifle?

“’Cuz he has this cool gauge that measures angles!” Mark said with new enthusiasm. “So he must understand them, right?”

“You have my blessing to ask.”

“Yeah!” He grabbed the worksheet and stuffed it into the daypack that already sat on the table. “It’s time for me to go anyway.”

“You’ve got the cookies?”

“You saw me put them in the pack.”

“Right.” Of course she had.

Anxious mother that she was, she walked as far as the front porch and stayed there while he pedaled down the driveway, turned right on the road then up Gabe Tennert’s nicely paved driveway. When he disappeared from sight behind the house, she figured he’d made it safely. Watson, nose pressed to the screen door, whined miserably. He’d wanted to go, and he didn’t understand why he couldn’t. Ciara shuddered at the thought of him in Gabe’s workshop.

He almost escaped when she opened the door, but swift use of her foot allowed her to slide inside and latch the door. “Not a chance,” she told him and went upstairs. He followed, of course, while Daisy lay at the bottom, watching sadly. She could barely handle the couple of steps from the back porch to the yard; a whole flight was out of her capability. Watson, on the other hand, would want to go in Ciara’s workroom, where he could do as much damage as he would in Gabe’s. The damage wouldn’t be as expensive, but Ciara couldn’t afford it.

She shut this door firmly in his face, too. He moaned but then subsided. As she plugged in her iron, she hoped her neighbor had a sweet tooth. Although she still found him alarming for reasons she hadn’t altogether figured out, ones that didn’t have anything to do with the fact that she also found him sexy, he’d so far been exceptionally nice to Mark. Oatmeal-raisin cookies were probably inadequate thanks, but she didn’t know what her next option would be.

Did he cook, or was he the kind of single guy who lived on microwave meals? Maybe tonight she’d bake bread. Everyone liked homemade bread. And if he kept letting Mark go over, she could invite him to dinner one of these nights. That would be the nice thing to do, wouldn’t it?

Steam puffed from her iron, and she gasped at the realization of how long she’d left it pressed on the delicate damask she was working on. Damn, had she burned it?

No, she saw in relief, but that was pure luck. She had to concentrate. Why on earth was she worrying about what a man she didn’t even know liked to eat? Mark’s sixth-grade teacher had been a man, and she’d never once considered sending him home-baked cookies.

Yes, but he’d been paid to teach her son. Nobody was paying the closemouthed, bearded guy next door to spend any time at all with Mark.

She winced, wondering what he’d think when Mark whipped out the geometry worksheet.

And then she wondered what Gabe Tennert would look like if he shaved off that beard.

CHAPTER FOUR

“IT’S A HEXAGON,” Gabe said absently. “Six sides.”

The boy’s forehead crinkled. “I thought it was a polygon.”

“It’s that, too.” Gabe explained that a polygon was a closed shape that usually had straight sides. “A triangle is a polygon.”

“Tri.” Mark’s face brightened as if it were lit from within, like his mother’s did. “Three.”

“Right. Four sided is a...?”

“Quadrangle.”

“Five sides makes it a pentagon.”

“Cool,” the boy decided. “So how do I figure out the sum of the angle measures in a hexagon?”

“Do you know what the measures of the angles of a triangle add up to?”

“A hundred and eighty degrees,” he said triumphantly.

“Good.” Gabe got out a ruler and pencil and showed him how to divide the shape up into triangles, then watched as Mark divided it into four triangles. He was able to multiply 4 times 180 in his head and come up with the right answer, which Gabe thought was pretty good.

“I don’t remember getting to geometry until high school,” he commented.

“My school did it in eighth grade. Except, if you were ahead, you did the eighth-grade stuff in seventh. Then if you were pretty good, you could skip Algebra 1 and take geometry as a freshman.”

“Gotcha.” Gabe nodded. “You okay with the next problem?”

They talked about a couple more, after which he put the worksheet away but pulled out a lidded plastic container. “Mom made cookies. She thought you’d like some.”

Gabe’s fingers were peeling the lid back before his brain gave the order. “What kind—” He inhaled. “Raisin oatmeal. My favorite.”

“Really? I thought she should make chocolate chip. That’s my favorite. But she says these are better for us.”

“I like chocolate chip, too,” Gabe admitted. “I wouldn’t turn them down. But these are great.” He took a bite and closed his eyes to better savor the burst of flavor. “Really great,” he mumbled a minute later.

He gobbled two before he remembered he shouldn’t waste the time eating when he was supposed to be—teaching, he guessed. He turned his mind back to his woodworking class and said, “I want you to do some measuring, and then you can experiment with the saw.”

Having seen how clumsy Mark was, Gabe did a lot of talking about safety precautions but was still a little unnerved when they got to the stage of practicing first with a handsaw, then a jigsaw and finally a circular saw. Interestingly, he found that the boy was both careful and precise. His focus was as intense as Gabe’s was when he worked. Gabe began to relax. They talked about the options for corner joints and decided that for Mark’s first effort, they’d go for a rabbet joint, good-looking and relatively simple.

He did some marking, chose clamps for his scrap lumber and practiced cuts with various saws. They talked about woods, and Gabe explained what his next stage was for the three separate cabinetry jobs he had going. Mark eventually decided to use cherry for his box; he liked the rich color of a darker stain better than the look of light woods. Truthfully, Gabe did, too, although he especially liked being able to use contrast.

It felt companionable putting sandwiches together with the kid again, with the bonus today that they both ate a couple more cookies. Gabe carefully put the top back on the container. Ciara had sent a couple dozen. That would keep him in cookies for...well, that depended on how greedy he allowed himself to be, didn’t it?

He evaded the boy’s hints that he’d like to learn to ride, too—half the day was already shot—but he did allow Mark to feed a couple of carrots to the horses again before he sent him home.

Gabe pretended he was just giving himself a minute to decompress when he stood outside watching the boy pedal home, but he knew better. He felt some sense of responsibility. The road didn’t have much of a shoulder. It wasn’t ideal for bike riding.

He was disconcerted to find he was smiling when he walked back into his workshop.

* * *

“THAT DOESN’T SMELL very good.”

Ciara turned to see that Mark had appeared in the kitchen.

“Shut the door,” she said hastily—too late.

Watson burst into the kitchen, leaping to put his paws on her chest, his wet tongue catching her chin before she could take evasive maneuvers. She had to fend him off with an elbow. “Mark!”

Eventually, he propelled the reluctant dog out of the kitchen and latched the swinging door. Ciara hoped the young dog would learn enough manners soon so that they didn’t have to exile him from any room where they were cooking or eating, but for now, she was grateful for the door. In their previous house, she wouldn’t have had any way to keep Watson from putting his paws on the dinner table and snatching food off Mark’s plate.

Above the whine that penetrated the closed door, she said, “This is a new recipe. There’s nothing in it you shouldn’t like.” She carried the casserole dish to the table and set it on a hot pad. “Try it.”

“I don’t like it when foods are all mixed together,” he said disconsolately.

“You like raisin-oatmeal cookies. Flour, sugar, oatmeal, raisins and several other ingredients, all mixed together.”

“That’s different.” He sighed loudly and plopped down in his place.

“You like spaghetti,” she pointed out.

“It’s not new!” he burst out.

Ciara only laughed. “Try this casserole. It may surprise you.”

She poured them both milk, dished up the peas she’d chosen because they were a favorite of his and sat down herself. She watched as he used the serving spoon to transfer a minuscule amount of the cheesy hamburger bake onto his plate, but said nothing.

He stared down at his plate. “Dad said he’d call tonight. Do you think he already did and we didn’t hear it?”

Familiar tension felt like wires strung through her body being pulled tight. “I think I’d have heard the phone, but you can check voice mail. After dinner,” she added, reading his mind even before he started to jump to his feet.

“But Mom—”

She took a bite to give herself a minute. “It’s only six-thirty. If he said this evening, it’ll probably be later anyway.”

Mark hunched his shoulders and stabbed at his peas. Several went skittering off his plate. “He’ll forget. He always forgets.”

He was right. Jeff did always forget. She wished he wouldn’t make promises at all, however casual. He knew how literal Mark was. In his world view, if you said you were going to do something, you did it.

“Your dad is pretty busy these days,” she said gently. New wife, new baby, promotion at work. Out with the old.

No, not fair—the new family and promotion at work had absolutely nothing to do with his disengagement from his first son. That happened as soon as he began to suspect Mark wasn’t a chip off the old block. The son he had once described as a “retard” was her fault, he had declared. Jeff was unimpressed with the reality that Mark scored at 95 percent or above on most standardized tests given in school.

“You know what I mean,” he’d growled.

Yes, she did. He meant Mark wasn’t a swaggering, sports-crazy, rough-and-tough boy’s boy. Instead, he was thoughtful, given to intense interests— none of which his father shared—and, at least so far, spectacularly unathletic. Ciara could not understand how any of that made Mark unlovable to a parent.

“How’d things go with Mr. Tennert today?” she asked in an attempt to divert him.

It worked. His face brightened. “He said to call him Gabe, you know.”

“Right.” She was trying to stick to Mr. Tennert, who sounded like a neighbor, versus Gabe, who was a sexy guy she found herself thinking about way more often than was healthy.

“It was good.” He chattered on, explaining how today they’d worked on finding the missing angles in triangles and quadrilaterals.

At one point she leveled a look at his plate, and he took a tiny bite then a larger one before he continued his enthusiastic recitation about complementary, supplementary, vertical and adjacent angles. Ciara pinned an interested smile on her face and tuned him out.

“He remembers everything about geometry,” Mark concluded with satisfaction. “That’s good, because I think it’s cool.”

Panic briefly raised its head. What if Gabe Tennert lost interest in helping Mark with his math?

I can research anything, she reminded herself. I am perfectly capable of staying ahead of a seventh grader.

It was humiliating to know she wasn’t buying her own pep talk.

Gabe had also had Mark sawing assorted pieces of scrap lumber. He’d done some miter cuts today, and Gabe had shown him how to mark intended cuts so as not to make a mistake.

“Mark them.” Her son cackled. “Get it?”

She produced a chuckle.

This was Thursday. She hadn’t encountered their neighbor since their Saturday morning confrontation over Watson chasing his horses. Having seen the bone-deep reluctance on his face, she’d honestly been surprised when he’d let Mark come down to his workshop later that same morning. She was even more surprised that he had scheduled appointments thereafter, meaning Mark had disappeared for up to two hours to the neighbor’s both Tuesday and today.

She was trying to keep her distance, but had expressed her gratitude by sending a loaf of freshly baked bread with Mark on Tuesday and a Bundt cake today. Mark had reported an enthusiastic reception for both the cookies and the bread. She asked now about the cake.

“He said you don’t have to send stuff every time.”

“Oh.” Ciara was disconcerted to feel let down. “Does he not like desserts?”

“He had, like, a humongous piece of cake while he helped me with my math.” Lines appeared between Mark’s eyebrows. “So I don’t know why he said that.”

Her spirits rose. “He was probably being polite.”

He stared at her. “Why is it polite to say he doesn’t want your food if he really likes it?”

Ciara told herself it was just the age, or maybe being dense about the games people played in the name of civility was a boy thing. She explained why people said, “Oh, you didn’t have to,” when that wasn’t really what they meant at all. Mark appeared to be listening earnestly, but his expression never cleared.

Her suspicion was confirmed when he said finally, “People are weird.”

Well, yes, they were, but Mark nonetheless had to learn the art of telling polite lies. Right now, if he’d been required to take a standardized test on this particular art, Ciara was afraid he’d score somewhere in the first percentile. He always said what he was thinking.

It seemed like every time she took the phone after he’d spoken to his dad, the first words out of Jeff’s mouth were, “For God’s sake, do you know what he just said to me?”

Um...the truth?

It was surprising how often the truth came out sounding awfully rude.

“When are you going back to Gabe’s?”

“Saturday. Tomorrow he’s going to a house to make measurements for cabinets. I wanted to go with him, but Gabe says I can’t ’cuz it’s going to take him most of the day and he knows I have to do schoolwork.”

“I don’t suppose he often builds cabinets for houses in Goodwater,” she said thoughtfully. She wondered if anyone in this small town could afford him.

“This house is at someplace called Medical Lake. Gabe says it’s called that ’cuz people used to think the lake water cured them of all kinds of diseases.”

In her initial search, she’d browsed houses online in Medical Lake. As in much of Eastern Washington, real-estate prices were staggeringly low compared to the Seattle area.

“There’s sort of a castle in Medical Lake,” she told him. “It was built by an English lord.”

“Can we go see it?” Mark asked eagerly. “Maybe we could go with Gabe.”

She shook her head. “In the first place, he hasn’t invited us. Plus, I think I remember reading the castle has been turned into an apartment house, and there isn’t much to see anymore.”

“You mean, you can rent an apartment in a castle?”

Mark had enjoyed touring Craigdarroch Castle in Victoria, British Columbia, almost as much as he’d liked the natural-history displays in the Provincial Museum there. Craigdarroch, built in the late 1880s, was no more a real castle than the one in Medical Lake—which had probably been built in roughly the same decade, come to think of it.

“I wish he’d let me go with him,” Mark said, sounding sad.

Ciara took a deep breath. “Maybe we should invite Gabe to dinner tomorrow night. Or Saturday, if he’ll be back too late tomorrow.”

“Can we?” He pushed back his chair and jumped to his feet. “Can I call him? Right now?”

She hoped this wasn’t a huge mistake. She was torn between discouraging Mark from forming any deep attachment to a man who might lose interest in him any day—and, okay, keeping her own distance for personal reasons—and bribing said man to keep providing something Mark obviously needed desperately.

Something his father would never give him.

“I think this is one invitation that should come from me,” she said firmly. “He needs to know it comes from me.”

“Then will you call him right now?”

“After dinner. Sit,” she ordered.

He sat. From then on, all he talked about was how cool it would be, having Gabe here. He bet Gabe could show him how to make Watson sit. ’Cuz he knew all about animals. Had he told her...?

Oh, Lord. What if Gabe Tennert politely declined her invitation? Mark would be heartbroken.

The phone rang. Once more, Mark erupted from his seat.

“I bet that’s Dad!”

He returned a moment later with her cell phone, his expression downcast. “It’s that man who came out here about the floors.”

She accepted the phone, saying brightly, “It’s still early,” even though she knew damn well Jeff wouldn’t call.

What was she thinking, letting Mark get attached to a man whose only connection to them was a property line?

Even as she greeted the local contractor who was ready to offer a bid on refinishing floors, all she could think about was their next-door neighbor’s slow, deep voice and a face not quite as expressionless as she suspected he wanted it to be.

* * *

CIARA DID LET him call his grandparents that evening, and took a turn talking to them herself. Dad said hello, there was a Mariner game on and gave the phone to Mom, who laughed.

“He started watching so he could sound intelligent when clients commented on games or players or whatever, and now he won’t miss a game. Bridget, too.”

“Bridget?” Ciara repeated. That, she’d have to see to believe.

“You know, if you gave your dad a chance, he could get Mark interested, too.”

Ciara snorted.

Mom laughed again.

“What about you?”

“I still can’t figure out why I’d want to waste hours watching grown men adjust their balls—and I’m not talking about the stitched leather kind—and stare intently at someone crouching behind the plate holding one finger or two fingers down between his thighs. Or, come to think of it, just below his balls.”

Ciara laughed hard enough to get tears in her eyes. Only her mother. “Have you expressed this opinion to Dad and Bridget?”

“Yes. Bridget said there is only one ball, and what am I talking about. Your dad snorted wine out his nose.”

“I miss you,” Ciara said with complete sincerity.

“We miss you, too, honey. We’re dying to see your place. Just let us know when you’re settled enough to welcome visitors.”

“I will,” she promised, disturbed to find herself torn between an aching need to see her family, and a reluctance to let reality intrude on the new life she and Mark were creating.

* * *

FRIDAY, GABE WAS disconcerted by how much he anticipated having dinner with the Malloys, mother and son. He tried to convince himself it was only that he didn’t get good, home-cooked meals very often. His own repertoire was basic and pretty limited. After the samples of her baking he’d devoured, he was willing to bet Ciara would feed him something mouthwatering.

Usually after a long day like this, he’d have stopped for a burger or even a pizza somewhere on the drive home. There weren’t many places to eat out in Goodwater, and when he did occupy a booth in one of the two cafés, people insisted on pausing to talk.

Not like I won’t have to make conversation tonight, he reminded himself, but was perplexed to realize he didn’t so much mind the idea. He was used to Mark; that had to be it. And Ciara—well, she seemed like a comfortable enough woman, except for her looks, which stirred him into a state that wasn’t comfortable at all.

It felt odd to turn into the driveway before his own. The horses wouldn’t like their dinner being late, but they could live with it. He winced at the dust rising to coat his truck. He’d paved his own driveway to avoid jarring and potentially damaging a finished cabinet or piece of furniture, but he was particular enough about his vehicles, keeping them clean had been a bonus.

Before his pickup even rolled to a stop, the front door sprang open and Mark and Watson burst out. Gabe yanked on the emergency brake, turned off the engine and jumped out before the dog could leap up and scratch the paint on his truck.

“Down!” he ordered, and the surprised mutt aborted his delighted spring.

“No leash?” Gabe asked.

The boy’s gallop down the steps had been only slightly slower but considerably less graceful than the dog’s. “He’s getting better. He comes right away when I call. See? Watson. Hey, boy, come here.”

The dog kept big brown eyes trained on Gabe’s face. His tail swung wildly.

“Watson!”

“It’s okay,” Gabe said. “He’s excited because I’m new, that’s all.” He laid a hand on Mark’s thin shoulder and gently squeezed. “You’re right. He seems a little less excitable.”

“Mom makes me take him out for runs all the time.” His face scrunched. “She says I need the exercise, too.”

Gabe laughed. “She’s right.”

“Mom made one of my favorite dinners. I told her I bet you’d like it, too.”

“So what’s this favorite dinner?”

Watson whirled around them as they walked toward the porch. Gabe noted how many boards on the steps were cracked. Might be an ideal example of good, practical carpentry Mark could help him with.

“Manicotti. Mom makes really great manicotti.”

Gabe’s stomach growled. Lunch seemed like a long time ago.

Daisy was waiting on the porch, her tail wagging. He stopped to give her a good scratch and speak softly to her, even though Watson and Mark were seething with impatience. They all entered the house together.

“Mom won’t let Watson in the kitchen when she’s cooking or when we eat,” Mark confided. “Only tonight we’re eating in the dining room—you know, because you’re a guest—so I have to shut him in my bedroom. He might howl.”

“I suppose you can’t put Daisy in with him.”

“Uh-uh. She can’t climb the stairs.”

“She looks good, though,” Gabe observed. “I think she’s walking a little better.”

“Mom’s giving her some pills the vet suggested. Do you know Dr. Roy?”

“He takes care of my horses. Rides in cutting-horse competitions, too.”

“Really?”

Gabe nodded toward the staircase. “Why don’t you go on and take Watson up? I’ll go say hello to your mom.”

“Okay.” The two raced up the stairs, sounding, as Gabe’s mother would have said, like a herd of elephants.

He pushed through the swinging door into the kitchen then stopped, hit with sensory overload. The manicotti smelled amazing, and Ciara was bent over, removing garlic bread from the oven. The sight of her in tight jeans and a frilly lemon-yellow apron made his mouth water in a different way. She either heard the door or his stomach growling again, because she swung around quickly, her eyes startled.

“Oh! I heard your pickup, but I thought maybe Mark had dragged you upstairs to see his room.”

Gabe ambled forward, hoping he looked unthreatening, although he wasn’t sure why it mattered. It might be best if she did find him intimidating. “No, he’s currently dragging Watson upstairs to lock him in solitary confinement.”

Ciara made a face. “I swear that dog’s last family must have let him help himself to food right off their plates. I refuse to gobble down my meals, ready at every moment to defend my food.”

Gabe found himself smiling at the picture. “Might be good for your reflexes.”

“More likely it would cause indigestion.” She tilted her head. “Was he coming right back down? Dinner is ready to go on the table.”

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