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“I’m countin’ on it, Blissie,” her father said with an encouraging smile. “It’s time for me to start over and I can’t do it without you.”
A huge lump filled her throat. Half sisters.
She’d have to meet them sometime, she decided without much enthusiasm, but that didn’t mean that she had to like them.
CHAPTER TWO
“Bliss Cawthorne’s coming back to town.”
Mason froze, his pen in his hand as he sat at his desk. “What?”
“You heard me.” Jarrod Smith snagged his hat from the hall tree as he walked to the door of Mason’s office. “Just thought you’d like to know.”
“You’re full of good news, aren’t you?” Mason said, leaning back in his desk chair until the old springs creaked in protest. His stupid pulse had jumped at the mention of Bliss’s name, but he calmed himself. So she was returning to Bittersweet. So what? He didn’t doubt that she cursed the day she’d ever set eyes on him. He didn’t blame her.
She was, as she always had been, forbidden.
Jarrod grinned like a Cheshire cat. “Supposedly it’ll be a short visit, just coming back for her old man’s wedding.”
“To your mother.” Mason had already heard the news that had swept like wildfire through dry grass along the streets of Bittersweet. In the taverns, churches and coffee shops, the topic of John Cawthorne’s marriage had been hashed and rehashed. Not that Mason cared so much about what Cawthorne did these days, except when it came to the ranch, the damned ranch. Behind the old man’s back he’d made a deal with Brynnie to buy out part of it. His conscience twinged a bit; he had a ten-year-old deal with the old man, too. One he no longer intended to honor.
“Yep.” Jarrod squared his hat on his head and paused at the door. “This is a small town.”
“Too small.” Nervously, Mason clicked the pen.
“But you couldn’t stay away.”
Mason grimaced and glanced at the picture propped on the edge of his desk. In the snapshot a pixie of a girl with dark hair and amber eyes smiled up at him. Freckles dusted her nose; teeth too large for her mouth were a little crooked in a smile as big as the world. Dee Dee. Well, really, Deanna Renée, but he’d always called her by her nickname. “I’ve got my reasons for coming back,” he admitted.
“Don’t we all?”
“I suppose,” Mason allowed. He and Jarrod had been friends for years, ever since high school. Jarrod had been everything from a log-truck driver to a detective with a police department in Arizona somewhere, but he’d been back in Bittersweet for a couple of years running his own private-investigation business. Mason had hired him to track down his younger sister, Patty. So far, no luck; just a few leads that always seemed to peter out.
Jarrod’s smile was slow as it stretched across his jaw. “So what’re you gonna do about Bliss?”
Bliss Cawthorne. “Not much.” His stomach tensed as he remembered her eyes, as blue as a mountain lake, and lips that could curve into a smile that was innocent and sexy as hell all at once. She’d nearly died. Because of him. Because he’d been weak.
Jarrod pretended interest in his knuckles. “You and she had a thing once.”
If you only knew. “A long time ago.” But it feels like yesterday.
“Old feelings die hard.”
“Do they?”
“She’s not married. Never been.” Jarrod twisted the knob and shouldered open the door. “It’s almost as if she’s been waiting for you.”
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nbsp; Mason nearly laughed as he folded his arms over his chest. “My guess is that she’d just as soon spit on me as talk to me.”
“Still blaming yourself for that accident?”
Mason shrugged, as if he didn’t give a damn, but the muscles in his shoulders tightened like cords of a thick rope that had been wet and left to shrink in the sun.
“Hell, Lafferty, it wasn’t your fault.”
Mason didn’t answer.
