Lily and the Lawman

Chapter Two

Max smiled to himself. He’d been observing Alison’s older, successful sister since they’d gotten airborne ten minutes ago. Judging by her frozen stare and the way she clutched her left armrest, Max figured that Lily Quintano reacted to flying much the way he did.

“I don’t like it, either.”

Startled, Lily turned her head away from the vast expanse of nothingness right beneath her and almost bumped into the sheriff. He was sitting much too close, but she supposed that wasn’t entirely his fault. The plane was crammed, to say the least.

Right now, he seemed to be using up all her available air.

“Like what?” She wanted to know.

Max nodded around him. “Riding in a small, single-engine plane. I keep waiting for a giant hand to reach right out of the sky and bat the plane to the ground, like in those cartoons they used to have for kids.” He glanced toward Sydney, who was sitting in front in the pilot’s seat. “No offense, Sydney.”

Sydney laughed lightly, knowing exactly how he felt. That had been her reaction once, too. “None taken. I wasn’t thrilled with my first ride to Hades, either. I was sure this plane was going to go down like a stone.”

Eventually, though, she’d changed her mind and managed to talk Shayne into giving her flying lessons. Lucky thing, too, otherwise she would have never been able to fly him to the hospital when he’d come down with appendicitis. She’d gotten him there just as it ruptured. Saving his life was a handy thing to hold over your husband’s head when discussions got a little heated.

“You feel better about it when you’re at the controls.” Sydney glanced over her shoulder. It wouldn’t hurt to have a few more pilots in Hades. Or a few more planes, for that matter. God knew, there were enough demands on her time these days. What Hades needed was a professional pilot who did nothing else, not like the rest of them. “Maybe you should take lessons, Max. I’d be happy to—”

He was already shaking his head. Air was not what he considered to be his natural environment.

“Thanks just the same,” Max told her. “I like having my feet firmly planted on the ground. I only fly when it’s absolutely unavoidable.”

Lily looked at him. That didn’t make sense to her. “So why did you volunteer to come meet my plane?”

“I didn’t come to meet your plane, I came to meet you.” He had no idea why it tickled him to correct her. Maybe because he could see that it irritated her, and he had a feeling that Ms. Lily Quintano was far too uptight for her own good. “And it wasn’t so much a case of volunteering as being volunteered.”

“Oh.”

Well, that was putting her in her place, Lily thought. Nothing like being regarded as a burden. Maybe she would have been better off staying home. She could have made a dartboard of Allen’s photograph and cleared her head that way. It would have been a lot less complicated than what she’d had to go through to make arrangements to spend two weeks away from the restaurant.

“I’m sorry to have inconvenienced you.”

The woman was blunt and she could be chillier than an Alaskan January night, Max thought. He was beginning to see why the wedding had been called off. Took a hell of a man to commit himself to the likes of Lily Quintano.

He made no apologies for her assumption. “Just part of being a sheriff,” he told her carelessly.

Her eyes narrowed. Now he was lumping her in with chores? Why had Alison and Jimmy sent this character? “I thought being a sheriff was catching bad guys and keeping the peace.”

He’d wondered when she’d get around to being sarcastic. “The peace more or less keeps itself out here and our bad guy supply has pretty much dwindled out.”

Max didn’t bother telling her about how Sam Jeffords’s traps kept being broken into and destroyed. Coming from where she did, he figured Lily would probably laugh at that being thought of as a crime. He knew it didn’t occur to people who lived in a city that some people’s livelihoods were still being made from setting traps and bringing in furs.

Personally, he knew he couldn’t do that himself—trap an animal so that someone could wear its pelt around their shoulders—but he wasn’t about to impose his own values on anyone else. Took all kinds to make the world go around. Faux fur notwithstanding, there was still a large market for animal skins. And, he supposed, on the plus side, it did keep the beaver population from multiplying and overwhelming the township.

“Then what is it that you do do?” The bright noonday sun was highlighting everything within the small cabin. The nose of the weapon he had tied to his thigh peered out of its holster, gleaming. It caught Lily’s attention. “Besides polish your gun?”

He wondered if she sharpened her tongue daily on a miller’s wheel or if it just maintained its edge naturally.

“A little of this, a little of that.” He looked at her pointedly. “Hunt for lost tourists.”

She never flinched. “Get many of those?”

“Even one is too many,” he told her honestly.

It was easy to get lost out here if you weren’t careful. Even people native to the area got lost on occasion. It wasn’t unusual to have to organize the town into a search party. He supposed that was what he liked best about living in a place like Hades, knowing that he could rely on his neighbor if he had to.

“Your brother got lost when he first came out here. He went to the Inuit village to inoculate the children against the flu that was going around that year. It was the beginning of June, but a freak snowstorm hit when he was on his way back. My sister was guiding him. If Jimmy and April hadn’t found their way to the cabin, they would have died from exposure.” He didn’t mention that, ironically, it was the cabin where he and his sisters had lived before their mother had retreated from reality. “This can be a very unforgiving land, Lily.”

There was something almost unsettlingly intimate about having him address her by her first name. Maybe the altitude was making her giddy, she thought, dismissing the odd feeling.

“If it’s so unforgiving, why do you and my sister stay?”

She wasn’t even going to mention Jimmy. When she first heard that her playboy brother had decided to take up residence in a place that was less than a fly speck on the map, she was rendered utterly speechless for one of the few times in her life. She knew that Jimmy had a good heart, and that he also liked to have a good time. From what Alison had told her, there was no nightlife in Hades other than the Salty Dog Saloon and a couple of movie theaters.

“Why does anyone stay?”

Max smiled to himself. If he had to explain, then she missed the point. But since she was waiting for some kind of answer, and he had a feeling she was the type who wouldn’t just let something go, he said, “Like a beautiful woman, it has its allure.”

She had another take on why he, at least, remained here. From the way he spoke and conducted himself, she had a feeling that he wasn’t exactly a go-getter. She wouldn’t have given him two minutes in her world.

“Or maybe it’s easier being a sheriff here than in, say—” she looked at him pointedly “—Seattle.”

If she was trying to put him on the defensive, he thought, she was going to be disappointed. “Maybe. But I wouldn’t know everyone in Seattle the way I do here.” He made himself comfortable in his seat, knowing they’d be landing soon. “I like knowing who I’m protecting.”

The plane suddenly dipped and without thinking, Lily grabbed onto Max, jerking him toward her.

“Sorry about that.” Sydney tossed the words over her shoulder. “We hit an air pocket.”

Lily’s heart was pounding so hard that she felt as though someone was doing a drumroll in her chest. “Felt more like the pocket hit us.” With effort, Lily pulled herself together. Realizing that she was still clutching Max’s forearm, she flushed and released him. It was then she saw that her nails had dug into his wrist, leaving a long, red mark. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to do that.”

“Nice to know.” He glanced at the scratch. A small red line of blood was forming along its length, making it look angry. Digging into his pocket, he took out his handkerchief and dabbed at the line. Max raised his eyes to hers. Amusement tugged at the corners of his mouth as he deadpanned, “I guess I can always tell people you drew first blood.”

Lily shifted uncomfortably in her seat. She hated acting weak. It detracted from the image she had of herself, the one she liked to project.

“I’m not usually this jumpy.” Lily slid forward, her hand on the back of Sydney’s seat. “How much farther is it?”

The comparison to her own children’s “are we there yet?” was unavoidable, but Sydney kept that to herself. She had a feeling that Alison’s sister wouldn’t take kindly to being compared to a ten-year-old girl and a fourteen-year-old boy, not to mention her two-year-old toddler. But she said what every good parent who hadn’t yet lost their temper said in similar circumstances.

“Almost there.”

Couldn’t be soon enough for her, Lily thought. “Maybe I should have just rented a car at the airport and driven to Hades myself.” The thought, she realized by the look on the sheriff’s face, had been uttered out loud instead of safely left in the regions of her mind where she thought she’d left it. “That way I wouldn’t have inconvenienced anyone,” she tacked on, hoping that would get her out of the awkward situation.

“More of an inconvenience coming out to look for you,” Max informed her crisply.

She didn’t like being thought of as a helpless female. She hadn’t felt like a helpless female since fourth grade, back when she would have sold her soul to be part of Jenny Wellington’s club. Only the most popular girls in the class belonged to it and she had pointedly been excluded. She’d realized there and then that wanting something that badly only allowed other people to have power over you. She’d made up her mind that she wasn’t ever going to want anything that badly again. That with the exception of her family, nothing and no one was ever going to mean that much to her again.

Her mistake with Allen was in thinking that maybe she’d made up her mind too hastily all those years ago, that maybe she did need someone to round out her existence. Someone to start a family with.

All the more fool she, Lily thought now.

She had her family. She had Kevin and Alison and Jimmy. If she needed anything beyond that, she had the people who worked for her at the restaurant. They were a family of sorts in themselves, with her as the mother. She couldn’t help wondering how they were getting along right now without her.

As if on cue, the cell phone tucked away in her suit jacket pocket rang.

The tinny noise had Max quizzically raising his brow as he looked at Lily. The woman seemed to come to life right before his eyes, the altitude and the small plane that was carrying them completely forgotten.

“My phone,” she said needlessly. Digging it out, she flipped it open. “Lily.”

“Lily, thank God.”

She immediately recognized her assistant manager’s high, whiny voice, the one he used just before he began to crumble in front of her. She’d left for the airport from the restaurant, rather than from her home. Arthur had been in charge all of four hours. What could have gone wrong so quickly?

“The fool from Bradberry’s didn’t deliver enough lamb chops for tonight and we have that huge private banquet at eight.”

The man was a gem when he didn’t get in his own way. Unfortunately, that happened all too frequently. “So, call Bradberry’s and have them deliver more.”

There was a slight indignant huff on the other end. “I’m not an idiot, Lily. I already did that.” And then the whine replaced the indignation. “They don’t have enough.”

“Then find my phone book in the drawer and call Fenelli’s.” She gave him a second name, knowing the man needed backup at all times. “Or try Wagner’s Market if they don’t have any.”

Lily tried to keep her temper. It was hard to believe that Arthur Knight had a degree in restaurant management. The man was good at following orders, but still lacked a great deal when it came to thinking on his own. Of course, she allowed, he’d never been given the opportunity before because, other than the two days she’d taken off for Alison’s wedding, she hadn’t been away from the restaurant for more than a few hours. There’d been no occasion for Arthur to have to do anything on his own.

“Wait,” Arthur begged, afraid she would hang up before he found the address book.

Lily could hear the sound of a drawer being opened and then the shuffling of papers. The sound got more desperate. He had better pick up whatever he threw down, she thought, envisioning the chaos.

“It’s not here.”

Lily closed her eyes, summoning an image, trying to block out the fact that she was being observed. The two-bit sheriff was watching her as if she were a Saturday feature in the tiny theater she guessed he frequented.

“Left-hand side, in the back. Under the green folder,” she recited.

More shuffling. “Got it!” he cried in triumph with no less verve than if he were Jason and had just secured the Golden Fleece.

“Good. Now look up the phone number and call one of them. And, Arthur,” she said just as she was about to break the connection, “calm down. You can do this.”

“Right,” he said breathlessly. “I can do this. I can do this.”

Arthur was still reciting the mantra as she bid him a crisp, “Goodbye,” and terminated the connection. Placing the phone back in her pocket, she finally looked at Max. He’d been observing her the entire time she’d been on the phone.

“What?”

The woman sounded as if she were a five-star general in training. “What is it you do again?”

“I run a restaurant. My own restaurant,” she felt compelled to add since it was obvious that no one had said anything to him about her.

She had no idea why it mattered that he know she wasn’t just some flunky for a corporation, even though she had worked for a major insurance company for several years to save up enough money for a down payment on her restaurant.

If she was looking to impress him, she was disappointed.

Max nodded, taking the information in. “Sounds more like you’re a general planning some kind of major strategy.”

She didn’t know if he was just making an offhanded remark or criticizing her. She didn’t react well to criticism. In-law or not, she definitely hadn’t made up her mind to like Sheriff Max Yearling. “Arthur needs a firm hand.”

She sounded as if she were talking about a horse or a pet. It was as plain as the nose on his face that the lady liked being in control. He pitied the man who had the misfortune of falling for her face, not realizing what the total package involved.

“Arthur, your fiancé?”

Eyes widening, Lily laughed. It was the first time, she realized, since she had found Allen in bed with that former patient of his. Arthur was a dear in his own way, but definitely not someone she would even remotely think of in a romantic light. It wasn’t even his tall, gawky frame or the fact that he had an Adam’s apple that seemed to be in perpetual motion. It was that, quite truthfully, he was skittish of his own shadow and if ever she were to think about romance again, she wanted a man, not a mouse. Not even a tall mouse.

“Hardly. What makes you think that?”

Max lifted a shoulder carelessly, letting it drop again. “The way you were ordering him around, it sounded as if you had a relationship.”

Lily stiffened her shoulders. She didn’t like what he was implying. “We do. Arthur is my assistant manager.”

He studied her for a moment, thinking that she was probably one of those people who hadn’t a clue how to kick back. “I thought you came here to relax.”

Though his voice was low, and to an outside ear, easygoing, Lily felt as if she was being interrogated. “I did.”

He nodded at the pocket where she’d put her phone. “Don’t you think you should turn your phone off, then?”

She looked at him as if he’d just suggested that she practice skydiving without a parachute. She’d had a cell phone on her person ever since they’d been invented. In the early days that had meant carrying around something that had resembled a talking brick.

“Why would I want to do that?”

He heard the defensive tone in her voice and knew his estimation about her inability to relax was right on the money. “So that the people who work with you can’t bother you with questions.”

“They don’t work with me, they work for me,” she corrected. “And what do you suggest I do, shut off my phone, forget about everything and after two weeks, come back to no restaurant? No thank you. I want Arthur to bother me with work questions if it means I have a thriving restaurant when I get back.”

Max was trying to get a fix on what she was actually saying. “Then this Arthur you have running things for you while you’re gone is incompetent?”

Lily became indignant. Arthur might have his failings, but no one was going to say that about him but her.

“No, of course he’s not incompetent.”

A smile spread along his lips slowly, like the early morning sun creeping out over the horizon. “Oh.”

She didn’t like the sound of that at all. “What do you mean, ‘oh’?”

Again Max shrugged, pausing to look out the window before he answered. They were getting close to home. Longest run from the airport to Hades he could remember, he thought.

“Just that maybe you’re afraid that this Arthur guy can get along without you.” He watched her eyes. They began to darken as he spoke. “Maybe you don’t want to find out that you’re not as indispensable as you’d like to think you are.”

She’d had just about enough of this man. She hadn’t come all this way to be ignored by her siblings and packed off with some know-it-all guy with a badge.

“Is this what you do as sheriff? Hand out homey advice?”

He saw her eyes grow darker still, like a storm coming in from the ocean. “I like to think of it as pointing people in the right direction.”

“Well, your sense of direction is off, Lawman. Because my instincts are fine and I’ll handle my restaurant the way I see fit, thank you very much.” She could feel her anger building. “Where do you get off, telling me how to run my business?”

The louder her voice grew, the quieter his became. The way he saw it, for every storm, there had to be a calm. That was his role in the scheme of things. He rarely, if ever, lost his temper.

“Wasn’t telling you how to run the restaurant, I was telling you how to relax. Something—” he cast about for a polite wording of the problem “—I don’t think you quite know how to do.”

When was this damn plane going to land? She wanted to get out of these close quarters, where she was confined with this man, before she forgot that she was a lady. A very tired, exasperated lady. “Not all of us are lucky enough to have found a way to make a living doing nothing.”

“We’re here,” Sydney announced a little too brightly, hoping to prevent a major flare-up.

“Great,” Lily growled.

The sooner she was away from the know-it-all sheriff, the better. What were Alison and Jimmy thinking, sending him to accompany her? She would have sooner ridden in a cage with a boxful of tarantulas. They might have been hairier, but they would have certainly been better company. And a hell of a lot less judgmental.

The landing that came several minutes later was almost flawless, but Lily could still feel her stomach churn as the wheels touched down. The second they came to a stop, she began unbuckling her seat belt. It wouldn’t give.

It figured, she thought grudgingly as she heard Sydney disembark. Frustrated, she tugged on the belt, trying to disengage the two halves.

“Stuck?”

Lily looked up to see that the know-it-all with the liquid-green eyes had not only gotten off the plane, but had rounded the rear and come to her side. To add insult to injury, he was looking down at the belt that refused to come undone.

“I can manage,” she snapped.

For a second, Max debated standing back and letting her continue to struggle. But then his training got the best of him. Being a sheriff meant taking the good with the bad. This part was obviously the bad.

“Why don’t you stop being superwoman and let someone help you once in a while?” Not waiting for an answer, Max moved her hands aside and took over.

She was about to swat his hands away, but her desire to get free overrode her desire to put him in his place. “Ever hear about giving someone an inch and they take a mile?”

He raised his eyes to hers and, for a moment, managed to stop the very air around them. “I don’t want a mile, Lily. I don’t even want the inch.” The belt snapped apart. “There, you’re free.”

Why the air had managed to lodge itself in her lungs when he’d raised his eyes to hers just then, she had no idea.

Maybe she was a little unstable from the flight, she thought, her head slightly foggy.

“Yes,” Lily heard herself saying, “I am.”

As she reached for the side of the cabin, to brace herself before she took that first long step down, she felt his wide hands on her waist, his tanned, strong fingers registering one by one. The next moment, he was swinging her out of the plane and her feet were touching the ground.

It was hard working her tongue around the cotton in her mouth. “Thanks.”

He touched his fingers to the brim of his hat by way of acknowledgment. “Don’t mention it.” Glancing at Sydney, he said, “She’s all yours,” with what sounded like unadulterated humor and relief.

And with that, he turned and walked away.

Lily wished that she’d come in winter instead. That way, there would have been snow on the ground and she could have made a snowball. Throwing one at his head would have made her feel a whole lot better.