Coming Home Read Free

nearest and only neighbor, Nick Rios, who was staying in the Granger house, was a couple of heavily forested miles away, and after the packed, surging humanity of New York, it was a great feeling to know that she could walk stark-naked out her own door and yodel at the moon and no one would see or hear her. Not that she was going to do that. But she could. If she wanted.
    Grinning to herself, Roxanne walked inside the cabin. Crossing to the new refrigerator, she took out a bottle of water and, after twisting off the cap, wandered out the other door of the cabin. There was a small deck here, too, this one covered, and she had a charming view of a small, meandering meadow before the ground rose and forested hillside met her gaze. Like many places in the country, the rear of the cabin was both the entrance and the back door. It had always struck her as strange to drive up to the back of a house, until she took in the fact that the front had the views and no one in their right mind would sacrifice view for a front yard or driveway. The much-speculated-about greenhouses were situated to the south of the cabin, and sipping her bottled water, she'd started to amble in that direction when the sound of an approaching vehicle caught her ear.
    She wasn't expecting anyone, and puzzled, she turned back to walk over to the wide gravel area where her own jaunty, rag-topped Jeep was parked. A second later, a red truck, a one-ton dually, roared up the last incline and stopped in a cloud of dust.
    Recognizing the truck and the very tall, very big man who stepped out of it, her spine stiffened and her fingers tightened around the bottle of water. Jeb Delaney. Absolutely the last person she wanted to see.
    Like the lord of all he surveyed, he strolled over to where she stood. Roxanne once surmised that the commanding air about him came from his job—a detective with the sheriff's department. There was a sense of leashed power around him, like a big huntingtiger on a slim lead, but even she had concluded that it was nothing he did on purpose, it was just…Jeb.
    Most people liked Jeb Delaney. Old ladies doted on him; young women swooned when he smiled at them; men admired him, and young boys wanted to grow up to be just like him. Just about everybody thought he was a great guy. Roxanne was not among them. He rubbed her the wrong way and he always had. She couldn't be in his presence for more than five minutes before she was thinking of ways to knock his block off. It wasn't a new emotion—she'd felt that way since she'd been seventeen years old and he'd busted her for possession of a joint of marijuana. She'd been embarrassed and humiliated as only a teenage girl can be and she'd never forgiven him. The stern first-time warning and confiscation of the joint wasn't for her, nope, he'd made an example of her—probably, she thought crabbily, because she'd been friends with his brother, Mingo, and he hadn't wanted Mingo to become corrupted. It had been the worst incident of her young life—the whole valley had known the story about how he'd handcuffed her in the high school parking lot and put her in the backseat of his patrol car. Fortunately, he hadn't taken her to jail, as all her bug-eyed friends had thought, Mingo among them; he'd driven her home, giving her a tongue-lashing along the way that still made her cringe. Tight-lipped, he'd turned her over to her parents. She'd spent the rest of the school year grounded and endured the disappointed look in her parents' eyes—she'd hated that most of all. Hated the knowledge, too, that she had flaunted the joint practically right under his nose, just daring him to do something about it. She scowled. Well, he'd done something all right. He'd ruined that year of school. She brightened. Of course, she
had
gained a bit of notoriety over the affair, which had made her a big deal among her friends.
    That time was behind her now and over the years most of her cocky edges had been sheared off, but to this