“Why are you so determined to jump into the middle of this?” Jensen asked. “I could probably name all the kids in your class if I tried, based on gossip alone. There are such things as lost causes, you know.”
“I don’t believe in lost causes.” She scowled at him. “And the fact that there are adults in this town who engage in gossip about teenagers but fail to help them is an indictment of the entire Longhorn Valley. You should be ashamed.”
Jensen did not look ashamed.
“But why are you leading this effort to stamp out gossip on the mean streets of Cold River? You’re new in town. You don’t know all the players.”
“I’ve been here for three years.”
“You’re new until three generations have been born and died here, at least.” Jensen was grinning again, but that only made it all worse. Or something that she chose to call worse, anyway.
Harriet refused to allow him to sidetrack her. “Do you have something against a sixteen-year-old boy who might actually learn something from you?”
“Aidan Hall has no interest in learning anything from anyone. That’s likely why he’s in summer school. And he doesn’t look up to me. Or anyone else. He probably thinks you can’t get me to come in.”
“Since you have such strong opinions about a high schooler, surely you should come prove him wrong.”
“I know Aidan about as much as I know all the other members of the Hall family. Mean old Lucinda Early likes to say they have bad blood.”
“Lucinda Early is a lovely old woman and a respected elder in the community.”
“She’s mean as a snake.” Jensen grinned. “Personally, I like her. And I’m not saying she’s right. What I will say is that every time there’s a burglary or a car chase or any other bit of lawbreaking around here, there’s usually a Hall involved.”
“Aidan is sixteen.”
“Great. Two more years before he gets tried as an adult and joins his brethren in jail.”
“Or maybe not,” Harriet countered. “If you showed him he could imagine something better.”
She couldn’t have defined the look she saw on his face.
Then it didn’t matter, because the door to the ranch house swung open, and another man stepped out.
Harriet recognized Zack Kittredge, the Longhorn Valley sheriff, and smiled politely in greeting. Even though inside, she was all … jumbled up.
Jensen looked over at Zack too. And somehow, immediately, managed to look as if he were still faintly intoxicated, when moments before he’d been as close to stern as she imagined laughing, happy-go-lucky Jensen Kittredge ever got.
“Harriet.” Zack thumbed his hat. He looked from her to his brother, and his gaze got sharp. “What are you doing here?”
“She’s here to talk to me,” Jensen said, his voice big and loud again. Harriet was already folding her arms, so she hugged herself a little, not sure why the switch bothered her. “She’s looking for a role model, and apparently, I’m the only Kittredge brother that fits the bill.”
“I hate to be the one to disabuse you of this notion,” Zack said, supposedly to her. But he was grinning at his brother. “He’s no role model.”
“I’m sorry to interrupt your Sunday,” Harriet said, struggling to keep her runaway feelings out of her voice. She was sure it was simply that she was that passionate about her students’ welfare. It had nothing to do with Jensen Kittredge in a T-shirt, looking lazy and a little bit disgruntled behind his usual wide grin. “But I really do need your brother to help me out.”
“I’m sure he would be happy to help you out,” Zack told her, with another look Jensen’s way.
Jensen laughed. “Would he?”
“He would,” Zack retorted. “And Harriet, you drove all this way to find a role model and found Jensen instead. That’s bound to leave a person hungry. Why don’t you join us? We’re about to sit down for a good, old-fashioned Sunday dinner.”
Harriet opened her mouth to politely decline but saw the dark look Jensen was aiming her way. With his wolf eyes that made her feel no less histrionic the more she looked at them. He would not have invited her to Sunday dinner, she felt sure. What he would like was for her to go away and take her talk of role models with her.
But Harriet was not a quitter, and she intended to make this man show up in her library and act like a role model whether he liked it or not.
“I’d love to,” she told Zack.
And assured herself it was for the kids.
No matter how silly Jensen made her feel.
3
Jensen followed Miss Harriet Barnett and Zack, who was not doing a great job of hiding his smirk, into the house with a sense of something a lot like dread.
Because this was a bad idea.
He should have ordered Harriet off the property the moment he’d seen her, but he’d needed a moment to get his bearings. Because she’d haunted him a little more than she should have after he’d walked away from her last night, but he’d comforted himself with the sure knowledge that he would never lay eyes on her again.
Yet there she was.
Right out there in the yard.
Tiny and determined-looking, like an officious duck.
He eyed Harriet’s back as she walked behind his brother, finding that same shapeless cardigan no more appealing in the light of day than it had seemed in the depths of the Coyote. And somehow—between that and a dress he would have expected to see on an Amish woman, should the Amish unexpectedly turn up in the Longhorn Valley—he wanted to do something crazy. Like shake her a little bit and ask her why on earth she dressed like a woman fifty years her senior.
Or maybe not shake her, a voice inside suggested.
Because despite himself, Jensen found he was a little too close to mesmerized as he watched the movement of her hips beneath all those yards and yards of floral fabric.
Meanwhile, Zack was clearly enjoying himself far too much as he led Harriet inside and through the house. He was asking Harriet questions in his public sheriff’s voice, that, to Jensen’s mind, had a lot in common with a regular old bossy voice that he’d assumed at birth.
Or so Jensen assumed, since he was two years younger than Zack and couldn’t recall ever not hearing it.
Jensen didn’t believe for one moment that Zack had been moved to this level of hospitality at the mere sight of Harriet in the yard. He had seen an opportunity to annoy Jensen and was taking it. And he knew he would have happily done the same if the situation were reversed, but that didn’t lessen his current irritation any.
Though Jensen would happily die on the spot before he gave Zack the satisfaction of seeing that he was bothered in any way.
“Look, guys,” Zack said brightly as he delivered Harriet into the living room where most of the rest of the family was sitting and waiting for dinner to start. “Jensen has a guest.”
Behind him, Jensen smiled blandly, because that was all the reaction he planned to deliver. Especially when every other member of his family currently in the living room stared straight past Zack, and the improbable sight of Harriet beside him, to get a load of Jensen’s response.
He had no intention of giving them one.