Moonglow, Texas. Mary McBride
manufactured when Roosevelt was president. Not FDR, but Theodore. My God, calling this place a pit was flattering it.
“I’ve been too busy to decorate,” she said lamely.
“Uh-huh.” He was leaning over the sink, jiggling the rusty lock on the window while looking into the backyard.
While Shackelford scrutinized the landscape, Molly scrutinized him. He was about six-two, lean as a greyhound, probably in his mid-thirties, and he needed a haircut desperately, not to mention a shave. New jeans, too. The ones he wore were faded to a soft sky blue, replete with fringed rips. Her gaze traveled down his long, muscular legs in search of the obligatory hand-tooled boots worn by every self-respecting male in Moonglow, only to discover a pair of flip-flops instead. Flip-flops! Oh, well. They went with the ratty Hawaiian shirt, she supposed, and the sunglasses that hung from a thick cord around his neck.
He didn’t look dangerous. He didn’t even look competent! But the marshal’s office had said he was okay.
“Mind if I park my trailer under that live oak back there?” he asked.
“Fine. As long as you don’t drive through the house to get there.”
Molly glanced at the clock above the refrigerator. “Oh, God. I’m going to be late for work.”
“Well, you just go on,” he said. “Don’t worry about me. I expect to have all new locks and dead bolts installed by the time you get home.”
“Home?”
“From work.”
“But I work here.”
“Oh.” He looked confused for a moment, then shrugged. “Then I guess I’ll just have to do my best to stay out of your way, Ms. Hansen.”
“Well, I certainly hope so, Mr. Shackelford.”
Dan slid behind the wheel of his black BMW, then glared in the rearview mirror at the Airstream looming there. He swore roughly. He used to be able to thread any vehicle through the eye of a needle at ninety miles an hour in the dark of night. Now he couldn’t maneuver a goddamned trailer into a cement driveway in broad daylight.
Little wonder Bobby had assigned him the lowest of low-priority witnesses. Kathryn Claiborn’s terrorists, the Red Millennium, had all but blown their own heads off in labs in the U.S. and Beirut and Ireland this past year. As far as U.S. Intelligence knew, there was nobody left for the woman to identify, but they kept her in WITSEC, anyway, just in case. It was easier to put someone into the program than to get them out.
The worst thing that was going to happen to her during this computer crisis had already happened when Dan backed his trailer into her house. And the worst thing that was going to happen to him was discovering once and for all that he was washed-up.
He turned the key in the ignition. Well, hell. He could always make a halfway decent living on the demolition derby circuit. And maybe, if he was really, really lucky, he’d be demolished in the process.
This time he shifted into Drive, easing the ancient Airstream out onto Second Street, then circled the block until he found access through a narrow vacant lot into Molly Hansen’s backyard. After half an hour he had the trailer unhitched, his lawn chair unfolded in the shade of the live oak, and a warm beer in his hand.
It was only nine-thirty, but he felt as if he’d already put in a full day’s work trying to ignore Molly Hansen’s long blond curls and the dangerous curves of her body. He hadn’t been with a woman since…
Damn. He’d promised not to think about that. His nightmares were bad enough. How many times could you watch your partner die because of something you’d done or failed to do or simply overlooked? How long could you try to dream it different, only to have it all turn out the same? The answer, after nearly five months, was indefinitely. He took a long pull from the bottle and let the warm lager slide down his throat. Unless, of course, you overmedicated yourself into besotted oblivion, which was still his favorite place to be.
Not Moonglow, that was for sure. He’d never expected to come back here, to come full circle. Bad boy leaves town. Bad man comes back. Dan closed his eyes. Hell, it seemed there had been nothing in between.
Molly showered, dressed, put on her makeup, took her morning coffee into her tiny back bedroom office as she did every day, then proceeded to spend more time at the window watching Dan Shackelford not working than she spent working herself.
Trust the government to hire a good-looking bum who didn’t know a hammer from a Heineken, she thought, glad it wasn’t her money that was paying him to sit around swigging beer all morning.
For a moment, while she was showering, she’d actually gotten a little excited about the prospect of fixing up this falling-down house. Not that she’d ever really like it, no matter the improvements, but maybe she’d hate it a little less. Now it looked as if any repairs would be accomplished in an alcoholic haze. Her house would probably look worse, not better, once Dan Shackelford was done with it.
All of a sudden Molly wanted to cry, but she wouldn’t let herself. If she started, even so much as a sniffle, there was no telling if she’d ever stop.
“I hate my life,” she muttered, settling once more in front of her computer screen and forcing herself to focus on sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph of the most unrelentingly boring and ungrammatical prose in the history of English composition.
When she’d applied for the position of English instructor at the online university, it seemed the perfect choice for her new persona. It didn’t pay much, but her need for privacy and safety was greater than her need for money. There was nothing to spend it on in Moonglow, anyway. She’d approached the job with her typical determination to succeed, but the challenge of correcting her invisible students’ errors in spelling and grammar had quickly dissipated when she found herself correcting the same mistakes over and over and over again.
“I hate your life, Molly Hansen,” she muttered at the screen. “I hate your cutesy-poo name, too. And I hate your bleached-blond hair. I hate everything about you, including that bum who’s set up residence in your backyard.”
It had all gone wrong so fast that she’d barely had time to comprehend it before she had been whisked into WITSEC. Kathryn Claiborn’s life, the one she had struggled so long and hard to achieve, had literally blown up in her face.
She’d been crossing the campus of venerable Van Dyne College, where she was director of financial affairs in addition to being associate professor of business, taking her usual shortcut through the basement of the Chemistry Department on her way to the Administration Building, when her world had exploded. One minute she was waving a cheerful hello to Dr. Ian Yates and the pale, white-haired fellow by his side, and the next she was waking up in a hospital with bandages on her face and half a dozen federal agents in her face.
Nothing had been the same after that. Kathryn Claiborn had died, giving birth to Molly Hansen. Kathryn Claiborn had been so frightened at the thought of having her throat cut by the white-haired terrorist whom only she could identify that she had willingly abandoned her job, her home, her fiancé, even her very self in order to insure her survival.
“Way to go, Kathryn,” Molly said with a sigh.
There was no way she was going to be able to concentrate on slipshod essays this morning, so she turned off her computer, then went to the window to see if her handyman was still swilling beer. If he was, it wasn’t where he’d been swilling it earlier. His ratty lawn chair was empty.
Molly glanced at her watch. She had a one o’clock appointment for a root touch-up. Maybe, since it was Tuesday and hardly anybody in Moonglow got her hair done this early in the week, Raylene could fit her in a little bit early.
Raylene Earl wasn’t exactly a friend. Unable to disclose anything about her life prior to her arrival in Moonglow, Molly wasn’t in a position to make friends. Of course, that didn’t keep the hairdresser from talking her head off.
Raylene’s