Mad About Max. Penny McCusker

off toward his son. And he knew just how to saunter, she thought as she watched his long, strong legs carry him and his jeans-clad backside away from her.

      “You should tuck yourself into bed with something hot all right, but if I were you, I’d try the doctor rather than his cure.”

      “Janey!” Sara glanced around, worried that someone had overheard her best friend—her only friend, aside from Max—and the one person she could confide in about Max. Without Janey Walters’s friendship, unquestioning support and wicked sense of humor, Sara knew she’d have gone off the deep end years ago.

      “Relax,” Janey said. “I’m not about to let anyone hear me talking like that. I have a reputation to uphold in this town.”

      “So do I,” Sara said glumly.

      “Aw, poor Sara.” Janey stuck out her bottom lip in sympathy, and put her arm around Sara’s shoulders. “People just pick on you because you’re an outsider. One of them city gals,” she added in an overdone drawl.

      “I’ve been here almost six years,” Sara muttered. “When do I get to be one of you folk?”

      “When pigs fly,” Janey said matter-of-factly. “Either you grow up around here or you marry someone from around here—then you get accepted by default. It’s tradition.”

      Sara felt even more dejected by that. “I can’t change the past, and it doesn’t look like I have much hope for the future, either.”

      “Don’t take it so hard. Everyone knows you’re the best thing to hit this town since government ranching subsidies. Wondering what you’ll do next is more entertaining than anything on TV, and more lucrative, too.”

      “Thanks,” Sara said on a heavy exhalation. “I’d managed to forget about the pool.”

      Mike Shasta, owner of the Ersk Inn, had run the betting pools in town longer than anyone could remember. There were the normal sports, and things like who was going to have the prize bull at the county fair that year. Of course pretty much everyone voted for themselves in that one, and few of the ranchers had time to sit around watching sports, especially during the summer, so the baseball pool had never been what Mike called successful. Hockey came in the winter, so it typically did the best of all the sports pools.

      But never as well as the Sara Lewis pool.

      The Sara Lewis pool was a big white sheet of poster board that hung on the wall of the Ersk Inn, with dates across the top and times down the side, forming squares for each sixty-minute interval. People paid five dollars to put their name in a square, hoping they’d be lucky enough to choose the occurrence of her next accident. As technology went, it wasn’t exactly state of the art, but that poster board did the job. As a matter of fact, it got a lot of attention, Sara had heard. As if making a fool of herself every few weeks wasn’t enough, practically the whole town spent a good portion of their leisure time hoping she’d do it again and keeping a sharp eye out to make sure they didn’t miss it when she did. If anyone but Max had known why she was wearing a paint-stained art apron at Open House…

      It didn’t bear thinking about. Much as she loved Janey and trusted her silence, Sara wouldn’t even tell her best friend that she’d accidentally superglued herself to Max. Of all the things she’d done, this was the most humiliating yet.

      All she had to do, Sara told herself, was get through the rest of the evening with no one the wiser. It couldn’t be all that hard, and as the evening progressed, it seemed as if she might just pull it off. No one asked about her apron, and the scavenger hunt she and the children had set up was a big success, every parent ending up with a prize all the more precious for having been made by their own child’s hands. Sara stayed away from Max, which meant that she kept her composure.

      And missed the moment when he let the cat out of the bag.

      A school event was no different from any other social occasion in town. The women gathered in one corner to trade recipes and organize the next potluck. The men gathered in another to discuss the price of beef and swap fish stories. Aside from Joey, if there was anything in the world Max liked more than his ranch, it was fishing. And if there was one thing universal to great fishing stories, it was exaggeration.

      Max apparently lifted his arms to lend credence to his latest one-that-got-away tale, and the red pleather-decorated button popped right out of the waistband of his pants.

      It was the sudden hush from that corner of the room that first caught Sara’s attention. She glanced over in time to hear The Question.

      “Hey, Max, what’s that on your button?”

      Sara really didn’t blame Max. It was an accident, and if there was anything she understood it was accidents. Just like she understood when he fumbled for an answer, his gaze automatically shooting to her.

      That stereotype about big, dumb cowboys was just that—a stereotype. As if it had been choreographed, the circle of men turned and looked at her, back at Max’s traitorous button, then back at her, this time their eyes dropping inevitably to her skirt—or what could be seen of it behind her apron. Her big, concealing apron.

      The room erupted in shouts, questions about who had the winning square and laughter. Parents and students from the surrounding classes crowded in, attracted by the pandemonium, until the room was overflowing. Sara found herself at the front of the room, standing right beneath that troublesome banner as the whole embarrassing story came out.

      After one glance at Max, his only assistance to shrug apologetically, Sara let everyone laugh and tease her good-naturedly, smiling and going along with the jokes. She caught sight of Jenny Hastings, her hair cropped boyishly short except for the tiniest fringe of barn-red. If Jenny could withstand the fallout of one of Sara’s episodes, Sara could surely take it—within reason.

      She let the ribbing go on for a full fifteen minutes, then held up her hands, her sudden willingness to talk bringing an instant hush to the room. “All that matters is that we saved the banner,” she said, looking up at the item in question—just at the moment it decided to come loose.

      The superglued center seam parted with a quiet whoosh, the two sides of the banner floating down right over her head. As if that wasn’t enough, the tacks she’d used to hold up the corners suddenly popped out, wreathing Sara in ten feet of white paper that smelled like crayon and felt like the weight of the world settling on her shoulders.

      She slumped back against the blackboard, listening as everyone filed out of the room. Even when Max offered to help her, she sent him on his way. As accidents went, having a paper banner over her head wasn’t so bad. At least it hid her tears.

      Chapter Two

      “Hi, Dad!”

      Max shouldered the fifty-pound sack of grain he’d been about to load into the back of his pickup and turned toward the entrance of the feed store to see Joey running in his direction. Sara stood in the open doorway, one hand on the jamb, the other lifted to shade her eyes from the bright sunshine so she could see into the dim interior.

      Joey was halfway across the cavernous space when he veered off suddenly, like a heat-seeking missile. Only in Joey’s case, it was kittens that drew him, a whole carton of them with FREE written on the side in big, bold letters.

      Just what he needed, Max thought as he bumped the sack up and off his shoulder, letting it fall onto the pile in the back of the pickup. Joey already had a hamster, three goldfish, a parakeet and two dogs, and those were the indoor pets. But even if he’d known about the kittens when he asked Sara to drop Joey off after school, Max still would’ve done it. It would be worth adding to the menagerie if he succeeded in dragging her out of her self-imposed isolation. And dragging, he figured, was exactly what it would take, considering that she was going to leave without even saying hello to him or goodbye to Joey.

      “Sara, wait,” he called before she could do more than turn around.

      For a minute it seemed she was