The Ransom. Maggie Price

      And in the People magazine he’d secretly bought to sate his curiosity about the woman who’d brutally clung to his thoughts over the past two years.

      Her laugh drifted on the cool air as she cupped her son’s chin, gave him a kiss, then straightened and turned toward the counter.

      With her gaze locked with Clay’s, Kathryn went still while everything around her slipped out of focus. A shudder shot down her spine and onward to bury itself behind her knees.

      If she took two short steps she could reach out and touch him. Touch the man whom she had once wanted more than she’d wanted even to breathe. The man she had made such a fool of herself over.

      She fought back humiliation along with the urge to grab Matthew into her arms and run as fast as she could away from Clay Turner, away from the past. The pain.

      But all she could do was stare back at him while she struggled for words that wouldn’t come. His face was thinner than she remembered, the hollows of his cheeks deeper. Lines were scored into the corners of his eyes and mouth. His body was trim, muscled and looked hard as granite. A white dress shirt, open at the neck, revealed curling black hair as rich in color as the hair that brushed the shirt’s collar. Beneath the brim of his Stetson, his dark eyes looked as sharp as a sword.

      Her gaze slid to his right cheek, now marred by a thin scar that slashed upward across his temple. A memory came: her own fingers stroking a similar scar on his back as they lay on rumpled sheets.

      “Hello, Kat,” he said quietly.

      “Clay.” Despite the blood pounding in her cheeks from his use of his private nickname for her, she kept her voice casual and controlled.

      “Been a long time,” he said.

      Not long enough. “It has,” she managed to say through stiff lips.

      “Mommy, you’re squeezing my hand too tight!”

      Jolting, she loosened her grip. “Oh, Matty, I’m sorry.”

      “You going to introduce us?”

      Her gaze whipped back to Clay. She needed to breathe, but she couldn’t quite remember how. “This is my son, Matthew. Matthew, this is Mr. Turner.”

      Matthew tipped his head back so far in order to meet Clay’s gaze that the boy rocked on the heels of his cowboy boots. Kathryn placed a steadying hand on his shoulder.

      “Hi, Mr. Turner.”

      “Hello.” Clay stepped closer and crouched, putting them eye to eye. He noted that Kathryn kept her son’s hand firmly in her own.

      “Nice to meet you, Matthew.” Clay skimmed a fingertip across the plastic badge pinned in the center of the boy’s T-shirt. “You the new law in these parts?”

      He nodded, his brown eyes sparkling. “I got to spit into Dr. Teasdale’s hand and that made me a deputy.”

      Clay raised a brow. “Sounds like the doc knows a good man when he sees one.”

      “Now, I can arrest the outlaws in mommy’s tunnel. Have you seen the tunnel?”

      The outlaw tunnel. Lifting his gaze to Kathryn’s, Clay saw that her face had paled. Was she thinking about all the nights she’d used the tunnel to sneak out of her house? About how he’d ride over to the Cross C after dark and wait for her in the stand of scrub oaks that hid the tunnel’s outer entrance so it couldn’t been seen from the house? Did she remember the time when a rainstorm whipped in and they’d had hot, wild sex in the tunnel?

      When she tore her gaze from his, Clay had his answer. Yeah, Kat, you remember. He struggled against the urge to tell her there was no way she could detest him more than he detested himself for the way he’d treated her.

      Instead he looked back at Matthew. “I’ve seen the tunnel. It’s a long stretch of land. Are you sure you can rustle up those outlaws all on your own?”

      Matthew nodded. “Me ’n Abby can do it.”

      “Who’s Abby?”

      “My weenie dog.”

      “Clay, your order’s ready,” the café owner said.

      “Thanks, Norman.” As he spoke, Clay kept his gaze on Matthew’s compelling face. “Time for me to go, Deputy. I’ll be sure I stay on the right side of the law so you and Abby won’t have to come arrest me.”

      “Okay.”

      “Matthew,” Kathryn said while Clay rose, “you can look in the display case and choose one cookie.”

      “Okay, Mommy.”

      Realizing the café had gone quiet around them, Clay checked across his shoulder. The man and woman in the booth, and all the teenage girls were staring holes through Kathryn. Since she didn’t seem to notice, he assumed her years of marriage to the heartthrob actor had made her immune to that kind of attention.

      When he looked back, her expression was impenetrable, her eyes unreadable.

      “I was sorry to hear about your grandfather,” he said quietly.

      “Thank you.” She closed her eyes for an instant. “And I’m sorry about your parents. Losing them that way must have been devastating.”

      Clay felt the bright, swift pain twist inside him. There was no way she could know how closely linked she was in his mind to their deaths. He tightened his jaw.

      “Guess we’ve both had our share of loss to deal with,” he said. “You’re doing a good thing by building the wing onto Layton’s hospital in Sam’s memory. He’d have been proud of you for continuing all he did for folks around here.”

      She smiled now, her lips as thin as a blade. “I’m sure,” she said then looked toward the counter. “Hello, Mr. Adams, how are you?”

      “Fine. I’m just fine, Kathryn. Seems like only yesterday you were sitting in my English class.” A blush settled under his skin and a muscle ticked in his cheek. “It was real nice, you mentioning my name when you won your Emmy award.”

      “You taught me about writing. I owe a lot of my success to you.” She looked back at Clay. “You mentioned you were leaving. Don’t let us hold you up.”

      Clearly she wasn’t interested in letting bygones be bygones. Couldn’t say he blamed her.

      He touched a finger to the brim of his Stetson. “See you, Kat. Bye, Matthew. Norman.”

      “Bye,” the boy responded. Norman nodded. The fact that Kathryn said nothing sliced Clay into a thousand pieces.

      With guilt and regret sitting in his stomach like jagged rocks, he snagged his sack off the counter.

      He headed for the door, deliberately distancing himself from Kathryn Conner for the second time in his life. This time, though, he was the one who felt all the pain.

      KATHRYN WOKE the following morning feeling as if a spider had woven a thick, sticky cobweb inside her brain.

      The sun’s rays slanted into her second-floor bedroom through the gauzy curtains, reflecting off the brass bed’s ornate grillwork. The light felt like ice picks stabbing into her eyes. She shoved at her tangled hair, thinking surely she hadn’t overslept. In the time she’d been back at the Cross C she had woken each day before dawn. As had Matthew.

      She told herself to get up, willed herself to, but her eyelids felt heavy and refused to stay open. On top of her lethargy, faint waves of nausea lapped at her stomach. Sick, she thought hazily. She’d picked up a bug. Since Matthew hadn’t been in to pounce on her bed like he did almost every morning it was possible he’d come down with it, too. The thought shot a sharp pang through her. Her concern wasn’t just a mother’s general worry that her child might be ill. Any sort of bug—even a cold—could have devastating effects on his transplanted kidney.

      That