Long Road Home by Joann Ross Page B

From the moment of the diagnosis, everyone and everything else had fallen off her priority list. Which had been easy enough to do with Jace out of the country in Australia.
    While her marriage might have been a farce from the beginning, Austin’s divorce was still fresh. She’d already learned what could happen when you impulsively leaped into a relationship.
    As happy as she was about Sawyer’s return home, the timing was all wrong. It was too soon. She could be jumping from the proverbial frying pan straight into the fire.
    Yet, thinking of fires, her mind reeled backwards to that flaming kiss. Of her arms wrapped around Sawyer’s neck while she strained against him, wanting, needing more as their bodies melded hotly. Sawyer’s mouth had claimed hers while his strong hands had streaked down her back, pulling her tight against his aroused body.
    “Well?” Heather asked, breaking into the fevered memory.
    “Okay,” she said on a rush of breath before she could change her mind. “Let’s go for it.”

6
    “I ’M GOING INTO town to do some shopping,” Winema Clinton said. “Want to come along?”
    Buck Merrill dragged his gaze from a rerun of the 2011 NFR bull riding championships. “Why in the blue blazes would I want to go shopping for female doodads?”
    “I’m getting groceries. In case you haven’t noticed, we’re getting low.”
    Buck made a sound somewhere between a curse and a grunt. Call him sexist, but unless you were talking a chuck wagon out working a roundup, as far as he was concerned, cooking was woman’s work. A thought he’d started keeping to himself after Austin had surprised him by letting him know, in no uncertain terms, that for his information, most of the great chefs of the world were men.
    She’d stood there, her hands fisted on her hips, practically throwing the words at him like stones. She’d been mad a lot lately. Which wasn’t anything like her, but Buck had decided that it beat the way she’d been last year. When her mood had dived lower than a diamondback in a rut.
    At least mad showed a spark.
    “I wasn’t going to drag you through the mercantile.”
    Being that River’s Bend was a small town, he’d known Winema all of his life. They’d gone to school together. After her husband’s lumber mill had burned down, Warren had to switch gears and take up teaching machine shop at the high school. Needing the extra income, Winema had started coming in once a week to clean for Buck’s wife.
    It was a few months later when Britta had taken off to Sweden, leaving him with a seven-year-old daughter to tend to. Since what Buck knew about little girls could fit on the head of a pin and still have room for a thousand dancing angels, he’d been grateful when Winema had suggested that so long as her kids could stay with her when they weren’t in school, she’d be willing to come help out with Austin for a spell.
    More than two decades later, she was still here. Though Warren, unfortunately, was not, having keeled over from a heart attack in Young’s Hardware while picking up a gallon of apple-green paint for their kitchen six years ago.
    “I thought you might want to stop by Harry’s, get your hair trimmed and a shave, and maybe play a game or two of checkers while you’re there,” she said.
    “No point in spending good money when you can cut my hair.” Buck rubbed his chin, feeling the scruff of bristles he’d ignored for the past week. “And there’s nothing wrong with my hands. I can damn well still shave myself.”
    “Then why don’t you?” she challenged.
    Bossy woman. He was about to ask her if she’d henpecked Warren to death, but was able to stop the words, which had shot from his brain to the tip of his tongue, just in time.
    “No reason to shave to watch TV,” he mumbled.
    “My point exactly. You spend too much time in front of that boob tube,” she countered. “When was the last time you got out and mixed with folks?”
    They both knew that had