“I’d be lost without you,” Jenna said honestly, “but not because I need you to take care of me. You’re the only constant in my life. You’re the one I trust.”

They stared at one another and the air thickened with summer heat and possibility.

“I think I should go for a drive,” Alice said quietly, “and let you work. And maybe we should both think about what we’re saying. Because I don’t think it would be casual, Jenna.”

“I know,” Jenna said softly. “I’ll see you tonight.”

Alice smiled a little wistfully, and then she was gone. Jenna listened to the sound of the Audi roaring down the drive, imagining herself kissing Alice, holding her. Every time she tried, she remembered the demanding press of Gard’s mouth and her lean, hard body and the picture dissolved.

Gard knelt in the dirt next to the anesthetized pig. She inserted the oral speculum and checked the boar’s canines. All four were extruded, but one was close to four inches long and about to pierce his lip.

“We’ll have to take that one down,” she told Mike Burns, pointing to the longest of the four teeth. “The others don’t really look like they’re a problem, but I can saw them off if you want.”

“I think just the one for now.”

“No problem.” She grabbed the Gigli saw from her kit and hooked the eighteen-inch-long strand of woven wire, fitted out with a rod-like handle at each end, around the left mandibular canine. “You want to stabilize his head? This will just take a minute.”

Mike held the pig’s snout as she positioned the wire blade a few millimeters above the gum line. She thought she saw the pig twitch, but when she waited a few seconds, watching, he didn’t move again. She’d given him a hefty dose of ketamine and Telazol, so he should be out for a few more minutes. He was a big animal and she didn’t want him waking up while she was working. Just as she began to cut, a sharp crack reverberated through the air. This time she was certain the pig twitched.

“Gunshot,” Mike muttered. “Somebody jumping the gun on hunting season.”

“Great,” Gard muttered, sawing through the tooth with as much speed as she dared. She didn’t want to violate the pulp space. The pig would bleed and be in pain, and the open tooth root would be a setup for infection. Two more sharp cracks, followed by a volley, thundered overhead just as she completed the cut through the tooth. The pig jerked, reared his head up, and slashed her forearm with the canine of his upper jaw.

“God damn it!” Gard jerked back and fell on her ass. Mike let go of the snout rope, and the boar staggered to his feet. He took a few steps and went down again, still heavily anesthetized. Gard rolled to her knees, made sure he was breathing, and got to her feet. Blood ran down her forearm and trickled between her fingers.

“Shit! Did he get you bad?” Mike asked.

“I don’t think so.” Gard grabbed a handful of gauze pads from her kit and wiped the blood from her arm. A five-inch gash gaped across her forearm midway between her elbow and the top of her hand. She could extend her fingers, so none of the tendons were damaged. She’d be sore, but once it was sutured, it ought to be okay. “Nothing too serious.”

“You want to come up to the house and get cleaned up?”

“I’d better wash it out,” Gard said. “Then if you wouldn’t mind giving me a hand bandaging it up, that ought to do it.”

Mike looked at the pig, then at Gard. His face clouded. “I’m really sorry, Gard. If you want to send me a bill for the doctor—”

“Don’t worry about it, Mike. It was an accident. Not your fault. We’ll send you a bill for the tooth trim. The rest is on me.” Gard tilted her chin at her med box. “Can you get that?”

“If you’re sure,” Mike said, hurrying to gather up her kit.

“Hey. He’ll need those other teeth done sooner or later, right? I’ll be back for those and charge you double.”

Mike laughed.

After she got the wound irrigated out and a clean bandage wrapped around it, she stowed her gear with Mike’s help and drove slowly down the narrow lane that wound between his cornfields. Once she reached the dirt road that fronted his property, out of sight of the house, she stopped and called Rina.

“Sheriff Gold,” Rina said.

“Hey, it’s Gard. Are you working?”

“Got the night shift. Lucky me. What can I do for you?”

“I’m out at the Burns place, off Route Seven. I could use a ride to Bennington.”

“Got another date?” Rina asked.

“Not so you’d notice. I just got gored by Mike’s stud boar. My arm’s bleeding pretty good and I—”

“Jesus, Gard! Why didn’t you just say so. I’ll be there in ten minutes. Can you hold on that long?”

“I’ll be fine. I’m just a little bit worried about driving all that way. Once I get stitched up—”

“Just sit still. I’ll be there.”

Rina’s ten minutes was more like seven. She must have torn up the highway to get there. The cruiser pulled in sharply behind Gard’s truck, and Rina jumped out, leaving the motor running. Gard pushed her door open and climbed down.

“I’m okay,” Gard said. “I just didn’t want to take any chances driving.”

“Let me see.”

Gard held out her left arm. “It’s into the muscle but not as bad as it looks.”

“Uh-huh.” Rina gently cradled Gard’s hand, assessing the blood-soaked bandage. “Come on, let’s get you in the cruiser.”

Gard didn’t argue. Now that she was standing, she felt a little dizzy. She doubted it was from blood loss, more likely just from the aftereffects of adrenaline surge, but she was just as glad she wasn’t going to drive the thirty miles to the hospital. She patted her leg. “Come on, Beam.” The dog jumped down and trotted along beside her. When Rina looped an arm around her waist, she didn’t resist. “I appreciate this.”

“You thank me for something like this and I’m going to kick your ass.”

Gard slid into the front seat of the cruiser after Rina opened the door for her. Beam crowded in at her feet. She let her head fall back on the seat and laughed. “Love you too.”

Four hours later, Rina pulled in behind Gard’s truck and stopped with the engine idling.

“I can take you all the way home,” Rina said.

“I should be fine now,” Gard said. “I don’t want to leave my truck out here any longer. It’ll be dark in another hour or so, and I’ve got equipment and medications onboard. Besides, don’t you need to get to work?”

“I’m the sheriff, remember? I can be late if I want.”

“It’s not that far, and I didn’t let them give me any narcotics. The arm feels good now. I’ve got probably an hour before the local wears off. I’ll be home and tucked up by then.”

“I’ll follow you all the same.”

Gard opened the truck and motioned for Beam to hop in, got behind the wheel, and opened her window. “You don’t have to follow me, but I suppose I can’t talk you out of it.”

“Humor me,” Rina said.

“Don’t I always?”

Rina grinned wryly. “Not so’s you’d notice.”

Gard waited for Rina to get back to the cruiser and then she headed for home, driving carefully with Rina behind her. She was about a mile from her own driveway when a red convertible came zooming around a curve and passed her going a healthy eighty or ninety miles per hour. She glanced in her rearview mirror, caught the flash of Rina’s headlights signaling to her, and then the sheriff’s car made a fast, tight U-turn and screeched off after the convertible. Gard smiled as she pictured Rina locking horns with Alice Smith.

“What do you mean, she chased you down?” Jenna took one last look at the paragraph she had just finished, decided it was adequate, and closed the document. Turning in her chair, she gave Alice her full attention. She’d only been half listening the last few minutes until she registered the words sheriff, speeding, and fine. “How fast were you going?”

“I don’t know. Maybe a little over the speed limit—whatever that is—certainly not too fast for the roads around here. There’s never any traffic!” Alice threw up her hands, the picture of innocence. Jenna narrowed her eyes. She didn’t look contrite, she looked exhilarated.

“You enjoyed it, didn’t you?”

“Which part? The part where she kept me sitting on the side of the road for thirty minutes while she did a crossword puzzle in the front seat of her cruiser? Or the part where every single car, truck, hay wagon, and tractor that went by slowed to approximately a quarter of a mile an hour so everyone could peer into my car? I thought some of them were going to fish out cameras and take my picture.”

Jenna smothered a smile. Not just exhilarated, completely thrilled. “I bet you were hoping she’d get out her handcuffs.”

“You don’t know me well enough to suggest that.”

“The hell I don’t.”

“Believe me, the only thing she wanted to slap on me was a great big juicy fine. Which she did.” Alice folded her arms beneath her breasts and looked thoroughly put out.

“How much?”

“Two-fifty.”

“Wow. You must’ve really been going fast.”

Alice shrugged and looked sheepish before she managed to don her outraged expression again. But that little break had been enough to tell the story.

“What else did you do?” Jenna rose. “Come on. Let’s make some iced tea and sit outside and you can tell me all about it. The sunsets are gorgeous here.”

A few minutes later, they occupied matching rocking chairs on the broad back porch. Below them in the fields, the cows clustered in a patchwork quilt of brown and white. Broken shards of sunlight cascaded over the mountaintops, the golden light fracturing into reds and oranges, bleeding down the mountains. A breeze cooled the perspiration on her neck, and Jenna felt very close to peaceful.

“So. You were going to tell me exactly what you did to get such a whopping fine.”

“Nothing,” Alice said far too quickly.

“Come clean.” Jenna sipped her tea.

“I suppose I irritated her a little bit when I accused her of lying in wait behind Gard’s truck. And I might have suggested that speed traps were illegal or something. Maybe the word attorney slipped out.”

“Wait, back up. Gard was there too?”

“Well, sort of. They were coming back from the hospital, apparently, because the sheriff got very snarky when she said that she was actually doing something important when she had to stop to deal with an irresponsible, arrogant city girl who didn’t—”

Jenna’s breath caught. “Hospital. What does that mean, hospital?”

“I don’t know. She didn’t exactly give me the details.”

“Think,” Jenna said sternly.

“I was a little bit preoccupied at the time,” Alice protested. “It’s not like the world stopped for me when she mentioned Gard’s name, you know.” Alice must have figured out from Jenna’s glare that Jenna was serious, because she sighed and looked thoughtful. “All right, she said…she shouldn’t have to leave a responsible citizen like Gard, who’d just been released from the hospital, to deal with—” Alice waved her hand in the air. “And then that was the part about the irresponsible, arrogant city girl.”

“Gard was hurt?” Jenna said quietly.

“Well, she couldn’t have been hurt very badly, she was driving her truck.”

“But the sheriff was following her. And she said that Gard had just come from the hospital.” Jenna stood. “Why didn’t you tell me that right away?”

Alice looked confused. “Which part? The part where I was humiliated, or the part where I got the fine, or the part where I was insulted by—”

“Never mind.”

“Where are you going?” Alice called as Jenna hurried into the house.

“To be a good neighbor,” she called back.

Chapter Seventeen

Gard closed the refrigerator door with her knee, juggled the jar of mayonnaise and packet of lunch meat in the crook of her right arm, and fumbled them onto the table just as the doorbell rang for the second time.

“Coming,” she shouted as she made her way down the hall. Clicking on the porch light, she peered through the vertical windows beside the heavy oak door, jolting in surprise when she saw Jenna peering back. Hastily, she pulled open the door. “Hey.”

“Hi,” Jenna said quietly, her attention shifting to Gard’s forearm. “How are you doing?”

Frowning, Gard followed her gaze, then shrugged. “It’s nothing. How did you know?”

“Alice said the sheriff said something about you being at the hospital—” Jenna’s eyes widened and even in the waning daylight, her blush was vivid. “Oh my God! I’m starting to sound like the people in the diner. I am so sorry. You must think I’m completely invading your privacy—I am completely invading your privacy. I’m leaving right no—”

“No, don’t.” Gard pulled the door open wide. “Come on in. I was just making dinner.” She grimaced. “Except it’s baloney and cheese sandwiches and somehow I don’t think that’s quite what I ought to be offering you for your first meal here. Not after what you made for me.”