Blindside

of it. I’m lucky to remember my coat.”
    “Eastern Tennessee is a very beautiful place, Katie.”
    She nodded. “Yes, it is. It’s the mountains, really—always there right beside you, going on farther than the eye can see. Then you’ll look at this incredible hazy blue glaze over the Appalachians. You know, I’ve always found it strange that people think we’re country bumpkins, living out here. But the fact is, we aren’t exiled here. We look up and see more stars than any city person can ever hope to see, and you know what? We actually sometimes feel the urge to talk to strangers. You’ve seen the cows, the dairy farms, the rolling farmlands. We’re rich here, Miles, more than rich, we’re blessed.”
    Miles studied her face as she spoke. “Yes, I can see that.” He paused, looked toward the kids, then said, “I won’t be here in the winter, Katie.”
    “No,” she said slowly, “I don’t suppose you will.”
    He slashed his hand through the air in frustration but he kept his voice low so the kids wouldn’t hear. “Usually I ask a woman I’m interested in to go out to dinner, maybe a show in Washington. Yet here I am living in a woman’s house and I’ve known her for what—four days?”
    “I’m the sheriff, that’s different.”
    “Is it?”
    She made a restless movement with her hand, thensmoothed out her fingers along her thigh. “You know what’s funny? My husband never lived here.”
    He let her sidetrack him, it was safer. “What did you do with the jerk?”
    She turned on the sofa, tucked one leg beneath the other, and leaned toward him. “The jerk’s name is Carlo Silvestri, and he’s the eldest son of an Italian aristocrat, and you’re right, he’s a jerk all the way down to his Ferragamos.”
    “An Italian aristocrat? You’re kidding.”
    “Nope. His father is Il Conte Rosso, a big shot who lives near Milan, into arms manufacturing, I believe.”
    “How ever did you meet an Italian aristocrat?”
    She gave a really big sigh. “I still feel like I should punch myself in the head for being so stupid. Carlo and two of his buddies were visiting Nashville. They wanted to see Dolly Parton’s breasts, one of them told me, so they drove east. When they landed in Knoxville, one of them, a Frenchman who must have thought it was Le Mans, was speeding like a maniac on Neyland Avenue, one of Knoxville’s main streets. I stopped them after a bit of a chase. The idiot had been drinking and nearly went over the guardrail into the Tennessee River.”
    “So you hauled his ass off to jail?”
    “Yeah, I did. Carlo decided he didn’t want to leave when his buddy got sprung. He said he fell in love with me when he saw me clap on the handcuffs. It was a whirlwind romance, I’ll tell you that. I was twenty-four years old, he was thirty-six, and I knew he was too old for me, knew the last thing he could ever do was leave Italy for good and live in Tennessee, but none of it mattered. I stopped thinking and married him. It didn’t matter that he was a spoiled egotist, too rich to have a clue about what responsibility meant. Women do that, you know. Stop thinking.”
    “So do men.”
    “For men, it’s lust. For women, it’s romance. You can get blindsided by both. I got pregnant right away. Theproblems started probably about a week later and never stopped. When Keely was about a month old, Carlo’s father, Carlo Silvestri senior, Il Conte Rosso, shows up on our doorstep in Knoxville, announces that his son called him to come and save him. I really got a good laugh out of that one. I told Carlo senior that I’d removed his son’s handcuffs a very long time before.”
    “So what happened?”
    “Daddy did something that will endear him to me and this town for the rest of our collective lives.”
    Miles sat up. “What did he do?”
    “He offered to buy me off for a million dollars if I would divorce Carlo without fuss, change Keely’s name to Benedict—my name—and never contact them again.”
    “You’ve got to be joking.”
    “No, I’m not. I remember I just sat there and stared at him, trying to picture all those zeroes following a one and all those commas actually written out on a check, and wondering: Will they all fit in that little space?
    “He actually believed I was playing him, that I was a tough cookie, and so do you know what the dear man did? He actually upped the ante. I’ll tell you though, I made sure the money was wired into my account before I