Lover Beware

cold, dark eyes. For a frozen second her heart stopped in her chest.
    Michael.
    She blinked, barely registering the fact that for once she’d used his first name rather than the more impersonal address of “Rider.” He was dressed in a pair of tight, faded jeans, his torso bare, and for a dizzying moment she wondered if she’d imagined him. His hair hung loose to his shoulders, and his skin was deeply tanned, as if he’d recently spent a lot of time in a tropical climate. His face was altogether leaner, sterner, than she remembered, his exotic looks hammered into a tough maturity that made her stomach clench.
    His gaze flashed over her and she almost flinched at the cursory appraisal, then the uniformed police constable pushed him toward the station doors, and he was forced to look away.
    Numbly, she watched the broad shape of his back as he disappeared into the station, and registered that the shiny glint she’d noticed around his wrists was a pair of handcuffs.
    For a moment she went blank, then the reality of what was happening sank in. Rider was under arrest. If he were just being brought in for questioning, the police wouldn’t have cuffed him, which must mean they had enough evidence to carry out the arrest.
    There was no question in her mind about why he was being taken in. After spending just fifteen minutes in town she’d soon discovered there was no other topic of conversation than the home invasion, but everything in her rejected the thought that Rider could have had anything to do with the Dillon murder. In all the time she’d known him, they had barely spoken, let alone touched on subjects like values and ethics, but at an instinctive level she knew Michael Rider to his bones. The sexual attraction aside, she would trust him before she trusted Sergeant Tucker.
    The doors of the police station swung closed, and Jane lifted a bag of groceries out of her trolley and dumped it in the chilly bin in the rear of her station wagon, automatically placing ice packs in with the groceries so nothing would spoil in the heat. She noticed her hands were shaking, and remembered she hadn’t stopped to eat lunch, she’d simply finished her lemonade, showered and changed, and left for town. But that wasn’t the only reason she was shaking. She was furious—quietly, deeply furious. She wanted to march into the police station and demand to know what Tucker thought he was doing—
    “Do you reckon he did it?”
    Jane glanced at the red-haired woman who’d paused beside her, a toddler clasped on one hip. Yolanda Perkins was a plump, happily married mother of four. She and her husband, John, owned a small farm, and John also operated a lucrative earthmoving business. Yolanda had often been heard to say that, given John’s indifferent skills with anything that had hooves or ate grass, the D-eight bulldozer was the only thing that kept them solvent.
    Jane lifted her final bag of groceries into the rear of the station wagon and transferred her attention to the small crowd that had gathered on the sidewalk, which included a TV news crew, who had materialized out of a brightly painted van. “No,” she said flatly. “He didn’t do it.”
    Macie Hume, the barmaid at the local pub, stepped out of the shade of the supermarket overhang, a shocking pink handbag, which clashed wildly with her lime green microskirt, in one hand, and a polystyrene cup of coffee from Stevie’s take-out bar in the other. She eyed the police station and grinned. “I don’t care whether he did it or not, I can think of a better use for those cuffs.”
    Marg Tayler, who had managed the local drapery since time immemorial, and whose family Tayler’s Creek had been named after, emerged from the narrow frontage of her shop, crossed her arms over her thin chest, and eyed Macie. “He’s taken,” she remarked gruffly.
    Macie set her coffee down on the car parked next to Jane’s, rummaged for sunglasses, and slid them onto the bridge of her nose. “Do tell. Who’s the lucky girl, then?”
    “That’s nobody’s business but his own.”
    Macie settled her hip against the car bonnet and sipped her coffee. “I might decide to make Rider my business. I’d hate to see all that man go to waste.”
    “Like you haven’t tried already,” someone called from beneath the shady overhang. “What are you gonna do, Macie, write to him in prison?”
    Macie sipped her coffee and flipped her middle finger in the general direction of the comment.
    Marg