“I’m going to be honest. I’m not interested in a relationship,” she said. “There are so many things I want to do and I need to make up for lost time.”
“Then let me help you. Look at what you did in Vegas.”
“Thanks, but I can’t,” she said with a smile. “I went to Vegas because I couldn’t do those things here.”
“Christine, you can do anything you want here. You just have to be smart about it.”
She hesitated and then shook her head as if to clear his advice from her mind. “You’re a bad influence.”
“I’ll show you everything I know,” he promised. It could be fun. Addicting. He needed to be very careful or the student would overpower the master.
“Okay, fine. I would love to see how your mind works.”
A chill swept through him. “What are you talking about?”
“You offered and I accepted,” she said as she walked back to the bank. “Ready or not, I’m going to find out everything about you.”
10
“THE PEOPLE IN Cedar Valley sure like to walk,” Travis said as he took a sip from his beer bottle and leaned back on Christine’s porch swing. It creaked as it gently moved back and forth. He gave a nod to a young couple in bright yellow raincoats as they strolled hand in hand down the sidewalk in the pouring rain. The two looked like they belonged in a sappy romantic musical. “I didn’t see anyone when I first arrived and now I feel like I’ve seen the whole town strolling down your street.”
“You are the talk of Cedar Valley,” Christine said, sitting next to him. She had changed out of the brown dress and wore a thin red blouse and dark jeans. Her hair was loose and fell past her shoulders, but his gaze kept going to her bare feet. He hadn’t expected her to go barefoot in front of him. It felt like an act of trust, but he knew he was reading too much into it.
“Why are people talking about me?” he asked. “I didn’t do anything. Yet.”
“Doesn’t matter.” She waved at the couple and they waved back. “They want to see what you look like. If we weren’t sitting out on my porch, they would find an excuse to ring my front door.”
“And here I thought we were sitting here because you wanted to show me off,” he teased. He was surprised that she had invited him to her house, but he didn’t get past the front door.
He had to find a way to get into the house. He needed a chance to discover where she was hiding the emerald. Unless she had it in a safe-deposit box. His stomach twisted with dread at that possibility. He would never get it back if that was the case.
He looked around the screened-in porch again. It was vibrant but relaxing. He could stay here for hours. “This is your favorite spot at home, isn’t it?”
She gave him a sharp look. “How did you know that?”
“It’s you.” From the small glimpse he had of her home, it had minimal furnishings and very few trinkets or pictures. The porch, however, was an explosion of color from the hunter-green floor to the printed throw pillows. There were plants in the corner and a shelf that held books and a stereo system.
“My parents never used the porch so I claimed it for myself. I wasn’t stuck inside, but I wasn’t out in the wild, either. It was a compromise.”
“Do you have your bucket list here?” he asked, glancing at the shelf. He didn’t see a box or a container that would store paper. Or an emerald. Chances were the stolen gem was where she kept her valuables. That bucket list was important to her. The emerald would be near it.
“You are obsessed with that list!” Christine said. “I swear there is one.”
He reached over and splayed his hand on her denim-covered leg. “Then tell me one thing on the list you don’t want people to know about.”
She scoffed at his suggestion. “Why would I tell you that?”
“I want to know what you wanted when you were eighteen that you don’t want now.”
“There are actually a lot of things on that list that I don’t think I’ll do,” she said as she gave him a thoughtful look. “I wanted to build my dream home. That was number twelve. It was going to be glamorous and in a big city. I had always felt cramped in this house and my dream home would have been a showcase for all the things I picked up on my travels.”
Travis couldn’t picture Christine in a big city, but she was someone who had souvenirs and scrapbooks. “And now?”
“I want to stay here. I’m lucky I don’t have a mortgage and I want to spend my time and money on something else. But it’s more than that. I always felt safe here. I can’t replace that.”