Almost Perfect Read online




  “Your past isn’t any of my business,” Carolyn told him.

  Letter to Reader

  Title Page

  Books by Marilyn Tracy

  About the Author

  Dedication

  An Almost, Texas Historical Perspective

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Epilogue

  Copyright

  “Your past isn’t any of my business,” Carolyn told him.

  “Of course it is,” Pete said. “I’m living in your bunkhouse, eating my meals with you and your daughters. I’m taking my baths in your house, for God’s sake. Who’s business is it, if not yours? You should want to know what kind of man you brought in here.”

  Halfway through his words, her eyes had met his and widened. In his list of things he’d done while he’d been at her ranch, he hadn’t mentioned kissing her, molding her to his body, enticing her beyond her wildest dreams. But he might as well have shouted it, for it hung between them like a palpable presence waiting to be acknowledged.

  “Run a check on me, Carolyn. If you want the truth, go to the source,” he said with a slow, bitter twist to his lips. “Call the FBI.”

  Dear Reader,

  Once again, you’ve come to the right place if you’re looking for that seductive mix of romance and excitement that is quintessentially Intimate Moments. Start the month with The Lady in Red—by reader favorite Linda Turner. Your heart will be in your throat as rival homicide reporters Blake Nickels and Sabrina Jones see their relationship change from professional to personal—with a killer on their trail all the while. And don’t miss the conclusion of the HOLIDAY HONEYMOONS miniseries, Merline Lovelace’s The 14th. . .and Forever. You’ll wish for a holiday—and a HOLIDAY HONEYMOON—every month of the year.

  The rest of the month is fabulous, too, with new books from Rebecca Daniels: Mind Over Marriage; Marilyn Tracy: Almost Perfect, the launch book in her ALMOST, TEXAS miniseries; and Allie Harrison: Crime of the Heart. And welcome new author Charlotte Walker, as she debuts with Yesterday’s Bride. Every one of these books is full of passion, and sometimes peril—don’t miss a single one.

  And be sure to come back next month, when the romance and excitement continue, right here in Silhouette Intimate Moments.

  Enjoy!

  Leslie J. Wainger

  Senior Editor and Editorial Coordinator

  * * *

  Please address questions and book requests to:

  Silhouette Reader Service

  U.S.: 3010 Walden Ave., P.O. Box 1325, Buffalo, NY 14269

  Canadian: P.O. Box 609, Fort Erie, Ont. L2A 5X3

  * * *

  ALMOST PERFECT

  MARILYN TRACY

  Books by Marilyn Tracy

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  Code Name: Daddy #736

  *Almost Perfect #766

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  *Almost, Texas

  MARILYN TRACY,

  author of twelve Silhouette novels and the widely praised Santa Fe Tarot Deck, written and designed in collaboration with her artist sister, Holly Huber, continues to live in Portales, New Mexico, in one of the oldest homes in town. She wiles away the hours of the day and night behind her computer, locked in the novel zone; chatting with friends while seated on the back of her forty-foot cement dragon; picking out a melody at her out-of-tune piano; or hugging her guitar, writing a new theme song to go with her books.

  Marilyn speaks Russian, a smattering of Hebrew, a bit of Spanish, and claims fluency in Texan. She likes writing about real people with real problems and loves exploring that moment when two people find a connection that can bring them happiness. She also loves hearing from her readers, enjoying the glimpses she receives of their lives, interests and loves.

  For John, who really wanted to know how Pete felt.

  For Dad, who filled me in on drug deals and state troopers.

  For Charles, who buoys me through deadlines.

  For Melissa, who believes in Almost, Texas.

  And for Chris, who makes fantasies come true.

  An Almost, Texas Historical Perspective

  Home to some six-hundred sunbaked people, the little town of Almost huddles the New Mexico-Texas border, roughly at the midpoint of what’s known as the Panhandle. After nearly a hundred years of hot dispute, the small community can rightfully take its place in the Texas—and New Mexico—history books. Not because its townspeople fought at the Alamo, rousted Geronimo from their land or drove Pancho Villa from their streets, but because a government surveyor finally decided Almost should delete one state and add a comma. At that point, Almost found its current identity: Almost, Texas.

  The Almost, Texas terrain is flat as the proverbial pancake, except where former rivers have carved great gullies; arid as the moon, unless a tornado and flash-flood watch is in progress; and such plant life as can survive the high summer temperatures and the extreme cold of winter appears spindly, spiky and utterly alien to the human species, except the lush green fields of maize, peanuts, potatoes or cotton that farmers lucky enough to have irrigation rights maintain. In other words, Almost could be called a land of contrasts.

  And yet, people live and thrive there.

  Almost has a combination minimart grocery store and gas station and a joint Almost Volunteer Fire Department and Post Office and no stop lights. The small town also boasts of the quality to be found in the Almost Public School, covering grades kindergarten through twelfth under one roof, though the junior class consists of only one student.

  The town also offers an active Almost Over-Sixty Club, and the friendliness found in the Almost Antique Store cum junk shop and the Almost Café—which serves all-you-can-eat chicken-fried steak on Saturdays and is always closed on Sundays—can’t be surpassed anywhere in the Texas Panhandle.

  The town’s three churches—the Almost Methodist, Almost Baptist, and Almost Catholic—thrive in the small community and serve as the predominant social life in the area.

  The town also maintains an Almost Historical Society which keeps exhausting records of all goings-on in the community. Alva Lu Titwater serves as current president of the society and takes pride in her assiduous accounting of all events transpiring in Almost today.

  According to Alva Lu Titwater, “Dry-land farming—a method whereby farmers rely on the annual rainfall for whatever water is needed for crop irrigation and one most farmers will say destines a rich man to be poor—and graze-land ranching provide the base of Almost’s economy.”

  As recently as the 1960s the town could boast seventeen active oil-and-gas wells. The community of Almost literally boomed. Unfortunately, the oil crunch in the eighties brought a swift closure to those wells due to the high costs of pumping and transporting oil and gas, resulting in Almost’s annual revenue plummeting by more than two-thirds.

  As Homer Chalmers, one of the seniors playing checkers in the shade of the Almost Public School’s wide veranda says, “A feller asked me the other day what I’d do if I won the lottery. I thought about it awhile, then I says to him, why I reckon I
’d go back to farming, ’til I used all that money up, too.”

  On different days, depending perhaps on his success with checkers, Homer might substitute rancher or oilman for the profession needed in his punch line.

  Newcomers should understand that the town of Almost took root in the desert soil before the turn of the century—the last century, the old boys at the school’s checkerboard games would say—and like other desert flowers, it managed to cling to life despite droughts, grasshopper plagues, hoof-and-mouth disease, vesicular stomatitis, oil crunches, violent storms, and young people wanting to move away for the lure of city lights.

  People in Almost cling to the belief that crime has no hold in their town, though just last year a student shipped to an alternative school boasted his father was the biggest pornography dispenser in Almost. Since even the newest teacher at the ‘fix-it’ school down in Pep, Texas, knew that Harlan Waniack had served his time for distributing questionable material nearly twenty years before and, as he now serves as a bus driver for the more remote areas around Almost and has the cleanest driving record in the county and never once misses Sunday morning or Wednesday night services at the Almost Baptist Church, this assertion was taken with a huge grain of salt.

  Since the small community squats a mere hour’s drive from any nearby city, Almost doesn’t have a regular physician, no surgeon, no tax accountant, and no real estate agency. A town of six hundred people doesn’t need such accoutrements. Almost only needs townsfolk.

  Notable people in Almost include Sammie Jo Spring, co-owner with her husband Cactus Jack, of the Almost Minimart and Gas station. Sammie Jo serves as the town gossip and is the beloved aunt of many of Almost’s children. She’s an avid movie buff and television watcher and stocks the store with any movie she considers interesting. Cactus—nobody knows where he came by the nickname and because of his garrulousness, everyone seems loath to ask—runs the gasoline end of the operation while Sammie Jo handles the store inside. Cactus is as heavy as Sammie Jo is slim. It’s rumored in Almost that the couple were sweethearts in the Almost Public School some fifty years before and no one doubts this as the two of them are obviously still enamored with each other. No one refers to the fact that Sammie Jo has breast cancer and is undergoing chemotherapy, but on chemo days, extra casseroles always appear on her kitchen counter.

  Dr. Charles Jamison, a veterinarian of both small and large animals, moved to Almost some twenty years ago and townspeople still consider him a newcomer. In his time in Almost, and to his continual amazement, Doc Jamison has delivered twenty babies, of the human variety, and treated nearly every soul in town for one ailment or another. His wife, Thelma, regularly won prizes for her rhubarbstrawberry pie every year at the county fair in Levelland, and women in her church group were dismayed when she passed away without passing along her prized recipe. Because Almost lies in a ‘dry’ county, Doc Jamison doesn’t have the heart to tell her Almost Baptist friends that the secret ingredient was a generous fourth of a cup of rum.

  Carolyn Leary, the widow of Sammie Jo’s nephew, Craig, who left Almost to go to college and became the town’s first real celebrity by becoming Almost’s first citizen to obtain a law degree and practice his craft in Dallas, moved to Almost only a month ago, settling into the rundown ranch house on her husband’s deceased parents’ place. Since most of the ranch land was sold for taxes years earlier, she inherited only some eighty acres of land plus the house, bunkhouse and barn. In prime country, eighty acres might count for something, but in Almost, during drought years, she was lucky to find her house with a roof and a barn that could stall a horse. The full value of the land appraised at less than the cost of the U-Haul that moved her and her two girls out to Almost. And she arrived to graffiti on her door warning her to leave town or else.

  Another Leary of note is Taylor Smithton, Carolyn’s sister-in-law, a Leary by birth and another widow forced to pick up the threads of her life when her peacekeeping husband was killed in the line of duty. She’s done a fine job of raising her triplet eleven-year-old sons, and considers her life full and rich, if a little lonely at night. Her boys, on the other hand, want a new dad and have just the right man in mind. Through exhaustive research, the boys have discovered that all their prospective new dad needs to do is see their Mom once and he’ll fall instantly in love. But a little mayhem might expedite matters.

  Craig and Taylor’s sister, Allison Leary, is yet another of the legendary beautiful—and reportedly unlucky—Leary women. Everyone in town knows Allison left home abruptly and hasn’t been back to Almost since the day her parents were buried fifteen years before. Typically, however, the afternoon Allison pulled back into town after her long absence, old Homer Chalmers looked up from his checker game and asked, “Been to Lubbock, have you, girl?” No one knows where Allison’s been all these years or why she’s come back. But there’s something very different about her.

  There are plenty of other folk living in Almost, Texas, but Alva Lu Titwater, Jackson Bean, Dallan and Mickey Peterson, and the nearly six hundred other Almost souls, are Almost born and bred and adhere to the principle that governs the small town in West Texas: what you don’t know can’t hurt you; what you know can bring you grief; and what you learn is probably best left untold.

  And that would be true except for three stories of three Almost Leary women—Carolyn, Taylor and Allison-because the telling of their stories put Almost, Texas on the map.

  Chapter 1

  Carolyn Leary drove the Ranger with one shaking hand and wielded the huge, attached flood lamp with the other. The lamp strafed a good two acres at a time, highlighting half-a-dozen pairs of red, startled eyes, rabbits caught unaware, mice, owls, nighthawks, even a coyote or two.

  Her heart thundered in her chest and her eyes felt strained beyond endurance. She didn’t have to glance for the eight-hundredth time at the clock on the dashboard; the ink black sky with its millions of indifferent stars painted an all-too-accurate picture of the late hour.

  Where were they?

  Bratwurst, the old dun gelding named both for color and temperament, had lathered into the corral shortly before dark, reins trailing, eyes still rolling white from his obviously furious run. He hadn’t been bleeding anywhere and the burrs he’d collected in his tail suggested he’d run through the tall careless weeds on the MacLaine place.

  She’d told the girls not to venture too far from the main house. They knew what dangers lurked out there these days. But they’d gone out anyway, deliberately disobeying her, riding off while she’d been closeted with the biggest stack of bills this side of the Pecos.

  When she got her hands on the pair of them. . .if she got her hands on them. . .

  Carolyn choked back a sob. She wouldn’t cry. She didn’t have time; she had to find Shawna and Jenny. She rounded a small rise and slammed her fist against the horn in three long blasts, their long-ingrained search signal—a desperate message she’d never had to employ before. If it had been daylight, the girls would know, at that sound, to head directly—and as fast as possible—to the main house. At night, they were to sit tight, make as much noise as they could and start a fire. They always had matches in their pockets for just such an emergency.

  It didn’t comfort her any to know she wasn’t the only one out searching for her children. After her second frantic pass by the house and finding them still missing, she’d called Doc Jamison, the veterinarian arid town brother figure in the nearby village of Almost, Texas, and asked him to rally the other ranchers for help. The only official authority in the vicinity, a deputy marshal, had left the area some six months before without replacement, so it was up to the local populace to form search-and-rescue parties. She’d also called her sisters-in-law, and they were calling all possible friends and relatives to see if the girls might be somewhere accessible. The trouble was there were far too few actual people and too many real miles to cover.

  And the girls were so terribly young.

  And the Wannamacher brothers
so terribly vicious.

  Deep into the MacLaine’s property, she began driving more cautiously than she had before, since the MacLaine place was riddled with deep gorges carved by a river long since run dry. It was worthless as farmland because of the ravines that scored the property and less than worthless as ranchland because cattle could easily fall prey to the dangerously loose ledges along the old riverbed.

  But Shawna and Jenny found endless enjoyment in exploring the riverbeds, the strange rock formations, and in speculating on the seemingly multitudinous number of Indian encampments they claimed to have discovered.

  What if a rattler had spooked Bratwurst and he threw them right into the deadly desert creature’s fangs? No, that was impossible; this was February and rattlers weren’t a problem in winter. What if the horse had stumbled on the precipice of a ravine and her daughters lay broken and hurt at the base of a shallow cliff? What if. . .?

  She couldn’t think about what could have happened. She’d go crazy that way. All she could do was continue her search, pausing every few agonizingly long minutes to blast her message on the horn and light the countryside with her blinding flood.

  The bright, daylightlike flood lamp revealed a sharp, conical hill directly in front of her, a rise her Ranger couldn’t begin to ascend and Carolyn threw the vehicle into a rocking Park and clambered from it. The rise was the single highest spot for miles around and if the girls had lit a fire out there somewhere, this hill would let her see it.

  She reached the apex of the rise, gasping for breath, not because she was out of shape, but because she was so desperate to see some indication her daughters were all right. Were alive. She could see the glow of Almost’s few lights off to the right, and those of the larger and aptly named Levelland far off to the left. And directly in front of her, south and a bit east, she saw the telltale flicker of a campfire. She nearly sagged to her knees in relief. It had to be them—Oh, God, let it be them. Her daughters had to be alive.