he cord to Hope’s Discman bumped against the front of her gray sweatshirt as she jogged toward Main Street. Her sunglasses shaded her eyes from the morning sun, and through her earphones Jewel provided commiseration for her breaking heart. She sucked cool mountain air into her lungs as her ponytail bobbed and swayed on her head.

Dylan hadn’t called. He hadn’t called the night before, and he hadn’t called that morning. Hope wasn’t good at waiting. Not when it felt as if her whole life were at stake. She’d given him until nine-thirty that morning before she’d pulled on her jogging shorts and set out for his house.

She was in love with him, and she was certain he cared about her, too. It had taken three years and more than a thousand miles to find him. They could work through their problems because she wasn’t going to give up now, but the closer she got to his house, the more her stomach twisted into a knot. As she entered town, she wasn’t so certain showing up at his door was the wisest move, but she’d had enough of waiting around for him. She had to know for certain what he was thinking and feeling. And exactly how important she was to him.

She rounded the corner at Hansen’s Emporium and slowed. A crowd had gathered outside the Cozy Corner Cafe half a block away, and it appeared to be a film crew, photographers, and a chaotic mess of spectators.

Immediately she recognized the back of Dylan’s battered cowboy hat in the crowd. She pushed her headphones down around her neck, and the knot in her stomach tightened. The closer she got, the tighter it got.

Dylan’s voice rose above the chaos. “Ms. Bancroft has no comment,” he said.

The throng moved as one down the street, past Jim’s Hardware, as reporters shouted questions that were never answered, photographers snapped pictures, and film footage rolled. Above it all, Hope heard Adam’s cries and his pitiful pleas to go away and leave his mother alone. The mob circled Dylan’s truck, and Hope squeezed her way through the shifting wall of reporters. Over the shoulder of one of the photographers, she saw Dylan shove Juliette and Adam into the cab of his truck and shut the door. She pressed forward and broke free of the melee.

“I didn’t do this,” she yelled as she grabbed his forearm.

His jaws were clenched and his eyes burned as he glared at her. “Stay the hell away from me,” he said and shook off her grasp. “And stay away from my son.” He fought his way through the crowd to the driver’s side of his truck. He fired up the engine, and if the reporters hadn’t quickly moved aside, Hope wasn’t so sure he wouldn’t have mowed them down.

As they pulled away from the curb, Hope looked into the cab at Juliette’s pale complexion, bleached so white no amount of makeup could hide her shock. She caught a glimpse of Adam’s face, of the tears rolling down his cheeks, and her heart hurt for him. For herself, too. It was over. She’d lost Dylan. He would never believe her now.

Numb disbelief settled over her as she glanced at the photographers snapping photos of Dylan’s fleeing truck. She held her hands up as if she could stop it all, the cameras clicking, the film rolling, Dylan leaving. Then suddenly it did stop. The crowd dispersed and she was left standing on the sidewalk alone, rooted to the spot where Dylan had told her to stay away from him. Where her life had fallen apart.

She turned to the people standing behind her, in the doorways of shops and spilling from the Cozy Corner. She recognized the faces of those who lived in Gospel, and she also recognized the stunned confusion in their eyes.

Hope didn’t know how long she stood there, staring down the street, nor did she know how long it took her to walk to Timberline Road. Her feet felt leaded, her hands cold, and her heart so battered it hurt her to breathe too deep.

Instead of entering her house, she walked to Shelly’s back door and knocked. She didn’t know what her friend had heard or what she believed, but the second Shelly opened the door, Hope burst into tears.

“What’s wrong?” she asked and herded Hope into the kitchen.

“Have you talked to Dylan?”

“Not since the two of you borrowed my hiking boots.”

Hope threw her sunglasses on Shelly’s counter and wiped her moist cheeks. “He thinks I told the tabloids about him and Adam,” she began. Shelly handed her a Kleenex and Hope told her the whole story, starting with waking up in Dylan’s house and finding Adam staring at her. When she was finished, Shelly didn’t even look surprised.

“Well, I’m glad it’s all out in the open now,” Shelly said as she took two wineglasses from the cupboard. “A little boy shouldn’t have to live with that kind of secret.”

“You’ve always known?”

“Yep.” She opened the refrigerator and poured zinfandel from a box. She held out a glass for Hope. “Dylan is a great father, especially considering he has no help, but sometimes he is so protective of that child that he is bound to hurt him.”

Hope took the glass and looked down into the wine. It wasn’t even noon, but she didn’t care. “I think Dylan hates me now.” She thought of the way he’d looked at her. “No, I know he hates me now. He believes I moved here to report the story for a tabloid.” She looked up. “Do you believe me?”

“Of course I believe you. I know how you feel about Dylan, and besides, I doubt you would have told me you worked for The Weekly News of the Universe if you were here secretly digging up dirt on Adam.”

“Thank you.” Hope took a long drink of her wine.

“Don’t thank me. I’m your friend.”

She looked over the top of her glass at Shelly’s curly red hair and freckles, her “Garth Rules” T-shirt, huge belt buckle, and tight Wranglers. “I’m glad,” she said. It had taken her three years and more than a thousand miles to find not only Dylan, but Shelly, too. Together they moved to the small dining room off the kitchen, and Hope opened up to Shelly about her feelings for Dylan.

“I didn’t mean to fall in love with him,” she said, “but I couldn’t stop it. I knew he would hurt me, and he has.” She told Shelly about her marriage to Blaine and why it had really ended, and when she was through, she thought she should feel better, somehow purged, but she didn’t. She just felt more hurt and broken.

Wally came in for lunch, then took off on his bike for Dylan’s, once Shelly had called to make sure it was okay for him to be there. While Shelly had stood with the phone at her ear, Hope had sat frozen in her chair, her ears straining to hear the sound of his voice coming from the receiver. Her heart had been lodged in her throat, and when she realized what she was doing, she stood and went into the living room.

Over the course of the next few hours, she and Shelly polished off several more glasses of wine and a box of doughnuts.

“I think you’re really tanked,” Shelly told her when she couldn’t stop crying.

“I’m usually a very happy drunk,” Hope sobbed. “But I’m emotionally distraught!”

“I’m impressed you can still say ‘emotionally distraught.’ ”

By the time Hope stumbled home, she was having a hard time putting thoughts together. Everything in her head collided and churned into an undecipherable mush. She managed to crawl to her bedroom, where she found her beer helmet and the boxer shorts Dylan had given her to wear the morning after the first time they’d made love. She put on the helmet and the boxers; then she did herself a favor and passed out. When she woke up her head felt as if someone had hit her with a concrete block.

She sat up, her stomach heaved, and she ran into the bathroom. As she sat on the cool tile floor, wearing Dylan’s boxers and praying at the porcelain altar, she got angry. Angry at herself and angry at Dylan. Sure, she probably shouldn’t have lied to him for so long, but hers hadn’t been a big lie. Not like his. He should have trusted her and believed in her, but he hadn’t, and she never should have fallen in love with him. She felt like she had the day Blaine had served her with divorce papers. Like she’d been kicked in the chest, only this time it was worse. This time it was her fault, because this time she could have prevented it.

From the start, she’d known there was no future with him, and yet she’d let it happen. Well, maybe “let” wasn’t the right word, but she could have prevented it. She could have run the other way and told him no the night of the Fourth of July. She should have protected her heart from his smiles and the sound of his deep voice melting her and calling her honey. She should have backed away from his touch that tingled her skin and made her heart beat faster. She should have avoided his gaze that seemed to reach out and caress her like the touch of his hand. She should have put up some sort of resistance, but she hadn’t. She’d run toward him even as she’d known to run the other way. Now she was paying with a shattered heart.

“What am I going to do?” she whispered. A part of her wanted to go. Just pack up and leave. Run away from this place. Gospel wasn’t her home.

She lay down and pressed her cheek against the cool, clean tile. Yet there was another part of her that rebelled at the thought of running away. She’d been knocked flat before, but this time she wasn’t going to hide from life. She wasn’t going to let the pain get the best of her again. She wasn’t the same woman she’d been before she’d driven into Gospel. She wasn’t going to stay down. Her heart was broken and it hurt like a bitch, but she was going to live her life on her feet.

She raised her head, the room spun, and she lay back down. Yeah, she was going to live life on her feet. Just as soon as she could pick herself up off the bathroom floor.

Dylan looked across the table at his son. Adam rolled his corn on the cob across his plate for about the five-hundredth time in the past five minutes. It bumped into the bites of steak Dylan had cut up for him, then rolled into a biscuit. “Why don’t you eat that instead of playing with it?”

“I hate corn.”

“That’s funny. Last time we had corn on the cob, and you ate four or five pieces.”

“I hate it now.”

Yesterday they’d taken one step forward. After the ordeal in town that morning, they’d taken two steps back. Seeing Juliette so upset, Adam blamed himself. He blamed Dylan, too. In his seven-year-old mind, he figured if he hadn’t acted naughty, his mom wouldn’t have brought him home early. She wouldn’t have been in Gospel, and the reporters wouldn’t have found her. She wouldn’t have cried.

“Your mom’s going to be okay,” Dylan tried to reassure his son.

Adam looked up. “She said they were going to cancel her angel show.”

She’d said a lot of things during the hour-long drive to the Sun Valley airport. “She was just upset. No one will cancel her show.” In all the time he’d known Julie, he’d known she could be very dramatic, but he’d never seen her that dramatic. She’d cried and ranted that her life was over, and when he’d tried to reassure her, she’d accused him of being insensitive. She’d also accused him of bringing a tabloid reporter into all their lives. She’d made it quite clear that she blamed him as much as she blamed Hope.

Hope. Even if Hope hadn’t known about Adam and Juliette before she’d moved to Gospel, she’d run with the story the moment she’d discovered the juicy details. He didn’t believe for one second that she wasn’t responsible for that scene outside the Cozy Corner. And even though she’d denied involvement, even as she’d stood there surrounded by other tabloid journalists and paparazzi, looking into his eyes and telling him, “I didn’t do this,” it was just too big a coincidence for him not to think she wasn’t involved up to her little blond ponytail.

He’d gone into the relationship with Hope thinking he would end it when Adam returned home. He’d thought he could spend a couple of weeks enjoying her company and then go back to the way things had always been. He’d quickly discovered that he didn’t want to go back. When she was around, she made him laugh. She made him happy, and she made his life better. He hadn’t wanted to give that up. To give her up. He hadn’t wanted it to end, but it had. It was over, and it was ironic as hell that it had ended according to the original plan.

“Why aren’t you eating?” Dylan asked Adam.

“I told you, I don’t like corn.”

“What about your steak?”

“Hate that, too.”

“Your biscuit?”

“Can I put jelly on it?”

Since nothing had gone Adam’s way since he’d been home, Dylan decided to give in about dinner. “I don’t care.” He bit into his corn and watched his son open the refrigerator.

“Where’s the grape jelly?”

“I guess we’re out. Try the strawberry.”

“I hate strawberry.”

Dylan knew that wasn’t true. In a pinch, Adam would eat it.

“Why didn’t you get some?” his son asked, like he’d committed a heinous crime.

Dylan set his corn on his plate and wiped his hands on his napkin. “I guess I forgot.”

“Probably too busy.”

And they both knew what Adam meant. Hope. He’d been too busy with Hope. Ever since they’d returned from the airport, Adam had been spoiling for a fight. Dylan recognized what was happening and tried not to let it get the best of him. “Are you going to eat any of your dinner?”

Adam shook his head. “I want grape jelly.”

“Too bad.”

“You’re not going to get me jelly?”

“Not tonight.”

“I won’t be able to eat breakfast without jelly.” Adam stuck his chin in the air. “Lunch, either. I guess I won’t ever eat again.”

Dylan stood. “That will save me the trouble of fixing you anything to eat.” He pointed to Adam’s plate. “Now, you’re sure you’re finished?”

“Yes.”

“Then go brush your teeth and get your pajamas on.” For a few tense moments, Adam looked like he was going to fight about that, too, but he stuck out his lower lip and left the room. Dylan grabbed Adam’s plate and put it on the floor. “Here, dog,” he said, and Mandy crawled from beneath the kitchen table and devoured the steak and biscuit in seconds. She licked the corn, then turned away.

He should have saved himself some trouble and just fixed Wheaties for dinner, he thought as he picked up the plate from the floor. A little over twenty-four hours ago, he’d thought his life had gone straight to hell. He’d been wrong about that. It hadn’t quite hit bottom yet. Now. Now it was hell.

Before dinner, he’d spoken to his mother on the telephone, and in her most optimistic voice, she’d reminded him that “things could always be worse.”

Yeah, he supposed she was right. He could get kicked in the nuts or Adam could get sick, but barring physical abuse or illness, he didn’t see that things could get much worse.

Dylan left the dishes on the table and the pans on the stove and relaxed in front of the television. He reached for the remote and started to flip channels. Jeopardy! Wheel of Fortune, and Inside Hollywood. Just as he was about to flip to the next channel, a picture of Julie flashed across the screen.

“Heaven on Earth star, Juliette Bancroft, has a seven-year-old son that she has kept secret from the world,” the report began as film footage rolled of him and Julie and Adam leaving the Cozy Corner. “An unnamed source informs us that Juliette’s son lives with his father in the small town of Gospel, Idaho, about fifty miles west of...”

Dylan watched himself shove Julie and Adam into his truck. A few seconds elapsed and Hope burst from the crowd and grabbed his arm. She appeared pale and as beautiful as ever. He watched her lips move, but the microphones didn’t pick up what she said. But then, he didn’t need to hear it. He knew. He knew she pleaded her innocence. It was a lie, of course, but even as he watched her image fade from his television, even though he knew she’d lied, there was a part of him that wanted to believe her. She twisted him inside out and had the power to make him want her even after what she’d done. Even after what he knew about her. She made him want to grab her and shake her and hold her and bury his face in the side of her neck.

Wanting her was a constant ache in the pit of his stomach, like he was standing on the edge of a cliff, swallowing air.

Disgusted with himself, he switched the television station to Cops and tossed the remote onto the couch.

He was absolutely going to stop thinking that things could not get worse. Because the minute he thought it, they sure as hell did.

When he went to bed that night, his thoughts returned to Hope. He figured that if he’d run a check on her before they’d become involved, he could have saved himself a lot of trouble. It was too late now, but he figured he should probably do it first thing in the morning. Just in case.

But the next morning, he found paparazzi camped at the end of his driveway. He and Adam jumped into the truck and headed for the Double T. They spent the weekend riding horses and doing the little things his brother-in-law hadn’t gotten around to doing yet, like fixing the chicken wire around his mother’s henhouse and regrating the gravel road. Julie called to let him know that she and Gerard were hiding out at his family’s vineyards in Bordeaux and that she planed to do an interview with People magazine in a few days.

By the time Dylan went to work early Monday, most of the reporters were gone. He was brought up to speed during roll call, and he had Hazel bring him the accident reports and booking actions for the past two weeks. He skimmed the DUI arrests, and read a complaint filed by Ada Dover which charged Wilbur McCaffrey with purposely letting his dog out in the morning to “do his duty” in the motel’s flower beds.

He waited until he’d read through the stack of reports before he contacted the California Department of Motor Vehicles. Within a few minutes, he received Hope’s address in Los Angeles and her social security number. Once he had that, finding out information about her was incredibly easy.

He found out that she really was employed by The Weekly News of the Universe and that she had three pseudonyms. Before the Porsche, she’d owned a Mercedes, and right out of college, she’d worked for The San Francisco Chronicle and later The Los Angeles Times. And he dug into her court records and read the date she’d been married and the date her divorce had been final.

He dug deeper and read about the civil-harassment restraining order she’d won against a wrestler named Myron Lambardo, a.k.a. Myron the Masher. She’d won it three months prior to her arrival in Gospel, and in his defense, Mr. Lambardo had argued that he was angry and only wanted Ms. Spencer to continue with the Micky the Magical Leprechaun series and turn him back into a “stud muffin” so people wouldn’t think he was a “homo.”

The court not only found in Hope’s favor, but ordered “that the defendant not threaten, strike, or make physical contact with the plaintiff, not telephone plaintiff, not block plaintiff’s movements in public places or thoroughfares, and stay at least one hundred yards away from the plaintiff while at work, home, or any other place the plaintiff may request.”

Dylan shook his head and leaned back in his chair. He guessed he shouldn’t be surprised by what he read. She hadn’t mentioned the restraining order, of course, but there were several important things she hadn’t mentioned. Being stalked by an angry dwarf was just one of them. He wondered what else he didn’t know.

Over the course of the next week, Hope refused to keep herself locked up in her house. She drove to Sun Valley to shop in the trendy boutiques and spent a lot of time with Shelly. She learned how to can pickles and hunt for huckleberries and she worked on her stories. She finished several for The Weekly News of the Universe and had most of the rough draft down for her article on Hiram. After writing fiction for so long, nonfiction was proving more difficult than she expected, but she was enjoying the challenge.

From Shelly, Hope learned that the Donnellys had been a picture-perfect family. The three children were older than Shelly, but she remembered that they never got into trouble and kept mostly to themselves. Two boys and a girl, raised by the county sheriff and his God-fearing wife. Together, Hiram and Minnie had been the moral compass of the community. Holding themselves up as the perfect family, yet their children had never come back to visit once they were out of the house. Something had been horribly wrong with the picture. But what?

It had taken Hope a few days of digging to find out more information on the Donnelly children. Although none of them would speak to her directly, what she discovered was enough to answer her questions and add a new dimension to her article.

She learned that the older son had died of alcoholism, the younger was in prison for domestic abuse, and the daughter was a crisis counselor. Hope didn’t need to hear the particulars to figure out that behind closed doors, the picture-perfect family was dysfunctional as hell. What Hope found particularly amazing was that they’d managed the facade in a town that fed off everyone else’s business.

Most of the time Hope spent trying to forget about Dylan, but she never succeeded for very long. He appeared in her sleep and in her daydreams as well. He’d even made an appearance in her work, too. In her latest alien feature, she’d added a bit of a new slant. A new character in the form of a cross-dressing alien sheriff. She’d named him Dennis Taylor.

The morning the story was due to hit the stands, she drove to the M & S and grabbed the most recent issue of The Weekly News of the Universe from the magazine rack. She flipped it open to the center spread. Once again, her article was the featured story. This was the first article featuring Dennis, and it showed him as a muscle-neck cross-dresser with a gold star pinned to his marabou teddy. While that should have made her feel vindicated, it didn’t.

She chatted with Stanley as she paid for her paper, then left. Walking to her car, she thumbed to the gossip section. Her gaze skimmed the columns, but there was no mention of Juliette and Adam. It would appear, though. Probably in next week’s edition.

Hope folded the paper and took her car keys from the pocket of her jeans. Her stories were doing better than she’d ever imagined, yet she felt nothing. Not happy. Not sad. Just blah. There was more to life than successful alien articles. Like living. Like opening yourself up and falling in love and getting your heart stomped on by a size-twelve cowboy boot.

She thought she heard someone yell her name, and she glanced up from the keys in her hand to the far end of the parking lot. A big cardboard sign caught her attention. It said: MAKE MICKY A STUD MUFFIN. She couldn’t see who held the sign, just a pair of little sneakers peeking out from beneath the cardboard. That was all she needed. She knew, and it shoved her heart into her throat.

Myron had found her.

She jumped into her car and peeled out of the parking lot, startling a family riding bicycles. As she drove down Main, her hands shook and her heart pounded in her ears.

She didn’t know if her restraining order was in effect in Idaho, or if Myron was free to harass her here. She really didn’t know what to do until she pulled into a space behind the sheriff’s office. She needed answers and she needed help, but she really didn’t want to involve Dylan. Maybe she could just talk to one of the deputies. She was sure someone besides Dylan could tell her what she wanted to know.

She looked for the sheriff’s Blazer and spotted it by the back door. He was in his office. Her pounding heart skipped a few painful beats. She didn’t want to involve him in her problem. The last time she’d seen him, he’d told her to stay out of his life. He’d meant it. And as much as that hurt, and as much as she thought of him every minute of every hour of every day, she meant to get over it. To get over him, but she couldn’t if she had to see and talk to him. Then she remembered his guard dog of a secretary and relaxed. Even if she wanted to see him, she didn’t believe Hazel would let her past. Not even if her hair was on fire and Dylan held the only extinguisher.

Hope took a deep breath and glanced in her rearview mirror. She reapplied her red lipstick and wished she’d worn something nicer than her white cotton shirt that buttoned up the front, jeans, and black leather belt. Not that what she wore wasn’t nice. It just wasn’t going to make anyone kick himself in the ass for dumping her.