Taming Jesse James by RaeAnne Thayne Page A

sink right through the carpet and disappear. “You must think I’m the most foolish woman in town.”
    He grinned suddenly, looking impossibly gorgeous. “Not even close, sweetheart. You’re not calling me to report seeing little green men in spaceships.”
    â€œNo. Only bogeymen who don’t exist.”
    â€œSarah, if you think you saw a man out there, I believe you. Just because I can’t see anything to prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt doesn’t mean the guy wasn’t there. It might have been a kid looking to steal some tools or just a peeping Tom hoping to get lucky and find an open curtain somewhere.”
    She couldn’t help her instinctive shudder at the idea of someone watching her without her knowledge.
    Jesse’s cop eyes picked up on her reaction. “It’s probably nothing for you to worry about,” he assured her. “I’ll cruise around the neighborhood and see if I can find any suspicious characters lurking around and I’ll also put an extra patrol in this neighborhood for a while.”
    â€œThank you. I… You’ve been very kind.”
    He gave her an inscrutable look. “Call me immediately if you see anything else suspicious. Try to get some sleep, okay?”
    She nodded, then watched him walk back out into the drizzly night. A week ago, she never would have even considered the word kind in the same sentence as Jesse Harte. He was hard and dangerous and he scared the stuffing out of her. But something had changed in the past few days. She was coming to see there were facets to the man she wouldn’t have guessed at before.
    He believed her.
    She pressed a hand to her chest, to the warmth that blossomed there despite the lingering anxiety. Another man might have shrugged off her concerns, especially after witnessing firsthand one of her wild panic attacks.
    But Jesse believed her.
    Â 
    Sarah lifted her face to the gloriously warm afternoon sun, wishing she didn’t have to go back into her classroom in another few moments.
    She would have been tempted to sacrifice her entire summer vacation if she could only spend the rest of the day right there on the playground with the sun on her face and that sweet-smelling breeze coyly teasing her hair and rustling her skirt around her legs.
    She had spring fever as badly as her students. After a week of gloomy weather, she longed to be out in the garden, planting and pruning and fertilizing.
    Who would have thought she would be so addicted to gardening? What had started out as a little thing earlier in the spring—a simple desire to plant a few flowers in the empty beds around the house—had quickly turned into an obsession.
    It amazed her because it was so unexpected. She, who’d never even had a houseplant before, was turning into an avid gardener. She loved the whole process. Painstakingly selecting seeds or starts at the nursery, preparing the earth for them, watching the hesitant little green stalks slowly unfurl toward the sun.
    There was an odd sense of power in the process. Though Mother Nature definitely played a heavy hand with her sun and rain, in all other respects Sarah was master of her little garden. She chose which seedlings belonged where, when and how many to plant, which to thin away and which would be given the chance to bloom.
    She found it heady and intoxicating. At least in this one area of her life, she felt in control.
    She rolled her eyes at herself—how pathetic was that?—then lifted her face to the sun.
    On a day like this one, her panicked call to the police three nights earlier seemed unreal. Ridiculous. As far away as the few wispy clouds up there. She could only have been imagining that terrible moment when she thought she saw someone standing outside her back door. It was the only explanation that made any kind of sense.
    This was Star Valley, a place that could practically be the poster child of peaceful, rural America.
    Who here