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just being polite.
    “Hi,” she said.
    “Good morning.” Quentin was stunned again by Tyson’s good looks every time he saw her. She was a tall willowy brunette with big blue eyes.
    The police radio on his belt squawked and he turned it down. Quentin looked even bigger sitting in the booth, she thought, his shoulders square and straight. He was over six feet and lean, so he looked ten years younger than his forty years. A number he’d seemed to go out of his way to mention to her, as if he were old.
    “Caltrans is closing the road to Timberline,” Quentin said. “They’re going to blow a potential slide. A couple of areas, I guess.”
    “I heard they were going to,” Patty said. There was an awkward silence.
    Quentin put his cowboy hat down on the seat next to him and smiled as if the idea of a slide were funny. “I hope we don’t have any problems,” he said. “If the road to 50 is closed for too long, everyone will be on my ass.” He saw her smile; she folded up her newspaper.
    Quentin’s mind froze again while he watched her. She had that effect on him. Lust had an odd way of grinding your thoughts to dust. Patty moved her long hair out of her eyes and looked up at him, tucking it behind her ear. Even in the sexless green uniform of a California State Ranger, she looked attractive. There was something profoundly womanly about her, he thought. He remembered her in the saddle and he almost blushed. The curve of her hips, the way she rode, the way her hips rocked. Masterly. You could tell a lot about a person by the way they rode a horse. Jerks and city people always rode with their boot toes shoved way too far into the stirrups. It never failed. Not her. She had a good seat.
    No, he thought, there were two kinds of people: the kind who hold on to the saddle horn at a trot and those who don’t need to. Patty Tyson held her reins easy with just two fingers. She was that kind of girl, and she was loping through his dreams most nights now. An easy-two-finger-on-the-reins kind of woman.
    The sheriff glanced out at the freeway below the restaurant. All the cars zooming past looked dirty, their outlines obscured by the snowstorm.
    “Coffee?” A waitress rescued them from an awkward silence. The woman poured coffee into Quentin’s cup, not waiting for an answer. Patty offered her cup, glad the waitress had come.
    Did I make a mistake? Patty tried to understand what was wrong. Maybe he thinks I’m stupid.
    He had ordered quickly, and it was her turn.
    “Pancakes,” Patty said, not bothering to study the menu.
    The waitress adjusted her glasses. Middle aged, the waitress wore heavy makeup and had red hair, about the same color as the Denny’s sign.
    “Dear, we’ve got sixteen types of pancakes at this Denny’s. What kind would you like?” The waitress touched her glasses with bemused exasperation, reading the obvious first-date look on the couple’s faces.
    “Buttermilk,” Patty said.
    “Okay . . .  we’re short-handed this morning. Coffee is on the house today,” the waitress said.
    “I talked to your daughter when I called. She’s nice,” Patty said, trying to think of something quick to say as the waitress turned and left.
    “Which one?”
    “I think the older one. Lacy.”
    “It’s like having two mothers,” Quentin said. “Especially Lacy. She’s going to Berkeley. She wants to be a doctor. She’s wanted that since we—” Quentin stopped himself. “Since I can remember. I keep reminding her she’s my daughter and not my mother, but it doesn’t seem to do much good.”
    After the waitress brought them their breakfast, the conversation became easier. They talked about that summer when they’d met, about the fact the little girl was never found, how devastating it must have been for her mother and father. Quentin told her the father still called the office once a week just to check.
    “It must be hard being a sheriff. I mean, having to see the bad guys win like that. I don’t