The Lawman's Runaway Bride

I don’t have anything left here, Noah had replied.

You have your entire life here!

And he had—Noah had run his own successful carpentry business. He had built a beautiful home on an acreage about twenty minutes outside of town, and he had his extended family all right there. This was the life he’d offered to share with Sadie, and there were several other women who’d immediately perked up at the news of the wedding that didn’t happen. Noah didn’t have to leave. What Chance should have said was, “You have me here, Noah.”

Noah had been a wreck, and he’d said that the best way forward was through. Chance would have agreed, except through meant something different to Noah—it led to the army. He’d gone on one deployment, and the night he came back, Chance could see that his brother had changed. Of course, a year in Afghanistan would have an impact, but it was more than the tan and the ropy muscle. It went deeper, to the steely glimmer in his eye. Then he left for another tour, and the distance between the brothers grew more pronounced. And then there was a third tour that Noah never came back from.

Chance pulled into the parking lot next to the Comfort Creek Police Department. It was a squat, brick building on Main Street, right across the street from the bank. A large elm tree grew just beside it, branches blanketed with snow.

This sleepy town was the location of Larimer County’s sensitivity training program. The cops who came here needed soft skills—patience, self-control and character growth. They didn’t come to face off with criminals, they came to do just the opposite, actually, and face their own issues. Comfort Creek had plenty of space and quiet to do just that, and Chance took his training program incredibly seriously. For the most part, these were good cops struggling with problems larger than they were, and Chance could sympathize with that. He knew what it was like to make one wretched mistake and watch his brother disintegrate because of it. A mistake didn’t have to define a man, but all too often it did.

Sadie’s face was still swimming through his mind as he trotted up the front steps to the police department. Her return had shaken him more than he liked to admit. He saw her grandmother, Abigail Jenkins, on a pretty regular basis. He’d have thought Abigail would give him a heads-up, but apparently he was wrong again. The women here seemed to have their own agendas that didn’t include keeping him in the know.

Chance pulled open the front door of the station and was met with the familiar scent of coffee and doughnuts, and the low hum of the officers working at their desks.

“Chief, your newest trainee is waiting.” Cheryl Dunn, the receptionist for the department, handed him a folder. She was about forty, slim, pale and efficient. She had three school-aged kids who called for her on a pretty regular basis, but she got the work done, and that was what mattered to Chance.

Trainees didn’t usually arrive on a Friday, but he could be flexible. Besides, if he got this trainee sorted out before the weekend, it would free up his morning to meet with Sadie.

“Thanks, Cheryl.” He flipped through the pages—signed forms, ID, that sort of thing. He was familiar with his newest trainee already. His name was Toby Gillespie, and he was being given this extra training because he was inflexible and generally intimidating to the public. The other officers nicknamed him Bear.

That had been Noah’s nickname, too... Well, they’d called him Teddy Bear, and it was bestowed upon him by the girls in school for very different reasons—he gave good hugs, and despite his muscular physique, he was gentle with those smaller than him. Noah had been the all-American boy growing up. He was athletic, good-looking and got top grades. He played on the high school football team. He’d been dark haired and swarthy compared to Chance’s sandy-blond hair and blue eyes—as different in appearance as they were in personality. Noah was a tough act to follow for a twin brother who had to study hard for mostly Bs and lacked that easy charismatic charm his brother emanated without even trying. It made for a complex dynamic between them, and if Chance had to be honest, he’d been jealous of Noah. And yet at the same time, he’d also been just as enamored with him as the rest of the town. Noah was like that—when he turned his attention onto a person, they couldn’t help but love him.

Including Sadie...until the end, of course.

A uniformed officer sat in a chair in front of Chance’s office. He wasn’t tall, but his build was stocky, and he was muscular. Toby Gillespie obviously spent a lot of time in the gym, and Chance guessed the guy drank protein shakes for breakfast.

“Toby, I take it?” Chance asked.

Toby rose to his feet and stood at attention. “Good morning, sir.”

“Come on in.” Chance opened his office door and gestured to the chair opposite his desk. “Make yourself comfortable.”

Toby stepped inside and stood beside the chair rigidly.

“At ease, officer. Have a seat.”

The younger man visibly deflated and sank into the chair. None of his trainees liked being here—he was used to that. This was discipline, after all. Chance shut the door and went around to his own chair and flipped open the folder.

“You started out as military, right?” Chance asked.

“Yes, sir. Four years of army service, three deployments.”

That was pretty close to Noah’s service.

“And you’ve been on the force how long now?”

“Another four years, sir.”

“Do you know why you’re taking sensitivity training?” Chance asked.

“I’m too by-the-book, sir.” Toby shook his head, and a look of disgust shone through that granite expression for a split second. “But the law’s the law.”

According to Officer Gillespie’s commanding officer, Toby was intimidating to the public and no amount of coaching seemed to change that.

“Do you like desk work?” Chance asked.

“No, sir. Hate it.” Toby arched a brow. “And yes, I know that’s where I’m headed.”

Chance had an idea of how to help this young officer, but it meant embracing this remembrance ceremony—something he’d been fighting ever since the mayor brought it up to him several weeks ago. There was no getting around it—Sadie had already been hired, and as police chief, he should have a role in it, too. Being a community leader didn’t mean he always got to do what he wanted, but right now, he could see that this commemorative ceremony might be of use to more than just their own.

“Considering that you’re ex-military, I have something I want you to help us with,” Chance said.

“Yes, sir.”

“We’re working on a ceremony for Comfort Creek that is going to commemorate four young men who died in service. I want you to help us with that.”

Toby froze, then shook his head. “Do I have a choice, sir?”

“Absolutely.” Chance smiled amiably. “There is a room full of binders about feelings and appropriate reactions to them in the basement. You have two weeks with us, and I’m sure you could work your way through fifteen or twenty of those binders in that amount of time.”

Toby looked away, his jaw tensing. He was doing the mental math there—how much could he endure, and which avenue did he prefer?

“I don’t like rehashing my military days, sir,” Toby said. “The past is the past. I’m a civilian now.”

Toby was no civilian in his head, or in his demeanor. He was still acting like the soldier.

“Understood.” Chance shrugged. “I’ll get an officer to show you down to the basement, then. You can get started today. I’ve got your first binder waiting on the table there. You can’t miss it. There are some workbooks that go along with it, and we’ll need full written responses that will be sent for psych evaluation—”

“I didn’t say I wouldn’t help out with your commemorative ceremony, sir,” Toby said quickly. “I just said that I didn’t want to dig into my own military service, if it’s all the same.”

Chance paused, watching conflicting emotions flit across Toby Gillespie’s face. He was a good cop—most of the officers who ended up here were. He was the cop you wanted to cover you going into dangerous territory. He was a veritable tank who just needed to figure out how to disarm himself from time to time.

“I can tell you what it would entail,” Chance said. “I need you to speak with the family members of the fallen men and get some personal information about them—pictures, military ranks and any medals they might have been awarded...that sort of thing. Bring that information back to me, and we’ll talk.”

Toby frowned. “That’s not normally my strength—grieving families and all that.”

No one liked facing grief, especially their own. Chance knew that better than anyone.

“It would be good practice with letting down your guard a little bit,” Chance said. “But I’m not sending you in without some preparation. One of the men who died was my brother. You can practice with me.”

Toby cleared his throat and looked down. “I’m used to interviewing suspects, sir, so talking with them isn’t an issue. It’s just that I don’t tend to...come across right. Normally those kinds of assignments are saved for officers with a softer touch.”

“That’s what we’re working on here,” Chance said frankly. “The softer touch.”

“So, if I did this—”

“No binders.” This was an option he gave nearly all his trainees, and 95% of them chose to avoid the binders. There was something about county-approved sensitivity training that rubbed just about every officer the wrong way.