Raeanne Thayne Hope's Crossings Series Volume One: Blackberry Summer

Owen giggled again and Riley grinned into the rearview mirror, feeling better than he had all week.

“I wanted to do something awesome, but I don’t have very much money. So Evie at my mom’s store is helping me make her something.”

“Something out of beads?”

“Yeah. My mom has this cool watch thing that she can switch like, with different bands, you know? So Evie’s helping me make her a new one.”

He couldn’t have said why that touched him so much, but something about the image of this very rugged little boy with the bum arm making a bead thingy for his mom slid right to his heart. If he was this mushy over it, he could only imagine Claire would bawl like a newborn calf. “She’ll love it,” he assured the boy.

“I hope so.”

“Where does your mom think you are?” he asked as he turned onto Blackberry Lane.

“I told her I was going to my friend Robbie’s house after school.”

“What if your mom called Robbie’s mom to check?”

“Robbie’s mom works at the bank until six. His big sister tends him after school, so I told her I’d have Evie make her some earrings if she…” He paused, and in the mirror, Riley saw guilt flash over his features.

“If she gives you an alibi,” he answered for Owen.

“Yeah,” he answered, his voice sheepish. “You won’t tell my mom, will you?”

Something told him Claire was going to have trouble with this one and his elaborately orchestrated schemes. “Are you kidding? I wouldn’t ruin the surprise for her or for you.”

Owen grinned. “Thanks a lot.”

“You be sure and let me know how she likes it, okay?” Riley said when he pulled into the driveway. The windows of her house looked warm and welcoming in the fading, gloomy light.

Although it went against everything he’d been telling himself all week about staying away from her, Riley knew he had no choice now and he opened his car door.

“You don’t have to come in,” Owen said. “I’m okay.”

“You might need somebody there to help you explain the mud on your cast. Anyway, your mom is an old friend and I need to check on her, see how she’s doing. And we’ve got a bike to fix, right? Between you and your mom, you’ve only got two good arms. I can give you a hand.”

“Do you know anything about fixing bikes?” Owen asked, his voice laced with suspicion. “My dad can never fix my bike when something goes wrong. Or Macy’s, either. If we have a bike that needs work, we always have to take it to Mike’s Bikes, even for a flat tire.”

That’s because your dad is a jackass pansy, he thought—but of course didn’t say.

“When I was first a beat cop, I used to ride a bike.”

Owen looked intrigued. “Like a motorcycle?”

“Nope, like a bicycle. Two wheels, pedals, chain. The whole bit.”

“Cops don’t ride bicycles.”

“Maybe not in Hope’s Crossing. It doesn’t make a lot of sense here. But in a city without a lot of snow, a bike is a great way to get around quickly.”

“Especially downhill.”

“True enough.” Riley smiled. “When you’re chasing a bad guy running down the street with some lady’s purse, you don’t always have time to stop and take your bike into a shop. We often had to fix our own rides on the fly.”

“Do you still like to ride a bike?”

He thought of his three-thousand-dollar mountain bike currently taking up space in the spare room at his rented house. One of the main reasons he’d decided to take the job—besides his burnout in Oakland—had been the recreational opportunities that abounded in Hope’s Crossing. In the summer a person could find world-class climbing, hiking, biking, fishing. And of course the winter featured challenging downhill skiing and cross-country trails.

So far, he had been too busy to enjoy any of it, a pretty sorry state of affairs.

“I’ve got a bike at home. Maybe when you get the cast off you can show me if there are any new trails around here since I was a kid.”

“Sure, that would be fun,” Owen said as he pushed open his front door. Claire’s droopy-eyed dog greeted them with a polite bark and a sniff at their wet shoes.

“Hey, Mom. I’m home. Where are the bandages?”

There was a pause of about five seconds, before he heard Claire’s voice growing louder as she approached them. “In the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, right where they’ve always been. Why do you need a bandage?”

She came from the kitchen on the last “bandage,” without the wheelchair, he was happy to see. She walked on crutches that had been rigged up to compensate for her cast, with a little platform to rest her arm. She wore a flowery cotton dress, a pale lavender this time that made him think of a meadow full of wildflowers.

She stopped in the doorway with an almost comical sort of double take. “Riley! Oh! Hello.”

He looked at her mouth and suddenly couldn’t remember anything but that shock of a kiss. When he dragged his gaze away to her eyes he saw the memory of it there, in the slight widening of her pupils and the sudden flush on her cheekbones.

“Hi,” he said stupidly, unable to think of another damn thing to utter. His mind seemed filled with remembering the softness of her skin, the springtime taste of her, her tiny ragged breaths against his mouth.

“What are you doing here?” she asked. “And why does my son need a bandage? Owen, why are you covered in mud? And blood, apparently.”

The boy grinned. “I crashed my bike in a stupid puddle and flipped over the handlebars. It was awesome.”

She looked at her son as if he was some strange exotic creature. A clone fighter himself or something. Because she’d never been an eight-year-old boy, she probably didn’t grasp the particular nuances of the situation and how very cool it could be to endo your ride.

“Awesome,” she repeated.

“Yeah, like something on the X-Games. You should have seen it.”

“True story,” Riley put in. “A genuinely spectacular crash.”

She looked from one to the other. “You’re both insane.”

Riley met the kid’s gaze and they shared a grin. When he turned back to Claire, she was shaking her head, but he thought she looked more amused than annoyed.

“And how exactly were you involved in this, Chief McKnight?”

He offered what he hoped was an innocent smile. It had always worked on his sisters, anyway. “Only an eyewitness, I swear.”

She raised an eyebrow and he was compelled to come clean. “Okay, I think I might have distracted him from paying as much attention as he probably should have to the road when I honked and waved.”

“It wasn’t your fault. It was that stupid pothole’s fault.”