Falling for the Sheriff

“N-nothing.” She clutched the small sequined bag to her body.

He held out his hand, making it clear he wanted to see for himself.

Tears welled in her eyes as she pulled a candy bar from her purse. “B-but I didn’t take it! That boy gave me it.”

Cole’s blood pressure skyrocketed. Alyssa was, by nature, a sweet, quiet girl, but throughout her kindergarten year—after every field trip or class party where other students had mothers present—she’d grown increasingly unpredictable. The teacher who had once praised his daughter’s reading skill and eager-to-please disposition had started calling Cole about behavior problems, including a memorable graffiti incident. Now some punk was trying to turn Alyssa into a shoplifter, too? Hell, no.

* * *

“HEY!”

Kate jumped at the angry boom, nearly dropping her car keys. She turned to see Cole Trent, the single dad who’d melted her insides with his smile. He wasn’t smiling now.

He strode across the parking lot like a man on a mission. One of his daughters was sobbing. The other looked grimly fascinated, as if she’d never expected a simple pit stop to be so eventful.

“Aw, crap.” Luke’s barely audible words—and the resignation in them—caused Kate’s heart to sink.

Not again. Not here! In her mind, she’d built up Cupid’s Bow as a safe haven. But how could you escape trouble when it was riding shotgun?

“What did you do?” she demanded in a low voice.

He slouched, not meeting her eyes. “It was only an eighty-nine cent candy bar. Jeez.”

Cole reached them in time to hear her son’s careless dismissal, his blue eyes bright with righteous fury. “It’s more than a candy bar, young man. It’s stealing.”

Kate’s stomach churned. “You stole?”

Cole’s gaze momentarily softened as he glanced at her, registering her stress. When he spoke again, his tone was calmer. “Perhaps I should reintroduce myself. I’m Sheriff Cole Trent. What’s your name, son?”

“Luke,” he muttered.

“And did you put that candy bar in Alyssa’s purse?” the sheriff asked in an unyielding, don’t-even-think-about-lying tone.

The boy hunched his shoulders. “I felt bad for her.”

Was that even true, Kate wondered, or had her son simply seized an opportunity for petty defiance?

Cole gave his sniffling daughter a stern look. “Luke may have been the one to take the candy bar, but you should have put it back. Or told me what happened. Other people’s bad behavior is no excuse for acting badly yourself.”

Terrific. Now her son was a cautionary tale for younger children.

“The two of you are going back inside to admit what you did and apologize to Mr. Jacobs,” Cole said.

His daughter gulped. The man behind the counter had smiled pleasantly at Kate, but she could see where his towering height, all black clothing and tattooed arms might intimidate a little girl.

“While you’re there,” Kate told Luke, “ask what you can do to make up for it.” He was too young for an official part-time job, but it was clear Kate needed to find ways to keep him busy and out of trouble. “Maybe they could use a volunteer to come by a few times a week and pick up litter in the parking lot.”

Cole’s gaze swung to her. “A few times a week? So you aren’t just passing through or visiting? You’re sticking around?”

Was that surprise she heard in his voice, or dread? Given his duty to maintain law and order in the county, he probably didn’t relish the idea of a juvenile delinquent moving to town. And Gram deserved better than a great-grandson who caused her problems in the community. Was this experiment doomed to fail?

“We’re staying with family in the area. Indefinitely.” She forced a smile and tried to sound reassuring. “But I plan to stay out of public until I learn how to properly carry sodas, and Luke may be grounded for the rest of the summer. So you don’t have to worry about us menacing the populace, I promise.”

The size of Cupid’s Bow might make it difficult to avoid someone, but she was willing to try. Between the terrible impression her son had made and Kate’s aversion to being around cops since Damon’s death, she rather desperately hoped never to see Sheriff Trent again.

Chapter Two (#ulink_0ba23c02-4f59-5ff0-bee1-bbe13870820f)

After Luke and his unwitting accomplice apologized to the gruff but fair Mr. Jacobs, Kate and her son resumed their journey. He had the good sense not to resume his complaining.

It wasn’t until they were jostling along the private dirt road that led up to Gram’s house that Luke spoke again. “Are you going to tell her about the gas station? And the sheriff?”

She sighed. “Well, it wasn’t going to be my opening. I thought we’d say hi first and thank her profusely for taking us under her roof before we hit her with news of your exciting new criminal activities.”

“I apologized,” Luke grumbled. “I even paid the guy, although no one ended up with the candy bar.”

“‘The guy’ is Mr. Jacobs, and you’re going to treat him with respect when you see him next weekend.” It turned out that the inked man with the gravelly voice visited the pediatric ward of the hospital once a month and gave a magic show. Luke’s penance was that he would sacrifice a Saturday morning to work as the man’s assistant. “And paying for what you took after the fact doesn’t justify what you did. You know better than to steal! Your own father was a policeman, who—”

“My father is gone,” he said flatly.

She parked the car, and turned to look at her son. “I miss him, too. And I get angry—at him, at the man who shot him, at the unfairness of life. But lashing out and doing dumb things won’t bring your dad back. It only drives a wedge between you and me. I’m still here for you, kiddo. Try to remember that?”

Without responding, he climbed out of the car.

She blinked against the sting of tears, preferring to meet her grandmother with a smile. Joan Denby had lost her husband even more recently than Kate. The two women were supposed to bolster each other, not drag each other further down.

Either Gram had been watching for them, or Patch, the eight-year-old German shepherd, had barked notice of their arrival. Kate had barely removed her seatbelt before Gram hurried out onto the wraparound porch to greet them. In a pair of purple capris and a polo shirt striped with hot pink, Joan Denby was a splash of vivid color against the white wood railing. She looked much the same as she had all those summers when Kate visited as a girl, except that the cloud of once-dark hair framing Gram’s face was silver and her lively hazel eyes now peered at the world through a pair of bifocals. Still, few would guess that she was the great-grandmother of a teenager.

“Luke! Katie!” The exuberant welcome in her voice carried on the breeze, and the knot in Kate’s stomach unraveled.

Home. Whatever happened during the next few weeks of transition, Kate was suddenly 100 percent certain this was where she was supposed to be. Her vision blurred again, but this time with happy tears. She jumped out of the car, not even bothering to shut the door before rushing to hug her grandmother.

“I’ve missed you,” she whispered fiercely. Even though she now stood taller than the woman who’d been equal parts mom and grandmother to her, Gram’s embrace still made Kate feel safer, just as it had when she’d woken from nightmares as a girl or been rattled by a Texas thunderstorm.

“Missed you, too, Katie. So much.” Gram patted her on the back, then pulled away to reach for Luke. “And you! I can’t believe how tall you’re getting. Strong enough to help with farm chores, I reckon. But don’t worry,” she added with a smile, “I promise to make sure you’re well-compensated with your favorite desserts.”

“Anything but candy bars,” he mumbled.

Kate suppressed a groan at the reminder of their inauspicious entry to town. “We should start bringing in bags,” she told her son. “The car’s not going to unpack itself.”

Gram followed them. “I expected to see you hauling a trailer of stuff.”

“We brought most of our personal items, but the furniture’s in storage back in Houston.” She didn’t add that she hadn’t wanted to move it all twice in case this relocation didn’t work out.

Gram insisted on helping, and Kate gave her the lightest things she could find in the backseat. Kate faltered at the box of Luke’s art supplies. It had been sheer optimism on her part to bring them; he’d told her she could leave them in storage—or throw them away.

There’d been a time when he’d never been without a sketch pad of some kind. A few months before Damon was killed, Luke had started working on a comic book series about a superhero on another planet. The interstellar crime-fighter didn’t have a family and he’d possessed larger than life mystical powers, but the physical resemblance between Luke’s fictional champion and his dad had been unmistakable.

His earlier statement echoed in her mind. My father is gone. But he hadn’t only lost Damon. In the last two years, he seemed to have also lost his inspiration and his direction. Although there was no need to get the heavy box inside before dinner, she vowed to put the supplies in his room later. Maybe, with time and patience, he’d find his direction again.