Kiss Me, Sheriff!

Izzy’s brows rose to new heights. Stretching his own legs out toward the water, Derek shrugged. “I might have taken some upper body privileges. But that’s it. When we—” He stopped. Too much information. But as he stared at the river, he let his mind float and thought, I want Willa for more than a night.

“You don’t know much about her. Nobody does. There isn’t a lot of information to be found apparently. A lot of people have Googled her,” Izzy confided.

“What?”

“Yeah. Come on, you haven’t?”

“No.” Not that he hadn’t been tempted, but... “No. Someday she’ll tell me what I need to know.”

“Okay, well we mere mortals are curious right now. And you know what we found out?”

“No. And don’t—”

“Almost nothing. There isn’t much information to be found. Isn’t that weird in this day and age? No Facebook, no Instagram—”

“I don’t have that stuff, either—”

“—and while I support her desire to stay off social media, you have to admit that it’s weird not to be able to find her somewhere online. These days, you can get a history of addresses for people who’ve lived under rocks—”

“That’s an invasion of privacy. That kind of information should only be available for legal purposes.”

“—and there are, apparently, over nine hundred Willa Holmeses, but none of them jump out as our Willa Holmes.”

Derek told himself there was nothing unusual about someone living under the radar of the internet.

“Some folks are saying she’s running away from a bad relationship,” Izzy continued. “Marcy Anneting thinks Willa is in the Witness Protection Program, but Marcy belongs to a mystery book club. And Jett Schulman says you can tell by her manner that she was born into a life of luxury and is just here temporarily to see how the other half lives.”

“When did you become the town crier, Izzy?”

He saw the sting of his words as her eyes flickered, but she didn’t back down. “Since my best friend started to fall for a woman I don’t think will ever love him back.” Unmindful of the sandwich she was squeezing tightly in her hand, Izzy exhaled noisily. “I don’t think she can love you back. I don’t know what the truth is. Maybe she was a mafia wife or her high school sweetheart died tragically and she can’t get over it, or she’s just a very normal, exceptionally private woman who is emotionally closed off. Whatever it is, she’s not the woman I want for you. Derek, everyone thinks of you as having it all together, and you do. Now. But I’ve known you since you since you were the original rebel without a cause. We come from the same place, you and I.”

“That was a long time ago. When I left my uncle’s house, I didn’t even know what I was running from.”

“I think you were trying to run to something. Just like me. You’ve been searching for a loving family that was all yours ever since I met you. I don’t want you to be hurt again.”

“And you think one small, shy woman can do that?” He smiled, hoping to tease Izzy out of her concern, but she refused to be distracted.

“I think she could, yes. I want to protect you, because I love you. Like you tried to protect me when Nate came back.”

“Yeah, and I was wrong,” he pointed out. “Everything turned out all right. Better than all right.”

She stared at him a long time then slowly wrapped the remainder of her now squished sandwich and put it in the insulated lunchbox she’d brought with her. “Okay.”

“Izz, I love you. But I’ve got to go with my gut on this.”

She wouldn’t look at him. “Yeah. Well, I hired her, you know? I brought her into our lives, so I guess I feel responsible.”

He chucked her on the chin. “Okay, you can be the best man at our wedding.” When she swiped at a tear, he realized how serious she was and felt a pinch of surprise. But he’d already considered all the possibilities. He knew where he was headed, and he wasn’t changing direction. “Izz, I know this may turn out to be nothing. I do. I accept that. I’ll deal with it.”

She sniffled. “You want to get married. You want a family.”

“Yeah,” he admitted. “I’ve borrowed yours long enough.”

She pulled back. “Derek! Don’t even say that.”

He smiled. “Hey, you and Eli are stuck with me.” For the past ten years, he’d spent nearly every holiday, every birthday and plenty of days off with Izzy and her son, who was now fifteen and getting to know his father for the first time. Eli didn’t need “Uncle Derek” constantly in the way. “I’m ready to branch out, that’s all. Widen the circle a bit.”

“Okay, I get it, but you are family, and my being with Nate doesn’t change that.” Izzy spoke emphatically, even though she’d said it all before.

She still couldn’t accept that the past Thanksgiving and Christmas had been different. On this first holiday as a family, Nate would have preferred to keep his wife and his son all to himself. It had been obvious, no matter how Nate had attempted to mask the feeling. Derek would have felt the same.

He rose. “I should get back to the station. Russell thinks he has the flu, so I’m on duty the rest of the day and night. I’ll take the sandwich with me.”

“Yeah, I need to get going, too. We ordered Pickle Jar hoodies for Thunder Ridge Community Church’s Souper Bowl. I have to pick them up. I got you a hoodie, by the way. You’re still going to serve soup with us, right?”

“Right. But if the hoodie has a giant dancing kosher dill on the front, I’m not wearing it.” Izzy busied herself with reassembling the lunchbox. Her silence confirmed that the design was the same as on the T-shirts they’d worn for the Hood-to-Coast Relay last summer. He shook his head. “What is it with you and pickle promos? First it was the giant foam costume and now shirts with vegetables.”

“The name of the deli is The Pickle Jar. Obviously, we need to promote. Besides, in case you haven’t heard, pickles are hip. Don’t be surprised if they turn out to be the staple snack food of the twenty-first century.” When Derek started to laugh, she socked him in the arm. “I’m serious. And the shirts are terrific. The pickles aren’t dancing this time. They have a cartoon face with a pickle mustache and the caption Got Pickles? Isn’t that great?”

He looked at her in disbelief. “I’m not wearing that.”

“Yes, you are.” Izzy reached for her backpack then looked beyond Derek and frowned. “What are those kids doing?”

Derek turned. Beneath a madrone tree about a hundred yards away, two boys, one a teen and the other a bit younger, appeared to be engaged in some sort of transaction with money changing hands. It was a school day; neither of them should have been in the park to begin with.

Keeping his gaze on the duo, Derek uttered, “See you later, Izz,” and started walking. About halfway over, he saw the smaller boy glance at him. Their eyes met. In one hand, the boy held a wad of bills he was about to pass to the teenager. As soon as he registered that the man walking toward him was an officer, his expression filled with trepidation. Before Derek could call out a word, both kids were off and running.

Adrenaline flooded Derek’s system. Making a split-second decision, he took off after the younger boy, his feet pounding the grass, sure this was going to be anything but another ordinary afternoon in Thunder Ridge.

* * *

Can U come back to bakery? Sorry to ask, but it’s important. Thx. Izzy.

Ordinarily her boss’s text would not have frustrated her, but Willa hadn’t slept at all the night before. She’d come home after her confrontation with Derek Neel and had done the worst thing she could do before trying to sleep, the very thing she had promised herself she would stop doing, in fact. She had watched a series of DVDs, each one labeled simply with her last name and the year the video had been shot. She kept them stored separately from the remainder of her modest DVD collection, and she never shared them with anybody else. They were hers and hers alone.

She’d finally fallen asleep around midnight, after plowing through half a box of tissues and taking two aspirin for the headache that followed her crying jag. The alarm had gone off at 2:30 a.m. and, after pressing the snooze button as many times as the clock allowed, she’d dragged herself into the shower and over to the bakery to begin work at three-thirty. It had taken an entire pot of coffee to push her along until noon today, which was when she’d cried uncle and headed home again.

Before Izzy’s text, Willa had done one load of laundry, eaten two sticks of string cheese and a banana and, at 2:30—p.m. this time—she was wondering if she’d completely throw herself off by taking a nap. And then her phone had pinged. She often went back to work without any prompting from her boss, but this afternoon she thought she might fall over just thinking about returning to the bakery.

Sure. Be there in a few, she texted back. At least she’d be closer to her regular bedtime when she came home again. Maybe tonight would be merciful, and she would fall asleep easily and stay asleep until morning.

She’d already changed out of her flour-dusted jeans and into a pair of soft plaid lounging pants, a gray thermal top and her thickest socks. Piled into a half ponytail/half bun, her hair was no longer work-ready, but she really, really, really did not have the energy to get herself dressed and coiffed again. So for the first time since she’d gotten her job in Thunder Ridge, she stuffed her feet into boots, grabbed her coat and headed to work looking, she figured, like a soccer mom with a hangover.

Willa shoved her hands into the pockets of her coat and ducked her head against the chilly wind that had kicked up. As she neared Warm Springs Road, the main street through Thunder Ridge, she raised her head to nod at the locals who greeted her. It was easier to remain private, she had discovered, if she smiled and seemed happy.

She arrived at Something Sweet hoping to be done in record time with whatever business Izzy wanted to discuss. Noting quickly that the store seemed to be doing a brisk late business, Willa opened the glass door and scanned the room for her boss.

“Willa!” Izzy called. She was seated at the table nearest the kitchen. All four chairs were taken.