Читать книгу The Lawman's Runaway Bride - Patricia Johns - Страница 14
ОглавлениеSadie was back in town. Chance rolled that fact over in his mind while he drove toward the police station. If it weren’t for the timing of this commemorative ceremony, he might not be so raw about the whole thing, but as it was, all those memories crowded just beneath the surface, and it had only been a year since Noah’s death. He’d been praying for God to help him to heal, but so far, those prayers had gone unanswered.
And he needed healing from more than just his brother’s death; he needed to let go of those feelings for Sadie. He’d thought he had, but when he saw her again today, it came crowding back in—that same unwanted attraction to Sadie and a flood of guilt.
He was the chief of police, and ran a sensitivity training program here in Comfort Creek—he wasn’t supposed to be the one struggling with personal issues. He was supposed to be the guy with the answers. How come every time he prayed for strength, he ended up driven to his knees? If anyone had asked him yesterday if five years had made a difference, he’d have said yes, it had. A lot had changed. But today, looking Sadie in the face, it was as if those years had melted out from under him.
The heat in his cruiser pumped into the car, and he reached over and turned it down. Sadie was back, and by the sounds of it, she wanted to make this permanent. He knew that he’d played a part in her run for Denver, but he’d been willing to talk about it. He could have told her that it was one moment of weakness, and that he could curb his feelings and she’d never be faced with them again. Had she stayed to talk about it. But she hadn’t. She’d run. And now she was back and all was supposed to be forgiven, and he couldn’t do it. The anger was back, and he couldn’t just push it aside.
A fully planned wedding didn’t evaporate, and it had taken weeks to help his brother handle all the details—clean up, return gifts, move her things back out of Noah’s house. The entire time, his brother had been a walking shell of a man. He’d been hollow, wan, brittle. Sadie might have been able to just walk away, but Noah had to stay and deal with the fallout. And all that time, Chance had kept his secret and never told his brother what he’d done. He regretted that now. He’d never imagined that he wouldn’t have a chance to get it off his chest.
Chance remembered the afternoon when Noah had told him his plans to join the army.
You can’t just leave, Chance had protested. You and I were going to buy that boat together, I thought.
They had plans for the future—the Morgan brothers. They were going to buy a boat, then buy a little cottage by a lake and spend every weekend from April through October fishing.
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.
A smile flickered at the corners of the younger man’s lips. “Fine. I’ll do the interviews with the families. But if they complain about me—”
Chance had hoped that he’d agree, and not only because it would be of service to the community right now. Toby Gillespie was behaving like a military man, and it wasn’t working with the police force. There was a certain amount of discipline and respect for command authority that the two careers had in common, but Officer Gillespie was suffering from something that had happened in the military—at least that was Chance’s best guess—and it was bleeding into his work on the force.
“You’ll start with me, remember? It’ll be fine. In the meantime, you’ll be assigned a cruiser and you can start patrol.”
Chance didn’t want to grieve for his brother with an audience, but sometimes helping a good officer get over his own issues meant a certain amount of vulnerability.
Lord, I hate this, he admitted silently. I asked You to help me heal, and now everything seems to be about Noah all over again.
He didn’t want to face this, but it didn’t look like he’d have a choice. He’d prayed that God would help him to work through his own grief, and sometimes when God answered a prayer, He did it with all the subtlety of a pile of bricks.
* * *
Sadie dropped her bag onto the seat of a kitchen chair and ran a hand through her hair. The meeting with the mayor had been more exhausting than she’d anticipated. There had been a very small and naive part of her that had been hoping that seeing Chance again would spark the old friendship they used to share, before those lines had blurred. Back when their relationship had been simple and sweet, she’d looked forward to seeing him, chatting with him, sharing jokes. Five years ago, Chance had been fun.
Marrying into a family that you honestly liked was a smart move, and that had been part of what had kept her moving toward the wedding. Mr. and Mrs. Morgan were kind and compassionate people—but they also knew how to stay out of a young couple’s relationship. Chance had been a good friend, too, and she had pleasant memories of sitting in his cruiser on a summer day, her bare feet up on the dashboard as she chipped away at that serious shell of his.
Feet down, he’d say.
Make me, Officer. She’d shoot him a teasing smile, and he’d crack a smile at that point—possibly imagining what it would take to get her to do as she was told. Personally, she thought he enjoyed the challenge.
She’d thought that flirting was safe—this was Chance, after all—but maybe she’d been naive about that, too. Because the day before the wedding, Chance had swung by her place to drop off some place cards that Nana needed for the reception. While talking on the porch, everything had changed...melted away into a foggy moment as their eyes met and the world faded away around them. He’d pushed a piece of hair away from her face, and as he did so, his eyes had locked on her lips, and she’d known that he was thinking about kissing her. She was an engaged woman, after all—she knew what that looked like. And he’d confessed his feelings.
I should have asked you out first, because watching you fall in love with my brother has been agony. I’m not saying I’m better for you than he is, I’m just— Never mind.
You what?
If you ever changed your mind about Noah, I’d be the first in line.
Her heart still lurched at the memory. In that moment, an innocent friendship with her future brother-in-law suddenly came into a new light. He obviously felt a whole lot more for her than she’d realized, and that moment had startled her awake in more ways than one. First of all, it made her realize that she’d never felt breathless and off balance with Noah. And second, she’d recognized that the life she’d agreed to wasn’t going to be enough.
Sadie rubbed her hands together. Nana’s house was always a little cold. Old houses were like sieves in the winter, the warm air flowing out as fast as it was pumped in. The house was small and white, with pink shutters that Sadie had painted herself when she was about thirteen. It stood at the end of Sycamore Street, just down from Blessings Bridal Boutique. As a girl, Sadie used to walk past that shop and stare into the windows at elegant bridal gowns. Was that why she’d been so quick to accept Noah’s proposal? But then, what girl didn’t want a wedding? She couldn’t let herself feel guilty about that. She’d been twenty-five when he proposed, not exactly a wisp of a girl, and she did want to settle down. She wanted a family, kids...
“So?” Nana prompted. She stood at the sink rinsing some dishes. Her hair was white and pulled back into a bun, and she wore a pair of pleated jeans and a faded blouse.
“I’ve got the job,” Sadie confirmed.
“That’s my girl.” Nana turned off the water and reached for a dish towel to dry her hands. “When I spoke with Eugene, he was quite excited. Apparently, our chief of police has been digging in his heels somewhat—”
“Chance,” Sadie corrected. “Our chief of police is Chance Morgan.”
Everyone else might be used to calling him chief, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. He was Chance—the guy she used to tease and hang out with.
“Yes.” Nana smiled wanly. “And how did that go?”
“Not as well as I’d hoped.” Sadie poured herself a cup of tea from a cozy-covered pot on the counter. “He’s not thrilled to be working with me.”
“He took his brother’s death hard,” Nana said. “We all did, really. Noah was universally loved...” She winced. “I’m not trying to make you feel bad.”
“I know, I know.” Sadie sighed. Her grandmother had been on her side when it came to ditching her own wedding. Nana had seen the writing on the wall, too, apparently.
Nana hung the towel over the oven handle. “Chance wouldn’t speak of you after you left. Not to me, not to anyone.”
“Really?” Sadie frowned. “He was that angry?”
Whatever he’d felt five years ago for her seemed to be safely gone. All she’d seen in his face was resentment—and she probably deserved it.
“Angry, loyal to his brother, maybe even a little betrayed himself.” Nana took another mug from the cupboard and poured it full of tea. “My point is, he’s bound to have a few residual feelings.”
“Residual feelings.” Sadie chuckled and took a sip. Her grandmother had no idea. “I suppose you could call it that. I’m pretty sure he can’t stand me. He wouldn’t even stay to drink his coffee in my presence.”
“He walked out on you?” Nana frowned. If there was one thing her grandmother couldn’t abide, it was rudeness, but Chance didn’t exactly count as rude. He was angry, obviously, and not thrilled to be working with her, but he’d always been so controlled, so proper. He was a cop to the core.
“After he paid for our coffee and bought me a piece of pie,” Sadie admitted with a shake of her head. “Noble to the last. I’m meeting him tomorrow morning at his office so we can sort out a few details for this ceremony.”
“That’s good.” Nana nodded. “You both need this.”
“Do we?” Sadie asked with a wry smile. “I’m not so sure. I wish I could be working with just about anyone else right now.”
“He needs this,” Nana replied. “I think he’s built you up in his head into something more than you are, and facing you again will bring it all back into perspective.”
So she’d been Godzilla in his head, had she? That was rather ironic. Well, maybe it would be good for him to see her as she was—a woman with feelings. He’d been able to see the woman in her before...
“And me?” Sadie asked. “Why do I need this?”
“Because you need to forgive yourself,” her grandmother replied. “At the end, I hope you two can make some peace. Move on. Stumble across each other in the grocery store and not dive for cover.”
Sadie chuckled. Nana had her own way of seeing things, and it was generally right. If Sadie was going to make her life here in Comfort Creek, then she needed to find some common ground with her almost-brother-in-law. Comfort Creek was a small town, and there was no avoiding someone with whom she had some unfortunate history.
“How is your mother?” Nana asked, and tears misted her eyes. When Sadie left town, she’d gone to the city and spent the better part of three years trying to find her mother. She’d worked for the catering firm, but her dedication to finding her mother had been stronger than anything else. She wanted answers—a reason for a mother to simply walk away from her little girl. She’d eventually found her living in a dumpy apartment, and she looked decades older than she really was.
“The last I saw her, she asked for money. And I—” Sadie put down her teacup “—I said no.”
“You had no choice, dear,” Nana said. “She’s an addict. She’ll always ask for money, and when you give it to her, she’ll buy more drugs.”
“She pleaded.” Sadie met her grandmother’s gaze. “She begged for it, Nana. I went back home and cried.”
Nana came around the table and wrapped her strong arms around Sadie, pinning her arms at her sides. These hugs—she’d come home for moments like this, where she wasn’t alone and someone else hurt as badly as she did when it came to her mom. Sadie’s mother had always been flighty. That was Nana’s term for it. She’d bounced from boyfriend to boyfriend, from job to job. When she’d gotten pregnant with Sadie, she wasn’t even sure who the father was—at least that was her claim. It was possible that she didn’t like who the father was... She’d never really put down any roots, and the most security Sadie had ever known was right here in her grandmother’s house. But Sadie was her mother’s daughter, too, and she’d inherited that tendency to bounce from job to job, from goal to goal...
“Sadie.” Nana pulled back and looked her in the face. “There was nothing you could do. If there were, I’d have done it already, I promise you that. Lori might be your mother, but she’s my baby girl.”
Sadie knew that, and she wasn’t a child, either. She understood the way drugs wreaked havoc on a person’s mind and body, but when she thought about all those years of waiting—hoping her mom would drive back into town as quietly as she’d left—it was both heartbreaking and infuriating to realize that her mom had been so close by all that time, and had never checked on her.
“Nana, I missed you.” Sadie meant that with every atom in her being. She’d missed her nana, the stability, the security, the love. For Nana, Sadie had been enough. She just hadn’t been enough for her own mom.
“I’m glad you’re home.” Nana patted her cheek. “Now, let me feed you. What would you like?”
That was always Nana’s solution for every problem—pie, bacon and eggs, perhaps a nice thick sandwich. Nana was a phenomenal cook, and she used food like therapy. Unfortunately, when Sadie was upset about something, her stomach closed down.
“I’m not hungry, Nana,” Sadie said with a small smile.
“Well...” Nana sighed, then shot Sadie a hopeful look. “I’ve made a few additions to the dollhouse...”
Sadie couldn’t help the smile that came to her face. “Are you still working on it?”
“Dearest, I’ve been working on that dollhouse for ages. I wouldn’t just stop. Come on, then. I’ll show you the newest renovations.”
Nana’s dollhouse was located in “the craft room,” which was a room too small for a bed, and since it had a window, it was also not suitable for closet space. Nana had turned this room into her crafting space, and it was therefore where the dollhouse sat on display. This dollhouse had been a formative part of Sadie’s childhood. She’d spent hours just staring into the tiny rooms, soaking in every perfect detail. Nana’s dollhouse was four stories of sky blue, Victorian elegance on the outside, but inside, the rooms were carefully decorated in a 1950s style. The house opened on hinges, so that even more rooms were available once the two back wings had swung out on either side. The center of the house had a staircase that led up to the very top floor—a tiny attic room with a cot and a rickety little dresser.
“What have you changed?” Sadie asked as she followed Nana into the study. It was a few degrees colder in that room, and the window had frost on the inside, too.
“Oh, this and that,” Nana said. “You know how it is. I decided to put real linens on the beds last year. Do you know how difficult it is to make a fitted sheet for a doll bed? I also made some tiny block quilts—all authentic, of course.”
“Of course.” Sadie bent down in front of the display of tiny rooms. She reached out to finger a tiny quilt on the bed in the attic. “Nana, this quilt is lined—” She stared at the minute craftsmanship.
“I told you—authentic.” Nana was pleased that she’d noticed—she could tell.
The funny thing was that seeing this dollhouse again felt like home in a deeper way than anything else in Comfort Creek. She’d spent so many solitary hours staring into these rooms, imagining the family that lived there, their dramas and quarrels, their victories and quiet Sunday evenings spent all together in the tiny sitting room in front of the fireplace...
The mother in this house never left. She doted over her offspring and cooked lavish meals in the kitchen. The father came home every day at the exact same time, and he picked up a tiny newspaper from the sideboard in the hallway. Any mess left about—like the toys on the children’s bedroom floor—was carefully orchestrated to be attractive. This house was perfection, frozen in an imaginary time where nothing could go so wrong that it couldn’t be set right again.
“I added a telephone in the kitchen.” Nana pointed to a pale pink rotary phone on the wall. “I found that one at the bottom of a bin in the craft shop. Liz could see how excited I was, and she charged me double, I’m sure. Oh! And I’ve been working on making sure that every single book in the library is real. I’ve found a tutorial online for making books that open. I tried making them with four or five pages each, but they just fanned open. It was very annoying. So I used thick cardstock on both sides, so that each book opens to the center.” Nana paused. “I was hoping you’d help me choose which books to include in the library. Maybe a few of your favorites, Sadie.”
Sadie rose and shot her grandmother a look of surprise. “Did you say you found a tutorial online?”
When Sadie left, Nana hadn’t exactly been tech savvy. She could email, but she was a strict telephone chatter. There was no video chatting with Nana, and for the most part, she tended to stay pretty old-school.
“It’s how it’s done these days, dear.” But her cheeks pinked in pleasure. “Okay, truth be told, last month, Ginny Carson’s grandson showed me how the tutorials worked. So I’m still new at it.”
“Ah.” Sadie shot her grandmother a smile. “I’m still impressed.”
“Welcome home, dear girl. Now you sit yourself down and get reacquainted with the old place, and I’ll go sort out some supper.”
Sadie was thirty-two, and this old dollhouse still soothed a part of her heart that nothing else could touch. This was the part of her that had softened to Noah—the part of her that longed for a perfect life with a picket fence. Noah had offered a picture-perfect existence here in Comfort Creek—a handsome man to come home to at the same time every day and pick up the paper off a sideboard table...
But it hadn’t been enough, because she didn’t love him enough, and she wasn’t sure that she was the kind of woman who could stay content with so much monotony, anyway. In the real world, with real emotions, real hardships, the life Noah offered wasn’t enough to fill her heart, after all. But he should have been, and if she’d been a little less like her flighty mother, he would have been. That knowledge had been nagging at her for the last five years. No man was perfect, and relationships didn’t stay in the honeymoon phase. Noah, his house, his family, this town—it all should have been enough.
Nothing had ever been enough for Mom. No boyfriend. No job. No town. They’d bounced from place to place, from romance to romance for her mom. And no matter how nice the guy, her mother always found a reason to cut him loose and they’d leave again... No one had been enough to fill that hole in her mother’s heart, and she feared that she might be the same. At least looking back on it all. She had been when it came to jobs around town.
If she could be faced with a sweet guy like Noah and the perfect life and still walk away from it all because she felt a rush of emotion with another man, maybe she deserved a life alone.
God rest Noah’s soul.
