Falling in Love on Willow Creek

by Debbie Mason

  “Come, come.” She gestured him to the front of the line. “Eh,” she said when someone grumbled a complaint. “He’s a hero. Nessa, she say he saved Finn. You know how much she love that dog. Come, come.”

  Chase apologized to the people in line. Most of them didn’t seem to mind now that they learned he’d “saved” the dog. He wondered what they’d think if he told them the truth.

  “You’re a good boy,” she said to Chase, her smile as bright as the sauce splattered on her white apron. “You take care of our Sadie, and now, you take care of Finn. Eh, look at that face.” She put down her wooden spoon and reached up to grab his cheeks between her strong fingers. “What a handsome boy.” With her fingers still clamped on his cheeks, she turned his face to the customers in line. “Just like a movie star, eh? If I was younger, I’d give our Sadie a run for her money.”

  She let go of his cheeks and patted his face. “She needs someone like you. A good man.” She wrinkled her nose. “The bambina’s daddy? He no good.” Then the disgust cleared from her expression, and she clapped her hands. “Now, what can Zia Maria get for you? We gotta fatten our Sadie up, eh? Too skinny. It’s the depression. It happens after you have the bambino sometimes.” She leaned to the side to look past him. “You had it, eh, Nina? You too, Marge.”

  Apparently, Nina and Marge weren’t the only women in the restaurant to have suffered from postpartum depression, and for the next fifteen minutes, every one of them shared their experiences and advice with Chase.

  “Ma, you’re backing things up,” a man called from the open kitchen, sliding a pizza into the wood-fired oven.

  “I’ll write it all down for you,” Maria told Chase, holding up a pencil and pad of paper. “You make her listen. She pretends everything’s okay, but we know it’s not so. Too proud, that one. She won’t even let her friends help. But you, she’ll listen to you.”

  He highly doubted that was the case, but he appreciated Maria’s faith in him, just as much as he appreciated her advice.

  They were right. Sadie wasn’t just exhausted; she was depressed. He hadn’t recognized the signs until he heard their stories. It wasn’t something the baby books he’d read had touched upon. They were focused on the baby’s development, not the mother.

  From behind him, a new voice chimed in. “You’ll have your work cut out for you, Mr. Knight. Sadie’s as stubborn and as proud as her grandmother.”

  He turned to the woman with the long, straight coal-black hair at the back of the line, recognizing her from the Highland Falls Herald. It was the town’s mayor, Winter Johnson.

  “The mayor is right. Agnes, she’s too proud to tell us her store, it is in trouble. It’s Elijah’s fault. Her grandson,” Maria confided to Chase. “He was a sweet boy, smart but not, how you say, smart about the people. Our Sadie and Agnes”—she wiggled her baby finger—“he had them wrapped so tight he say jump, they say, how high.”

  “Ma.” Her son rattled off something in Italian.

  “A little like your Marcello, eh, Maria?” an older man at one of the tables said.

  “No pizza for you, Ed,” Marcello yelled from the kitchen.

  Everyone laughed, and Maria waved her spoon at her son. “This is important, Marcello. You want Agnes to lose her store or what?”

  “If you keep talking and not taking orders, we’ll be in the same boat. Bring it up at the next business-association meeting. Abby will be there. She’ll figure something out.”

  “Okay, okay.” Maria shrugged. “What he say, it is true. Abby, she’ll know what to do. Mayor, you’ll take care of that, eh?” Once Winter Johnson confirmed that she’d put it on the top of that month’s agenda, Maria waved Chase off to the side. “I got the order for the store. The nice boy, he said you’d pick it up. I’ll make yours. I know what Sadie likes. Better, I know what she needs. You too. Don’t worry, Zia Maria knows what you’ll like,” she said before calling out orders to her son for what sounded like every customer in line.

  While he waited for his order to be filled along with everyone else, the conversation turned to the body discovered in the woods. It was a conversation Chase listened to with great interest. His subtle questions eventually steered the conversation in exactly the direction he wanted it to go. The customers began surmising where Elijah was lying low.

  “No, he wouldn’t go to Sadie’s,” Maria dismissed a woman’s suggestion. “She cut ties with him last summer. The cocaine. Bah. That boy needs a kick in the culo.”

  “So does Payton. It’s her fault he got involved with the gang on Whiteside Mountain in the first place.” Nina rubbed her fingers together, the universal sign for money. “She was always after him to buy her things. Never satisfied, that one. She always wanted bigger and better.”

  “You’ve had it in for that girl since she broke your boy’s heart, Nina,” a woman said from one of the tables.

  “I agree with Nina,” the woman sitting beside her at the table said. “My boy’s been friends with Elijah since they were in grade school. That girl’s been leading him around by the nose since they got together.”

  “Word is she has a bun in the oven and Elijah is the daddy,” one of the older men said.

  Interesting. Chase wondered if Elijah had shared the news with his sister. If he had, it might create an opening for Sadie to get closer to Payton Howard. The more Chase learned about the woman, the more she came into play as a means of bringing Elijah in.

  The women in line turned to look at the older man who’d shared the news. “What? I’m just repeating what I heard at Highland Brew,” the man defended himself.

  “If that’s true, he’d better stop hiding out in the woods and get himself a good paying job.”

  “How’s he supposed to do that, Ed? He’s got the Whiteside Mountain Gang after him. You ask me, all of us should be praying he stays far away from Highland Falls. We don’t need anyone coming into town looking for him.”

  “They’re already too close for comfort if you ask me,” Ed said. “What with the dead body in the woods and the shoot-out last night. Heard they came after Elijah.”

  So it looked like Gabe’s effort to keep last night’s shooting quiet hadn’t exactly panned out. The chief had admitted it was tough to keep anything quiet in the small town. But while Chase wasn’t thrilled word had gotten out, he was relieved that Sadie’s part in it hadn’t appeared to.

  “Damn fool,” the older man said. “What was he thinking bringing them so close to Willow Creek and his sister’s place?”

  The older man made a good point. Something Chase planned to bring up with Sadie once she deigned to speak to him again. He figured he’d be waiting awhile.

  “That’s what I said to my wife just this morning,” the man’s tablemate agreed. “Elijah’s been playing in those woods since he was a little tyke. Aside from his sister, the lad knows more hidey-holes in those woods than all the citizens of Highland Falls combined. The caves south of Honeysuckle Ridge, for one.”

  Some of the other customers joined in, naming the places where Elijah Gray used to play. The perfect locations for him to lie low. Exactly the information Chase had been hoping for. He repeated the locations in his head as Maria waved him over to the counter.

  “You come back for tomorrow’s special, eh?” she said after he’d paid.

  “If this tastes as good as it smells, you won’t be able to keep me away, Zia Maria.” Not only for the food but for the gossip as well.

  It took another twenty minutes for him to get out of the restaurant. Someone asked if he’d had a Bigfoot sighting yet, which of course he hadn’t. How could he, he asked, when they didn’t exist? It was something he shouldn’t have said out loud, because every customer at Zia Maria’s had a Bigfoot story to tell, including Zia Maria.

  By the time Chase pulled his car alongside the sidewalk in front of I Believe in Unicorns, Sadie was turning the sign in the window to Closed. Their eyes met and held through the glass. She turned away. She might as well have given him th
e middle finger.

  It bothered him that she was mad at him, far more than it should. He couldn’t become intimately involved with the sister of their primary suspect, a suspect herself in his partner’s eyes. Even if Chase disagreed with Black, it didn’t mean he didn’t have some suspicions of his own when it came to Sadie, which made his feelings for her more difficult to understand.

  But understand them or not, they were there. So maybe it was for the best that she couldn’t stand the sight of him. Living under the same roof with Sadie would be easier if she kept her distance.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Sadie glanced in her rearview mirror as she pulled into her driveway. Sure enough, Michael was right behind her. Chase, she reminded herself on a low growl. Chase Roberts, the man who’d lied to her. An FBI agent who was using her to get to her brother, and she’d named her daughter after him. He wasn’t her knight in shining armor after all.

  As a heavy weight pressed upon her and the backs of her eyes began to burn, she looked at herself in the mirror. “Do not cry. He doesn’t deserve your tears.” She glanced at her daughter. “And he doesn’t deserve your love, my sweet baby girl.” Tears welled in her eyes, threatening to spill over as she remembered her daughter’s delighted giggles. Michaela had rewarded Chase with her first smile and her first laugh. He didn’t deserve to be given those gifts.

  Sadie sniffed back tears, catching movement in her side mirror as she went to turn off the engine. She must have sat there longer than she’d realized. Avoiding the inevitable, she thought, as Chase walked to the front door with a suitcase in one hand and a large takeout bag from Zia Maria’s in the other. If she wasn’t worried about her daughter’s safety, she would have told him what he could do with his protection. Her stomach gurgled. The food he could leave.

  “Stay where you are,” he said when she got out of the car.

  “Unless the FBI teaches you to open a deadbolt…” She swallowed a mortified groan when he opened the door and stepped inside with his gun drawn. She’d left the door unlocked.

  Michaela began to fuss in her car seat, and Sadie eased her way around the car to comfort her. As she did, she searched the area. Nothing looked out of place. Then again, what did she know? She hadn’t sensed the gunmen’s approach last night. She prayed Elijah wasn’t hiding inside the cottage. Surely he wouldn’t bring danger right to her door. She liked to believe he wouldn’t, but he had a long-standing tradition of thinking only of himself.

  And soon he’d have a baby to think about. She’d gone back and forth on whether or not to share the news with her grandmother. Late that afternoon, the decision had been taken out of her hands. Babs Sutherland had arrived to congratulate Sadie and her grandmother about the new addition to the family. Sadie had played dumb. But she hadn’t pretended to be happy about the news. How could she be?

  Her grandmother was another story. It was like Elijah wasn’t on the run and in fear for his life and Agnes wasn’t months away from losing her business and home. She was already planning the baby shower.

  “You can come in now.” Chase hesitated in the doorway as if contemplating helping her with Michaela. Something in her expression must have told him she didn’t need or want his help, because he picked up the takeaway bag and rolled his suitcase into the cottage.

  She opened the back passenger-side door and leaned in to grab the baby bag and slide it over her shoulder before releasing Michaela from her car seat. Her daughter didn’t reward her with a delighted gurgle or a happy smile. Instead, she tangled her grasping fingers in Sadie’s hair and tugged. Hard.

  She let out a loud ow, which brought Chase to the door. “What’s wrong?”

  “Besides you standing in my doorway with a gun in your hand and your suitcase in my entryway? Nothing. Nothing’s wrong.” She closed the car door and beeped the lock, wincing as she walked up the path with her hair still gripped tightly in her daughter’s hands.

  He sighed and stepped aside for her to pass him. As she did, Michaela made small grunting sounds, letting go of Sadie’s hair to hold out her hands. Sadie looked from her daughter’s hands to the object of her ardent desire. He stepped out of reach, his expression blank, but there was an emotion in his eyes she couldn’t read. She thought it might be regret.

  “I know how you must feel, Sadie,” he said as he closed and locked the door. At her raised eyebrow, he lifted his hands. “You’re right. I don’t have any idea how you feel, but you need to know, I didn’t want to lie to you. My partner was against telling you the truth. You heard that yourself.” He looked at Michaela, who was still holding out her arms to him. “Can I take her?”

  When Sadie hesitated, he said, “Whatever you think of me, you have to know that my feelings for Michaela were real, are real. Michael is my middle name and Knight is my maternal family’s surname. If it makes you feel better, I’ll go by Michael. I don’t care.”

  “I have to call you that anyway. You’re still undercover, remember?” It wasn’t just his offer to go by his middle name or that he was, in a way, Michael Knight that made her feel better and hand him her daughter. It was that he’d asked her permission to take Michaela. Drew had only ever pretended to respect her wishes and boundaries.

  “Thank you,” he said, then held her gaze. “I meant what I said, Sadie. I care about Michaela, and I care about you.”

  Sadie woke up to sun streaming in her bedroom window and rubbed her eyes. She wasn’t dreaming. Shooting up into a sitting position on her bed, she tried to get her bearings. A towel fell off her head and onto the blanket that covered her. She wore a towel and nothing else.

  Images of the night before filtered into her brain in vivid Technicolor. Chase with her smiling daughter in his arms, setting the table for dinner. She’d gone to take a shower before they sat down to eat. A long, leisurely, blissfully peaceful shower. She’d been in there so long she’d used all the hot water in the tank. Afterward, she’d gone to her bedroom to change and remembered, as clear as if it were happening right then, lying on her bed.

  She’d only meant to take a moment to think through everything Chase and Nate had revealed to her yesterday morning. To go over what Chase had said about caring for her and her daughter, wondering if she should believe him. Or was he just one more man in a long line of them who would break her heart and her trust?

  Her brain synapses seemed to be firing on all cylinders this morning. Which would have been a welcome change if her brain didn’t choose that moment to point out that there were only two men who’d truly broken her heart—her father and her brother. After that, she’d never let another man close enough to get past her defenses.

  She thought over her past relationships. Okay, so maybe the men she’d dated hadn’t been worthy of her love. But she really hadn’t given them the chance to be, had she? She got a gold star for her ability to sabotage a relationship. Her trust issues when it came to men were deeply entrenched. For the past ten years, she’d been protecting herself and her heart. The only person she’d truly let in was her baby girl.

  She blinked. Michaela! Sadie threw back the blanket and leaped from her bed. She stopped with her hand on the doorknob. She was naked, and she had a man in her house. A drop-dead gorgeous man she was attracted to. An attraction that hadn’t abated even when she found out he’d been lying to her all along.

  She ran to her dresser and pulled out the drawers. They were empty save for two pairs of underwear and a bra that had seen better days. She turned to the overflowing laundry hamper. Clothes littered the honey-colored wood floor around the hamper, with more articles of clothing tossed on the blue chair in the corner. Everything she owned was dirty. She eyed the black yoga pants and white T-shirt hanging over the arm of the chair. They’d have to do.

  Grabbing a pair of underwear and the bra from the dresser drawer, she hurried to the chair. She sniffed the yoga pants and T-shirt. They didn’t smell, and they weren’t stained. She remembered why. She’d tossed them there yesterday morning after deciding they
weren’t work appropriate.

  She listened for signs of her daughter and Chase as she threw on her clothes, her stomach doing a nervous dance. The cottage was suspiciously quiet and must have been so for twelve hours, because she’d slept the sleep of the dead. Then again, they could have had a party and she probably would have slept through it.

  Overwhelmed with guilt and more than a little embarrassed, she opened her bedroom door and tiptoed across the hall to her daughter’s room. At the sight of the empty crib, she whirled around and ran, stopping short when she reached the living room. Chase was asleep on the couch with her daughter on his chest, his arms wrapped protectively around her.

  Sadie stood there staring at them with a lump forming in her throat. It was the most beautiful sight she had ever seen. She glanced around for her camera, wanting to capture the moment. It surprised her a little. Up until six months ago, her camera was always close at hand. Photography had been her passion long before she’d gotten into graphic design. But aside from a few photos of Michaela when she was born, Sadie hadn’t taken any pictures at all.

  In her search for her camera—even her phone would do—her eyes landed on the bottles on the coffee table, the neatly piled sleepers and diapers beside them. She glanced at Chase to see him watching her through bloodshot eyes that made the blue of his irises stand out even more. She winced and opened her mouth to apologize.

  He moved his hand to press a finger to his lips and whispered, “She just went back to sleep.”

  Her daughter’s head came up. Chase looked like he wanted to groan but instead raised a hand to Michaela’s head and gently pressed it back onto his chest, humming and rocking her as he did so. As soon as he stopped, Michaela’s head popped up again.

  After the third time it happened, Sadie was barely able to keep the laughter from her voice. “It’s okay. We both have to get ready for work anyway.”

  He turned his head to look out the window that faced Willow Creek. He frowned, raising his arm to glance at his watch. This time he did groan out loud. “How can it be eight in the morning already? I swear I just closed my eyes.”