Steadfast (True North #2)

by Sarina Bowen

  Good enough.

  Downstairs in the dining room, caterers did laps to and from the kitchen. My father stood drinking a glass of scotch in their midst, oblivious to the frantic pace around him. He looked me up and down when I walked into the room. “That’s what you’re wearing?”

  My mouth gaped open. “Seriously? Why do you care?”

  He stirred his ice cubes with a finger. “Don’t think you’ve met Nelligan yet, right?”

  I shook my head. But I knew the name—he was my father’s youngest officer.

  “I think you’d like him,” he said. “He’s single.”

  “Um, that’s nice?”

  The doorbell rang, ending our conversation. I snagged a glass of wine off one table and a miniature pig-in-a-blanket off another. My father wanted to set me up with a cop? That was new. And now I couldn’t wait to meet this guy. If my father thought he was suitable, I was betting on some pasty dude with tape on his glasses and a stutter.

  Officer Nelligan wasn’t all that bad. Sure, he was wearing a sweater vest. I didn’t know anyone still wore those. And he kept calling me “Miss Sophie,” which made me feel as though I were trapped in an old movie. But he was friendly and unassuming. He was like Denny with a southern accent and a gun on his hip.

  “May I get you another drink, Miss Sophie?” he asked, his blue eyes wide over his freckled nose.

  “That would be lovely. Thank you.” I’d already made the rounds, greeting everyone once. I’d eaten my weight in little hors d'oeuvres. Now the final hours of the evening needed only to be endured.

  While Nelligan trotted off to refresh my cabernet, I decided there was a question I should ask him. So far we’d stuck to the safest of topics. I’d assured him that even a southern boy could learn to snowboard. And he’d assured me that even a northerner could get to like grits.

  “So,” I said when he brought me a fresh glass of the inexpensive hooch that my father served his officers’ wives. (The cops were all drinking beer, because no cop would be caught dead drinking cabernet.) “I suppose you’ve heard all the gossip about me.”

  The guy’s eyes widened only slightly. “I don’t listen much to gossip.”

  “I’m sure you’re a good boy,” I said, tilting my head in a way that could only be described as seductive. “But you can’t live in this county and work for my father and not hear all the shit that went down here before.”

  “I heard y’all went through a bad time,” he said diplomatically.

  “Truth,” I said, touching my wine glass to his beer bottle. “And I’d really like to move on, but it’s not easy.” I held his eyes while I said it. They absolutely warmed. If I wasn’t mistaken, Nelligan liked the idea of me moving on.

  “Well.” He gave me a shy smile. “If there’s any way I can help, maybe you’ll let me know.”

  “Actually—” I smiled back at him, feeling like the most evil troll in the world. “—there is something I’ve been meaning to ask for. And I think you could help.”

  “Name it,” he said.

  “I would like to read the police report from the night of my brother’s accident. Nobody ever showed it to me.” I understood why, I really did. We were all so raw and devastated at the time. But I’d assumed we’d pull together enough at some point to have an honest discussion of what happened that night. Even now, the questions I asked were shot down immediately.

  Clearly my new pal Nelligan was not expecting this request. “Um…” he fumbled. “I shouldn’t really do that without your father’s permission.”

  “Really?” I said, tossing my hair in a way that was less than subtle. “It’s a public document. If I file a request, I can get it anyway. Do you really want to make me do that?”

  His expression turned sheepish. “I guess not.”

  “This way I could read it without upsetting him.”

  He scratched his head, still looking uncomfortable. “How would that work, exactly?”

  “We could meet for coffee. You’ll bring the file. How is that difficult?”

  He smiled. “All right, Miss Sophie.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Jude

  Cravings Meter: 4 and Escalating

  Winter was beautiful in Vermont. I’d forgotten how nice our town looked with a little snow on the porches and Christmas lights in the trees. I put wreaths over both garage doors—real ones, with red bows. It was all part of my plan to perk up the garage and attract more business.

  I finished painting an interior wall of the garage. Somehow another sober week was strung together—all seven days.

  On eBay, I sold several Porsche parts. Packing and shipping them kept me busy for at least a whole hour. My PayPal account was accumulating blood money, and I needed to mention it to Sophie. I kept putting it off, though. My time with her was precious and reserved for better things.

  The following Wednesday went down much like the last one. After working the church supper, I went home and showered, leaving the door open. This time when Sophie arrived I was already on my back in bed. When I heard her footsteps on the stairs, I lifted my arms overhead, tucking them behind the pillow.

  She opened the door and spotted me there, stretched out, my chest on display, the sheet tented over my erection. She gave it a pointed frown. “You started without me?”

  “Maybe.” I dropped a hand down to my dick, stroking my fingers up the underside through the sheet. “Didn’t know for sure if you were coming over.” That was teasing talk, of course. We’d exchanged several hot glances over various food preparations.

  I don’t think we were subtle, either. We must not have been, because her boy Denny had looked grouchy as hell tonight.

  Sophie stripped out of her jacket and hung it on my doorknob. She kicked off her shoes and then stood there a second just watching me. “Pull the sheet down,” she demanded.

  As I tugged it off, she knelt on the bed. One second later her lips closed around my dick. I threaded my fingers through her hair and forgot all about car parts on eBay.

  After another very satisfying hour together, she lay in my arms and drowsed for a while. “Tired tonight?” I asked her, kissing her forehead to help her stay awake.

  “So tired.”

  “I wish I could just tuck you in and let you sleep.”

  She’d sighed. “Me too.”

  But we couldn’t do that, and we both knew it.

  “Wednesday is the best day of the week,” she whispered, trailing the backs of her fingers over my face.

  “They don’t call it ‘hump day’ for nothing.”

  She laughed and gave me one more smile. “Maybe we could see each other over the weekend.”

  “How?” We had to be so, so careful. Her father would freak if he knew we spent time together, and I didn’t want to make Sophie’s life any more difficult than it already was. Even our Wednesday trysts made me feel guilty.

  “Stowe is ninety percent open already. Want to go snowboarding?”

  I did. Lift tickets were probably almost a hundred bucks, though. And there was another problem. “I can’t. No board or boots.”

  “Where are they?”

  I pulled Sophie closer, and it killed me to answer honestly. I did it, though. “I sold them for almost nothing because I needed a hit.”

  Sophie inhaled too sharply. It was the gasp of someone who understood more than they wanted to. But this conversation was absolutely necessary. Part of recovery is learning to get this shit off your chest and admitting to the people you love all the ways you’ve hurt them. “I did a lot of shit I’m not proud of. Hate telling you about it. But you should know.”

  “What else?” she asked, her voice an uncomfortable scrape. She might not want to hear these things, but Sophie was wise to learn exactly what I was capable of.

  Just in case she dabbled in the same kind of improbable, romantic thoughts that occasionally got the better of me, she needed to know who she was really dealing with.

  At yesterday’s NA meeting we�
�d talked about all our “never’s.” As in—the shit an addict says he’ll never do and then does anyway. We all have them.

  “Before I went to prison, I did painkillers, right? I snorted them. But in prison that shit was too expensive for me. The only thing I could afford was heroin.”

  She stiffened in my arms. “Like, with needles?”

  “Just like that. I shot it in between my fingers to avoid track marks and in between my toes. Anywhere I thought it wouldn’t show. It was the last thing I thought I’d ever do. And then I was still trying to hide it.”

  Sophie was silent for a minute. “You can just buy heroin in prison?”

  “Yup. I bought cigarettes and food with my paycheck and traded them for heroin. The prison doctor gave out clean needles. It’s a very efficient little economy they have working in there.”

  “Ugh. I hate thinking about you doing that,” she said to my chest.

  “Me, too,” I said quickly. And yet if you handed me a needle right now I might do it again.

  The first time I shot heroin it took me to a sweet, forgetful place. But then it just left me wanting more, and afterward the high was never as good. I hated that shit with all my heart, and I loved it, too.

  How fucked was I?

  Sophie didn’t ask any more questions. The truth was that I’d been more honest with her these last few weeks than ever before. Weirdly, this was as healthy as our relationship had ever been.

  It’s not a relationship, I reminded myself. Just two people relieving some sexual tension on Wednesday nights. That’s all we could ever be. And even while I wanted more, this arrangement prevented me from relying too much on Sophie’s company.

  One of these days it would end for good. Sophie was almost done with school. She’d hinted at having to look for a new job. And I had to leave Colebury eventually. As long as her father was chief of police, this town would always be my enemy. I’d been stopped—and my car searched—twice this month. Once the cop said I didn’t signal a turn. But he let me go with just “a friendly warning,” because we both knew it was bullshit.

  The second time the cop didn’t even give a reason. “Step out of the car, sir,” was all he said. I complied, of course. But these days the only place I drove was to the Shipleys’ and the grocery store. I walked everywhere else I needed to go. The police had made me into the most eco-friendly resident of Colebury. Griff Shipley would be so proud.

  “You could rent a snowboard,” Sophie suggested suddenly, interrupting my morose thoughts.

  “Sure. But what if one of your dad’s deputies goes to the mountain on his day off? You know it’s a bad idea if we’re seen together. I don’t want to make your life more difficult.”

  “Fuck,” she grumbled in frustration. “There has to be somewhere we could go.”

  I stroked my fingers through her hair and didn’t argue. She needed to realize it for herself—there were no cheery options for us. We were stuck, and there was no unsticking us.

  Before Sophie left, I tugged her down for one more lingering kiss. I held the back of her head, making sure I got a good one before she went. It had to last me a long time. “Bye,” I said, instead of I love you. Saying it out loud would only be more depressing. Because I couldn’t have her. Not for keeps.

  “Bye,” she’d said instead of I love you, too.

  The sound of the door closing behind her had made me flinch. I went to sleep feeling sad and woke up feeling worse.

  Thank God it was Thursday, though, and I could spend the day looking forward to an evening with the Shipleys. I showered and headed down to the garage at eight AM. When I touched the doorknob, the door creaked open under my hand.

  Weird.

  A chill climbed up my spine, and instead of going inside I just stood there for a moment. I hadn’t left the garage open last night. I’d never do that. We had too many expensive tools in here. As a recovering addict, I knew all too well that anything of value might be stolen by somebody who thought he could get a few bucks for it.

  “Hello?” I said into the darkness. I supposed there was an infinitesimally small chance that Dad had come in here already.

  Silence.

  I reached inside and flicked on the lights. Everything looked just as I’d left it. And there was nobody here. So I shook off my wary feeling and made some coffee in the drip pot I kept in here. Then I got to work organizing our collection of paints and finishes.

  My efforts were rewarded in the late afternoon, when someone rolled in to ask about a custom paint job. That never happened.

  The young man had driven up in a Prius. While he got out, I circled the car, looking for the dent. But there wasn’t one. He wanted a perky paint job in lime green. “I own a solar-panel installation business,” he explained. “The car is going to be, like, an advertisement on wheels. I’m going to add decals.”

  “Gotcha,” I said, inviting him inside to look at our paint catalog. I wanted this work. Paint jobs weren’t cheap. “Show me your logo. Let’s see what would make a good color choice.”

  The logo was black, and he picked out the craziest, brightest green paint on the page. “Nobody’s going to miss you in that color,” I said.

  “I know it’s a little much, but I want to be visible.”

  Not a problem. “You know, if you angled a white stripe down the door right here, your logo would pop even more.” I pointed.

  The guy rubbed his beard. “That is not a bad idea. I want it legible.”

  “Exactly.”

  He clapped his hands. “Okay. Let’s make this happen. What do I do?”

  “Make a deposit, and I’ll order the paint. I can fit you in next week.” Or anytime.

  “Good deal,” he said, and we shook on it.

  My father came in after that, probably because he smelled money. “You quote it right?” he asked when I told him about the paint job.

  “Of course.” You dick. “Don’t forget—tomorrow’s payday,” I prompted him.

  His answer was a grunt, but my reminder would probably do the trick. Sometimes he just plain forgot to pay me until I asked. When I was behind bars I’d bet he didn’t even keep track of the books. He probably just spent whatever landed in the till. But I wasn’t going to bust my ass for free. Every transfer from his bank account to mine put me one step closer to freedom.

  At last it was quittin’ time. “I’m out of here,” I said. “Got dinner with friends.” I’d started showing up to the Shipleys’ early on Thursdays. It allowed me to help out in the kitchen and also spend a few minutes gossiping with May.

  But first, some preparations. I got cleaned up and then took a walk to Crumbs. I’d become quite the regular customer. Their cakes were far from cheap, but they were quality. And K.K. was my new bff. She usually gave me a free cookie for the road.

  The bell on the door jingled when I walked inside. Even though it was almost closing time, there were people seated inside, nursing the last espresso of the day, I supposed. I was distracted by the Christmas lights that K.K. had hung over the counter. I almost didn’t notice Sophie sitting at one of the little tables. But she lifted her pretty face, and even that small movement had my gaze zeroing in on her.

  When our eyes met, hers went wide. And then they dropped down to her coffee cup, which she studied as if the secret to life was written there.

  Across the table from her sat a guy.

  Shit. As my stomach bottomed out, I hastily looked the other way.

  I knew Sophie and I weren’t supposed to be a couple. Nobody could know about our Wednesday nights. But we hadn’t run into each other like this before, and to watch her actually ignore me gave me heartburn. It really drove the reality of the situation home—all I would ever get were a few stolen moments. No more than that.

  “Hey, hottie,” K.K. teased. “What are you in the mood for this week?”

  “What’s good?”

  “Well, if you like your cake to look like wood”—she wiggled her eyes suggestively—“I recommend the Buch
e du Noel. It’s a French-Canadian thing.”

  The cake did, indeed, look like a yule log, complete with some lichen piped onto the side for realism. The damn thing was forty bucks, though. “Those crazy French Canadians. I think I’ll take a cheesecake tonight,” I said, pointing. Then I put my credit card on the counter.

  “Always a solid choice.” She moved away to box up my purchase

  I stood there with my back to Sophie, feeling like shit. And eavesdropping. “Thank you again,” Sophie was saying. “You’ve been so helpful.”

  “It’s my pleasure, Miss Sophie. Let’s do this again sometime.”

  “Absolutely.”

  If I could have stabbed myself with the ballpoint pen on the counter, I would’ve.

  “Well, Officer Nelligan, I’d better be on my way in a few minutes.”

  Shit. The base of my spine tingled. No wonder she’d looked freaked out when I walked in. That was a cop she was sitting with. The guy worked for her father.

  “I thought you were going to call me Rob.”

  I took my cheesecake and got the hell out of there.

  When I went into the alley to get into the Avenger for the trip to the Shipleys’, I could hear the garage phone ringing away inside.

  Crap. The garage phone was the only way anyone could reach me, since I was too cheap to buy a cell phone. I heard the ringing stop. But then it started right up again immediately.

  Fine. I unlocked the garage and ran for the phone, answering it before it went to the machine again. “Hello?”

  “I’m so sorry,” Sophie said right away. “That sucked. I feel shitty. But that guy I was sitting with works for—”

  “I get it.” My voice sounded tight, even though I really did get it.

  “If one of my dad’s deputies had a hunch that we were…” She cleared her throat. “They’d harass you.”