This was so messed up.
How was he supposed to work beside her now, to laugh and joke and trade stories like they always had? He was very much afraid he would always be remembering how she tasted, that little hint of strawberries and cream, and the sexy little hitch in her breath when he licked at the corner of her mouth...
He let out a long breath. “It’s been a...crazy day for both of us and I completely lost my head. Can we just chalk it up to that and forget the last few moments ever happened?”
He knew that wasn’t likely on his part, now that he had tasted the silky sweetness of her mouth and discovered just how perfectly her curves fit against him. He wouldn’t be able to forget anytime soon—but he was sure as hell going to try.
“You really think we can forget this?”
If they didn’t, working conditions at the small Haven Point Police Department would become intolerable. The awkwardness would be off the charts and the other officers would be sure to pick up on it.
“We have no choice, in order for us to continue working together.”
She gazed at him for a long, wordless moment while the river murmured and an owl hooted somewhere downstream. Finally she tucked one of those loose strands of hair behind her ear with fingers that trembled just a little. She must have sensed it too because she quickly curled them into her palm and dropped her arm to her side.
“Fine. Whatever you say. Thank you for the steak. It was delicious. I should be going. As you said, it’s been a crazy day and I’m exhausted.”
She turned away and began gathering up the dishes from his patio table.
“You don’t have to do that,” he protested.
“I’ll just help you carry them in. You can clean everything up later, when I’m gone.”
They worked together in silence without any of the easy camaraderie they usually shared.
His fault.
He had taken something he wanted without thinking of the consequences, and now everything between them had changed.
* * *
IDIOT MAN.
Did Cade really think she could pretend those moments of kissing him had never happened, after all this time of wondering what it would be like?
She was quite certain that kiss would be branded in her brain forever. The heat of his mouth, firm and delicious. His arms around her, making her feel cherished and powerful at the same time. His mouth, teasing, tantalizing, seducing.
How would she ever be able to forget it?
She’d heard rumors, of course. Half the women in town were in love with the gorgeous, slightly dangerous police chief. It wasn’t only the eligible females who pined after him. After two years of working for the department, she was finally used to the disappointed sighs from ladies, young and old, when she showed up on a call instead of him.
She was asked at least three or four times a day where that nice Chief Emmett was and sometimes she thought certain females she wouldn’t mention called the police on every little thing, just in hopes he would be the one to respond to the emergency.
Now she knew the hype was not an exaggeration.
When she returned to work, she would have to sit across from him during department briefings and try not to remember the way he had kissed her with fiercely intense concentration, as if all his secret fantasies had just come true and he didn’t want to miss a second of it.
Good luck with that.
She wasn’t going to do his dishes for him, even though her mother probably would have reprimanded her for it. What her mother didn’t know, and all that.
She helped carry the last dishes into his tidy kitchen then picked up Pete’s leash. “I’ll leave you the rest of the cheesecake.”
She wasn’t sure she would ever be able to take a bite of cheesecake again without remembering him. That was a crying shame, since she loved cheesecake.
“Thanks,” he murmured.
“I guess I’ll see you in a week, then.” She gripped the dog’s leash and headed for the door.
To her dismay, he followed right behind her. “I’ll walk you home.”
Didn’t he realize a girl sometimes needed a minute to herself to catch her breath after kissing a guy like him?
Or maybe that was only Wyn.
“Totally not necessary.” She had a black belt in Krav Maga, for heaven’s sake. She could certainly take care of herself when walking two hundred yards down her own quiet road in the sleepy town of Haven Point.
“Necessary or not, I’m walking you home.”
She had no chance of talking him out of it. The man could be as stubborn as she was.
Why had she ever even entertained the idea that she might be able to convince him to ease her suspension? Once he made up his mind about something, Cade was immovable—which didn’t bode well for her chances that he would ever kiss her again.
As they set off the short distance to her house, Pete took the lead, his nose sniffing all the edges where concrete met grass. She couldn’t resist glancing at the house across the street. The curtains and blinds were shut tight, without even a sliver of light peeking through. The bikes and balls had been hidden away in the garage, the van pulled out of sight.
If she hadn’t spoken with the woman and children herself earlier, she might have thought the house still stood empty. It was a mystery she was determined to solve, though she accepted she couldn’t do anything about it tonight.
She was painfully aware of him beside her, big and tough and gorgeous. That kiss. How on earth was she supposed to pretend it never happened?
“How’s your family?” she asked, seizing the first topic she could find to fill the awkward silence.
If anything, his features suddenly appeared even more stark and remote in the moonlight. “Not that great, to tell you the truth.”
“What’s going on?”
His mouth tightened as if he regretted saying anything. He said nothing for a long moment and she had a feeling he was trying to decide whether to answer.
Finally he sighed. “Marcus is in jail again in Boise. His wife called to tell me right before you knocked on the door.”
“DUI again?” she asked. He had confided in her a few months back about his brother losing his job and running into legal troubles.
“I don’t think he’s going anywhere for a while. His wife doesn’t want to bail him out this time.”
She was grateful that he could still talk to her as friends, at least.
“You’re not going to, are you?”
“No, but Christy wants me to talk to him. What do I say?”
“That’s a tough one.”
“I just want to shake him and tell him to get over himself and think about what he’s doing to his kids. If he loves them, how can he put them through the same damn things we had to endure?”
The frustration in his voice and the echo of old pain made her throat ache. She longed to reach for his hand, to share some of that burden but knew she didn’t have the right.
She could only guess at what his childhood had been like after his mother died, when Cade had been expected by his worthless father to take care of himself and his brothers. She knew a little of it, things she had figured out herself and bits and pieces she had picked up from overhearing her parents talk when they thought no one was listening.
Walter Emmett, Cade’s father, had been an alcoholic, in and out of jail, who eventually died a few years ago after his latest prison stint. She knew Cade was the one who held his family together, who got his brothers off to school, helped them with homework.
When Cade was eighteen, Walter Emmett went to prison again for robbery and Cade’s younger brothers were sent to live with relatives in southeastern Idaho. Her parents and Marshall tried to persuade him to move in with them for the last four months of his senior yea
r of high school, but he refused.
Instead, barely eighteen, he stayed by himself in their run-down home in Sulfur Hollow, working after school to keep the utilities on.
The day after graduation, he left for Marine Corps basic training. Through hard work, he became a military policeman and after two deployments, he left the Marines and came back to Haven Point to work for her father.
Cade was an extraordinary man.
Many people never managed to rise above the difficult circumstances of their youth and chose instead to re-create it in their own lives. Despite everything, he had broken the cycle to become a man who was respected by just about everyone in Haven Point, even the lawbreakers.
Was it any wonder so many women in Haven Point found him irresistible?
Including her, apparently.
She tightened her hold on Pete’s leash as they neared her house. “That’s what you have to say to him. Remind him of what things were like for all of you growing up and tell him he owes his children better than you had. We can’t change the past but that doesn’t mean we have to live there either.”
“That is absolutely right.”
When they reached her mailbox, Pete padded up the sidewalk and waited there for her to unlock the door for him.
“Thank you for walking me home. Can you believe we made it all this way and not a single person tried to attack us?”
He gave a mock scowl at her dry tone. “Don’t press your luck, Officer Bailey. You’re not inside yet and you never know who might be lurking in the bushes.”
She didn’t have anything to worry about from random attackers. The man walking beside her, however, was definitely a threat—at least to her emotional health.
Memories of their kiss teased at the edges of her memory and she did her best to hide her sudden shiver.
When they reached her door, he stopped and faced her, his jaw set. “I have to say this one more time, Wyn. I should never have lost my head earlier. I swear, it won’t happen again but if you think you need to file a complaint with the mayor and city council, I completely understand.”
She stared at him, hurt that he would even think her capable of such a thing—especially when her only complaint was that he didn’t kiss her long enough!
She wanted this whole thing to go away. What had she been thinking, to kiss him like that? She hadn’t been thinking, obviously, otherwise she would have realized it would change everything.
“I kissed you. I’m the one who wasn’t thinking straight. I don’t know, maybe smoke inhalation rattled my brain or something. It was an impulse, I acted on it and now it’s done. It was one kiss. Surely our working relationship—and our friendship—can survive one kiss.”
A muscle flexed in his jaw but he said nothing.
Did he think they couldn’t get past this?
The kiss had affected him more than he wanted to let on, she suddenly realized. He was attracted to her and he didn’t want to be.
Was she supposed to find that flattering or offensive?
Neither, she decided. It just was.
“Absolutely nothing has changed,” she lied. “We haven’t changed. When I return to work in a week—tanned, relaxed and well rested—things will be just as they were between us an hour ago.”
“I hope that’s true.” He didn’t look optimistic, however. He looked...troubled, his forehead furrowed and his eyes murky.
He seriously thought he had risked his job by kissing her. She couldn’t do anything to help ease the stress he felt about his brother or the scars he still carried from childhood but she could help him with this.
“You’re the one who said we should forget it. That’s what I intend to do and I suggest you do the same. You’ve got enough to worry about right now. You’re going to have to try to survive a busy June week on a lake full of crazy tourists while you’re short your best officer. That problem, at least, is entirely your own fault.”
He gazed at her for another long moment, then the edge of his mouth lifted into a faint smile. He looked faintly relieved at her determinedly casual attitude. “No matter how rough it gets, I’m still not lifting your suspension early. I’ll see you in a week, Officer Bailey.”
He reached down to give her dog a farewell pat. “See you later, Pete, buddy.”
“Good night,” Wyn said.
He waited until she unlocked her door and went inside before he headed back down her sidewalk toward Riverbend Road and home.
She watched him for just a moment, then headed through to the kitchen and poured water for Pete and for her. The window was open and she stopped for a moment to gaze out at the dark night and listen to the soothing sound of the endless river.
Yeah. She was a big fat liar.
She had told him nothing had changed while the truth was, she suddenly felt as if the entire world had shifted. The repercussions seemed to ripple around her like she had just jumped into that river, still icy with runoff.
How could she go back to being merely friends with him when she could no longer avoid the hard truth that she wanted so much more?
She had always felt something for Cade. When she was fourteen and he had been the rough-edged kid hanging around with her brothers, she thought it had been sympathy mixed with a healthy dose of forbidden crush.
She knew about his family, knew he had a rough home life, knew her dad had tried to mentor him and show him he could reshape his own destiny.
He wasn’t the first young man John Bailey had tried to help out along the way, nor was he the last. Yet Cade was the only one who left her flustered and hot every time he came around.
Over the years, that secret crush had developed into affection and respect. She had chosen to focus on those things, not the little hitch in her heartbeat around Cade, especially after the terrible New Year’s Eve when she was twenty-four, when everything changed.
She could do that now. Just put it aside and focus on her life—and on figuring out what she wanted to do with the rest of it.
CHAPTER EIGHT
WYNONA QUICKLY DECIDED she wasn’t very good at doing nothing.
Though she had gone to sleep fully intending to stay in bed all morning and catch up on reading on this, the first day of her suspension, she woke before sunrise, exhausted from a night of twisted, tortured dreams.
She only remembered the last few bizarre scenes her subconscious had spun right before she awoke. In one, she had been back in the middle of smoke and flames and fear, trying her best to comfort two scared little boys when Cade galloped through riding a moose, of all things. He had scooped up the boys and rode out with them while telling her she was going to have to stay inside the burning building for the entire length of her seven-day suspension.
The dream had shifted then and she was on his deck with the river murmuring past and the night air swirling sweet and cool around them. Cade kissed her, his mouth hot and urgent on hers. In the dream, they kissed for much longer than they had in real life, until she felt like she was as hot and breathless as she had been inside that structure fire.
He murmured to her in that low, sexy bedroom voice that he wanted to do more than kiss her, that he wanted to do everything with her, but he couldn’t. When she asked him why, he calmly pointed out that her clothes were on fire and he didn’t want to get burned. In horror, she looked down and discovered she was wearing her full Haven Point Police Department uniform, which was completely engulfed in flames.
In the dream, she cursed at him for not telling her and letting her ruin her last good uniform, and then she ran to the bank of the Hell’s Fury, ready to jump in, where she found Andrea Montgomery, her foot in a cast, floating down the river on an inner tube, her children right behind her like little ducklings.
Andrea told her she wasn’t welcome there but Wyn insisted she had no choice. Couldn�
�t they see her clothes were on fire?
She awoke right before she jumped into the icy waters.
Dreams. What the heck, right? Sometimes her subconscious was seriously whacked.
Sensing Wyn was awake, Pete padded over to be let out. She groaned and pushed the last tendrils of weirdness away as she climbed out of her warm bed and grabbed a robe.
She let him out, then stood watching the pink rim of sunrise above the mountains before letting him back inside again a few moments later. She thought about going back to bed but she was wide-awake now, too restless and unsettled to even settle back between the sheets with a good book.
Instead, she changed into work clothes then spent several hours weeding the perennial flower beds her grandmother had planted years ago. Wyn tried to maintain them but with her hectic schedule, it was a haphazard effort at best.
She had all the time in the world now, she told herself. Might as well do it right. When she was satisfied all the morning glory and dandelions, curly dock and those pesky mallow had been ruthlessly eradicated, she turned her attention to the inside of her house and all the jobs she always claimed she didn’t have time to finish.
Two hours later, her kitchen cupboards had been scrubbed and organized and her closet plucked clean of all the clothes she no longer wore. The excess now filled a couple of bags in the back of her SUV that were destined for Goodwill.
So. That was done. How she would fill the remaining days of her suspension, she had no idea but at least her house was shipshape.
A quick glance at her clock told her she had more than enough time to clean up and still make it to the regular monthly potluck lunch held at McKenzie’s store.
The doorbell rang just as she was heading for the shower. She switched directions and opened it to find her mother standing on the doorstep carrying two large tote bags.
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