by Lily Everett
“I’m very glad to hear it,” Lt. Phelps replied. Something in her slow, careful voice made the smile drop off Andie’s face.
Gripping the phone more tightly, Andie said, “I’m pretty sure I gave you my cell number in case you needed to contact me.”
The dread coiling in her guts rolled over when Lt. Phelps hesitated. “Yes. You did. Well, for this kind of call I’m afraid the army requires that we use a landline. I have an important message to deliver from the Secretary of the Army.”
White noise buzzed in Andie’s ears. She didn’t know what kind of sound she made, but it must have been bad because Sam was instantly at her side. His strong, sturdy presence gave Andie the courage to stand up straight and say, “All right. I’m ready, Lieutenant.”
The chaplain took a deep audible breath. “Andrea Shepard, the secretary has asked me to express his deep regret that on the sixteenth of May, your brother, Sergeant First Class Owen Shepard, went missing in action.”
There was more, but Andie heard it all distorted, broken by the static of the Army chaplain’s sympathy and the shocked grief beating at her own heart. Wounded, presumed dead, body not recovered, so sorry …
“Wait,” Andie rasped, breaking into Lt. Phelps’ halting condolences. “Presumed dead. So you don’t know for sure.”
“That’s correct. But I wouldn’t want to give you false hope, Andie.”
“Owen is strong,” Andie insisted, reminding herself as much as arguing with the chaplain. “He’s smart and fast—if he’s still alive…”
“That’s a big if,” Lt. Phelps said softly. “His team was ambushed. There were a lot of casualties.”
Andie wanted to press the point, to shout down the line and make Lt. Phelps agree with her, but she heard the subtle catch in the other woman’s breath. Like a suppressed sob. And she knew Lt. Phelps wanted to believe it, too, as much as Andie did—but she couldn’t say it aloud.
Rather than torture them both, Andie took a shuddering breath and said, “Thank you for calling, Lieutenant Phelps. You volunteered to notify us, didn’t you?”
“Owen’s C.O. is still OCONUS, that is, outside the continental U.S., but he authorized me to go ahead with the notification. Up until today, they were still working to discover Owen’s whereabouts but…”
“The search has been called off,” Andie finished, her lungs squeezing down until her voice was a faint thread. “Okay.”
“I’m very sorry for your loss.” The lieutenant had steadied herself and was back on script, but Andie could hear the genuine regret and sorrow throbbing through Loretta’s voice.
“I’m sorry for your loss, too,” Andie told her. “I know you were friends.”
Maybe more than friends, judging by the fragile silence on the other end of the line. Or maybe Loretta had simply loved Owen like a sister—that was enough cause for pain, as Andie knew all too well.
They said their good-byes and after extracting a promise that she’d be notified if there was any new information, Andie hung up. Her feet felt leaden, too heavy to lift, but she was afraid if she didn’t walk over to the couch and sit down, she’d collapse in a heap on the kitchen floor. She couldn’t collapse. She had to hold it together.
A large, warm hand smoothed down her arm to circle her wrist, solid and comforting. Andie blinked up at the man beside her, his dark, watchful eyes and the concerned tilt of his brows, and she let herself fall into him.
She trusted that Sam would catch her, and he did. With an incoherent hum of low, soothing words, Sam scooped her up against his chest and carried her to the sofa. He lay down full length and pulled Andie over him like a shaking, gasping blanket and there, cradled against the strength of Sam’s body, she allowed the first tear to fall.
*
Sam held Andie in his arms and felt his heart crack with every tear she cried, and he knew all those things that had stopped him from leaving town were nothing but flimsy excuses compared to this—the reality of this woman and the way he’d somehow become so connected to her that he felt her grief as his own.
He couldn’t even think of leaving her now. Not when she needed him so badly … and not when he’d finally realized that he’d be leaving his entire heart behind with her.
Chapter Nineteen
“You don’t have to come with me tonight, if you’re not up to it,” Sam said from the bedroom doorway.
Andie responded by turning her back and gesturing at her dress’s stubborn zipper. She was determined not to sit around feeling sad. Brooding wouldn’t help Owen, and it certainly wouldn’t help Caitlin—who had to be her first priority now.
“Your cousin’s graduation party is a good distraction,” Andie said, giving him her best attempt at a smile. “Besides, I feel invested in Matt. It’s always nice to see a kid you’ve arrested turn his life around.”
The zipper hitched, then slid upwards. Sam’s fingers followed it, smoothing the soft cotton of the dress and sending a clenching shiver through the center of Andie’s body.
“If that’s what you want to do, sweetheart. But if it’s going to be too much for you, I can explain to Penny about what’s going on, and no one will blame you for ditching the party.”
“No!” The vehemence in Andie’s voice surprised them both. Sam’s hands stilled. She met his stare in the mirror and swallowed hard. “I mean, please don’t talk to anyone about Owen. Not yet.”
“Andie. These people here are your friends. They’d want to know what’s going on so they can help you, support you. Isn’t that what friends are for? That’s the whole point of belonging to a community like this one, or so a certain someone keeps telling me.”
Considering that she was about to get booted out of this particular community—or at least, booted out of the sheriff’s office—she wasn’t so sure. Andie bent down to search the closet floor for her one pair of dressy sandals. “It’s not that. I’m just not ready to give up on Owen yet.”
“And that’s why you’re still not telling Caitlin either.”
“I don’t want her to worry until we know more about what happened,” Andie said, trying to sound confident and upbeat. “It wouldn’t help anything, and might derail her when she’s finally settling in here. Sometimes we have to keep things from people for their own good.”
And saying it out loud to Owen’s daughter might make his disappearance more real.
Andie checked, but Sam didn’t seem to be listening for the unspoken true reason for her keeping this from Caitlin. Instead, his dark gaze had turned inward.
“Sam?”
He startled. “Yeah, no. I hear you. I won’t say anything to Caitlin. But what about your father?”
She stiffened, crouched on the floor of her closet as if she’d heard an air raid siren. “What about him?”
“I’m not saying you ought to call him up,” Sam said. “At all. As far as I’m concerned, he waived all right to hear from you when he threw you to the wolves back in Louisville. I guess I just thought, maybe he’s learned something from losing both of his kids, in different ways. He must know by now, about Owen, right?”
Words jammed into Andie’s tight throat. She jerked her shoulders up and down. “I doubt it. I haven’t told him, and when Owen left home, he swore he’d never speak to him again. He even went so far as to put me down as his next of kin on his army intake forms. The army wouldn’t even know to call Dad, or how to reach him.”
Andie knew, despite not having spoken to the man in years. Her father was still in the same little rowhouse where her mother had dropped dead in the kitchen, an aneurysm in her brain going off like a bomb that destroyed the entire family.
The brush of Sam’s body as he sat down beside her drew Andie from her memories. He put a hand on her arm, gentle and undemanding, telling her without words that he was there if she wanted to say more. She sent him a half smile that turned to a grimace as she let herself slide down to sit against the closet doorjamb.
“All the men in my family are cops. Going back—go
sh, I don’t even know how many generations,” Andie explained wearily. “From the time we were little, Dad was always after Owen, telling him how it would be when he got to the academy, out on the beat, how if he applied himself, he could make detective. It was all he seemed to care about, once Mom was gone. Or maybe it was just the only future he could envision anymore. I don’t know. But Owen was always more interested in causing trouble than keeping the peace.”
Extending his mile-long legs on either side of her, Sam tugged until her curled-up body unraveled against him. Andie wasn’t a small woman—she’d never pictured herself as the kind of petite, kittenish girl who sat in a man’s lap—but Sam was huge, solid, and reassuring. A wall strong enough to hold her up when she needed it.
He nuzzled a kiss into her hair, making her relax deeper in his embrace. “Your dad must have been proud that you followed in his footsteps.”
“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” Remembered hurt surged up, the feeling of being invisible, irrelevant, a footnote. “He sent Owen to military school to try and straighten him out before he could get accepted to the police academy, and I guess it worked a little too well. Owen quit getting into trouble—but he didn’t come home and follow my father’s script. Instead, as soon as he turned eighteen, he joined up. I was so proud of him…”
Her voice broke, all her fears for her brother pouring over her once more, but the steady circle of Sam’s arms around her shoulders helped keep her head above water.
“But your dad was angry,” Sam guessed, although the grim tone of his voice said it wasn’t a shot in the dark.
“He didn’t see that Owen was still protecting and serving, just in a different way. All he cared about was that Owen had defied him. And when I graduated from college and started the recruitment process with the Louisville Metro Police Department … I thought it would make things better. That Dad would get off Owen’s back because he’d see that the Shepard legacy of law enforcement would live on. But Dad didn’t care. I wasn’t a boy, wasn’t a Shepard son, so I was never good enough. Even when I beat every other candidate, including the men, at the physical ability test. It didn’t matter.”
Sam’s fingers flexed, as if he were fantasizing about wringing her father’s neck. “Andie, I’m sorry. He should’ve cared—you’re amazing. Any police department would be lucky to have you.”
“That wasn’t even the worst part.” Forcing herself to sit up, Andie wiped a finger under her eyes and hoped she hadn’t wrecked her eyeliner. Hard enough getting it on straight the first time. “I thought joining the LMPD would put my family back together, but instead it tore Owen and me apart.” Guilt and pain wrapped around her heart like climbing vines studded with thorns. Andie forced herself to continue.
“He was furious about it, like I’d personally betrayed him. He accused me of trying to replace him, to push him out of the family—and I lost it, I yelled that he’d ditched us a long time ago and maybe he should stay gone. It was awful. We were young and stupid; we both said things we didn’t mean. I finally calmed down enough to apologize and convince him that I actually wanted to be a cop. We patched things up on the surface, but underneath, it was never the same.”
A sob choked out of her, chest heaving, and Andie covered her streaming eyes. “And now I might never get the chance to make things right, to let Owen know once and for all that I never wanted him out of the family.”
Sam leaned in, framing her face with his big hands and rubbing tears away with sweeps of his thumbs across her cheekbones. “Ah, sweetheart. He knows. Wherever he is, Owen knows you’re his family. When he was in trouble, when he needed a place for Caitlin to stay, he trusted her to you. That tells me Owen Shepard is a man who knows who his family is.”
The words broke through Andie’s misery of regret, fear, and grief. Owen knows, Sam said. Knows. Not knew—not past tense. She blinked until her blurred vision cleared and all she could see was Sam Brennan’s serious mouth and deep brown eyes.
“I love you,” she whispered thickly.
Sam’s eyes warmed, a smile touching the corners of his lips, and Andie’s poor, battered heart throbbed. But before Sam could reply, Caitlin’s clear voice piped in from the hallway.
“What are y’all doing on the floor?”
“Looking for my shoes,” Andie called, snagging a pair of flat, gold-toned sandals and raising up on her knees to peer over the bed at Caitlin’s curious face. “Found them. Are you ready to go?”
“I’ve been ready for days,” Caitlin told her, vibrating impatiently.
“Days! Gracious. I guess I’d better hurry and catch up then.” Andie climbed to her feet and held out a hand to help Sam up. “Goodness only knows what my face looks like. Stupid makeup.”
Stupid hysterical crying fit. Although Andie had to admit, she felt lighter for having shared that burden with Sam.
Slipping her feet into the sandals, Andie rubbed at her cheeks and prayed she didn’t have raccoon eyes. “How do I look?”
“Too gorgeous for company,” Sam growled, desire heating up the tender glint in his eyes until Andie had to kiss him, nipping at his bottom lip and tasting the desire on his tongue.
“Gross,” Caitlin pronounced. “Stop that. Come on, I want to go see Taylor.”
“We’re coming, we’re coming,” Andie laughed, feeling better than she had all day.
Harrington House was ablaze with lights when they pulled up. Caitlin was out of the SUV and scrambling up the porch steps to look for Taylor almost before Andie had it in park.
Sam and Andie followed at a more sedate pace so that Andie had time to admire the Victorian gingerbread trim and the stately, welcoming feel of the place. Through the sparkling golden windows she glimpsed guests talking and smiling, raising their glasses in a toast. A cheer and a wave of laughter rolled out the door when they opened it, a wall of sound that made Andie flinch.
Maybe Sam had been right. Maybe it was a mistake for her to come here tonight.
As if sensing Andie’s second thoughts, Sam quietly closed the front door in front of them. He curved his arm around her shoulders and steered her around the side of the wraparound porch to the cool darkness at the back of the house.
“I’m fine,” Andie tried to protest, but her feet followed where Sam led without hesitation.
“Of course you are,” Sam said matter-of-factly. “You’re just going to take a minute out here to gather yourself while I go in and wrangle Caitlin. We’ll come find you in a few.”
Filled with gratitude, Andie nodded mutely and Sam turned to leave. She kept hold of his hand though, and reeled him back in for a soft, thankful kiss.
“Enjoy the roses,” Sam whispered against her parted lips. “Be back in two shakes.”
This time, Andie let him go. How did I get so lucky? she mused, leaning both hands on the porch railing and breathing in the moonlit garden. The scent of newly budded roses wafted lightly through the cool night air, fresher and greener than the way they smelled in full bloom on a hot summer day.
Andie counted her heartbeats and breathed in and out, hoping some of the night garden’s serenity would rub off on her, but she couldn’t stop noticing things. The deep, black shadows at the back of the garden by the summer cottage where Sam was staying; the breeze rustling through the dogwoods and the sound their thin, spindly branches made; the crunch of a booted foot on the graveled garden path …
Adrenaline shot into her bloodstream, sharpening her vision and prickling at her skin. Andie peered into the darkness, every sense alert and seeking.
Someone was out there.
Andie cataloged what she had with her. She’d turned in her gun along with her badge back at the sheriff’s office, but she still carried pepper spray in her purse. And the purse itself, small but heavy with her car keys and wallet, could be used as a weapon. Slipping the shoulder strap off, she casually swung the purse from her right hand and retrieved the pepper spray with her left.
Keeping the canister down by her thigh, A
ndie called out, “Who’s there?”
No answer.
“I’m Sheriff Andie Shepard,” she tried again, shamelessly using the title to hopefully intimidate whoever it was into breaking cover. “Come out and state your reason for being here.”
But no one came out. Nothing moved in the garden other than the gentle sway of the rosebushes in the lightly scented breeze, and Andie began to doubt her instincts.
There was probably no one there, she told herself as she walked down the back porch steps and out into the garden, pausing to listen. But there was nothing to hear. This was nerves and paranoia brought on by a sleepless night of worrying and praying for her brother’s safety, and the emotional exhaustion of sharing her family’s history with Sam. She was being ridiculous, literally jumping at shadows, because once again her emotions were clouding her judgment.
Sighing, Andie turned to go back up to the house, determined to get through this party with a good-natured smile—when a hand shot out of the darkness and hauled her roughly back against a masculine chest.
“Sheriff Shepard,” the man hissed, his foul breath hot and moist against her ear. “You’re the bitch that’s trying to keep me away from my wife and son.”
Andie regretted wearing flat-heeled sandals when she stomped as hard she could on the man’s booted foot and he barely winced. He did spit out a curse and tighten his arm across her throat, trying to drag her away from the house toward the shadows behind the summer cottage. Andie knew she couldn’t let that happen. As stars began to sparkle at the edges of her vision, she bent her right arm and elbowed him in the gut.
He wheezed and cursed again, his grip loosening enough that Andie could drag his forearm down and slam her head back. She felt the crunch of cartilage in his nose before he dropped his arms to bend over with both hands to his bleeding face.
Andie didn’t hesitate. She followed up with a shot of pepper spray straight to his eyes, which was enough to have him on the ground and howling. Flipping him over, Andie got her knee into the small of his back and scrabbled for her purse. She unhooked the shoulder strap and used it to secure her attacker’s hands just as Sam roared her name from the porch.
