by Kait Nolan
Across the diner, Miranda and Norah rose, shrugging into coats.
“Getting back into music isn’t the only thing you’ve been avoiding.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Dating, my friend. You haven’t done any of it since the divorce.”
Yeah, he’d been busy trying not to die, then changing his entire life. Women hadn’t exactly factored into the equation. And Ethan had been fine with that. Nobody had sparked his interest anyway.
Miranda’s laugh rang out, rich and unabashed. The sound rolled over him like warm molasses.
Until now.
“She’s single.”
Ethan jerked his attention back to Clay. “Who?”
“Miranda. I assume you weren’t eyeing the new Mrs. Crawford.”
“I’m not eying anybody.” But he couldn’t stop himself from glancing back as the two women got to the door.
Clay continued as if he hadn’t even spoken. “She’s a lot of fun. Helluva dancer.”
Something in the casual tone had Ethan’s hackles rising. Still, he kept his expression bland and reached for the ketchup. “And you’d know that why?”
“We dated a while.”
The bottle jerked in his hand, making his fries look like the victim of a particularly gruesome homicide. Stupid. He’d exchanged all of two sentences with the woman, and both of those were today. He certainly had no claim on Miranda Campbell, and he sure as shit had no right to be aggravated that she’d gone out with his best friend. “I expect you’ve dated damn near every single woman who’s breathing in Wishful at one point or other.”
“My streak isn’t near as wide as you seem to think.”
Ethan just lifted a brow at him.
“Not since I came home, anyway,” Clay amended, grinning. “Anyway, it wasn’t recent. We had some fun together, but we just didn’t click.”
Ethan didn’t want to think about what kind of fun that might’ve been. “Doesn’t matter one way or the other.”
“So you think being Chief of Police means you don’t get a love life either? Man, why did you move here again?”
“You know why.”
“Yeah, and I remember something in there about having a life while you still had one. You’re falling down on that, brother.”
Ethan scowled at his friend. “I’m easing in at my own pace.”
“Yeah, the Geriatric 500.” Clay leaned closer, lowering his voice. “Look, I know Becca did a number on you. But it’s time to get back out there.”
The flash of honey gold hair had Ethan looking up.
As if summoned by Clay’s words, Miranda stood there, those hazel eyes snapping, her long, surgeon’s fingers balled to fists. “Chief Greer, I’m really sorry to interrupt your lunch, but I need to report a crime.”
As Wishful’s not-quite-brand-new police chief turned those clear gray eyes to hers, Miranda couldn’t help but hear Clay’s words repeated in her head.
It’s time to get back out there.
For the barest instant, she forgot what she’d come here to talk to him about because her long neglected lady parts were busy standing up and waving. I volunteer as tribute!
“What happened?”
Those three little syllables pulled Miranda out of her nanosecond’s fantasy about what those big, warm hands that had steadied her earlier would feel like somewhere more interesting than her elbows. She didn’t have time for tributes or fantasies.
“My car’s been vandalized.”
He didn’t look annoyed, didn’t even look at his food. He just slid from the booth. “Show me.”
The position put him inside her personal bubble again, and Miranda took an instinctive step back, glancing at Clay. “Sorry to borrow him.”
Clay waved that off. “Nature of the job.”
Ethan followed her out of the diner and halfway down the block to where she’d parked. He didn’t make casual small talk. Miranda had no idea what to say, so she said nothing at all, just pointed him to her driver’s side door where Nosy Bitch had been scratched into the paint. He still didn’t speak, just slowly circled the vehicle snapping pictures and, presumably, looking for more damage.
Eventually, he brought that laser focus back to her. “Do you have any idea who might do this?”
Why did his attention make her want to shiver?
“I know exactly who did it. You walked in on the tail end of our argument earlier. Clarice Morris.”
“The blonde in the diner?”
“That’d be her.”
“What was the argument about?”
The temper that had dropped to a simmer cranked back up to boil. “She was maligning one of my employees. I called her out on it.”
“Is this your first run-in with Ms. Morris?”
Miranda snorted. “Hardly.”
Ethan’s eyes sharpened at that. “You have history?”
“Going all the way back to first grade.”
A flicker of surprise cracked the serious cop mask. “First grade?”
“Not an exaggeration, actually. It’s a small town. Most of us go back a long way. In this case, Clarice and her sister, Amber, have a history of tearing people down. I abhor bullies, so I have, over the years, intervened to defend people. And before you ask, no, it’s never led to any kind of physical blows or retaliation in this particular fashion.”
“So why do you think it was her this time?”
Miranda frowned at him. “Because I literally just dressed her down in public. She left first, and I come out to find this. Two and two equals four.”
He glanced back at the door. “She only had a couple minutes’ lead on you. A message like this would take a little while to carve in. I’m not sure she had enough time to do it. Is there anybody else who might have a grudge against you?”
“Contrary to the evidence of the moment, I don’t make it a habit to fight with people. I don’t have enemies.”
That focus came back to her, feeling almost like a physical touch. When Ethan Greer looked at her, he really looked at her. No glancing at her shoulder or the bridge of her nose. He made full, unabashed eye contact. It was both disconcerting and strangely intimate.
“Everybody has enemies, even if they don’t know it.”
“That’s a pretty cynical point of view.”
“What you call cynicism, I consider realism. Realistically, unless somebody happened to be driving by, or walking on the green and glanced over at the right moment, nobody actually saw this happen. There are no businesses with security cameras along this stretch. There’s not really any way to prove who did this. You can believe down deep in your gut that this woman was behind it, but without any corroborating evidence, I can’t charge her with anything.”
“You’re not even going to talk to her?”
“Oh, I’ll talk to her. But unless she spontaneously confesses, I don’t really have anything else to go on.”
“So basically I dragged you away and let your lunch go cold for nothing.” Scooping a hand through her hair, Miranda felt stupid. Of course there was nothing he could do about this. It was minor vandalism. He probably had more important things to be worrying about.
“Not nothing. I’ll write up a report to document it. If you plan to file a claim on your insurance, you’ll need that.”
She blew out a breath and looked at her Jeep. Having the door repainted wouldn’t eat up her deductible for the year, and reporting it would probably just make her rates go up. With the burden of her mortgage, student loans from med school, and the business loan on her practice, that was the last thing she needed.
It’s an inconvenience. An irritant. Clarice just wanted to get to you, and you’re giving her exactly what she wants.
With effort, Miranda tamped her temper down. She had patients to get back to, and she needed to be calm when she saw them. “Thank you.”
“I’ll need your number.”
She blinked at him. Had he just asked her out?
“To le
t you know when the report is finished. The forms are all in my patrol car.”
“Right.” Idiot. He’s just doing his job.
He punched the number into his phone. “It should be ready for pick up in a day or two, after I’ve had a chance to talk to Ms. Morris.”
Not, I’ll call you.
“I appreciate it, Chief Greer. And I apologize again for dragging you away from your lunch.”
He angled his head and started to lift his hand before stopping himself, as if he was accustomed to having a hat to tip at a lady. “No problem. You have a good day now, Doc.”
Miranda climbed into the driver’s seat and watched him go.
Maybe she’d completely misread that frisson of attraction when they’d bumped into each other in the diner earlier. She’d been out of the dating game entirely since she came home to Wishful, and her last relationship had left her singed enough to be okay with that state of affairs. But Ethan Greer made her wonder. Worse, he made her want things she hadn’t wanted in a very long time.
Doesn’t matter. He’s not interested, and you don’t have time for a guy anyway.
But as she drove past the diner on her way back to the clinic, she couldn’t stop herself from taking one more glance at the way those broad shoulders filled out his uniform shirt.
Chapter 2
“It was just an accident. I tripped and ran straight into the door frame.” Rene Forbes gave a nervous laugh. “I’m such a klutz.”
Miranda looked down at the hand-shaped bruise darkening Rene’s wrist. “And when did the door grow fingers?”
Had she not been holding the hand and wrist to examine it, Miranda had no doubt that Rene would’ve tugged her sleeve down to cover the injury. As it was, she dropped her gaze to somewhere around Miranda’s left shoulder.
“Rene.” She kept her voice gentle. “You didn’t fall into a door. You didn’t step in a hole last time or have a box fall off the top shelf onto your head the time before that. Let me help you.”
“I just need to know if my wrist is sprained or broken.”
Miranda resisted the urge to grind her teeth. “All right. I’ll get Keisha to take you back for an x-ray.”
While her nurse ushered Rene down the hall, Miranda slipped into the break room and called the police station. Inez Barlow, the dispatcher and admin who’d been running the place for thirty years, answered the phone.
“Hey Inez, it’s Miranda Campbell. I wondered if you could send an officer down here to take a statement about a domestic abuse case.” She didn’t know if she could convince Rene to cave and report Harley, but there needed to be some kind of documentation of his escalation on file.
“Is there any danger presently at the clinic?”
“No. The victim is alone. Could you ask whoever shows up to be circumspect? I want to protect her privacy as much as possible. Have them come to the back door.”
“Can do, Doc.”
As soon as she ended the call, she sent a text to Shelby Abbott, her office manager. Called Theresa’s Mom. Theresa Hammond had been the first domestic abuse patient Miranda had treated when she moved back to Wishful. She and Shelby had established a shorthand around that to let the rest of the staff know, per their established protocol for this kind of situation, that they’d be sneaking police in the back and to keep all patients out of the halls as much as possible.
That done, Miranda continued seeing patients.
She’d just stepped back into the hall and ordered a strep test for little Rachel Keeney, when Ethan Greer came through the back door of the clinic.
Of course, it would be him. After she’d damned near knocked him over at Dinner Belles earlier in the week. Well, no, he was incredibly solid. She hadn’t been able to avoid noticing that when she’d been pressed up against him for that all too brief encounter.
He hadn’t called about the report on her car. His dispatcher had. She refused to analyze the flare of disappointment she’d felt at that.
Focus.
He strode down the hall with a long-legged swagger that reminded her of a cowboy in an old Western, an impression helped along by the well-worn boots on his feet.
“Chief.” She took him into one of the empty exam rooms and shut the door for privacy. “Thank you for coming. I’m gonna be honest with you—my patient probably isn’t going to be willing to report her husband today. But I have a documented escalation of injuries in her medical records over the past year, and I want to make sure that the police are aware of it.”
“Sensible.”
Did it take a crime of some kind to elicit more than three syllables at a time?
“Can you wait here, while I go over the x-ray with her? I’m going to make my case. If she’ll agree, I’ll bring you in. If not, I’ll make the report myself after she goes.”
“I’ve got time.”
Not sure what else to say for the moment, Miranda gestured to a chair. “Make yourself comfortable.”
Keisha met her in the hall with the radiograph and followed her back into the exam room. Miranda slid the x-rays onto the lightbox to view them. The hairline fracture wasn’t a surprise. Perhaps the bigger shock was that it wasn’t any worse. Given the bruising, he’d cranked his hand around her fragile wrist like a vise.
“Well?” Rene asked softly.
Miranda used a capped pen to point. “It’s fractured. See that line right there? You’ll need a cast for a few weeks.”
“Can you do that here?”
“Yes. The bones aren’t separated or out of alignment. If it was any worse, I’d have to send you to an orthopedist.” She glanced at Keisha. “Non-displaced wrist fracture.”
“On it.”
As her nurse slipped from the room to retrieve supplies, Miranda spoke again. “Rene, I want you to look here, too. See that?” She pointed to several thick, white lines across the ulna. “Those are previous healed fractures. This has happened before.”
Rene hunched her shoulders. “I told you, I’m clumsy.”
“I’m sure that’s what he tells you.” Miranda dragged a stool over to the exam table and sat. “Are you aware you’ve been in here seven times over the past year for injuries? Three times since Thanksgiving. And I know I saw you in the emergency room once last year. Your records at the hospital indicate that wasn’t your first visit. Harley is getting violent more often.”
“Holidays are hard. Since he got laid off from the factory, he hasn’t been able to find steady work.”
The fact that Harley was seldom sober probably had a lot to do with that. “You don’t have to stay with him. You have options. The women’s shelter out at Hope Springs has both room and resources.” Well, not as much room as they needed, but they were nearly done constructing an expansion, and Miranda knew that Lily Mae Pollard, the woman who ran Monarch House, wasn’t about to turn away anyone in need.
“I took vows.”
How many times had Miranda heard that from Rene and others like her? “So did he. And he’s breaking them. He assaulted you. You need to report this.”
“The police can’t do anything. What happens in a man’s home—”
“That’s where you’re wrong. The law doesn’t stop at the doorway to a residence. Assault inside the home is still assault. Now you can ignore this like you’ve been doing. You can go on home and tiptoe around his moods, hoping you can anticipate what will set him off. But one of these days he’s going to snap, and it’s going to be worse than a fractured wrist and some bruising. Based on the escalation I’m seeing here, that’s not far off. He could kill you, Rene.”
Miranda’s hope that the words would shock her patient into action were dashed when she only lifted a stubborn chin. “He wouldn’t. Harley loves me.”
Maybe he had once, though Miranda questioned how much a man like that could really love. She chose her words carefully. “He probably wouldn’t mean to, but he gets aggressive when he’s been drinking. He’s not in control of himself. He needs help.”
Rene brighte
ned somewhat at that. She wouldn’t reach out to take help for herself, but she’d think about it for him? Miranda didn’t like what that said about the woman’s self esteem, but she pushed for whatever advantage she could get.
“If you report him, a judge could order him to counseling, to treatment for alcohol addiction, if he thinks it’s necessary.”
The woman chewed her lip. “Harley would be really mad about that. He doesn’t trust therapists and the like.”
“Maybe not. But if a judge says he has to go, he doesn’t have a choice. And while he’s there, he could deal with his anger issues and get the drinking under control.” Miranda knew perfectly well a hostile, court-mandated patient wasn’t a good candidate for any of those things, but if they could get him out of the house and away from Rene long enough, they could maybe finally convince her to leave his ass and go to Monarch House.
“You really think it could help?”
I really think it could help you. “Yes.”
“Then I’ll do it.”
Repressing the urge to do a victory dance, Miranda rose. “Okay. I know you don’t want to go into the station, so I’ve called someone to come take a statement. Meanwhile, we’ll get started on that cast.”
In the hall, she snagged Keisha. “She’s agreed to report it.”
“Praise Jesus.”
“I’m not taking any chances that she’ll change her mind. If you’ll set out the casting materials, I’ll do it when I bring in our guest.”
“You got it.”
After putting Delaney on duty in the hall to see that none of their patients left their exam rooms, Miranda went to grab Ethan. “She’ll talk to you. She doesn’t have the self-esteem to pursue it for her own sake, but I convinced her it was in Harley’s best interest. I may have implied that a judge could order him to treatment.”
His dark brows winged up faintly and an expression of respect crossed his face. “Not inaccurate, even if not guaranteed. Good move, Doc. I can work with it.”
Wow, three whole sentences.
He followed her back down the hall to room three.
