by Glynn, Anne
“I guess that’s right.”
“I’ve always been attracted to men in uniform.”
Tanner had the thumb of one hand hooked inside the large black belt around his waist. In his other hand, a set of handcuffs were held in one fist.
Are you thinking of something kinky? Leah wondered. Tanner had never been one for bondage games before but, then, he’d never been sheriff before, either.
She thought it might be fun, playing with handcuffs.
He said, “Won’t do you any good to flirt with me, miss. I’m a dedicated public official. I always get my woman.”
“I’ll bet you do.” Leaning back on the cot, Leah hooked her heels onto its support bar. Her dress slid up her thighs. “Tell me, Sheriff Boyd. Am I wanted?”
Chapter Two
“Jesus, Leah,” Tanner said, his professional demeanor crumbling. “You’re not wearing any panties.”
“So observant, too.”
“We can’t –” He looked over his shoulder, checking to see if anyone was in the building. “I mean, not right now. Not here.”
“Why not? I’ve been a bad girl, Sheriff Boyd,” she confessed, reaching for his zipper. “A very bad girl, at least whenever you’re around. I shouldn’t have trespassed.”
“What happens if Donna McNaught comes back early?”
“She’s on vacation,” Leah said. “Besides, I’m a miscreant. I’ve broken the law and I have to be punished.”
“Honey.”
“I promise I won’t resist arrest. You can do whatever you want to me.”
“You don’t understand.” Catching her hand, Tanner pulled her into a seated position.
A little confused, she brought her feet to the concrete flooring. “You asked me to meet you here.”
“Not for this,” he said. “If somebody walked in on me with my pants down, my career would be over. It would be the fastest recall in political history.”
Leah pulled at her dress, smoothing it over her legs. “Then why?”
To her surprise, Tanner dropped to one knee in front of her. Reaching into his shirt pocket, he removed a small, square box.
Oh, Tanner, she thought.
“I love you,” he said.
“I love you, too.”
He opened the box. A gold band nestled in a cushion of black velvet. Small diamonds sparkled under the overhead light.
“It’s beautiful,” she said.
“You like it?”
“It’s perfect.”
“Won’t be big enough to satisfy Mother Marlene.”
She knew he was right. Her mother disliked Tanner, not because of who he was but because of his family. Without having ever met them, she detested his parents, his siblings, and his cousins. She hated every single member of the Boyd family.
That’s because the Boyds of Stanton Grove were poor. Born into poverty, most of them had embraced their economic state. They saw little value in education or gainful employment. Even when presented with the opportunity to do better, they simply didn’t.
Marlene Preston refused to believe that the Boyd’s middle son, Tanner, might be the exception to his family’s rule. If he wasn’t yet a failure, she was certain he would be in the future. She wanted a better fate than that for her only daughter.
Removing the ring, Tanner slid it over Leah’s finger. “The day I met you, I knew you were the one. I knew it. I just had to wait until the right time.”
“Now is the right time?”
“Yes.”
Leah turned her hand, examining the ring. “Is it ‘the right time’ because you’re sheriff?”
Tanner didn’t answer.
“You said you wanted to run for office because this is where you were born. Your way of giving back to our community. A way to honor Bill Carpenter’s legacy. Was that true?”
“Most of it, yeah.” He mumbled the sentence, as if he was trying to swallow his words.
“You ran for office because of me?” Leah said, disbelievingly. “Tell me you didn’t.”
“Not for you, for us. I was due for a change. I’m over CSI: Mississippi. Now, it’s time to try Sherlock Holmes of Stanton Grove.”
“Arthur Conan Doyle wouldn’t have been caught dead here.”
“This is a good job, steady and dependable. It’s a career. Sheriff Carpenter was here for thirty years.”
Thirty years. It sounded like an eternity to Leah.
She said, “That’s who Bill Carpenter was, Tanner. Steady and dependable. He enjoyed the pace here, he was comfortable with it. He wasn’t you. Over in Albee, you worked Metro. A lot of action, even some danger, almost every day of the week. You liked it.”
“People change.”
“They don’t, not often. Not at heart.”
“Then I’ll be the exception to the rule.”
“You’ll get bored here.”
“Not with you at my side.” He took her hand in his. “You should be smiling.”
Leah couldn’t even try. Her sense of elation was gone.
“Do I have to say the words?” he asked.
“Not yet.”
It was Tanner’s turn to appear puzzled. “What?”
“If you’re going to propose, don’t,” Leah said. “I’m not ready to get married.”
He appeared stunned. Involuntarily, his hand tightened around her fingers.
“What do you expect me to do, Tanner? Find a house with a white picket fence, start growing babies?”
“Not right away.” Releasing her, he climbed to his feet. “But, yeah, that was the general idea. In time.”
“I’m just graduating from film school. I took a full-time job to pay for it while I went to classes. I’m going to Los Angeles; I’m going to be a movie producer. Or have you somehow forgotten everything we’ve talked about for the last eighteen months?”
“Oh, that.” He stayed in front of her, the empty ring box in his hand. “I always thought that was just, y’know, Marlene talking.”
“What are you telling me?”
“Nothing.”
The tone in his voice scratched at her. “You think I went to school to please my mother?”
“A little. The smallest part of it, maybe.”
“At least Marlene was supportive of me.” She knew it had been more than that. Marlene had been thrilled with the idea of film school, hoping Leah would move to California and far from the Boyd clan.
“I thought the movie stuff was a little far-fetched, that’s all.”
“You think the whole film school experience is – is some kind of ego thing?”
“Did I say that, ever?” Tanner shook his head. “You can be a firecracker, you know? The least little thing sets you off.”
Leah slid from the cot. She poked her finger against his chest. “Tell me I’m wrong about you. Tell me you think I can do it.”
“You can do it.”
“Liar.”
“There’s a television station not forty miles from here. I expect, in time, you could get a job there. I think you’d be good at it.”
“KCrap over in Guthrie?”
“Leah, honey, life is what it is. Film school graduates from the middle of nowhere aren’t exactly in high demand. They’re lucky to find any work at all.”
“So I should settle.”
“You should be realistic!” Tanner exhaled heavily. “This ring is just a symbol but it’s the strongest way I know to say I love you. I love you with every fiber of my being.”
His words rang with sincerity. This was his truth, expressed from the heart.
Leah felt herself softening. “I love you, too.”
“You have to think about the future. Our future, together. Isn’t that what you want? What we both want?”
“What about my career?”
“Four years from now, my term of office will be over. If you still want to go to the Smog State, good enough, I’ll travel with you. You can be a producer and I’ll be a kept man.”
Leah reflected
on what he’d said. She thought, You want to lose this man?
She didn’t. She’d made enough wrong choices in her dating life to know that Tanner was special. As much as anyone she’d ever met, he was the man of her dreams.
She was ready to accept his proposal, when the words froze in her throat. She couldn’t even open her mouth.
Panic fluttered inside her chest.
Mary Ellen had said there was something wrong with me, she remembered. Astrid said so, too.
“I was never one for the silent treatment, sweetheart,” Tanner said. “That’s one of Marlene’s little tortures.”
Swallowing, Leah felt a trickle of saliva coat her mouth. Her lips refused to separate.
“Is that the way it’s going to be?”
Don’t get mad, Leah told him silently. I’m trying to speak to you. Can’t you tell?
Tanner’s neck flushed in growing anger. “All right, you want the truth?”
Hush, she pleaded. Don’t say another word.
Don’t ruin everything.
“I did a little investigation, being as I’m a cop and all. I checked into your school and its film program. Want to know what I found?”
Mutely, Leah had no choice but to allow him to continue.
“Last year, Bellebrook had eighteen graduates. The year before, there were fourteen, and another fourteen the year before that. Being a new school, that’s the entirety of their graduating class. You know how many are making a living off the silver screen as I speak?”
Months before she’d applied to the school, Leah had done her own research. Not that she could tell Tanner at the moment.
“Zero. Not even one,” he said. “If I were a betting man, I’d bet each of those students thought they’d be the lucky one, the one that made it big. It didn’t happen.”
You think this is all a fantasy? Leah thought. I put my heart into my schooling. I poured my soul into it.
I can’t believe I was going to marry you.
At the same moment, her lips parted, easily and without effort. Testing her voice, she said, “Tanner.”
“You want to climb the ladder in Hollywood, Leah, you have to know somebody. You need connections. Or you have to be really special.”
His words struck her like a physical blow. “Oh.”
“Not that you aren’t. You’re special to me.” Tanner forced a brittle smile. “I’m trying here, I’m making an effort.”
Leah felt her own anger growing.
“I wanted this to be romantic,” he said.
“Because nothing reminds a woman of roses as much as a Southern Mississippi drunk tank.”
“Be reasonable.”
Curling her hand around the ring on her finger, she yanked it off.
“Don’t be stupid, Leah.”
It was those words she’d remember more than any other: Don’t be stupid.
Taking his open hand, she pushed the ring inside of it. “You think that’s all this is about. Me, being stupid.”
In the past, she’d tried to ignore his casual tolerance for her ambitions. He’d never openly scoffed at her dreams. She’d hoped he’d understood them.
“Don’t do this. You go out West, they’ll eat you alive.”
Pushing past him, Leah hurried for the exit.
“You said you loved me,” Tanner called out from the cell. “I love you. What more do you want?”
She stopped. Not wanting to see his face, she directed her gaze at the tiled floor. “I want a man who believes in me.”
Then she was gone.
Chapter Three
Three Years Later
Leah enjoyed what she did but, if forced to make a different career choice, she knew she’d enjoy being a truck driver.
Give me the open road any day, she thought. A powerful vehicle, a stretch of highway, and I’m in heaven. You want to make me happy, just send me on a road trip.
Except for the price of gasoline, she loved being on the road. The smell of exhaust, the noise from surrounding vehicles; none of it bothered her, not really. She treasured traveling by ground all the more, she supposed, because she hated airplanes.
She’d been in an airplane only twice in her life. The first time, feeling anxious but not knowing any better, she’d boarded a red eye flight from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Less than an hour later, staggering onto the tarmac, she was an emotional wreck. The second time, determined to get past her fear, she flew into Vegas and ended up drinking herself into unconsciousness.
Since then, she’d refused to even enter an airport. As far as she was concerned, everyone else on the planet could collect their Frequent Flyer miles while she remained safely on Terra Firma.
On this particular road trip, her Mustang purring along the ribbon of black asphalt that runs from East Coast to West, she stopped at a rest stop in the middle of America. Fumbling with her e-reader’s cover, her gloved fingers lost hold of the device.
The e-reader smacked to her feet, its screen cracking as it struck the ground. All of her reading material vanished in an instant.
“You have to be kidding me.” Leah felt devastated.
Her tablet had gone black that morning, permanently bricked unless her Tech guy could fix it later, and now she’d lost her favorite reading device. She needed the lost manuscripts inside of it. Reading was her joy – she’d once considered becoming a writer – but it was her job, too. Even as a fledgling producer, she knew the first rule about making movies: everything starts with the word.
Luckily, there was a bookstore not far from the rest stop.
“We don’t stock electronic readers, dear,” Judy, the store owner, told her. “Competition and all.”
“I understand.”
“You needn’t look so stricken. I probably shouldn’t say this but you can use your cell phone. You can download a reading app in seconds.”
“The screen’s so small, I’d never enjoy it.”
“Then you’ve come to the right place,” Judy said cheerfully. “Our little shop specializes in last century’s technology. Something in paper.”
“Where’s the mystery section?”
“Mysteries and Thrillers, aisle three.”
Following her advice, Leah explored the shelves around her. The end caps featured the usual prospects, Leonard and Robb and Patterson, but the “New This Month” rack held a writer who was unknown to her. Taking the paperback in hand, she examined it.
The book’s title was To Protect and Service. Its cover featured a pair of legs in stockings, stiletto heels piercing the circle of a handcuff, and a military pistol pointed in an interesting direction.
Drawn to trashy stories even while viewing them as a personal weakness, she flipped to a random page.
*
From To Protect and Service:
“You know anything about huntin’ gator?” Sonsev asked me.
“Not much,” I admitted.
The big man grinned, his weathered face revealing a line of piano key-sized teeth, so white they had to be artificial.
“You barge onto my property, nonetheless,” he said. “No permission asked or granted, no regard for the rights of others. Ready to wade into my swamp’s dark and dangerous waters, carryin’ nothin’ but a Bowie knife. Unarmed, so to speak.”
Put that way, it didn’t sound like the best of plans.
“Don’t bother you, the thought you might fail. Don’t even cross your mind. Nothin’ bother a man like you.”
“Mosquitoes,” I said.
“What?”
“I don’t care for the insects that congregate in this area. The bugs. The mosquitoes are big, huge, and there’s so damned many of them. They bother me something fierce.”
The smile faded. “You bein’ a smart ass, boy?”
Behind Sonsev’s back, his two enforcers frowned at me. They weren’t sure what was happening here but they knew when their boss was unhappy. If he became angry, it would fall to them to rectify the situation.
Two against
one, Gregor and Schatz had to like their odds.
As for Derec Sonsev, he’d been King Toad for so long, he’d forgotten how to have a proper conversation with someone who wasn’t on their knees, kissing the hem of his robe.
Guess it was going to be up to me to remind the man of his manners.
*
Raymond Service reminded her of someone. Then she got it: Tanner. It’s as if the writer met Tanner, put him in this story, and gave him a new name.
She felt a twinge at the thought of her old boyfriend but quickly buried it. Tanner had gone on with his life and it was time she did, too.
Finding a second volume in the Raymond Service series, she carried both of the books to the cash register. Studying the covers, Judy said, “If you’d like to look around, we have everything Lee Child has ever written. I’m told his books are very entertaining.”
“Jack Reacher has already been taken. I’m betting no one has dibs on Raymond Service.”
“Say again?”
On her way back to the Mustang, Leah texted her assistant. Before she’d finished a late supper at her motel room, she heard the answer she wanted:
To Protect and Service was for sale if the price was right.
“I’ll bet it’s not a very high price, either,” she told herself. Propping her back against the bed’s headboard, she turned to page one.
Chapter Four
Several days later, Leah had a one year option on the character, his current novels, and any future tales. It was her first solo decision for the team but, as she’d surmised, the contract didn’t cost them much. Offering a sum in the low four figures, they didn’t have any real money at risk unless the cameras rolled.
Gil had placed options on a half-dozen projects. There was no reason to think her pick was the one that might make it to the screen.
Her partner observed her without comment when she selected a writer and he expressed polite admiration for the first draft screenplay when it was complete. He didn’t read the script – as Gil had said in the past, he had people to do those kinds of things – but he was impressed she’d taken the next step.
