Sweetest Mistake (Nolan Brothers #2)

by Amy Olle

  She lobbed toffee-brown daggers at him. No woman ever looked at him like that. All he ever saw was adoration and longing.

  A whiff of disappointment wafted through him. “You don’t talk much, do you?”

  Her brown eyes cooled like an autumn frost. “Wo-would you, if y-you talked like m-me?”

  A pang struck his chest, but he ignored it. “I wasn’t complaining. A quiet woman is like a mild winter. Both a rare and welcome relief.”

  “Have I d-d-done something to offend you?”

  “Not at all.” He leaned against her car. “It’s my job to protect the good citizens of this town from harm. I take my job very seriously.”

  “And you think I’m going to hurt someone?”

  “The problem is, I don’t know. I have to assume the worst until I’m shown otherwise.”

  “You don’t have to,” she muttered.

  “I mean, what do I really know about you? You’re five foot three if you’re an inch, thirty-two years old, and you recently bought an insanely large house.” He lowered his sunglasses to peer at her. “Oh, and you’re a Wildcat.”

  Her sharp gaze swung to his face. “You've been spying on me?”

  No, he hadn’t, though the thought had occurred to him. Rather, he’d obtained a wealth of information in a brief conversation with his brother, but she didn’t need to know that.

  He shrugged. “I’m a cop.”

  “You’re a terrorist.”

  It occurred to him then that the more he tormented her, the less she stuttered. “You were one semester shy of graduation when you quit. Why is that?”

  She stared up at him with soulful, brown eyes. A sliver of softness sloped through him.

  “My mom got sick and I moved home to take care of her.”

  He straightened away from the car. “I’m sorry,” he said softly.

  Her hand shot out and she plucked the ticket from his grasp. She put the Jetta in gear and whipped out onto the road.

  That night, while he sat up with his bottle of whiskey, he contemplated the fact that his encounter with Emily Cole was the best part of his whole day.

  Chapter Three

  Emily dreamed of a green-eyed man.

  A naked green-eyed man, with a well-defined bare chest and a flat plane over his stomach. The fuzzy hair of a happy trail disappeared into his low-slung blue jeans while pink fuzzy handcuffs swung from his fingertips.

  She leapt out of bed at first light.

  In the kitchen, she started coffee brewing and settled in front of her laptop at the center island. She pulled up the bare-bones website she was in the midst of designing and connected her digital camera to the computer.

  She spent the next hour uploading photos she’d taken of the home and its breathtaking views—she still couldn’t believe they called the body of water outside her door a lake. To Emily, a lake was an inland body of water she might swim or paddleboat across. No one would dare attempt to paddleboat across Lake Michigan, as the waves crested and crashed to shore as ocean waves might.

  She fussed with the web layout, searching for a design that pleased her. In college, she’d studied photography and graphic art, and it felt good—really, really good—to use this particular skill set again.

  Once done with the website, she kept working, relishing the distraction from the disturbing dream and the even more disturbing real man. She searched the web to find other bed-and-breakfasts in the northwestern part of the state and studied their websites, taking notes on everything from their web layout to their prices and general marketing strategy.

  By mid-afternoon, an angry growl in her stomach roused her from her spot hunched over the laptop. A quick search for food turned up a bag of potato chips leftover from the sub sandwich she’d picked up at a deli in town a few days ago. She snagged the bag off the counter and returned to the computer.

  She crunched on a chip and logged in to check her e-mail. She had a new message from her cousin, Mina. In two weeks, she’d return to Michigan, along with her boyfriend, Noah, for an extended stay and wanted to rent the apartment over the carriage house.

  Having grown up two thousand miles apart, Emily and Mina didn’t know each other all that well. Not yet, anyway.

  Emily sent an immediate reply stating the apartment was hers, free of charge, for as long as she wanted it, and that she couldn’t wait to see them when they arrived.

  She fiddled with the website some more and sketched out a few ideas for a sign to place in front of the inn. A web search turned up the website of a sign shop she’d noticed in town, and she sent an e-mail requesting a quote for a sign with customized design work.

  An hour later, she’d discovered Michigan had a robust tourism campaign and had registered the Winslow Inn and Bed-and-Breakfast with their databases. She e-mailed the city to request the house and the archaeologically significant eighteenth-century dwelling on its premises be added to their list of local area attractions.

  Whenever possible, she sent texts or e-mailed. She despised the phone, as her stutter intensified severely when she tried to use it.

  Soon, her stiff muscles demanded she step away from the laptop. The chips had done little to slacken her hunger. The fridge remained mostly empty, as did the cupboards. She needed to make a large shopping trip to stock up on essentials.

  She hesitated. What if he lurked around town? She’d rather go hungry than face Luke Nolan. She shook herself. Who was she kidding? Chances were, he’d had his fun at her expense and would now move on. Certainly by now he’d have forgotten all about her.

  On the drive into town, she rolled down her windows and enjoyed the warm breeze. Her lightheartedness sagged a little when she turned onto Main Street.

  No signs of the Thief Island police when she eased through the traffic light. The sign for Mike’s Country Store sprang into view. She was going to make it.

  She peeked at the speedometer and the red gauge sat on top of the twenty-five. She flipped on her turn signal.

  Red and blue lights winked in her rearview mirror.

  Anger rose up to choke her.

  She sidled up to the curb with expert ease. Before he arrived at her window, her arm flopped out, her license and registration poised between her fingers.

  His stern scowl only intensified his dark beauty. He took the license and registration from her hand. “A rolling stop is not a stop, Ms. Cole.”

  “You’re right. Must be the dead body in my trunk. I didn’t account for the extra weight.”

  “I’m glad you find this funny.”

  Her jaw clenched tight. “I don’t find a single thing about this funny.”

  “I’m relieved to hear that.”

  She wiggled her fingers at him. “Ticket, please. I need to get back to the lab to check on the meth.”

  “Oh, come now.” He tore a sheet from his notepad. “You wouldn’t want to give me probable cause to follow you home and conduct a search of your… premises.”

  Feverish heat burned her cheeks. “You can’t keep pulling m-me over. It’s harassment, and it’s not legal.”

  “This is a small town, Ms. Cole. A tiny, isolated island, to be more precise.” He lifted his broad shoulders and let them drop. “I can pretty much do whatever I want.”

  She snatched the documents from his hand. “Good day, Officer.”

  Her tires spun on a patch of gravel when she tore away from the curb.

  In the rearview mirror, he shook his head, a wide, sparkling smile on his face.

  He was laughing at her.

  She refused to live like a prisoner. For the second day in a row, she remained trapped, a captive in her seaside resort mansion without wine or potato chips.

  Enough was enough.

  She waited until dusk to make her move, hoping the cover of night and the potential for a shift change would confuse his overzealous radar and allow her to carry out her shopping trip undetected. She stepped into her flip-flops and tugged a baseball hat over her distinctive hair.

&n
bsp; Outside, the hot, muggy air licked her skin while the last rays of sunlight danced atop the cresting waves. She’d been on the island two weeks already and hadn’t so much as stuck her big toe into the lake. Tomorrow, she resolved, she’d go for a swim.

  A few minutes later, she stole into town like a thief. She saw no sign of Officer Bright Eyes when she rolled down Main Street. Maybe it was her lucky day. Her lungs stopped expelling air until she slid safely into the parking lot of the small market store and the breath she’d been holding burst from her.

  She scurried inside the store. Learning how to cook a proper meal remained on her list of things yet to do, so she loaded up on frozen dinners and prepackaged foods. Mike’s produce section was a thing of beauty, and she filled her cart with an array of colorful, oversized fruits and vegetables before winding her way to the checkout lanes.

  At the car, she flung the grocery bags onto the passenger seat, darted around the front end, and fell into the driver seat. She crouched low and yanked the cap down over her forehead, unable to repress the urge to hide even knowing Luke would recognize her car whether he glimpsed her behind the wheel or not.

  She steered out into traffic, and as she neared the stoplight leading out of town, her adrenaline soared. This time, she would make it. Victory never tasted so sweet.

  The light changed. She bit back a curse and eased to a stop. And that’s when she spotted him. The white SUV, with its dark green lettering, sat tucked beneath an elm tree on one of the neighborhood side streets, no doubt stalking innocent civilians going about their legal affairs.

  While the car idled, she kept her eye on the SUV. Would he harass her today? Was there any chance he had actual police work to do? Had he been spying on her some more? Her knuckles turned white on the steering wheel.

  Let him snoop. Some things he didn’t know. Couldn’t know.

  Like the fact that she’d been a painfully shy child with a torturous stammer. Or that, in all her thirty-two years, she’d slept with exactly one man, and him only a handful of times.

  Or the real reason she’d dropped out of college.

  While it was true her mom had started to show symptoms of the disease that would kill her, Audrey hadn’t yet required full-time care when Emily left school, nor did they yet know how serious her illness would turn out to be.

  Emily left school because, in order to graduate, she had to complete a public speaking course, which required her to give a ten-minute speech in front of 250 of her classmates. Rather than subject herself to that cruelty, Emily dropped out, nine credits shy of a earning her Bachelor’s degree.

  The old wounds stung anew. She scowled at Luke’s police cruiser. He’d been having a good laugh at her expense. Well, no more. She wasn’t that painfully shy, stuttering girl anymore. Well, she still stuttered, but she’d worked hard to overcome her deficiencies, and she’d be damned if she was going to let him drag them back out into the light.

  It was time she put an end to his bullying ways.

  A car horn honked and Emily startled. The traffic light glowed green overhead.

  She punched the accelerator and the car lurched forward. Painful memories hounded her and she pressed down on the gas pedal.

  The needle on the speedometer bobbed past twenty-six, through twenty-seven and twenty-eight, to top out at thirty miles per hour as she bore down on him. She continued to push down on the accelerator.

  Out of the corner of her eye, the bottle of wine she’d bought at the store peeked out from one of the grocery bags. In a moment of sheer reckless rebellion, she snatched it up and, tipping it high so he could make out its unmistakable shape, pressed the unopened bottle to her lips.

  “Cheers,” she muttered.

  Predictably, red and blue lights flashed in the darkening sky. With a self-satisfied smile, she pulled off to the side of the road and killed the car’s engine.

  The police cruiser pulled up snug behind her and a moment later a man stepped from the vehicle. In the glare of his headlights, she lost sight of him. She readjusted her rearview mirror until he came into view.

  His tall frame seemed less lean than she recalled, and he had a hitch to his walk she didn’t remember noticing before now. Her smile faltered.

  Then fell away completely.

  The air wheezed from her lungs. With a groan, she slunk low in her seat.

  The officer’s hand came up and he knuckled a sharp rap on her window.

  Her hand trembled when she pressed the electronic control button. With a soft whir, the glass between them disappeared and she looked up into a face that was very distinctly not Luke Nolan’s disgustingly handsome mug.

  Chapter Four

  Luke stuffed the last bite of the fast-food hamburger into his mouth and checked his blind spot before easing out over the centerline to pass a tow truck angled on the shoulder of the road.

  The truck’s safety lights flashed in the night sky as the driver hitched to the front end of a Jetta.

  Luke twisted in his seat. The sedan appeared unscathed, with no mangled fenders or busted glass. Maybe a mechanical failure? A flat tire? He’d missed the license plate, and there was no sign of Emily.

  At the station, he parked near the front door and bore a straight path to the main desk. “You know anything about a Jetta getting towed on Main Street?”

  Dominic swiveled on his chair, a wide grin on his baby face. “I got a fish in the tank.”

  Luke stretched, trying to get a look through the glass partition into the jail’s cellblock. “What’s the charge?”

  “OWVI.”

  “Drunk driving?” An alarm bell sounded inside Luke’s skull. “Who’s the suspect?”

  Newberry launched into his brief. “A female, thirty-two years old, no prior arrests. She said something about outstanding citations, but I can’t find any record of that.”

  Probably because Luke never turned in those ridiculous tickets.

  “Did you perform a field sobriety test?” Luke’s voice sounded thin and strained to his own ears.

  Newberry cleared his throat. “Yes, sir, I did.”

  “And?”

  Newberry shifted his weight in the chair. “She passed.”

  Relief rushed over Luke. “So she isn’t drunk?”

  “Upon questioning, the suspect exhibited incoherent, slurred speech and her face appeared flushed.”

  Luke stalked toward the cellblock door, his long strides eating the ground beneath his feet. “Buzz me in.”

  The grating buzzer sounded, followed by the hard clank of the lock’s release, and he burst through the steel door. At the second holding cell, he lurched to a stop.

  She sat huddled on the gray-blanketed cot, her back pressed to the concrete wall. Her brown eyes appeared huge in her pale face.

  Another jarring buzz split the air and the door latch to her cell released.

  A heavy silence hung in the air inside the cell, and with it, an odd sensation surged in him. Something gross and squirmy. It felt kind of like uncertainty, but that didn’t make any sense.

  He shuffled forward. When he dropped onto the cot beside her, she jostled. She risked a sideways glance at him.

  “Are you okay?” he asked softly.

  A shaky sigh eased through her lips, and she nodded.

  “What happened?”

  “I w-w-was teaching y-y-you a lesson.”

  At the stutter, he felt a pinch in the center of his chest. “What lesson would that be?”

  “I saw a cop car and thought it w-was y-y-you. I figured if y-you w-were going to pull me over again, I should give y-you a reason to do it.”

  He swallowed the dryness in his throat.

  “I w-was speeding and—” one hand flitted through the air as if to grab the words, “I p-p-pretended to drink from a w-wine bottle I’d just bought. It w-w-wasn’t open,” she struggled to add.

  Despite himself, a low chuckle slipped from him.

  She searched his face. He allowed her assessment of him, and indeed, he
performed one of his own, noting for the first time the smoothness of her fair skin and the smattering of freckles across the bridge of her small, straight nose. She was tragically cute.

  “I really w-wish it’d been y-you in that cop car.”

  “So do I.” He nudged her with his shoulder. “Sounds like you violated three, maybe four laws. A strip search might’ve been warranted.”

  Her shy smile caught him off guard. Then she lifted a hand to push a hank of bright hair behind one ear, and the sleeve of her oversized sweatshirt dropped back to expose her forearm.

  He stilled.

  Slowly, he reached for her hand and gently turned her palm up. He pushed her sleeve up to her elbow. His fingers traced over angry red marks marring the fair skin around her wrist.

  “What’s this?” There was no softening the hard edge to his tone.

  She pulled free from his grip. With her other hand, she rubbed at the marks. “I guess the handcuffs did that.”

  He noted similar bands of irritation on her other wrist as well and a cold violence stirred in him.

  He climbed to his feet. “Can you sit tight a little longer while I go fix this?”

  Her head snapped up. “You can fix this?”

  “Do I hear doubt in your voice?”

  She cut him with a look. “Yes.”

  He laughed. “Give me twenty minutes. Half hour at the most. You okay that long?”

  She nodded.

  “Is there someone you want to call to come pick you up?”

  “M-Mina’s out of the country. I don’t know anyone else.”

  He frowned. He hoped she meant she didn’t know anyone else on the island. But that wasn’t what she’d said.

  The knife of regret twisted. He stood. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  He left the door to her cell wide open and returned to the reception area.

  Dominic cradled the phone against his ear and hunched over a computer. Luke sat at the other workspace, where Dominic had left open Emily’s arrest file.

  The final report not yet written, Luke combed through the rookie’s notes. He’d clocked her at thirty-three and gaining speed in a twenty-five before she came under suspicion of drinking while driving. The alcohol container visible, as she’d described.