Chapter 7
Chapter 7
Smoke curled from the hood of the pickup that was embedded in the front of the corner store down the street. On the opposite corner, an old beige Honda had jumped the curb and nudged a lamppost just enough to scratch the front bumper. Three doors swung open, and three old ladies jumped out.
Calvin scanned them; they seemed unhurt but shocked. “Stay back, ladies,” he instructed them, and sprinted over to the driver’s side of the pickup truck. Behind the wheel, he could see a middle-aged man blinking at the destruction before him.
“He’s a maniac!” one of the ladies called out. She had white hair curling around her head and blue eyes flashing with indignation. He recognized her from the market; she was one of the women who had been with Daphne. Her grandmother?
“Ran a red light and swerved onto our side of the street!” The grumpiest of the three crossed her arms and snarled at them, her cane clacking against the side of the car.
Two deputies went to talk to the ladies while Calvin turned back to the alleged culprit. He opened the driver’s door. “Are you hurt?”
“Those old ladies ought to have their licenses revoked,” the man shouted. He had a beer belly and scraggly brown hair. “They’re blind if they think that was my fault!”
“You’re the one who should have your license taken!” Daphne’s grandmother yelled.
“You’re too old to be on the streets!” Spittle flew out of the man’s mouth and landed on Calvin’s cheek.
He wiped it off, then put his hands up and stepped into the man’s line of sight. “I’m going to have to ask you to calm down,” he said in his best Sheriff Voice. “We’ll figure out exactly what happened.”
“What happened is those old hags need to take their driving tests again. I could have been killed!”
“You!” The angry old lady stomped over, leaning on her cane. “ You could have been killed? If it weren’t for Greta, you would’ve run us down!”
Calvin made eye contact with Hank and Teri, one of the female deputies on the force, and nodded for them to usher the trio of old ladies out of the man’s line of sight. He turned back to the pickup driver. “What’s your name?”
“I think I have whiplash,” he said, rubbing his neck.
“Your name,” Calvin repeated.
“Bobby Troy,” the man grumbled, peering around Calvin’s shoulders to glare at the women.
Before he could react, Calvin heard Daphne’s panicked voice. “Grandma?” Glancing over to see Daphne sprinting toward the other car, he watched her hug one of the ladies and check her for injuries before moving to the two others.
“I’m all right, honey, thank goodness. Crazy people on the roads these days. Look at that thing. It can’t be roadworthy.”
Calvin must have gotten distracted by the worry in Daphne’s voice, because he hadn’t noticed the pickup driver move until the man was sprinting across the pavement toward the old ladies.
“That’s my truck you’re talking about!” he yelled, arms pumping as he sprinted across the road.
Calvin was just a few feet behind Bob, but as he lunged to grab on to the running man, all he got was a handful of cotton shirt. Horror slid through his veins as he saw panic and shock flash across Daphne’s face, followed by grim determination.
“Daphne, get out of the way!”
She did no such thing. She sidestepped in front of her grandmother and braced herself. A second later, the man barreled into her and sent her tumbling. She let out a grunt and rolled on the pavement as Calvin threw himself at the pickup truck driver, tackling him to the ground and then holding him there. His cuffs were in his hand a second later. The man squirmed, then went still, a shout stuck halfway up his throat.
Panting hard as he hauled the man up to his feet, Calvin glared at Daphne, who was sitting on the asphalt, looking dazed.
“Are you hurt?” he barked.
She met his gaze. “No.”
“Will you stop being a damn hero, Davis? I can’t spend all my time worrying about what injuries you’re suffering when you’re getting in the way of me doing my job.” His voice was harsh, and he wasn’t sure if he was angry or just spooked by the way Daphne had gone flying over the asphalt. Her face was still a mess, and if she’d hit the curb wrong ...
“I was getting in the way of my grandmother being attacked by a maniac, Flint,” she shot back.
Said maniac bared his teeth. “She deserved it for insulting my truck.”
“Oh, shut up,” Calvin muttered, then guided the man to the sheriff’s department.
An ambulance parked nearby, and he paused long enough to see the paramedics jump out. He nodded to Daphne and her grandmother. “Davis just got knocked to the ground. Check her for a head injury. She doesn’t seem to be thinking straight. This one will be in a holding cell.”
“I’ll take him and check him for damage,” Teri said. She was a volunteer EMT as well as a sheriff’s deputy, so Calvin handed the man off.
Daphne was hauled up to her feet as she insisted the paramedics check the old ladies ahead of her. Calvin watched on, his anger mounting. Couldn’t she just listen to him one time? As if she sensed his thoughts, her gaze slid over to meet his. She scowled at him, blue eyes flashing. God, but the woman was infuriating.
Not wanting to bark at Daphne any longer, he turned to the destroyed corner store and headed inside. The shopkeeper had his phone in his hand, probably already calling up his insurance. He looked up and nodded. “Sheriff Flint.”
“Did you see what happened?”
“Heard the screech of tires and then looked up just in time to see him coming through the window. I’ve got cameras pointed at the front door that might have recorded something useful.”
“I’ll take a copy,” Calvin said, his gaze shifting to make sure everything was under control outside. The paramedics were working on the old ladies while Daphne watched on.
The woman made no sense. She was happy to stay locked up in her little office for hours on end, and then she went and got in the way of dangerous people who obviously didn’t mind doing her harm. He didn’t know whether to be angry or appreciative. How everyone saw her as the less impulsive sister was a mystery. She was a menace.
Unable to help himself, he walked across the street and stopped in front of where she sat on the curb. “You’re a menace,” he informed her.
She had her arms crossed on top of her knees and looked up at him through two bruised eyes. The swelling had gone down, but her skin was still mottled a thousand shades of purple, green, and yellow. She arched a brow. “Does the sheriff’s department offer sensitivity classes about how to say thank you? Because I think you could use some.”
“Do you enjoy getting hurt? Is this some sort of fetish?” His jaw was tight, and he couldn’t decide if he wanted to shake her until her teeth rattled or wrap her in his arms and never let go. She could have been hurt—seriously hurt.
“If this is some twisted attempt at finding out my fetishes, it isn’t working, Einstein.”
“How about this, Davis. Next time some deranged maniac comes running at you, you get out of the way .”
Daphne stood up and glared at him. She leaned forward so her chest nearly brushed his. The scent of her went straight to Calvin’s head. When she spoke, her voice was low. “Don’t pretend like you care, Flint.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You can play good guy now, but we both know you’ve hated me for almost twenty years. A fancy uniform and a shiny new badge doesn’t change that.”
He blinked, staring into those startlingly blue eyes. Even with the bruises, she was a beautiful woman. Fierce in a quiet sort of way that no one seemed to notice except for him. He wondered if she hid that steel on purpose, if she liked being treated like Little Miss Goody Two-Shoes because it made people underestimate her. Then her words sank in. “You think I hate you?”
“Oh, please.”
She smelled floral and feminine, and the urge to shake her gave way completely to the urge to wrap her up and make sure she was okay. Calvin resisted. How he could be at war with himself around this woman was a mystery. It’d been the same all those years ago. She’d been so smart, so determined to make her way in the world, and he’d been the loser who had to repeat his senior year. He was nothing compared to her—and she reminded him of it at every chance. Her nickname for him, Einstein, wasn’t a compliment.
But she’d taken a punch and a tackle that should’ve been aimed at him. She hid behind her books and her spreadsheets, then went and acted like a reckless lunatic, and Calvin couldn’t help his desire to find out which version of her was the real one.
He took a deep breath, and in a softer voice, he asked, “Are you hurt, Daphne?”
She blinked, as if startled by his tone. “No. No, I’m fine. I hit the ground and rolled. I’ve ruined another shirt, but I’m okay.” She nodded to the gash in the side of her shirt, where a sliver of skin was exposed.
Calvin stared at the curve of her waist through the rip while his mouth went dry; then he nodded. “Good,” he said, and stalked away.
Scanning the gathered crowd, Calvin noted that Jenna Deacon seemed to have left at some point during the ruckus. He hoped that was the last he’d see of her. One nightmare of a woman was more than enough, and if he had to choose between Jenna’s flirting and Daphne’s animosity, he’d choose Daphne every time. Whatever that said about him, he didn’t want to look at it too closely.
It took a few hours to get everything sorted out. By the time a tow truck had removed the pickup and the shopkeeper had begun boarding up the corner store window, statements had been taken and security footage had been acquired from every camera in the area. The mystery of who was at fault had been solved. The truck had run a red light and swerved into the old ladies’ lane when he turned. Bobby Troy was lucky that Greta, the driver, had reflexes that belied her age.
The culprit had been checked over and cleared by the paramedics, and he was cooling his temper in one of the holding cells.
Calvin headed back to the station to start on the paperwork.
He paused at his office door and swerved to keep walking toward the back of the main room. Through the narrow window in the interview room door, he saw that Daphne was back at work, squinting at her computer with papers stacked in neat piles all around her.
The other side of her. Studious, intelligent Daphne Davis, who fooled everyone into thinking she was boring.
He knocked and opened the door when she glanced up.
“How’s your grandmother?”
Daphne gave him a flat look. “Over the moon. She hasn’t had anything this exciting happen to her for years, she says. She’s fielding phone calls from half the island. Apparently someone convinced the shopkeeper to share his video footage, and it’s all over social media.”
Of course it was. “I’m glad no one was hurt.”
“Me too.”
He leaned against the doorjamb and nodded to her paperwork. “How’s it going?”
Eyes narrowing slightly, Daphne studied him for a beat. He wondered what it would take to get that suspicion out of her gaze. “Do you actually care, or are your eyes going to glaze over as soon as I start talking?”
He came around her desk to peek at her computer screen. It was covered in the tiny boxes of a spreadsheet, many of them filled in with colors and numbers that immediately made his head hurt. “My eyes’ll glaze over,” he admitted, and was rewarded with a sparkle in Daphne’s gaze as she tried to hide her smile.
It was a rush to glimpse that hidden expression on her face, a shot of adrenaline to his veins. Did she really think he hated her? Sure, they hadn’t gotten along in high school, but that was because Calvin was an angry kid who blamed everyone for his pain. She had everything he’d craved. Daphne had come from a loving family. She was smart and pretty and calm. She had college dreams and scholarships and a future . In his teenage urges to destroy everything around him, he’d wanted to knock her off her high horse. It had been petty and wrong of him, he knew.
But he hadn’t hated her. He’d never hated her.
“Looks like you’re making progress,” he said, just to break the silence.
“It’s slow, but it’s going well,” she finally told him. “Nothing’s jumping out at me so far, other than your usual mismanagement of funds. I’m about to go through all the invoices for that extension that only got half-built out back. I walked through it this afternoon, and it looks like the contractor just picked up his tools in the middle of the job and walked off.”
“From what I hear, that’s exactly what happened, but you know how it is around here. Hard to get a straight answer through all the gossip.”
She put her hand on a stack of invoices and drummed her fingers, then narrowed her gaze at him. “Speaking of gossip. What was that about earlier?”
Calvin leaned on the edge of her desk, one foot on the ground, the other hiked up so his knee angled toward her. He crossed his arms. “What was what about?”
Daphne’s voice dropped to a breathy, seductive register as she fluttered her eyelashes at him. “‘Maybe I like a man in uniform’?”
The shot of lust that ran through Calvin’s body made him jerk back and drop his dangling foot to the floor. He cleared his throat and tried to hide his reaction with a glare. “Don’t, Cupcake.”
She laughed, and it was such a bright, pure sound that it did nothing to quell the heat in his blood. She leaned back in her chair and arched a brow at him. “I didn’t know you and Jenna Deacon had a thing.”
“We don’t. You know her?”
“Don’t you? We were all in senior year together. She was in half our classes.”
Calvin frowned. Most of what he remembered about his senior year was his annoyance at having to repeat it, drinking himself into a stupor at every opportunity, and perfect little Daphne Davis. “Was she?”
Daphne rolled her eyes. “You’re telling me she just came down here and gave us all that little show, having never dated you at all?”
“A little show you seemed to be enjoying, by the way.”
Her smile was sharp, and it sliced right across Calvin’s chest. “It was awful. I loved it.”
Scrubbing his palms over his face, Calvin let out a sharp breath. “My mom’s trying to set me up with her. She might have suggested that I take Jenna as my date to her vow renewal next month.”
“I see.”
Calvin dropped his hands and curled them around the edge of Daphne’s desk. Meeting her gaze, he shook his head. “I’m not going to take her.”
“Why not?”
“I’m not in the habit of letting my mother set me up on dates.”
“Jenna seemed more than willing.”
“She’s not my type. I told my mom I already had someone lined up.”
Daphne nodded. “Right. So who’s the lucky lady?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“I want to give her a heads-up that she might have to fight Jenna Deacon for you.” Her blue eyes were piercing as she held his gaze, mirth buried somewhere deep. “Give her the chance to think about whether dating you is worth the hassle.”
“I thought maybe you wanted to get in line behind the other two.”
“In your dreams, Flint.”
“I’ll put you down as a maybe,” he told her, if only to hear the outraged squeak that came out of her mouth. Calvin headed for the door. When he was back in his office, he finally let his lips curl into the smile he’d been biting back.
He might have been in his thirties, but apparently, Calvin still enjoyed poking at Daphne until she snapped.