Sneak Peek of Arresting Her Heart
When Rookie Officer Noah West arrived at the retirement apartments adjacent to the church in the center of his small hometown in Texas, he had no idea what he was getting himself into. Bullets and fists flying were expected with his job. Having his ear talked off by the Widow Clancy wasn’t what he signed up for when he followed after his brothers’ and sister’s footsteps and joined the Faith Valley police department.
“This is the first time I’ve gotten the youngest West officer. Of course, I’ve seen you at church and around town, but I had no idea how handsome you were up close." The older woman batted her dark blue eyes at him and tilted her head to the side, as if debating what to do about it. A smile slowly spread across her face and she nodded her head in determination. “I think I have a granddaughter that is just about your age. If you come inside, I could show you her picture. She’s won a couple of pageants, for scholarships of course.”
Noah didn’t want anything to do with Mrs. Clancy’s beauty queen granddaughter. Not only because he’d learned from past experience how high-maintenance pageant girlfriends could be, but because it would be completely unprofessional to let the older woman play matchmaker for him while he was on the job. He clicked on the button for his flashlight and pointed it around the plastic bin behind the apartment building, scanning for any evidence that someone had been in the alleyway. “Mrs. Clancy, are you sure you saw someone by your trash can? Could it have been a raccoon?” he asked, trying to refocus her back to the reason she gave the dispatcher when she called the police department.
“Yes, Officer West, I’m quite certain I saw a man out here. I was afraid he might be trying to look through the window and see me in my undergarments,” she accused with indignation. “I might be a seasoned widow, but I’m still a dish.”
Noah eyed the older woman, who had a head full of curly, white hair with a tinge of purple in it. He remembered his own grandma had hair just like that once and complained that her hairdresser used too much toner and ruined her color. She never went back, but he suspected from Mrs. Clancy’s humble home and clothes, her color choice stemmed from a financial limitation brought on by widowhood. Even with her meager resources, however, she was dolled up with a pound of makeup and a layer of what he assumed was her best jewelry.
She wrapped her frail arms around his muscular bicep and squeezed. “At least you’re here to protect me, Officer West. You must have scared off whoever was back here prowling. Why don’t you come inside so I can give you some hot tea and homemade cookies to thank you?”
“That’s very kind of you, Mrs. Clancy, but I need to be getting back to work,” Noah objected as he gently tried to pull away.
“Nonsense. Faith Valley closes up at nine p.m. on the dot, and there usually isn’t a peep out of anyone until the next day. You have plenty of time to come in and try my oatmeal raisin cookies. They’re the best in the county,” the older woman bragged with a smile.
Oh how he wished a call would come in over his radio, but when one didn’t, he found himself being dragged into her apartment. She pushed him into a seat at a small wooden table where she already had a plate of cookies waiting. “They just came out of the oven right before you got here.”
She picked one up, and before he could protest, she was shoving it into his mouth. Noah wanted to ask if she was so afraid of the prowler outside, how did she manage to bake a perfectly delicious cookie without so much as burning them one bit? Even though he knew he shouldn’t, he found himself reaching for a second cookie.
“I see you like them,” she stated with approval. “Let me get you that tea. I have a wonderful cinnamon tea that goes perfectly.” Mrs. Clancy shuffled into the kitchen where she had a kettle by the stove. She picked it up and poured the steaming amber-colored liquid into a teacup that was waiting on the side counter. She set to work putting in cream and sugar.
The longer Noah watched the widow work, the more he got the sneaking suspicion that she had planned all of this. He glanced from the cookies to the tea, to Mrs. Clancy several times before accepting the truth; he’d been hoodwinked.
Jumping up from his seat, he brushed his hands off over the table and pushed back his shoulders, ready to confront the widow about her entrapment. When she turned around with the cup in her shaking hand and a lonely look in her eyes, the words he planned to say got stuck in his throat.
“You want to leave, don’t you?” she whispered in the most vulnerable voice. “I heard you stand up and figured you don’t want to bother with some old woman. I get it, I was young once, too.” She put the cup down and collapsed in her chair. “You must think me some kind of desperate person to behave like this. It’s just when my Sammy passed away, I got so lonely. My two children moved to different places after college, and I don’t have any other family in town.”
Noah’s heart ached with sympathy for the old woman, and he found himself sitting back in his vacant chair. “I guess I can have one cup of tea.”
“Good,” she said with a smile. She pushed the saucer and cup across the table to him. “And then we can play a couple of hands of Rummy before you take off.”
An hour later, Noah finally found himself back in his police car. Not only was he full from half a dozen cookies, a cheese and meat plate, and three cups of tea, but his hazel eyes were plumb exhausted from staring at the cards and his pride wounded from steadily losing the entire time. He couldn’t prove it, but Mrs. Clancy had to be a secret card shark at one point in her life.
“Dispatch, this is P.O. 6. Show me Code 10-8,” he said over the radio.
“Copy that, P.O. 6, we have you in service and available for assignment,” Noah’s middle brother, Marshal’s voice responded over the radio. “How did the call go? What did you think of Widow Clancy?”
From his audibly amused tone, Noah realized that his brother was fully aware of what happened to him on the call. It was just another hazing in a long line of scenarios that the rest of the officers had been punishing him with ever since he finished the state police academy and joined the department eight months back. His brothers took it upon themselves to make his transition as miserable as possible. From shaving cream in his locker to secretly switching out his name tag to “Sweetheart,” they’d teased him relentlessly. Add to this, his field training officer put him through the wringer for the first six months. It had been the stuff of nightmares. Even now, after two months on his own, it didn’t seem like it was going to let up.
Refusing to give his brother the satisfaction of knowing that the assignment got to him, Noah tried to change the subject. “Do you have a call for me or not?”
“Nope, there’s nothing pending, so resume standard patrol,” Marshal ordered.
“Hold on, we’re not letting him off that easy,” his oldest brother, Clayton’s voice boomed over the radio. Noah’s heart dropped into his stomach, knowing that this was only going to get worse now that both of them were there. “I didn’t come in on my night off just to have him skip over his first encounter with the Widow Clancy.”
“First encounter? What does that mean?” Noah accused with trepidation.
“Oh, she calls in on a regular basis,” Marshal explained with a chuckle. “We all take turns having to handle her, but since you’re the new guy, we figured it was only right you get this one.”
“And all future ones,” Clayton added, joining in on the laughter.
Once their merriment finally died down, Marshal revealed one more nugget of torture. “By the way, she has the cards marked. That’s why you lost, Noah. I hate to break it to you little brother, but you need to be more observant if you’re going to make it as a cop.”
“Thanks for the encouragement, guys, but I need to get back to my patrol,” Noah stated in a clipped tone, biting back what he really wanted to say. As the newest rookie in the department, he didn’t have the luxury of speaking his mind. It didn’t matter that the cops ridiculing him were his brothers. There was a clear pecking order and he was firmly at the bottom of it.
He turned on his playlist from his cell phone, and the hard rock came blasting out of his speakers. Once he passed his field training and was released to work on his own, he found that the loud noise kept him awake and alert. The long, dark nights could wear on even the most seasoned officers without another soul around.
“Man, what I wouldn’t give to have a K9 partner to talk to right now,” he grumbled to himself as he shifted in his seat. Out of nowhere, the image of his estranged half-brother, Sean West, came popping into his mind. Just a month ago, he’d overheard his parents arguing about his older half-brother from his dad’s first marriage. Noah didn’t know much about the situation, since no one in the family talked about it. From what little he could gather, Sean’s mom took off with him when he was little and moved to the neighboring town of Woody. Their dad married Noah’s mother and they started their own family, and there had been no contact between them. This presented a problem for Noah. Ever since he heard them talk about Sean, he couldn’t help but wonder about the elite K9 handler that worked for Disaster City Search and Rescue. How much did they have in common? Did they look alike? Was he serious like their father, or a joke-cracker like his other brothers? He’d been tempted to try to contact Sean since he only lived a half-hour away, but with the depth of the estrangement, Sean might as well have lived on the moon. Contact was out of the question.
Noah tried to suppress a yawn, knowing it would only make him more tired if he gave into the reaction. He rolled down his front windows, hoping the cold air would snap him back to attention. His favorite Led Zeppelin song came on, and he belted out the lyrics from memory. There was a sudden onslaught of rain, forcing him to roll his windows back up to keep it from coming inside the vehicle. Within minutes, it was raining cats and dogs outside. He flicked on his windshield wipers and tried to ignore the irritating sound of the rubber scrapping against the glass in a steady rhythm.
Just over the hill, he saw headlights coming from the other direction. His focus was pulled toward the vehicle, wondering what someone was doing out so late on this rural stretch of road. Was it teenagers coming back from a secret field party? Noah had gone to enough of them in his youth to know that heavy drinking and drugs were common at them. Did that mean the driver might be under the influence?
As the white car zipped past him, he saw the flash of blonde hair and a feminine face. He didn’t recognize the young woman, which made him even more certain that it was one of the students from Faith Valley High School. He flipped his police car around and took off after the other vehicle. It only took a few seconds to catch up to the blonde. By the time he did, his suspicions were confirmed when she suddenly swerved out of control. She must have overcorrected because her car careened off the road and crashed straight into a nearby tree.
Silently, he sent up a prayer asking for God to protect the occupant of the car. Teenagers rarely thought about consequences, and he hoped that the young girl wasn’t going to pay for the decision to drink and drive with her life. He pulled up and parked behind the crashed Honda Accord, then jumped out of his own vehicle. He rushed over to the driver’s side and peered through the window to get a better look at the occupant. On closer inspection, he realized that the blonde female was older than he first assessed. She looked to be in her mid-twenties rather than a teenager.
“Ma’am, are you all right?” he asked as he reached for the handle of the car door. She looked shocked as she turned her head to face him, her big, blue eyes filled with unshed tears. “Are you injured?” he inquired further when she didn’t respond to his first question.
As soon as he pulled the door open and bent down to check on her, he was greeted by the overpowering stench of alcohol. The entire car was filled with the pungent scent, confirming his initial assessment that she was indeed guilty of drunk driving. Despite how pretty she was and the fact he didn’t want to make her cry, he had to do his job and arrest her. He took a deep breath and then blurted out before he lost his nerve, “Ma’am I’m going to need you to step out of your car.”