Chapter 3
Chapter Three
LOXLEY
It wasn’t that big of an infraction, and for some reason, I thought if I passed Sam’s driver's license to the officer and stayed cool, he’d write me a ticket, and I’d be on my merry way.
That was the naivety of a twenty-four-year-old who’d been driven around since she was seventeen. I’d had my problems solved for me so that I could keep making everyone money.
But I wasn’t stupid. I knew exactly how fast I had been going. The officer wasn’t going to gaslight me into thinking I was somehow at fault just so he could check off a quota.
"Um, ma'am?" The officer’s voice broke through my thoughts, his words stumbling over each other. I watched as he flicked his eyes between the photo on the license—an older man with salt-and-pepper hair—and then up at me.
“There is no way I was doing twenty over, Mr.….” I looked at his uniform, trying to find his name tag. “Brooks.”
“Officer Brooks,” he corrected, looking angry. “And I know you weren’t, but I also know you aren’t who you were telling me you were. Step out of the vehicle.”
Dammit.
“Please, Mr… Officer Brooks. I need to get somewhere safe as soon as possible.” I flashed a look out the window.
The last thing I wanted was for someone to drive by and realize Loxley Adams was sitting on the side of the road with a cop.
It wouldn’t be the end of the world, but it would sure feel like the end of my world.
The press would show up. Sam would have a meltdown. The label would send their goons to drag me back to my tour bus like some kind of rock-n-roll hostage.
I couldn’t let them know I was in Harmony Haven. I needed a break. I needed to get away—I needed coffee—and then I could come up with a plan to fix everything.
"Are you in some kind of danger?" Officer Brooks’ voice dropped to a protective tone. He started scanning the horizon like he was about to uncover some major criminal conspiracy. Which, for the record, wasn’t exactly in my plans for the day.
“Not particularly.” I half-smiled, hoping he wouldn’t start checking the undercarriage of my car for bombs.
He sighed deeply, as if I were some big problem that had fallen into his lap and motioned for me to exit the vehicle. I really wasn’t in the mood for a power struggle, but clearly, Mr. Officer wasn’t about to let me off with a mere “sorry.”
There was no way he wasn’t going to report the car as stolen, but I wouldn’t be going to jail. Sam would just bail me out and send me back to the tour bus like a lost puppy.
I sighed exaggeratedly, throwing open the door like it was the most dramatic thing to happen in my day.
“You’re serious right now?” I chuckled, mostly to myself, tossing Sam’s jacket into the driver’s seat, followed by the hat.
“This can’t possibly be the most important thing you’ve got going on today, right?
Shouldn’t there be a bank robbery or something? ”
Officer Brooks stood there, chest puffed out as though he was about to challenge me to a duel at high noon. The sun was beating down on me, so I shaded my eyes with my hand as I glanced up. Eventually, I looked him square in the eye.
“You’re not Sam Moreno, are ya?” he asked knowingly.
“He’s my manager,” I shrugged, pretending I didn’t care that much. “The car’s rented in his name.”
"Mind telling me your real name?" His sunglasses were still firmly in place, and I could tell he was trying his best to look intimidating. But he was way too composed and that made me realize that he hadn’t recognized me.
Good, I thought to myself.
“Let’s be honest here,” I deflected, hoping he’d just drop the whole thing. “I was barely speeding. You could’ve just let me go, pretended you’d never seen me, and I’d have kept this between us. No harm, no foul.”
“Ma’am, I’m two seconds away from putting you in the backseat of my squad car and taking you in. Hand me your real ID and tell me who you are. While you’re at it, tell me why giving a cop the wrong ID seemed like a good idea.”
I let out a mock sigh. “Bad judgment on my part. But…”
“Now,” he barked, voice getting louder, which made me jump a little. I was half-impressed, half-terrified.
“Alright, alright.” As I grabbed my real ID and handed it to him, my nervous rambling kicked in and I used an obnoxious amount of air quotes.
“You know, for someone who’s ‘supposed’ to be ‘enforcing the law,’ you’ve got a lot of time on your hands.
What is this, some kind of... ‘get to know your barely speeders’ day?
I’m not the ‘troublemaker’ you think I am. ”
He didn’t even glance at the ID as he took it. Instead, he stood there, letting my sarcasm hang in the air while a smirk started pulling at the corner of his lips.
“You certainly ‘feel’ like a ‘troublemaker,’” he said, raising an eyebrow and adding his own air quotes just to mock me.
“Listen, Mr. Officer.” I leaned in closer to him. “If you want to catch me breaking the law, you’re gonna have to be a little more creative. I’m more of a lay-low kind of girl.”
I secretly gave myself a congratulatory fist-pump for avoiding the air quotes.
“You seem to forget you gave me the wrong ID. Once you did that, this was no longer about speeding. It was about lying to a…”
“That was an honest mistake.”
He smiled slowly, then shook his head, unconsciously bending my ID between his thick fingers. “You’re a handful,” he drawled, clearly unbothered by my incessant chatter.
“You seriously have no idea,” I muttered under my breath, knowing that the second he read that ID, I’d be splashed across the front page of TMZ with the headline: “Smalltown Cop Catches Loxley Adams Trying to Run Away.”
For a moment, he paused, his brow furrowing as if he was contemplating something deeper. There was tension hanging in the air, but I was done talking. I had dug a hole deeper than I could handle and I needed to just let him do whatever he needed to.
“Tell you what,” he said, suddenly sounding less like a hard-ass cop and more like someone desperately trying to appear tough. “I’m going to let you off with a warning. This time.”
“You’re giving me a pass?”
“You gonna argue about that, too?”
He still hadn’t even read my ID. He hadn’t even remotely connected the dots. His decision wasn’t about who I was.
“Just worried you’ll follow me to my hotel and try to bust me for the ‘drugs’ I have in the glove compartment,” I said, my voice rising to a completely unnecessary level of drama. And dammit, I used air quotes again.
Just arrest me.
“If I didn’t know any better, Ma’am, I’d think you were on something, for sure.”
“But you know better?” Shut. Up. Loxley.
“Your eyes look clear, you aren’t showing any signs of being under the influence of anything. Not to mention, I’m not sure your wit would be this well versed if you were trying to hide something.”
“I talk too much when I get nervous.”
“And I make you nervous?” He asked, almost grinning.
“Okay, slow down, Mr. Officer Brooks,” I said, lifting my hands up in mock surrender. “Let’s get something straight. I’m not nervous because of who you are. I’m nervous because of who I am. Can I please go now?”
I reached for my ID, expecting him to hand it over, but instead, he flipped it over, reading the name my mom had given me twenty-four years ago, when she saw me for the first time and decided I would be a star and needed a name I could take on the road.
A name that rolled off the tongue and everyone would remember.
“Loxley Belle Anderson?”