Kidnapping In Hope Town (Hope Town Secrets #1)

Chapter One

Corporal Gardner Fairhurst had his life down to a perfect science these days.

He had a challenging, fulfilling job. One that offered him enough spontaneity and movement to serve the side of him that craved both, without drawing him into the kinds of danger he’d been trying to pull his younger sister out of since he could remember.

Maybe being a cop hadn’t turned out to be as save the world as he’d once thought when he’d been young and eager and naive, but he still knew that he helped people. On the bad days, it felt like not enough. On the good days, it felt like a badge of honor he’d earned.

Tonight, he’d clocked out, radioed off duty, and headed inside his nice little house on Main Street in Bent, Wyoming. Today had neither been good nor bad, and after some of the years of bad he’d been through, he appreciated a boring day that offered neither.

Or maybe he was just getting old. Sure, forty was a few years off yet, but it was breathing down his neck. Something he was reminded of with each new recruit he was assigned to train who seemed to get younger and younger with each assignment.

A couple of the kids, as he called them, had invited him to hit Rightful Claim, the local saloon in Bent. Gard had declined. Tonight, he’d shower. Eat a frozen dinner and watch a sporting event. Then go to bed. Alone.

Some people might call it boring, but Gard figured those people had never spent time in the unknown. They’d never turned their back on everything comfortable and supportive and easy and then had to suddenly rebuild their own life.

Boring was a death knell only for people who’d never known struggle.

Besides, going out when you were feeling your age was a recipe for recklessness and disaster, so Gard stayed in. Recklessness wasn’t his MO.

He ran through the shower, microwaved a frozen chicken potpie, and grabbed a beer from his fridge.

He was halfway to the couch when he heard a noise outside his front door.

The knob of said door moved. He stood, beer in one hand, a microwaved chicken potpie on a plate in the other.

He’d locked that door—a habit being a cop had ingrained deep into his bones.

Still, the knob jiggled and moved and then… opened.

He blew out a breath and scowled at the intruder. “Sammy.”

His niece stepped inside. She’d dyed her usually blond hair black since the last time he’d seen her a few weeks ago, and she had it piled on top of her head in messy waves. Her blue eyes were direct and defiant, reminding Gard of her mother. She had a duffel bag slung over her shoulder.

And there was no one entering his house with her.

So just like that, the well-ordered construct of his world crumbled. Because if Sammy was here without her mother…

“Just to get it out of the way, she never came home last night,” Sammy said, her voice devoid of all emotion except generic teenage distaste for everything. “I don’t know where she is, and since she didn’t come back tonight, I guess I’m crashing here for a bit.”

Gard didn’t say anything to that at first. He’d bought this house with the extra bedroom for just this kind of situation, but… Things had been going so well, he’d really stopped thinking she’d need it.

“You want me in family services?” she demanded when he didn’t say anything.

He sighed. He didn’t love working around the system, but his sister had made that a constant struggle.

Because the system kind of sucked when you couldn’t stay clean, but you didn’t want to lose your kid.

Years ago, Gard had tried to convince Dani to give him custody—that way she wouldn’t have to worry about the Department of Family Services.

Dani hadn’t gone for it, and Gard hadn’t felt right forcing the issue. And for the past three years, he hadn’t even thought of it. Dani had been clean. Sammy had been good. Everything had been good. It killed him that after all this time, they were about to start over.

“Let me crash here,” Sammy said, all world-weary detachment too big for a fifteen-year-old. “All you have to do is give me a ride to school in the mornings. I’ve got a ride home. No one will know the difference as long as I’m in school.”

“You’ll get a ride home from who?”

She smiled at him, reminding him so much of Dani it hurt. He’d never been able to save his sister, and he had increasing concern he’d never be able to save Sammy.

Sometimes a man had to accept people didn’t want to be saved, but he’d never been able to accept that when it came to the people he loved.

“Don’t worry about it,” she said, tossing her lone duffel bag on his couch.

The problem was, he did worry about it. About Dani. About Sammy. He thought they were past her one-bagged arrivals. It had been three years since the last one, and back then it had always been Dani dropping Sammy off on her way to do something…bad.

Now, apparently, Sammy was old enough to show up all on her own. Even though she was still a few months shy from getting her driver’s license.

“How’d you get here?” Dani and Sammy had a place in Fairmont. He’d had one too for a long time, but last year Dani had insisted she needed space. She needed to know she could take care of Sammy and herself without him breathing down her neck.

So he’d bought a house out here in Bent, about a half hour away. Space, but not…too much. Close enough, room enough, to be what either of them needed, if they needed.

“A friend dropped me off,” Sammy said casually, but with a kind of smugness that made Gard especially aware he had no business helping raise a teenage girl.

But that was life. Gard was going to have to look into her friends. Which wouldn’t win him any favors with Sammy, but he wasn’t looking for her to hero-worship him like she had when she was little. He was desperate to find a way to help her be…all right.

God, he’d wanted that for his sister. And he hadn’t given up on it, but this…hurt. He’d really thought she’d turned a corner. Three years. Three years clean without any problems. Why would she throw that away? “I thought…”

“We all think. We always think.” Sammy walked into his kitchen, stuck her head into his fridge. “And she always goes back.”

Her words were emotionless, but Gard knew better. Sammy might be resigned, but it wasn’t like she hadn’t found some hope these past few years either. Hope that was now dashed. Cruelly.

Gard hated that he couldn’t argue with Sammy, couldn’t find some way to protect that now-lost hope. “Here, eat this,” he muttered, setting the potpie down on the table, and moving into the kitchen to make himself something else.

Lia Blair had never been a morning person. So the irony was not lost on her that she’d decided to run a bakery and coffee shop that necessitated her getting up before the sun just about every day.

Luckily, she’d hired a responsible assistant manager who often opened so Lia could get that extra hour of sleep in. But an extra hour of sleep in bakery world was still too damn early.

She could grumble about it, and would, but some mornings when she stepped out of her little house off the main drag of Hope Town, Wyoming, and the sunrise was a soft, pretty pastel painting on the sky, she was reminded of how lucky she was to be here.

It was a hell of a lot better than everything she’d endured as a teenager that had led her to a life in Hope Town’s secret, privatized WitSec program.

Because her name might be Lia Blair here, but that was only because Edwina Cornelia Pitt didn’t exist anymore. For her own protection. Something that didn’t even faze her anymore. She liked her life here in Hope Town more than she’d ever liked any part of the life prior.

Since it was a nice day, and Lia planned on eating one of her giant cinnamon rolls for breakfast once she got into the bakery, she walked the short distance from house to bakery building out on Main Street rather than drive.

Albennie, her assistant manager, was already in the kitchen, doing the necessary first-thing-in-the-morning tasks. They didn’t speak through that first hour—even in a good mood Lia wanted absolute silence before at least a cup and a half of coffee.

So, silently, Lia went through her first hour of work, frosting pastries, baking yesterday’s doughs into rolls and the like. She drank her first cup of coffee as she worked, then sat down with her warm, delicious cinnamon roll and drank half the second cup.

Life was good.

The morning rush came through and kept Lia and Albennie busy, though not too rushed. Thursdays in Hope Town, Wyoming, weren’t exactly teeming with people, but the threat of winter in the air had people getting out and about more than they would soon enough.

Things tapered off in the afternoon as they usually did. Albennie said her goodbyes, leaving Lia to clean up and close up once three finally hit. Since it was Thursday, the place was dead by two, but Lia stayed open, always ready for a straggler.

She used these downtimes to test new recipes or work on one of the million projects she was always working on to keep the historical building her bakery was in functioning. Today, she wasn’t in the mood for tools or frustrating building-improvement projects, so she went to her kitchen.

She kept the music low so she could hear if someone came in—the bell on the door would ring. Then she lost herself in butter and sugar and the simple satisfaction she always felt when baking.

It almost made the early mornings worth it.

The new sugar cookie dough recipe she’d tried from an old cookbook she’d bought at the antique shop down the street was stickier than she’d like, messier than she’d like, but pretty darn tasty if she did say so herself.

She packaged it up to chill overnight then heard something…odd out in the front room. She wiped her hands on a towel and moved out of the kitchen area to the café itself.

There was someone inside. Which…didn’t make sense since she hadn’t heard the bell ring. But the figure stood on the other side of the counter. Not waiting to order, at least not if the open and empty cash register drawer was anything to go by.

From Lia’s angle, she couldn’t see their face or really make out much of them considering they were wearing an oversize, bulky hoodie.

She should probably pull her phone out of her pocket and call the Bent County Sheriff’s Department, but she paused, watching as the figure helped themself to the money in the tip jar.

They shoved it into their hoodie pocket, looked around—allowing Lia to see enough of their face for Lia to realize it was a girl. Probably a teenager.

The girl clearly didn’t see Lia, because her next move was to reach around the counter, open the pastry display case at that awkward angle, and grab what she could.

Before the girl could fully pull her hand from the case, Lia took a step forward into her line of sight.

“Are you going to put that money back, or am I going to have to call the cops?” Lia hated cops. That would be a very, very last resort. But the threat when it came to teens usually worked.

Unless this teen was a lot like the teen she had been.

The girl stopped, though she didn’t turn around to face Lia. Lia imagined she was considering her chances of getting away if she ran.

Not good.

When the girl finally turned toward Lia, Lia blew out a breath.

The eyes were blazing, the snarl combative.

And there was that belligerence only a teen could pull out with such a lack of toughness behind it.

She’d dropped the pastries and pretended she didn’t see them on the floor. “I didn’t take anything.”

She couldn’t be more than fifteen or sixteen. Full of bitterness and fury and helplessness. It was damn familiar. And the last thing Lia wanted to do was involve cops when she could so easily see herself being this girl.

But there was the way she wanted things to be, and the way things were. The food was one thing, but she could hardly let this girl just disappear with the money.

Zach Simmons might be cool with a lot of things, but he wasn’t going to be down with that. Zach owned most of the buildings in Hope Town, funded pretty much all the businesses on start-up. Because he was the creator of the privatized WitSec in Hope Town, everything went through Zach.

Lia prided herself on turning a profit with her bakery. She prided herself on being foundational to Hope Town—what it was, what it stood for, whether anyone outside its inner circle knew those things or not.

Even if the girl needed the money, and she didn’t strike Lia as someone who did based on what she was wearing, Lia couldn’t just let her walk. Not and explain to Zach why her books were so out of whack.

Mostly because he’d likely understand, and worse, sympathize with her. Lia knew what had landed her in Hope Town. Knew her life was…well, sad. The few people who knew about all that sad were the few people she always wanted to prove to that she was just fine and quite healed, thank you.

“Put the money back on the counter,” Lia said, trying to find a balance between gentle and firm. “We’ll forget the food you took and the tray of cream puffs you ruined when you grabbed the food. No worries.”

The girl snarled. Not great. Not smart. “I know my rights,” the girl said.

Lia wanted to groan. There was no getting through to a person who knew their rights, especially a teenager. Which meant she had to do the thing she didn’t want to do.

“Cops it is.”

At least she knew the Bent County deputy assigned to Hope Town. She could probably work Royal around to warning the girl off in a way that gave her a bit of a scare and forced her to return the money without totally being a jerk about it.

God, she hoped.