Chapter Two
Gard didn’t have anyone on field training right now, so he was enjoying being on the road by himself. He liked teaching and guiding the younger cops, but sometimes it was nice to exist in his own head. Like times when his sister had disappeared, and his niece was staying with him.
She’d assured him her friend, a girl, could drop her off at his house after school.
Had claimed she had a Model UN meeting so she wouldn’t be home much earlier than him—which he wasn’t sure he was buying, but he didn’t want to call her a liar.
He could hardly stalk her. She was fifteen. She needed some autonomy.
And still her safety was the biggest thing. He didn’t think she’d want to get involved with drugs after watching her mom struggle her whole life, but he knew young brains didn’t always work in reasonable patterns.
He needed to find a babysitter. Someone Sammy liked and wouldn’t think of as a babysitter.
He didn’t know how the hell he was going to accomplish that, but he needed to figure it out and fast. He had enough seniority to not work nights, and always had some days off built up, but he wouldn’t be able to get out of every weekend and mandatory overtime was always a possibility.
Today, luckily, he was on Hope Town duty which was a normal schedule.
It’d get him off work and hopefully home around the same time as Sammy.
The Hope Town duty required an afternoon walk up and down Main Street, just to show a police presence.
There were plenty of shops, a smattering of tourists since it was a nice afternoon, and no trouble.
The assignment was usually boring and, again, that wasn’t always a bad thing. Mostly, not much happened in Hope Town. There’d been a kidnapping a few months ago, but it had been taken care of.
Of course, after that dustup, Gard wasn’t particularly sure everything that was going on in this town was on the up-and-up, but he didn’t think it was necessarily…
criminal. Exactly. Something about that kidnapping, about former FBI Agent Zach Simmons’s involvement, and the way only women owned businesses in this place struck Gard as… odd.
Still, it was nice to get out of his cruiser, stretch his legs, and walk on a pretty afternoon.
Smile at passersby. Hand out stickers to kids who seemed interested.
All the while internally going through the list of people he knew who might have the time and inclination to keep their eye on a fifteen-year-old after school and on weekends when he had to work.
When the dispatcher called him on the radio, Gard was surprised to hear that there was a call at the Hope Town Bakery for him to respond to. A stealing in progress.
Surprising. But he was close, so he jogged down the street the rest of the way to the bakery. When he opened the door and stepped inside the sugary-smelling café, Lia Blair stood in the middle of the tables and chairs, arms crossed, mouth arranged in a scowl.
She was dressed as she usually was. Jeans. A Hope Town Bakery T-shirt. Her dark hair pulled and pinned back behind a headband, no doubt in a nod to keep hair out of her baked goods. Her hazel eyes edged more green and flashed with annoyance.
The scowl did not change when she turned her gaze to him. If anything, it deepened. “I was hoping it would be Royal.”
Gard didn’t bristle, though it was a hard-won thing. Lia Blair had made her distaste from him known from their very first meeting—back when her bakery manager had been kidnapped and he’d had to question her.
He’d never known why she disliked him, but she’d made it clear.
And continued to do so, any time they ran into each other—and since the Royal in question was one of his deputies and dating the woman who lived above the bakery, who just so happened to be friends with Lia, they did run into each other socially—not just in a cop-to-witness-questioning manner.
He’d tried to charm her. And then he’d used that charm to irritate her, because usually that kind of hostility rolled right off his shoulders. Lots of people didn’t like cops or were weird about his profession, and that wasn’t a reflection of him, so who cared?
Today, he was irritable, and he knew it was because he’d been up half the night trying to figure out where Dani would have gone. Usually she left clues. Usually, she at the very least texted him an apology. The fact she wasn’t following the pattern left a hard ball of worry centered in his chest.
Worse, he knew better. Dani made her own choices, and yes, they were choices built on a foundation of trauma and substance abuse, but they were hers, and he needed to stop trying to absolve her of the consequences.
If she’d bolted without a word, it wasn’t out of the ordinary, it wasn’t something he could solve. It was just her current choice.
But the worry persisted. The need to do something persisted. And it made it really hard not to be a jerk to Lia Blair’s open hostility. But he was on duty so he let a slow breath out, forced himself to smile. “Campbell took off today. What seems to be the problem?”
“I’ve got a thief.” She gestured to a girl in an oversize hoodie and…and a hoodie he recognized. Because it was his hoodie.
He had to close his eyes against the wave of frustration, helplessness, and—worst of all—grief. Because he didn’t know what to do for his sister, and he was making all the same mistakes with his niece.
“Sammy, what is this?” he ground out.
“You know the thief?” Lia asked, with some level of surprise and not accusation.
Sammy smirked at the lady, a flash of Dani so potent Gard just wanted to haul her out of here, take her home, and lock her in his house until she got it through her head to stop repeating her mother’s mistakes.
“Uncle Gard, tell this lady that I didn’t take anything, and she can’t prove I did.”
Oh, if only he thought that were true. “Cut the crap, kid.” He held out his hand. “Give me the money.”
Her face went mutinous. “You don’t believe me?” she shrieked.
“Give me the money,” he repeated. He couldn’t deal with the personal side of this just yet. First, he’d get Lia her money back, then he’d deal with…
God, he didn’t know.
Sammy shoved her hand into the hoodie pocket, pulled out a fistful of ones. She shoved it at him like he was the bad guy here.
He wished he could believe she was trying to help herself, but he just knew her too well. “All the money.”
She looked at him with eyes full of hate and fury.
Yeah, he’d had his fair share of that from Dani too.
These days it didn’t hurt so much as just make him sad.
All he wanted to do was help, to save, to make things okay, but he could never seem to get that through to them.
They just had to paint him as their enemy sometimes.
Sammy pulled out more money—a carefully folded wad of twenties. Jesus. He took it and handed it over to Lia. “Is that all of it?”
Lia counted it out. “Yeah, that’s it.” She looked up from the money, to Sammy, to him. There was something…calculating in her expression. “Unfortunately, that doesn’t account for the baked goods she ate or ruined in her quest to steal from me.”
Hell. “How much?” He reached for the wallet in his pocket.
Lia looked from him to Sammy and back again, still considering, calculating. He didn’t know what that was, and he wanted to get out of here more than he wanted to figure it out.
“I don’t want your money,” she said firmly. Lia’s gaze moved back to Sammy. “A couple weeks’ work should pay it back. You’re over fourteen, aren’t you, kid?”
“I’m sixteen.”
“She’s fifteen,” Gard muttered irritably. “And has school. She might be currently masquerading as brainless, but she’s actually got a tough course load. I don’t like the idea of her working on top of it. She’s got to keep her grades up. I’ll pay you back for the baked goods.”
“Attentive uncle, are we?”
Gard liked to think he was an easy-going guy. But he also had a line he didn’t let people cross. Usually, they were criminals trying to find a breaking point.
But Lia Blair sure found his quick.
She must have realized it, because her own disruptive smirk—not unlike Sammy’s—melted off her face.
“Weekends are my busy days and when I need help,” she said in her usual no-nonsense manner.
“Six to noon, Saturday and Sunday. Three weeks of that should clear up this little…misunderstanding. And it still gives her time to do all her schoolwork.”
“Six in the morning?” Sammy squeaked.
Which settled it for Gard. Besides, if she was here, she couldn’t go sneaking off, could she? Maybe she’d cause trouble here, but that was going to be Lia Blair’s problem. “Start this Saturday?”
Lia had a lot of problems with Corporal Fairhurst. First, the fancy-pants name. Second, the fact he was a cop. Third…
God, he was hot. Tall, broad shouldered. She was sure the whole uniform getup added to the fact he looked big and intimidating, but she had a sneaking suspicion even in plain clothes he’d look big and intimidating.
And she knew she had issues, because yeah, she liked that. She would have said she didn’t like short hair on guys, because it gave off that cop/military/authoritative vibe she was most assuredly not going for in her life.
He made it work. Then there were the eyes. A piercing, startling blue. And he had that whole cop distance thing down to an art, but there was a lot more going on in his eyes. Including a very clear concern over his niece.
He’d questioned her back when Albennie had been kidnapped. He’d been courteous and had a fairly good bedside manner for a cop, but still… Cops. She didn’t trust them.
“I hate you,” the girl seethed, then stalked out of the bakery.
Corporal Fairhurst scrubbed a palm over his jaw, let out a long sigh as his eyes followed the storming Sammy out of the bakery. But he didn’t immediately follow. Lia watched him try to get a handle on his temper, and a lot of other more complex emotions going on in there.
She didn’t want to feel a little soft around the edges, because he clearly didn’t know what to do about his teenage niece but wanted to. She wanted to think of him like every other cop she’d dealt with when she’d been Sammy’s age. Brutal and cruel.
Gard sighed. “I’m sorry about this. She’ll be here Saturday. I’ll make sure of it, but… She didn’t really steal enough baked goods to necessitate three weekends of work, did she?”
Lia hesitated. She didn’t owe him the truth, but he seemed to know it anyway. “No, she didn’t. But if you give me three weekends, I think I can give her some…direction.”
“And what do you care about a fifteen-year-old stranger’s direction?” he asked, those eyes right on her and doing very uncomfortable things to her equilibrium—something she prided herself on and had all her life.
She couldn’t say it was none of his business since he was clearly in charge of said niece in some capacity. “Let’s just say I was once a fifteen-year-old girl lacking direction myself.”
He studied her, like he could see all the runaway teen on her. She didn’t like that at all.
“Her mom, my sister, has…problems. Her dad was never in the picture. Things have actually been good the past three years. Stable. But my sister…lit out again. It’s a really delicate time.
She’s not a bad kid,” he said, so earnestly it was hard not to believe him.
“She’s…had it bad, and sometimes she acts out because of it. ”
“I understand that,” Lia said. Lia didn’t like to think about her teenage years. What had landed her here in Hope Town. But she saw it all on Sammy, and she had made the job offer because she wanted to help. “We’ll take good care of her, Corporal.”
“Call me Gard.”
“I’d rather not.”
Something in him changed then. Lightened. Flipped. Something. Like he’d moved from trying to figure his niece out, to trying to figure her out. “You ever going to tell me why you don’t like me?”
She crossed her arms over her chest, looked up at him. She shrugged, uncomfortable with how obvious she was. “I don’t like cops.”
“You like Campbell just fine.”
“Royal is an exception only because he makes Franny happy, and Franny is my friend.”
“So all I have to do is make one of your friends happy for you to like me?” He flashed a grin. Charming. Damn, it was charming, but he must know it. “Give me a list.”
She wanted to smile. She fought it back. “Goodbye, Corporal.”