Chapter 7
Sarah pulled into the lot beside Benji's. Hudson parked behind her.
He should have kept driving to the hotel, but when Sarah climbed out and turned toward Main Street, he found himself doing the same.
She rubbed the back of her neck. Tired. Hungry too, if he had to guess.
“Lunch?”
She came to a dead halt. “Sorry?”
“You haven’t stopped moving since this morning.”
“Is that your professional assessment, Deputy Marshal?”
“It’s my hungry assessment. How about it?” He gestured toward Benji’s.
“Okay.” Her smile touched her eyes. “That would be nice.”
Sarah reached the door first, but Hudson caught it before she could. She gave him a look.
“Habit.” He flashed her a smile.
She smiled in return and headed in. A prickle ran briefly across the back of his neck. Nothing caught his attention. Which wasn’t the same thing as feeling easy. Still, he gave the street a final sweep before he followed her in.
Benji’s hit him before the door had even swung shut—warmth first, thick and immediate after the cold outside, then the smell of it, coffee and cinnamon working their way through the air.
The pink neon sign in the window threw a faint wash of color across the booths nearest the glass.
Vinyl squeaked somewhere as someone shifted their weight.
He hadn’t been in here in over fifteen years and the place hadn’t moved six inches.
“Sit anywhere,” a voice called from behind the counter. “Be right with?—”
Louisa looked up. She finished pouring and set the coffee pot down. “Well, I’ll be.”
She came around the counter, hands going to her hips, looking at him as if he was a piece of furniture that had wandered back into a room it used to live in. “Hudson. Kane. You used to come in dripping mud with those Meyer boys and eat like you’d been stranded in the wilderness.”
“Louisa.” He offered her a grin. “Hi.”
“Don’t you Louisa me like you’ve been gone a weekend.” She was already moving toward him. “Booth by the window, both of you, that one’s got the good light.”
Sarah slid in across from him without comment.
She knew better than to argue with the seating arrangement.
She took her hat off and laid it on the bench seat beside her.
Her hair was flattened where the hat had been.
She adjusted it absently, but a strand refused to stay where she put it.
The urge to reach across and tuck it behind her ear surged through him.
Get a grip. He picked up the laminated menu and studied it intently.
“Heard you were back.” Louisa reached for the coffee pot on the next table over, topping off a mug that hadn’t asked for it.
“Mrs. Oldman’s granddaughter saw you at the gas station, told her mother, and her sister told me before you’d even gotten your gas cap back on, probably.
” She set two mugs down without asking if they wanted coffee.
Sarah reached for the mug immediately. He wasn’t sure whether that was because she wanted the coffee or because the mug gave her something to do with her hands. Either way, she wrapped both hands around it as if she’d been cold for hours.
“Sheriff.” Louisa nodded to Sarah.
“You hear a lot, Louisa.”
“It’s not worth knowing if I don’t hear it.” She said it as a fact. Then her gaze swung back to Hudson, and something in it softened into a different register entirely. “Pie’s apple today. No cinnamon rolls.”
She tilted her head, studying him. “You used to fight Wyatt over the last roll every single Sunday. Don’t think I forgot that, just because you went and grew up and got yourself a badge.” Her eyes flicked toward the federal credentials clipped to his belt. “Heard about that too.”
“Of course you did.”
“Ham and cheddar,” she said. “You always wanted yours toasted till the cheese went past melted into something Harold called a structural hazard.”
Damn. He hadn’t thought about that sandwich since he’d left for Coronado. Aurora Cove remembered him.
He tucked the menu back into its holder. “That’ll work.”
Louisa’s mouth curved, satisfied, already turning toward Sarah. “And you, I know better than to ask. Soup and the cornbread, extra butter, don’t fight me on it, you look like you haven’t eaten since Tuesday.”
“I had breakfast.”
“Mmm.” Louisa was already moving away, pot in hand.
Hudson looked at the table. At the salt and pepper shakers shaped like little lighthouses, chipped at the base, probably been sitting on this exact table since before he was born.
He didn’t look at Sarah. That didn’t stop him knowing exactly where she was.
“You used to fight Wyatt over cinnamon rolls.”
“Most Sundays.” He sipped his coffee.
“I don’t remember that.”
“We were kids. You weren’t always there.” He turned his mug on the table, watching steam curl off it. “Your mom used to make us split them so we’d stop.”
“That sounds like her.”
A silence opened up that wasn’t uncomfortable. The diner noise rolled on around them, griddle hissing, the bell over the door going off twice.
Hudson met her eyes for the first time since Louisa had walked away. “All that time. And she still remembered how I take a sandwich.”
“People remember things.” Sarah held her mug as if she needed somewhere to put her hands that wasn’t anywhere near him.
“You always ordered that.” She said it so quietly he almost lost it beneath the diner noise.
“The sandwich. I remember now. You’d order it and Wyatt would make some comment about you ruining good cheese and you’d just—” She stopped.
Started again, smaller. “I just remember you ordering it.”
“You said you didn’t remember the cinnamon roll thing.”
“I don’t.” She finally looked up, her expression careful. “I remember the sandwich.”
Her words jolted through him. His thumb pressed into the ceramic mug hard enough to feel the heat through it.
Louisa set the plates between them and was gone again before either of them objected—the ham and cheddar sandwich, the soup steaming, cornbread with butter melting into a slick, golden pool across the top.
Sarah’s attention shifted to the window. The street outside. Anywhere that wasn’t him. Her soup sat untouched.
Hudson waited a few seconds. “Eat.”
Her eyes slid back to him. “Excuse me?”
“Louisa will take it personally.”
For a second, she looked like she might argue. She shook her head. “You haven’t changed.”
“Haven’t I?”
“No.”
She took a spoonful of soup. “Still think you can solve most problems by telling people to eat.”
His laugh caught him by surprise.
Sarah’s spoon paused halfway to her mouth. For a fraction of a second, she just looked at him, recalibrating something. She covered it quickly and returned to her soup.
He exhaled a slow breath. Only then did he take a bite of his sandwich.
Around them the diner carried on without them—plates clattering, coffee pouring, Louisa scolding somebody about pie.
Sarah remembered the sandwich.
Such a tiny thing.
Meaningless.
Right?