LITMIR.BIZ

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mind snapped back to that nightmarish moment when he had pulled up to the fire at Darwin Twitchell’s barn and found her patrol vehicle empty and no sign of Wyn, and then an instant later she burst through the doors of the barn with a kid in each arm and flames exploding behind them.

      He had run through that moment in his head dozens of times in the last few hours and still couldn’t figure out the emotion he’d experienced, when he knew she was safe and unharmed.

      Something had changed. That’s all he knew. Or maybe it had been there forever but was only now growling to life.

      “What are you doing here?” he asked, then realized how rude the words sounded when her hesitant smile slid away.

      But what was he supposed to say? Though she lived at the other end of the street, they didn’t socialize at each other’s homes outside of work. He could count on one hand the times he’d been to her place, usually to drop off paperwork. She stopped here just as seldom.

      Why was that?

      He didn’t know the answer and it seemed odd now. They were friends and had been for years, even before she came to work for him after her father’s injury. Her brother was his best friend.

      He had been to all his other officers’ homes several times. Barbecues. Birthday parties. It had never been a big deal to socialize outside of work, especially in a small police department like Haven Point. But something about Wyn Bailey was...different.

      Maybe he could blame the same something that had sent him rushing to the scene of a fire after she stopped responding to the radio, with his heart hammering and his foot pushing hard on the gas pedal.

      “I’ll tell you why I’m here but I’d rather not do it standing on the porch,” she said. “May I come in?”

      He had no choice but to step back and open the door wider for her.

      A familiar canine followed her in and he couldn’t help a smile, despite the tension that popped and sparked between them like a bad wire.

      “Hey there, Young Pete.”

      The dog’s ears perked up at his name and he sat at Cade’s feet with his tail brushing the wood plank floor of his entryway. Cade reached down and scratched Pete in the spot he remembered the dog liked, just under its left ear.

      “How are you, buddy?”

      He and Young Pete went way back, to the days when the dog used to be John Bailey’s constant companion. The former chief had adored the puppy, the latest in a string of dogs he always named Pete.

      He wasn’t a puppy anymore. Gray peppered his muzzle and he walked with the same ginger care of an old man on the cusp of needing artificial knees.

      “How are the lungs?” he finally asked when Wyn showed no inclination to let him know what she was doing at his house.

      At her blank look he arched an eyebrow. “Smoke inhalation, remember? A few hours ago you were being examined by two of Haven Point’s finest EMTs. Ring a bell?”

      “Oh. Right. The lungs.” She shrugged. “If I breathe too deeply, they ache a little but nothing I didn’t expect.”

      The reality of her close call seemed to reach out and grab him by the throat all over again. He couldn’t even contemplate what might have happened to her.

      Yeah, he knew the risks of the job. Every day when he sent his officers out, he knew they were risking injury and even death. People thought Haven Point was a nice, quiet town where nothing much happened but those in his department knew better. The town had its share of drug abuse, domestic disturbances, assaults.

      He had been standing just a few feet away when her father took a bullet to the head that should have killed him—and in a roundabout way, eventually did just that two years later.

      If Wynona had joined the ranks of the fallen that included her father and her twin brother, Cade wouldn’t have been able to live with himself.

      Her mom was probably out of her head with worry.

      “That was a really stupid thing you did,” he said sternly.

      “Yes, I believe you mentioned that when you were yelling at me in front of the entire fire department.”

      For a guy with a reputation for a cool head under pressure, he had done a miserable job of handling the whole situation. He could admit that now, after the fact. He should have taken her aside and reprimanded her in private. The whole public-safety community didn’t need to watch him lose his temper.

      Too late now. It was done and he wouldn’t back down or change his mind.

      “Did you come here thinking you could talk me out of the suspension? If you did, don’t bother.”

      “You are ridiculously stubborn, Cade Emmett. Did anybody ever tell you that?”

      “You. About a thousand and sixteen times.”

      Of all his officers, he trusted her judgment most. She wasn’t afraid to call him out when he became dogmatic or unreasonable, whether during an investigation or in personnel issues. He wasn’t afraid to admit when he was wrong but he knew he wasn’t on this one.

      “Would you at least consider reducing the number of days I’m suspended?”

      “No.”

      She narrowed her gaze at him. “This is the worst time of year for the department to be shorthanded, with all the tourists starting to trickle in before Lake Haven Days in a few weeks.”

      “I know that.”

      She sighed. “You’re hanging me out to dry as an example to the rest of the guys, aren’t you?”

      Yeah, that was partly true. When it counted, he needed his officers to follow the chain of command. If he ordered an officer to stand down, he needed to know the order would be heeded.

      “It’s not easy having to be the one who makes the tough calls.”

      Sometimes he was really tired of being the responsible one. Between the phone call from Christy about his brother and Wynona calling him out because of her suspension, the burden had never felt so heavy.

      “I get it. You did what you had to do. A week just seems excessive to me.”

      “A week. No more, no less. You scared the hell out of me, Wyn.”

      He shouldn’t have said that last part, especially not in that rough, intense tone. She gazed at him, her eyes wide and he thought he saw something there, a little flicker of awareness, before she shifted her gaze down to her dog, who was now stretching out on the floor at his feet.

      “Fine. Your decision. I guess we’ll all have to live with it. That wasn’t really why I stopped anyway,” she went on. “You have new neighbors across the street.”

      “Yeah, I saw a vehicle in the driveway this morning and a moving van unloading things when I came home around lunchtime.”

      “Do you know anything about them?”

      He shook his head. “Not a thing, except what I saw earlier. They must have kids because I saw a couple of bikes out on the lawn when I came home—a boy and a girl, judging by the stereotypical bike colors. The pink bike was bigger. They drive a minivan with Oregon plates and listen to NPR, according to a bumper sticker.”

      She laughed. “For not knowing anything about them, you seemed to have picked up quite a bit.”

      It would probably sound too much like bragging to recite the license plate he’d memorized or the county in Oregon where the vehicle was registered last. “It’s my job to notice what’s going on in front of me.”

      She made a funny little sound in her throat that morphed into a cough. “Of course it is.”

      Did her dry tone imply there was something significant he hadn’t noticed?

      He

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