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She narrowed her gaze, not sure if his question was a legitimate guess or a subtle insult. “Four years.”
He seemed surprised by that revelation. “Four years and you’re not completely disillusioned yet?”
“My determination to fight for justice doesn’t blind me to the flaws in our system.”
“That’s...admirable,” he decided.
She slid the strap of her briefcase onto her shoulder. “You’re a prosecutor,” she guessed.
“No,” he said quickly. Vehemently. “I’m not a lawyer.”
“So what do you do, Not-a-Lawyer Reid Davidson?”
“I’m a sheriff.”
She nodded, easily able to picture a shiny badge pinned to that wide chest. “And you throw the book at anyone who doesn’t toe the line in your jurisdiction.”
He didn’t deny it. “It’s my job to uphold the law.”
“The law doesn’t exist in a vacuum,” she argued. “It requires context.”
“Apparently you have some strong opinions on the subject,” he noted. “Why don’t we continue this discussion elsewhere, and you can enlighten me?”
She absolutely wanted to continue this discussion—or any discussion—if it meant spending more time with the broad-shouldered sheriff with the mesmerizing eyes and sexy smile.
“What did you have in mind?” she asked, determined to play it cool despite the anticipation racing through her veins.
“I could buy you a drink,” he suggested.
She considered herself a smart woman—too smart to hook up with a stranger. But while she didn’t know even the first page of Reid’s life story, she knew that he set her blood humming in a way that it hadn’t done in a very long time. And after more than two years without a man even registering a blip in her pulse, she was too curious to walk away without determining if the attraction she felt was reciprocated.
She wasn’t looking for love. She wasn’t even looking for sex. But she couldn’t deny that she enjoyed looking at Sheriff Reid Davidson.
Sometimes you don’t know what you want until it’s right in front of you.
With the echo of her sister’s voice in her ears, she made her decision. “A drink sounds good.”
* * *
Reid had never been afraid to admit when he was wrong, and he’d realized—less than halfway through the workshop discussion—that he’d been wrong about her.
Katelyn.
The name struck him as a unique combination of the classic and contemporary, and as intriguing as the woman herself. Because while she might look prim and cool, there was a lot of heat beneath the surface. She argued not just eloquently but passionately, making him suspect that a woman who was so animated in her discussion of a hypothetical situation would be even more interesting up close and personal. Now he was about to find out.
There were two bars in the hotel—the first was an open lounge area that saw a lot of traffic as guests made their way around the hotel; the second, adjacent to the restaurant, was more remote and private. He opted for the second, where patrons could be seated at pub-style tables with high-back leather stools or narrow booths that afforded a degree of intimacy.
He guided her to a vacant booth. When the waitress came to take their drink order, Katelyn requested a Napa Valley cabernet sauvignon and he opted for a locally brewed IPA, signing the check to his room when the drinks were delivered.
After the server had gone, he raised his glass. “To stimulating discourse.”
Though she lifted her brows at his deliberately suggestive word choice, she tapped the rim of her glass against the neck of his bottle.
“Where are you from, Sheriff Reid Davidson?” she asked, after sipping her wine.
“Echo Ridge, Texas.”
“You’re a long way from home,” she noted.
“So it would seem,” he agreed. “How about you?”
“Northern Nevada, so not quite such a long way.”
“Humboldt, Haven or Elko County?”
“You must have aced geography in school,” she remarked.
“I didn’t ace anything in school,” he confessed. “But I recently visited the town of Haven.”
“Why were you there?” she asked, then held up a hand before he could respond. “No, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”
“Why don’t you want to know?”
“Because almost everyone in Haven knows everyone else—or at least knows someone who knows that someone else, and if it turns out that you hooked up with someone I know, this—” she gestured from her own chest to his and back again “—isn’t going to happen.”
“Is this—” he copied her gesture “—going to happen?”
She sipped her wine. “I’m thinking about it.”
“While you’re thinking, let me reassure you that I’ve never hooked up with anyone from Haven.” His lips curved as he lifted his bottle. “Yet.”
She set her glass on the table, her fingers trailing slowly down the stem. “You’re pretty confident, aren’t you?”
“Optimistic,” he told her. “But I do need to ask you something.”
“What’s that?”
“Is there anyone waiting for you at home in Haven?”
“Aside from my father, grandparents, sister, two brothers, several aunts, uncles and cousins, you mean?”
“Aside from them,” he confirmed.
“No, there’s no one waiting for me.” She traced the base of her wineglass with a neatly shaped but unpainted fingernail. “What about you, Sheriff Davidson—are you married?”
He shook his head. “Divorced.”
“Girlfriend?”
“No,” he said again. “Any more questions?”
“Just one,” she said.
He held her gaze, waiting, hoping.
“Do you want to take these drinks back to my room?”
Chapter Two (#udc6d5391-96d8-5b5e-8fca-0348804637a7)
Five weeks later
“I can’t believe you’re leaving.” Trish Stilton pouted as she rubbed a hand over the curve of her hugely pregnant belly. “Especially now, only a few weeks before the baby’s due to be born.”
Reid dumped the entire contents of his cutlery drawer into a box. Though he didn’t dare say it aloud, considering the imminent delivery of his ex-wife’s baby, he’d decided that his timing was almost perfect.
“Just last week, I told Jonah that we should ask you to be the godfather, but now that you’re moving to Nevada, that’s out of the question.”
Which further convinced Reid that he’d made the right choice in accepting the offer to take over the sheriff’s position in Haven. Though he and Trish had been divorced for more than four years and she’d been remarried for almost three, they’d remained close. Maybe too close.
When she’d walked down the aisle to exchange vows with her current husband, Reid had been the man to give her away. Yeah, it had seemed an odd request to him, but he didn’t see how he could refuse. When she’d found out that she was pregnant, she’d stopped at the Sheriff’s Office to share the news with Reid even before she’d told her husband. And when she’d cried—tears of joy, because she was going to be a mother, mingled with grief, because her child would never know his grandfather—he’d held her and comforted her.
If she’d asked him to be her baby’s godfather—as Jonah Stilton had warned him she intended to do—Reid wouldn’t have been able to refuse. How could he refuse any request from the daughter of the man who’d saved his life?
Reid had been an orphaned teenager running with a bad crowd when the local sheriff took him under his wing. He didn’t just turn Reid’s life around, he saved it, and Reid knew there was no way he could ever repay the man who had been his mentor, father figure and friend. So when Hank realized he wasn’t going to beat the cancer that had invaded his body and he’d confided to Reid that he was worried about his daughter, Reid had promised to take care of her. The news of their engagement had been a balm to the older man’s battered spirits, and he’d managed to hold on long enough to see Reid and Trish exchange their vows.
“I’m honored that you thought of me,” he said to his ex-wife now. “But I’m sure your baby’s father would prefer to have his brother fill that role.”
“Jonah understands how important you are to me,” she said, without denying his claim.
“You’re important to me, too, but I think this move is going to be the best thing for all of us.”
“But why do you have to go so far away?” she demanded.
“Nevada’s not all that far,” he said soothingly.
“But Haven?” she pressed. “I looked it up—it might as well be called Nowhere, Nevada, because that’s where it is.”
“Then I won’t expect you to visit,” he said mildly.
“Of course, I’ll visit,” she promised. “Because you don’t have any friends or family in that town.”
“Actually, I do have a...friend...in Haven.”
“A female friend?” she guessed.
He nodded.
“I knew there had to be another reason that you suddenly decided to leave Echo Ridge—something more than a temporary job.”
“She’s not the reason I’m leaving,” he said truthfully. “But I am looking forward to seeing her again.”
“What’s her name?”
Reid shook his head. “None of your business.”
Trish smiled. “Afraid I’ll track her down and ask about her intentions?”
“Yes,” he admitted.
Not that he was really worried. He had no doubt that Katelyn Gilmore could handle his ex-wife. But the attorney had no idea that he was moving to Haven, because they hadn’t exchanged any contact information before they went their separate ways after the conference. And with the perspective that came with time and distance, he couldn’t help but wonder if he’d made the weekend they’d spent together into more than it really was.
“Well, it would only be fair,” Trish said now. “You wouldn’t let me go out on a second date with Jonah until you’d done a complete background check on him.”
“Because your father asked me to take care of you,” he reminded her.
“He wanted us to take care of each other,” she said.
And for a while, they’d done just that. But Trish had wanted more than he’d been willing or able to give her—an irreconcilable difference that led to the end of their marriage. When that happened, he felt as if he’d let down Hank as much as Trish, but he knew his old friend would be pleased to see his daughter in a committed relationship with a man who could give her everything Reid couldn’t.
He was sincerely happy for her, because she was happy. For himself, he’d decided a long time ago that he wasn’t cut out to be a dad. A kid who’d been knocked around by his mother’s various boyfriends for the first six years of his life, then raised by his widowed grandmother for the next eight before being kicked into and around the system didn’t know anything about being a father. He’d lucked out when he’d met Hank. Trish’s father had given him an idea of the type of man a dad should be, but Reid suspected it was too little too late, that the scars from his earlier years were too numerous and deep to ever truly heal.
“Now you’ve got Jonah,” he reminded her.
“Yes, I do,” Trish said, smiling through the tears that filled her eyes again.
“Jeez, will you stop with the waterworks?” he demanded, passing her a box of tissues.
She plucked one out and dabbed at her eyes. “I can’t help it—it’s pregnancy hormones.”
“Well, let your husband deal with your blubbering—he’s the one who knocked you up.”
“Yes, he did,” she said proudly, rubbing a hand over the enormous swell of her belly. “And those hormones have also led to doing a lot more of what got me into this condition.”
He lifted his hands to cover his ears. “Way too much information, Trish.”
She laughed through her tears. Then she reached out a hand to touch his arm. “Can I give you one piece of advice?”
“Can I stop you?” he countered drily.
She ignored his question. “Before you get involved with this woman—before she gets involved with you—be honest about what you want and don’t want from a relationship.”
“I never meant to be dishonest with you,” he said quietly.
“I know,” she admitted. “The problem was, we rushed into marriage without ever talking about all the things we should have talked about.”
He nodded. “But now you have everything you wanted.”
“Soon,” she amended, rubbing a hand over her baby bump again. Then with her other hand, she grabbed his and drew it to the curve of her belly. “Do you feel that? He’s kicking.”
