A Sheriff in Tennessee

by Lori Handeland

Belle narrowed her choice to the brownie with cherries on top or the marble cheesecake with the chocolate icing. Decisions, decisions.

  She’d come to Pleasant Ridge early because she’d been too anxious to stay in California one more day. This show was her big chance, and could make or break her budding acting career. If she didn’t do well, she’d be back modeling thong bikinis in thirty-degree weather.

  She could think of worse things. But being a model was probably not the best career choice for a bulimic. Even an undiagnosed, self-counseled, secret bulimic.

  “The brownie,” she muttered. “Definitely.”

  A buzzer announced her entrance into the bakery. Seconds later an elderly woman bounced in from the back. Her spritely step belied the lines on her face and the gray in her hair.

  “Can I help you?” She smiled as her glance swept Belle from head to toe. “I’d say yes. You need a cake.”

  Belle raised her eyebrows. “A whole cake?”

  “Well, sure. Doesn’t everyone?”

  The accent made Belle nostalgic. It had been a long time since she’d heard the cadence of the South. She’d just spent the past few years erasing it from her own voice. Ironic that she’d have to recover that accent for her very first part.

  “What if we start with one of the cherry-topped brownies I saw in the window?”

  The woman’s smile fell. “I’m sorry, sugar. Those are plastic. I’ve only got what you see in the display case right here.” She tapped a fingernail on the glass in front of her.

  “Why would you put plastic brownies in the window?”

  The woman’s cheeriness faded and her shoulders sagged. “It’s no secret that business isn’t the best these days. Folks are having a hard time making ends meet in Pleasant Ridge, and when that happens the first things to go are the luxury items. Bakery, for instance.”

  Belle nodded. One of the reasons this town had been picked out of so many others was that Pleasant Ridge was dying but not dead yet. The place still looked prosperous, but it could be bought.

  “There’s no point in baking all that I can and then throwing it out every night, now is there?” The woman indicated her display case with a regal tilt of her head and a sigh. “So I have samples, and I only make certain things on certain days. Monday is brownie day.”

  “I’ll have to remember that.” Belle hunkered down and stared into the case. Wednesday appeared to be cake day. “Can I have a piece of cake?”

  “You bet. Which one?”

  Belle picked the chocolate cake with chocolate icing—as close to her original choice as she could get. The woman handed her a slice big enough to rival one of the mountains on the horizon, atop a plate the size of the moon.

  “Uh—” Belle was treated to a smile of such expectation that she found she couldn’t ask for a smaller serving. What would be the point of asking, anyway? She wouldn’t eat all of a smaller piece, either. “Thank you,” she said, instead.

  After paying a miniscule amount for such a large piece of cake, Belle returned to the street. Before the door closed behind her, she heard, “See you Monday, sugar!”

  Belle waved before heading toward the tiny apartment the production company had rented for her above the five-and-dime. Private stairs from alley level gave her access to a clean-but-sparse kitchenette, bath and living area. Her favorite part was the bed that pulled out of the wall. She’d always wanted one of those.

  Folks had been apologizing for the accommodations since she’d arrived, and while the apartment was much less than what she’d had in the past few years, it was much more than she’d had in the years before that. The important thing was the window through which she could watch the streets below. That had been her only requirement for a living space in Pleasant Ridge.

  Belle would immerse herself in the town, its people, her part. She would become Sheriff Janet Hayes. She could do this. All she needed was some guidance from Gabriel Klein. Both her director and the producers had assured her she would get it.

  The man was new to Pleasant Ridge, but he’d been in law enforcement for a very long time. Belle paused on the sidewalk to cut off a morsel of cake and popped it into her mouth. As she rolled the sweet around on her tongue, making one bite last before she took another, she considered what she knew about the sheriff.

  The Citadel for college, then eight years in the marines, where he’d been an MP. After his service, he’d worked in Atlanta, become a detective, then, oddly, taken a job in Savannah for less than two years before coming here. He was a fascinating man, and Belle couldn’t wait to meet him.

  She swallowed her last bite of cake and glanced at the paper plate. Without realizing it, she’d already cut the rest of the slice into tiny pieces and moved them about to appear as if she’d eaten more than she had. Old habits were hard to break.

  Before she could be tempted further, Belle tossed the remains into the nearest trash can and hurried on so she wouldn’t have to hear the thud as the great, big, beautiful treat hit the bottom of the barrel. She hadn’t gone three steps when a hand descended on her shoulder.

  “Hold it right there, missy.”

  A sun-leathered, sinewy old man scowled at her. The expression only deepened the myriad lines in his face. He slid his hand from her shoulder to her elbow, as if afraid she might run. The sleeve of his rumpled and baggy brown uniform bore the insignia of the Pleasant Ridge Law Enforcement.

  Belle’s eyes widened. This was Gabriel Klein? She’d thought him a younger man, but then, she’d only heard the highlights of his career. Perhaps he’d worked in a dozen other cities as well as Atlanta and Savannah—two dozen by the looks of him.

  He was barely her height of five foot nine—didn’t the marines have some macho height requirement?—and she probably outweighed him, too. But his gaunt fingers were strong as they ground into the sensitive skin above her elbow. She tried to tug away, but he was having none of it.

  “Hello,” she began. “I’m—”

  “A 4-25,” he announced in a high-pitched, nasally voice she knew right off was going to be far too annoying to listen to for long.

  “I’m sorry. What did I do?”

  His thin lips tightened and he jabbed a bony finger at the ground. Belle followed his direction and discovered her cake all over the sidewalk. She frowned. “I must not have hit the hole in the trash can quite right. I’ll pick it up.”

  She made a move toward the cake, but he yanked her back. For a skinny, little old guy he was incredibly agile. “Too late now, missy. We take littering seriously in this community.”

  Before she could ask how seriously, she learned. The sheriff pulled her hands behind her back and shackled them in handcuffs with an ease born of practice.

  “Hey, wait a minute. I said I’d pick it up.”

  “But you weren’t gonna until I caught you. You just marched right on and never glanced back. That cake is pure evil.”

  “Don’t I know it,” Belle muttered.

  “To a dog. Didn’t you ever hear that chocolate is dog poison? What if I hadn’t been here and Miss Dubray’s Chihuahua ate that? Can you imagine what would happen if the yapping twit up and keeled over right here on Longstreet Avenue? While some days I wish he would, I’d rather not have to listen to his mama. Miss Dubray treats that Mex puppy like her baby. Even dresses it in baby clothes.”

  “There oughta be a law.”

  The sheriff scowled at her. “There is. Against people like you. Let’s go.”

  Belle could have argued. She could have told him who she was. She could have screamed for the mayor, a lawyer, her producer. But then she wouldn’t find out how it felt to be arrested like a common criminal, how extremely embarrassing it was to be dragged directly to jail. She’d never experience an arrest from the side of the arrested.

  But no sooner had they entered the police station than the sheriff’s radio crackled static.

  He cursed and spoke into the contraption, which appeared to be a walkie-talkie as old as he was. “Ten-four. I’
ll be there in five.”

  “You understood that?”

  “’Course. It’s a 10-91D.” At her blank expression, he continued. “Cow standing in the middle of Highway B, about seven miles outside town, tangled with a semi. Only known casualty the cow. We don’t get it off the pavement, there’s gonna be BBQ before sundown. I’ll have to put you in a cell and book you when I get back.”

  He was already forcibly encouraging her toward a gray cement-block hallway at the rear of the police station. There, a room opened off the hall, with two cells inside.

  “You’re just going to leave me here? Don’t I get a phone call?”

  “When I get back.”

  “Don’t you have a secretary or something?”

  He snorted. “Yeah, but she’s out havin’ lunch with my butler.”

  He twisted the key in the cell door, removed the cuffs and hustled her inside. The closing clank of the iron door made her flinch. Somehow this wasn’t so interesting anymore.

  “What you see is what you get, missy. This ain’t Memphis.”

  “I could sue you.”

  “You could?” He shrugged. “Sue me later.”

  The sheriff walked out, leaving Belle alone. The outer door closed, then silence settled over the Pleasant Ridge police station.

  Belle didn’t mind being alone. She was alone a lot. As a child she’d had no friends; as an adult she didn’t have any, either.

  She sat on a surprisingly comfortable cot and looked around. She was starting to feel just a bit claustrophobic. Funny, she’d never known that about herself. A life of crime would not be her thing. If she had to stay in this small, locked room much longer she was going to scream—and if she started to scream, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to stop.

  A door opened somewhere, then closed. “Hey!” she shouted, the sound ricocheting around the cell.

  Footsteps approached. Belle geared up to give the sheriff a piece of her mind. But the man who stepped in wasn’t the sheriff.

  Belle couldn’t help it; she blinked and her mouth fell open. He was huge—at least six foot and then some of solid muscle—and the way he walked, confident and sure, with a hand on the butt of his pistol, the other swinging free and loose…

  She couldn’t stop staring at his large, capable hands. Belle shut her mouth and swallowed. She had a thing for nice hands.

  She allowed her gaze to travel up his wide chest, over to a pair of great biceps, then up again to meet his curious blue eyes. He had nice eyes, too—determined but kind, and intelligent. He wasn’t the handsomest man she’d ever seen; in fact, she’d bet most folks would call him downright homely. But Belle knew a thing or two about the value of a pretty face—a commodity, nothing more.

  His short salt-and-pepper hair gave her pause. As did his brown uniform.

  Huge. Muscular. Crew cut. Well, duh.

  “You’re—”

  “Gabriel Klein,” he said, his voice a sexy, Southern rumble from the depths of that incredible chest.

  Now, that’s more like it, Belle thought.

  CHAPTER TWO

  KLEIN WAS IN NO MOOD for trouble. He’d had a morning full already. Unfortunately, the young woman in the cell looked like trouble on a platter.

  He’d just spent the past half hour walking the streets of Pleasant Ridge, nodding to the folks who greeted him, walking and walking, trying to calm down enough to come back here.

  He should have learned by now that arguing with the mayor only gave him a headache. Chai was his boss, plain and simple. And as Mayor Smith had pointed out, if Klein didn’t like the way things were in Pleasant Ridge he could go straight to…another town.

  Klein ground his teeth, a new habit courtesy of Chai. Obviously he still wasn’t calm enough and should walk another mile or so until he was. But he’d heard Virgil answer the call on the dead cow and knew he’d better return to mind the fort. He wished Virgil had told him they had company.

  “What did you do?” he asked.

  Might be any one of a hundred things, with Virgil. The man remembered the code book better than he remembered what he’d had for breakfast. Klein spent a lot of time releasing people Virgil arrested for outdated nonsense. It gave them both something to do.

  “I believe it was a 4-25.”

  Klein frowned. Her voice was odd. Pleasant, but odd. The overtones were flat Yankee, yet the sound of the word four—fo-ah—made him wonder— Damn, he had far too little to detect in Pleasant Ridge if he was pondering the accent of a college kid who’d wandered off the interstate.

  The way she’d shouted “Hey!” and the tense manner in which she held her shoulders did not bode well. That he couldn’t see her face beneath the shadow of her Titans cap made Klein edgy. He liked to look into a person’s eyes. But her baggy clothes and high-topped tennis shoes assured him she was just a kid, despite the mature, somewhat sexy tenor of her voice.

  Klein rubbed his eyes. Sexy? Great, he was starting to stalk the cradle.

  “A 4-25?” He dropped his hand. “Jaywalking?”

  She snorted. “Not according to your sidekick. Littering seems to be a federal offense around here.”

  “A lot of things are.”

  “I’ll have to remember that. I’d think that if you locked people up for every little thing you’d have more jail cells—or at least, fewer empty ones.”

  “Well, we sort of have a system here. Virgil locks folks up—” Klein unhooked the ring of keys from his belt, twisted one in the lock and opened the door “—then I set them free.”

  “Interesting system.”

  She stepped out and took a deep breath, as if she needed fresh air. She wasn’t going to get it in here, where the overriding scents were old paint and ancient coffee.

  However, she smelled fresh and sweet, like sunshine and chocolate. Two of his favorite things.

  Klein took a giant step backward, away from temptation. He needed to get a grip. Or maybe get laid. Because what else could explain his attraction to a sweet young thing? Gabe Klein knew better.

  “If you’ll follow me.” He led the way to the front office. “We’ll just light a small ceremonial fire with your paperwork and you can be on your way.”

  “Your friend—”

  “Deputy.”

  “Fife was it?”

  “Gumm,” he snapped. It was okay for him to call his deputy by the name of the infamous screw-up from Mayberry, but no one else had better try it. “His name’s Virgil Gumm.”

  “Even better,” she murmured. “There was no paperwork. Deputy Gumm got called out on the suicide cow before he could book me.”

  Suicide cow? Klein almost laughed. He had an odd sense of humor himself, but most of the time he was the only one who got his jokes. Chai certainly couldn’t be counted on—for anything—and Virgil, well, not much was funny to Virgil Gumm. The law was a serious business.

  Klein stopped just inside the office doorway, and she bumped into him. The difference in their sizes caused her to bounce back several steps. “Hey!” she said. “Your brake lights are busted.”

  “Sorry.” He continued to his desk and glanced at the surface. No papers, just as she’d said. None on Virgil’s desk, either. Damn.

  “So you’re telling me my deputy put you in a cell and never read you your rights?”

  “He didn’t even ask my name.”

  Double damn. Virgil was losing it, and this time they could have a lawsuit on their hands.

  “I apologize, miss. We’re a small town and sometimes things get muddled.”

  “Fascinating word choice, Sheriff.” Her lips curved. “I think I’m going to enjoy working with you.”

  Klein’s gaze leaped from her mouth to her eyes. They were still shadowed, and he could see little but the line of her cheek and the slant of her jaw.

  Then she pulled off her Titans cap and shook out a mane of long, curly, blond hair. He forgot all about her face as the mass tumbled to her waist, drawing his eyes to the tank top that exposed pale skin on either
side of her overalls. The sight was the most erotic thing he’d encountered in a long time.

  He yanked his eyes from her hips to her face, and froze. She wasn’t as young as he’d thought. But that wasn’t what had his ardor waning quicker than ice melts in springtime.

  It was the sight of a beautiful woman.

  BELLE WASN’T USED TO men staring at her with no expression in their eyes. Over the past several years she’d viewed a gamut of emotions—appraisal, admiration, avarice, lust, even love—but she had to say, she couldn’t recall any man looking at her as Gabriel Klein was right now: as if he had no interest in her at all.

  She might think he was gay, except there had been interest at first. Not only in his eyes but in his body language, until she’d taken off her hat and let him see her face. That usually reduced most men to gibbering slaves. This one merely turned his back and walked to the window. She had to admit, she was intrigued.

  “You’re Isabelle Ash?”

  “You don’t recognize me?”

  “Sorry. I’m not much of a Victoria’s Secret buyer. No matter how many times I ask, they refuse to carry my size.”

  Belle choked. He threw a glance that was almost admiring over his shoulder, before he caught himself, sobered and focused his attention outside once more.

  He didn’t know who she was! He’d never drooled over a picture of her in satin and lace, not even spandex and a smile. Why did she find that more appealing than eight dozen white roses?

  “Are you going to sue us?” he asked the window.

  Ah, so that’s what he’s worried about.

  “Sue the department that’s teaching me all I need to know for the chance of my lifetime? I don’t think so.”

  “Swell.”

  Funny, he didn’t sound happy about it, and she had a feeling she knew why. “You don’t want us here, do you?”

  “I never said that.”

  “Specifically, you don’t want me here. You don’t want to help me.”

  He turned, and his gaze met hers. Annoyance made his eyes shine like blue neon against his sun-bronzed face. “Fine. I don’t. But I’ve just been informed I have little choice in the matter. So the point is moot.”