Ian’s cries were interrupted by the hiccups. Nate shifted the poor little guy to his shoulder. “Terrance, please.”
Terrance disappeared up the stairs to Nate’s apartment. He was probably searching for a beer. Nate hoped he brought back one for everyone.
“I want to go home.” Rutgar sat up too quickly. His eyes rolled back in his head and he flopped back on the cot.
Nate handed Ian back to Flynn, grabbed the med kit from behind the counter and hurried to Rutgar’s side. The old man still had a pulse, but was out cold. Nate waved smelling salts beneath his nose. “When are we getting a doctor in town?”
“Soon, I hope,” Flynn shouted back.
Rutgar startled, and then pressed his palms over his eyes. “I had a dream...”
Ian’s cries continued to fill the jail, interspersed with hiccups.
“Someone save me!” Rutgar shouted. “It wasn’t a dream.”
Terrance returned carrying something that looked like one of Nate’s green hand towels. A wet hand towel. He took the baby from Flynn the way you’d expect a father of five to—with sure hands. Covering his index finger with the towel, he pressed it to Ian’s lips.
Ian’s cries lessened, and then he began to suckle the wet towel.
Silence rang in Nate’s ears. No one moved.
“Why would Ian respond to that and not breastfeed or take a pacifier?” Flynn whispered, collapsing in Nate’s desk chair.
“Every baby’s different,” Terrance said in a muted voice fit for a late-night visit to a nursery. “That’s why parents need a big arsenal of tricks.”
Nate pulled out a chair behind the counter for Terrance, unable to stop himself from pointing out, “Good thing you aren’t on walkabout today. We’d still be here with a screaming baby.”
“You’d have managed,” Terrance said gruffly, not looking up from the spent baby in his arms. “But you’d have managed badly.”
Slouching in the desk chair, Flynn considered Nate. “It must be bittersweet to have missed out on two years of your son’s life. The panic over colic. The joy over first smiles.”
“First smiles are always gas, son,” Terrance murmured.
Nate felt numb. He’d been upset last night because he hadn’t been told Duke existed. He hadn’t looked at it from the heart, from the emotional moments and milestones that bound a father to a son. Duke was a great kid. The years stretched out before Nate. Duke playing on the school playground, his legs too long for his torso and his ears still too big. Duke bringing friends home to play video games and raid the refrigerator. Duke dating, graduating, choosing a college or a career path. Getting married. All without Nate.
He felt hollow. So hollow. Was this what he wanted?
It didn’t matter what Nate might want or long for. Duke needed a father who knew how to navigate the waters of childhood.
“I’m having a hard time imagining you leaving anyone at the altar,” Flynn said into the silence.
Terrance looked up sharply.
Nate could’ve done without Flynn’s sudden interest in his personal life. “It’s not what you think,” Nate began. And then he restarted, “I mean, it’s kind of what you think. I was dating Julie’s sister. We were talking about what we wanted to do in the future. We both said marriage. And all of a sudden she was hugging me and saying, ‘Yes.’”
“There’s usually a lot of time between becoming engaged and getting married,” Terrance pointed out.
“Plenty of time to stop the wedding,” Flynn seconded.
Not to be outdone on rubbing it in, Rutgar added, “You had to have taken her ring shopping, rented a venue, talked to a caterer and a florist, been fitted for a tux—”
“Not to mention you had a thing for Julie.” Terrance looked at Nate like he was an unexpected exhibit in the reptile section of the zoo. “That must have weighed on your mind—being engaged to the wrong sister.”
“I never said I was in love with Julie.” Nate’s voice rose to baby-waking volume.
“I have five sons.” Apparently Terrance’s blue eyes had seen the truth during those brief few minutes at El Rosal. “I know that lovesick stare when I see it.”
Whereas Nate had no clue what love looked like.
“Oh,” Flynn said, grinning. “That’s what that look at breakfast was.”
“Enough.” Nate cut them off with a slice of his hand. “You’ve all had your fun.”
“And it’s always fun,” Rutgar said gruffly. “Until someone gets their heart broken.”
They were too loud. Nate was too annoyed. Ian waved his arms and whimpered.
Terrance settled him down with a few soft-spoken words, and then he turned his attention to Nate. “You wanted to do the right thing with Julie’s sister. But I’m disappointed you let it get that far.”
No one but his Uncle Paul had spoken to Nate like that. Terrance’s words touched Nate in a way that had him saying, “It won’t happen again.”
Terrance and Flynn looked at Nate as if he was a public defender who hadn’t made a solid case.
This was why Nate didn’t talk about his past or his feelings. It made him feel as flat as a boot-squashed bug.
“I have to make my rounds.” Nate headed for the door, needing space. “Can one of you stay with Rutgar?”
“I should get Ian home.” Flynn stood and took his son. “Thanks, Terrance. Hopefully he’ll sleep for a couple of hours.” He left with Nate’s towel.
Terrance crossed his arms over his chest and leaned back in the chair. “I’ll do it, but I insist you go see your son while you’re out and that sweet girl you can’t stop staring at.”
“She was here already,” Nate groused. “And I have rounds.”
“Rounds.” Terrance scoffed. “I can tell you what’s going on in town. The widows are meeting at El Rosal, discussing floats for this year’s Spring Festival. The bowling team is having coffee at Martin’s. Phil’s smells like they’ve been doing too many perms. The science experiment at school was supposed to launch a rocket that would then parachute to earth, but Brad what’s his name aimed it at a tree by accident.” This last Terrance put in air quotes. “Oh, and Eunice convinced Jessica to make horseradish spice cupcakes.” He lowered his chin and his voice. “Not for the faint of heart.”
“Jessica likes a man who’ll try anything she makes,” Rutgar said staunchly. “Like me.”
Nate opened the door. “I guess I’ll swing by the bakery and pick up a cupcake for you, Rutgar.” Regardless of Terrance’s update, Nate had to see for himself.
Nate made his rounds. He stopped to talk to Old Man Takata, who was sitting on his front porch not smoking a cigar—he’d quit after a health scare a few years ago. Nate swung by the Messina garage when he noticed there were more cars than usual outside—Joe was having an oil change special. Nate stopped to see Agnes, who’d texted him about needing to talk.
When he arrived, Agnes was weeding her flower beds. She pulled off her dirty gloves and dusted off her blue jeans. Her normally lively eyes were framed with concern. “I wanted to tell you personally in case you haven’t heard. The town council is calling a special meeting tomorrow to announce candidates. We want to deal with this challenge to our power and your position as quickly as possible.”
“I appreciate that.” The black rain cloud appeared on the horizon.
She patted his shoulder. “You trust me, don’t you?”
“Of course.” Most of the time. It was Doris he didn’t trust. She was like the Rubik’s Cube he’d tried to solve once. “Can you tell me why Doris is so...”
“Unhappy?” The wind tousled her pixie-length gray bangs. “Poor Doris. She was never the easiest of girls.” At what must be a confused look on Nate’s face, Agnes explained, “She grew up here, like many of us.” She clasped her garden gloves b
etween her thumb and forefinger.
The black rain cloud hovering on the horizon moved closer, diluting the warmth of the spring sunshine.
“Agnes...” Nate wasn’t sure he wanted to ask this question. “What were her parents like?”
Agnes closed her fingers around her gloves; her expression switched to disapproving. “They were strict. Stricter than strict.”
The rain cloud floated above Harmony Valley, somewhere in the vicinity of Doris’s house.
“And she was married?”
“For too long.” The garden gloves were bunched in her fist now. “Maury was more closed off than her parents.” Agnes leaned in and lowered her voice, as if they were at a cocktail party and at risk of being heard. “There were rumors. Like Maury controlling the finances. Some said he gave Doris cash to buy groceries and made her return with the receipt and exact change.”
Nate glanced skyward. He didn’t want to know anything more about Doris, about her pain or her past. She’d won her freedom from her parents and her husband. Now he understood why she considered any rule constrictive. Her vindictiveness wasn’t fair, but it had little to do with Nate.
“Nate.” Agnes stared up at him with the same tender smile many Harmony Valley residents gave him, the one that made him long for a different kind of childhood. “You have nothing to worry about with this election.”
Nate disagreed. He had plenty to worry about. He wanted nothing more than to belly up to the bar at El Rosal and order a tall cold beer. But he continued with his rounds, checking on some of the town’s shut-ins and driving the roads to make sure no one had broken down.
Finally, after he’d circled the Lambridge Bed & Breakfast three times, he admitted that he wanted to check on Julie and Duke. Terrance would say it was because he loved Julie. Nate would’ve countered that it was because he was simply worried about them.
Leona opened the door before Nate had set foot on the front step. It was eerie how she watched the neighborhood. “Sheriff Nate. To what do I owe this pleasure?”
“We.” Reggie muscled her way past her grandmother to the front porch. “To what do we owe his pleasure?”
Leona released a long-suffering sigh.
Nate stopped on the porch. “If you must know—” and who in Harmony Valley wasn’t curious about business that wasn’t their own? “—I’m here to ask Julie and Duke to dinner.” Might just as well admit it. If he only had a week with Duke and Julie, he wanted to help them out as much as he could.
“Nay!” Duke shouted excitedly from the second-floor landing. He wore a clean white T-shirt. His hair had been combed, revealing those Landry ears. He hurried toward the steps.
“Wait for me.” Julie took Duke’s hand and escorted him downstairs, glancing up occasionally to frown at Nate.
“Looks like she’s given her answer,” Leona said, still standing in Nate’s way.
“Nothing personal, Grandmother, but you know nothing about people,” Reggie said, softening the ruthless remark with a hug that was so unexpected, it widened Leona’s eyes and stilled her tongue.
“Just so you know, Jules...” Nate jumped into the void with the most logical reasons they should have dinner with him. “Most places in town roll up the carpet at about four. I thought I’d make dinner at my place.”
“How sweet.” Reggie herded Leona into the foyer.
Recovered from the shock of Reggie’s hug, Leona harrumphed. “A word of warning, Miss Smith. I’ve never heard anyone say the sheriff is a good cook.”
“That’s because I’ve never cooked for anyone here.” But he’d picked up a couple of steaks and potatoes at the grocery store out by the highway, and horseradish spice cupcakes for Rutgar from Martin’s. “What do you say, Jules? Steak and baked potatoes? Cold beer?”
Julie’s gray eyes were cool. “We’ll get something at El Rosal.”
“You can have El Rosal any night,” Reggie said, stepping in front of Leona, who looked as if she had a different comment in mind. “It’s not every night a man offers to cook for you.”
Nate gave Reggie a grateful smile. “I’m cooking for Rutgar, so making extra is no trouble. You can put your feet up and Duke can run around the jail. That should wear him out enough that he’ll sleep late in the morning.”
Julie’s eyes sparked with reluctant interest.
The key to compromise with Julie, Nate realized, was offering to help with Duke. Keeping his son occupied and wearing him out so that Julie could rest was as appealing to her as a chocolate doughnut with cream filling.
“Well,” Julie said with all the enthusiasm of a cat faced with a bath. “If you burn anything, El Rosal will be our backup.”
* * *
JULIE SHOULDN’T HAVE accepted Nate’s invitation. Despite the day’s revelation about April, he was still the enemy. But here she was, sitting in a chair in his office, feeling as cranky as a hall monitor in a school filled with free passes.
Nate should’ve been the cranky one. She and April had stolen two years of Duke’s life from him. Instead, in between turning the steaks Nate was barbecuing in the back alley, he played hide-and-seek with Duke. April would have been ecstatic.
Julie should be happy for Duke, too. He was gaining a father. But what if this, too, was short-term? What if Nate couldn’t commit to being a regular presence in Duke’s life?
But what if Julie was letting her need for justice stand in the way of what was best for Duke?
April, get out of my head.
Nate lived above the jail. It was no place to raise a little boy. Not that Julie’s apartment was much better. It was a one-bedroom fourth-floor unit, no playground or park nearby. But she had Mom and her backup caregiver. Nate had no family in town to help.
“Why does the boy keep hiding under my cot?” Rutgar wasn’t fooling anyone with that put-upon air. The old man was loving the attention from Duke.
“Juju.” Duke ran over and sprawled across her lap. He was done playing. And given her little man hadn’t taken a nap today, he’d go to sleep early and sleep late, just as Nate had promised.
“I think I’m going to sleep instead of eat,” Rutgar said. Almost immediately, he began to snore.
Nate had set his desk as a dinner table. He put plates loaded with food on it. “If I’d have known Rutgar wasn’t going to join us, we could’ve eaten upstairs.”
In his apartment. No, thanks. “This is fine.” She’d set limits. She’d refused a tour of his personal space above them. She’d declined a beer.
They ate in near silence, exchanging pleasantries about the weather, their favorite football teams, mutual friends.
After cleaning his plate, Duke climbed into Julie’s lap and fell asleep as quickly as Rutgar had.
“I never was one for scintillating conversation.” Nate gave Julie that tight half smile. “But I’ve never put so many people to sleep before.”
“I’m so full, I might have to join them.” That was the biggest meal she’d eaten since being shot.
“Go ahead and snooze. I found Terrance napping in that chair when I got back from afternoon rounds.” Nate stacked the dishes and carried them upstairs. When he returned, he pulled his chair closer so that he sat next to her.
For several minutes, they said nothing. They might just as well have been an old married couple staring at the world from their front porch, not the open door of the local jail. April would’ve been happy to sit with her thoughts and the man she loved. Julie was unsettled, unsure how she felt about Nate.
“Since you’ve been talking about a test to determine what makes a good father,” Nate said into the lull. “I’ve been thinking about my dad.”
Julie stopped rubbing Duke’s back and tried to rein in her need to interrogate. Maybe if she knew more about Nate’s history, she’d understand why he’d had doubts about Apri
l and why April had backed out of the wedding at the last minute.
“My dad’s the reason I chose to go into the army.” Nate’s words sounded as if they were being forced out past gravel. “And then into the police academy.”
“Your father sounds like a good guy.” So why didn’t Nate talk to him anymore? Why did he look like someone had died when he talked about him?
He was slow to qualify his statement. So slow she thought he wasn’t going to answer. “My dad wasn’t any prize. His father wasn’t any prize either.” Nate stroked Duke’s hair the way April used to, as if he couldn’t believe he existed. “I guess on some level, I don’t think I’m a prize, not as marriage or father material.”
Julie did a double take, needing to make sure she was still talking to handsome, successful Nate. “Spare me the tale of your insecurities.”
“Jules, I—”
“You were asked three years running to be in a calendar benefitting the widows’ fund.” He was that good-looking.
“But I didn’t—”
“No one on the force had a bad word to say about you.”
“Jules, I—”
“And you’ve never been shy or uncertain around women in your life. You see a woman coming and you open doors and pull out chairs and basically act like a prince.” Julie was anything but a princess. She intimidated men with her bold attitude. “So don’t try to excuse your behavior by blaming it on your nonexistent insecurities.”
“I wasn’t,” he said when she stopped for breath.
Rutgar’s steady snore turned into a snortfest before he settled into sleep again.
Julie let her head fall back so she could stare at the ceiling and perhaps receive divine guidance from April. Did her sister really want Nate to have a shot at full-time fatherhood?
“I realize this is hard on you.” His deep, calm voice simultaneously riled and soothed. “I’m sorry.”
“You should have said that to April.”
“I did.” Everything about him communicated his sincerity—his posture, his tone, the way he didn’t squirm when she went on the attack.
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