Chapter 1
Katie Sutton wanted to swear.
Normally she wasn’t a swearing person. She couldn’t afford to be when she worked at the local daycare in a small town where everyone knew everyone’s business, sometimes before the person knew it themselves. No, she was frustrated and angry to the point of swearing or crying.
She was not going to cry.
In a couple of weeks she might even share the story at the local bar with friends and laugh about it. Right now, she sat on the corner of the dumpster and looked hopefully again for her set of keys.
“What are you doing?” a male voice drawled.
Katie closed her eyes for a moment. It had to be Jackson Davis who found her like this. Trent Davis had been one of her best friends growing up. She’d been raised on the neighbouring farm to the Davis’ and had made their home pretty much her home away from home until she went to college. Jackson was Trent’s older brother.
Trent’s sexy, tall, handsome older brother that she’d been crushing on since she discovered that boys were different than girls. Her cheeks flushed a little and she opened her eyes, desperate to find her keys.
“I lost my keys,” Katie tried for an even tone.
“In the dumpster?” Jackson asked, looking up at Trent’s best friend. She was an athletic blond tomboy who had kept his brother on his toes for much of their childhood. “How does that happen?”
Katie sighed. “One of the bags carrying my groceries ripped. You know how cheap and thin those things are. The jar of pickles broke all over the pavement. When I picked up what was left of my groceries, my purse strap kept falling off my shoulder…”
“And?” Jackson prompted, putting his bags beside her bags on the ground. He hefted himself onto the edge of the dumpster, swinging a leg over.
“Careful!” Katie cried. “Don’t move anything yet. I’m hoping to just spot them rather than having to dig through everything.”
He carefully settled himself on a corner and looked at the pile of smelly garbage bags and loose items. “How did the keys end up in here?”
Katie rubbed her temple. “I may have been angry and used a little too much force to swing the purse strap onto my shoulder. The keys kind of flew off my finger and fell in here.”
“Are you sure? They didn’t land on the outside or behind the dumpster?” Jackson shifted a bag carefully with the toe of his boot.
“No, I checked all around the outside,” Katie slowly lowered herself in, feeling the garbage squish down beneath her.
“Do you have a spare set?” Jackson did the same and one of the bags broke open. A distinctively unpleasant odor filled the air. He made a face. “Old Chinese food. Nice.”
Katie scrunched her nose against the rotting egg roll smell. “This is the spare set. Earlier this week the kids at the daycare flushed my first set down the toilet.”
“Why am I not surprised?” Jackson carefully moved some garbage with his hands, sifting through the mess, trying to stick to the dry bits of garbage.
“You know, my life is not always a disaster,” Katie retorted. It might be a lie but she felt the need to defend herself. It was true that she tended to have more bad luck than anyone else she knew.
“Maybe you could get a set of keys from the dealership,” Jackson suggested.
“The car is thirty years old. It’s a rust bucket hatchback that drinks a quart of oil every week. I don’t think they’re going to have keys for it,” Katie sighed and began digging in earnest.
After a half hour of digging and sorting they both had stains on their clothes from who knew what and smelled like something dragged out from a rotting fetid swamp.
“Maybe I could hotwire it for you?” Jackson offered, wiping his forehead and leaving a yellow smear behind.
Even so, he was still sexy in his faded jeans and plaid shirt. Katie tamped down the thought. “Thanks, but no. Someone might steal it.”
“Anyone who steals that car is doing you a favour,” he muttered and stooped to sort through another round of garbage.
“I need that car. I can’t afford another one,” Katie mentally braced herself and dug her fingers into some sort of goo, feeling for anything that resembled her keys. She couldn’t afford any other car. She could barely afford the one she had. The daycare had recently reduced her hours because there was a drop in the population of the farming community and small town. Many people were packing up and moving to the nearby cities for jobs. Entire families were leaving which meant that there just weren’t as many kids. It didn’t help that her landlord had recently stated that her rent was going up. Katie didn’t see how this could make sense since people were leaving. Surely more places were available now so the rent should go down? Katie mulled her dilemma over and decided she would need to go shopping for a new place to live. The problem was, she couldn’t afford first and last month’s rent. She was stuck unless she did what everyone else was doing, leave for the city.
She’d lived all her life in this area and loved the small town feeling. She liked that everyone knew everyone. People waved on the streets. People helped each other. These were her neighbours and friends and it would be so hard to go.
She would need to if they closed down the daycare which was the latest rumour going around.
