Page 4 of Two Favors Repaid

His laugh was a thunderous, beautiful sound.

“What were you doing here at this time of day, anyway?” he said.

“Just buying some dinner.”

He raised an eyebrow at the shattered wine bottle and the apparent absence of any other groceries.

“Dinner, huh?”

“Dinner,” she repeated stubbornly.

Great. Now he’s going to think I live on wine alone.

His green gaze locked on hers for a moment, as if he were trying to read her. She kept her expression neutral. Finally, he broke eye contact and turned around, walking to his cruiser. Something clenched inside her as she noticed the burns on the back of his shirt.

She opened the door to the passenger seat of the cruiser and got in quickly before he had a chance to help her. She didn’t think she could take much more kindness from him.

He started the ignition quickly.

“I knew everything was going to be fine,” she said.

“You did?” he said, surprised.

“Of course. People call you Lucky Rob, after all, don’t they?”

Though she was just trying to make light of the situation, his eyes dimmed at the mention of the nickname. Emma looked down at her hands, hating that she was responsible for that.

#

Rob

As soon as the door to the station shut behind him, Rob let down his guard, groaning. Alma only worked mornings, and Susan would be out on patrol, so he didn’t expect there to be anybody else at the station. He hobbled to his desk. In the good old days, when he first joined the Sharp Cover’s Sheriff Department, Aaron Bowmann always kept a bottle of cheap whiskey stashed in his desk drawer. Though Rob could do with a shot just about now, he knew he wouldn’t be finding any whiskey anywhere since Natalie Bowmann, Aaron’s daughter, had been elected sheriff and taken over the department a few years earlier.

Natalie’s more likely to keep a live lizard in her desk drawer than a bottle of whiskey.

The thought made him smile briefly, but Rob knew perfectly well why Natalie didn’t drink. She’d been attacked once walking out of a bar when she was young. Rob had been a rookie then. It’d been his first crime scene, and one he’d never forget. Fourteen years later, Rob still didn’t know how Aaron Bowmann had held it together after finding his daughter in that dark alley.

It certainly made Rob respect the man even more when he thought about it. The mistakes that had been made in that case were not the old sheriff’s fault, though Rob still wondered if there was anything he himself could have done to prevent the misunderstandings and mistakes that followed.

He could only be glad that those errors had been righted last year, and that Natalie and Hunter Fowler, who’d originally been convicted for the crime, were currently on their honeymoon in Saint Lucia—and short months away from bringing a child into this world.

Rob sat down. The old chair creaked. He was a few months shy of thirty-five but already felt like an old man.

“Interesting day, Rob?” Susan Lopes said, coming from the kitchen. Even though it was early afternoon, the young woman held a steaming mug in her hand. The department’s newest officer, Susan had arrived in Sharp’s Cove only a year and a half earlier, but her addiction to caffeine was already legendary in town. Susan had straight black hair, skin that tanned easily, and a slight musical accent that Rob knew she protected fiercely, a reminder of her Mexican mother.

“It was okay,” he drawled, smiling. “What are you doing here, Susan?”

“Finished my rounds and came back to write up some parking tickets. So, I heard you picked a fight with a truck.”

So the story’s making its way around town.

“I also heard sweet Emma was there,” she said. Susan’s voice took on an innocent tone, and her dark eyes twinkled. She knew exactly how he felt about Emma.

“You hear a lot of things, Susan.”

“Why don’t we get you out of that bloody, torn shirt? Come on, there must be something that fits in your locker.”

He let Susan guide him to his locker. He did keep some extra clothes there, and getting changed might him feel less like a survivor of some kind of natural disaster.