Bachelor Sheriff, page 8
He slowed his speed a bit, as the road to the lake was full of twists and sharp turns. “Did you hear anything that could have been a gunshot?”
“I’m not sure. I thought I heard something each time, like a cracking sound. But it wasn’t what I thought a gunshot would sound like.”
Aaron smiled slightly. “Have you ever heard a gunshot? Not counting television.”
“No,” Melissa admitted.
Cooper Cove Marina came into sight around one final turn. Aaron pulled into the small parking lot in front of the bait shop, spotting his father and his brother J.D. examining Melissa’s little white Volkswagen. They looked up when he and Riley stepped out of the truck.
“I’m thinking a .22 rifle,” J.D. pronounced as Aaron joined him next to the shredded left back tire. “It had to have come from some distance or she’d have seen whoever had been shooting.”
“Unless he was camouflaged,” Riley pointed out.
Aaron frowned. “This is crazy. Why would a woman like Melissa Draper be on somebody’s hit list? She’s nobody.”
J.D. cleared his throat, his gaze shifting to a point behind Aaron. Aaron turned around to find Melissa standing a couple of feet away, her arms hugging herself as if she were cold. Her pale blue eyes met Aaron’s in an unwavering gaze, though he thought he saw a hint of hurt behind her half smile.
“You’re right. I’m not the sort of person people want to kill,” she said aloud. “But here we are anyway.”
He crossed to her, lifting his hand to squeeze her arm but pausing when he remembered how she’d reacted to his unwanted touches the day before. He dropped his hand to his side. “Are you okay?”
Her gaze dropped with his hand. “Just freaked-out more than anything.”
“Let’s get you inside.” The place was surrounded by woods on three sides, with the open lake in front of them. If someone wanted Melissa dead, it wouldn’t be hard to take another potshot at her standing out here in the open.
In the bait shop, his mother was waiting on a fishing customer. Aaron eyed the man as he gathered up his purchases and headed outside.
“Do you know that guy?” he asked his mother.
“Ray Pelham. Comes by for night crawlers every couple of days,” Beth answered.
“Navy Lieutenant J. G. Pelham, retired. Good guy.” J.D. clapped Aaron’s back. “Not everybody’s the enemy, Aaron.”
Aaron turned to Riley. “Handle the evidence retrieval from the vehicle. We’re also going to need to take a look at the woods near where the shooting occurred, see if the bastard left any shell casings around.”
Riley nodded and headed back outside.
Aaron turned back to Melissa, lowering his voice. “You’ve clearly made an enemy. A determined one, from the looks of it. You don’t need to wander around Chickasaw County alone while this creep’s still at large.”
She gave him a worried look. “What are you saying?”
“I’ve got vacation time accrued. Maybe it’s a good time to take it. Because you need around-the-clock protection.”
Chapter Seven
Melissa shivered inside the cab of Aaron’s truck, staring out at the woods where Riley Patterson and four other deputies were searching for signs of expended rifle cartridges. Aaron remained in the driver’s seat next to her, listening in to the chatter on the other deputies’ radios.
Still trying to play bodyguard, she thought.
“Wouldn’t you rather be out there helping with the search?”
He shook his head. “I’m fine right here.”
“We don’t even know this was an actual attempt on my life,” she protested. “This is still hunting season, right?”
“Yeah. Deer season’s over at the end of January.”
“So there are bound to be hunters around here, right?”
“It wasn’t a hunter who shot at you, Melissa.”
“You can’t know that.”
“If it had just been the tire, sure. Maybe it could be a hunter. But the guy shot at you a good hundred yards past that first shot. That’s intentional.”
She dropped her gaze. “I don’t know how this is happening. Terry Harris is in jail, and I don’t really know who else—”
“Don’t you have other domestic abuse clients?”
“A few. None of their abusers are as volatile as Terry, and none has threatened me in particular.”
“I still need the list of names, so I can look into their whereabouts this morning and the night of the fire.”
She met his gaze firmly.
“No.”
“No?”
“Attorney-client privilege.”
“Then ask their permission.”
“No. My clients have been through hell, and most of them are finally getting their lives back to some semblance of peace and order. I am not going to involve them in a police investigation that drags their abusers back into their lives.”
Aaron growled with frustration. “What am I supposed to do, then? How am I supposed to protect you if I have no idea who’s trying to hurt you?”
“I can check into their whereabouts on my own,” she suggested. “I have contact with some of their probation officers. I know some of their families. I can make some inquiries about their recent activities.”
“And if you find a suspect? Aren’t you still bound by your confidentiality rules?” Aaron asked.
“Look, how about this—if any of the men in question seem viable as suspects, I’ll ask their victims for permission to share the information with you.”
He didn’t look happy with her proposed solution, but he didn’t argue the point. “Is there anybody else?” he asked. “Besides disgruntled wife beaters? Any contentious cases you’ve handled through your law firm?”
“Contract law doesn’t usually inspire murderous passions.”
“What about personally? Are you seeing anyone? Maybe just broke up with someone?”
“No. I haven’t been seeing anyone for a while.” Not since Evan Hallman.
He gave her a skeptical look. “How long is a while?”
She wasn’t about to admit it had been four years. He probably found her pathetic enough as it was. “It’s not an ex-boyfriend. Trust me.” Certainly not Evan, who was still locked up in a North Carolina prison.
“How about the people you work with? Do any of them know where you’re staying since the fire?”
“I guess they all do, since I told Carter where he could reach me right in front of them all.” She sighed. “But it can’t be anyone at the office, Aaron. I’m not into workplace drama. I don’t backstab. I don’t sleep my way around the place. I don’t have a cushy corner office someone covets—” She stopped short, because that wasn’t entirely true. Not the corner office part, but there was someone at work who was a little jealous of her, wasn’t there?
Dalton Brant wasn’t her biggest fan.
But the idea of Dalton picking up a cap gun, much less a hunting rifle, was so ludicrous she almost laughed aloud. “There’s a guy at the office who thinks I leapfrogged over him for my last promotion, but honestly, it wasn’t enough of a promotion to inspire murder. He just takes joy in snarking at me at the office.”
“You’d be surprised how little it takes to enrage some people,” Aaron said.
She gave him a pointed look. “I defend abused spouses. There’s little that surprises me anymore.”
“Tell me about this guy. What’s his name?”
“I’m not going to narc on someone I work with.”
“It’s not narcing, Melissa. Someone has tried to kill you. Twice. I’m trying to make sure there’s not a third attempt, but you’re making it hard for me to do my job.”
“I don’t mean to.”
His brow furrowed. “I’m beginning to wonder if that’s true. You aren’t exactly a charter member of the Aaron Cooper fan club, are you?”
On the contrary, she thought. I probably started the damned thing. “Whatever you think I think of you, I’m certainly not trying to thwart your investigation.”
“Then tell me the name of the man at work.”
She sighed, knowing he had to at least look into any possible lead. “Dalton Brant. But he’s not the guy, Aaron.”
“We’ll see.”
She grabbed his arm. He looked down at her hand, then slowly back up at her. The temperature in the truck cab rose at least ten degrees, sending heat flushing into her cheeks. She withdrew her hand, but the feel of his rough denim jacket lingered on her fingertips, shooting a tingle up her arm.
She cleared her throat. “Don’t harass Dalton, okay? Can’t you just ask around without confronting him directly?”
“Are you afraid of him?”
She stared at him, appalled. “No, of course not.”
“Then why do you care if I ask him a few questions?”
She looked down at her hands. “I don’t want to create a big stir at work, okay? I like my job.”
“You think your boss would fire you just because you’re a victim of a murder attempt?”
“I’m not a victim,” she said bluntly. She’d spent the last four years making sure she never would be again.
“Okay.” He fell silent. The truck cab seemed impossibly small all of a sudden.
The crackle of the police radio made her jump. She smiled self-consciously while Aaron listened to the dispatch call for a patrol car to respond to a traffic accident on the other side of the county. “I feel like I’m keeping you from your job,” she said when he turned to look at her.
“This is my job.” He tapped his thumbs on the steering wheel, his brow creased in thought. “You said your whole office heard you tell your boss where you were staying, right?”
“Right.”
“Did you come straight here from the office?”
“No, Carter asked me to drop off some papers to another law firm over in Maybridge.”
“Maybridge? That’s at least twenty miles out of the way.”
“Still sort of on the way here,” she said, not sure she was following his line of thought. “I didn’t mind.”
“Who knew you were going to Maybridge before coming here?”
“Well, Carter, of course. And Vicki Trammell—she was supposed to take the papers, but since I was heading this way Carter asked me to take them instead and save her the trip.”
Suddenly, she understood his questions.
She stared at him in horror. “You think someone from my office shot at me.”
AARON GAUGED her reaction, wondering if she’d been soft selling Dalton Brant’s antipathy for her. But she looked utterly flummoxed.
“You don’t think it’s even remotely possible?” he asked.
She shook her head. “Of course not.”
“Are Carter Morgan and Vicki Trammell the only people who knew you’d be detouring to Maybridge?”
“I told Vicki what Carter asked me to do, and everybody else in the office was right there. Any one of them could have overheard. It’s a small office.”
Aaron released a long, slow breath. So much for trimming the suspect list. “How many people work in your office?”
“Eight. Carter, of course. His partner Charles Dailey. Dalton. Vicki. Kent Long, our go-to guy on bankruptcy law. Gregory Champion—Carter’s been looking at making him a partner, so he’s hardly in the frame of mind to off a junior associate,” she added with barely veiled sarcasm. “Alice Gaines, but she’s on vacation this week. And me.”
Aaron caught a hint of hesitation in her voice when she mentioned Alice Gaines. “Tell me about Alice.”
Melissa’s brow furrowed. “Why? I told you she was on vacation this week.”
“Is she another lawyer?”
“No, she’s a paralegal like Vicki, only Vicki works mainly with Carter and Charles. Alice helps the rest of us more.”
There was still a hint of uncertainty in her voice when she spoke about Alice. Aaron made a mental note to ask more questions about the vacationing paralegal.
“Nobody at my office would kill me. Nobody at my office has any reason to try to kill me,” Melissa insisted. “Yes, Dalton Brant can be a jerk, but he’s also a very smart guy. He knows he might be a suspect. He’s not stupid enough to risk his freedom over a promotion.”
“Probably not,” Aaron agreed. And if the timing of this latest ambush wasn’t so intriguing, her coworkers would probably be well down the list of possible suspects. But how else could someone have known that Melissa would be driving down Ridge Road at this particular time?
Melissa’s voice grew more plaintive. “Please promise me you’re not going to harass my coworkers about this. I don’t want them to know this is happening to me.”
He cocked his head to one side, looking at her through slightly narrowed eyes. She seemed genuinely mortified by the thought. “Why not? They might want to help you.”
She didn’t answer, though a faint flush rose in her cheeks. An almost pained look flashed across her face before she tamped it down and looked away.
He decided not to push her. Maybe if he backed off the intensity, she might relax and open up a bit more. He searched his mind for a safer topic, one that might allow her to let down her guard. “How did you get into the pro bono stuff you do?”
Apparently he’d chosen the exact wrong topic. Her spine stiffened, and she kept her expression carefully neutral when she answered. “I volunteered with a domestic abuse hotline for a while during my last year of law school. It affected me a lot. So when I got the chance to help women abused by people they loved, I knew I had to do it.”
“A lot of people wouldn’t have wanted to get involved.” Aaron was impressed by her courage. Domestic violence situations were messy and dangerous. “Can’t be an easy job.”
“What about your job?” She sounded eager to change the subject. “Being a deputy can’t be easy, either. What made you decide to choose that line of work?”
“Your dad, believe it or not.” He grinned. “Remember when Seth Becker and I rolled Cliff Mulligan’s yard after the state championship my senior year?” The sheer volume of toilet paper streams they’d left in the Mulligans’ front yard had been the stuff of legends. Aaron had used three weeks worth of savings from his grocery sacking job to pay for the toilet paper.
He looked at her expectantly, hoping his foray into their shared past combined with the mention of her father might at least make her smile. But if anything, her expression shuttered further. “No, I don’t remember that.”
He looked surprised. “Really? Thirty rolls of toilet paper hanging from the Mulligans’ big old oak tree?”
She shook her head.
“Come on! It was all over school the next Monday, because your dad hauled us in and talked our parents into letting us stay overnight at the county lockup to teach us a lesson.”
Her brow furrowed prettily as if she were genuinely trying to remember. Finally, a glimmer of recognition shone in her blue eyes. “Oh. That was in December, right? My mom had an accident around that time, and my dad arranged for me to be out of school for a couple of weeks to take care of her.”
“Oh.” Now that he thought of it, part of Deputy Draper’s harangue against him and Seth that night had included his irritation at being dragged away from his injured wife to deal with a couple of idiot hooligans. Or something like that. “I’m sorry. I hope she was okay.”
“Just broke her arm, but she couldn’t do a lot of stuff for herself for a while.” Looking away from him, Melissa cleared her throat. “How did a night in jail make you want to be a cop? I mean, you went to college on a football scholarship, and all I ever heard about you was how you were going to be the top NFL draft pick. Wasn’t that your real dream?”
Aaron’s mood darkened immediately. It had been almost seven years since a late hit had torn his anterior cruciate ligament and ended his dream of being an NFL star, but the memory of what fate had torn from him still had the power to wound. “It didn’t make me want to be a cop right away,” he answered, forcing his mind away from a future he’d never have. “I spent most of my college years with stars in my eyes and a lot of voices in my ears telling me I was going to be a millionaire pro player.”
“But that didn’t work out.” Melissa looked up at him, her expression sympathetic.
“No, it didn’t.” He sighed. “So when I had to think of something else to do with my life, I remembered how your dad’s tough love act made me take a long, hard look at how I was behaving back then. I wanted to be different. Your dad helped me grow up a lot that night.”
“Tough love,” Melissa echoed softly, turning her gaze away from Aaron and staring down the road ahead.
He followed her gaze and saw Gossamer Lake glimmering like a sapphire in the midday sun. A surge of emotion rippled through him, a sense of belonging.
Gossamer Lake was home.
If he’d lived the pro ball dream, how often would he have been able to come back home to Chickasaw County to visit? Once or twice a year? How much more isolated would he have become?
Here, at least, he had his family. God love them, they’d never turn their backs on him.
“Did you ever tell my father he changed your life?” Melissa’s voice sounded strange. Constrained.
“He’d already retired by the time I graduated from college and came back here. I guess maybe he’d had enough of dealing with self-absorbed little jerks like me.”
She finally turned and looked at him again. “Do you like being a deputy? Even if it’s not your first dream?”
“Yeah, I do,” he admitted with a smile, meaning it.
Her smile in response looked strained. “Even if it means putting up with self-absorbed little jerks like you once were?”
He chuckled. “Even that. I don’t do as much of that now that I’m an investigator, though.” He rubbed his hands together, blowing on them. The cold outside had begun to overwhelm the lingering heat in the cab’s interior. “It’s cold out here. Maybe I should take you back to the house. If I know my mom, she’s probably got a big crock pot of chili cooking for lunch. Maybe we could mooch a little from her.”
She blinked, and he thought for a moment he saw moisture clinging to her eyelashes. But when she looked at him again, she was clear-eyed. “I don’t want to impose on your mom.”
“I’m not sure. I thought I heard something each time, like a cracking sound. But it wasn’t what I thought a gunshot would sound like.”
Aaron smiled slightly. “Have you ever heard a gunshot? Not counting television.”
“No,” Melissa admitted.
Cooper Cove Marina came into sight around one final turn. Aaron pulled into the small parking lot in front of the bait shop, spotting his father and his brother J.D. examining Melissa’s little white Volkswagen. They looked up when he and Riley stepped out of the truck.
“I’m thinking a .22 rifle,” J.D. pronounced as Aaron joined him next to the shredded left back tire. “It had to have come from some distance or she’d have seen whoever had been shooting.”
“Unless he was camouflaged,” Riley pointed out.
Aaron frowned. “This is crazy. Why would a woman like Melissa Draper be on somebody’s hit list? She’s nobody.”
J.D. cleared his throat, his gaze shifting to a point behind Aaron. Aaron turned around to find Melissa standing a couple of feet away, her arms hugging herself as if she were cold. Her pale blue eyes met Aaron’s in an unwavering gaze, though he thought he saw a hint of hurt behind her half smile.
“You’re right. I’m not the sort of person people want to kill,” she said aloud. “But here we are anyway.”
He crossed to her, lifting his hand to squeeze her arm but pausing when he remembered how she’d reacted to his unwanted touches the day before. He dropped his hand to his side. “Are you okay?”
Her gaze dropped with his hand. “Just freaked-out more than anything.”
“Let’s get you inside.” The place was surrounded by woods on three sides, with the open lake in front of them. If someone wanted Melissa dead, it wouldn’t be hard to take another potshot at her standing out here in the open.
In the bait shop, his mother was waiting on a fishing customer. Aaron eyed the man as he gathered up his purchases and headed outside.
“Do you know that guy?” he asked his mother.
“Ray Pelham. Comes by for night crawlers every couple of days,” Beth answered.
“Navy Lieutenant J. G. Pelham, retired. Good guy.” J.D. clapped Aaron’s back. “Not everybody’s the enemy, Aaron.”
Aaron turned to Riley. “Handle the evidence retrieval from the vehicle. We’re also going to need to take a look at the woods near where the shooting occurred, see if the bastard left any shell casings around.”
Riley nodded and headed back outside.
Aaron turned back to Melissa, lowering his voice. “You’ve clearly made an enemy. A determined one, from the looks of it. You don’t need to wander around Chickasaw County alone while this creep’s still at large.”
She gave him a worried look. “What are you saying?”
“I’ve got vacation time accrued. Maybe it’s a good time to take it. Because you need around-the-clock protection.”
Chapter Seven
Melissa shivered inside the cab of Aaron’s truck, staring out at the woods where Riley Patterson and four other deputies were searching for signs of expended rifle cartridges. Aaron remained in the driver’s seat next to her, listening in to the chatter on the other deputies’ radios.
Still trying to play bodyguard, she thought.
“Wouldn’t you rather be out there helping with the search?”
He shook his head. “I’m fine right here.”
“We don’t even know this was an actual attempt on my life,” she protested. “This is still hunting season, right?”
“Yeah. Deer season’s over at the end of January.”
“So there are bound to be hunters around here, right?”
“It wasn’t a hunter who shot at you, Melissa.”
“You can’t know that.”
“If it had just been the tire, sure. Maybe it could be a hunter. But the guy shot at you a good hundred yards past that first shot. That’s intentional.”
She dropped her gaze. “I don’t know how this is happening. Terry Harris is in jail, and I don’t really know who else—”
“Don’t you have other domestic abuse clients?”
“A few. None of their abusers are as volatile as Terry, and none has threatened me in particular.”
“I still need the list of names, so I can look into their whereabouts this morning and the night of the fire.”
She met his gaze firmly.
“No.”
“No?”
“Attorney-client privilege.”
“Then ask their permission.”
“No. My clients have been through hell, and most of them are finally getting their lives back to some semblance of peace and order. I am not going to involve them in a police investigation that drags their abusers back into their lives.”
Aaron growled with frustration. “What am I supposed to do, then? How am I supposed to protect you if I have no idea who’s trying to hurt you?”
“I can check into their whereabouts on my own,” she suggested. “I have contact with some of their probation officers. I know some of their families. I can make some inquiries about their recent activities.”
“And if you find a suspect? Aren’t you still bound by your confidentiality rules?” Aaron asked.
“Look, how about this—if any of the men in question seem viable as suspects, I’ll ask their victims for permission to share the information with you.”
He didn’t look happy with her proposed solution, but he didn’t argue the point. “Is there anybody else?” he asked. “Besides disgruntled wife beaters? Any contentious cases you’ve handled through your law firm?”
“Contract law doesn’t usually inspire murderous passions.”
“What about personally? Are you seeing anyone? Maybe just broke up with someone?”
“No. I haven’t been seeing anyone for a while.” Not since Evan Hallman.
He gave her a skeptical look. “How long is a while?”
She wasn’t about to admit it had been four years. He probably found her pathetic enough as it was. “It’s not an ex-boyfriend. Trust me.” Certainly not Evan, who was still locked up in a North Carolina prison.
“How about the people you work with? Do any of them know where you’re staying since the fire?”
“I guess they all do, since I told Carter where he could reach me right in front of them all.” She sighed. “But it can’t be anyone at the office, Aaron. I’m not into workplace drama. I don’t backstab. I don’t sleep my way around the place. I don’t have a cushy corner office someone covets—” She stopped short, because that wasn’t entirely true. Not the corner office part, but there was someone at work who was a little jealous of her, wasn’t there?
Dalton Brant wasn’t her biggest fan.
But the idea of Dalton picking up a cap gun, much less a hunting rifle, was so ludicrous she almost laughed aloud. “There’s a guy at the office who thinks I leapfrogged over him for my last promotion, but honestly, it wasn’t enough of a promotion to inspire murder. He just takes joy in snarking at me at the office.”
“You’d be surprised how little it takes to enrage some people,” Aaron said.
She gave him a pointed look. “I defend abused spouses. There’s little that surprises me anymore.”
“Tell me about this guy. What’s his name?”
“I’m not going to narc on someone I work with.”
“It’s not narcing, Melissa. Someone has tried to kill you. Twice. I’m trying to make sure there’s not a third attempt, but you’re making it hard for me to do my job.”
“I don’t mean to.”
His brow furrowed. “I’m beginning to wonder if that’s true. You aren’t exactly a charter member of the Aaron Cooper fan club, are you?”
On the contrary, she thought. I probably started the damned thing. “Whatever you think I think of you, I’m certainly not trying to thwart your investigation.”
“Then tell me the name of the man at work.”
She sighed, knowing he had to at least look into any possible lead. “Dalton Brant. But he’s not the guy, Aaron.”
“We’ll see.”
She grabbed his arm. He looked down at her hand, then slowly back up at her. The temperature in the truck cab rose at least ten degrees, sending heat flushing into her cheeks. She withdrew her hand, but the feel of his rough denim jacket lingered on her fingertips, shooting a tingle up her arm.
She cleared her throat. “Don’t harass Dalton, okay? Can’t you just ask around without confronting him directly?”
“Are you afraid of him?”
She stared at him, appalled. “No, of course not.”
“Then why do you care if I ask him a few questions?”
She looked down at her hands. “I don’t want to create a big stir at work, okay? I like my job.”
“You think your boss would fire you just because you’re a victim of a murder attempt?”
“I’m not a victim,” she said bluntly. She’d spent the last four years making sure she never would be again.
“Okay.” He fell silent. The truck cab seemed impossibly small all of a sudden.
The crackle of the police radio made her jump. She smiled self-consciously while Aaron listened to the dispatch call for a patrol car to respond to a traffic accident on the other side of the county. “I feel like I’m keeping you from your job,” she said when he turned to look at her.
“This is my job.” He tapped his thumbs on the steering wheel, his brow creased in thought. “You said your whole office heard you tell your boss where you were staying, right?”
“Right.”
“Did you come straight here from the office?”
“No, Carter asked me to drop off some papers to another law firm over in Maybridge.”
“Maybridge? That’s at least twenty miles out of the way.”
“Still sort of on the way here,” she said, not sure she was following his line of thought. “I didn’t mind.”
“Who knew you were going to Maybridge before coming here?”
“Well, Carter, of course. And Vicki Trammell—she was supposed to take the papers, but since I was heading this way Carter asked me to take them instead and save her the trip.”
Suddenly, she understood his questions.
She stared at him in horror. “You think someone from my office shot at me.”
AARON GAUGED her reaction, wondering if she’d been soft selling Dalton Brant’s antipathy for her. But she looked utterly flummoxed.
“You don’t think it’s even remotely possible?” he asked.
She shook her head. “Of course not.”
“Are Carter Morgan and Vicki Trammell the only people who knew you’d be detouring to Maybridge?”
“I told Vicki what Carter asked me to do, and everybody else in the office was right there. Any one of them could have overheard. It’s a small office.”
Aaron released a long, slow breath. So much for trimming the suspect list. “How many people work in your office?”
“Eight. Carter, of course. His partner Charles Dailey. Dalton. Vicki. Kent Long, our go-to guy on bankruptcy law. Gregory Champion—Carter’s been looking at making him a partner, so he’s hardly in the frame of mind to off a junior associate,” she added with barely veiled sarcasm. “Alice Gaines, but she’s on vacation this week. And me.”
Aaron caught a hint of hesitation in her voice when she mentioned Alice Gaines. “Tell me about Alice.”
Melissa’s brow furrowed. “Why? I told you she was on vacation this week.”
“Is she another lawyer?”
“No, she’s a paralegal like Vicki, only Vicki works mainly with Carter and Charles. Alice helps the rest of us more.”
There was still a hint of uncertainty in her voice when she spoke about Alice. Aaron made a mental note to ask more questions about the vacationing paralegal.
“Nobody at my office would kill me. Nobody at my office has any reason to try to kill me,” Melissa insisted. “Yes, Dalton Brant can be a jerk, but he’s also a very smart guy. He knows he might be a suspect. He’s not stupid enough to risk his freedom over a promotion.”
“Probably not,” Aaron agreed. And if the timing of this latest ambush wasn’t so intriguing, her coworkers would probably be well down the list of possible suspects. But how else could someone have known that Melissa would be driving down Ridge Road at this particular time?
Melissa’s voice grew more plaintive. “Please promise me you’re not going to harass my coworkers about this. I don’t want them to know this is happening to me.”
He cocked his head to one side, looking at her through slightly narrowed eyes. She seemed genuinely mortified by the thought. “Why not? They might want to help you.”
She didn’t answer, though a faint flush rose in her cheeks. An almost pained look flashed across her face before she tamped it down and looked away.
He decided not to push her. Maybe if he backed off the intensity, she might relax and open up a bit more. He searched his mind for a safer topic, one that might allow her to let down her guard. “How did you get into the pro bono stuff you do?”
Apparently he’d chosen the exact wrong topic. Her spine stiffened, and she kept her expression carefully neutral when she answered. “I volunteered with a domestic abuse hotline for a while during my last year of law school. It affected me a lot. So when I got the chance to help women abused by people they loved, I knew I had to do it.”
“A lot of people wouldn’t have wanted to get involved.” Aaron was impressed by her courage. Domestic violence situations were messy and dangerous. “Can’t be an easy job.”
“What about your job?” She sounded eager to change the subject. “Being a deputy can’t be easy, either. What made you decide to choose that line of work?”
“Your dad, believe it or not.” He grinned. “Remember when Seth Becker and I rolled Cliff Mulligan’s yard after the state championship my senior year?” The sheer volume of toilet paper streams they’d left in the Mulligans’ front yard had been the stuff of legends. Aaron had used three weeks worth of savings from his grocery sacking job to pay for the toilet paper.
He looked at her expectantly, hoping his foray into their shared past combined with the mention of her father might at least make her smile. But if anything, her expression shuttered further. “No, I don’t remember that.”
He looked surprised. “Really? Thirty rolls of toilet paper hanging from the Mulligans’ big old oak tree?”
She shook her head.
“Come on! It was all over school the next Monday, because your dad hauled us in and talked our parents into letting us stay overnight at the county lockup to teach us a lesson.”
Her brow furrowed prettily as if she were genuinely trying to remember. Finally, a glimmer of recognition shone in her blue eyes. “Oh. That was in December, right? My mom had an accident around that time, and my dad arranged for me to be out of school for a couple of weeks to take care of her.”
“Oh.” Now that he thought of it, part of Deputy Draper’s harangue against him and Seth that night had included his irritation at being dragged away from his injured wife to deal with a couple of idiot hooligans. Or something like that. “I’m sorry. I hope she was okay.”
“Just broke her arm, but she couldn’t do a lot of stuff for herself for a while.” Looking away from him, Melissa cleared her throat. “How did a night in jail make you want to be a cop? I mean, you went to college on a football scholarship, and all I ever heard about you was how you were going to be the top NFL draft pick. Wasn’t that your real dream?”
Aaron’s mood darkened immediately. It had been almost seven years since a late hit had torn his anterior cruciate ligament and ended his dream of being an NFL star, but the memory of what fate had torn from him still had the power to wound. “It didn’t make me want to be a cop right away,” he answered, forcing his mind away from a future he’d never have. “I spent most of my college years with stars in my eyes and a lot of voices in my ears telling me I was going to be a millionaire pro player.”
“But that didn’t work out.” Melissa looked up at him, her expression sympathetic.
“No, it didn’t.” He sighed. “So when I had to think of something else to do with my life, I remembered how your dad’s tough love act made me take a long, hard look at how I was behaving back then. I wanted to be different. Your dad helped me grow up a lot that night.”
“Tough love,” Melissa echoed softly, turning her gaze away from Aaron and staring down the road ahead.
He followed her gaze and saw Gossamer Lake glimmering like a sapphire in the midday sun. A surge of emotion rippled through him, a sense of belonging.
Gossamer Lake was home.
If he’d lived the pro ball dream, how often would he have been able to come back home to Chickasaw County to visit? Once or twice a year? How much more isolated would he have become?
Here, at least, he had his family. God love them, they’d never turn their backs on him.
“Did you ever tell my father he changed your life?” Melissa’s voice sounded strange. Constrained.
“He’d already retired by the time I graduated from college and came back here. I guess maybe he’d had enough of dealing with self-absorbed little jerks like me.”
She finally turned and looked at him again. “Do you like being a deputy? Even if it’s not your first dream?”
“Yeah, I do,” he admitted with a smile, meaning it.
Her smile in response looked strained. “Even if it means putting up with self-absorbed little jerks like you once were?”
He chuckled. “Even that. I don’t do as much of that now that I’m an investigator, though.” He rubbed his hands together, blowing on them. The cold outside had begun to overwhelm the lingering heat in the cab’s interior. “It’s cold out here. Maybe I should take you back to the house. If I know my mom, she’s probably got a big crock pot of chili cooking for lunch. Maybe we could mooch a little from her.”
She blinked, and he thought for a moment he saw moisture clinging to her eyelashes. But when she looked at him again, she was clear-eyed. “I don’t want to impose on your mom.”
