She couldn’t be more than fifteen or sixteen. Full of bitterness and fury and helplessness. It was damn familiar. And thelastthing Lia wanted to do was involve cops when she could so easily see herself being this girl.
But there was the way she wanted things to be, and the way things were. The food was one thing, but she could hardly let this girl just disappear with the money.
Zach Simmons might be cool with a lot of things, but he wasn’t going to be down with that. Zach owned most of the buildings in Hope Town, funded pretty much all the businesses on start-up. Because he was the creator of the privatized WitSec in Hope Town, everything went through Zach.
Lia prided herself on turning a profit with her bakery. She prided herself on beingfoundationalto Hope Town—what it was, what it stood for, whether anyone outside its inner circle knew those things or not.
Even if the girl needed the money, and she didn’t strike Lia as someone who did based on what she was wearing, Lia couldn’t just let her walk. Not and explain to Zach why her books were so out of whack.
Mostly because he’d likelyunderstand, and worse, sympathize with her. Lia knew what had landed her in Hope Town. Knew her life was…well,sad. The few people who knew about all that sad were the few people she always wanted to prove to that she wasjust fineandquite healed, thank you.
“Put the money back on the counter,” Lia said, trying to find a balance between gentle and firm. “We’ll forget the food you took and the tray of cream puffs you ruined when you grabbed the food. No worries.”
The girl snarled. Not great. Not smart. “I know my rights,” the girl said.
Lia wanted to groan. There was no getting through to a person whoknew their rights, especially a teenager. Which meant she had to do the thing she didn’t want to do.
“Cops it is.”
At least she knew the Bent County deputy assigned to Hope Town. She could probably work Royal around to warning the girloff in a way that gave her a bit of ascareand forced her to return the money without totally being a jerk about it.
God, she hoped.
Chapter Two
Gard didn’t have anyone on field training right now, so he was enjoying being on the road by himself. He liked teaching and guiding the younger cops, but sometimes it was nice to exist in his own head. Like times when his sister had disappeared, and his niece was staying with him.
She’d assured him her friend, agirl, could drop her off at his house after school. Hadclaimedshe had a Model UN meeting so she wouldn’t be home much earlier than him—which he wasn’t sure he was buying, but he didn’t want to call her a liar. He could hardlystalkher. She was fifteen. She neededsomeautonomy.
And still her safety was the biggest thing. He didn’t think she’d want to get involved with drugs after watching her mom struggle her whole life, but he knew young brains didn’t always work in reasonable patterns.
He needed to find a babysitter. Someone Sammy liked and wouldn’t think ofasa babysitter. He didn’t know how the hell he was going to accomplish that, but he needed to figure it out and fast. He had enough seniority to not work nights, and always had some days off built up, but he wouldn’t be able to get out of every weekend and mandatory overtime was always a possibility.
Today, luckily, he was on Hope Town duty which was a normal schedule. It’d get him off work and hopefully home around the same time as Sammy. The Hope Town duty required an afternoon walk up and down Main Street, just to show a police presence. There were plenty of shops, a smattering of tourists since it was a nice afternoon, and no trouble.
The assignment was usually boring and, again, that wasn’t always a bad thing. Mostly, not much happened in Hope Town. There’d been a kidnapping a few months ago, but it had been taken care of.
Of course, after that dustup, Gard wasn’t particularly sure everything that was going on in this town was on the up-and-up, but he didn’t think it was necessarily…criminal. Exactly. Something about that kidnapping, about former FBI Agent Zach Simmons’s involvement, and the way only women owned businesses in this place struck Gard as…odd.
Still, it was nice to get out of his cruiser, stretch his legs, and walk on a pretty afternoon. Smile at passersby. Hand out stickers to kids who seemed interested. All the while internally going through the list of people he knew who might have the time and inclination to keep their eye on a fifteen-year-old after school and on weekends when he had to work.
When the dispatcher called him on the radio, Gard was surprised to hear that there was a call at the Hope Town Bakery for him to respond to. A stealing in progress.
Surprising. But he was close, so he jogged down the street the rest of the way to the bakery. When he opened the door and stepped inside the sugary-smelling café, Lia Blair stood in the middle of the tables and chairs, arms crossed, mouth arranged in a scowl.
She was dressed as she usually was. Jeans. A Hope Town Bakery T-shirt. Her dark hair pulled and pinned back behind a headband, no doubt in a nod to keep hair out of her baked goods. Her hazel eyes edged more green and flashed with annoyance.
The scowl did not change when she turned her gaze to him. If anything, it deepened. “I was hoping it would be Royal.”
Gard didn’t bristle, though it was a hard-won thing. Lia Blair had made her distaste from him known from their very firstmeeting—back when her bakery manager had been kidnapped and he’d had to question her.
He’d never knownwhyshe disliked him, but she’d made it clear. And continued to do so, any time they ran into each other—and since the Royal in question was one of his deputies and dating the woman who lived above the bakery, who just so happened to be friends with Lia, they did run into each other socially—not just in a cop-to-witness-questioning manner.
He’d tried to charm her. And then he’d used that charm to irritate her, because usually that kind of hostility rolled right off his shoulders. Lots of people didn’t like cops or were weird about his profession, and that wasn’t a reflection of him, so who cared?
Today, he was irritable, and he knew it was because he’d been up half the night trying to figure out where Dani would have gone. Usually she left clues. Usually, she at the very least texted him an apology. The fact she wasn’t following the pattern left a hard ball of worry centered in his chest.
Worse, heknewbetter. Dani made her own choices, and yes, they were choices built on a foundation of trauma and substance abuse, but they were hers, and he needed to stop trying to absolve her of the consequences. If she’d bolted without a word, it wasn’t out of the ordinary, it wasn’t something he couldsolve. It was just her current choice.
