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“Sheriff De Angelis. Nice to see you.”
“What are you doing here?”
Her question more of a demand laced with suspicion, Tess wondered if she should answer the other woman. Something told her that if she did, she wouldn’t be addressing the sheriff but Doctor De Angelis’s ex-wife instead.
That made her smile. “I thought I would take a walk, get some fresh air. The weather’s beautiful.” Her smile wavered. “Jack would’ve loved it. Autumn was his favorite time of year.”
“A walk? All the way to the mountain side of town? Convenient.”
“Not really. The doctor told me to stop by during office hours if I needed something to help me sleep. Maria brought me most of the way. I decided to walk the rest.”
Caitlin crossed her arms over her chest. She was still feeling burned by Lucas’s rejection and here was a perfect target for her pissed off mood. “What were you doing in the trees? I’d thought you’d know it wasn’t safe by now.”
“I couldn’t help myself, Sheriff. I thought I heard a cat when I was passing by. I couldn’t just keep walking. I had to see if I could find it.”
“Did you?”
Sullivan shook her head slowly. “There was nothing there.”
“‘Course not. We don’t have any strays in Hamlet, you understand. Just pets. You won’t find anything in the woods except for trouble.”
With a small nod and a tight smile, Tess conceded the point. Sheriff De Angelis’s subtle dig managed to go straight to the bone. Oh, yeah. She understood. If you were a part of Hamlet, you belonged. But they wouldn’t tolerate any outsiders who begged to survive.
Strays. Right.
“Now that I think of it,” De Angelis continued, “I have to ask: where’s your shadow?” At Tess’s blank look, she explained, “Mason.”
The other woman’s expression went from blank to completely closed off. “I’m not sure,” she hedged. “I thought he was on duty.”
“Didn’t stop him last night.”
Tess heard enough in the sheriff’s short answer to guess, “You heard what happened to me.”
De Angelis jerked her thumb over her shoulder, gesturing back at Lucas’s office. “From the doctor, actually. And you know what? That worries me, Mrs. Sullivan. Crime goes down in my town, I’ve got to know about it. I will know about it. But I should’ve heard about it from my deputy. Or the civilian claiming to be harassed.”
Sullivan’s brow wrinkled, thin lines marring her forehead. She pursed her lips, started to argue. “I never—”
Call it petty, call it vindictive, but it made Caitlin happy to see Tessa Sullivan as anything less than perfect. Even when she was sobbing, she somehow managed to look radiant. Here, now, looking embarrassed and confused and upset, Caitlin felt like she won something.
She held up her hand, cutting the other woman off. “Don’t. I’ve heard enough from Luc, and you can bet I'll be taking Mase to task for keeping this from me. You want to make a formal complaint, meet me at the station house.
“For now, I’ll tell you this just once, Mrs. Sullivan… consider it a fair warning: don’t make the mistake of thinking his loyalty is to anyone outside of town. No matter what, Hamlet always comes first.”
Tess didn’t know if the sheriff meant Mason or Lucas. Both, she decided. Caitlin De Angelis was just that proprietary.
She tilted back her head, jutting out her chin. If the sheriff saw it as a dare, so be it. “‘Hamlet helps’,” she said. “Am I right?”
Caitlin ran her gaze over Sullivan’s guileless face. She sniffed. “Yeah, well, I voted against that slogan.”
Without another word, she turned her back on Sullivan. She was halfway around the rear of her cruiser when she realized that she was on her way back to Lucas.
Freezing in place, Caitlin pulled the thick rope of her braid over her shoulder. If she went back inside, she’d have to hear it all over
again how she shouldn’t be jealous. That she no longer had the right.
Too bad she couldn’t turn her feelings off as easily as Lucas seemed to. To hear from Adrianna that Lucas was having brunch with an outsider had been a stab. Then to have him shrug off her attentions as easily as he had was an absolute insult.
It took every ounce of her considerable willpower to return to the driver’s side of the cruiser. From the weight of the Sullivan woman’s curious stare, she knew her every action was studied, dissected. That bothered her. And the fact that she cared what some outsider thought just made her more pissed off.
