AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Should be,” Brock said.
“But when the shoe fits,” Rex, brother number three, said with a yawn.
“You wear it proudly,” Chase, brother number two, finished.
Everyone chuckled.
Rayma’s eyes found Jordan’s bright green ones. “I’m ready when you are.”
He nodded and got up from where he’d been helping the oldest two of the kids—Zoe and Connor—do a puzzle. “I can go.”
They stood up, said their goodbyes, and thank-yous to Joy, Grant, and everyone else, then with fuzzy feet, a full belly, and an even fuller heart Rayma slid into the passenger seat of Jordan’s white Dodge Ram.
“You can fiddle with the seat warmers here if you want,” he said, turning over the ignition, then pulling out onto the quiet road covered in a thin layer of dusty snow.
Nodding, she turned up the seat warmers until her butt was just shy of being on fire.
“Are you at UVic?” Jordan asked, after a couple of minutes of them awkwardly driving in silence.
“Yeah, business and marketing major, second year.”
“That’s cool.”
“Yeah.”
More silence.
Ugh.
She hated awkward quiet which was probably why she’d been called a chatterbox more than once in her life. A filterless chatterbox no less. Which was why she found herself grasping for a topic of conversation.
“So how long have you been a cop?”
“A little under a year,” he said. “Finished at the academy in Regina, then did a posting up in Fort St. John for a year, and was transferred here at the end of January, to the WestShore precinct.”
“And how do you like Victoria?”
“Expensive,” he said with an uncomfortable chuckle. “But it’s beautiful.”
“Indeed, it is.”
“Are you from here?”
Rayma shook her head. “Baltimore, actually. Moved here to be closer to my sister.” That was at least what she told people when they asked why she moved clear across the continent, particularly since she’d finished her last year of high school in Victoria while living with Joy. She stayed because Pasha moved here, but she originally moved in with Joy because she was getting into too much trouble back home, and then when she went to visit Pasha in Seattle, got into the ultimate kind of trouble that nearly killed her.
Joy intervened because that was just the kind of woman she was, and helped Rayma get through some of her PTSD and set herself back on a better path.
Now, Victoria felt more like home than Baltimore ever did, and despite how fucking expensive it was, she couldn’t imagine living anywhere else.
“Where are you originally from?”
“Charlet Heights. It’s on the border of Quebec and Ontario. On the Quebec side though. A couple of hours outside of Montreal. Big ski hill, touristy, but otherwise small as fuck.”
Rayma snorted. That was the first bit of humor he’d used. First curse word, too. She didn’t detect any French accent, but he was probably just good at hiding it. She did that with her east coast accent. Once in a while—particularly when she was drunk—it slipped out a bit but usually people had no idea she wasn’t as west coast as they come.
“Did you like growing up in a small town?” Based on the way he saidsmall as fuck, she was going to guess that his answer was going to be a big, fatno. But sometimes people surprised you.
For a moment, just a moment his expression turned dark. Scary dark. Had she not been looking at him, she would have missed it. A thrill raced through her at the idea of getting to peel back a layer on this mystery goody-goody cop.
