game, remember?”
After this afternoon, she was looking forward to a little peace and quiet. But would it really be almost a whole week before she’d get to see them again?
“I’ll see you next Tuesday, but I don’t know about Saturday, yet.” Unfortunately, her last sentence wasn’t even heard by the two boys who were now running toward their teammates.
“So, do I really have to pay for a new chip display at the Gas N’ Mart?” Luke asked.
Uh-oh. He was still there. And her little towheaded buffers had made a beeline for the field. She shifted her hips to the right, but because of her holster knocking into the seat belt buckle, she couldn’t scoot any farther away from him.
“It really didn’t look too busted to me,” she said, thankful she was wearing her mirrored aviator sunglasses. Hopefully Luke couldn’t tell that she was barely able to make eye contact with him. “I set it back up and the boys put all the bags that didn’t burst open back on the shelves. I was going to have them clean up the broken chips, but I think Elaine Marconi just wanted us to get out of there at that point. She was annoyed, but she has kids of her own so she didn’t seem too put out. I’ll have the chief let you know if she files a claim for damages.”
There. She’d directed any future conversation through her boss, who also happened to be Luke’s friend. While she loved spending time with his funny and impulsive children, being around the man himself caused the butterflies fluttering around in her stomach to migrate straight to her brain.
“Those boys are going to be the death of me,” he said, voicing aloud the exact thought she’d had forty minutes ago. His forearms now rested on her windowsill, as though he wasn’t planning to shove off anytime soon.
“Anyway, I’m sorry we’re late. It was my fault,” she said quickly, hoping he’d take the hint that she was in a hurry to finish the conversation.
“Don’t worry about it. Listen, I really appreciate you spending time with them after school. I’m sure you have much more important things to do around town than play big sister to a couple of little monkeys.” The way he smiled showed his dimples to advantage and indicated that he used the nickname for his kids out of affection.
But she wasn’t particularly fond of the way he classified her into his sons’ peer age range, as if she wasn’t just a few years younger than Luke, himself. At least he’d said sister, though, and not brother. That was something, right?
As much as she wanted to get far, far away from his sexy grin, politeness dictated she respond. “Actually,” she said, “you may find this hard to believe, but the Sugar Falls PD doesn’t see too much action on the weekdays. Foiling a nonrobbery at the Gas N’ Mart has been the most exciting thing to happen on one of my shifts since last January when those tourists didn’t check out of the Snow Creek Lodge by eleven o’clock.”
She clamped her lips tightly together after she spoke. Why did she do that? Why did she always downplay the importance of her job—the value of her abilities? Shrinks would probably say it was some type of residual defense mechanism from growing up in her oversize machismo family or trying not to stand out in a male-dominated profession.
“Still, I know they’re in good hands with you.” Did the man ever stop smiling? “Coop said you outwrestled half his force in defensive tactics training last week.”
“That’s not saying much considering we only have four other officers on staff.” There she went again. She should be proud that she was an expert in martial arts. But she didn’t want Luke to think of her as some juiced-up, studly gladiator. She wanted him to see her as...
Stop. It was this kind of foolish thinking that would seriously undermine all the work she’d put into getting her mind right and her head back in the game since she’d broken up with Mark and moved here. Man, she needed to get away from Luke and her AWOL thoughts.
Thinking quickly, she reached beneath the dashboard and double clicked on the mic of her bandwidth radio, causing the volunteer dispatcher to respond. Carmen clicked on the mic again, then leaned down toward the radio as though she was listening to something Luke couldn’t hear.
The resulting static probably wouldn’t fool a former SEAL, but she went through the pretense of answering a phony call out. “Ten-four. I’m en route.”
She looked back at him as she put the vehicle in gear. “Gotta run,” she said, barely waiting for him to move his arms off the window before tearing out of the dirt lot.
* * *
That was the worst fake radio call out Luke had ever seen. And he should know. He’d trained as a communications specialist before going through Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training.
He watched Officer Delgado drive off, gravel crunching and dust flying. Why had she been in such a hurry to get away from him? Was he giving off that lonely “I need to talk to someone who understands kids” vibe again? He rubbed his forehead, then dragged his fingers through his hair before shoving his hands in his jeans pockets.
His twin brother, Drew, said it was obvious whenever Luke was missing the guys from his unit—or worse, when he’d been in the cabin all weekend with his squirrelly sons and he needed adult conversation—because it was the only time Luke uttered more than a few sentences.
But moving to Sugar Falls to become a full-time dad, changing assignments from team leader of an elite Special Forces unit to pushing paper at the naval recruiting office outside of Boise...well, it was all proving to be more challenging than he’d anticipated.
Luke poked his athletic shoe at some tiny rocks that had been kicked up from Carmen’s patrol car as she’d blasted out of the lot. The action was instinctive, as though his feet needed the physical reminder that he was actually standing on solid ground.
He thought back to the night before Samantha’s accident several years ago. Luke had been in a training exercise where the team was being hoisted from the ocean and into a hovering Osprey helicopter. It was dark and the water was choppy, with waves crashing over his head. When it had been his turn, part of his safety harness ripped and he’d had to hold on to the cable with his bare hands to keep from dropping. He’d dangled like that, with the chopper blades stirring up more wind force than the actual storm, for at least a minute before being pulled up to safety.
Ever since his wife had died, he hadn’t been able to shake that feeling of being suspended in the air, swinging above a raging dark sea and holding on as if his life depended on it.
“Hey, Dad,” Aiden yelled from the outfield. “Are ya comin’ or what?”
He waved at the boy and started to jog toward the dugout. He needed a good run tonight. Something that would clear his thoughts or at least make his mind too tired to think.
“How’s Officer Delgado today?” Alex Russell, the team coach, asked Luke when he finally made it back to the dugout. He liked Alex, whose family owned the local sporting goods store, but he didn’t like the sly half smile the man was now wearing.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Even Luke heard the unfamiliar agitation in his voice.
“I’ve just noticed that she’s been dropping the boys off at practice a few weeks in a row.”
“Yeah, that mentorship program at the school finally found someone who was willing to take them on. Once a week, I have to stay at the recruiting office later and can’t pick the boys up, so I think Delgado must’ve taken pity on them—the people who work at the after-school program, that is.”
“Some kids have all the luck.”
His kids? Lucky? No way. They’d already lost their mom before they could really remember her and they’d been bounced around with various relatives while Luke had played Captain Save-the-World. Now it was taking a whole ski resort village to raise the lovable little hellions. “What do you mean?”
“Not only do they get to hang out with a cop, which would be any