to see if Alyssa had forgiven him yet. In his peripheral vision, he caught the blonde’s son pressing a quick finger to his lips as if sharing a secret with Alyssa. The boy quickly dropped his hand and moved away. Alyssa frowned at her purse.
“Sorry again about the soda.” The blonde was back, her tone brisk, as if she wanted to put their encounter behind her. “And good luck with the parenting.”
Cole hated to let her go. He wanted to know who she was and why she was here. Was she visiting someone in Cupid’s Bow or simply passing through on her way elsewhere? Maybe he would have asked if she hadn’t seemed so anxious to go. Or if he weren’t busy puzzling over Alyssa’s strange expression.
“Good luck to you, too,” he said.
With a nod, the blonde walked away, holding the door open for her son.
“Can we go now?” Mandy rejoined them, bouncing on the balls of her feet. “I’m starving!”
“Same here.” He ruffled her hair, but kept his gaze on his other daughter. “What about you, Alyssa?”
She jerked her gaze up from her purse, a flush staining her cheeks. Even someone without Cole’s training in suspicious behavior would have spotted the guilt in her eyes.
“What have you got in your purse?” he asked.
“N-nothing.” She clutched the small sequined bag to her body.
He held out his hand, making it clear he wanted to see for himself.
Tears welled in her eyes as she pulled a candy bar from her purse. “B-but I didn’t take it! That boy gave me it.”
Cole’s blood pressure skyrocketed. Alyssa was, by nature, a sweet, quiet girl, but throughout her kindergarten year—after every field trip or class party where other students had mothers present—she’d grown increasingly unpredictable. The teacher who had once praised his daughter’s reading skill and eager-to-please disposition had started calling Cole about behavior problems, including a memorable graffiti incident. Now some punk was trying to turn Alyssa into a shoplifter, too? Hell, no.
* * *
“HEY!”
Kate jumped at the angry boom, nearly dropping her car keys. She turned to see Cole Trent, the single dad who’d melted her insides with his smile. He wasn’t smiling now.
He strode across the parking lot like a man on a mission. One of his daughters was sobbing. The other looked grimly fascinated, as if she’d never expected a simple pit stop to be so eventful.
“Aw, crap.” Luke’s barely audible words—and the resignation in them—caused Kate’s heart to sink.
Not again. Not here! In her mind, she’d built up Cupid’s Bow as a safe haven. But how could you escape trouble when it was riding shotgun?
“What did you do?” she demanded in a low voice.
He slouched, not meeting her eyes. “It was only an eighty-nine cent candy bar. Jeez.”
Cole reached them in time to hear her son’s careless dismissal, his blue eyes bright with righteous fury. “It’s more than a candy bar, young man. It’s stealing.”
Kate’s stomach churned. “You stole?”
Cole’s gaze momentarily softened as he glanced at her, registering her stress. When he spoke again, his tone was calmer. “Perhaps I should reintroduce myself. I’m Sheriff Cole Trent. What’s your name, son?”
“Luke,” he muttered.
“And did you put that candy bar in Alyssa’s purse?” the sheriff asked in an unyielding, don’t-even-think-about-lying tone.
The boy hunched his shoulders. “I felt bad for her.”
Was that even true, Kate wondered, or had her son simply seized an opportunity for petty defiance?
Cole gave his sniffling daughter a stern look. “Luke may have been the one to take the candy bar, but you should have put it back. Or told me what happened. Other people’s bad behavior is no excuse for acting badly yourself.”
Terrific. Now her son was a cautionary tale for younger children.
“The two of you are going back inside to admit what you did and apologize to Mr. Jacobs,” Cole said.
His daughter gulped. The man behind the counter had smiled pleasantly at Kate, but she could see where his towering height, all black clothing and tattooed arms might intimidate a little girl.
“While you’re there,” Kate told Luke, “ask what you can do to make up for it.” He was too young for an official part-time job, but it was clear Kate needed to find ways to keep him busy and out of trouble. “Maybe they could use a volunteer to come by a few times a week and pick up litter in the parking lot.”
Cole’s gaze swung to her. “A few times a week? So you aren’t just passing through or visiting? You’re sticking around?”
Was that surprise she heard in his voice, or dread? Given his duty to maintain law and order in the county, he probably didn’t relish the idea of a juvenile delinquent moving to town. And Gram deserved better than a great-grandson who caused her problems in the community. Was this experiment doomed to fail?
“We’re staying with family in the area. Indefinitely.” She forced a smile and tried to sound reassuring. “But I plan to stay out of public until I learn how to properly carry sodas, and Luke may be grounded for the rest of the summer. So you don’t have to worry about us menacing the populace, I promise.”
The size of Cupid’s Bow might make it difficult to avoid someone, but she was willing to try. Between the terrible impression her son had made and Kate’s aversion to being around cops since Damon’s death, she rather desperately hoped never to see Sheriff Trent again.
After Luke and his unwitting accomplice apologized to the gruff but fair Mr. Jacobs, Kate and her son resumed their journey. He had the good sense not to resume his complaining.
It wasn’t until they were jostling along the private dirt road that led up to Gram’s house that Luke spoke again. “Are you going to tell her about the gas station? And the sheriff?”
She sighed. “Well, it wasn’t going to be my opening. I thought we’d say hi first and thank her profusely for taking us under her roof before we hit her with news of your exciting new criminal activities.”
“I apologized,” Luke grumbled. “I even paid the guy, although no one ended up with the candy bar.”
“‘The guy’ is Mr. Jacobs, and you’re going to treat him with respect when you see him next weekend.” It turned out that the inked man with the gravelly voice visited the pediatric ward of the hospital once a month and gave a magic show. Luke’s penance was that he would sacrifice a Saturday morning to work as the man’s assistant. “And paying for what you took after the fact doesn’t justify what you did. You know better than to steal! Your own father was a policeman, who—”
“My father is gone,” he said flatly.
She parked the car, and turned to look at her son. “I miss him, too. And I get angry—at him, at the man who shot him, at the unfairness of life. But lashing out and doing dumb things won’t bring your dad back. It only drives a wedge between you and me. I’m still here for you, kiddo. Try to remember that?”
Without responding, he climbed out of the car.
She blinked against the sting of tears, preferring to meet her grandmother with a smile. Joan Denby had lost her husband even more recently than Kate. The two women were supposed to bolster each other, not drag each other further down.
Either Gram had been watching for them, or Patch, the eight-year-old German shepherd,