Page 21 of Search for the Truth
Both states made her mentally scold herself.
“Follow me in yours, or else the whole town will be talking about us riding together,” she said, regaining her composure. “Meeting up is fine, showing up together will get everyone’s mouths flapping.”
He nodded again.
“After you,” he said, motioning out to the parking lot.
And that was that.
Blake had hooked the sheriff and would be repaying her debt to him. All while the kids were in daycare and Lola was out being social.
It felt good.
It felt—
“Miss Bennet?”
Blake’s body turned back on reflex.
“Yeah?”
The sheriff wasn’t smiling, but she heard something different in his tone when he spoke.
“Call me Liam.”
THEREWERETWOcars parked outside of the Twenty-Two Coffee Shop. Liam let Blake take the last open parking spot, and he slid his truck into the drug store’s lot across the street. By the time he was crossing over Main on foot, Blake was standing on the sidewalk and staring up at the café’s sign. Her hair was loose. It looked nice against the light-colored blouse she was wearing. Her expression, however, was flitting between a scowl and a smirk.
When she saw him, she nodded up to the sign.
“We might have all gotten older, but some things really haven’t changed a bit.”
Liam waited for an explanation. Blake didn’t give one.
“Make sure you order something frilly-sounding,” she followed up instead. “You don’t want to offend Corrie.”
“Why? She doesn’t own this place.”
Blake snorted.
“No, but Cassandra does, and if you make Corrie happy, Cassandra will follow. Same with the opposite end of the experience. Make one twin angry, you get the other one angry too.” That scowl-smirk combo smoothed into an easy-to-define feeling. She gave him a raised brow. “Don’t tell me you’ve been in Seven Roads for two years, and this is the first you’re hearing of the twins. The Daniels family is a part of town lore 101.”
Blake didn’t give him space to respond.
He was finding she was a point-A-to-point-B kind of woman. She didn’t stray from her target. At least, not long enough for him to get a few more words in.
Liam wasn’t sure if he disliked that quality though. The South had a habit of churning out people who spent more time talking about nothing than not. At least with Blake, she seemed to edit out the time-wasting part.
The little bell over the front door dinged as she led the way inside of the shop. Liam had been in the café several times but had never really lingered. It was a small space with only a handful of tables and chairs and a bar that took up more than half of the tight area. Having a quiet cup of coffee to himself had never been an option in the shop. Their to-go service had been his best plan.
Now he settled into a chair next to one of the larger plate glass windows that looked out at the sidewalk that wrapped around the edge of the corner lot. The old pocked road that led from Main to one of the older established neighborhoods was in desperate need of repair. According to Mayor Tufton, that was an almost impossible task given their current town funds.
Mayor Tufton and his little sports car never drove down Main unless it was campaign time.
The mayor had a habit of keeping his head down outside of town repair too. The moment he had heard that Liam was still looking into Missy’s death had been the moment he had decided to have a lot of opinions on why theyshouldn’thave a lot of opinions on the matter.
It was true that Liam had no solid evidence to suggest that anything had happened to Missy other than her jumping off the bridge, but it still made Liam angry now at how the mayor’s reasoning for stopping had been about “the optics.” The mayor didn’t want bad press.
Liam curled his fist against the knee of his jeans.
