Page 9 of Deputy Brand Gets Her Man
“Our biggest trip of the year. Three horse shows in the same weekend, and we’ll hit ‘em all,” she said. "We leave next week.” Then she lowered her head. “I should’ve waited until morning to show you this, though. Really didn’t mean to interrupt. Goodnight, sweetheart.” Then to Jeremiah, “Goodnight.”
Then she ducked right out the door, pulling it closed behind her. Willow watched her walk back along the flagstone path, into the driveway, and all the way beyond the reach of her porch light, out of sight.
Willow turned to face Jeremiah, met his eyes, and swore she could hear sizzling. “You need to be out the door in the next two minutes, or she’ll think we’re in here having sex.”
“What if we were?” he asked, and he held her eyes with his, not letting go.
“We’re not.” She reached past him without touching, despite the butterflies in her stomach and elsewhere, and opened the door.
“But what about all that kissing?—”
“Yeah, um, I’m not lookin’ for…I mean, I’m not fixin’ to get mixed up with a man right now.”
“No?”
“No,” she said. “I want to be sheriff one day, and that’s gonna take a lot of work, a lot of focus.”
“I get it.” He lowered his head. “Okay then, I apologize if I?—”
“Don’t apologize. I was as into it as you were.” Their eyes locked tighter. Sssssss. “But still…it was a momentary lapse. It’s just not the right time for me.”
“Right. I just…I really hate to leave.”
She really hated to let him, but she opened the door wider and stood there. He moved right up close, stood in front of her, and pushed it halfway closed again. Then he leaned in slow and she met him halfway. They kissed in slow motion, and a quicksand pit opened up in her middle.
After a long, long moment, he pulled away, opened the door wider again, and stepped through. “Night, Willow.”
“Night, Gringo.”
She closed the door, then moved to the window to watch as he walked back along the curving driveway to where it rejoined the main one, veering right, toward the road. She watched until his shape was swallowed up by the darkness. Then she locked up, turned off the lights, and went to the kitchen to wash Aunt Chelsea’s lasagna dish.
Willow was in the Quinn County Sheriff’s office at seven a.m. She’d dropped the flat tire off at the motor pool with a note to repair or replace. Until then, she was driving around on the spare. Her shift didn’t start until three, but she was on a mission, one in which she was completely immersed when Uncle Garrett came in bearing two things he was forbidden, donuts and coffee.
“Don’t give me that look, Will,” he said. “Mine’s decaf. And I’m only havin’ one donut. The suddenly crucial question is, which one?”
She didn’t bother to hide what was on her computer screen. She was running a background check on Jeremiah. He’d already seen it, and she wasn’t one to sneak around anyway.
“Jeremiah do something to make you think he’s worthy of investigation?”
“Yep.”
“You fixin’ to tell me what it was?”
“Nope.”
“Is this background check legal?”
“It’s…a gray area,” she said as if with great authority.
He reached past her and tapped the x to close out the program, but Willow had seen enough. Jeremiah Thorne had been a criminal every day up until the day he’d arrived in Quinn County.
“You find what you needed?” Garrett asked.
“I found some things. Don’t exactly know what I need. When his father came to Quinn way back then, Jeremiah was a toddler, livin’ with his mother. A year later, he was livin’ in his father’s mansion, even though the old man was in prison. Somehow he got custody.”
Garrett lowered his head, shaking it slow. “I didn’t know any of that. Who raised him, then? I didn’t think de Lorean had a wife or?—”
“I don’t know. The records don’t say.”
