The Sheriff's Second Chance. Michelle Celmer

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      Chapter Two

      When he’d left the diner that morning, Nate had vowed to avoid Caitie whenever humanly possible. But when the call came in about the car stalled in the intersection, he’d had no idea it would be her.

      He would have driven past and kept going, but this was a matter of public safety, and as an officer of the law he had an obligation to stop and assist her. Though how she had managed to get her car from the intersection to the ditch was a mystery.

      He radioed for a tow, then got out and crossed the road to Caitie’s car. It sat nose down in a tangle of weeds and grass in the ditch. Caitie, looking alarmingly disheveled with her sweat-soaked hair and clothes and bleeding knees, limped over and joined him.

      Suddenly his bad day didn’t seem so horrible after all.

      Shoulders slumped, looking tired and defeated, Caitie stopped beside him, gazing down into the ditch at what was left of her car. From what he could see, the front end was in pretty bad shape but probably fixable. Although, considering the age of the car, it hardly seemed worth it. Honestly, it was a miracle it still ran at all.

      “You look like hell,” he told her.

      Without taking her eyes off the car, she said, “Thanks for noticing.”

      “Are you okay?”

      “Define ‘okay.’”

      “Are you in need of medical assistance?”

      She shook her head. “I’ll live.”

      “So, you want to tell me what happened?”

      She shook her head again and said, “No. Not really.”

      “I need to fill out an accident report.”

      Her attention shot to him. “It wasn’t an accident.”

      “You put your car in a ditch on purpose?”

      She rolled her eyes in exasperation. “Of course not! It died, and I was...pushing it out of the road.”

      The mental picture almost made him smile. “Got away from you, did it?”

      Her deadpan look was the only answer he required.

      As much as he wanted to believe she deserved it, wanted to feel vindicated, she looked so damned defeated he couldn’t manage anything but pity. He’d been so busy not looking at her in the diner, he hadn’t noticed the dark circles under her eyes, or that she was thinner than he’d even seen her. Her wrists looked bony and her collarbones jutted out.

      But whatever she’d suffered, or was still suffering, she’d brought it on herself. That was what he wanted to believe, anyway.

      Caitie stepped forward to climb down the embankment, and without thinking he grabbed her upper arm to stop her. The instant his fingers touched her bare skin, he was hit by a zap of awareness so intense it nearly knocked him into the road.

      Where in the hell had that come from?

      Considering the way Caitie blinked in surprise and jerked her arm free, she must have felt it, too. “At ease, Officer.”

      “You can’t go down there,” he said.

      “I have to get my things.”

      “It may not be safe. You should wait until the tow truck gets here.”

      “I haven’t called one.”

      “I did. It shouldn’t be more than an hour.”

      “I don’t have an hour. I have to get back to work. And there are papers in there from the diner that my mom needs now. And I need my purse.”

      “Where is it?”

      “Everything was on the front passenger seat.”

      With a sigh of resignation he told her, “Stay here.”

      Hands propped on her hips, she scowled. “I didn’t ask for your help.”

      Like it or not, she was getting it. If she went down there and wound up hurting herself, it would be his ass on the line. He picked his way down the slope into the ditch on the passenger’s side of the car, weeds twisting around his legs and clinging to his uniform pants like tentacles. Thankfully there had been no rain for a while, or he would be trudging through mud and muck.

      He gave the car a firm shove, to make sure it was stable, and it didn’t budge. From this angle he could see that the hood was wedged under a large boulder at the edge of the field. This car had definitely seen its last days on the road.

      “How bad is it?” she called down to him.

      “Looks fatal,” he answered, and he heard her mutter something under her breath. “Sorry, I missed that.”

      “I said, what next? Which in retrospect was probably a stupid idea. Why tempt fate?”

      He didn’t believe in fate. Not anymore.

      He tried the passenger’s side door. It resisted at first, but with one hard yank and the grating screech of metal against metal, it opened. As he leaned inside he was filled with an eerie sense of déjà vu. Somehow, despite having essentially spent the past seven years under a tarp in the garage, the car still smelled like the coconut body spray she’d used in high school.

      He shook the thought away as he reached over and switched on the hazard lights.

      The papers she’d mentioned lay scattered across the floor. He gathered them up, revealing an expensive-looking leather purse underneath, its contents spilled out onto the mat. He recognized the brand as one his ex-wife had often coveted but could never afford.

      He had overheard his dad tell someone that Caitie had done rather well for herself in New York. It was a surprise to Nate. Not because he considered her incompetent. He had just always believed that material things didn’t interest her, that family was what she really cared about. Living in the city had obviously changed her.

      Or hell, maybe he never really knew her at all.