The Lawman's Runaway Bride

“I’m not hungry, Nana,” Sadie said with a small smile.

“Well...” Nana sighed, then shot Sadie a hopeful look. “I’ve made a few additions to the dollhouse...”

Sadie couldn’t help the smile that came to her face. “Are you still working on it?”

“Dearest, I’ve been working on that dollhouse for ages. I wouldn’t just stop. Come on, then. I’ll show you the newest renovations.”

Nana’s dollhouse was located in “the craft room,” which was a room too small for a bed, and since it had a window, it was also not suitable for closet space. Nana had turned this room into her crafting space, and it was therefore where the dollhouse sat on display. This dollhouse had been a formative part of Sadie’s childhood. She’d spent hours just staring into the tiny rooms, soaking in every perfect detail. Nana’s dollhouse was four stories of sky blue, Victorian elegance on the outside, but inside, the rooms were carefully decorated in a 1950s style. The house opened on hinges, so that even more rooms were available once the two back wings had swung out on either side. The center of the house had a staircase that led up to the very top floor—a tiny attic room with a cot and a rickety little dresser.

“What have you changed?” Sadie asked as she followed Nana into the study. It was a few degrees colder in that room, and the window had frost on the inside, too.

“Oh, this and that,” Nana said. “You know how it is. I decided to put real linens on the beds last year. Do you know how difficult it is to make a fitted sheet for a doll bed? I also made some tiny block quilts—all authentic, of course.”

“Of course.” Sadie bent down in front of the display of tiny rooms. She reached out to finger a tiny quilt on the bed in the attic. “Nana, this quilt is lined—” She stared at the minute craftsmanship.

“I told you—authentic.” Nana was pleased that she’d noticed—she could tell.

The funny thing was that seeing this dollhouse again felt like home in a deeper way than anything else in Comfort Creek. She’d spent so many solitary hours staring into these rooms, imagining the family that lived there, their dramas and quarrels, their victories and quiet Sunday evenings spent all together in the tiny sitting room in front of the fireplace...

The mother in this house never left. She doted over her offspring and cooked lavish meals in the kitchen. The father came home every day at the exact same time, and he picked up a tiny newspaper from the sideboard in the hallway. Any mess left about—like the toys on the children’s bedroom floor—was carefully orchestrated to be attractive. This house was perfection, frozen in an imaginary time where nothing could go so wrong that it couldn’t be set right again.

“I added a telephone in the kitchen.” Nana pointed to a pale pink rotary phone on the wall. “I found that one at the bottom of a bin in the craft shop. Liz could see how excited I was, and she charged me double, I’m sure. Oh! And I’ve been working on making sure that every single book in the library is real. I’ve found a tutorial online for making books that open. I tried making them with four or five pages each, but they just fanned open. It was very annoying. So I used thick cardstock on both sides, so that each book opens to the center.” Nana paused. “I was hoping you’d help me choose which books to include in the library. Maybe a few of your favorites, Sadie.”

Sadie rose and shot her grandmother a look of surprise. “Did you say you found a tutorial online?”

When Sadie left, Nana hadn’t exactly been tech savvy. She could email, but she was a strict telephone chatter. There was no video chatting with Nana, and for the most part, she tended to stay pretty old-school.

“It’s how it’s done these days, dear.” But her cheeks pinked in pleasure. “Okay, truth be told, last month, Ginny Carson’s grandson showed me how the tutorials worked. So I’m still new at it.”

“Ah.” Sadie shot her grandmother a smile. “I’m still impressed.”

“Welcome home, dear girl. Now you sit yourself down and get reacquainted with the old place, and I’ll go sort out some supper.”

Sadie was thirty-two, and this old dollhouse still soothed a part of her heart that nothing else could touch. This was the part of her that had softened to Noah—the part of her that longed for a perfect life with a picket fence. Noah had offered a picture-perfect existence here in Comfort Creek—a handsome man to come home to at the same time every day and pick up the paper off a sideboard table...

But it hadn’t been enough, because she didn’t love him enough, and she wasn’t sure that she was the kind of woman who could stay content with so much monotony, anyway. In the real world, with real emotions, real hardships, the life Noah offered wasn’t enough to fill her heart, after all. But he should have been, and if she’d been a little less like her flighty mother, he would have been. That knowledge had been nagging at her for the last five years. No man was perfect, and relationships didn’t stay in the honeymoon phase. Noah, his house, his family, this town—it all should have been enough.

Nothing had ever been enough for Mom. No boyfriend. No job. No town. They’d bounced from place to place, from romance to romance for her mom. And no matter how nice the guy, her mother always found a reason to cut him loose and they’d leave again... No one had been enough to fill that hole in her mother’s heart, and she feared that she might be the same. At least looking back on it all. She had been when it came to jobs around town.

If she could be faced with a sweet guy like Noah and the perfect life and still walk away from it all because she felt a rush of emotion with another man, maybe she deserved a life alone.

God rest Noah’s soul.

Chapter Three (#u8c8bfd10-3f11-5b44-b02e-bbd1ac25ae1f)

The coffee they made at the station was about as thick as boiled tar, but it was also concentrated caffeine, which the officers took strange pride in gulping down. Chance, however, appreciated a fine cup of coffee, and over the years he’d gotten more particular about how he liked it. He brewed his own at home and brought it in a thermos that no one was allowed to touch upon pain of traffic detail. He was sipping his own brew Monday morning as he headed through the bull pen toward his office.

“Chief, could I get a signature?”

Bryce Camden was their newest recruit to the Comfort Creek police force. He was newly married, his wedding ring still shiny, and he fiddled with it when his hands were free.

“How’s Piglet?” Chance asked. Piglet was the nickname Bryce gave his adopted daughter—now eight months old—because of her dedication to finishing a bottle. They were all attached to that baby since she’d been dumped on the station doorstep as a newborn.

“Growing like a weed,” Bryce said with a grin. “She’s trying to say ‘Dada’—I’m sure of it.”

“Yeah?” Chance scanned the forms that Bryce handed him, and he jotted down his initials where required and signed the bottom, then handed them back. “Isn’t it kind of early for that?”

“She’s a genius, what can I say?” Bryce spread his hands and grinned. “I’ve got video proof on my cell phone, if you don’t believe me.”

“Later,” Chance chuckled. “I’ve got a meeting to prepare for.”

“Much later, then,” Bryce said. “I’m just leaving on patrol.”

Bryce had certainly settled into family life, and Chance felt a pang of envy. That was the goal, wasn’t it? Beautiful wife, a couple of kids, a home with a woman’s touch around the place... Somehow he’d managed to avoid the comfortable life all this time, and he was pushing forty. Part of it was that he hadn’t met a woman who intrigued him enough to get married, and living in a town this small, there weren’t a lot of fresh options. The other part of it was guilt. He and his brother hadn’t had a lot in common—except their taste in women. The one woman to make him sit up and take notice had been his own brother’s fiancée. There was a whole lot wrong with that.

Chance headed into his office and paused for a sip of coffee, then slid into his chair and turned on the computer. He had a fair amount of paperwork to get through today, plus there was the meeting with Sadie. He’d asked her to come by early so that he could get it out of the way and stop worrying about it. Sadie might have been the one woman to catch his attention over the years, but she was also at the root of his deepest grief, and his unresolved guilt. If she’d just stayed in the city...

There was a tap on his door.

“Come in.” His tone was gruff, and he looked up as the door eased open to reveal Sadie. He glanced at his watch. Was it nine already? Almost. She was five minutes early.

“Good morning, Chance.”

They weren’t going to be hung up on formalities, apparently. She wore a pair of jeans this time, and a white turtleneck under a puffy red jacket. She had a tablet in one hand, a purse over her shoulder. He nodded her in, and she closed the door behind herself without being asked. She was right, though—the last thing they needed right now was an audience. This was awkward enough, already.

“Have a seat,” Chance said, clicking his emails shut once more. “So how are you?”

“Do you really care?” Her tone was quiet, but her gaze met his in challenge. “I’m not used to being left at a table on my own.”

Ouch. Yeah, he’d regretted that as he’d walked out, and he’d had the weekend to kick himself for it. He’d been frustrated and eager to get some breathing space, but he’d known it was the wrong call.

“I’m sorry about that,” he said. “I thought I’d dealt with Noah’s death, and it’s all coming back on me again. I’m not at my best.”

“Okay.” She nodded. “I get it. I’m probably a reminder of the old days.”

“Yeah, you could say that.” She was reminder of a whole lot of frustration that he’d kept hammering down into the pit of his stomach over the years.

“So let’s just get the work part over with—”

“So how much did the mayor tell you about my feelings toward this ceremony?” Chance planted his elbows on his desk.

“He mentioned you weren’t keen on the idea.” She licked her lips. “Personality conflict, maybe?”

“We’ve never really gotten along. We grate on each other.” He sighed. “I’ll level with you—Mayor Scott wants this big personal ceremony, and I don’t. My brother isn’t a bit of sentimental propaganda. And I don’t like private grief being offered up for public consumption.”

“You aren’t the only one who loved Noah,” she countered.

“Including yourself in that?” he asked coolly.