Riverbend Road

If his brother had been there, Cade would have had no problem pounding him, badge or no badge. Idiot. He had a good thing going. A wife who loved him, kids who needed him. Why would he throw all that away?

Cade’s own beer—the bottle from the single six-pack he allowed himself per week—suddenly tasted flat and bitter.

None of them had been given much of a chance, with an abusive drunk for a father and a weak mother who didn’t take care of herself and ended up with liver disease because of it.

With such a screwed-up childhood, it was a wonder Marcus had been able to maintain a good relationship with Christy all these years.

“You take good care of yourself and those kids.”

“That’s what I’m trying to do. But you know Marcus won’t see it that way.”

He feared she was right. “Do you need help with bills?” he finally asked quietly.

Christy was silent for a long, awkward moment. “You’ve done more than enough, Cade.”

He didn’t mention to her that Marcus had come to him asking for help paying the mortgage the last few months. He had a feeling she knew and was too proud and stubborn to ask for more.

He would send a check anyway and hope she accepted it, for the kids’ sake. Losing their home wouldn’t help the situation right now.

“I’ll talk to you later in the week to see how things are going,” he said.

“Thanks, Cade. I didn’t know what else to do but to call you. I needed to vent to someone else who loves that idiot as much as I do.”

“I’ll do what I can,” he promised.

After they said goodbye, he leaned his head back against the wall and closed his eyes, exhausted suddenly from the crazy day. Marcus and his latest DUI seemed like just one more thing he couldn’t fix.

The world was filled with problems he couldn’t solve, which sometimes seriously sucked.

The doorbell rang while he was still trying to figure out how he could slip Christy the extra money for her mortgage—which happened to be the one problem he could remedy.

He might get to that steak at some point that evening, but he was beginning to wonder.

“Coming,” he called out.

He headed to the front door and pulled it open. All thoughts of Marcus and Christy, DUIs and mortgages, flew completely out of his head.

Wynona Bailey stood on his doorstep with her wheat-colored hair pulled back into a thick braid and tan shorts revealing a surprisingly long stretch of tawny legs.

Yeah. The world was really good at throwing unsolvable problems at him.

His mind snapped back to that nightmarish moment when he had pulled up to the fire at Darwin Twitchell’s barn and found her patrol vehicle empty and no sign of Wyn, and then an instant later she burst through the doors of the barn with a kid in each arm and flames exploding behind them.

He had run through that moment in his head dozens of times in the last few hours and still couldn’t figure out the emotion he’d experienced, when he knew she was safe and unharmed.

Something had changed. That’s all he knew. Or maybe it had been there forever but was only now growling to life.

“What are you doing here?” he asked, then realized how rude the words sounded when her hesitant smile slid away.

But what was he supposed to say? Though she lived at the other end of the street, they didn’t socialize at each other’s homes outside of work. He could count on one hand the times he’d been to her place, usually to drop off paperwork. She stopped here just as seldom.

Why was that?

He didn’t know the answer and it seemed odd now. They were friends and had been for years, even before she came to work for him after her father’s injury. Her brother was his best friend.

He had been to all his other officers’ homes several times. Barbecues. Birthday parties. It had never been a big deal to socialize outside of work, especially in a small police department like Haven Point. But something about Wyn Bailey was...different.

Maybe he could blame the same something that had sent him rushing to the scene of a fire after she stopped responding to the radio, with his heart hammering and his foot pushing hard on the gas pedal.

“I’ll tell you why I’m here but I’d rather not do it standing on the porch,” she said. “May I come in?”

He had no choice but to step back and open the door wider for her.

A familiar canine followed her in and he couldn’t help a smile, despite the tension that popped and sparked between them like a bad wire.

“Hey there, Young Pete.”

The dog’s ears perked up at his name and he sat at Cade’s feet with his tail brushing the wood plank floor of his entryway. Cade reached down and scratched Pete in the spot he remembered the dog liked, just under its left ear.

“How are you, buddy?”

He and Young Pete went way back, to the days when the dog used to be John Bailey’s constant companion. The former chief had adored the puppy, the latest in a string of dogs he always named Pete.

He wasn’t a puppy anymore. Gray peppered his muzzle and he walked with the same ginger care of an old man on the cusp of needing artificial knees.

“How are the lungs?” he finally asked when Wyn showed no inclination to let him know what she was doing at his house.

At her blank look he arched an eyebrow. “Smoke inhalation, remember? A few hours ago you were being examined by two of Haven Point’s finest EMTs. Ring a bell?”

“Oh. Right. The lungs.” She shrugged. “If I breathe too deeply, they ache a little but nothing I didn’t expect.”

The reality of her close call seemed to reach out and grab him by the throat all over again. He couldn’t even contemplate what might have happened to her.

Yeah, he knew the risks of the job. Every day when he sent his officers out, he knew they were risking injury and even death. People thought Haven Point was a nice, quiet town where nothing much happened but those in his department knew better. The town had its share of drug abuse, domestic disturbances, assaults.

He had been standing just a few feet away when her father took a bullet to the head that should have killed him—and in a roundabout way, eventually did just that two years later.

If Wynona had joined the ranks of the fallen that included her father and her twin brother, Cade wouldn’t have been able to live with himself.

Her mom was probably out of her head with worry.

“That was a really stupid thing you did,” he said sternly.

“Yes, I believe you mentioned that when you were yelling at me in front of the entire fire department.”

For a guy with a reputation for a cool head under pressure, he had done a miserable job of handling the whole situation. He could admit that now, after the fact. He should have taken her aside and reprimanded her in private. The whole public-safety community didn’t need to watch him lose his temper.

Too late now. It was done and he wouldn’t back down or change his mind.