Show Me A Hero

His lips thinned. He rolled up his window and cranked the engine. It started after a few tries, belching a cloud of black smoke from the tailpipe.

Ali winced and tucked her nose back into the protection of her knit scarf and watched him drive away.

Chapter Three

“You should have let Cooper skate on the expired parking meter.”

Ali set the mineral water and lime and the order of onion rings on the table in front of her sister Greer. If Magic Jax wasn’t so busy, she’d have set herself down, too, in the seat opposite her. “I had to choose between citing Grant Cooper or getting skewered by my sergeant again. If Gowler has an actual reason to write me up, it’ll be the first nail in my coffin with the department. And he only needs three nails.”

“He’s not going to fire the only female officer he’s got,” Greer countered. “Particularly if she’s not guilty of anything more serious than letting a new resident off a minor infraction with a warning. Everyone else with the department does it from time to time. Why not you?”

“Everyone else doesn’t make the mistake of dating his precious son, Madame Prosecutor. I am not taking any chances.”

Greer gave her a look. “I’m a defense lawyer.”

“Don’t remind me.” Greer was the oldest of the three triplets and worked with the public defender’s office. Maddie was the middle triplet. The ultimate do-gooder, she was a social worker with family services. Because of her role there, the family court judge had agreed to let her be the temporary caregiver for Layla.

Ali gestured at the stack of files sitting on the table next to her sister’s elbow. The public defender’s office workload was so huge that they also had a rotating crew of private attorneys who took cases pro bono. “Always trying to get the people I arrest off with just a slap on the wrist.”

“You do your job and I’ll do mine. That’s how it works. Gowler aside, you could have at least bargained a little with Cooper over the ticket. You catch more flies with honey, you know.”

Ali didn’t dare slip her toes out of her high-heeled shoes so she could wiggle some blood back into them. If she did, she feared she would never get her feet back into the shoes. And she really didn’t want to hear Greer’s advice at the moment. “You want anything else to go with those onion rings?”

“I shouldn’t even be eating these.” Greer plucked a ring from the basket. Magic Jax didn’t provide a full menu, but they did offer the usual types of bar food. “But I’m starving. Came straight here from the office.”

“If you change your mind, let me know.” She grabbed her tray and headed back to the bar, picking up empty glasses along the way. It was even busier than it had been the night before. Part of that was because it was Friday night. A larger part, she figured, was because Jax himself was actually mixing drinks behind the bar. For as long as she’d been picking up shifts at Magic Jax, she could only recall a handful of times when he’d actually played bartender.

Every time he did, though, word seemed to spread and the ladies came in droves.

It wasn’t surprising. Jaxon Swift was rich. He didn’t take any part in the running of the family oil business like Linc did, but he was still part of Swift Oil. He was also as handsome as a blond devil and loved women just as much as they loved him. In short, nothing much had changed since he and Ali had been in high school together.

And now, thanks to Maddie marrying his brother, Linc, they were theoretically one big happy family.

She went behind the bar to rinse the empties and stack them in the dishwasher tray. “Busy night. I didn’t expect it to be, considering the snow today,” Ali said to her boss.

Jax took the lid off the blender and filled three hurricane glasses with the virulent pink daiquiris that the giggling college girls at table four had ordered. “Busy is the way I like it.” He set the glasses on a tray, leaving Ali to top them with the requisite whipped cream and sliced strawberry. He glanced at his next order and reached for a bottle of wine with one hand and a bottle of gin with the other. “Keeps us all in business.”

They both glanced toward the door as it opened and a flurry of snowflakes danced inside. A few more women hurried in and started shimmying out of their cold-weather gear. One wore a spaghetti-strapped blue sequin dress under her parka. The other had on a strapless red corset with rhinestone-studded jeans.

Both fluffed their hair as they focused on Jax behind the bar.

Ali had a hard time not rolling her eyes as she finished fanning one of the strawberry slices over a mound of cream. “I think I’m the only one here who’s never wanted to date you,” she told him.

He chuckled. “What about Greer?”

“Greer never dated anything except her textbooks. Besides, it would have been gross. You went out with Maddie.”

He deftly poured two glasses of wine, set them on a tray for Charlene and tossed the empty bottle into the bin beneath the bar top. “Yeah, but she married my big brother.” He shrugged and grinned. “No accounting for taste, sometimes.” He quickly prepared a gin-and-grapefruit, shaking out the last few drops of grapefruit juice from the plastic pitcher before tossing it into the stainless-steel sink, and added the glass to Charlene’s order. “No more grapefruit.” Then he picked up a knife and finished prepping the last daiquiri while she fussed with her second one. “You’re lagging, Ali.”

She rolled her eyes as she picked up the tray and headed around the bar again. After delivering the drinks, she went over to the newcomers, who were still hovering near the entrance. She didn’t recognize them. “Help you find a place to sit?”

One of them bit her deeply red lip. “We wanted the bar.”

Ali looked over her shoulder. There were a half-dozen bar stools and all were occupied.

By women.

“You’re welcome to wait, but I think it might be a while.” She gestured at a two-top in the far corner. It, and one other just like it, were the only vacant tables in the place. “If you change your mind, just grab one of those over by the pool table.” She barely paused as she spoke, since standing still for too long just reminded her how sore her feet were.

She made the rounds of her tables again and headed back to Jax with a fresh set of orders. Then she went into the small kitchen and dumped another bag of already breaded onion rings into one fryer basket and added similarly prepared chicken fingers to a second.

She left them bubbling merrily away in their vats of hot oil and nipped into the employee bathroom long enough to pee and wash her hands. Then it was back to the fryer, then to the drink station to fill some water glasses, and then out to see if Corset and Spaghetti had decided to forgo the coveted stools at the bar for a table.

They had, and she went to deliver water to them and collect their orders. “First time in?”

Corset nodded and fluffed her hair again. “We drove over from Weaver.”

Ali lifted her eyebrows. The thirty-mile drive between Braden and Weaver was tedious even without snowy conditions. “Hope you’re planning to spend the night in town. Probably going to be hard getting back there tonight. What can I get you?”

“Do you have a menu?”

Most people didn’t bother asking. “Sure.” She grabbed one from another table and returned with it. “It’s a full bar, so we can make most any drink you want.” She smiled. “Unless it takes fresh grapefruit juice. We ran out a few minutes ago.” It was obvious to her that they weren’t ready to make a decision since they were too busy ogling Jax. “I’ll come back in a few minutes and check on you.”

She headed back through the tables, only to stop short at the sight of her sergeant coming in. But then she straightened her shoulders. There was no rule against her working a second job, and plenty of the other guys did it to help supplement their public-servant wages. She headed toward him. “Good evening, sir. I’m afraid we’ve only got one table left—”

Gowler lifted his hand, cutting her off. His usual scowl was in place and he looked no more pleased to be there than she was pleased to see him. “Heard you were moonlighting here these days.”

No matter what logic told her, she felt the alarm like a swift, oily wave inside her stomach. “Temporarily.”

“Whatever,” he said, dismissing her reply. She didn’t even have time to draw a breath of relief before he plowed on. “Got a disabled vehicle out on the expressway. Need you to get on some real clothes and report for duty. Get things moving before we’ve got something worse on our hands.”

The “expressway” was Gowler’s favored term for the highway between Braden and Weaver. Mostly because it was in no way an express. The road was narrow. Winding. Just two lanes for most of the distance between the sister towns. And unfortunately, it was the site of increasingly frequent accidents. The more Weaver continued to grow—mostly because of people going there to work for Cee-Vid, an electronics and gaming manufacturer—the more people there were traveling back and forth between the sistering towns.

She stifled the “why me?” that hovered in her mind and nodded. She knew if Gowler had had a choice, he’d never have asked her to pull overtime. He hated when the excess pay screwed with his sacred budget. “I just need to let Jax know. He’ll have to call in another cocktail waitress.”

Gowler waved, looking impatient. But not even his mammoth-sized ego was large enough to think he could order her to do otherwise. Particularly where the Swift family was concerned. Swift Oil was integral to the town’s existence. “Do what you’ve got to do. Then get your rear out to mile post seventeen.” He turned on his boot heel and stomped back out the door.

Jax was a lot more understanding than Charlene when Ali broke the news that she had to leave. But then Jax wasn’t the one who had to cover all the tables until he found someone else to come in at the last minute on a Friday night.

As she rang up her last set of orders, her gaze fell on Greer. The onion-ring basket was half-empty and she had files spread out all over her table. Greer didn’t seem to be aware of anything going on around her as she bent her head over her work. Her dark hair was twisted up in one of her fancy chignons and the only movement she made was with her pen as she scrawled notes on a legal pad.

“Get Greer to fill in for an hour,” Ali suggested to Jax.

She left him giving her sister a speculative look and went to the employee bathroom again to change back into the uniform she’d just changed out of only a few hours earlier. She was dog-tired and didn’t really look forward to spending any time out on the dark, snowy highway. But there was one bright spot: she got to peel the high-heeled pumps that she had a hate-hate relationship with off her feet.

She rolled up the cocktail uniform and stuffed it in her carryall, pulled on her overcoat and headed out to the front again.

Greer spotted her and gave her the stink eye around Jax as he stood next to her table, clearly trying to talk her into emergency-waitressing for him. Ali smiled broadly as she headed out the exit. Greer would never be able to flat-out refuse their brother-in-law’s brother. And in Ali’s opinion, her legal-eagle sister could stand an hour or two slinging drinks like common folk.

The traffic was backed up so badly on the highway that it took Ali nearly an hour to work her way through it. She had to weave slowly between cars on both sides of the road with her beacon flashing before she got to the sight of the disabled truck. One of the county deputy sheriffs from Weaver was already on site, but it was obvious that he’d arrived only a few minutes before Ali had.

She grabbed a bright orange vest from her emergency kit and pulled it over her coat as she jogged across the headlight-illuminated road to where he’d set out flares. “Hey, Dave,” she greeted when she got close enough to recognize Dave Ruiz. He was a longtime deputy with plenty of experience when it came to their expressway. Far more experience than she had, at any rate. “Miserable night for this particular pleasure, but nice to see you all the same.”

Dave, wearing a similar vest, handed her a bundle of flares. “You, too, Ali.” He gestured at the semitrailer that was on its side, blocking both lanes of traffic. “Driver’s cleared the debris from the hay bales he lost, but we’re still waiting on the tow to get it back on its wheels.”

If it hadn’t been for the headlights and the glow of the flares, it would have been impossible to see much of anything. As it was, the lights reflecting off the falling snow made their task even harder. “At least this wasn’t two miles up the road.”

“Amen to that. We’d have had someone go off the curve for sure. All we have to deal with now are a bunch of pissed-off, impatient drivers.” The deputy pointed at the toppled trailer. “If we could get some snow cleared away from that side of the trailer, we could redirect traffic one-by-one past the block.”

She squinted at the vehicles crowded around them. “Going to have to get each side to give an inch or two.”

He grunted. “Yep.” He jerked his head. He was wearing a dark beanie, same as she was, and snow clung to it. “Already got a Good Samaritan working on our side to get ’em pulled back some. Busy night with the snowstorm, or we’d have more boots on the ground here.”

“Help is help. I’ll work on my side,” she said. “Considering the angle of the trailer, might be easier if we started letting my side go through first.”

“That was my thinking, too.”

Happy that they were on the same page, she lit a flare and started working her way back along the highway, dropping the flares as she went to outline the improvised route.

When she was finished, she walked back along the line of bumper-to-bumper vehicles, telling each driver what the plan was and assuring them they were trying to get the road passable as quickly as they could. Her feet were cold again inside her boots, but at least they didn’t ache the way they had in the high heels.

There was no room to use the plow on the front of her unit or Ruiz’s, so she pulled the snow shovel she always carried from the back, headed over to the end of the long semitrailer and started attacking the berm that had built up from weeks of snowplows clearing the highway. It was a good four feet high, packed hard with ice and snow and dirt, and she was already breathless when someone carrying a pickax joined her.

“Fancy meeting this way.”

She went still, peering at the tall figure. “Mr. Cooper?” He had on a proper coat and gloves at least, though his head was still uncovered.

“Might as well make it Grant, Officer Ali.” With a smooth motion, he swung the sharp tip of the pickax into the iced-over mound. “I’ll break. You shovel.”

It was too much effort to argue, particularly when the idea was a good one, and between the two of them, they managed to break down a car length’s worth of snow and ice, shoving the clumps off into the ditch on the other side. The ditch wasn’t terribly deep, but it could break an axle if a driver wasn’t careful. They both moved farther along the berm and continued.

“You always carry a pickax around with you?”

“Doesn’t everyone?”

“Your truck parked somewhere in this logjam?”

“’Bout a mile back on the other side.”

“So you are capable of a straight answer.” She stopped for a minute to catch her breath and rub the growing ache in the small of her back. She was in good shape, but this was a workout like none she’d had in a while. “Have business in Weaver?”

He, on the other hand, just kept swinging away with the pickax. The guy was like a machine. “My sister isn’t in Weaver.”

Too proud to let him make her look weak, she jabbed the tip of the shovel into the mess again and resumed pitching it off to the side. “That’s not really what I asked.”

After siccing Jax on Greer back at the bar, she was going to have to work hard to get her sister to let her use her sweet, claw-foot bathtub back at the house tonight. When she and her sisters had bought the place, they’d agreed to pay separately for the renovations to their own bedrooms and en suite bathrooms, but combine their funds to restore the rest.

A fine idea in theory.

Except that Ali’s bathroom was still a work in progress. It had a plywood subfloor perpetually in wait for tile, a sink that worked most of the time and a shower that didn’t. Since Maddie had moved in with Linc, Ali had taken to regularly using her shower. But a shower wasn’t going to help her aches and pains anywhere near enough after tonight.

Greer, on the other hand, had immediately redone her bedroom and bath. In the entire house, it was the one haven from all that was broken or about to break down. And her claw-foot tub was seriously a thing of beauty.

“It’s what you meant,” Grant countered.

She didn’t bother correcting him, since it was true. “You bought the Carmody place quite a few years ago.”

The sharp tip of his pickax sliced cleanly through the snow and ice. “Your point?”

She possessed excellent peripheral vision. Which was handy, because she could watch him without seeming to watch him. “You left it vacant for a long time.”

“No law against that.” He moved farther along the berm, chipping away faster than she could shovel.

She clenched her teeth and sped up, even though her muscles protested. From behind the truck trailer, she heard engines revving up. Impatient drivers were starting to get a scent of freedom. Just to be safe, she left the shovel standing in the berm and walked back to the first car. The middle-aged driver—smoking his way through a pack of cigarettes if the butts sitting on the road were any indication—rolled down his window when she approached.

Smoke wafted out around her and she coughed once. A lot of her fellow officers smoked, but she’d never understood the appeal.

She repeated what she’d told him once already. “I’ll come back and let you know when it’s safe to proceed. It’s still gonna be a little while yet, I’m afraid.”

He swore. “Little lady, I’ve got places to be.”

She smiled, though she wanted to grind her teeth. “We all do, sir. Might want to consider preserving your gas a little if you can stand the chill—”

He swore again and rolled up the window, cutting her off. He did not turn off his engine.

She straightened, headed back to her shovel and pulled it from the snow. “Just another night in paradise,” she muttered.

Already two yards farther than he had been, Grant paused. “Say something?”

He’d done such a good job of breaking up the berm that all she had to do was push the tip of the shovel against the road to plow the chunks off into the ditch. “You’re pretty good at this. Had a lot of practice?”

He didn’t answer.

“Naturally,” she said under her breath.

They chipped and plowed for another few minutes when she saw Dave Ruiz signaling with his mag light.

They’d cleared about thirty feet of iced-over berm.

“That’s good enough to start,” she told Grant, and his rhythmic swinging immediately ceased. He hooked the deadly tip of his pickax over his shoulder and headed off.

“Thank you,” she called after him.

He didn’t pause. Didn’t look back. Merely lifted his left hand in acknowledgment.

The less he said about anything, the more curious she got.

The feminine side of her wished she wasn’t so darn predictable. The cop side of her just accepted the fact that she was always curious where all people were concerned. Not just enigmatic, aqua-eyed men.

She propped her shovel against an upturned wheel on the trailer as she walked back around it, stomped her feet hard against the road to make sure she still had some feeling in them and returned to the first car in the lineup. “I’m going to walk ahead of you until you’re past the trailer,” she told the driver. It wouldn’t speed up the process any, but she wasn’t taking any chances on an impatient man going off into the ditch and suing the department as a result.

And one by one, that’s how she slowly cleared enough of the road on her side to allow traffic on Dave’s side a chance of squeaking around the trailer.

Eventually, she was able to get back into her own SUV, crank up the heater and call in the progress as the traffic slowly crawled along the flare-lined path. About two hours after they’d started, three heavy-duty tow trucks arrived and they had to block off the road again from both sides to allow them space to get the semi back up on its wheels.

The only saving grace was that the snow stopped falling halfway through the mammoth task. But when it did, the temperature dropped another ten degrees and the wind—always pronounced, particularly along this highway cut into the hills—picked up.

But finally, the deed was done. The semi was hitched to the back of another tractor and was headed down the road to Braden. The highway returned to its usual quiet midwinter-night state. Dave and Ali congratulated each other on getting the job done without any collisions or injuries, and they all headed home.

When Ali finally made it there, she noticed Greer’s car parked in her half of the detached garage behind the house. In the kitchen, the slow cooker was sitting on the plywood counter. Stone-cold. Full of uncooked ingredients. Ali had forgotten to turn it on when she’d left the house this morning.

She clamped the lid back on top and left it. It wouldn’t be any worse come morning and she could deal with it then.

She dragged herself up the narrow staircase and decided she was too tired to worry about waking up her sister to beg to use her fancy-ass bathroom. Instead, she turned on Maddie’s shower and stripped once the bathroom was full of steam.

Then she finally stepped beneath the blessedly hot spray. She expected her mind to go blank as she stood there, unmoving, her eyes closed while the water rained down on her head. But she was wrong.

She kept thinking about Grant Cooper. Working beside her. Without being asked. Without complaint. Then just walking away.

She shivered, and realized the water was running cold. She shut it off, stepped out and wrapped a towel around her body. Then she wrapped another towel around her head, returned to her own bedroom, climbing in bed just like that, and pulled her quilt up to her ears.

She wasn’t even able to enjoy the grateful thought that she didn’t have to work the next day before she was out cold.

Chapter Four

Grant eyed the cardboard box sitting on the front porch.

He hadn’t noticed it the night before when he’d finally gotten home after the mess on the highway. The bulb in the porch light fixture still didn’t work even though he’d replaced it, and it was a wonder he hadn’t tripped over the carton in the dark.

He didn’t have to open the box to know what was in it. His publisher’s logo was imprinted on the side. The address of his cabin in Oregon was crossed out. The address where he stood now had been marked over it in slashing black ink. Because, God forbid, his author copies of CCT Final Rules should have remained behind at the cabin, along with everything else he didn’t want.

Just like Officer Ali Templeton, his ex-wife publisher had found him.

He grabbed the box and carried it inside, dumping it on the fireplace hearth.

He’d burn them right now, except he’d probably also end up burning down the entire house. Considering the overall condition of the place, he wasn’t setting a match to anything in the fireplace until he got a chance to have the chimney inspected.

He knew he had electrical problems. The porch light was just one example. He also knew he had plumbing problems. The kitchen faucet only worked on hot. The shower in his bathroom upstairs only worked on cold, which meant he was out of luck because the bathtub in the bathroom downstairs was too damn short. He was also pretty sure he smelled something burning every time he turned on the furnace, which was why he wore a damn coat inside the house, even when he was sleeping.