to be missing.
She headed into her office last and suddenly gasped.
Riley was there in an instant. “Whoa.” His gaze sharpened on the wedding dress still hanging in the protective bag, both slashed to tatters with what looked like a pair of her own scissors from the workroom. “Now that’s interesting.”
Interesting? She could come up with a hundred different adjectives and that particular one wasn’t among them.
“That’s a designer wedding dress,” she moaned. “I’ve had it for only two days so I could customize the beadwork on the bodice. It was a huge commission.”
A commission she could now see imploding—along with possibly the store’s entire future. “Who would be so destructive?”
“Wild guess here, but maybe somebody who’s not too crazy about the bride. Who did the gown belong to?” he asked.
“Genevieve Beaumont. The mayor’s daughter.”
Her grand society wedding to the son of one of the region’s richest bachelors was still eight months away. Maybe Gen would have time to order a replacement gown between now and then and Claire could still have time to finish the beadwork.
Or maybe the somewhat spoiled bride-to-be would decide to sue Claire for every penny she eked out of the store, for whatever breach in security had potentially ruined Genevieve’s big day.
Chester nudged her leg with his head and she wanted to sink to the floor in the middle of all those spilled beads, gather him in her arms and indulge in a big, soggy pity party. The emotions clogged her throat and burned behind her eyes, but she blinked them back and swallowed hard. She had no time to indulge in tears, not now when she had such a mess to clean up—and especially not in front of the new chief of police, for heaven’s sake.
“This is a nightmare. It makes no sense. Why just destroy the dress when they didn’t even bother to take the crystals? They’re worth a fortune.”
“I don’t know the answer to that yet. But I promise you, Claire, I’ll find out.”
Riley might have been an annoying little pest when he was younger and a hell-on-wheels troublemaker when he hit his teen years, but all she had heard over the years from Alex and the rest of his family indicated he had shaped up from his wayward youth and truly found his calling with police work.
Most people in Hope’s Crossing seemed to think the town was lucky he had agreed to give up his life as an undercover detective in the Bay Area to come back, although she had heard rumors there was discontent in the police department over his hiring.
“Tell me what else I can do to help you, then.”
“Just sit tight while I finish processing the scene. Maybe you and your dog here could head over to Maura’s place for coffee or something. I might be here a while.”
“I’d rather stay, if you don’t mind. We’ll do our best to keep out of your way.”
“Not a problem. I’m glad to have the company, I only wish it were under better circumstances.”
For the next hour, she had a front-row seat as Riley worked the scene—collecting evidence, lifting fingerprints, taking photos.
It was a bit of a jarring dichotomy trying to reconcile the pain in the neck she remembered with this wholly competent officer of the law. Mixed in there was the wild, angry teenager he’d been after his parents’ divorce, but by then she’d been living in Boulder for college and had only heard everything secondhand about his drinking, smoking and more.
The Riley she remembered was the one who had hidden a voice-activated tape recorder in his sister’s room during one of Claire’s frequent sleepovers at the McKnight home so he could overhear what she and Alex talked and giggled about.
Their conversation had inevitably centered around boys, of course, because they were probably twelve or thirteen at the time and beginning to be obsessed with the opposite sex. Claire had just started to notice the smartest, cutest boy in the grade ahead of her, Jeff Bradford. Alexandra at the time had been enamored with the quarterback on the freshman football team, Jason Kolpecki.
They had talked long into the night about their current crushes with no clue that Riley, the sneak, had recorded all of it—and then threatened to share the tape recording with the boys in question if they didn’t meet his demands, a mortifying prospect.
It was probably a good thing those who weren’t thrilled about Riley’s return didn’t know their new chief of police had once included blackmail in his repertoire. She and Alex had spent every Saturday for two months taking over his customary duty of mowing and edging the McKnights’ lawn in exchange for Riley’s promise to destroy the tape.
All the teasing and mischief of their childhood seemed worlds away, buried deep under the weight of all that had come later. Her father’s scandalous death, her mother’s subsequent breakdowns, his father’s midlife crisis that had decimated his family and Riley’s own wild youth.
Sometimes she thought she would give anything to go back to that peaceful time, when the only thing she had to worry about in junior high was her algebra grade and Riley leaking to Jeff Bradford that she had a crush on him.
After another half hour while he spent considerable time on his cell phone with, she assumed, officers working the other crime scenes, he finally collected the last evidence and loaded everything into a bag.
“That should do it,” he said. “I’m going to send everything here to the crime lab and hopefully we can get a print or two.”
“Thanks, Riley. I really appreciate everything you’ve done.”
“No problem. I hope to have information for you as soon as possible.”
He gave her the big, broad, charming smile he had perfected as the youngest and only boy in a family of five sisters, the same smile that helped him wiggle out of more trouble than she cared to think about.
A little sizzle of attraction sparked through her, just like the flickering lights floating down the mountainside in the hands of skiers during the annual Christmas Eve candle festival at the resort. She frowned, especially when he stepped a little closer and reached for her hand.
“It really is terrific to see you, Claire. When things settle a little, what do you say I take you up to the resort for dinner so we can catch up under better circumstances?”
Okay, she had been out of the dating scene for pretty much ever, since she had started seeing Jeff when she was fifteen, but that sounded suspiciously like Riley McKnight was asking her out.
“Uh.” Brilliant answer, she knew. She couldn’t help it—she couldn’t remember the last time anything beyond leaving her grocery list at home managed to fluster her. Surely she must have misunderstood. He was just being polite, wasn’t he?
“It was only a simple dinner invitation, Claire.” A dimple quirked at the edge of his mouth. “I didn’t intend to send you into a panic.”
She forced a bland smile and reminded herself this was pesky Riley McKnight. “The day you send me into a panic is the day I dye my hair purple and join a punk-rock band.”
“Now
