very long time. And after more than two years without a man even registering a blip in her pulse, she was too curious to walk away without determining if the attraction she felt was reciprocated.
She wasn’t looking for love. She wasn’t even looking for sex. But she couldn’t deny that she enjoyed looking at Sheriff Reid Davidson.
Sometimes you don’t know what you want until it’s right in front of you.
With the echo of her sister’s voice in her ears, she made her decision. “A drink sounds good.”
* * *
Reid had never been afraid to admit when he was wrong, and he’d realized—less than halfway through the workshop discussion—that he’d been wrong about her.
Katelyn.
The name struck him as a unique combination of the classic and contemporary, and as intriguing as the woman herself. Because while she might look prim and cool, there was a lot of heat beneath the surface. She argued not just eloquently but passionately, making him suspect that a woman who was so animated in her discussion of a hypothetical situation would be even more interesting up close and personal. Now he was about to find out.
There were two bars in the hotel—the first was an open lounge area that saw a lot of traffic as guests made their way around the hotel; the second, adjacent to the restaurant, was more remote and private. He opted for the second, where patrons could be seated at pub-style tables with high-back leather stools or narrow booths that afforded a degree of intimacy.
He guided her to a vacant booth. When the waitress came to take their drink order, Katelyn requested a Napa Valley cabernet sauvignon and he opted for a locally brewed IPA, signing the check to his room when the drinks were delivered.
After the server had gone, he raised his glass. “To stimulating discourse.”
Though she lifted her brows at his deliberately suggestive word choice, she tapped the rim of her glass against the neck of his bottle.
“Where are you from, Sheriff Reid Davidson?” she asked, after sipping her wine.
“Echo Ridge, Texas.”
“You’re a long way from home,” she noted.
“So it would seem,” he agreed. “How about you?”
“Northern Nevada, so not quite such a long way.”
“Humboldt, Haven or Elko County?”
“You must have aced geography in school,” she remarked.
“I didn’t ace anything in school,” he confessed. “But I recently visited the town of Haven.”
“Why were you there?” she asked, then held up a hand before he could respond. “No, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”
“Why don’t you want to know?”
“Because almost everyone in Haven knows everyone else—or at least knows someone who knows that someone else, and if it turns out that you hooked up with someone I know, this—” she gestured from her own chest to his and back again “—isn’t going to happen.”
“Is this—” he copied her gesture “—going to happen?”
She sipped her wine. “I’m thinking about it.”
“While you’re thinking, let me reassure you that I’ve never hooked up with anyone from Haven.” His lips curved as he lifted his bottle. “Yet.”
She set her glass on the table, her fingers trailing slowly down the stem. “You’re pretty confident, aren’t you?”
“Optimistic,” he told her. “But I do need to ask you something.”
“What’s that?”
“Is there anyone waiting for you at home in Haven?”
“Aside from my father, grandparents, sister, two brothers, several aunts, uncles and cousins, you mean?”
“Aside from them,” he confirmed.
“No, there’s no one waiting for me.” She traced the base of her wineglass with a neatly shaped but unpainted fingernail. “What about you, Sheriff Davidson—are you married?”
He shook his head. “Divorced.”
“Girlfriend?”
“No,” he said again. “Any more questions?”
“Just one,” she said.
He held her gaze, waiting, hoping.
“Do you want to take these drinks back to my room?”
Five weeks later
“I can’t believe you’re leaving.” Trish Stilton pouted as she rubbed a hand over the curve of her hugely pregnant belly. “Especially now, only a few weeks before the baby’s due to be born.”
Reid dumped the entire contents of his cutlery drawer into a box. Though he didn’t dare say it aloud, considering the imminent delivery of his ex-wife’s baby, he’d decided that his timing was almost perfect.
“Just last week, I told Jonah that we should ask you to be the godfather, but now that you’re moving to Nevada, that’s out of the question.”
Which further convinced Reid that he’d made the right choice in accepting the offer to take over the sheriff’s position in Haven. Though he and Trish had been divorced for more than four years and she’d been remarried for almost three, they’d remained close. Maybe too close.
When she’d walked down the aisle to exchange vows with her current husband, Reid had been the man to give her away. Yeah, it had seemed an odd request to him, but he didn’t see how he could refuse. When she’d found out that she was pregnant, she’d stopped at the Sheriff’s Office to share the news with Reid even before she’d told her husband. And when she’d cried—tears of joy, because she was going to be a mother, mingled with grief, because her child would never know his grandfather—he’d held her and comforted her.
If she’d asked him to be her baby’s godfather—as Jonah Stilton had warned him she intended to do—Reid wouldn’t have been able to refuse. How could he refuse any request from the daughter of the man who’d saved his life?
Reid had been an orphaned teenager running with a bad crowd when the local sheriff took him under his wing. He didn’t just turn Reid’s life around, he saved it, and Reid knew there was no way he could ever repay the man who had been his mentor, father figure and friend. So when Hank realized he wasn’t going to beat the cancer that had invaded his body and he’d confided to Reid that he was worried about his daughter, Reid had promised to take care of her. The news of their engagement had been a balm to the older man’s battered spirits, and he’d managed to hold on long enough to see Reid and Trish
