done more than enough already.”
“Try to get some rest, if you can. I’ll check in with you tomorrow and also bring something for your lunch.”
He didn’t exactly look overjoyed at the prospect. “I don’t suppose I can say anything to persuade you otherwise, can I?”
“You’re a wise man, Sheriff Bailey.”
Will giggled. “Where’s your gold and Frankenstein?”
Marshall blinked, obviously as baffled as she was, which only made Will giggle more.
“Like in the Baby Jesus story, you know. The wise men brought the gold, Frankenstein and mirth.”
She did her best to hide a smile. This year Will had become fascinated with the small carved Nativity set she bought at a thrift store the first year she moved out of her grandfather’s cheerless house.
“Oh. Frankincense and myrrh. They were perfumes and oils, I think. When I said Sheriff Bailey was a wise man, I just meant he was smart.”
She was a little biased, yes, but she couldn’t believe even the most hardened of hearts wouldn’t find her son adorable. The sheriff only studied them both with that dour expression.
He was in pain, she reminded herself. If she were in his position, she wouldn’t find a four-year-old’s chatter amusing, either.
“We’ll see you tomorrow,” she said again. “Call me, even if it’s the middle of the night.”
“I will,” he said, which she knew was a blatant fib. He would never call her.
She had done all she could, short of moving into his house—kids, pets and all.
She gathered the children part of that equation and ushered them out of the house. Darkness came early this close to the winter solstice, but the Jacobs family’s Christmas lights next door gleamed through the snow.
In the short time she’d been inside his house, Andie had forgotten most of her nervousness around Marshall. Perhaps it was his injury that made him feel a little less threatening to her—though she had a feeling that even if he’d suffered two broken legs in that accident, the sheriff of Lake Haven County would never be anything less than dangerous.
MARSH WAITED UNTIL he heard the door close behind Andrea Montgomery and her children before he allowed himself to grimace and release the breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding.
His entire body hurt like a mother trucker, as if somebody had been pummeling him for the last, oh, twenty-two hours. He couldn’t pinpoint a single portion of his anatomy that wasn’t throbbing right about now.
Though the surgery to set and pin the multiple fractures in his foot and ankle had taken place in the early hours of the morning, his head still felt foggy from the anesthesia and the pain meds they had thrust upon him afterward.
Oddly, the leg wasn’t as painful as the abrasions on his face and hands where he had scraped pavement on the way down. Some of his pain was probably the inevitable adrenaline crash that always hit after a critical incident.
He drew in a deep breath of air that still smelled like his neighbor, sweet as spring wildflowers on a rain-washed meadow.
He hated that he was now her pity project, thanks to her sense of obligation to his sister. He knew that was the only reason she had come by. Wyn must have blackmailed her into helping him. What other reason could she have for doing it?
Andrea Montgomery didn’t like him. He wasn’t sure what he’d done to her, but in their few previous interactions she had always seemed cold and unfriendly to him. He would have figured her for the last person to come to his rescue. Few people were strong enough to withstand pressure from Wyn when she was at her most persuasive, though.
He didn’t want his neighbor and her kids to come back the next day. Short of locking the door, how could he prevent it?
Less than a day ago, he had been under the wholly misguided impression that he had most facets of his life under control.
He had a family he loved, a widowed mother who had just found happiness again and remarried, a brother he admired and respected, a sister who was now engaged to his best friend, another one who was suddenly passionate about saving the world. He lived in the most beautiful place on earth and he had a position of great responsibility that he had worked very hard to earn.
Yeah, he had some in-house personnel problems in the sheriff’s department—the most urgent concern one that involved a significant amount of missing cash in a drug case—but he was dealing with them.
He certainly had a few enemies among the criminal element in his county. Who in law enforcement didn’t? Suspects he had investigated and arrested would probably top that list, followed by the people who loved them.
A few powerful people were on that list as well, including Bill Newbold, a wealthy rancher and county commissioner Marsh had had a run-in with a few weeks earlier over a neighbor’s claim he was overreaching his water rights.
Marsh could have handled that matter a little more delicately, but he’d never much liked Newbold and figured the man used his political position to line his own pockets. Attempted vehicular homicide, though? He couldn’t countenance it.
Maybe he was being too naive.
Marshall would never claim his life was perfect. He had made his share of mistakes—one huge one that was never far from his mind, especially lately. But he never expected to become a target of deadly force, until somebody in a snowy parking lot set out to show him how very wrong he was.
When he closed his eyes, he could still hear the sound of that engine gunning, the tires spinning on slush and gravel.
It wasn’t an accident caused by weather and nerves, despite what the investigator with the state police wanted to believe. How could it be? Someone had lured him to an abandoned gas station on the outskirts of Shelter Springs, baiting the trap with the promise of a lead in a long-cold missing persons case he worked when he first started at the Lake Haven Sheriff’s Department as a deputy fresh out of the military.
When he arrived, of course no one had been there. Marsh had walked around the dilapidated building to see if he was missing something and that was when he heard the engine gun from behind him. He turned just as the SUV headed straight for him and had barely been able to leap away at the last minute to avoid a direct hit.
He hadn’t been quite fast enough and the vehicle had struck his right leg. The combination of the impact and his own attempt to twist away had done a number on his leg. The X-ray looked like somebody had smashed his leg with a hammer, and the grim tally included a compound fracture of his ankle and multiple smaller fractures all the way up to below his knee.
He had been too busy trying not to pass out from the pain and hadn’t caught much that would identify the vehicle, except the color—white—and the general make—American-made late-model small SUV.
As for the driver, in the dark and the snow and from Marshall’s angle on the ground, he had seen nothing except a dark
