okay,” she said numbly.
She was here, in the place of her dreams. It had taken a full day for YaYa to convince her to come and then the rest of the week to arrange to be away and take care of last-minute details that couldn’t be handled by computer while she was gone.
Lima hadn’t been happy with Nev’s plans, but then, Lima was never thrilled with anything her older daughter did. Marieka had laughed at her for wasting vacation time in a little old Georgia town. She was going to New York on her next vacation to do some quality partying with her best girlies. She wouldn’t be caught dead in a dirty old town like Copper Lake.
But YaYa had encouraged Nev, and the dreams hadn’t gone away, and now here she was. The place of her dreams. Sounded like a good thing. Nightmares was more like it. Hauntings.
She tried to relax on the iron chair, wiggling like an uneasy cat. She’d been in town less than fifteen minutes, and she already wanted to leave. What could she possibly learn here? She didn’t know a soul to ask questions of and didn’t know what questions to ask.
And she certainly wasn’t walking down that asphalt path in the riverside park. Not alone.
A rush of cold air blew over her as the man came out with an identical cup of frozen coffee and a couple of cookies. He set them down and then pulled a linen napkin from his hip pocket and laid them down, too. “I’m Ty Gadney,” he said as he slid into the chair across from her.
Heat flushed her cheeks. First, he’d witnessed her standing on the sidewalk like a zombie; now he’d bought her food and felt obligated to sit with her and make sure she didn’t do something stupid like stumble in front of a car or collapse to the ground.
Nothing like looking her best when she met a gorgeous man.
“Nev Wilson,” she mumbled, paying extra attention to the napkin she spread across her lap.
“Short for Nevaeh?” He laughed. “I’ve got a cousin named that. She goes by Vaeh.”
Though she couldn’t quite meet his eyes, she smiled, too. “My younger sister got the perfectly normal name of Marie—to which she added an extra syllable in fifth grade because it was too normal—while I got heaven spelled backward. I guess my mother thought of me as a gift from heaven.” Or the backward spelling meant she wasn’t quite the gift Lima had expected.
“Vaeh has sisters named Cherina, Shiraz, Kaiea and Chablis. Makes for interesting yelling at family reunions when the rest of us have names like Tom, Janet, Linda and Bill.”
He took a bite of his cookie, and a look of pure pleasure crossed his face. Nev pinched off a piece from her own. In one bite, she tasted oatmeal, walnuts, chocolate, butter and sugar. Man, she needed this recipe.
“Are you visiting someone here?”
The obvious question—he was from here, she wasn’t—startled her, and the chill deep inside gave a faint shiver to remind her it hadn’t gone away. “I, uh, no. I’d seen the, uh, website and had some time off so...”
“If you have time while you’re here, stop inside the coffee shop in the evening. Raven works then. She did the website, pictures and everything. She’d love to hear that it caught your attention enough to make you come.”
An image of every barista she’d ever bought coffee from popped into Nev’s mind, teenagers and college students, with an occasional adult thrown in. Not exactly tourism/website developers. “She did an excellent job on the site.”
“She’s better with a camera than anyone I know.” He shifted positions, his shirt rippling over taut muscles. For the first time, she noticed the embroidery on the left chest: Detective Division, Copper Lake Police Department. Suddenly she realized why his wrinkled brow and concerned tone had been familiar: he shared more than that with her favorite television federal agent. Shaved head, muscular body, quick grin, aura of danger, devastatingly handsome.
Sighhh. Not for her, but still sighhh...
“Would you like a tour of downtown Copper Lake? Depending on whom I channel, it could take as little as ten seconds.”
She reached for her iced coffee and miscalculated, almost knocking the cup over. Catching it quickly, she looked up, meeting his gaze. “Channeling?”
Cocoa brown eyes, grin, shrug that reminded her of a big lazy cat. “Channeling, copying. Like my boss. ‘Coffee shop, church, old house. Square, memorials, old buildings. Ellie’s Deli, more old buildings. More that way, that way, that way.’” He gestured north, east and south.
The vague uneasiness stirred by his mention of channeling faded. “I take it your boss is a man of few words.”
“He was. Now that he’s got kids, he’s expanding his vocabulary. Now, I could also do Miss Lydia’s version of a tour. Her family’s been here for centuries—they built the mansion over there—and she knows the history of every building and pretty much every family in Copper Lake. She can remember seeing presidents in the town square when she was a little girl.”
“History is good,” Nev agreed. Her family had history, too, but they weren’t big on remembering it. Lima said it was people a person should value, not places, circumstances or events. Nev couldn’t figure out how to separate them. Didn’t growing up black in the South, with a grandmother who’d been a slave, do a lot to shape YaYa into the woman she was today? Hadn’t Pawpaw’s experiences in helping to break down race barriers in the army in World War II—harassment, prejudice, hatred and fear—affected who Daddy had become?
Hadn’t growing up with a father who adored her, a sister who was perfect and a mother who preferred that sister played some role in who Nev was?
“How long will you be here?”
“I don’t know. I’m pretty flexible.” As soon as his grin started, her face heated and she restated, “My schedule is flexible. So...” She took a long suck of coffee, savoring it. “Does it offend you if people call you police officer instead of detective?”
He stretched out his long legs, bumping hers, murmuring an apology. “Some of the people I work with take offense, yeah. It takes commitment to become a detective, and some people want the respect of the title. But me, nah. It took commitment to become a cop, too. Either title deserves respect in my opinion.” He took a long drink of his own. “In a lot of people’s opinion, neither does.”
“Is it what you always wanted to do?”
“Always. Are you doing what you always wanted to do?”
Once again she shifted on the metal chair. Doing what she always wanted? Not by any stretch of imagination. She was old-fashioned, Marieka said scornfully, because she’d always wanted to get married, have a bunch of kids and be happy. That was it.
Jobs didn’t matter; she’d held a variety of them and hadn’t hated any of them except waiting tables. Money didn’t matter. As long as they could pay their bills, that was enough. A husband she loved who loved her back, kids who grew up safe and hopeful and loved—that was her dream.
Aware that Ty was waiting for an answer, she shrugged. “I don’t think my job existed when I was a kid. I’m a virtual personal assistant.”
“So you work mostly online and do virtually everything your clients need?”
