Can't Hurry Love (Sunshine Valley #1) - Melinda Curtis Page 0,3

her, he’d have to come and get her.

And give her some answers while he was at it.

* * *

Females plus fire often equaled trouble.

When Sheriff Drew Taylor arrived on the scene, he’d done a three-point inspection of the female with the fire—no weapons, no tears, nothing out of the ordinary in Lola Williams’s appearance. In short, this wasn’t shaping up to be trouble.

Drew knew all about women and trouble. He was a single dad to a precocious six-year-old girl and the big brother to four younger sisters. When Drew was ten, his dad had seen the pink writing on the wall and hit the road, sentencing his son to a life of hair bows, chatterboxes, and long bathroom queues.

Granted, that made Drew qualified to raise a little girl alone but experience told him a woman’s appearance was sometimes more important than her outward expressions of emotion. When his sisters had sunk into Woe-Is-Me mode, they’d called for pizza and raided Drew’s dresser for his old sweatpants. The healing power of an elastic waistband and a pepperoni pie was amazing. When his sisters had reached Watch-Out-World mode, they’d donned their female battle gear (tight-fitting clothes, man-hunter makeup) and cut down anything in their path, including cheating boyfriends, backstabbing girlfriends, and well-meaning brothers.

Contrary to what Florence in dispatch had reported, there wasn’t a wild woman setting fire to the neighborhood on Skyview Drive. Lola hadn’t been dressed to wallow or wound. Her makeup had been as natural as her sun-kissed brown hair. In shorts and a pink tank top, she’d been dressed to wash her car or work in the garden, not eat her way through a pizza or confront her dead husband’s lover with a weapon.

Drew aimed a chemical stream at the small flames in Lola’s driveway, vowing that Becky wouldn’t fall in love until she was thirty. By then, he’d be fifty-five and ready to sit back and enjoy being a grandpa. He wouldn’t have to worry about the women in his life—Becky, his sisters, his ex-wife.

My ex-wife…

Drew gripped the fire extinguisher as if it were an empty, crushable beer can.

He looked around. The widows watched him in patient silence. A gentle breeze rustled bright-green leaves on trees up and down Skyview Drive. Two houses down, Joni Russell watered the daisies in her window boxes. This was Sunshine. Quiet, sleepy Sunshine.

Keeping the peace in Sunshine was easy compared to keeping the peace in Afghanistan, New York, or a household with four sisters. Shoot, worry about his siblings had kept him up more nights than worry about his own kid. The twins were finishing college over in Boulder, occasionally running out of money, occasionally posting heart-stopping activities on social media. Eileen was twenty-seven and worked at the local animal shelter. She had a habit of bringing home strays she couldn’t handle. The last stray had two legs and a southern accent. And then there was Priscilla, who was about Lola’s age. She was newly divorced and pushing the boundaries of her newly found freedom, acting more like the twins than a woman of twenty-nine.

Sometimes Drew wanted to arrest his sisters for their own good. The absolute last thing he needed was to add Lola Williams to his Watch-Over list, which was already filled with his mother, his four sisters, and his daughter.

He exhaled and changed his grip on the fire extinguisher.

“Drew Taylor.” Mims gave him a stern look she’d perfected while running the elementary school cafeteria. “You are not going to arrest Lola.”

Having no intention of reading his landlord her rights, Drew set the safety on the extinguisher.

“She didn’t hurt anyone.” That came from Bitsy, the protector of the underdog. She’d recently retired from working in customer service at a cable company’s call center in Greeley, where rumor had it she’d comped irate customers more free services than were listed in the coupon book the high school band sold every year.

“We’re here to take Lola under our wing.” Clarice shook her walking stick at him, tottering only slightly on those two new knees she’d gotten six months earlier. “What that girl needs is a life, not a police record.”

“Oh.” As in Oh no. Drew had a sudden burst of sympathy for Lola.

The Sunshine Valley Widows Club did good work, but most of its members were old and set in their small-town ways. For local charities, they held fund-raisers as traditional as bake sales and as politically incorrect as kissing booths at the fair. Tonight, the Widows Club was holding a bachelorette