in her life that she had put behind her.
As she made her way slowly out of the courtroom, a painful and humiliating thought flitted through her mind. Just because she remembered everything, down to the smallest detail of their short romance, didn’t mean that Zach did. All the promises he’d made, including the last, most important one, had been lies. So what made her think he remembered her at all?
MIDNIGHT, ALABAMA
Police Chief Zach Tanner wasn’t having a good day. It’d started too damn early. Getting a call in the middle of the night that Mr. Dickens’s cattle were roaming free wasn’t exactly murder and mayhem, but it was something he’d had to handle. By the time they’d been rounded up and Mr. Dickens had once again promised to get his fence repaired, it was long past dawn. Going home and grabbing a couple of hours’ sleep hadn’t been feasible. Now, five cups of coffee later, he was looking at the graffitied wall of Henson’s Grocery, one of the oldest stores in Midnight. Other than the misspellings, Zach couldn’t help but think that it actually looked better this way. Old man Henson had put off painting for years, but thanks to some idiots with nothing better to do, it looked like the old store was finally going to get a face-lift.
“What’re you aiming to do about it, Chief?”
The sarcastic tone of his last word bounced off Zach with no impact. He and old man Henson had a past, and no matter how many years went by, neither of them would ever forget it. Which was just damn fine with Zach. Torturing the old bastard with his presence was, in its own way, a reward in itself.
Still, as chief of police, it was his duty to serve and protect even holier-than-thou useless pricks like Henson. Problem was, with only three deputies in a town of fourteen hundred people, Zach had learned early that certain issues couldn’t get as much attention as he would have liked. But this type of vandalism would continue until either the culprits were caught or they found something else to occupy their time.
“I’ll put one of my deputies on it, but be warned, there’s not a lot of evidence here. Might want to reconsider those security cameras we talked about.”
Brown tobacco juice splattered, landing barely three inches from Zach’s boot. Henson wiped his tobacco-filled mouth with his sleeve and snarled, “Chief Mosby would’ve made this his number one priority.”
That was because Mosby hadn’t been above taking a few under-the-table bribes to help him choose his priorities. Henson had made it more than clear that he expected to be able to continue that service. At first Zach had laughed in his face, amazed at the asshole’s audacity. That’d pissed the old man off but good. Then, when Zach had turned him down with the not-so-subtle warning that bribing an officer of the law was illegal, the man had been furious. Since then, Henson’s hostility had become even more blatant.
Letting the man rile him wasn’t worth Zach’s time or energy. “I’ll have Deputy Odom come by in a few minutes.” With that, Zach turned away, ignoring Henson’s mutterings.
He and Henson had never been on good terms. He hadn’t known for a long time why that was and could have lived quite happily without ever knowing. Zach had just assumed that poor people pissed the man off. Of course, it hadn’t helped that a teenaged Zach had been caught twice stealing food. The fact that it’d been from the dumpster in the back of the grocery store hadn’t mattered to Henson. Until the trash collectors came by, that “gal-derned garbage in those dumpsters was rightfully his and nobody had a right to touch it.”
He slid into his police cruiser, cranked the engine, and headed back to his office. The pile of paperwork on his desk wasn’t something he was looking forward to, but it had to be done. When he’d agreed to become police chief, he’d made a commitment to do the best job he could.
Coming back to Midnight was only supposed to be a temporary thing for Zach. After two tours in Iraq and one in Afghanistan, he’d left the army with no real clear idea of what he wanted other than peace and solitude. He’d taken the time to finish up his degree and then had returned home with one specific goal in mind: sell the old house for what he could get out of it and then leave