Will I kiss you again? Will I take you upstairs to my bed and put my mouth on every inch of your skin? My body stirred, despite the slightly melancholy nature of our conversation and the mood I’d been in since I’d made the drive home from my mother’s. Will I arrest Gage and lock him up for life? Throw away the key?
“Sure.”
She tilted her head. “Why do you drive all the way over from the other side of the lake to work out at that snotty club?”
“That snotty club? The one that hired you?”
She gave a half-hearted eye roll. “I’m temporary help.” She paused. “It just seems like it’s a long way to go when you live—usually anyway—and work in Pelion. Don’t they have clubs or gyms there?”
I shrugged. “Yeah, but the club in Calliope is the best.”
But that felt off. It felt like I was lying . . . to her . . . to myself. Especially after I’d just thought about how my family name was often said in contemptuous tones by Calliope residents. So why did I make the thirty-minute drive to the exclusive club when I could have worked out in Pelion? Why did I frequent the restaurants on the other side of the lake? Was it because—as I’d told myself—I wanted something of my own? Something that didn’t have Archer Hale’s fingerprints all over it? Even if I wasn’t a hundred percent welcomed or embraced?
Or was it something I hadn’t acknowledged?
Talk about straddling lines. Maybe it came easy to me as far as Haven was concerned, because I had plenty of practice.
Perhaps I’d grown used to straddling the line between the old life I’d lived when my mother owned Pelion and I was set to inherit it all—when I’d felt important and when Victoria Hale was the toast of the town—and my new life as a small-town chief of police who would never live the high life, at least not on the level I once had.
Certainly not on Gage Buchanan’s level.
But was there really anything wrong with still enjoying a few holdovers from the life I’d grown up with? The life that separated me from my brother? The one that was my own? Mine and no one else’s? Should I apologize for that?
“Just preference,” I answered her. Or habit? I scratched the back of my neck. Jesus. Maybe I had no idea who I really was. Still. Even after all this time.
She bit at her lip momentarily as if unconvinced by my answer. Why shouldn’t she be? Hell, I was unconvinced of it myself. “Any interest in running for political office?”
“Political office? Where did that come from?” I gave her an amused half-smile.
She shrugged but looked away. “Being chief of police is a government position. I just wondered if maybe you’d thought of running for other offices.”
I shook my head. “No. I enjoy law enforcement, but I have no desire to go into politics.”
She was silent for a moment, watching me. “Hmm,” she finally answered. “Then . . . what sort of life do you want, Travis? Where do you see yourself, say, in five years?”
Confusion overcame me. What sort of life do you want? Where do you see yourself? What she was really asking me was what were my dreams. No one had ever asked me that question. No one since my father. I’d told him I wanted to be a policeman like him, and I’d seen the light of pride in his eyes. I’d tried so hard to let him go because he’d let me go. But I’d held on to that look. I’d carried it with me, and I’d become the chief of police. I’d bought the land that was my father’s. I planned to settle there. If I had really let my father go like I’d convinced myself, why was I walking in his footsteps?
What sort of life do you want? My mother had certainly never asked me that question. And none of the women I’d dated—including Phoebe—had wondered. Hell, I’d never asked it of myself. I’d thought about marriage, kids. But after Phoebe’s betrayal, that particular idea had been lost. And yet I didn’t mourn it. At least . . . not with her. “I guess I have everything I want,” I said. “This is it. This is the dream.”
She studied me for several beats. “You don’t sound very sure of that.”
I chuckled. “What about you? What sort of life do you want?”