by JoAnn Ross
CHAPTER ONE
October
Washington State coast
AIDEN MANNION WATCHED the fishing boats chug along beneath a gray quilted sky from the deck of his family’s vacation house. Out on the horizon a storm was brewing, bringing to mind all the ships that had sunk into the sea off this wild, rugged Washington coast. Including ancestors from the Harper side of his family.
Life, as he knew firsthand, could be dangerous. Anything could happen. You could be hit by a taxi while sightseeing in Times Square. Run into a tree headfirst while shushing down a diamond run pretending you were Bode Miller. Or you could be a cop who got up one morning, headed off to work on the joint police/Homeland Security Department detail you’d been assigned to and, out-of-the-blue, end up in the ER getting a slug dug out of your thigh while your partner was being wheeled off to the morgue.
He took a long drink of coffee. It was black and thick and sweet. It was his thirtieth day waking up without a hangover. “Which has to be an improvement, right?”
“Too bad no one’s around to give you your one month chip.” The dry response had him realizing he’d spoken out loud. It also made him laugh for the first time in a very long while.
“You always were a smart ass.”
“Takes one to know one, dude,” his former partner shot back with that flash of grin that was the last thing Aiden remembered seeing before all hell broke loose. When Bodhi Warfield’s ghost had first appeared on the ferry headed to Honeymoon Harbor, Aiden had thought he was a hallucination. That was weird because, after attending Bodhi’s funeral—with all the pomp and ceremony that occurred when a police department lost one of their own—he’d purposefully waited until he’d gotten here to the coast house to start drinking. Having witnessed too many drunk driving deaths during his LAPD patrol days, no way was he going to risk causing another.
But after drinking himself to oblivion for the first several weeks and, waking up with a hangover the size of Mt. Olympus, he’d come to the conclusion that being a drunk was getting boring. So, he’d just stopped. Cold turkey. The same way he’d quit the cops. But Bodhi had continued to hang around.
“Don’t ghosts get cold?” Aiden asked.
Bodhi glanced down his California beach-tanned chest at the Hawaiian print board shorts he was wearing instead of the leather biker dude duds he’d been wearing when killed. “Surfers are too chill to get cold,” he said.
They’d been an odd couple. The laid-back surfer—who’d changed his name from Broderick to that of Patrick’s Swayze’s surfer bank robber character from Point Break, then had joined the cops mostly to piss off his liberal psychologist professor parents—and the Marine turned vice cop who still carried an edge from his bad boy days. But that difference had made them a great team. Like Starsky and Hutch. Men in Black’s Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones. Lethal Weapon’s Murtaugh and Riggs, and Miami Vice’s Crocket and Tubbs, who even Bodhi had reluctantly admitted would win on the chill factor.
“But hey,” his partner would say, whenever the topic would come up, “they were just actors playing roles. We’re the real deal, Mannion.”
And they had been. Until they weren’t.
“Someone’s coming,” Bodhi said.
Apparently death gave you preternatural senses, because it was another few seconds before Aiden heard the car rumbling across the bridge over the creek, fed by glacier waters that would soon be icing up for the winter.
The house had been built on the cliff where the mighty Pacific—ill named, Aiden always thought, since there was nothing peaceful about it—constantly warred with the land. The towering sea stacks offshore, many with trees still growing atop from when they’d been part of the mainland, were proof that wind and water would always eventually win.
Built for a whaling captain nearly a hundred years ago, the house was two stories with a widow’s walk around the top. Seth Harper, who’d taken over his family’s construction company (which had originally built the house) and was engaged to Aiden’s sister, Brianna, was the only person, other than his immediate family, who knew what had gone down the night Bodhi had lost his life. The night Aiden had lost his way.
The driveway was long and lined with towering, shaggy Douglas fir trees. He walked around to the front of the wraparound deck and watched the familiar SUV come into view.
“It’s your dad,” his partner said, without even bothering to look up.
Seems to be.” He knew his parents worried, but he’d reminded them that he was no longer that wild ass boy who’d gone off to war. All he needed was a little time to adjust. Something he could do better on his own. During their twice a week check-in phone calls, he hadn’t shared the fact that he wasn’t exactly alone.
“He’s bringing change.”
“And you know that how? What, is my life written down on some big Life and Times of Aiden Mannion board somewhere?”
Aiden had been raised Catholic, but life had turned him a hard core agnostic. Had it not been for his former partner’s ghost showing up, he would’ve gone full-out atheist, but maybe there was something to the life after death thing, after all.
Unfortunately, every time he tried to pry some details about the afterlife from Bodhi, he’d only get a shrug and the response that it wasn’t his place to tell, but not to worry, it wasn’t boringly pastoral and the music was a helluva lot cooler than just harp players.
That was encouraging. Not that Aiden was in any hurry to find out for himself. He’d assured his mom that yeah, he might have issues. But she didn’t have to worry about him being suicidal. Part of him wondered if his imagination had recreated his partner to help him overcome the gut wrenching guilt that in the beginning, had hung over him like a cold, wet shroud. If that was the case, it seemed to be working, so he wasn’t going to dig too deeply into the question.
He watched his father park the SUV and climb out with a cooler that Aiden knew was filled with meals his mom had cooked. She’d sent John Mannion out with a similar cooler last week. And every week since Aiden had arrived back in Washington.
“You don’t have to keep coming all the way out here,” he greeted his dad. “The freezer has enough food for any army.”
“You know your mother. She believes in the food pyramid. Which is why she sneaks green stuff into her dishes. I also picked up a pizza at Luca’s.”
“Loaded?”
“Is there any other kind?” John carried the cooler past Aiden and Bodhi and into the kitchen. “If you moved back to town, you could have all the pizza you wanted. And Luca won’t make you put vegetables on it.”
“I’m happy where I am.”
Sure, he was drifting, okay, maybe stalled, but what was wrong with that? Wasn’t a guy entitled? He had, after all, been shot. Maybe not that badly, but it should give him a pass.
“I went to mom’s birthday party. And that wedding,” he pointed out.
“Three months ago. And you only went to the wedding because your sister guilted you into it because her fiancé, who used to be your best friend’s mother had come back from Yellowstone Park to officiate.”
It had been hard enough to sober up enough to drag himself out to the family Christmas tree farm just out of Honeymoon Harbor for his mother’s birthday celebration, but at least that had been just family—who, except for his grandfather, who seemed to have lost his conversational filter—had treated him with kid gloves.
Then Brianna had taken him out to the barn, supposedly to show him all that had been done to fix it up for summer theater companies while he’d been away, and to tell him how she and Seth Harper were trying to decide whether to have their next year’s summer wedding here in the barn or in the garden of her bed and breakfast, Herons Landing.
“And speaking of weddings,” she’d mentioned offhandedly, “Seth mom’s going to officiate Kylee and Mai’s ceremony tomorrow.”
“You mentioned that, too”
“You should come.”
“Why? Kylee was yours and Zoe’s friend. I barely knew her. And I’ve never even met Mai.”
“In the first place, you can’t hide away like a hermit forever. In the second place, you should go because you’ve been ignoring my fiancé, who used to be your best friend, and it’s not like an hour or so of socializing with a few old friends is going to kill you. And third—” she ticked the reasons off on fingers tipped in a turquoise polish that reminded him of the Caribbean”—”we’re all worried about you, Aiden. Including Seth. And me.”
“You’re playing the Catholic guilt card,” he’d grumbled.
She grinned, looking not the least bit guilty. “It’s my superpower.”
And so, unable to say no, he’d caved. And while it had admittedly been good to talk with Seth, it still weirded him out thinking about his best friend and his sister having sex. Unfortunately, Brianna hadn’t warned him that Jolene Wells would also be there. That was probably because if his sister had no way of knowing about his and Jolene’s past.
“You sure have a lot of secrets for a guy who always came off so uncomplicated,” Bodhi said. Aiden glanced over at his father, who, after putting the pizza on the center of the table, had begun loading up the refrigerator. Fortunately, he didn’t appear to hear a thing. That meant Aiden’s ghost, hallucination, or imagination, was a private one.
Aiden followed his dad to the kitchen and got out some paper plates and napkins. “It hasn’t been that long,” he belatedly responded to his dad’s comment.
“Four months.”
Four months, one week, and five days, he thought. There had admittedly been those lost weeks when he’d first arrived.
“I need your help,” his dad said as he popped the top on two bottles of beer.
“I’m not drinking.”
“Good for you. This is a nonalcoholic winter ale your brother made.”
“Because nothing says I’m an alcoholic like drinking a non-alcoholic beer.”
“Or it could say, I’m a smart guy who wants to keep my wits about me while the morons around me are getting plastered,” John Mannion suggested in that deceptively mild tone that somehow possessed as much power as Aiden’s former drill instructor’s shouts. “Why don’t you withhold judgement until you taste it?”
Shrugging, Aiden took the bottle, tipped it to his lips, and swallowed. But not before rolling it around in his mouth. He may not be an expert, but he’d drunk enough beer over his lifetime to recognize good stuff when he tasted it.
“This is really great.” Good enough if you gave it to a guy without a label, he might not realize it was alcohol free.
“Can you imagine Quinn doing anything that wasn’t?”
No. Quinn Mannion always been the quintessential perfect eldest child. A real life Eagle Scout with the badges to prove it, along with being head altar boy at St. Peter the Fishermen’s Church, had made him a hard act to follow. Which was why Aiden hadn’t even tried, instead going for a gold medal in rebellion.
Quinn had been making big bucks as a corporate lawyer in Seattle when he’d up and quit, come home to Honeymoon Harbor, and started a brewery and pub, following in the footsteps of their ancestor Finn Mannion, who’d been forced to shutter the Mannion family pub during prohibition. The beer was as perfect as everything else Quinn did. It was dark, with an honest-to-god beer flavor that carried a hint of seasonal spices.
“He makes a summer version, too,” John said. “It’s got a citrusy taste that’s great for cookouts. It got a lot of buzz locally, so he’s going regional with it next summer. This is the first season, but I suspect it’s going to do as well as his Captain Jack Sparrow.”
The beer had won a bunch of awards, Aiden knew. It had also made it down to L.A., where it was strictly a draft beer, because, according to Quinn, most distributors and bars kept kegs cold all the time, allowing for a consistent flavor advantage. The kegs also protected the beer from light. And proving that Quinn hadn’t exactly given up capitalism when he’d walked away from his big bucks lawyer gig, he’d told Aiden that kegs had bars buying and sell a lot more than in bottles.
“Damn, I miss beer.” Bodhi heaved a huge sigh and shook his sun-bleached hair “And pizza. It’s a bummer having to live vicariously through you, since you’ve never exactly been Mr. Party Guy, but the past few months have been brutal.”
“You could leave,” Aiden shot back. Then cringed, when his dad, who’d been dishing up slices of pizza glanced up. Damn.
“I didn’t mean that the way it sounded,” he backtracked. “I meant you didn’t have to hang around to keep me company just because mom’s worried about me.”
“Parents worry. It comes with the job. But this is a busy time, getting ready for the Christmas tree selling season, so I’m only staying long enough to eat a slice of pizza and offer you a proposition.”
“Okay.”
While his mother could be a velvet steamroller you could see coming from a mile away, his dad had stealth ninja skills that had you agreeing to something before you knew what had hit you. Like that judge who’d been tempted to throw up his hands and send Aiden to juvie. But without attempting to use the power of his office, that John Mannion had far too much integrity to ever try, he’d deftly worked out a deal where, so long as Aiden stayed out of trouble for the last two months of high school, he could enlist in the Marines when he turned eighteen and have his juvenile crime spree record expunged.
Because his father had gone to bat for him, risking his own reputation, Aiden had started growing up on the spot by keeping to his part of the deal. Later the Marines, as tough as his Afghanistan deployment had been, had proved to be the best thing that had ever happened to him.
They sat at the table where he and all his brothers had carved their initials, to the feigned consternation of his mother. The fire in the kitchen fireplace, that before electricity had made its way to this upper part of the Olympic Peninsula Coast, had served as both a heater and oven, added a wood-scented comfort. Bodhi was sitting on the edge of the counter, tanned legs swinging.
“Axel Swenson had a stroke,” John Quinn broke the comfortable silence.
“That’s too bad.” Aiden and the Chief of Police had had an adversarial relationship, which, he had to admit, had all been on him. “How is he?”
“Okay. There are some memory issues that may or may not clear up. And lingering weakness in his right arm, but he’s going to undergo therapy for that.”
“That’s good to hear.” Brianna had called and told him that their grandfather Harper had had a TIA, and while Jerome Harper continued to insist all was fine, Aiden knew his mother worried about her father more than she let on. Although he knew enough not to talk about this with his grandpop, Aiden hated the idea of losing the gruff old family patriarch.
“Yeah. Axel might have a chance of coming back to work, but his wife put her foot down. She wants him to focus on getting better, then she’s booked that cruise to Alaska he’s been promising her for the entire forty-five years of their marriage.”
“Sounds about right.” And a lot like Seth’s parents taking off to see the country in a motorhome. Apparently Boomers aged into gypsies. But not his parents. He couldn’t imagine them ever leaving the farm they’d gotten married on. Built a house and raised four sons and a daughter on.
“Here it comes,” Bodhi warned.
“I’d like to see those glaciers before they’re all gone, myself,” his dad said, “Maybe your mom and I can book one of those cruises next year. After the new trees are planted.
“I’ll bet mom would like that.” He couldn’t remember the last time his parents had taken a real vacation, other than a few days here at the coast house.
His dad took another pull on the brown bottle with the snow-flaked fir tree on the label. “The thing is, it’s going to be hard to find someone to fill Axel’s shoes.”
Bang! The damn ninja star hit its mark.
“No.”
John lifted a brow, but didn’t bother to pretend not to know that Aiden had jumped a step ahead. “Why don’t you just hear me out?” he suggested. “I did bring pizza. And beer.”
“What would mom say if she knew you’d stooped to bribery?
“As it happens, we’re on the same page about this. Well, except for maybe the triple meat on the pizza. Which she needn’t know about.”
His mother had always been into healthy eating before farm to table became a concept. Her one exception was her award winning fried chicken that had been passed down through generations of Harpers before her becoming a Mannion by marriage.
“My lips are sealed.”
“Mine, too, unfortunately,” Bodhi moaned. “That Italian sausage would be making my stomach growl.” He put a hand on his buffed up abdomen. “If I had one.”
It was all Aiden could do not to roll his eyes. While he liked pizza and burgers as much as the next guy, Bodhi had always worshipped in the church of carnivores. With fries and onion rings on the side. Their woman captain, a forty-something vegan who was into yoga, had always sworn Bodhi’s arteries must look like the Pacific Coast Highway at rush hour and claimed he was a walking heart attack waiting to happen.
Unfortunately, Bodhi hadn’t lived long enough to test the validity of her accusation.
“I’m not talking about a long-term commitment,” his father said. “Unfortunately Axel had his stroke on the night we were at Mannions, celebrating his twenty-fifth anniversary in the job.”
“He could’ve taken that as a sign it was time to get out of law enforcement,” Aiden said.
“There is that. My point is the position is open and we need someone. Now.”
“You’re the mayor. Appoint someone. Anyone but me.”
“You’re the only viable candidate. Don’t get me wrong, we’ve got some good young deputies, but they’re green. We’re also a small town with a small budget, so the others who have more experience under their belt are either volunteers or retired from other cities and don’t want to get back into full time police work.”
“I fully appreciate their thinking.”
“This isn’t the same as what you were doing in California,” his father said. “Instead of working the rough streets chasing down bad guys, you’d mostly be helping out Honeymoon Harbor citizens.”
Previous generations of Mannions had been doing exactly that since their arrival on the Olympic peninsula, though he was the only police officer in the family that he knew of. The tallest building in town, discounting the clock tower, was the three-story gray town hall built in 1876 by one of Seth Harper’s ancestors. The bronze plaque on the side of the building named Finn Mannion as mayor. The same position his dad had held for years. Partly, he’d say, because no one ever wanted the unpaid job, that kept anyone from running against him.
“Take it from me, any streets can be rough these days,” Aiden said.
“Your dad obviously doesn’t watch Dateline,” Bodhi said. “Hell, if you watch that show enough, you’d never leave your house”
Aiden bit back the smile, not wanting his dad to think he was smiling at the idea of Honeymoon Harbor’s former bad boy playing Andy Griffith for the Pacific Northwest’s version of Mayberry. His mother used to claim that just because his name meant he’d been born from fire, didn’t mean he needed to be constantly setting them at every opportunity. He’d admittedly been the family black sheep, a wildling who’d constantly rebelled at what he’d viewed as the constraints put on him growing up with the town’s mayor as his father and a high school principal mom.
He routinely got into fights, could have papered the wall of the bedroom he’d shared with his brother Burke with parking tickets, and had once gotten caught TP-ing the house of a guy who’d stood up his teenage sister Brianna for the Spring Fling.
Luckily, he seemed to have inherited whatever family gene had made his uncle Mike the Mannion family charmer, and Aiden would have been the first to admit that he’d talked his way out of more trouble than a lot of guys would have gotten away with. But even his family name and charm came screeching to an end when he swiped a twelve-pack of Coors from the back of a delivery truck outside Marshall’s Market. That had caused the judge to issue his ultimatum and give seventeen-year-old Aiden a choice: the military after graduation, or he could leave the courtroom and go straight to juvie.
“The city council approved me hiring you this afternoon.”
Given his former reputation, showed how desperate they were. “Good for them. Now you can go back and tell them to come up with another candidate because I’m not interested.”
“We’re not meeting again until next month. Are you suggesting the town go without a police chief while we’re doing a hiring search?”
“You could always contract with the county sheriff’s department.”
“They’re good people,” John allowed. “But although Honeymoon Harbor has always been the county seat, we value our independence and prefer to run our own town.”
Which, as mayor, his dad had always done well, while managing to handle expanding growth with environmental concerns. “Even if I were to consider it, which I’m not,” he said quickly, holding up a hand, “the operations I worked in L.A. weren’t play-by-the-book deals. I spent a lot of time undercover, that definitely didn’t involve playing with others.”
Other than his partner, who’d always had his back. “How do you know I even have leadership skills?”
“You know, I watched a documentary on the History Channel last week,” his dad said mildly, as he appeared to sidetrack the conversation. But Aiden knew that he was just buying time to set up another Ninja attack. “How, since 1775, Marines have embodied our country’s standards of courage, esprit, and military prowess. You may have taken off the uniform, Son. But you’ll always be a United States Marine. There isn’t anyone who’d be better.”
“He’s got you there, dude,” Bodhi chimed in again. “Besides, now that you’re not drinking yourself into a stupor trying to get over misplaced survivor’s guilt, you’re going to need something else to do. I gotta tell you, dude, I’m getting cabin fever hanging around here.”
Aiden hated to admit it, but they both had a point. Now that he was sober, he was beginning to get bored. And restless. And there was also the fact that he owed his dad. Without this isolated coast house to crash in when he’d gotten out of L.A., he wasn’t sure how far off the rails he might’ve gone.
“How long are we talking?”
“Well, ideally, you’d settle in and like the job—”
Aiden crossed his arms. “How. Long?”
“If you find you don’t feel like the job’s a good fit for you, only until we find a replacement. Say, sometime mid-February?”
“That’s six months.”
“He can do math, too,” Bodhi said.
“Why don’t you sleep on it?” his dad suggested. Then, savvy politician that he was, he turned the conversation to the Seahawks chances of making the Super Bowl while they finished off the pizza.
“Having been a detective in a previous life, I happened to have noticed that you failed to mention a salient fact,” Bodhi said as they stood in the doorway, watching Honeymoon Harbor’s ninja disguised as mild-mannered mayor drive back down the tree-lined road toward the coast highway that would take him along the Strait of Juan de Fuca to Honeymoon Harbor.
“Which would be?” But Aiden knew exactly what he was referring to.
“That the guns for drug deal we were on was going to be your last one. You were getting out and transferring to the youth gang suppression unit.”
The unit had been established to try to keep kids from turning to gangs in the first place, so cops like him and Bodhi wouldn’t have to be re-arresting them. And it would hopefully save the lives of the kids, innocent bystanders, and police officers.
“That was the plan.”
“After the clusterfuck, you were also offered a police shrink and paid leave to get your head back together.”
“I didn’t want either one.”
He’d already been on the brink of burnout. That night had continued to play through his mind and pushed him over the edge into the deep dark pit he’d finally begun to crawl his way out of. But he hadn’t done it alone. Because damn if somehow Bodhi hadn’t shown up as backup.
“Would you rather have ended up being the dead guy?” his partner asked.
“What the hell kind of question is that?” But Aiden knew. And yeah, given a choice, he would’ve willingly changed places and been the one having “Amazing Grace” played by a kilt-wearing, bagpipe-playing homicide detective at his gravesite.
“You always talked about how your father’s spent years serving your hometown. And how that big brother of yours is such a boy scout. But guess what, dude? You’ve got the same blood running in your veins. You may have joined the Marines because your only other choice at the time was juvie, but we’ve dealt with enough kids back in the ‘hood to know when a basically good teenager is acting out. Which you definitely must have been to get the judge to force you off that dangerous path everyone thought you were headed down. But the deal is, deep down inside you’re a standup guy. The kind who’d stand up for your fellow jarheads—”
“You weren’t there.”
“I didn’t need to be. I’ve watched you in action. It was like you had that protect and serve motto tattooed over your heart. How many funerals of gangbangers and their victims did you go to?”
Aiden shrugged. “I’ve no idea.”
But he did. Because every damn one of them was embedded in his mind. He went to the funerals of the teen bangers, not just to watch for the killer to show up, that happened more times than you’d think, but also in respect of their friends and families who’d loved them. The same with the victims, but those had been harder, because many had been so damn innocent. Like the toddler shot sleeping in the tub—the one place her mom thought she’d be safe—during a drive-by shooting at the wrong house.
“Getting back to my question, would you have rather have had your parents burying their son in that flag draped casket instead of mine?”
“That’s an impossible choice.” Struggling out of the quicksand pit of despair those memories triggered, Aiden opened another bottle of the winter ale and wished he hadn’t dumped all the real stuff down the drain thirty days ago.
“Aren’t you glad it wasn’t your choice to make? Or mine either? Life’s out of our hands, dude. All you can do is ride the wave you get, and stay upright as long as you can. Then, if you’re lucky enough to survive the wipeout, then you get back on the board and wade out into surf again. No one makes it through alive, Mannion. And to quote the great Mark Foo, ‘It’s not tragic to die doing something you love.”
“Isn’t Foo the guy who died surfing? “Although Bodhi had a degree from UCLA in philosophy, of all things, mostly all he’d ever talked about was someday quitting the cops and joining the pro surfing circuit.
“Yeah. He bought it on his first ever session at the Mavericks Big Wave competition at Half Moon Bay. That made it kind of a sucky omen, but he wouldn’t have wanted to go out any other way.”
“So you’d rather have drowned than gotten shot?”
Tanned shoulders shrugged. “It’s six of one, half a dozen of another. I got the same rush from chasing bad guys down a dark alley as I did doing barrels in shallow water.”
Aiden had learned that surfing move was more dangerous than in high water because—not that he’d ever intended to try it himself—sand apparently was like concrete when you hit it, which left more than a few surfers with broken necks.
“You never really loved being a big city cop,” Bodhi pressed his case. “It was too impersonal. That’s why you went to all those damn funerals. To make a connection. But, bro, those were some really effing painful connections.”
Aiden didn’t answer. There was no need. Sometimes he figured he’d gotten more than a lifetime of violence in Afghanistan, which was why he’d only lasted six months on the SWAT team before asking for a transfer. SWAT had felt too much like war.
The Gang and Narcotics unit working with Homeland Security had been just as bad, triggering nightmares he wouldn’t classify as full-blown PTSD, but had made him so edgy he couldn’t stop wondering if maybe he had slipped up somehow that night Bodhi was killed. Clusterfuck, indeed.
Hell. Maybe his dad was right. Maybe playing Sheriff for a few months might not be such a bad thing while he figured out what to do with the rest of his life, now that drinking his way through it hadn’t turned out to be a viable option.
“Women like men in uniforms.”
“So?”
“So, you could try it out on that redhead from the wedding.”
“Are you talking about the bride?” Who, if Bodhi hadn’t been able to tell from the two Wonder Women on top of the wedding cake, wouldn’t be the least bit interested in him.
“No, the other one. With the sexy streaked, auburn hair. The one you were pretending not to be scoping out. While she was doing her best to pretend to not notice you.”
“I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.” But he did. At the time he’d tried to tell himself that long, deep burgundy hair with the sunlit copper streaks was as impossible to miss as a flashing red stop light. The fact that it was tousled in a way that looked as if she’d just gotten out of bed had caused the numbness inside him begin to stir.
“Dude, there were so many sparks flashing back and forth between the two of you, I’m surprised that flowered arbor over those two brides didn’t burst into flames.”
“That redhead is Jolene Wells. She grew up here too. But I was a year older so we didn’t move in the same crowd.” That part was true. Especially since Jolene hadn’t belonged to any clique.
The mean girl queen bees had called her out for being trailer trash; the nerdy girls hadn’t seemed to notice anyone else around them, given that their noses were always stuck in books; and the girl jocks were always out on the field, doing their own, energetic athletic things. Being a guy, Aiden hadn’t missed noticing that sweaty, super fit girls could be hot and had dated enough to know that they could be every bit as energetic in the back of his truck as they were running, kicking soccer balls, shooting baskets, and slamming each other’s shins with field hockey sticks.
“Jolene and I barely knew each other.”
It was a flat-out lie.
Aiden had never forgotten those secret nights when they’d lain on the deck of his boat anchored in Serenity Cove, talking and looking up at the stars. There’d also been a lot of making out, that had, on more than one occasion required a cold shower when he’d gotten home, but as the daughter of a former teen mom, Jolene had had no intention of risking pregnancy. Also, although having sex wouldn’t have been illegal, he’d been trying to stay on the straight and narrow to avoid going to lockup, where the actual juvenile delinquents would probably love nothing more pounding on the guy whose mom had kept sending them to detention.
Granted, he’d screwed things up with her, but he’d been about to try to fix that until another fateful night years ago, when time and tide had literally shifted and...
Nope. Not going there.
“Okay. If you’re not really into her, which I’m still not entirely buying because there sure as hell was something going on there, the redhead wasn’t the only fox there. Like that cute brunette who had the sexy librarian glasses, pinned up ponytail, and pencil skirt thing going on.”
“Chelsea Prescott is a librarian.”
“So I overheard when she was talking about cataloging romance novels with your sister. Who’d have thought the Dewy Decimal system could be so sexy.”
“Life isn’t all surfing and sex.”
Aiden’s mind, distracted by an unbidden memory of Jolene Wells stripped down to a thong and a barely-there lace bra, had him automatically falling back on the line he’d repeated so many times. Just to yank his partner’s chain because they both knew that despite his laid-back attitude, Bodhi had been the sharpest, and most successful undercover cop in the unit. Aiden had often thought that was because bad guys never bothered to look beneath the stoner surfer act he was able to slide into like a wetsuit.
“Maybe life would be better if it was all about surfing and sex,” Bodhi shot back, on cue. “Seriously, though, Mannion, have you considered that part of your problem is that you need to get laid?”
“Maybe I don’t have a problem. And maybe I don’t need to get laid.” He hadn’t even thought about sex until that damn wedding. When a certain bed-head-tousled redhead started invading his dreams. Despite leaving him hot and bothered, they were an improvement over the nightmares that had driven him deep into the bottle.
“Said no guy ever. There’s also the fact that you also told me how your dad worked his tail off to save you from landing in corrections.”
It had been a long night on a stakeout down the street from a major gun dealer’s house, where they’d stunk up the car with takeout from a food truck.
“So?”
“So, maybe you owe him.”
“What, did you learn that guilt card from watching my sister while we were out at the farm?”
“It worked didn’t it? She got you to sober up for two days in a row so you could go to that wedding where you and the redhead connected.”
“We didn’t say a word to each other.”
Jolene had seemed as eager as he’d been to avoid any memories of that night. Not that he hadn’t thought about her. A lot. Especially when, during those long, lonely nights as a Marine sniper when he’d spent hours lying as still as a stone waiting for a shot and she’d filter through his mind. Memories of her pressed up against his body, even though she’d only ever let him get to second base, had helped keep him determined to get home alive.
On the way home from basic training, he thought back on all those rom-coms his sister made the family watch when it was her turn to pick a film for movie night and had, for a fleeting moment, considered holding up a boom box outside her window, like John Cusack in Say Anything.
Or, he could make a fool of himself by serenading his girl from the high school bleachers, like Heath Ledger, in Ten Things I Hate About You. He couldn’t overcome his fear of heights to climb up a fire escape in Pretty Woman because one, he didn’t have a fear of heights, and two, there was only one fire escape in Honeymoon Harbor, and that was on the courthouse.
With all those things going through his head, before leaving for basic training, after stupidly breaking up with Jolene, he’d been headed to the beach, where he’d heard she was at a party. That wasn’t his first choice, because if he was going to make a fool of himself, he’d rather do it in private. But if he could talk her into taking a walk, or even better, a midnight sail with him, he’d do whatever it took to make things right. Be honest about his feelings and, although it was selfish, and looking back, Aiden realized that they’d been way too young to be thinking about forever-afters, ask her to wait for him.
“I noticed the zone of silence between you both. Which only made it more obvious something was going on.”
“Maybe to you. Because you’ve got this ghostly superpower thing going on.”
“That’s true. But others noticed, too. Your sister and that red-haired bride were talking about it.”
“You eavesdropped on my sister?”
“I was just kind of hanging around and overheard the conversation. And by the way, you never told me your sister was so hot.”
“She’s marrying my best friend. And besides, a player who goes through women like tequila shots isn’t allowed to say anything about Brianna. Not even when you’re dead.” Aiden dragged a hand through his hair.
“For the record, my playing days are over and I didn’t say I wanted to do her. Sorry,” he said as a storm moved across Aiden’s face. “Wrong choice of words and I apologize if you thought I disrespected your sister.”
“I didn’t just think it. You damn well did. And if you were real, I’d have knocked you on your ass.”
“I was merely pointing out that she’s got a cool blonde Hitchcock vibe going for her. The kind that makes a guy want to muss her up a little.”
Which, dammit, had Aiden thinking of Seth messing her up on a regular basis. There probably wasn’t enough Clorox in the state to wash that image out of his head.
“Correction. You are not allowed to so much as think of my sister. Period.”
“Fine.” Bodhi lifted his hands. “Am I allowed to at least say that I didn’t exactly eavesdrop on she-who-must-not-be named, but the way she and her friend kept looking over at Jolene, then back at you, then her again, like they were watching a match at Wimbledon, was a clue that I wasn’t the only one curious about whatever backstory you two were hiding.”
“There is no story.”
Not one he’d ever tell. He suspected Jolene would be even less likely to. It was ironic, and crummy that by going to the damn wedding he hadn’t wanted to attend in the first place, he’d probably taken away from her enjoyment from it. Because if there was one person on the planet Jolene Wells undoubtedly never wanted to ever see again, it was him.
“What the hell are you doing here, anyway Bodhi?” It was not the first time he’d ask the question. He’d yet to get a decent answer.
“Hanging with you.”
“But why?”
“Why not?”
“Because if you’ve been sent here to earn your wings by getting my life back on track—”
“It’s a Wonderful Life was fiction. At least I think it was. But I’m not interested in getting any wings. And no, I wasn’t sent here to fix your life, as fucked up as it is right now.”
Bodhi frowned and scratched his blonde goatee, that he’d taken to wearing a few months before he’d gotten blown away by that AR-15. “Even though you might as well have been the guy who died, given how you’ve been hiding from life out here, I sure wouldn’t mind seeing you headed in a new direction that’ll make you happy.”
They’d been partners long enough that Aiden could tell when Bodhi was holding back. He also knew that for all his beach bum vibe, the guy was as tough as steel and impossible to drag anything out of until he was ready to share. So, he could wait him out. It wasn’t as if he had a helluva lot else to do with his days.
“You’re not real, either. You’re just a hallucination.” He’d gotten a concussion when a round of shots against his chest protector had knocked him off his feet onto the pavement. Head first. It made sense his brains would’ve been scrambled.
“Would a hallucination tell you to get laid? I bet you don’t even jack off in the shower.”
Okay. That was admittedly flat out pitiful. Even worse was he’d not only not been thinking about sex, he hadn’t missed it. Until that moment he’d spotted the one woman he had no business thinking about walking across a summer garden her full skirt swinging like a bell, and felt both his gut and groin tighten in a totally inappropriate way.
He’d wondered, at the time, if she’d come back to town for good. Although he’d originally planned to return to the house as soon as the vows were exchanged, instead of cutting out, he’d wandered through the crowd who’d lined up to get plates dished up by Italian chef Luca Salvadori, who’d catered the event, listening to gossip, that had been amped up to eleven by news of a home town girl being nominated for an Emmy.
Not being an awards show watcher, except for occasionally tuning in to the CMAs, Aiden hadn’t even known there was a category for makeup. But he was glad that Jolene had managed to escape Honeymoon Harbor, where she’d been a target for those spray-tanned, bleach-blond mean girls and a subject of what he knew to be bald-faced lies about sexual conquests from guys who would never deserve a girl like her.
Although Bodhi was right about them circling each other on the fringes of the gathering, there’s been a moment when their eyes had met, causing a rosy color to bloom in her cheeks. Undoubtedly from embarrassment at what had happened the last time they’d been together. That was enough to tell him that she didn’t want to have anything to do with him. For more than one reason.
Still, as he turned away, Aiden was glad she was doing well. Better than well. He had been surprised to hear from his sister that they’d both been in Los Angeles at the same time. And not only that, she’d been living in Beverly Hills. What would he have done if he’d known? Probably nothing because what would an Emmy-nominated makeup artist from the hills want with a cop living in a downtown studio apartment that had holes in the walls from where previous renters had hung pictures, and was surrounded by city infill construction.
He’d also been relieved to overhear Jolene’s mother tell his mom that right after the reception, Jolene was leaving for Ireland, to work on a miniseries. That meant their paths probably wouldn’t be crossing again.
Which, Aiden had attempted to convince himself, was a good thing.
Need to know what happens next? Preorder your copy of Snowfall on Lighthouse Lane wherever you buy your books!
Copyright © 2018 by JoAnn Ross