Mona’s face did nothing to disguise her feelings about my outfit as I stepped into the Cold Montana Police Department for the second day in a row.
I’d had all sorts of grandiose visions about the outfits I should be wearing, but planning didn’t always translate into ease of execution.
“I know. Trust me, I know. I ordered some plain jeans off of Amazon yesterday as soon as I left the station, but they won’t be here until tomorrow. I can’t believe you don’t have same-day delivery. And the closest mall is two hours away!”
White silk, my blouse billowed around my midsection with a flirtatious drape where I’d tucked the front of it into my rhinestone-encrusted jeans. They just had tiny clusters every so often, but they weren’t the makings of a simple outfit. And, on top of it all, the same Zac Veeson coat. My brown suede ankle booties weren’t exactly backcountry, but the flat sole was at least practical.
Mona’s answering smile was downright comical. Overexaggerated and toothy in the middle, she was basking in my misery. “Welcome to Montana.”
The phone trilled its demand to be answered, and she held up one unmanicured finger toward me. Just as I nodded, a body-numbing wind rolled up my spine. The door had evidently opened behind me.
My smile bright and welcoming, I turned to greet the chief for the second morning in a row. Only, instead of wily eyebrows and an untucked shirt, I found Levi, clothed in a crisp, pressed uniform and shiny black shoes. He looked as handsome as the time I’d first laid eyes on him—if not better.
His eyes were pointed at my mouth, a tiny wrinkle forming in the skin between his eyebrows.
I spoke quickly even as my smile dimmed, trying to head off the confrontation before it came to pass. “Good morning, Levi.”
“Ivy.” His answer was a grunt. Nearly monosyllabic. But at least he wasn’t calling me a stuck-up bitch.
I struggled to find conversation for the first time in my life. The door, the ceiling, the floor, and my shoes—all of it became complex and inspection-worthy.
Oh, look, it’s my shoes. The same shoes I put on this morning. Wow, let’s keep looking at them for no apparent reason at all. Maybe they’ll get interesting soon…
I wasn’t accustomed to not knowing what to say. Normally, I could chat my ass off, ask interesting and insightful questions, and make people feel completely comfortable. But, apparently, when it came to Levi Fox, I only knew what to say when I was yelling.
Mona, bless her, interrupted our silent evasion. “Got a callout, Levi. It’s Joe Morris. He’s supposedly got a squatter on the property, and his wife says he just came in and got his shotgun.”
“Fucking hell,” Levi muttered with a shake of his head. “On it.” He didn’t acknowledge me at all before turning and shoving back out the door, moving to his cruiser in the back lot at a brisk clip.
Without even thinking, I went after him.
“Levi!” I yelled as he rounded the corner of the building. He didn’t slow, so I sped up. Salty, slushy gravel crunching under my boots, I ran as fast as I could without busting my ass.
He had the driver’s door open and was dropping into the seat when I finally caught up.
“Levi! Wait!”
“I gotta go, Ivy,” he said, his patience waning. “The man’s waving a shotgun around if you didn’t hear. We’ll have our meeting when I get back.”
I ignored his insinuation and used all of the breath I had left after the jog to demand, “Take me with you.”
His mouth turned down at the corners. “Fuck no.”
“Please,” I begged desperately, my hands shaking as I clasped them in front of me.
I wasn’t sure whether to blame it on the cold or the thirst for experience.
This—riding along to a real-life scenario—was exactly what I needed. I could have all the meetings in the world with as many police officers as would give me their time, but I needed to be out there in the field.
I needed to feel real fear and test out my ability to make split-second decisions. Only then would I be able to understand what Grace had gone through.
“I need this. I don’t need the stupid meeting where we talk and stare at each other uncomfortably for an hour. I need to know what it’s really like out there.”
He held my beseeching gaze for what felt like forever.
When the suspense finally ended, his grunt seemed mined from the deepest recesses of his self-control. “Get in. Quickly.”
I booked. Feet pounding, arms churning, I rounded the car as fast as my lungs would allow. If I thought I could have pulled it off, I would have jumped up and slid across the hood like an action hero.
I barely had my ass in the seat, my door not fully closed, when Levi slammed his foot on the gas, put a hand to my headrest, and backed up on a spray of gravel. Wisely, I didn’t bother to try to reach for the door as it swung out of my hand, and though it was fighting valiantly to be released, managed to keep my scream inside my throat.
The door situation righted itself, thankfully shutting closed as he pulled the shifter into drive and slammed his foot onto the gas again.
I glanced over cautiously, cataloging the focus on his face for future reference.
“So…uh…do you get calls like this a lot?”
“People take their property pretty seriously around here, Ivy. If you weren’t an out-of-towner, I would have spent all last night fishing buckshot out of my skin.”
The corner of his mouth lifted upward for the first time since he’d caught me in a lie, and I thought I might faint. Hand to God, he was the living, breathing, modern-day version of Adonis.
I had to ignore it.
A couple of days in and we’d been nothing but two left feet, tripping over one another so much we had no option but to drag the other down in a bid to survive.
Finally, I felt like I’d gotten some of my coordination back. Sure, he was making fun of me now, but I would take it. Anything that kept us from being at each other’s throats and got in the way of my being able to learn what I needed to about Grace Murphy.
And thinking he was attractive—or God forbid letting that fascination grow into wanting him—would undoubtedly take us right back down the spiral to hell.
He reached forward and flicked on the lights and siren with a sinewy, veined arm, and then took the first right at an alarming speed. When he came to the next intersection, a left was our fate.
He didn’t look to anything to guide him, and another question popped into my head. “I take it you know where Joe Morris lives?” Mona hadn’t given him an address or anything.
He nodded, the strong line of his jaw flexing with the motion. “I know where everyone lives in Cold.”
“Wow.” That seemed like a lot of information to keep up with, but he was already shaking his head without my even having to say anything to that effect.
“I’ve lived here all my life. Been a cop here for a decade. And there’s not a whole lot of turnover. Most of these people have lived on the property they live on now longer than I’ve been alive.”
People didn’t move? In LA, people were looking for bigger and better places on what seemed like a weekly basis. The idea that all of these people could be happy in the same place for the span of their entire life fascinated me—especially given the reason I was here in the first place.
And he’d been a cop for a decade? Wow. That meant he had to be in his thirties—depending on what he’d done for school, maybe even thirty-five. I wasn’t sure he’d react kindly to a question about his age, though, so I kept my ponderings to myself.
“Nobody took off when the Cold-Hearted Killer was here? What about after?”
“Talking time is over,” Levi announced as my body pushed into the door with the force of our turn into Joe Morris’s driveway. I wasn’t an expert in the town, I didn’t know where everyone lived, but the guy standing out in the front pasture with a shotgun pointed directly at another guy was a dead giveaway. “Stay in the car,” he ordered as we slid to a dramatic stop and the gear shifter slipped easily into park.
He didn’t give me time to agree or disagree. He moved so quickly it seemed like one second he was next to me, and the following, he was walking straight at the guy with the gun.
I strained my ears to hear what they were saying from inside the car, but the thing may as well have been a well-constructed voice-over booth. I couldn’t hear a damn thing.
Unacceptable.
First, in an attempt to follow orders, I searched the door panel for a button to put the window down. I found it, but when I pressed the button, it didn’t do anything. The car was still running; there hadn’t been enough time to shut it off, so I had to assume police cars came equipped with child locks on steroids for any and all controls not within the cabin of the driver himself.
Dejected, I focused back out the windshield, on Levi’s back—right as Joe Morris took the gun he had pointed at the squatter and turned it on Levi.
Something overcame me, boiling deep from the pit of my stomach and turning my throat raw. I didn’t hesitate, and I most certainly didn’t think.
Because if I had, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t have ended up with the gun pointed at me, wind whipping a sting into my nose as I yelled, “Stop!”
Just a minute ago, I’d been in the warmth of Levi’s police car, struggling to hear, and now, I was out in the cold, staring down the barrel of a shotgun with an angry Levi at my back. One positive, though—I could hear just fine.
“Ivy!” Levi growled. “Have you lost your goddamn mind?”
It wasn’t a ridiculous question. Fear and adrenaline pounded through my arms, the tips of my fingers tingling with the intensity, and for the first time in my life, I questioned whether my lack of impulse control was a bad thing. Up until this point, all of my rash decisions had only led to moments that changed my life for the better.
But this one had the potential to affect my life in a whole other way—by ending it.