Travis (Pelion Lake 1)

Maggie frowned, leaning over the diner counter where I sat at my regular seat and putting the back of her hand to my forehead. “You don’t feel feverish. Maybe you should go home. When was the last time you took a sick day?” She nodded at my new recruit, sitting next to me, shoveling Norm’s O’Brien potatoes into his mouth as if this might be the last meal he’d ever eat. “Spencer can handle things for one day, right, Spencer?”

Spencer nodded, but before he could speak and show us a mouthful of chewed food, I intervened. “No. I’m fine. Just something that needs to run its course.” The truth was, my stomach felt fine, but my appetite was still affected by the sour mood I’d been in since I’d walked in on my girlfriend in bed with another man.

The picture was burned across my retinas and there was a strange pinching feeling in my gut that wouldn’t recede.

Maggie studied me for a moment and despite being a grown man with a gun strapped to his hip, I almost squirmed under her perusal. “I heard you and Phoebe broke up.”

“Where’d you hear that?”

Maggie waved her hand. “Around.”

Around. Sometimes I hated living in a small town.

I took another sip of the now-cold coffee, nodding casually. “Things just ran their course.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Huh,” she said. “Just like that?”

I shrugged. “Relationships fail all the time, Mags. Just because you and Norm have been together since the ice age, doesn’t mean everything lasts as long.”

Maggie glanced back at Norm scraping grease off the griddle, the bald spot on the top of his head gleaming in the fluorescent lights, his large gut hanging over his belt. “It’s true you’re no Norm,” she said, turning back to me, and giving me a teasing wink. “But you do have your good points. You know I’m here if you need someone to talk to, right?”

“I do, Maggie. Thank you.” Maggie had always seen the good in me, even when I didn’t deserve it, and had tried her best to take up where my own mother left off. I felt a tightening in my throat and swallowed around it, tapping Spencer on his arm. “We should get going.”

“Yes, boss.”

“You don’t have to call me boss, Spencer. Travis is just fine.” Spencer bobbed his head. He was a good guy, just young and a little too eager to please, socially . . . challenged, and he could be so damned literal sometimes. But . . . he was the grandson of a couple in town, the Connicks, who owned a number of cottages on the lake, people I’d known all my life. I remembered Spencer as a kid, holding a toy police car in his hands and watching the now-retired chief stroll by in his uniform with a look of awestruck wonder on his face. When he’d applied to be an officer and I’d called and told him he was hired, I’d known I was granting a long-held dream. And it was obvious that Spencer had transferred the hero worship he’d held for the retired chief to me.

Spencer downed the last of his coffee, and I put some money on the counter, said a goodbye to Norm, and smiled at Maggie. “Be safe,” she called as the bell sounded over the door and we stepped out into the warm June day.

We turned into the lot where the cruiser was parked, almost colliding with someone. “Oh shit. Sorry, man. I wasn’t looking—”

The man stopped talking suddenly, his mouth hanging slack. I pulled back, my blood freezing, eyes narrowing when I saw who it was.

Him.

“Urrr . . .” he choked, his eyes darting from my face, to my gun, and back again as we stood at the side of the diner, staring at each other.

I smiled, a slow, cold tipping of my lips as I reached down and rested my hand on my weapon. I saw Spencer frown in my peripheral vision, stepping back to get a better view of the interaction, his own hand going to his weapon.

The guy—Easton—took a step back, his expression filled with surprised terror. “Listen, man, it wasn’t what you think.”

I tilted my head. “Really? So you weren’t fucking my girlfriend when I walked in on you two naked in her bed? You hadn’t seen the photographs on her nightstand of the two of us? You must have asked. Did she tell you about me? Did it make it more exciting?”

He swallowed. I could see by his expression that I’d hit the nail on the head. If anything, those pictures had sweetened the deal, upped the challenge. And then there was likely the fact that, because she’d had—past tense—a boyfriend, Phoebe wasn’t a girl who was going to demand anything of him after the deed was done.