When Eli’s SUV finally shot past the restaurant like a belated bullet, Brynne gave a great, gasping sob of relief, and Miranda took her into her arms and hugged her hard.

“There, now, you see? That man of yours is just fine,” she said.

That man of yours.

Oh, no. No.

She could not love Eli Garrett. She simply could not.

Except, she did.

She’d loved Eli in high school—okay, kindergarten, but nobody needed to know that—she loved him now, and she’d loved him for all the years in between.

She was doomed.

“ABOUT TIME YOU got here,” Melba told Eli, when he reached the vacant lot behind Russ Schafer’s motel.

Melba was a tall, slender Black woman, with short dark hair and golden brown eyes. She’d met Dan when they were both in the navy and kept pace with him from basic training right on through the SEAL program. They’d married while Dan was in law school and Melba was walking a beat on the mean streets of a major city, had two kids—both girls—and split up when Dan graduated and entered the FBI.

Evidently tired of city life—and possibly because she needed a place to hole up and lick her wounds—Melba had eventually returned to the Creek, her hometown, with her young daughters, looking for work.

She’d purchased her late grandmother’s house, where she’d been raised, applied for a job with the sheriff’s department, gotten it, and had rapidly proved her worth. She was smart and fit and so far beyond competent that there wasn’t a word for it.

Once, when she and Eli were on a long, boring stakeout together, Melba, who usually played her proverbial cards close, had answered the question Eli had wanted to ask, but hadn’t.

“I don’t know that any woman ever loved a man more than I loved Dan Summers,” she’d said quietly, almost brokenly. “But nothing was ever enough for that man. He aced the SEAL program, so he had to get a law degree. That didn’t suit him—he graduated at the top of his class and had job offers from all over the country, you know—it wasn’t exciting enough. So when he joined the FBI, I figured it was time to get off that merry-go-round because he wasn’t ever going to stop reaching—reaching for the next thing. He couldn’t just settle down someplace, work a job he could be proud of, be a husband and a father. Oh, hell no, not Dan Summers! He was too big a hotshot for that.

“Well, I wanted to be a cop—that’s all I ever wanted to be, besides a wife and mother—and do right by the people I was hired to serve and protect. So I came on home to the Creek, and here I mean to stay.”