Mountain Shadows (Rosemary Mountain Romantic Suspense Book 1) by Nicole Gardner

Author:Nicole Gardner [Gardner, Nicole]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hawthorn Hill Books
Published: 2023-09-25T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Four

Greg

“Morning, Sheriff!” Ms. Hall’s cheerful voice rang out as I walked through the doors of our building. I stifled an inward groan. I wasn’t in the mood to talk cats today.

“Good morning,” I said, forcing a smile and hoping it didn’t come across as insincere.

“It’s going to be a good day today,” she said. “Can’t you just feel it in the air?”

“I hope you’re right.” My gut was saying the opposite.

I went straight to my office and closed the door, needing a minute to get my head on straight. Last night had been amazing. When that call came in, Janet had stepped in and had done something I never would have expected—she had taken care of me. It was a weird feeling, honestly. I was used to being the one to take care of everyone else. But last night, she had seen the weariness in me, and she had set about easing it.

Truth was, had she not been there, I would have gotten in my truck and headed straight for O’Malley’s to take care of things, even though Jackson was already on scene and had already handled it before he called me. He’d assured me he didn’t need me, but I would have gone anyway. Janet had told me that was silly, that I was obviously exhausted and needed to “put on my own oxygen mask first.” She made sure I ate, entertained me with funny stories of her own, then suggested we play a board game. We played until late in the night, with her giggling like a schoolgirl every time she beat me. As we played, we swapped life stories and got to know each other. And somehow, she eased the tightness in my soul in a way I wouldn’t have thought possible.

The woman was incredible.

We had grown up in completely different worlds. My family vacationed in the Hamptons, while Janet grew up in a trailer park in Arkansas. Night-and-day backgrounds, but I was beginning to see how similar we really were. I had rebelled against my parents’ world by going my own way, working myself up from the lowest ranks to where I was now, wanting to earn my respect instead of being given it because of my dad’s accomplishments.

In a way, Janet had done the same thing. She wanted more for herself than the world in which she was raised, a world that told her life was hopeless and she should resign herself to a bleak future of hard work and poverty.

The hard work didn’t scare her. That was obvious from how hard she had worked to climb the ladder in her industry. As a nineteen-year-old girl, she had “taken the easy way out,” as she described it, by marrying Lonnie. But when that imploded, she built a new life for herself from the ground up. I admired her for it, and I was starting to understand why she felt the need to dress the way she did and surround herself with nice things. This life still felt fragile to her in a way.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.