How Cat Got A Life

There had to be some mistake.

Sheriff Brock Leonetti stared at the woman standing in the middle of his office. He guessed she might be around thirty. Her chestnut hair made an elegant knot. The beige pencil skirt and cream silk blouse reeked of Old Money. A pair of tortoise shell glasses perched on her patrician nose.

She looked like a cross between a debutante and an accountant.

A young man hovered behind her, but Brock barely noticed.

“Excuse me. I’ll be back in a moment.” He jerked to his feet and strode across the floor to the open area that housed his two deputies and an empty desk where the secretary used to sit.

He closed the door to keep their voices from carrying through.

“What the hell is going on?” He turned to Karen.

Walter, the older deputy, had his strong points but giving succinct answers wasn’t one of them.

Karen lowered her coffee mug with “Mothers do it with Love” in big red letters on the side and raised her brows. “What’s the problem?”

“You’re supposed to send the kids to my office and not notify the parents.”

Walter pretended to be reading the morning paper, but his weather-beaten face creased into a grin that stretched his bushy moustache.

Karen raised the mug again and took a sip. “We didn’t notify anyone. Walter picked them up at six, just when it started getting light. It didn’t seem worth dragging you out of bed. They swore they’d come in to see you at nine, and they have.”

“Are you telling me…?” Brock’s words trailed away. His gaze drew back to the half-glazed door. The woman stood still, facing his empty desk. The fact that she hadn’t turned around to stare after him sent an odd prickle of irritation down his skin.

“Yup.” Karen contemplated him over the rim of her cup. “That’s the two of them. They were almost at the top when Walter got to the Town Hall. The alarm had gone off, but they hadn’t caused any damage. Just some chalk on the brickwork and that’ll wash off when it rains.”

“Son of a bitch.” Brock shook his head, barely able to take in the facts. “She was doing the Clock Tower Challenge?”

“Yup.” Karen nodded. “Seemed real anxious about her son getting into trouble, so I told her the charges will be dropped after they’ve done forty hours of community service each.”

“Her son?” Brock’s eyes darted back to the woman. “They’re mother and son?”

“Yup.” The son’s sixteen, a freshman at LaSalle. A nerdy kid who skipped a couple of years at school. The mother’s visiting for the weekend.”

With a grunt of exasperation, Brock spun on his heels. What the hell was the world coming to when a grown woman was caught in a clandestine climb up thirty feet on the outside of a public building? Parents were supposed to condemn dangerous pranks, not take part in them.

He stormed back into his office. She looked so fragile, so…feminine. The image of her tumbling through the air and smashing into the sidewalk flickered across his mind. Rage soared inside him, more potent than he would have expected.

As Brock settled behind the scuffed pine desk, he fisted his hands to control the urge to shake some sense into her. “Of all the idiots I’ve had in this office, you must take the prize. Not only do you jeopardize your own life, but you let your son risk his.”

“I—”

“You can damn well be quiet until I’ve finished.”

“I—”

“Quiet,” he thundered, then spoke to the pale young man who’d stepped out of her shadow. “Whose idea was it?”

The son glanced at the mother. “Mine.”

Brock took a deep breath in an effort to calm down. “And what gave you the harebrained notion to let your mother try a stunt like that? Last year, two boys fell and one of them broke his leg.”

“Those guys weren’t climbers. They didn’t know their elbow from their ass.”

Brock gave an angry snort to dismiss the suggestion that experience made the feat any less dangerous. “What’s your name, son?”

“Dalton. Dalton Bridgewater.”

“Dalton, you’ll be in this town for three years until you graduate. From now on, I’ll hold you responsible for your mother. Don’t let her get into trouble again.”

“Excuse me.” The woman edged between them. “I resent the assumption that I’m under the supervision of a sixteen year old.”

Her shoulders had grown rigid beneath the cream silk. Her chest rose and fell with angry breaths and a pink flush covered her cheeks. Something tightened in Brock’s abdomen. He did his best to ignore the sensation.

“If you refuse to behave like a mature adult, you can’t expect to be treated as one.” He scowled at her. “Or can you offer a rational explanation to your little jaunt?”

The rosy blush on her cheeks deepened to scarlet.

“No,” she said, but her tone was quiet, evasive.

Brock raised a brow at her son. “You’d better come clean.”

The young man shifted his weight from foot to foot and stole a look at his mother. “It was a bet.”

“Dalton.” Her voice rang with a warning.

“She thinks I’m not going to eat properly. I promised that if she got to the top first, I’d have a healthy breakfast at least three times a week.”

Brock exhaled a sigh. “And what was her end of the bet?”

The young man flustered. He slanted a glance back to his mother, whose exquisite face had darkened into a thundercloud. Head lowered, the son mumbled, “She hasn’t been out since Dad died over a year ago. She’s put herself in mothballs. If I got to the top first, she had to start going out on dates.”

Every muscle in Brock’s body snapped taut. Damn, if his mind didn’t zoom into all kinds of impossible directions. He saw her across a candlelit dinner table, in a slinky dress that hugged the contours of her body…in his arms, her head tipped back, offering her lips for a goodnight kiss…in his lonely bedroom, trembling beneath his hands as he slowly undressed her.

Heat surged up along his chest. Blood pooled in his groin. Since his wife passed away a few years ago, Brock had exerted a steely control over his body. Sex belonged in marriage. That’s what he’d been brought up to believe, and as another marriage was the last thing on his mind, he’d learned to suppress his needs. He’d had so many cold showers the heating bills had gone down.

“I understand there’s a requirement for us to do community service.” The woman lifted her chin. Her eyes widened when they met his, and Brock turned away to hide the hunger that he suspected she’d already seen lurking beneath his half-closed lids.

“Dalton will take care of that,” he muttered. “There’s a children’s home near the campus. He can go over a couple of hours each evening and organize games for the kids.”

“Sheriff Leonetti, let me assure you that I accept responsibility for my own actions. I broke the law. I’ll serve the punishment.” She bit her lip. “But perhaps something else…I’m not very good with children.”

Brock’s brows shot up, and his gaze shuttled between mother and son.

“Dalton is my late husband’s son,” she said quietly. “We were married for less than a year. I have no experience with babies or toddlers.”

The young man reached out to touch her arm. “But you’re doing brilliantly with teenagers.”

The smile that lit up her face brightened the entire room. Her joy hadn’t quite faded when she turned back to Brock. “That nice deputy who arrested us said your secretary resigned unexpectedly, and you haven’t been able to replace her. I used to work in an office. I could help out. If you let me work full days, I could get it done in a week and fly home next weekend.”

Brock swallowed to ease the pressure that constricted his throat.

No, his mind screamed.

“Yes,” he heard himself say. “We could use someone who can type and knows how to operate a computer.”

As he filled in the paperwork for their misdemeanor, Brock struggled to keep his hands steady. What he hell was wrong with him? He’d committed no crime, but he’d just sentenced himself to forty hours of torture.