“You’re not a tidy guy?”
His smile was slow coming and then it grew until he chuckled. “I’m a guy. I try. That’s pretty much all I can say.”
“At least you’re honest.” Katie thought back to those earlier days before she’d left Sweet. “I remember your sister well.”
He drew in a deep breath before speaking. “I hoped you would. I hope somebody does. Someone besides me.”
“How long is it been since you heard from her?”
Caleb looked down. “Too long.” He cleared his throat and pulled himself up to a stand. “You really shouldn’t be in here, Katie Dobbs. It’s dangerous. We’ve been discouraging kids from coming here for a long time because we’re not sure the structure is stable.”
At the formal use of her full name, she replied, “I suppose so, Officer Samuel.”
Caleb chuckled when she mimicked him. “Don’t start with me, Katie. I know your secrets.”
“Yeah? What are you going to do about it?”
“Nothing. I have more secrets than you, and you pretty much know all of them, too.”
“You shouldn’t have hung out with my brother and bragged.”
Feeling a little better, she stood up. She liked talking with Caleb. That lonely feeling that had enveloped her earlier had disappeared and been replaced with curiosity.
Sweet was a small town. There were wide borders but most people knew what was going on. At least they knew when someone was hurting. Katie had been so self-absorbed in her own misfortune that she’d forgotten that Caleb had a good dose of his own. Still, he managed to serve in the military and then become a police officer in Sweet. He rose above his heartache.
Guilt ate at Katie until she felt the cold seep into her bones again. “It’s cold.”
“It’s Montana. What do you expect? Let’s get out of here. You’ll be warm soon enough in your car.”
She followed behind him slowly and carefully. “I still think this chapel could be wonderful. Something beautiful out of something broken.”
Caleb stopped walking and turned to look at her. He stayed silent for a lingering moment. With the beam of light shining down, she could barely see his smile. But it was there. This time, he wasn’t making fun of her.
“I think you better see it in the daylight before you make that assumption,” he said.
“Maybe I will.”
He sputtered, “Did you just tell a police officer that you planned on breaking and entering? Again?”
She shrugged. “If you do it with me, it’ll just be me checking out the place with a police escort.”
His jaw shifted to the side as if he were weighing what she’d said. “Is that so? Now I know why you never got in as much trouble as I did when we were kids,” he said. “You’re smooth.”
Her smile was wide as she followed him outside. “You have no idea.”
Sweet Home Montana: Chapter Two
Caleb finished writing a ticket for a driver, a fifty-something-year-old man who was dressed to kill was probably a banker or investor from LA, who’d been speeding on one of the back roads. These days Sweet got a lot of snazzy people from out of town who wanted to scoop up all the land for an investment and build a “little” weekend getaway so they could escape the grind of the big city. It left many locals on edge wondering how their town was going to change.
A tow truck whizzed past him as he stood by the sports car and ripped the ticket out of his pad. The only investor Caleb knew who didn’t quite fit the same bill was Kasper Dobbs. His roots were dug deep in this Montana county. No amount of New York City living was going to change the local boy who’d done well for himself. He saw that firsthand over the winter when he’d come back to Sweet to invest in rodeo stock, and had fallen in love with the young rodeo barrel racer named Tabby Swanson.
The man in the Porsche glared up at him as he stared at the fine he’d just been levied. “Is there any way we can make this go away?”
Fingernails of irritation scraped up Caleb’s spine. The guy’s shoes probably cost more than the amount he’d written out for the ticket. He was in a hurry. They all were. But he’d sped right past him and then slammed on his brakes just as a school bus was stopping to drop off some kids. When Caleb had pulled up behind him, the man had shown his impatience by tapping on his steering wheel and glancing at his watch.
“Not unless you want to see me in court,” Caleb said. “You can pay the fine or fight it. Your choice. But just so you know, I always show up for court.”
The man’s plastic smile was slick and nauseating. “Aren’t you a little too busy with law and order to be appearing in court?”
He glanced over at the farmhouse about a hundred yards away. “You see that house over there?”
“Yeah?” the guy said without turning.
“That family has two sets of twins. Two boys and two girls. The girls got off the bus just as you were racing out of town. It would have been a damned shame if one of them had been hit as you were trying to weave around that bus in such a hurry.” He tucked his pad in his shirt pocket. “I take my job seriously. If you fight it, which is your choice, then you’ll see me in court. We’ll let the judge decide. Of course, that means you’re going to have to drive
