Annie's Neighborhood (Harlequin Heartwarming) Read Free

to serve his country. By the time he’d finished two tours in Iraq and one in Afghanistan, with months between tours spent at a variety of military bases, his old job, out of necessity, had been filled, although his captain had tried to save it. Since Corrine, Sky’s wife, divorced him while he was gone and subsequently married a bigwig Kentucky racehorse breeder, this job put Sky as close to his five-year-old son, Zachary, as he’d been able to manage.
    He’d been chief of Briar Run less than a year, but it hadn’t taken him very long to see that his force couldn’t handle the escalating crime being directed from outside his legal reach in Louisville. Reciprocal help was a joke; it meant when Louisville cops had time, and they were up to their eyeballs, too.
    Out of self-interest, Sky had feelers out, hoping to turn up a job in a larger town, with a force that offered a bigger staff. However, in this slow economy police departments everywhere were cutting back, not expanding, as was the case here. His already minuscule force had been cut in half again in the last budgetary process, implemented by Aaron Loomis, the new city manager who’d been appointed by the governor to pull Briar Run out of debt.
    Sky pulled up to a trio of homes that had seen better days. In fact, this whole street, like many in the neighborhood—including his, a few blocks away—looked as tired as he felt.
    Koot drove in and parked behind him as Sky picked up his clipboard of report sheets. Shoving his sunglasses off the bridge of his nose into shaggy hair he hadn’t found time to get cut, Sky waited for his friend and coworker to join him.
    The older man came up, blotting sweat from his cocoa-brown face. “Enid called me from dispatch. She said three homes in a row were vandalized while the occupants attended a funeral. Whose work do you reckon it is?”
    “I don’t know. I just got here and haven’t interviewed anyone yet.” Sky started to say more, but broke off as a woman separated herself from a foursome watching workmen install a window. She came toward them, undoing her hair from a band that had confined it. Sky’s attention stalled on thick, black waves unraveling around her shoulders, hair that shone almost blue in the sunlight. She was tall, but not quite as tall as his five feet eleven, even though she wore heels. A no-nonsense navy suit didn’t hide her womanly shape. He couldn’t help staring as she approached. The closer she got, the more Sky was mesmerized by her flawless skin and smoke-gray eyes fringed by jet dark lashes. Obviously natural lashes. In this job he often dealt with women who achieved that look with stuff that came in a tube and tended to smear when they cried. Women he encountered in the course of a workday were always crying, it seemed.
    The woman stopped a few feet short of the men. “I’m Annie Emerson,” she said straightaway. “I called to report the fact that three homes were broken into and vandalized while we all attended my grandmother’s funeral.”
    “I’m sorry for your loss,” Sky muttered, unable to quit staring at her long enough to write her name on the report sheet, until Koot jabbed him none too gently in the ribs. “Ah, yes. We, uh, got the call. I’m Chief Sky Cordova. This is Lieutenant Talmage.”
    Annie lifted an eyebrow. His hasty condolence fell a bit flat. She knew his job probably had him mouthing the words on a regular basis, but his perfunctory tone got under her skin. “I didn’t expect such high-ranking officials to show up. Mrs. Gilroy—” Annie pointed to the older of the two other women at the scene “—felt you’d be too busy to come at all.”
    “Our department is small, and we’re stretched thin,” Koot explained. “We can see your exterior vandalism. Can you tell us what’s missing from inside? And did anyone see the perpetrators or their car, or get any kind of useful description?”
    Annie hesitated. “As I said, I was at my grandmother’s