Butterfly Cove Read Free Page B

He was used to bad weather, to heat and flies. Afghanistan had taught him to stay focused in all situations.
    Off in the distance red lights burned through the rain and he made out the outline of an ambulance. About time. The kids were shaken up. Their teacher was holding it together, but Rafe had learned that she was a diabetic, and she didn’t have extra insulin with her. He had already called in that information to the EMT unit so they would have the meds she needed.
    Two more cars crawled past. A state police cruiser appeared. The window came down. “Looks like you could use some help here. I’ll park and take the other side.”
    “I’d be glad for it. I’ve had my hands full with the mudslide.” Rafe turned up his collar against the pelting rain. “At least the ambulance is here. I’ve got somebody in my cruiser with a dislocated shoulder. Possible concussion. She needs to be looked at first.”
    “I’ll pass that on.” The cruiser angled forward into a spot right behind Rafe’s vehicle.
    It was barely 5:15 p.m. on his first day with the Summer Island Police Force.
    He had dealt with two accidents. A mudslide. Crank call at the high school and a possible case of identity theft.
    It was one helluva homecoming, Rafe thought grimly. He remembered the sound of the collision. At first he’d been angry. Then he had realized the driver was very brave, choosing the only space left to avoid hitting the van full of stranded children.
    She’d kept the collision to minimum impact, despite zero visibility in the storm.
    But Rafe wouldn’t have expected anything less of Olivia Sullivan. She had always been smart, always been thoughtful and careful. She did the right thing, no matter what. You could count on that.
    A flood of other memories returned to haunt him. Rafe’s hands clenched. He didn’t figure well in most of those memories. They had been very close once. He had let her build up hopes that he couldn’t fulfill. In the end he had betrayed her.
    Rafe had lived with that guilt every day since.
    But now he had a job to do. He couldn’t allow Olivia’s warm breath or the soft, sweet pressure of her breasts against his shoulder to pull his mind away from all the things he had to do to stabilize the accident scene.
    He had screwed up more times than he could count growing up as the town bad boy. He had mocked authority, been a petty thief, played hooky from school as often as he could get away with it and broken more than a few store windows. After one brief season as a football hero, he had given up on sports, too. He didn’t care for the male bonding, the authority figures or the relentless schedule.
    Which was kind of funny, all things considered, because Rafe had joined the Marines as soon as he could, and that brought him right back to authority figures and relentless schedules.
    But the Marines had given him a home, a focus and a discipline in his life. He would still be over in Afghanistan had it not been for the broken arm and shattered wrist from a fuel explosion that had nearly killed him.
    When Tom Wilkinson, the county sheriff, had pitched him the offer of a job, Rafe had simply laughed. He was the last person anyone on Summer Island would expect to wear a uniform. But the sheriff had persisted, and he was a hard man to say no to. At one time, his son and Rafe had been good friends in high school. But Tom’s son had been killed in the Sangin Valley, and Tom looked pretty sick these days. Rafe hadn’t gotten all the details, but he gathered the diagnosis was inoperable, slow-growing cancer. Tom was signed up for experimental treatments in Portland, but he was getting weaker.
    So Rafe had agreed, even though it was the last thing he’d planned to say. Saying yes had brought him here, with traffic snarled around him on a blocked coast road in a driving rain. It had brought him straight into Olivia Sullivan’s path on his first day of work.
    The ambulance team jumped down and raced toward him.