Begin Reading

  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  Thank you for buying this

  St. Martin’s Publishing Group ebook.

  To receive special offers, bonus content,

  and info on new releases and other great reads,

  sign up for our newsletters.

  Or visit us online at

  us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup

  For email updates on the author, click here.

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  For first responders everywhere

  —thank you for helping those who cannot help themselves—

  and for the loved ones who pray for your safe return

  1

  When life hands you lemons, hand them back.

  You deserve chocolate.

  —SIGN AT THE SUGAR SHACK

  Normally, Sheriff Sunshine Vicram would’ve been alarmed at the sight of a knitting needle sticking out of a guy’s neck. At the very least, she would’ve been concerned for the horrified man’s well-being. Yet, there she stood. Unmoved. Unshaken. Unstirred. Much like the forgotten bottle of dirty martini mix in the back of her cabinet. At the tender age of early-thirty-something, Sun realized she had seen it all. The world held no more surprises. No more magic. It just was.

  “Stop it,” the man standing beside her said.

  She turned to her chief deputy, the blond bank vault door known as Quincy Cooper, and asked, “Stop what?”

  “That.” He circled an index finger, outlining her in midair. “That thing you keep doing.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” She crossed her arms over her uniformed chest and went back to staring at the knitting needle and the impaled man behind it.

  “You know exactly what I’m talking about. You’re pining.”

  “I’m not pining.”

  “You’re pining.” He leaned closer and lowered his voice. “Worse, you’re pining for a man who clearly doesn’t want to talk to you.”

  The accuracy of his words stung like lemon juice on a paper cut, and she had to give it to her bestie. He never missed an opportunity to be brutally honest. “Please,” she said, lifting her chin and forcing her poker face to hold fast under fire. “You’ve been pining after that same man’s sister for months. You have no room to talk.”

  “Touché.”

  “Besides, it’s not that. It’s just…”

  Wait. What was it? The pit of despair she’d fallen into? The black hole of melancholy to which she’d succumbed? The bottle of Patrón she’d finished off at two that morning?

  “It’s just?” Quincy prodded.

  She rubbed her temple. She always forgot how horribly tequila affected her until the morning after, then it all came rushing back. And up. She wrapped a protective arm around her queasy stomach, squishing her memo pad in the process. “It’s just … this has been a really long week.”

  He checked his watch. “It’s eight thirty-seven—a.m.”

  A questioning brow rose of its own volition as she looked up at him.

  “On Monday.”

  “Your point being?”

  He lifted a heavy shoulder, giving in. “They say the first five days after the weekend are the hardest. Hang in there, cupcake.” He nudged her with his elbow.

  She nudged back, then returned her attention to one of Vlad’s distant cousins, Doug the Impaled.

  Their assault victim, an older man wrapped neck-to-kneecaps in a trench coat, lay on a gurney, cradling his neck with both hands. He stared up at them, panic rounding his lids, but he didn’t dare speak. Probably because of the knitting needle protruding from one side of said neck. Doug, their resident flasher, had apparently flashed the wrong person and ended up in the emergency room as a result.

  “My first question,” Quincy said, tilting his head for a better view, “is how did someone get the capped end of a knitting needle so far into his neck like that?”

  “Right?” Sun grimaced at the metallic object. “The pointy end is sticking out.”

  “Maybe both ends are pointy?” he guessed. “Do they make knitting needles with dual pointy ends?”

  “Maybe.” Sun tilted her head, too. “That makes so much more sense than what I was thinking. Wouldn’t it have hurt the assailant’s hand, though? To jam it in there like that?” She made a stabbing gesture with her pen, trying to imagine the scene in her head. The needle had been embedded far enough to remain stationary when Doug breathed. Undoubtedly a good four inches, if not more.

  Quincy tossed a questioning gaze to the nurse. “Any hand injuries today?”

  The nurse, a pretty brunette who looked like she’d graduated from nursing school thirty seconds before walking in the door, shook her head. “Not that I know of.” She scanned the area, worry scoring lines into her forehead. “The doctor should be here any minute.”

  Sun leaned closer to Doug and said loudly, “Do you know who did this?”

  Doug glared at her, then shook his head. Just barely, obviously afraid to move.

  Quincy cleared his throat from behind her. “Yeah, I don’t think Doug’s hard of hearing.”

  “Right.” She straightened. “My bad.”

  She was off her game. She’d been off her game since she told Levi Ravinder—aka, the man she’d been in love with since conception—they had a lot more in common than he might think. They both liked pepperoni pizza. They both loved sunsets and long walks on the beach. They both had a fifteen-year-old daughter named Auri.

  Weird.

  “You know Auri is yours,” she’d said to him, sitting in the back of Quincy’s cruiser. Well, Levi was sitting, handcuffed and more than a little miffed. Sun was straddling. Not miffed in the least.

  He’d stilled at her words, his inscrutable and impossibly handsome face even harder to read than normal. And she was an above-average reader.

  Instead of joy or amazement or elation at finding out he had a daughter he never knew about—all the emotions she’d naïvely hoped for—he just sat there, staring at her, his expression guarded. Cautious. Almost calculating.

  Sadly, before Sun could ferret out what lay hidden beneath his stoicism, she got called to the scene of a traffic accident, and the first chance he got, Levi ditched the protective custody she’d forcefully placed him into. He vanished, and in the process, he’d stolen Quincy’s cruiser.

  Sun understood. Not the car-theft thing but the running thing. It was a lot to lay on a guy. Especially since, five minutes earlier, she and her deputies had also informed Levi that his uncle Clay was trying to kill him—hence the protective custody—and take over his very successful distillery.

  She’d blindsided the poor man with those five words, sent him running, and now she could concentrate on little else. They’d found the stolen cruiser at his house an hour later, as was his intention, but no Levi. And, possibly even more concerning, no Uncle Clay.

  In her dreams, the scene in the back of Quincy’s cruiser had gone very differently. She’d imagined Levi’s expression morphing into one of shocked happiness when he learned the truth about their daughter. She’d imagined his mouth covering hers, grateful and eager. Kissing her until her toes curled. Until the oxygen fled her lungs.

  “Who’d you piss off, Pettyfer?”

  Sun blinked up at Quince, snapping back to the present, and nodded. “Right?” she said, recovering quickly. She had to get a grip or Levi Ravinder was going to cost her more than just her ability to drink in moderation. He was going to cost Del Sol’s newest sheriff her job. “Who did you piss off? Knitters are usually so laid back.”

  “Exactly,” Quince agreed, making the word sound like an accusation as he stared Doug down. “They hardly ever stab people. Statistically speaking.”

  The nurse managed to pry Doug’s hands off his throat for a better look, but she was afraid to touch anything. “I don’t think your windpipe has been punctured, Mr. Pettyfer.”

  “So, he can talk?” Quincy asked.

  She offered a noncommittal shrug. “He can try. I guess. I don’t know.” She bit her lip and glanced up between the two of them. “Wh-what do you think?” Poor girl. She didn’t look much older than Auri.

  After a quick glance at the girl’s name tag, Sun said softly, “Wendy, you’re doing great. Doug is just an ass.”

  He glared at her.

  She glared back. The man had refused to reply to their first round of questions, pointing at the knitting needle to justify his silence. She had two missing persons to find. She didn’t have time for this. “Cut the crap, Doug. What happened?”

  “I’m the victim here,” he said, his voice a little hoarse but no worse for the wear. “They tried to kill me.”

  Quincy shifted his weight and released a long, irritated sigh.

  Sun fought the urge to do the same. Doug created more drama than Hollywood during sweeps week. So far, he’d caused a pileup on Main Street, set a woman’s hair on fire—long story—and gave Sun a concussion trying to save his ass after he’d flashed Mrs. Papadeaux only to have her chase him under the Cargita Bridge with a melon baller. Sun shuddered to think what the woman would’ve done with th
e baller given more time.

  “They?” Quince asked, his voice sharp enough to slice through her fuzzy musings once again.

  Doug nodded at Quincy’s inquiry and instantly regretted it, making a face only a mother could love.

  “Did Mrs. Papadeaux finally exact her revenge?” Sun asked. She’d barely been on the job four months, but even she’d had enough of the man.

  “Mrs. Papadeaux?” Doug asked, appalled. He had slick, sun-damaged skin, the leathery folds creasing as he frowned at her. “I was jumped. By a gang.”

  “A gang of knitters?”

  He turned an orangish shade of red. Salmon perhaps. Or coral. Why he needed people to see his penis was beyond her. She thought about asking a psychologist, then realized she didn’t care.

  “How should I know what gang members do in their spare time?” Doug asked. “I was just walking down Main—”

  “Wearing a trench coat,” Quincy added.

  “—minding my own business.”

  “Doubtful.”

  “—when out of nowhere, a street gang attacked me.”

  “Because we have so many of those running around Del Sol.” Sun let her doubt manifest into a frown. A frownier frown than she’d previously been wearing. A scowl, if you will.

  As a small New Mexico tourist town in the middle of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, Del Sol just didn’t attract many gangs.

  Though she hated to admit it, Doug did look pretty beat up. Bruises and scrapes peppered his face and hands, and his left eye was swelling alarmingly fast.

  “And all of this happened at the corner of broad and daylight?” Quince asked.

  “No. I told you, Main.”

  “With no witnesses?”

  He tested the knitting needle with his left hand before shuddering and dropping it. “I don’t know. I don’t remember seeing anyone. It … it all happened so fast.”

  Quince wasn’t buying it. “I guess I could canvass the area. See if anyone saw anything.”

  “Oh, you don’t have to do that.” Doug tried to sit up and immediately regretted it. He lay back with a wince and said, “I can’t imagine anyone saw. We were in a pretty secluded spot.”

  Quince took a step forward, his patience gossamer thin, and said from between gritted teeth, “You just said you were on Main.”

  “Yeah, but they jumped me right as I turned down that alley between the Sugar Shack and Bernadette’s?”

  “Of course they did.” Sun’s chief deputy seemed to be hovering on the same precarious edge she was on. The one called I’ve Had Just About Enough of You, Mister Man. He crossed his arms over his chest and leaned closer to her. “I say we push the needle the rest of the way in and call it a day.”

  So tempting. “I hear you, but then we’d have to get rid of Wendy, too, and she seems really nice.”

  Wendy’s startled gaze landed on them. Sun winked at her, and for the first time since they’d arrived, the girl seemed to relax. She hid a grin and said, “I’ll see what’s keeping the doctor,” before sliding the curtain closed around them and heading down the hall.

  “I’m going to ask one more time, Doug, then you’re on your own.” But before Sun could make good on her promise, her phone rang. She answered the call from her new lieutenant, Tricia Salazar, only to be yelled at.

  “He’s gone!”

  Odd way to start a conversation, but okay. She’d play along. “You didn’t chain him to the radiator?”

  “What? No. Why would I chain him to the radiator?”

  “The filing cabinet?”

  “No.”

  “The coffee maker?”

  “Is that even possible?”

  “Perhaps if I knew who we were talking about, I could answer that question.”

  “Oh, sorry, boss. Randy escaped again and I panicked.”

  Sun let the tension drain from her shoulders with a relieved sigh. Just the raccoon. A raccoon that was going to be the death of her. Or Quincy. Probably Quincy. “We should’ve named him Houdini.”

  “What should I do?”

  Sun cupped a hand over the phone and stage-whispered, “Whatever you do, don’t tell Quincy.”

  Salazar laughed softly into the phone, but Quincy scowled at Sun when realization dawned. He bit down and turned away, anger tightening his jaw.

  “How’s Doug?” Salazar asked.

  “He’ll live.”

  “Oh,” she said, not bothering to hide her disappointment.

  Sun swallowed a bark of laughter. Salazar didn’t really want Doug to die, but a more debilitating injury would’ve made all their lives easier. At least for a little while. “Call me if you find the you-know-what.”

  “Will do, boss.”

  She hung up and slid her phone into its case on her belt.

  Quincy scrubbed his face and said from behind his hands, “He got out again, didn’t he?”

  “It’s your own fault.”

  He lowered his hands and scowled at her. Again. “How the hell is it my fault?”

  “I have no idea, but I’ll think of something.”

  “That thing is a menace.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Sun may not know a lot about raccoons, but she knew a ton about her best friend, and no matter how much he grumbled and protested and complained, he admired the clever creature. The fact that it was on a mission to make Quincy’s life as miserable as raccoonly possible seemed moot. If Sun didn’t know better—and she really didn’t—she would swear it was targeting her chief deputy. “We need to move the cage out of the locker room and into the bullpen at night so the cameras can record how he’s getting out.”

  “Yeah, if I don’t kill him first.”

  All talk, this one. “You’re just mad because he ate your Twizzlers.”

  He pressed his lips into a straight line. “Can we finish up so I can go arrest the love of your life?”

  Ever since Levi escaped—like, two days ago—Quince had been dead set on arresting him. Like oddly obsessed. As though Levi stealing—no, borrowing—his cruiser had somehow assaulted his manhood.

  “Not yet,” Sun said.

  “Why not? He stole my cruiser. Stealing is illegal. Arresting him is kind of our job.”

  “First, he borrowed your cruiser.”

  “Seriously?”

  “We found it an hour later.” Quince opened his mouth to protest again, but Sun cut him off. “And second, we have something else to do first.”

  He rubbed the line between his brows. “And that would be?”

  She released a withering sigh, hardly able to believe what she was about to say, but it had hit her about three shots past midnight. She steeled herself and said, “We have to find Clay Ravinder before Levi does and put him into protective custody before Levi kills him.”

  Quincy’s jaw literally dropped open. After a few blinks of astonished disbelief, he said, “And you want to prevent that from happening why?”

  She shrugged. “Apparently that’s part of my job.”

  “Oh, right. The sheriff thing. Still, that’s a big ask.”

  “Quince, if Levi finds him first, he’ll make the man rue the day he was ever hatched.”

  “And that’s bad because?”

  “Because I don’t want Auri visiting her father in prison.”

  That sobered him. He bit down, his jaw working hard under the stress, then lowered his head. “Does she know yet? The bean sprout?”

  A wave of anguish washed over Sun and settled beside the last remnants of tequila souring in the pit of her stomach. How would she tell her daughter who her real father was? How would Auri take the news that he’d been right in front of her this whole time and no one, not even Sun, knew?

  She couldn’t think about that just yet. She had far too many irons in the fire at the moment, one of them being protecting the most hated man in town from one of the most beloved. Levi was nothing short of a folk hero to the citizens of Del Sol. Putting him in prison for premeditated murder would not sit well with them. “No,” Sun fairly whispered, “she doesn’t know yet.”

  He nodded in thought. “Are you going to tell her?”

  Sun’s gaze snapped to his profile. “Of course.”

  “Because no one would blame you if—”

  “Quincy,” she said, interrupting before he could even finish the sentiment, “just because you never liked the guy—”