Carolina Dreaming: A Dare Island Novel by Virginia Kantra Page A

tapping briskly on her computer keyboard.
    Damn it.
    Luke Fletcher was out on patrol, Jack Rossi behind the closed door with its cheap metal POLICE CHIEF sign. Hank wanted to annoy
somebody
.
    Being at work usually relaxed him—the familiar file cabinets, the wanted posters, the rack of locked-up rifles in the gun closet, even the smell of coffee sitting until it turned to sludge. He’d always been more comfortable with men than women, always better suited to the job than things at home. Which was why—even after his retirement from the county sheriff’s office, even after he’d supported the hiring of outsider Jack Rossi as Dare Island’s police chief—Hank had hired on as backup relief officer. Let the younger man worryabout writing grants and kissing the town council’s asses. As long as Hank could report to work every day, he wasn’t dead yet.
    Most of the calls that came in were parking or noise complaints, reports of vandalism and petty theft, a little drugs, an occasional domestic, negotiating disputes between neighbors. Not even much of that in the off-season. Islanders were an independent lot, used to settling their own problems. After years of big busts, gang-related crime, and high-speed car chases, working for a small police department sometimes made Hank feel like a meter maid with a gun.
    And that suited him, too. He was fifty-goddamn-nine years old. Too old for excitement. Or a change.
    But today he couldn’t get comfortable in his chair or in his skin.
    Hank dropped his feet, prowling restlessly between the three desks to the coffeepot.
    “You don’t need more coffee,” Marta said without pausing a beat in her typing. “You’re like a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs as it is.”
    He set down his mug, happy to have someone to vent his frustrations on. “It’s that Murphy fellow. I don’t like having some transient on the island, sponging off the Fletchers.”
    “The Fletchers are very capable of looking after themselves. You worry too much. And you drink too much coffee. No wonder your blood pressure is so high.”
    “What are you, my mother?”
    “I have four boys already. I don’t need another one.”
    “Wife, then.”
    Their eyes met. For no reason at all, Hank’s heart started pounding.
    “If I were your wife, you would take better care of yourself.”
    “Or kill myself.”
    Marta pursed bright lips. “Either way, your blood pressure wouldn’t be a problem anymore.”
    A laugh escaped him. Hank did his best to turn it into a cough.
    Marta turned slightly from her computer screen. “Tell me what is bothering you.”
    “Gary Wilson took his grandson Ethan fishing this morning. He saw that Murphy fellow at Jane’s.”
    “And this worries you because . . . ?”
    “He was raking her yard,” Hank growled.
    Marta raised dark, arched brows. “I am sure her grass will recover.”
    “People are talking.”
    “People always talk. He’s new in town. And handsome.”
    “He’s a jailbird.”
    “He’s a friend of Luke’s.”
    “Then what’s he doing hanging around my daughter?”
    “I don’t know. But I do know if you go over there and protest, Jane will think you do not trust her judgment.”
    Hank scowled. “So now you’re an expert on what my daughter is thinking.”
    “Of course not. She is your daughter. But I am a woman. It is what any woman would think.”
    He knew Marta was a woman, damn it. He’d been made aware of it every day since Jack hired her, her perfume and her earrings and the way she crossed and uncrossed her legs when she got out of her damn chair.
    When Hank started with the sheriff’s department almost forty years ago, law enforcement was all male and almost all-white. Marta stirred things up, stirred him up, in ways he didn’t like to acknowledge. Even to himself.
    “Well, I know how guys think,” Hank said. “And I’m telling you, this Murphy bum is after more than Jane’s cupcakes.”
    “And what makes you think she