Page 58 of Make Me Love You

“On patrol. Come with me.”

“I was afraid that’s what you meant. No, thank you.”

“Riding along with a police officer, seeing that interaction with Hart’s Ridge citizens, that seems like something a good mayor would be interested in doing.”

She gave his chest a slight push. “That’s a low blow, Officer Carter.”

He noticed that she had left her hand there, resting on his heart. He looked down at it, then at her, eyebrows raised.

“Yes,” she snapped. “I like touching you. What of it?”

“Come with me, and you can keep doing that. Maybe I’ll even let you hold my hand.”

She rolled her eyes. “I’m not that kind of girl.” She huffed a long-suffering sigh. “Fine, I’ll come. But only because I want to be a good mayor.”

He grinned. “Sure, that’s why.”

As he led her to his car, he grabbed her hand, lacing their fingers together. Because he knew exactly what kind of girl she was.

Chapter Sixteen

Emma buckled herself into the last place on Earth she ever wanted to be. She had never been in any police car at all, much less Eli’s. But she knew someone who had.

She sneaked a surreptitious glance over her shoulder to the back seat, trying to imagine her dad sitting there behind the partition, handcuffed and ashamed. It made her chest ache. She caught Eli’s eye as she faced forward again.

“I didn’t use the squad car to bring him in,” Eli said.

“What?” Apparently she wasn’t as subtle as she thought.

“You were thinking about your dad, right? He was never back there. After you told me, I waited for you to go to Dreamer’s, and I took my truck. No handcuffs, either. I didn’t want to give the neighbors something to talk about before I could see you again. I wanted you to hear it from me, not some nosy busybody who didn’t love you.”

She sucked in a sharp breath of air at the word love. He meant as friends. Back then, he had loved her, not as a sister, exactly, given what he had said about her in that bathing suit, but as a friend. The way she had loved him.

Although, come to think of it, how she had loved him was feeling increasingly murky. Having him back in her life made all those old memories come roaring back to the surface. Like how she had always managed to be single just in time for each and every school dance, so they could go together as “just friends.” And all the little excuses she would find to touch him. She had always liked to touch him. That wasn’t a recent development.

Anyway, this wasn’t the time to think about that. This was about her dad. She exhaled slowly, trying to refocus her runaway brain. “And he just...went with you? It was that easy?”

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