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He grinned. Not smug. Not cruel. Just … infuriatingly pleased with himself. “Rough morning?”

“My morning was perfectly fine until you became part of it.”

He chuckled. Chuckled.

She finally looked at him again. “What do you want?”

He shrugged, easy. “Coffee. A nice chat with a local law enforcement officer before I head to work.”

“This is not a chat.”

“Could’ve fooled me.”

The barista slid her order across the counter. Felicity handed over a five and wrapped both hands around the cup like a lifeline. Took a careful sip. Relief flooded her system, temper easing just enough to register the sound of Ronan’s quiet laugh.

“That better?” he asked.

She exhaled through her nose. “You’re enjoying this.”

“A little,” he admitted. “You’re real fun before caffeine.”

Something in her chest tightened, quick and unwelcome.

“Well,” she said curtly, stepping around him, “try not to trip over anyone else on your way out.”

He turned to watch her go, amusement still in his voice. “See you around, Deputy.”

She paused at the door but didn’t look back. “Don’t count on it.”

But as she stepped into the morning light, she knew one thing with absolute certainty — this was not the last time Ronan Murphy was going to be in her way.

6

Caught red-handed

Her thoughts turned out to be prophetic. The call from dispatch came in a couple of hours before the end of her graveyard shift eight days later — the suspected mailbox vandal, caught red-handed.

“Five minutes out,” she replied, already gunning it from her position across town.

Since the destruction of Ms. Harmon’s fence, there’d been another incident. A mailbox ripped clean off its post. Different tire treads this time, but she’d managed to capture several boot prints in the soft ground left by an earlier rain.

There was no traffic at that hour, shaving thirty seconds off her estimate. She pulled up hard, tires protesting as she braked—

And stared through the windshield, jaw slack.

Her headlights pinned the scene in stark white, while the strobes washed everything in pulses of red and blue.

An older, single-cab truck sat backed onto the sidewalk, its front end still jutting into the street. Another truck, shiny new, was parked directly in front of it, a man leaned casually against the tailgate.

Through the passenger window of the older truck, she could see the wide-eyed stare of a youth.

It was almost comical.

Almost.

If not for the fact that the man leaning against the truck was none other than Ronan Murphy.

She approached him. “Marine.”