4
“This is a mistake.I’m telling you. My grandfather suffers from dementia,” Liv repeated for the third time as Officer Not A Stripper walked her into the Whisper Lake police station.
He hadn’t said much, or anything at all on the ride over. She didn’t want to find his silence attractive, but apparently everything the man did was the human equivalent of catnip to her. Even the way he smelled. When he’d stepped into her room, she’d gotten a whiff of his masculine scent and she’d leaned in to get more.
Thankfully, he hadn’t noticed since he’d been turning around to give her privacy. She wasn’t sure if it was against the law to sniff police officers but if it was, she’d definitely been in violation.
Her head was still a little, or a lot fuzzy, from the bottle she’d downed. She would have thought getting arrested would have sobered her up, but it hadn’t really killed her buzz as much as she hoped.
She was trying to behave like a sober person, but she wasn’t sure if she was pulling it off. Just the fact that she was trying to act sober probably meant she wasn’t.
Hot Cop ushered Liv past a woman with purple glasses and spiky gray hair who clearly noticed her arrival but didn’t speak to her, back to a room with no windows. There was only a table and two chairs.
Am I going to get booked?
Interrogated?
Arrested?
“Please, just call Anna.” Liv pointed to the pocket where Hot Cop placed her driver’s license and card.
“I’m sure we’ll get it all sorted out. Wait here.”
Feeling helpless, and a little unsteady, Liv lowered down in the chair as the door closed. As a writer, she tried to absorb any situation that she experienced. There weren’t a ton of police station scenes in her historical romance books but just in case she took mental notes.
The smell was sterile, like cleaning solution. The air was a little stuffy. The table had words scratched into it, some were curse words and others just looked like doodles. The walls were either a dingy white or a pale yellow, she couldn’t tell. The fluorescent lights above flickered when the door opened and they had again when the door shut. And the temperature was chilly. She was glad Officer Not A Stripper had suggested she grab a sweatshirt before they left the B&B.
Those were all the external components. Internally, she noted that her pulse was elevated. She felt uncomfortable in her own skin. Anxiety and nervousness washed through her. She hated being confined in the space. Not that it was particularly small, it was just the thought that she couldn’t leave if she wanted to.
And she was innocent. She wondered how she would feel if she was guilty.
She pulled out her phone to start typing notes of where her thoughts were leading and it dawned on her that she had her phone. She could call Anna.
That should have been the first thing she’d done. But between her tipsiness and the stripper misunderstanding, she obviously wasn’t thinking clearly. She pressed the call button and put the phone to her ear.
When nothing happened, she pulled the phone from her face and looked at it. No reception.
Great. Now she would just have to wait until this was all sorted. Since she didn’t want to sit here counting the minutes until Hot Cop returned, she opened up Notes and began typing away.
This was her least favorite way of working, typing on the screen of her phone. She much preferred her laptop but since that wasn’t available and it seemed she’d be here for a while; she didn’t want to waste time just sitting there.
The thing about writing was, you could write anywhere. Amy Daws wrote Wait With Me in the waiting room of a tire shop. Whenever people asked Liv how to become an author, her answer was the same one she’d heard her grandad give thousands of times, you write. That’s it.
That was the most difficult part. To actually write. To be a successful writer you basically needed the discipline of putting words on the page. Another thing her grandfather liked to say was, “You can’t edit a blank page.”
She’d had the benefit of growing up and seeing her grandad’s dedication to his craft. She’d witnessed him pull all-nighters before deadlines, and sacrifice sleeping, eating, and showering to get the job done. His dedication to his craft was admirable.
She wasn’t sure how long she’d been typing away when the door opened. Her head lifted and she saw Officer Not A Stripper walk in. He shut the door and sat down in the chair opposite her across the table.
The room was small and being in a confined space with this perfect specimen of a man was doing a number on her hormones. They were throwing a rave even though she was trying to tell them this wasn’t a party.
“Miss St. Claire, I ran your information and you do have a bench warrant in Chicago. Unpaid parking tickets.”
Liv closed her eyes. The past two years had felt like she was running daily marathons. From the moment her eyes opened until she laid her head back on the pillow at night. She hadn’t had a chance to catch her breath.
Her grandad didn’t have a regular retirement or medical. He had Medicare but she’d had to pay out of pocket for several emergency room trips and also his in-home care. So, she’d let her parking tickets add up and had missed a court date when she had to rush Grandad to the hospital.
Maybe this meet-cute wasn’t so cute after all. What started out as a comical-ish misunderstanding could turn into her spending the night in the slammer.