Need You for Keeps (Heroes of St. Helena, #1)(76)
Oh God. What had she done?
“I never meant for Jonah to be caught up in this and I promise I will fix it,” she said, then took off running for the sheriff’s department.
She needed to tell the sheriff exactly what had happened. Set the record straight. She’d taken one look at those cats and knew she’d do anything to save them, but right then Shay wasn’t thinking about the kittens. She wasn’t thinking about her shelter or herself.
She was thinking about Jonah, and how she had to make this right so that he wasn’t obliterated by the tornado that was Shay’s life. He was by-the-book and she was take-it-as-it-came, and yet he’d known that and had gone out on a limb for her anyway. He’d taken on Warren, the mayor, even the sheriff to give her the chance to prove herself to this town.
And how had she repaid him? By having him walk down Main Street with a hot kitten in his holster.
Shay hit Adams Street and shoved through the front doors of the station, only to come to a stop. Because there, looking confused and taking the heat from not one, but two people he answered to, was Jonah. And beside him was Warren, soaking it all in.
Jonah looked at her and her heart thudded hard in her chest once, and then stopped.
She was too late. And she might of have just blown the best thing in her life.
“Is it true?” Jonah asked, his voice so remote, so distant, she knew in that moment that everything between them had changed. “Did you steal the cats?”
“No,” she said, then thought better of it. “Technically yes, because I didn’t follow the proper channels, but a box of clearly neglected kittens showed up with my name on it and a note saying that the kittens needed a good home.”
“Did you check to make sure that the person who gave you the kittens had the right to release them to you?” the mayor asked, and Shay shook her head.
She knew that was the first rule in animal rescue but had chosen to overlook it anyway. “I took one look at their condition and knew they had been mistreated.”
“Why didn’t you come to me?” Jonah asked and Shay felt her heart break.
Because I was scared. Because I knew you’d tell me to take them back and I couldn’t give up on them. Because I think I was already in love with you and I didn’t want to have to choose. “Because I didn’t think that the sheriff’s department would have taken my concern with the same level of seriousness. Pets get neglected every day and no one does anything.”
“Got it,” was all Jonah said, but his face told so much more. He was frustrated and hurt and, worse, disappointed. In her. In his decision to trust her.
It was the kind of look that Shay knew well, the kind that breaks the skin first and hurts a little worse with time. It was a look that she had finally started to believe she’d never see again. Only this one, coming from Jonah, didn’t just hurt. It burned through.
“Well, I can look into these accusations,” Sheriff Bryant said, his tone gentle. “But what concerns me is that you are admitting keeping property, which you believed might have been stolen, for the purpose of selling it to someone else.”
“Them,” Shay said and swallowed. “Not ‘it’ but ‘them.’”
The sheriff’s expression told her the pronoun she chose to use didn’t change the fact that she had stolen property in her house.
Which felt weird even thinking because Shay had never thought of her animals as property or the fees as selling. They were little lives that she got to help on their journey, and the adoption fees were there to make sure that people who applied for the animals would value them, and to help offset the medical costs.
“I don’t make any profit off of my animals, sir. I just wanted to find them a safe, loving home,” she explained. Then, determined not to make any excuses for her behavior, she added, “But I can see how it would look that way.”
“The problem I’m having,” the sheriff began, “is how it looks when one of my deputies, who put his neck out on the line for you, walks down the middle of town with stolen property on his person, while in uniform. That’s a big problem. Not just for him, but for this entire department.”
“I know and I am so sorry.” She looked at Jonah, wanting him to see the truth in her eyes, but he wasn’t looking back. “I know what I did was wrong and I would like to make a statement that Jonah knew nothing about the cats. When he came to my house in regard to the noise violation, he asked about the kittens and I was not forthcoming.”
“Are you saying you lied?” Warren asked like it was Christmas morning and Santa had come.
“No.” Shay turned to face Jonah, because he was the only person who mattered. “But I wasn’t truthful either, and I am so sorry.”
“Me too,” Jonah said quietly and then looked up and, bam, the hurt and disappointment swimming in those blue pools shot her dead. Knocked the foundation right out from under her, with little to no chance of recovering. Her fault.
Shay had been too scared to put her faith in one of the best guys she’d ever met for fear that he’d hurt her. And in the end she’d hurt him and destroyed any chance they had at becoming more. Too bad she’d lost her heart in the process, because even though her head had a hard time trusting, her heart had become his a long time ago.
“Deputy, we’ll give you a minute to figure out how you want to handle this, but know that this goes higher than me now,” the sheriff said and pulled Warren and the mayor away, leaving Shay and Jonah alone.