Trust with a Chaser (Rainbow Cove Book 1) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Acknowledgements & Author’s Note

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Also By Annabeth Albert

  Author Bio

  Trust with a Chaser

  Rainbow Cove, Book One

  Annabeth Albert

  Copyright © 2017 by Annabeth Albert

  Cover design: Sloan J Designs

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  To the small town that made me and to everyone who has ever loved a small town.

  Contents

  Acknowledgements & Author’s Note

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Also By Annabeth Albert

  Author Bio

  Acknowledgements & Author’s Note

  Rainbow Cove is a fictional town on the southern Oregon coast. Any resemblance to real places, people, or events is entirely coincidental. Some readers may wonder why Nash is the chief of police instead of a sheriff. In Oregon, sheriffs are county-wide offices, while police usually handle law enforcement for each city. Many thanks to those who helped with my research in Oregon law enforcement, family courts, coastal living, and other matters. A special thanks to my editor, Edie Danford, for her tireless work and her help in pushing me to go deeper into Mason and Nash’s journey. My proofreader, Jody Wallace, does amazing work and deserves huge kudos as well. Wendy Qualls, Karen Stivali, and Layla Reyne keep me on track with writing sprints and support. My Facebook group, Annabeth’s Angels, has been so supportive of this project, and I treasure all my readers. Thank you to everyone who has reviewed, tweeted, shared, and cheered me on—your support is priceless. My family puts up with my crazy hours, and I love them for their understanding. Writing and publishing is a journey, and I’m so grateful to everyone who has helped me along that journey.

  One

  Mason

  When Adam stepped inside the glorified closet I was using as an office, eyes all twitchy and hands wringing a bar towel, I knew I wasn’t going to like what came out of his mouth.

  “Sheriff Sexy just walked in. He’s your problem.”

  Fuck. I squeezed my eyes shut and took a deep breath. “Please don’t call Police Chief Flint that. He might hear, and I’m pretty sure he’d find a citation for you. And I am not bailing your ass out.”

  “You’re just worried that one of these days you’re going to slip up and call him that.” Adam grinned at me. This was an old argument—he’d been calling Flint that stupid nickname since we were in high school. The hard-nosed cop wasn’t one to cut teen drivers any slack—especially if they were in any way associated with the name “Hanks.” “Anyway, you know he freaks me out. I’ve got no idea what he wants—all our permits are in order, right?”

  “Of course.” Standing, I grabbed the folder with the permitting paperwork. I prided myself in the organization I was bringing to the bar and grill that I co-owned with Adam and our friend, Logan. Flint wouldn’t find anything to complain about, not with me in charge. “I’ll go deal with him. You go back to the bar in case we get a rush.”

  Adam snorted. Despite it being opening weekend, traffic had been embarrassingly light. We’d worked for weeks transforming the old tavern—a Rainbow Cove institution for decades—into the newly renamed Rainbow Tavern. The gay-friendly bar and grill was our vision for pulling our sleepy little coastal town into the twenty-first century. Logan had crafted a new menu of upscale bar food ready to go, and Adam had innovative drinks specials at the ready. All we needed were customers. And to not run afoul of Nash Flint on our first day of operation.

  Flint was a Rainbow Cove institution himself—born and raised here, same as Adam and me, but unlike me, he’d never left, sliding into his father’s shoes as police chief and apparently fitting the role as easily as a pair of broken-in jeans. He’d been Officer Flint last time I’d seen him, almost ten years prior.

  Guess I could have seen him had I come down for Freddy’s trial, something I still felt niggles of guilt over, and I told myself that was why my stomach fluttered on my way out to the tavern’s dining room. Unlike Adam, I’d never found Flint particularly…

  Sexy. All my thoughts fled as I took in the man sitting in front of the plate-glass window. He dwarfed the small wooden chair, one of dozens that Adam and I had painted bright colors. Broad shoulders stretched the confines of his uniform shirt, biceps bulging under the short sleeves. His cut-glass jaw was firm as ever, as were those hard hazel eyes. But what had been frankly terrifying to my teenaged self made my twenty-seven-year-old libido sit up and take serious notice.

  Flint blinked as I approached, head tilting to one side. I’d been getting a lot of that since I’d been back in town. “Mason…Hanks?”

  “The one and only.” I stuck out my hand. “What can I do for you, Chief Flint?”

  He returned my handshake with a sure grip, only a moment’s hesitation. I guessed he wasn’t all that used to shaking hands with a Hanks. Oh well. I was out to prove to the whole damn town that I wasn’t like my father and brothers, and if I had to start with Flint, so be it.

  “Nice place you’ve got here.” His eyes swept around the renovated room—restored antique bar on the far wall where Adam wasn’t bothering to conceal his nosiness, dance floor beyond that, colorful tables and chairs in the front of the bar, only a handful occupied despite the dinner hour.

  “Thanks. Our permits are all in order.” I held out my folder. “Liquor license is on top.”

  He waved the folder off. “Not worried about that.”

  No? Then why the heck was Flint in my establishment? “Good. We’re on the up-and-up. You won’t have trouble from us—”

  “Glad to hear it,” he said levelly, eyes skeptical, reminding me that I was, after all, nothing more than a Hanks. “Cheeseburger?”

  “Pardon?”

  “That Ringer kid didn’t see fit to give me a menu, but I’m trusting you all offer something approximating a burger? Salad, no fries, and an iced tea.”

  “You want to order?” I was still struggling to keep up with him.

  “This is a food establishment, right?” He s
hook his head as if he hadn’t expected more from me, and that rankled.

  “Of course.” I crossed the room in long strides, grabbed an order pad from the bar, ignoring Adam’s gaping. As soon as I returned to Flint’s table, I added, “Anything you want. On the house.”

  “None of that.” He sighed like my very existence was tiring. “Got my meals from the old tavern for years. They kept a tab open for me.”

  “We can do the same—”

  “Let’s see if you can cook first,” he said, voice drier than yesterday’s toast. “I thought I’d come by, check the place out.”

  “Appreciated,” I said and meant it. Business, any business, was good, but people in Rainbow Cove trusted Flint. If he gave us the seal of approval, more locals might give us a try, make us less dependent on the tourist trade that we were going after. Tourism took a while to build, and our grand plans of making Rainbow Cove an LGBTQ travel destination weren’t going to happen overnight. We needed every customer we could get, Flint included, even if he was the unlikeliest of allies.

  “You still haven’t brought me a menu.” He shook his head. “But whatever you’ve got passing for a burger is fine. Nothing vegan though.”

  “We’ve got local grass-fed beef, third-pound patty on a brioche bun with a pesto mayo and local Gouda. Or—”

  “I reckon that will do fine.” Flint always had a bit more country than coastal in his voice. Not Southern, but you could tell he was rural Oregon through and through, and I liked the slow, deep rumble of his words. What I didn’t like, however, was the implication in his tone that he wasn’t expecting much from us.

  “Sure you don’t want fries? We have hand-cut sweet potato as an option with a chipotle dipping sauce. As far as salads, I’ve got side, Caesar, spring berry and pecan—”

  “I’m on duty here. Kind of pressed for time. The burger and a side salad are fine. I don’t need anything fancy.”

  Yeah, well, maybe I want to give it to you. I quashed that thought, same as I had the one about how hot he looked in his uniform. Wanting to impress Nash Flint wasn’t going to get me anywhere.

  “I’ll put a rush on it.” I made a note on the order pad, not that it was really needed since Logan hardly had a packed house to worry about.

  As I walked over to the window to put in Flint’s order, I noticed more than one table giving him curious glances. Hell, maybe I was wrong about any business being good business. Last thing I needed was Flint scaring away what few customers we had. Not that he was known as a gossip or anything like that, but he was awfully…old school. Traditional. The last kind of guy you’d expect to find at a gay bar, that was for sure, and even though we were attempting to attract a mixed clientele, he stood out.

  Nash

  Mason Hanks was trouble. And not the same kind of trouble as his good-for-nothing brothers and father. Hell, even his uncles were a thorn in my side, same as they’d been for my father. The Hanks family was always up to something.

  Mason, though, he’d always been a bit different than the rest of the family. A preemie named for being no bigger than a Mason jar, he’d been an asthmatic kid and scraggly teen, nothing like his overgrown bulldog brothers who’d terrorized everyone both on and off the football field. He’d been, well, homely wasn’t a very kind word, but it fit. All big teeth and floppy hair and blotchy skin and knobby joints that didn’t seem to quite coordinate with each other.

  But the man who’d taken my order had nothing, absolutely nothing, in common with that kid, and he was trouble. Taller than I remembered—he had to be pushing six feet now, with a sturdy, muscular frame. The “Rainbow Tavern” T-shirt he wore stretched across his chest quite nicely. As he talked to someone in the kitchen through the window behind the bar, he rubbed a fuzzy jaw that gave him a rugged look, made him seem a bit older than the late twenties I knew him to be. Yup. Trouble.

  And what was with this Rainbow Tavern business? The cheerful multicolored logo on his shirt looked like something out of a Portland Pride parade, a big change from the traditional ship’s anchor logo that the last tavern had used for decades. Folks around here relied on the tavern for a greasy burger, cheap beer, and its reassuringly familiar facade. And from what I’d heard, Mason’s re-do offered none of those things—all organic meat this and local lettuce that and microbrews with whimsical names and brand-new decor that seemed intent on proclaiming exactly how “welcoming” the place was.

  Which was all well and good, and, unlike some in the town, I didn’t have a bone to pick with his “gay tourism” agenda except for the part where it made getting my dinner-break burger a mite more…uncomfortable than it had been previously. That was all. I didn’t much care for feeling exposed as I waited for the food, all eyes on me, people wondering. I’d gone almost forty years of working my ass off to avoid that kind of wonder and speculation.

  But still, the tavern was the closest eating establishment to the police station, and the local economy sorely needed a boost. I wasn’t going to take my business to the chain fast-food joints up on 101 just because I was scared of some idle gossip. That’d be the sign of a coward, and that was the last thing I was.

  A blessedly short few minutes later, Mason brought my food. The Ringer boy who was tending bar always had been a bit skittish around me, so it wasn’t much of a surprise that he was making Mason wait on me. “One house burger, a salad, and I had Logan toss on a few fries, on us. I just wanted your opinion on the new sauce.”

  No, no I would not be giving Mason Hanks my opinion on his sauce. Ever. But my mother had raised me with manners, so I nodded. “Thanks.”

  “We bake the bread in-house and—”

  “Are you planning on hovering my whole meal or just till I start chewing?” I couldn’t resist messing with him, just a little. His cheeks colored. Yup, there came trouble, all right.

  “No, of course not. But if you have any feedback—”

  “Still hovering.”

  “Got it.” He licked his lips before backing away. His full, surprisingly pink lips. His much, much too young lips. Too young. Too Hanks. Too out—I’d known about the Ringer kid ever since I caught him up on Mill Peak Road making out with the star running back, and he and Mason had been thick as thieves back then. I wasn’t all that surprised when I heard Mason had gotten himself a fancy boyfriend up in Portland. I had been surprised that he’d come back to town—usually when people left Rainbow Cove, they left for good. And ever since the mill closed and the fishing business bottomed out, more people had been leaving than coming, that was for sure.

  “Oops. Forgot your iced tea.” And there he was, back again, this time with a full glass of some pale stuff that didn’t look like any tea I’d seen before.

  “That’s tea?”

  “It’s an organic green blend we’re trying out.”

  “I’ll stick to water, thanks just the same.”

  “Darn.” Mason looked like I’d kicked his raggedy dog—the one that used to follow him everywhere. “Thought people might like a change—”

  “Change is hard.” Didn’t I know it. I put all my years into the advice I handed out, trying to remind myself that I was indeed older and wiser here. “Take it slow. Change the buns if you must, get that fancy beef, but maybe leave a man his Lipton, you know?”

  “Not so much change. Got it.” He nodded, and for a brief second I finally saw his younger self in his grownup visage. He’d always nodded like that while promising me he’d never speed again, only to go and do whatever fool thing he wanted next. I had a feeling this would be more of the same—no Lipton forthcoming.

  Still, after he finally left me in peace to eat, I had to hand it to them—the burger really was first rate. Nice yeasty bread, grilled, with a thick patty that had a perfect sear on it. I wasn’t really a picky eater, but this was top shelf. With forty approaching faster than I liked, I’d been trying to avoid fried food, but it would have been rude to not at least try the sweet potato fries. They were sinfully good, crispy and tender with the
right amount of heat in the sauce.

  “Dessert? Pie on the house?” Mason showed up right as I was finishing the fries. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, the kid was so eager to please it was almost painful. A few more diners had filtered in while I ate, but the large room was barely a quarter full, if that.

  “I’m good. Check, please?”

  Mason looked down at the paper in his hand. “I wish you’d let me comp this.”

  “But I won’t.” I plucked it out of his fingers, ignoring the brief electric burst when our hands brushed. I was well-accustomed to ignoring this sort of attraction. Mason might be more trouble than most, but I could tamp down my rowdy body. I dug out a twenty. “Keep the change.”

  “So you liked it, then?”

  Oh yes. Took me a second to remember that he meant the food, not the brush of our hands. “Food wasn’t bad,” I allowed. “Suppose I’ll live.”

  “Want me to set you up a tab now?”

  I laughed, a rusty sound that I didn’t make much anymore, not since my dad had passed, and first my mother, then Steve, moved away. “You’re quite the salesman, aren’t you? They teach you that at that fancy school in Portland?”

  “Culinary Institute isn’t that fancy. And it was the restaurant managing experience that came after school that taught me to always try for repeat business. And to appreciate customers who spread the word.” His smile was all gleaming white teeth. Maybe the fancy Portland boyfriend had been a dentist. And it was not okay, the way my hands fisted at the thought of the Portland guy.