After all, what’s the fun when you can see the ending coming?
About Cassia Brightmore
Cassia Brightmore is a Canadian dark romance author. She loves writing dark stories with twisted characters that she hopes will thrill the reader as well as make them fall in love.
She loves hockey, video games and online shopping. If she's not writing or editing, you can usually find her doing one of these things. Writing is her passion and publishing her first book as an indie author was truly a dream come true.
http://www.cassiabrightmoreauthor.com
Handcuffs & Stethoscopes: Beat of My Heart
Crystal St. Clair, Edits donated by Maria Vickers
Handcuffs & Stethoscopes: Beat of My Heart
Prologue
A woman walked by Jessa, lightly tugging her child’s sleeve so he’d stop picking his nose and finish his blue lollipop. Jessa laughed and looked away from the scene to her radio just in time to answer a call. The dispatcher announced that a call had come in from a grocery store nearby. She slipped a letter into a mailbox then raced to her patrol car.
Turning on the sirens, she sped to the location directed on her monitor. The store wasn’t too far from where Jessa delivered her letter, but the situation required her to sound her sirens due to traffic. She needed people out to stay out of her way.
She pulled into the nearly empty parking lot, and the cars in the exit lanes yielded to her, allowing her to park in the nearest space available. Everyone seemed more concerned with where Jessa was going rather than where they were going. She shut off her sirens, then stepped out of her vehicle and noticed an unusual silence. A line-up of people waited outside to get into the grocery store, but it didn’t look full inside. After Jessa and her partner secured the scene and made sure no one was in danger, she returned to the queue of customers.
Jessa figured the civilians couldn’t wait to gossip about the incident, so she took their statements. Someone who was standing in the outdoor line-up answered their phone and swiped their call on speaker—someone ready to jump to conclusions and gossip, of course. Jessa had to be careful about what she said when she asked them to get off of their phones; she could not state any evidence that may or may not be useful to the case and filing charges. Bystanders were almost as bad as the press with their news spreading, reporting half of the story, telling others they want to hear rather than the full truth.
Back inside the store, there was one male standing on the other side of the counter from the clerk. He looked to be in his late twenties to mid-thirties, short black hair and brown eyes, six foot one, built, and clean-shaven. Inspecting everything more closely, Jessa searched around the small storefront and into the staff room behind the sliding door that was left half-way open. He and the clerk were the only two in the store while others remained outside.
The female clerk, who wasn’t much shorter than Jessa, had short blonde hair a few tints darker than Jessa’s and bright blue eyes. The woman couldn’t stop fidgeting with her hands, and she shook from probably shock and nerves, which were caused by the situation. Still, she attempted to remain calm from behind the counter. Her black uniform appeared tidy, but her chest didn’t display a name tag like it should. Chrissy, she stated when Jessa questioned her. Unfortunately, Chrissy didn’t have much information beyond that, she just kept repeating that there was a disturbance. No items were broken on the floor. The glass from the freezers was so clean that Jessa could see herself and the handsome gentleman’s reflections through them. Jessa had encountered her fair share of sexy criminals in her police career, so she knew how not to get distracted by falling into their dreamy eyes, perfect lips, and muscles that were smooth and pulled his t-shirt taut.
Nobody was harmed, but apparently, a strange man ran into the store while claiming to have a bloody nose due to an altercation with a friend, who had threatened to steal his credit cards after he treated his friend to lunch and a few beers. After Chrissy ran to retrieve a Kleenex for him, she then watched the stranger wipe his blood from a scab on the side of his nose. The situation felt off for her when she realized blood wasn’t coming from the inside of his nose like she thought. For the customers’ sake, the clerk cleaned up a few drops of blood from the floor and convinced the stranger he was safe. She then called him a taxi. Customers continued to shop during the incident, and from the interviews, it seemed to Jessa that the clerk kept calm during the entire situation.
At some point, after the strange man left, Chrissy explained the shock finally set in. She had trouble convincing the stranger to leave once the taxi arrived, and even more so when both credit cards he attempted to use to purchase some items showed up on the machine as blocked, which meant they were more than likely stolen.
Jessa had to admit that she was impressed with Chrissy. She remained calm during the ordeal and wrote down all of the details of the stranger and the altercation before Jessa had arrived. The only other item of interest that Chrissy disclosed was that the strange man left his backpack and belongings all over the storefront as he scavenged for his cards, which he was convinced the cards he’d set on the counter were not the ones he was searching for. Upon two customers cashing out, the handsome main witness noticed there was a situation between the clerk and the strange man as something felt off to the witness.
The main witness, Kyle Stevenson, stood tall above Jessa and Chrissy, a concerned expression displayed on his face. He had a calming aura about him. Interviews from everyone matched up, and Kyle seemed to be no threat. The nearby stores in the same plaza had not seen the strange man Chrissy talked about. Jessa kept the paper with the clerk’s details in her notes with the address to where the taxi dropped off the stranger, which supposedly was where he lived, according to the store’s customer membership files. Jessa held onto the information to check on the stranger’s well-being later, but at that point, there was, unfortunately, nothing Jessa could do pertaining to laying any charges. She planned to encourage the store owners to have at least two clerks working together.
Jessa couldn’t believe the day she was having. Her father reached for his mug from the kitchen cupboard to pour some tea, but he lost all of his strength in his hands and dropped the mug, and collapsed on the floor. Luckily her mother was home and found her father to call for an ambulance. The doctors weren’t sure of the cause for his fall, but they suspected a stroke. Her mother ran all of the errands and rarely spoke with Jessa. They just didn’t see eye-to-eye, so it was best they kept their conversations short. Other than errands, Jessa had no idea where her mother went as she was left to figure out all of her father’s medical information because even the doctors hadn’t seen her mother visit her dad in the hospital. Jessa never crossed paths with her mother in the hospital, and it was for the best. Yet, Jessa’s day was less chaotic than usual. Today everything felt heavier as she struggled to keep her head clear and focused. Even the eye candy she laid eyes on at the earlier incident didn’t make her feel better. She was worried about her father in the hospital after his fall, but she knew he was where he should be, with some of the best doctors in Southwestern, Ontario.