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James reached into the drawer of the bedside table and pulled out a foil packet. He tore it open with his mouth, and rolled the thin covering over his length.
And then he was inside her. Mara wrapped her legs around his waist, loving the feel of his body against hers, inside hers. This was all she needed.
James Calhoun was everything she wanted, even if she could never be the woman that he needed.
* * *
MARA WATCHED JAMES sleeping soundly on the hotel room bed. The lights were off, but the glow of the neon on the street below was enough to illuminate the room dimly. His mouth was open slightly, his left hand over his heart and his legs tangled in the sheets. The tie draped over the pillow. A lock of hair fell over his eyes. She pushed it back.
This wasn’t just fun.
She swallowed. She wanted to slide under his arm and rest her head over his heart. Wanted to lie there for hours, listening to his heart beating.
God, what had she done?
They’d been meeting like this, in hotel rooms around the country every few months, for nearly three years. Every time it had just been about the sex. Good sex. Excellent sex.
Why did she have to go and let her heart ruin it? This was a great arrangement. He liked his small-town life, and she liked her on-the-road life. They met up for sex, they each went back to their lives, and no one expected anything more.
She took a deep breath. She shouldn’t want more, so why did she? It wasn’t fair. She should have been able to love him and leave him, the way she had every other time they’d met.
Mara pressed a quick kiss to his cheek. James rocked his head slowly to the side, but he didn’t wake.
“I don’t want to mess this up,” she whispered to the man on the bed. The man who had been her best friend for most of her life. The man she should never have fallen in love with. “This will lead to broken hearts and anger, so I’m ending it now without the anger and without breaking anything. It’s better this way.”
She slid off the bed, picked up her satchel and laptop, and quietly left the hotel room. She would arrange for the hotel to pack her things and ship them to her office in Tulsa, because if she waited for him to wake, she wouldn’t be able to leave. She would tell him how she felt about him.
He might tell her he felt the same, but it wouldn’t matter. She didn’t want his kind of life any more than he wanted hers.
More than that, he deserved better.
He deserved someone who wasn’t broken.
CHAPTER ONE (#ufcb80752-5194-5458-8c4e-54bbf2157abc)
Present day
MARA PULLED INTO the parking lot of Mallard’s Grocery in Slippery Rock, Missouri. The lot with its cracked pavement sat at the corner of Main Street and Mariner, a few blocks north of Slippery Rock Lake. The grocery store still had the image of a duck on its sign, the paint dividing the parking spaces was still off-center from the cement blocks at the head of each space, and the same cracked glass was in the revolving door.
Despite the light breeze along the shore, it was oppressively hot in the town center. She had forgotten exactly how muggy and uncomfortable a southern Missouri summer could be. Since slipping out of town the night after her high school graduation, Mara had allowed herself only a handful of visits, all around the holidays, when the weather was significantly cooler.
She turned off the ignition and tossed her keys into the large tote she carried for work. Although the store stood several blocks from the waterfront, where a horrible tornado had leveled several buildings a few weeks before, she could hear the hammering and sawing going on in the downtown area.
This section of town had experienced a few uprooted trees, but most of the damage had been to roofs and windows. The grocery store still had one big plate-glass window boarded over, and one of the cart corrals looked as if a tree had landed on it. Maybe one had.
She hadn’t expected to feel sympathy for the town when she decided to come back, but sympathy was the only explanation she had for the tightening in her chest. Closing her eyes, she took a few deep, centering breaths. The tornado was an act of God. It wasn’t her fault. Not like so many other happenings that had befallen this town because of her. Now she was in a position to help this place that had saved her as a child.
And ideally, while she was helping the town at large, she could fix a couple of personal messes, too.
Mara activated the locks on the SUV as she exited. A few cars and trucks sat in the lot, and she decided to begin her security sweep here rather than checking in with the office first. She didn’t need a store manager distracting her from her job with talk of how little crime they’d experienced. If the stores she visited weren’t in need of a security upgrade, she would not have been dispatched to their area.
On a small notepad, she jotted the locations of several security cameras situated to capture the inbound and outbound foot traffic to the store, but as she crossed to the rear, near the row of Dumpsters and a big cardboard baler, she noted only one camera. It appeared to be slightly askew, and she wondered if it worked at all. Not a great setup despite the low crime rate in Slippery Rock. She made a notation in the notebook.
Air-conditioning blasted her as she pushed through the two-sided revolving door into the store, a nice relief from the heat of the blacktop parking lot. The clerk, a middle-aged woman with salt-and-pepper hair, ignored her as Mara passed through the automatic doors. The woman’s hair might have changed color since Mara left Slippery Rock ten years before, but that frown on her face was as familiar as the bored tap-tap-tapping of her fingernails against the counter. A teen with red-and-blue-striped hair—the high school colors—sat on the end of the check stand, chewing gum while he waited for a customer to come through the line. A few glass-domed cameras looked down over the front of the store, but again, in the back there was little security. She scribbled more notes. To test the system, she put a box of cookies in her bag along with a small carton of milk.
She waved to the clerk as she left the store. The clerk ignored her. No sirens sounded, and the teenage bagger remained at his perch at the end of the check stand.
Not good. No wonder the grocery store wanted an upgrade. They were probably losing a small fortune in junk food to kids who either didn’t have the money to buy it or simply didn’t want to pay. The fact that the beer aisle was one over from the cookies probably pushed their loss ceiling even higher. A man with only a couple of dollars in his bank account and a tremendous thirst for a Budweiser wouldn’t think twice about risking a run through the less-than-secure store.
Mara turned around and headed back inside, and as she stepped into the revolving door, buzzers began beeping, and the mechanical door stopped moving altogether, trapping her in between a wall of glass and the inner door. Mara tried to stop, but her shoe slipped against the floor, and she lost her balance. Her shoulder slammed into the glass, making her wince in pain. Mara regained her footing only to find she was trapped inside the door. She had never encountered a system that trapped only people who returned to a store with stolen merchandise. For that matter, she didn’t think such a system existed. Probably some kind of kink in the software.
The gum-smacking teen pointed a broom handle at her as if she were under fire, and the bored clerk talked animatedly into the phone, waving her hands as she said something Mara couldn’t make out from her side of the thick-paned door.
She motioned to her bag and tried to shout above the racket of the beepers. “I’m with Cannon Security,” she said, but the teenager kept wielding the broom handle at her like it was a machete. “I’m on a security check,” she said, trying again, but neither of the employees seemed able to hear her. Maybe the two of them didn’t want to hear her.
Damn it. She checked her watch. She needed to be at the bed-and-breakfast in twenty minutes, and she didn’t see that happening. Crap, crap, crap. She never missed Zeke’s postnap snack. Never.
A crowd gathered behind the check stand, mostly middle-aged women wearing jeans and T-shirts and probably boots, just like their husbands would. A few had small children with them and pushed the kids behind their carts as if Mara might be dangerous. “Turn off the buzzers,” she yelled, putting her hands over her ears.
The checker hung up the phone and came over to the glass. She said something that sounded peculiarly like “Criminals deserve discomfort” before backing away to the safety of her check stand. As if Mara was about to draw a gun or something.
“Now I know what the goldfish at the office feels like,” she muttered, still holding her hands over her ears. She pushed one foot against the inner and outer doors, but neither budged.
Finally the beepers stopped and everything quieted. Mara took her hands from her ears and tried the doors again. They didn’t budge. She repeated her call through the thick glass.
“I’m here on a security check. I need to speak with Michael Mallard.” The clerk shot a glance behind her toward an area marked Employees Only. No one appeared. The crowd began to disperse, lessening the goldfish effect.
She tugged at her earlobe when a low siren began to wail. Was this some kind of second-tier warning system? The clerk crossed her arms over her chest as if in triumph. The wailing became louder, and it wasn’t coming from inside the store. Mara pressed her face against the outer door, looking left and then right.
“No, no, no. Please, no.”
The siren grew louder, and a few cars passing on the street pulled to the side.
“Let it be a fire. Let it be a fire.”
But it wasn’t a red fire truck that entered the parking lot. It was a big black SUV with Wall County Sheriff plastered along its side. She was definitely not making it to the B and B for snack time.
As the SUV came to a stop, she could make out the driver, a large man with brown hair and big aviator sunglasses over his eyes—eyes she knew would be the color of molten chocolate. This man had been interrupting her dreams since she’d hit puberty and began to figure out why male and female body parts were made so deliciously dissimilar.
“Crap, crappity crap.”
* * *
JAMES PULLED INTO the parking lot of Mallard’s Grocery and sighed. He could see a tall, thin woman caught between the double doors, and she looked annoyed. Her long hair was pulled through the back of her Kansas City Royals baseball cap, which obscured her face. Probably another customer who’d reentered the store after making a purchase. He’d been called out here at least a dozen times since Christmas, when the store’s security system started going wonky. Not once in all the calls he’d answered had anyone actually been stealing from the store. Of course, that didn’t stop CarlaAnn from acting like she’d been deputized every time. And, crap, was the bag boy wielding a broom at the woman?
That alarm system was a menace. Mike should invest in better locks and leave it at that. There was no need for expensive—and defective—security systems in Slippery Rock.
He got out of the SUV, blistering afternoon sunshine reflecting off the pavement. Since the tornado, the summer temperatures had been relatively mild, but according to the local weatherman, this heat wave would continue for at least a week.
James knocked on the glass of the entrance, his attention focused on the woman still caught between the doors. She turned and faced the store, her shoulders and spine seeming rigid beneath the vibrant blue of the tank top she wore. Cropped jeans hugged the curves of her lower half, making his mouth go a little dry.
CarlaAnn, the clerk at the checkout, pressed the button that disabled the alarm, allowing the doors to whoosh open, but the woman caught inside didn’t budge until the door pushed her gently forward. She stepped from the doorway, holding on to her oversize shoulder bag with both hands, gaze focused intently on the empty aisle leading to the butcher counter. Maybe she wasn’t a typical customer. James put his hand on his holster just in case as he motioned for her to follow him to the check stand.
“We’ll get this straightened out in a moment,” he said.
“I wasn’t stealing anything. I had a reason for being in this store,” she said, and her husky voice sent a shiver down James’s spine. He knew that voice. Even after two years, he knew it.
“Mara?” He turned his shocked gaze to her. She’d let her hair grow, and she wasn’t the stick-thin girl he remembered either from high school or the day she’d walked out on him two years ago.
“I swear,” she said, reaching into the bag and pulling out a box of cookies and a small carton of milk, “I have a really good explanation for this.”
Well, that much, at least, was familiar. Mara Tyler always had a good explanation, both before she acted and after the fact. While in high school, the six of them—he and Mara, her brother Collin, Levi Walters and the twins, Aiden and Adam Buchanan—had pulled a number of pranks on the town. They’d painted Simone Grainger’s phone number on the water tower after she dumped Aiden before the last basketball game of their senior year. They’d all brought dogs to school on the same day, and had switched the cables from the principal’s computer to the secretary’s. They repainted the downtown parking spaces and put up Tractors Only parking signs. There were countless other pranks, but each one had been orchestrated by Mara, and every single one of them he’d gone along with because he would rather have been with her than without her.
Whenever Mara came around, his law-abiding side warred with his reckless side, and usually the reckless side won, leaving his law-abiding self to clean up the mess.
Like the mess the two of them made graduation night.
Correction: the mess he’d made all by himself when he took one of her pranks to a whole other level.
No one except him and Mara knew exactly what happened that night, and he planned to keep it that way.
“Yeah, it just figures Mara Tyler would set off the store alarm.” CarlaAnn had joined them. “I thought I recognized her when she walked in, but I wasn’t sure until the alarms went off.” She shook her head, her shoulder-length, salt-and-pepper hair shaking from side to side. “This alarm system isn’t good for much, but it finally caught her in the act.” She stabbed a finger toward Mara’s chest. James stepped between them.
CarlaAnn was Simone’s mother, and she’d always blamed their group for the water tower incident—with just cause. A few weeks after that incident, Simone ran off with the biker she’d dumped Aiden for, and she had never returned to Slippery Rock. CarlaAnn blamed only Mara for that offense, and her blame had turned into a raging hatred before the six of them graduated.
“I have a perfectly good explanation for being here, and for setting off the alarms. I tried to tell you that through the glass,” Mara said, stepping around James’s arm. “I need to speak with Mike.” She glanced at her watch, and she tapped the toe of her shoe against the tile.
CarlaAnn crossed her arms over her chest. “Mike is on vacation. You’ll have to deal with me.”
Mara kept her gaze trained on the other woman for a long moment. CarlaAnn was the first to look away. “Then I need a phone number or email address where he can be reached.”
CarlaAnn pressed her lips together and scowled. “I don’t have either of those,” she finally said.
James noticed the crowd of shoppers gradually inching closer to Mara and CarlaAnn, probably expecting some kind of girl fight now that Mara had been identified. Small towns meant there was always a helping hand around, but they also meant long memories. Everyone remembered the water tower prank, among others. The love-hate relationship between Mara and the town had turned to flat-out hate after the fiasco of graduation night, though.
Since then, James had done his best to prove he was a man worthy of being the next sheriff. Mara setting off alarm bells at the grocery store would only reinforce their belief that she was a felony charge away from jail time.
He knew she wasn’t a felon, and their pranks had been generated out of boredom rather than malice, but that wouldn’t matter. Nor would the fact that James graduated at the top of his class in both college and the police academy. His anonymous restitution to the school would be irrelevant. None of those things would matter to the townspeople, just as those things didn’t truly assuage his conscience. He could only hope that someday the man he’d become would matter more than the boy he’d been. Maybe that was how Mara felt, too.
“We’ll take care of this, everyone.” He motioned to the crowd to continue shopping, then turned to Mara. “Why don’t you and I go into the office area and talk this through?”
Mara checked her watch again. “Can we make it quick? I, um, have an important, uh, conference call in fifteen minutes.”
“Don’t you need my statement, too, Deputy Calhoun? Or is this a purely cursory investigation?”
James thought he heard a silent too on the end of CarlaAnn’s last question, as well, and remembered his mother confronting his father after CarlaAnn accused him of conducting a “cursory investigation” into Simone’s disappearance with the biker. James took Mara’s arm and pushed past CarlaAnn.
“Hey,” Mara said in protest, but he ignored her until the door to the back office closed behind them. “I’m not a criminal. And I have another appointment.”
“No, you’re a mischief maker. And important conference call or not, I’m going to investigate why you’re setting off alarm bells at my grocery store.”
“I thought it still belonged to the Mallard family, or have the Calhouns gone into groceries as well as law enforcement?”
“You know what I meant. This is my town, and the people here are my friends, my family. The businesses they run, I protect.”
“They were mine once, too.”
“Until the day you ran out on everything.”
Mara jerked her arm from his grasp. “You, of all people, know why I left.”
James clenched his jaw. Yeah, he knew. Only it hadn’t been her leaving ten years ago that he’d been talking about. She didn’t need to know that, though. He opened the door to the room that held the security equipment and motioned her inside. “Want to show me your reasonable explanation for stealing five dollars in snacks when I know for a fact that you don’t eat generic cookies and are lactose intolerant?”
“I can’t.” Mara looked uncomfortable. “But if you would let me get to my—”
“You’d better, or CarlaAnn out there is going to do her damnedest to make sure this misdemeanor offense not only lands on the crime blotter of the Slippery Rock Gazette but also sounds like a felony.” God, but she was cute when she was upset. Her face took on a pretty pink hue, and she wrung her hands together nervously. Mara was almost never nervous, so seeing her this out of balance was nice. Especially since she was so good at putting him off balance.
Mara motioned to the equipment on the counter. “The system doesn’t catch where I was in the store, and it misses a lot of the parking lot.” She pulled an ID badge from her bag, the move pulling her top taut over her breasts. James’s mouth went dry. Stupid reaction. He’d been hung up on Mara Tyler for most of his life, but he was not going to let himself get hung up on her again. He was a responsible adult with a responsible job, and she’d walked out on him two years ago without so much as a goodbye. He was over her.
“I work for Cannon Security.” She named a firm he had heard about during his training in Jefferson City a few years before. “Mike hired us to do a security overhaul, and I was here to conduct a cursory check before telling him what needed to be done. No one told me he was on vacation. I have emails on my computer at the B and B.”
“You work for a security company?” That was new. He had always figured Mara had gone into hacking or some other not-quite-legal profession. Although they’d had an on-again, off-again relationship, they never talked about anything important. She’d seen his badge, and knew he had always wanted to become the sheriff, but they had never talked about her plans. Or dreams. Hell, he couldn’t really call what they’d had a relationship. It was more like a five-year series of booty calls when she was near Slippery Rock or when he went to law-enforcement conferences in the cities where she worked. “I didn’t realize you were one of the good guys now.”
“Well, I don’t wear a cape, but I do have a lot of really cool techy toys that come in handy from time to time.”
Great, now he was picturing her in tights and a cape, and in his imagination her body looked so much better than any of the good guys from the comic books. Not that she was one of the good guys. Er, girls. Women. Whatever. He refocused as she continued talking.
“I do camera and detector installs, but I also write specific programs for some of our clients.” She sat at the counter and ran through the tapes from the ancient camera system.
The images were grainy and fuzzy, but he could tell they focused on the check stand and the front of the store. He moved closer, putting his hand over hers. Warmth from the touch spread up his arm, but Mara didn’t seem to notice. He shook himself. He was not going down this road, not again. Mara only ever saw him as a friend or a booty call, and even if that changed, his job didn’t. Her reputation wouldn’t. Getting tangled up with her again would be...irresponsible. James hadn’t been irresponsible, at least not inside the Slippery Rock city limits, since graduation night.
“This was to be a custom job because Mallard’s is the only store on this particular block. He has specific needs.”
So did James, not that his needs had anything to do with the images on the screens before them. Those needs had everything to do with the heat that seemed to seep into his skin from hers. He stepped back. “Like more cameras and a new door.”
“Yes, as well as computerized entry codes and new systems for opening and closing the registers. The store has lost a lot of revenue from shoplifters, but Mike also mentioned something about registers not adding up. It’s a big job.”
“And they picked you to run it.” He was impressed. Mara Tyler was not only a good guy but also a good-at-her-job good guy.
“Actually, I volunteered.” She stood. “I needed to make sure my family was okay after the tornado, and...” She paused. “It seemed like a good time to come home for more than a day at a time.” She twisted her mouth to the side as if she might say more.
James waited a long moment, but she didn’t continue. “I thought you hated Slippery Rock.”
“Sometimes the things you hate the most as a kid are the things you miss the most as an adult.” There was something in her voice that made him look at her more closely. This wasn’t personal—that couldn’t be it. But there was something different about Mara. Something had changed over the past two years, and that change was interesting.
Not that he would act on interesting. Still, it might be nice to have her around for a while, if for no other reason than to give uptight old CarlaAnn a hard time.
“Are you ready to face the music with CarlaAnn?” He checked his watch. “By my count, you have ten more minutes before the big conference call.”
