Uninhibited in Apple Trail, Arkansas - Volume 2 (2 page)

And that included him.

Small amounts. Little doses was the only way he knew how to be around her without losing his mind and control and putting his hands in places he had no right to be touching. “Who’s that?”

She lifted her bag on her slim shoulder and stared at him. “You.”

His dick liked that idea. A lot by the way it jumped and filled his mind with her honey scent and hardened with thoughts of licking and suckling her well, everywhere.

A quick boat ride and an agonizing trip to her house where he would keep his hands on his steering wheel to see her safely home or leave her at the mercy of all these drunk bastards? Thinking wasn’t even required. He’d deal. He’d make it. He’d be too busy driving to do anything stupid he didn’t have any business doing. He would simply do what he had been doing for years. He would again survive Tiffany McBride. “Then let’s go.”

“Let me change. I don’t want to be wet in your truck.”

He glanced around the sandbar. There were no buildings. Not a hut. Nothing. “Where?”

She rolled her eyes and walked toward the tree line. Her ass once again swayed and damn near looked like it winked at him as she walked the thick sand. Winked! The fucking tease.

“Tiffany.”

She didn’t stop.

No. Surely not. Tiffany paused at the edge of the woods and dropped a pair of white flip-flops and slipped them on her feet. Feet with matching neon pink paint on her toes. Feet Mike wanted to hold in his hands and massage until she moaned and her muscles puddled. He groaned and followed after.

She walked through a circling of pines just off the sandbar.

He peeked in the little area, thankful she hadn’t stripped down. “You can’t just change your clothes on the sandbar. That is illegal. It’s called public nudity.”

“Are you going to arrest me, Chief?”

The bag fell from her hand and flopped to the pine straw covered ground. She hooked her thumbs in the thin strips of her bikini bottoms and didn’t wait a split second before she bent and started shoving them down.

He dropped his gaze immediately. If he saw any more of her creamy skin, he’d lose his mind there on the spot. It wasn’t possible for his blood to pump faster without giving him a heart attack or stroke or whatever the hell it was you got from your heart beating too fast. He couldn’t fucking think with her around, what the hell was he supposed do with her around and
naked.

He closed his eyes and pulled in a breath. He needed to clear his mind. Work. Work always kept him occupied. He surveyed the area of pines. By the bits of litter on the ground, people used this spot a lot. By the used condom two feet away from him, they used it for more than a dressing room. He made a mental note to see about sending someone down here to clean up and post a warning about trash.

And that was all he could come up with. Any other thoughts came from his dick about the woman standing in the center of the circle.

He dared a peek, hoping she was done. Big mistake. A huge, mind blowing, cock hardening, lust-creating, monster-sized mistake. Her back was to him, but she was stark naked. Her ass, one he’d seen often enough barely covered in her little swimsuit was bare. It just wasn’t the same at all without the bottoms. The bottoms had been hiding things like the delicate curve of the top of her ass. Disguising the generous swells of her cheeks. Covering the small dimple that matched the one on her cheek—her face cheek. God, he wouldn’t be able to look at her again without remembering this.

He swallowed and tugged at the front of his pants for relief that would not come.

“I’m going to take that as a no on the arresting?”

He blinked and looked away from her ass to see she was staring over her shoulder at him as she fastened her bra.

Laughter hooted from the sandbar and broke him out of the strongest erotic lust haze he’d ever been in. The people on the sandbar stared at a skier going by. But if Mike could clearly see them down there, then a pretty much naked Tiffany could be seen up here. He jerked her towel from the ground and held it out as a curtain.

He stared at the ground, trying to memorize the crisscrossing pattern of the pine straw scattered around. “You can’t just strip like this.”

“If I can’t, then how come I did?”

“You
shouldn’t
.”

“Relax, Mike. No one is looking.” Her voice was soft, but still chiding. Still teasing like always. Tempting him out of his barely held control. “You’re less than a foot away and you’re not even looking.”

He swallowed, refusing to fall for her bait and look. That was, until she moved closer. Her arms wrapped around his neck. The towel,
his
clothes, and her bra were the only things separating them. A brick wall wouldn’t have been enough to block her soft curves pressing along him.

She sighed. “Why do we have to be this way? All this fighting and arguing is exhausting.”

The heat of her skin bled through the few barriers and drew him even deeper under her spell. He swallowed to clear his throat before speaking, to mask the heavy desire fogging over his mind. She’d never been this close before. Her voice never this soft. “Because I worry about the trouble you get into, since you don’t.”

“Whatever.” Her arms fell from his body like all his hairs being ripped out at once. Clothes rustled and her feet crunched the straw under her. “I’m dressed.”

He peeked and saw, thankfully, she was. He folded the towel up and handed it to her.

“You know what amuses me the most about this situation?” She packed her things in her bag.

Her back was to him, the tag of her shirt fluttered in the wind, giving him a much needed distraction. Yes, let’s think of her clothes, for god’s sake. “Something other than your shirt is on inside out?”

She looked down and chuckled. Without concern, she stripped it off, flipped it right side out and tugged it back on. She was fast, but not so fast he didn’t get another good look of her pristine white bra cupping her tanned breasts like his hands ached to do.

She flicked hair off her shoulder. “That wasn’t it. When you’re not harassing me about my behavior, you can be decently fun. Not a whole bunch, but decent enough.”

His eyes narrowed. “I don’t harass you.”

“What do you call all that clucking like a hen?”

His pulse throbbed in his head. “I. Do. Not. Cluck. The problem is you’re always borrowing trouble. If it’s not stupid shit like today, it’s hustling drunks in the bar, it’s racing or whatever else you can come up with. It’s always something with you. You can’t just grow up. Lord only knows what else you’ve gotten into that I don’t know about.”

Her mouth hardened. “I take it back, I don’t think you would know fun if it bit you in the ass.”

“Some of us have responsibilities, Tiffany. We can’t just run around all fun and games all the time.”

She slung her bag over her shoulder. “Oh, yes. That’s what life is to me. Fun and games.”

“Isn’t it?”

The corners of her eyes crinkled, jaws ticked. “You know that sixty bucks you cost me? That was the grocery bill for the next two weeks so Jessie and I could eat more than peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.”

God. Her cousin, Jessie McBride, was part of the issue here. Tiffany wasn’t near this wild until her parents died and she moved in with Jessie. Things just feel apart then. “If it was that important, maybe you shouldn’t have risked it in the first place.”

“You just don’t fucking get it. Screw you and screw your ride. I’ll find another way home.”

She started by him, but he caught her by the arm. “Why don’t you explain it to me?”

Crossing her arms over her chest, she huffed and a hip kicked out to one side. “I made the sixty dollars last night in a card game. Doubling that money today would have gone toward the electric bill due Monday and given us a cushion at the grocery store. Now you’ve set me back. That’s how we live. All my ‘stunts’ that you find as headache are a means of staying afloat.”

That’s ridiculous. No one could live for as long as she had that way. “Find a job. Something more than loading feed sacks.”

She shook her head. “Oh, yeah. Everyone in Apple Trail is just handing out the offers for work after all the hell I caused as teenager. The tight economy is just another strike against us. The only reason I have the part-time job at the feed store is because the man who owns it was friends with my dad. The best he can afford is to only work us both part-time.”

“Things can’t be that bad that you need to resort to all this betting and stunts.”

“When’s the last time you were at the house?” When he didn’t answer, she shook her head. “It’s falling apart. Literally. Every bit of money we’re able to scrap together goes to food or more duct tape and glue to hold the house together.”

“Jessie could sell some of the land for money.”

Tiffany was shaking her head again. Her fast drying blonde hair curled around her shoulders and danced against her skin. “That’s her daddy’s land. My parents helped him buy it. The bank will have to strip it out of both of our cold, dead hands. He bought that last hundred and fifty acres just before…”

They all died.
Her parents and Jessie’s parents had been in a car accident together, leaving the two teenagers to figure things out.

She cleared her throat. “It doesn’t have too much left on it.”

“How much?”

She bit her lip.

“How much, Tiffany?”

“Two and half years.”

“And you plan to keep your behavior going for that much longer.” Over
his
dead body. He couldn’t take this for another two years. It had been going on now for, fuck, eight years? Nine already?

She shrugged. “I’ve been doing it for years now.”

“Not at this level.”

She shook her head. “We had a lot of rain this spring. Most of our garden that we usually sell or trade things for was ruined. Riley Hamilton has been very gracious in giving us beef, even though we don’t have near the fruits and vegetables we normally give him in return. Jessie and I have been helping him where we can to make up for it, but it’s not near the compensation for the amount of meat. Without that, I don’t know what we would be doing right now.”

“You have a lot of acreage that’s loaded in deer.”

She nodded. “We sure do. And pigs. And squirrels. And rabbits and all the meat a person could eat. But the only guns we have were our daddy’s and they kick so hard, Jessie and I both liked to have broken our noses when we tried firing them.”

He raked a hand through his hair, unbelieving. It wasn’t possible they had slipped through cracks like this right here under his nose. “I’ll find something for you at the station.”

She stared after him for a long moment. “No.”

“There’s something. You can help Mary Sue. She needs the extra hands right now with her pregnancy advancing.”

“No.”

“It’s easy. You can do it.”

“I’m not worried about being able to do it, I’m worried about doing it with you around.”

His brow rose and she released a disgusted sounding noise, ending any sort of stupid ideas he’d started imaging.

“Not because I can’t work around you, asshole. I’m not going to have you over my shoulder all day telling me how I’m doing something wrong.”

“I won’t.”

“That’s all you ever do.”

“I do no—”

Her look cut him off short. “Thanks, but no thanks.”

“So you’re going to stay in the situation you’re in because you don’t want to be told what to do.”

“I can’t handle you telling me what to do twenty-fours a day. Not like you do. Not with this nagging disapproving tone over every single step I make. Hell, Mike, I think I bent over and checked the ties of my shoes once and you jumped all over me.”

He straightened, the memory jumped to mind in full clarity. Of her blue skirt blowing in the sudden strong breeze, the curves of her ass barely covered by orange panties right there on display. “That’s cause you were flashing the entire street!” He pulled in a breath. “I won’t be over you all the time. Just for working hours.”

“No. It wouldn’t work anyway. Three-quarters of this town would have a heart-attack if they found out I was working in the Sherriff’s office.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

She shook her head, her eyes heavy and sad. “No it’s not.”

“If you do what I say, the—”

“Uh-huh. There you go again.”

He cursed himself for the slip. “It’s the best I can do.”

She sighed, the bag slipped down her collapsing shoulders. “I didn’t tell you all this for your pity. In a month and a half, we’ll have melons. We were able to salvage a bit and we planted more things for the fall. Pumpkins and stuff that we’ll sell.”

“And until then?”

“Until then we’ll make it on hope. We’ve done it so far.”

“You’re just being stubborn.”

“I’m being sensible. I’m liable to murder you in your sleep if I work for you.”

“Tiffany.”

She rolled her eyes, her body straightened. Any bits of vulnerability disappeared. “How does this sound, I work for you, take your nonstop correction, for half the day, but the other half of the day, after business hours, you’re all mine. You do what I say, when I say, how I say. Period. Sounds like a nightmare, doesn’t it? To be trapped at my beck and call.”