“You make it sound so…savage,” she said in a whisper.
“Not the word I would’ve used,” he said dryly. Then he hefted himself back to his feet. “How’s this looking?”
As a subject change, it wasn’t exactly subtle. But it worked. Summer’s gaze dropped to his chest and he heard her suck in a little gasp of air. Then she stepped into him and reached out her hand. He tensed, but she didn’t touch him, not right away. His chest was still wrapped and he wasn’t exactly looking forward to having the bandage unwound.
“It’s okay,” he reassured her.
“I’m not sure it is,” she said. “Turn around.” Tim did as she asked and she undid the ends of the bandage and began winding it away from his skin.
As the gentle pressure that the elastic bandage had exerted against his chest was released, he winced as his muscles unclenched then stiffened in pain.
“It looks terrible,” she told him, her fingertips lightly stroking over his bruised skin.
“It feels like hell,” he agreed, then turned to face her. “There,” he said lifting her chin and staring into her bright eyes. “I feel better already.”
Embarrassment bloomed on her cheeks and her gaze cut to the doorway. “Georgey…”
Yeah, he guessed right. She was more embarrassed about being caught kissing than she was mad about him smacking the kid upside the head. He pointedly glanced toward the open door—and, thankfully, no one had his head poked through. “What about him?”
She shot him a dirty look. “We can’t exactly do this with him around.” Before he could ask what that meant, she quickly added, “Whatever this is.”
“This,” he said, settling his hands back on her hips and pulling her tight against him, “is two adults who are attracted to each other—right?”
She was tense in his arms, but only for a second before she melted. “Right,” she said, but she didn’t sound happy about it.
“Two consenting adults who don’t have any other obligations, right?”
“Right,” she said again, resting her head against his shoulder.
He was able to take a deep breath without too much pain, because she was there. “I don’t see what the problem is.”
She looked up at him and rolled her eyes. “This doesn’t strike you as awkward at all?”
“The only awkward thing here is the fact that I’m exhausted and sore. If it weren’t for that, I’d close that door and lay you down and pick right back up are we left off this afternoon.”
His words had an immediate impact. Summer’s eyes widened and a flash of something that looked a hell of a lot like want crossed her face—before it was buried behind worry. “You can’t be serious.”
“Summer, the kid is seventeen. He knows what sex is.”
He was not making this any better. “But he would know,” she stammered out. “About us. About…you know.”
Tim sighed again, which made his ribs pull. Maybe this wasn’t a good idea. Yeah, he was attracted to her and yeah, she was attracted to him. But there was a whole hell of a lot more to a relationship than just sexual chemistry. The fact was, she might be too sweet and innocent to deal with a man like him. The gulf between their worlds might be too damned wide.
Still, what was she going to do when she got Georgey back to the big city? Was she going to spend the next year—or several years—not dating just because her brother might know she was kissing men?
She must’ve taken his sigh the wrong way because she got a worried look and said, “You take the bed. I’ll sleep on the couch.”
“What? No.” He might not be the most chivalrous of men, but he wasn’t about to let her sleep on that crappy couch. “You get the bed. Or,” he added, cutting her off when her mouth opened to argue, “we can share the bed.”
Her eyes got very wide. “We can’t do that.”
He cupped her face in his hands and stared down into her eyes. “Why don’t you have a boyfriend?” Because that was the question that had been bothering him for a long time. “You’re beautiful and caring and intelligent. You should have someone who’d miss you.”
He could feel her blush as much as see it. The skin under his fingertips warmed. “I don’t need a man just because I should have one.”
He thought about that. “What about your friends? I know you told me you gave up your summer school job to stay out here a little while longer—won’t your friends miss you?”
Something that looked like pain flashed in her eyes, then she pulled free of his grip so quickly he almost lost his balance. “I have friends,” she said in the tight voice.
Something in him responded on a basic level—his gut instinct. The same gut instinct that told him Georgey wasn’t hopeless.
She was lonely. He recognized it all too well.
“Who’s going to miss you while you’re here?”
Her spine stiffened. “I am not some pitiful spinster, you know,” she snapped under her breath. “I have friends.”
She hadn’t answered the question. “You have your job,” he said slowly, the truth dawning on him. “You have your students and your coworkers and your mom, right?”
She glared at him but she didn’t answer.
“And you tell yourself that that’s enough—but it’s not. Not like this is.” And before she could reply, he pulled her back into his arms and kissed her like he hadn’t kissed a woman in so long, he wasn’t sure he was doing it right.
In fact, he was pretty sure he was doing it wrong because her arms came up and she pushed him away. He let her, but he didn’t let go of her.
“You do not know me,” she breathed, her chest rising and falling in anger. “You don’t know me at all.”
“I think I do—because that’s how I feel, too.”
“I don’t—what?” She blinked up at him, momentarily stunned. “What are you talking about? This is where you belong.”
“I know. This is my tribe and my people and my land—but I arrest so many of them and the ones who are left…I’m a stranger to them.” He touched his forehead to hers. “And you—you are a stranger. But that’s not how I feel when I’m with you.”
“They would miss you,” she insisted—but quietly. “I would miss you.”
He breathed out slowly. “When you go back to the city, I’m going to miss you too.” No, it didn’t make any sense to him at all. He’d only known her for a matter of days. But there was something about her that called to him. “When you’re around, I don’t feel so alone.”
And that? That was pitiful. That was weakness. And it wasn’t the kind of weakness that could be prevented with a bulletproof vest.
He’d left himself open. Maybe it was the ribs. Maybe it was the exhaustion. Or maybe…maybe it was something else.
Maybe it was her.
She sighed, her warm breath caressing his skin. “Let me get you some more ice. And then,” she added in what he thought of as her teacher voice, “you’re going to lay on this bed and sleep.”
He couldn’t fight the grin that took hold of his mouth. “What about you?”
She stepped out of his arms and moved toward the open door. When she reached it, she looked back at him and he saw the longing in her eyes. It was so strong he almost told her to come back and sleep with him tonight. Begged her to do just that.
“I can take care of myself,” she told him.
And she walked away.
***
While she got the ice, she heard Tim in the bathroom. Amazingly, Georgey had the dishes almost done and set out on the drying rack. How long has she been in there with Tim? Summer’s head pounded. Everything about this felt weird and wrong.
Except for the part where Tim held her and kissed her and told her that he wasn’t as lonely when she was around.
“Is he okay?” Georgey asked quietly. “He looked like hell.”
“I think so. He just needs to rest. I’m going to sleep out here on the couch tonight, if that’s okay with you.”
Georgey sh
rugged—typical teenage indifference.
She got the ice into the plastic grocery bag she’d borrowed from the childcare center. This way, it wouldn’t leak as badly.
She wanted to hate Tim because he made her sound so damned pitiful. No boyfriend, and her work friends were all off having wild summer adventures of their own—without her. And her mother? Summer didn’t even want to go there.
But she didn’t think she could hate him. Because instead of throwing it in her face like her mother would’ve done or laughing it off like some of the guys in college had when she’d tried to explain the loneliness she’d felt, Tim understood.
She’d never been an Indian. Or a Native American or a Lakota or any of those things, except for that one time she’d come out to the reservation and stayed with her father for that week.
And there’d always been something…missing. Something that bothered her in the back of her mind every time her mother got going on her father and all his failings. Then she hadn’t been all white, either. She’d been somewhere in between and, in all reality, in between was a pretty lonely place to be.
But it hadn’t been something she’d been able to name until Tim Means had said, We are all family. Until she’d come to this place and found her brother.
Her head buzzing, she headed back to the bedroom. Tim had laid out towels on the bed again and was sitting on it, looking beat. He’d changed into a loose-fitting pair of gym shorts and right now, he looked almost nothing like the stern sheriff who’d found her lost in the grasslands.
But as she approached him, he hefted himself to his feet and lifted his arms as best he could so that she could wrap him again.
“Summer…” he said in a low voice.
She cut him off before he could say something that would make everything more confusing. “It’s okay,” she told him again.
But she should’ve known by now that a man like Tim Means would not be deterred. When she moved around to the front of his chest, he put his hands on her shoulders and held her still. “I’m tired and I’m sore and I’m sorry what I said hurt you. It wasn’t my intention.”
If it weren’t for the part about him being tired and sore, she’d like to know exactly what his intentions were. Really, what did he want with her? Or even with Georgey? Because if this was just going to be a brief summer fling, well—that would be okay, wouldn’t it?
But when a man stood in front of her and told her in all sincerity he was lonely and he’d miss her when she left, it didn’t sound like a fling. She didn’t know what, exactly, it sounded like—and that was the problem.
“Don’t worry about it,” she told him, tucking the ends of the bandage in and making sure the ice was over his bruise. “You need more than three hours of sleep. If you get up before six in the morning…”
She didn’t actually have a threat she could make good on and he knew it. His lips quirked into a smile. “Yes?”
She swatted at his shoulder—the one on his good side. “You’ll wake me up,” she said in a dull voice.
“And nobody wants that,” he grinned.
He looked like he wanted to say something else, so she leaned up on her toes and kissed him. “We’ll talk more tomorrow—after you start feeling better.”
She had a feeling that, if he were in better condition, he’d argue with her. But as it was, he nodded once and let her back him up to the bed. He winced as he leaned back, then she checked again to make sure the ice was in the right position before pulling the sheet over him.
He caught one of her hands in his and brought it to his mouth, where he kissed her palm. “Thank you,” he said in a quiet voice, his eyes already shut.
She kissed him on the forehead. “I’ll be here when you wake up.”
Within seconds, his chest was rising and falling in even breaths. Summer couldn’t help but notice he fell asleep with a smile on his face.
Chapter Nine
That night, Summer discovered exactly how uncomfortable the couch was. There was no good place to put her hips that didn’t twist her back one way or the other. She finally decided laying on her side was the least-bad option.
Although Tim didn’t have curtains on the window on the front of his house, it was still pitch black in the room. The only light came from the clock on the stove across the room in the kitchen. This was another thing completely different from her apartment back in Minneapolis. There, she had five blackout curtains to keep the light from the street lamps and cars from leaking into her bedroom. Here, there wasn’t any of that. Tim’s house was set off from the other houses she’d seen between here and the clinic or the police station. It was an almost physical representation of what he’d been talking about in the bedroom—being a part of the community but not really.
“The recliner is less lumpy, if you want to trade,” Georgey said into the blackness.
Which, all things considered, was a downright thoughtful thing for a seventeen-year-old boy to say. “It’s fine,” she lied. After all, Georgey was a growing boy. Besides, she had no idea what Tim was going to have the kid doing tomorrow. He needed the rest.
But seeing as neither of them were asleep, Summer had some questions. “Georgey?”
“Yeah?”
“What do you want to do with the rest of your life?”
She heard the boy groan. “I don’t know.”
She propped herself up on her elbow and stared in his general direction, even though she couldn’t see him. “Well, what did you want to be when you grew up?”
She heard the recliner shift and she imagined he was shrugging his shoulders. “Don’t know,” he repeated.
Boys. Either they thought they were going to be the next LeBron James or they didn’t have a clue. “We need a plan,” she told him.
“Why?”
“Why? Because if you don’t have a plan—a goal to work for—then you’re gonna wind up bumping along and that’s when you get into trouble. You do stupid stuff like trying to break into a medical clinic instead of looking at the big picture. If you have a job, you know you’ll be able to afford medicine for your grandma. Or your own car. Or your own apartment with a bed that doesn’t suck like this couch does.”
Georgey snorted. “I offered to trade,” he reminded her.
Although he couldn’t see it, she rolled her eyes. “That was literally the least important part of that entire statement.”
“Well, I don’t know,” he said again, this time more firmly. “It’s hard to plan for the future when you don’t know how you’re gonna eat tomorrow—or tonight. It’s hard to work for a goal when you’re not sure if you’ll freeze to death because the electricity’s been cut off again.” His voice was louder and angrier. “It’s hard to think big picture when the small picture is so huge you’ll never get around it. Never.”
There was so much hopelessness in his voice—in his life. She felt stupid again because she knew on some level what he said was true. After all, she’d seen it with her own students.
But she wasn’t going to let him wallow in self-pity. “Well, you’re going to start thinking big picture. I’m a big picture person and I’m more than happy to take care of you while we work on your big picture, but you’re almost a man. You can’t spend the rest of your life living with me.”
He was quiet for a few moments. She wondered if he was going to pretend to have fallen asleep. Not that she was going to buy that.
“Did you always know what you wanted to be?” He sounded younger, more like a little brother than an angry teenager.
“Sort of. I wanted to be a cowgirl—and an Indian princess,” she admitted. “I knew I was an Indian, but I only have a few memories of our dad before he and Mom got divorced. Mostly, I just remember coming back for a pow wow when I was twelve and you weren’t quite three yet.” She swallowed. “Do you remember that? We played together. I was…” She took a deep breath. “I was so glad to have a little brother.”
The silence filled the room. “I don’t remember,” he finall
y said, his voice barely a whisper. “I wish I did, though. If I’d known…”
She understood. How would things have been different if she’d kept her promise to her father before now? If Georgey had known he could’ve called her before he’d gotten arrested?
She cleared her throat, which was suspiciously tight. “To answer your question, I always liked school.”
Georgey snorted. “Weirdo.”
She grinned. “I didn’t say it was normal. But I did. I liked school and I liked my teachers and I did well, so it seemed like the most logical choice. I don’t know anything about horses and cows.” Or about being an Indian. But she pulled her thoughts away from that direction. “Don’t get me wrong—by the end of the school year, I'm just as tired of school as everyone else. Right now, I never want to read Romeo and Juliet again.”
“Is that a book?”
She sat all the way up at that. “It’s a play,” she said in a careful tone. “By William Shakespeare?” Surely he had heard of Shakespeare. Hadn’t everyone?
“You read a play in class?” He sounded as careful as she felt.
She realized he was admitting something to her, in his way. “Georgey, when did you drop out?”
Silence.
This was not good. “Georgey?” Because she assumed he dropped out—well, if he was seventeen, hadn’t he at least made it to tenth grade?
“I’m not stupid,” he whispered in a fierce voice.
“I don’t believe you are,” she said honestly.
“It’s just that the words—I don’t think they look right. I mean, the letters…” He swallowed so loudly she could hear it, even in the darkness. “I don’t read. They said it was because I was stupid and lazy but if they tell me what’s on the page, I can remember.”
“They?”
“My teachers,” he said in a defeated voice. “I got held back a couple times and they said I’d have to take eighth grade again…”
The Sheriff (Men of the White Sandy Book 5) Page 10