by Madi Le
Time Bomb ??
On The Run Romance
Madi Le ♥
Published by Raven Westbrook House
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Misty liked the feeling of pressing herself against him. She liked the way that he reacted to it. She liked the hard feeling of his muscles, under his shirt. She even liked the feeling of his stubble, scratching her cheek as she pressed a line of kisses across his throat.
The thought that it was the same path she might use to cut it, if there was need for violence, popped up and then faded into thankful forgetfulness.
Misty shifted her position to hold Grant tighter, his broad hips pressed between her thighs and reminding her in an instant that there was nothing else going wrong in their lives right now. She was good at forgetting. At least, she could try to forget. And that was all she needed.
Her lips pulled back as her teeth sank into the sensitive flesh of his throat, scraping across stubbled skin.
"Oh, God," he breathed, though Misty couldn't have said that she was supposed to hear it. His hand reached around behind himself, wrapping around her head and taking a handful of hair into his grasp. He pulled on it, pulled her over his hip and into his lap. Misty let him, slipping around until she was standing propped up on one leg, the other perched beside him.
Then she pushed forward, and he was pressed back onto the bed. Her leg didn't hurt any more. It was like she'd never been hurt, though she knew she had. She also knew that if he pressed on it then that feeling of pleasantness wasn't going to last very long.
She let out a long, low breath, and leaned over him until she was held up over his head. She let herself down enough for their lips to press together, just enough to be a little rough.
"Are you sure about this?"
The one question he shouldn't have asked. This wasn't time to wonder about whether or not they were sure about anything. This was time to decompress, to unwind, to explicitly not worry about anything or whether or not they were making the "right" decisions. Asking questions was anathema.
"No," she said. "But I'm not thinking about that right now." She pushed herself up until she was straddling his hips. She wasn't wearing anything, and with her hands lifted above her head, anything that Grant might have had to say to her about his doubts was swallowed up by the need to look at her breasts. He let one hand come up to cup one.
Grant was gentle with her. Too gentle, she thought. There was a time and a place for gentle. Desperation didn't go well with gentle, or sweet. Desperation didn't want to make love. Desperation wanted to fuck, and in that moment, Misty was as desperate as she had been the entire last year. The sooner she forgot about her worries and her troubles, the sooner that she could get back to thinking about them with a fresh head.
She moved her hips up until she was sitting on his chest, and then with another scoot forward, her wetness hovered above his mouth. Grant didn't need a hint about what she wanted. His hands gripped her hips and pulled them down. His tongue started exploring immediately, parting her folds and probing. He started shallow, exploring the opening, exploring her clit. Tasting her.
It was nice, but it wasn't enough. Misty started to rock her hips against him. He didn't complain, nor did he speed up the pace. His tongue kept moving exactly as fast as he wanted it to, deliciously teasing her. Forcing her to wait for what she wanted, even though waiting was the last thing that she had any interest in.
Then, just as she was about to give up, Grant seemed to change his mind. He decided to give her what she wanted after all, and pulled back, pressing his lips against her clitoris and sucking. She shivered at the sudden sensation, her fingers digging into his hair as if he could get any more pressed against her womanhood.
His mouth went back to exploring, but with a desperate need that overwhelmed Misty in exactly the way that she had wanted all along. Her body shivered as he did, a pressure building up in her entire body as she threatened to come in a shower of juices and need.
Her shoulders were the first to lock up. Her fingers tightened in his hair until she was sure that she couldn't have tightened them any more. Her toes curled up, and then the big muscles started to get involved, the long ones along her back, her abs, her thighs, until she was as tight as a drum from her forehead down to her toenails, and then… everything started to relax.
Through it all, his mouth never stopped moving, never stopped exploring, never stopped sending delicious electric signals coursing through her. Misty rolled over, off of him. Her breath came hard and fast, and kept catching in her throat, but she couldn't have asked for anything more. At least, she hoped she couldn't have–what she'd been given had felt hard enough to control already, and she wasn't sure what would put her any further over the edge.
She heard the zipper of Grant's trousers working, but it didn't mean anything to her exhausted, sex-addled mind. It didn't mean anything until he was the one hovering over her, and something hard and thick pressed against her opening.
Then it meant a lot. "I just came," she breathed.
"You've had a minute," Grant said. "Now you're going to cum again."
Misty didn't have time for a witty reply; he was already moving to take her knees in his arms, pulling himself tight against her opening and forcing the two of them together in delicious agony.
"You're a bastard, you know that?"
"Is that a problem?"
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One ♥
*
Grant was sitting at his desk, and he was staring into the middle distance, at nothing in particular. In front of him, Deputies were scurrying around, doing paperwork, making notes. Jason was behind the desk, talking to old Mrs. Steen, who was entirely convinced that there was someone vandalizing her house. She'd been in a dozen times in the past month, and every time they went to look at the damage, she couldn't actually identify anything.
If he were being honest, then Sheriff Holloway could probably have talked her down. But Grant wasn't ready to put on the fake person that was perfectly confident that he could fix everything. He couldn't even fix his own marriage.
He turned back to his computer and read through the report. It didn't say anything that he didn't already know, but that was ninety percent of police work. Confirming details, and then confirming them again.
He finished the entire thing. It was just another weekly report from one of the informants Deputy Sloane had brought in. She was a good cop, and that was what he needed more of. But while the guy had brought in a new perspective, and told them a lot, the reports coming in were no different than they'd been at first.
Grant wanted to cut him loose. But then, if he ignored the reports, he'd miss something when there was a change. So he kept paying the guy for his weekly reports full of nothing, and he kept reading them.
There weren't a ton of problems in Williamsburg. They were a small town, and whenever you told someone where you worked, you had to tell them you didn't mean the one in Virginia, which wasn't any kind of big city itself.
But Williamsburg had its share of problems, and if he was going to be Sheriff then Grant was going to solve them. The biggest, and the most present, was that he had to deal with a bunch of kids who thought that they were big, bad hackers. Now Grant wasn't an old man. He knew how to use a computer, same as most people.
That said, they'd done some stuff that impressed him. So he wasn't about to doubt that they were capable. But the entire world had hackers making grant political statements. Taking down, or trying to take down, major
corporations. Getting information out to some Swiss guy who the Feds were trying to prosecute for releasing classified intelligence.
These particular yahoos, though, weren't pointing their intentions in the right direction. Instead, the big feather in their cap was that they'd managed to catch the mayor having a completely consensual, completely legal, and only slightly extra-marital ménage à trois, wherein he and his wife were two of the three.
It was the sort of thing that meant nothing, in the long run, but it was enough to put people out of a job. And with that little victory, that small, embarrassing secret, they'd decided that they were just at the tip of the iceberg, and started releasing information on all kinds of public officials.
After all, Grant thought sourly, the government was all corrupt. He was corrupt too, he supposed, since they had put all the information about his wife's application for annulment out for the whole county to see.
The claim was that he had never intended to start a family with her. She'd found someone else who would. The claim was false, of course. He'd intended to start a family. It just… hadn't happened yet. The right time hadn't come along. But he was turning thirty next month and if Heather wasn't comfortable waiting, then he didn't exactly blame her for finding someone else.
She was religious; the whole church wedding had been weird, for Grant. But he'd gone, and he'd attended services the entire time that they'd been married. So when she explained how important the annulment was, in addition to a civil divorce, well… he put his head down and did what he could to help the process along.
His phone rang in his pocket. He should ignore it. If it was important, then they'd call back on his work line. But he didn't ignore it.
"Tell me you've got some good news," he said.
The voice on the other line was a little bit garbled, but it wasn't impossible to make out. "Hey, Sheriff," it said. Then it said some more stuff, but as it went on, the signal degraded more.
"What's that?"
"Sorry," his lawyer said, on the other end. "Heading through the mountains."
"You didn't figure it could wait?"
"I thought you'd want to hear as soon as I did."
"Good news, then?"
"As of thirty minutes ago, you were never married to Miss Heather Hanson. I don't think she'll be able to wear white at the wedding, but–" the voice started to go bad again.
"I'll let you get back to driving," Grant said. He didn't wait for Lincoln to answer. He just hung up.
The Sheriff stood up and let the phone slip into his pocket. He wasn't sure what he felt about the situation. He hadn't been sure when Heather told him she wanted a divorce, and he wasn't sure now. Grant thought he should have felt worse, but he didn't. He felt the same as he always had. Distant. She deserved the divorce, if she wanted it.
He turned towards the back and started pouring himself a cup of coffee. The sound of someone talking to Jason in a nervous voice was all the signal he needed to duck into his office proper, rather than just sitting at one of the desks in the bullpen like he usually preferred.
So he checked his email, and sipped his coffee, and tried not to think about the fact that his life was falling apart, or the fact that he wasn't doing anything to stop it. If anything, he was working to make it fall down even faster. And as much as it was his life, and he'd worked to build it, he felt no more watching it fall down than he felt when someone stepped on an anthill.
The voice in the front was becoming more frantic. Grant checked his phone. One message. A text, from his mother. He swiped the notification away.
He could let Jason handle the woman out front. She'd calm down eventually, and she'd explain what she wanted. Then Jason would send out a deputy to get her cat out of a tree, or whatever.
But it kept on. Fifteen minutes into the woman's pleading, and Grant had more-or-less figured out what she wanted, and he knew more-or-less why Jason couldn't help her. She wanted to be taken into custody. But the Sheriff's office isn't a mental hospital. If you haven't committed any crimes, they can't just give you a place to stay. And she hadn't said one word about being guilty of anything but wanting a bed.
He let out a breath and stepped out through the door. He looked down at his coffee as he stepped into view, but he spoke with the confident voice that the Sheriff uses, not the soft voice that Grant used in his private life.
"I'm the Sheriff, ma'am. Is there something I can do–"
He looked up as he spoke, and what he saw stopped him dead. She wasn't supposed to be here. Far as anyone knew, she was supposed to be dead.
Grant sat in the interrogation room. That was what they called it, anyways. It was more of a conference room, but with only seven Deputies, it wasn't hard to keep in touch. So it was an interrogation room. And there was a box of honey-glazed crullers, but they were on the opposite side of the table.
That hadn't stopped Misty from taking one, though. Grant looked at her like any man would look at any woman who had walked out of his life and disappeared from the face of the earth. She looked at him like any woman would look at any man she'd never seen before in her life.
"So, you're going to take my statement, and then you're going to take me into custody?"
Grant rubbed his forehead. "I'm not sure I'll be able to do that. But I'll listen to what you have to say, and I'll see what we can do to try to help you, okay?"
"Sure."
"So are you a citizen of Williams County?"
"No," she said. "I don't think so, anyways."
"What do you mean, you don't think so?"
"I move around a lot. But it's possible that at some point I had a permanent residence here. It would have been a long time ago."
More than a decade, Grant thought sourly. That was a pretty long time. But a damned long time to pretend that she didn't remember being here at all. Not when she'd lived here for half her life before that.
"Can I get your name for the record?"
"Misty," she said. "Misty Glenn."
He didn't write it down. It was a name that still burned in his mind most mornings, even after all that time. He didn't have a name for the other people who burned in his mind whenever he dared to think about it. About him, he corrected automatically.
"And you don't remember living here, Misty?"
"No, sir, Sheriff."
"I'd bet my eye teeth you did live here, Miss Glenn. A while back."
"Is that a fact?"
He looked at her. She looked surprised, but not very surprised. Like someone had just been told that the light had turned green at a traffic stop.
"So here's my problem."
"What's that?"
"I need more information. We don't have the space to take in every person who wants a place to stay the night. If you want to go out and be drunken and disorderly, we'll take you in, but you'll be ticketed. We could just cut to the chase and fine you two hundred dollars without your needing to procure alcohol. But I don't run a halfway house."
"Did you know me?"
"What?"
"When I lived here. Did you know me?"
"That's not germane to the situation," Grant said. "Now, do you see my trouble?"
"You did, didn't you?"
"Can you tell me where you're from?"
"I'm from here," she said. There was no hint in her voice that she was unaware of that fact less than three minutes ago. If he hadn't seen her face when he told her, then she'd have fooled him. He'd have been taking down her address.
"I mean, where you left, to come here. Where were you, say, yesterday? Or the day before that?"
She pinched her lips together. She was weighing what she wanted to tell him. He didn't like that.
"I was in Virginia," she said. "Northeastern Virginia. I caught a Greyhound out west. And here I am."
"That's quite a journey," Grant said mildly. It was almost two thousand miles, and would have taken more than a week unless she caught 24-hour service.
"It's been a long month," she said. "But
I'm home now. The trouble being that my family sold the house, so I've got no place to stay until I can get settled in."
"So stay at a hotel."
"That's my problem. I have some people after me."
"That explains the ride from Virginia," Grant said. "Who's after you?"
He was more or less prepared to write her off as nuts, at that point. The Misty he had known was someone who he would put his ass on the line for, no question. This woman seemed to be delighting in lying to him, all while she was trying to pump him for information. She seemed to think that she was being subtle about it, too, which was the part that frustrated him most of all.
"I'd…" she closed her eyes. "I'd rather not say."
"I'd rather know," Grant said. "Unless you're hoping that your old friend Sheriff Holloway is going to take pity on you."
"Is that an option?"
"Why don't you just tell me the whole story? Instead of trying to feed it to me bite-by-bite."
She let out a breath, looked Grant in the eye, and started talking. She was a good liar. She'd never been a good liar when he knew her. But ten years is a long time.
"I was dancing in Lexington–"
"That's Lexington, Virginia?"
"Yeah. Some guy started to take a liking to me. Well, a dancer, you kinda… play into that. It's easier to get tips."
"That's an… 'exotic' dancer?"
She didn't have a hint of embarrassment at the question. "Yeah."
"Go on."
"He starts getting handsy. I tell him to back off. He talks to his friends. Army guys, I guess. They decided I was insulting his honor or something. Decided to make sure that I knew how wrong I'd been to insult him like that."
Grant looked at her face and tried to decide how much of what she said he could believe. She was a good liar. She'd already shown that. The trouble with liars is, they don't have to always lie. Sometimes, liars tell the truth. It's what separates the good ones from the really great ones.
"So you've got these army guys after you?"