by Erin Wright
He gave a short nod. “Thanks.”
He realized that this was another instance of him having to swallow his pride. Damn, it was starting to get painful, this pride-swallowing thing. The sooner he could stop relying on others, the better.
“Let me grab the keys for the cruiser. Be right back.” She stepped into the sheriff’s office, the light spilling out from the glass door growing brighter as the valley sank into the winter night. Maggie ran over to him, finally having marked every tree and bush and interesting object in sight, some of them twice, and was obviously pleased with herself for her industriousness.
“You’re such a boy sometimes,” he told her with a scratch of her head. She just panted happily, leaning against him as they waited. He knew Maggie had struggled being locked up in a cell day after day with nothing to do – she was a work dog, not a pampered pet. But the other choice had been to send her back to his place without him, and that would’ve just started the whole cycle all over again.
Plus, these last few weeks, having her there in the cell with him…it’d made things just that much more bearable. Between her and Abby…
Abby reappeared, keys in hand. “Ready?” she asked rhetorically, and they headed to the back towards the cruiser.
It was time to go home.
Chapter 16
Abby
It was a little crazy, getting into her police car, and having Wyatt get upfront next to her, like he was just some passenger, some citizen needing a ride somewhere. Nothing, really, had changed from just an hour before on the way home from Boise, but the simple act of having him climb in upfront, with no handcuffs on…
Everything had changed.
She scrambled for something to say as they pulled out of the parking lot, Maggie’s panting breath the only sound in the winter night. “Have you thought about what you want to do for your community service?” she asked, heading out towards Wyatt’s place. Her childhood home. She hadn’t been out there since her father had lost it to the bank, and a small part of her wondered how she’d handle the memories sure to come back.
“Yeah. I have to talk to him, of course, but I’m thinking about Adam Whitaker and that new therapy camp of his. I figure he could use another set of hands to help out, especially a pair that knows something about horses.”
Abby shot him a big smile. “That’s a brilliant idea,” she said. “I should’ve thought about that but it didn’t even cross my mind. I’m sure he’d appreciate the help.”
Wyatt smiled back and the butterflies began swarming in her stomach, all trying to tell her just how sexy he was.
Not that she needed a reminder. Wyatt was damn sexy, and there was no forgetting that fact any time soon.
There was also the simple fact that her father would approve of them dating…never, as a matter of fact. And there was no getting around that.
“Well, come on over to the courthouse and fill out the paperwork after you’ve talked to Adam. We can get you started right away on it so you can wrap this up and move on.”
The headlights of the car cut through the darkness, lighting the way, while the dashboard lights gave a faint green glow to Wyatt’s face, but still, she could see the smile that lit up his face. “That’s going to be a great day,” he agreed.
Today had been a great day, that was for sure. To finally have a judge who listened and saw Wyatt for who he was, warts and all, rather than through the haze of hatred and blame. The judge and his son wanted to blame someone, anyone, for Shelly’s death. Sure, they could blame the drunk driver, but he was from Boise, up in the area on vacation. They didn’t know him.
And from what Abby had heard around town, the judge had never really welcomed Wyatt into the family. He’d thought his little girl was too good for him, and hadn’t tried to hide that fact from Wyatt, Shelly, or anyone else. It must’ve been hard to be a part of that family for years, and even harder when she’d died and the people he should’ve been able to grieve with were the ones who were shunning him and making his life damn miserable.
Yeah, he shouldn’t have sent Richard to the hospital; Abby didn’t think anyone would dispute that, not even Wyatt. But she understood why it’d happened. Out of all of the people in the world to know that you shouldn’t drink and drive, Richard should be it. Thank heavens his Jeep was that awful orange camo color. Everyone knew to dive for cover when he came tearing down the road.
Just then, her childhood home came into view and she switched off the engine with a grin. “You painted the house green,” she said with surprise in her voice. Growing up, it’d been stark white. Now a light sage color, she was surprised by how much it changed the look of the house. She could just spot her old bedroom window through the wintry darkness.
“Yeah, Shelly wanted to give it some color,” Wyatt said with a shrug. It was obvious, and not surprising, that Wyatt didn’t seem to care much about decorating choices. “Thanks for the ride home. Much appreciated.” He swung out of the car and opened up the backdoor. “C’mon girl, let’s go home,” he said, as Maggie streaked out past him and began zigzagging through the dark, reacquainting herself with every rock, snow drift, and tree in the yard. Her tail was going a million miles a minute, and Abby figured that no dog in the history of the world was as happy as Maggie was just then.
With a wave, she turned and headed back down the long, rutted driveway that connected to the county road. The driveway was clear of snow, which meant that Jorge must’ve been keeping up on the job while Wyatt was in jail. Hopefully he kept up on other chores, too, and Wyatt’s farm hadn’t fallen into too much disrepair.
It was only a little after five when Abby pulled back onto the smooth blacktop of the county road, but it felt like midnight. It’d been a day. A really wonderful day, but a long day nonetheless.
It was time to go home, take a long bath, and relax. And time to start forgetting about Wyatt Miller and his brilliant blue eyes.
She could start right then.
Chapter 17
Wyatt
He walked into the dark house, not bothering to unlock the front door – he hadn’t locked it before he’d left that day for the store, and sure enough, no one else had bothered to come along and lock it for him while he’d been in jail.
Even before his hand could find the light switch and turn on the lights, though, his nose was telling him about something else that no one had bothered to do while he was gone: Empty the trash. The stench was overwhelming, almost to the point of making him instantly nauseous, and Maggie whined, immediately did a U-turn, and scratched at the door to be let out.
Wyatt chuckled. He couldn’t say as he could blame her. He opened the door and she shot back outside, into the darkness and away from the stench. He smiled for a moment into the January night. If he’d been able to run away from the smell, he would’ve followed her.
Instead, he propped the front door open and moved through the house, flipping on lights as he went, until he got to the kitchen where the smell was the strongest.
With a sigh, he tackled the biggest problem first – the trashcan. He carried it outside without even opening the lid. He didn’t know and he didn’t care. He’d buy a new trashcan the next morning. This one was going into the dumpster whole.
Oh dammit, the fridge too. It wasn’t just his trash – it was every single bit of fresh food that he’d owned that night of the fistfight. The apples in the bowl on the counter were a mushy brown sludge that turned his stomach just to look at.
This was gonna be fun.
The bowl of apples, curdled milk, rotten sour cream, and a green brick he supposed used to be cheese followed.
Item after item, trip after trip, even to the two bathrooms in the house to empty out those trashcans, until finally, every rotten item in the house had been thrown away. He could only be glad that he’d been incarcerated during the colder parts of the year. If all of that food had sat in the summer heat instead…
He imagined he would’ve just burnt the house to the ground and st
arted over again.
As it was, he was going to have to pull out his winter gear and sleep on the three-season porch that night. They were definitely in the fourth season of the year and he really shouldn’t be sleeping there, but there was no way to get a goodnight’s sleep with the lingering odor wafting through the air. He’d call a cleaning company first thing in the morning and beg them to come clean right away. He’d probably have to pay double for their services, but he didn’t give a damn.
Anything to have a house that didn’t smell like an enclosed garbage dump.
Except…his stomach rumbled. As much as the rotten food had turned his stomach, he’d also worked up a sweat cleaning everything out. He couldn’t believe what awful shape he was in. Months of enforced inactivity had kicked his ass. The county jail didn’t have an exercise room, only a courtyard that he got to walk around twice a day.
They just didn’t house that many long-term prisoners. He was probably the person who’d stayed the longest at the Long Valley County Jail in the last ten years. They usually shipped people off to another county if they were going to be incarcerated for longer than a week or two. He had to wonder if that was the sheriff’s doing – that he didn’t want to have Wyatt shipped somewhere else as “proof” that he couldn’t handle having Wyatt in his jail.
That sounded like the sheriff.
Well, nothing to be done for it. The only edible food still left in his house were green beans and baked beans, and despite their similarities in names, he wasn’t about to dump them both into a saucepan and eat them together. Which meant – he checked his watch – he’d better hurry over to the grocery store if he was going to get there before they closed at nine. Otherwise, he’d be stuck grocery shopping at the convenience store again, and wasn’t that what got him into this trouble in the first place?
With a groan, he grabbed his keys and headed out. It was going to be a long night; driving to go buy the food – and maybe a clothespin for his nose while he was at it – coming back and cooking it, then sleeping outside on the porch.
Not exactly the homecoming he’d been envisioning the last few months.
Maggie followed alongside as he headed to his truck, and jumped into the bed, tail wagging. Hot damn, he better buy her dog food, too. Her food was probably at Declan’s house, since he’d been trying to take care of her while he was in jail. Dog food at the Shop ‘N Go was going to cost an arm and a leg.
Nope, this homecoming wasn’t going one bit like he’d been dreaming the past few months.
Chapter 18
Abby
She studied the shelf in front of her. Bubba’s Honey-Sweet BBQ or Mesquite…She’d been standing there for five minutes, trying to decide, and finally with a sigh, threw them both into her cart. When in doubt, buy them both? Sure, why not.
She’d gone home after her shift ended and had changed into civvies, when she realized that she had no food for dinner. Of course.
She was tired beyond words, but out to the Shop ’N Go she’d gone. She could pick up a few items, cook dinner, and then take that bubble bath she’d been promising herself.
She pushed her little cart around the corner. Just one more—
Crash!
Her cart went skittering sideways and she fell over, right into…
“Uh…hi Wyatt,” she croaked, staring up at him. He looked sweaty and tired and smelled a little bit like…garbage?
She jerked away, upright, onto her own two feet. Even tired, sweaty, and smelling like garbage, her skin sizzled where his hands had touched her arms. She needed to keep her distance. She was his parole officer, dammit. “Out shopping for groceries?” she asked, and immediately wished she could shove her police-issued boots down her own throat. That was just about the most dumbass thing to ask ever. What, exactly, does a person do in a grocery store if it wasn’t grocery shopping?
He grinned at her, his face suddenly a lot happier than it’d been when they’d first crashed together. She smiled back. Wyatt smiling was a sight to behold, and it surely didn’t do anything for the twerking butterflies in her stomach. “Yeah, I didn’t think about it and apparently no one else did either, but my groceries at my house didn’t exactly keep for the last two months.”
Her mouth made a perfectly round “O.” “Of course,” she breathed. “Oh man, I bet your house smelled something fierce when you got home.” Which explained the garbage smell.
“I can’t say it’s the most pleasant smell I’ve ever come across in my life,” he said with a small grin. “Maggie came inside, took one whiff, and turned right back around and wanted out. If I thought that running away would make the situation better, I would’ve followed right behind her.”
“You got it all cleaned out, then?”
“Best I could.” He shrugged. “All I had left to eat was beans – baked beans and green beans. Even I knew better than to throw those two into a pot together.”
She shuddered. “Yeah, probably not. You want to come to my house for dinner?”
She didn’t know where the words had come from. Her jaw was moving and words were coming out and she felt like a total jackass because she couldn’t invite him to dinner. She was his probation officer. She absolutely, positively could not invite him to dinner.
And yet? She had.
And she desperately wanted him to say yes, stinky garbage smell and all.
“Yes,” he said, his eyes lighting up like she’d just offered him the best present a person could receive. “I’d love that! Let me buy dinner – I was going to go old school and just buy steak and potatoes and some salad. Are you okay with that?”
She grinned at him. Such an Idahoan dinner. The only thing that could make it more Idahoan was to add on a dessert like peach cobbler or apple pie. “I’d love it,” she said. And she would. And she knew she shouldn’t, but somehow, she couldn’t seem to make herself care right at that exact moment. She would later.
Just not right then.
They went wandering up and down the aisles, arguing over the best salad dressing – blue cheese was just downright nasty, obviously – and what to include in the salad. Not surprisingly, he didn’t want tomatoes, not even little cherry tomatoes.
“Sometime, you’re going to have to tell me what your major malfunction is about tomatoes,” she said, dropping a small container into the cart for her own salad. He could leave them off his if he wanted. Far be it from her to force him to eat all the good stuff.
“Tomatoes are God’s little joke on the world,” he said as they browsed through the meat section, finally settling on a couple of marbled New York Strips. “They’re food…with some assembly required.” They’d moved over to the produce section, where he swung a 25-pound bag of russets into the cart. She didn’t normally buy potatoes in those kinds of quantities, but considering how far south his potatoes would’ve gotten in the last two months, she figured he must be planning on taking the extras home with him when he left.
She cocked an eyebrow at him. “Some assembly required?”
“Yeah. Salsa, ketchup, spaghetti sauce – they’re all great and wonderful. But you have to cook ‘em up before you can eat them.”
They moved towards the front checkout counters. “I guess that’s one way of looking at it,” she said. “But don’t you at least love the smell of tomato plants during the summer? I always figured I’d throw in a few stems from a tomato plant into my bridal bouquet when I got married. I love that smell more than roses.” She snapped her mouth shut. What on earth had possessed her to bring up marriage? She was such an idiot.
The cashier, a few years younger than her – was he Matthew Blank’s younger brother? She wasn’t quite sure – looked back and forth between them with interest. She sent him a pained smile. “How are you this evening?” she asked politely as Wyatt ran his debit card through the machine.
“Just fine, Officer Connelly,” he said as he bagged their groceries up. She stifled a groan. Any chance that he had no idea who she was, was obviously out the
window.
And the way he was looking between her and Wyatt? The chances of this little foray not getting back to her father were growing vanishingly smaller by the moment.
Whoops.
And yet, she couldn’t seem to make herself care. She should. A tiny voice in the back of her mind was jumping up and down and screaming in panic right now but that part of her brain just seemed so far away. And unimportant.
Wyatt scooped up the grocery bags and a bag of dog food and asked, “Ready?”
“Yup.” She turned away from the cash register, and the kid called out after her, “Have a good evening, Officer!”
She nodded, still heading for the door, trying to escape as quickly as possible.
What were the chances of her father not hearing about this? About zero percent or so.
Which, strangely, meant that she had nothing left to fear. If she was going to get into trouble for hobnobbing with Wyatt at the grocery store, well then, why not actually do something to get into trouble about? So far, she’d gone grocery shopping with a drop-dead sexy man…who smelled like garbage. Not exactly something to get arrested over.
Might as well make the crime worth the punishment.
Chapter 19
Wyatt
He put Abby’s groceries into the backseat of her Toyota Corolla and then hopped in his truck to follow her to her house. Now that he thought about it, he wasn’t quite sure where she lived. Surely not at home with her father, right? Because that would just about make for the most awkward dinner of his life.
Thankfully, she pulled up to the old Brightbart’s place instead. He was surprised. He hadn’t realized that the Brightbarts’ children had sold it after Mr. Brightbart passed away last year.