by Jessie Evans
“Shit,” she cussed beneath her breath, leaping the fallen stool and sprinting for the gate. She reached the picket fence and vaulted over, but when she landed on the other side, and started for the curb, she was jerked back into the boards.
The fence rattled, and Mia cussed again as she reached behind her, fumbling to liberate her tee shirt from the top of the fence post, cursing her decision to embrace the retro trend and wear an oversized cropped shirt over her purple spandex tank top. She had just wiggled free, when Tea for Two’s front porch light flicked on behind her, casting jagged, fence-post shadows across the sidewalk.
It was a deadly omen if Mia had ever seen one.
Without risking a glance over her shoulder, she sprinted off the curb and across the street, gunning it for the protection of the Blue Saloon’s hedge with everything in her. Her fists pumped like pistons and her thighs burned with the force of her exertion, but she knew she wasn’t going to make it before the door opened behind her, not unless she did something drastic.
Later, Mia would blame it all on the whiskey, but in the heat of the moment, diving into the bushes and rolling onto the parking lot pavement on the other side seemed like a perfectly acceptable plan. Sure, she might end up with a few scrapes, but she would escape without being made as the Panty Bandit, and that would make it all worth it. The fact that anyone with half a brain would know that the prank-inclined owner of the lingerie shop was responsible for pantying downtown didn’t matter. If no one caught her in the act, she would still have plausible deniability.
And so she jumped, diving arms first through a narrow opening in the hedge, bracing herself for impact with the pavement on the other side. But instead of flying through the air, and starting her roll as she lost momentum, Mia collided with a wall of firm, human flesh.
Mia stifled her bleat of surprise—Lula was no doubt standing on her front porch by now, and her hearing was excellent—but the man she’d body-slammed let out a loud “Oof” as she toppled him. The man’s larger form cushioned her fall, but Mia winced as his body collided with the pavement.
That had to have hurt.
“So sorry,” she whispered, scrambling to get off her poor victim, but only succeeding in slamming her kneecap against his before she fell on top of him again.
He cried out in pain just as Lula called, “Who’s there?” from across the street.
“What the—”
Mia’s hands flew to cover the man’s mouth, trying to silence him.
“—hell is going on?” he finished in a way-too-loud voice, his lips moving beneath her hand.
“Shhh!” she hissed. “Please, be quiet.”
“Who are you running from?” he asked, at the same moment Lula shouted—
“Do I hear your voice Amelia Louise Sherman?”
Panicked, Mia knew she had only one course of action. She couldn’t see much in the shadows behind the bushes, but the man beneath her had recently shaved, and smelled of leather and soap—something crisp that reminded her of floating the Rio Grande in springtime. He was obviously clean, and in excellent shape, if the rock hard chest she was sprawled on top of was anything to judge by. She had probably kissed worse in her lifetime, and right now there was only one way she could think of to shut him up before he lured Lula off her porch and across the street.
“Did you hear me?” the man asked, his voice so deep it made Bubba’s sound girly in comparison. “Are you okay? Who are you—”
Mia leaned in, covering his mouth with her own, silencing him with a kiss.
At first his lips remained hard, immovable—chiseled marble every bit as muscled and unrelenting as the rest of him. Mia’s pulse spiked with anxiety, worrying that she had just added assault-with-unwanted-lips to her list of sins against this man, but then it was like a switch flipped inside of him. His mouth came to life beneath hers, and Mia’s blood pumped faster for reasons that had nothing to do with nerves.
The stranger’s big hand threaded through her hair, pulling her closer as his tongue slipped between her lips, swirling through her mouth with a skilled sensuality that took her breath away. He tasted of salt, summertime, the desert wind, and a dozen mysterious, manly things she couldn’t put names to. She only knew that they made her body ache, her fingers dig into his shoulders, and her tongue spar eagerly with his. He was…delicious, and each taste of him only made her want more. She angled her head, deepening the kiss, moaning softly when his fingers fisted in her hair, tugging at her scalp as his free hand skimmed down her back.
Down, down, until his wide palm cupped her bottom and Mia’s nerve endings sizzled, even as a voice in her head insisted this was getting out of hand. She didn’t even know this man’s name, or exactly what he looked like. He was a complete stranger, who had been wandering around The Blue Saloon Hotel parking lot in the middle of the night. For all she knew, he could be an axe murderer, or a Peeping Tom, or a closet stamp collector, or one of those guys who aspired to eat an entire car, piece by piece.
Or he could be a genuinely nice guy looking for a consenting adult to take home and pleasure all night long with his wickedly talented tongue. And while Mia had no doubt this man would deliver in the bedroom, she wasn’t in the market for a one-night stand, or a boyfriend, or anything else. She’d made a promise to herself when she came back to Lonesome Point—no romantic entanglements. Between her gruesome family history, and the nightmare she’d lived through in Los Angeles during her last year of graduate school, she knew better. The only way to keep everyone safe was to keep her relationships with the opposite sex purely friendly.
Thankfully, just as she was trying to figure out how to extricate herself from the man’s arms, when something stubborn inside of her insisted it would rather stay and kiss him senseless, she heard footsteps coming from the far side of the parking lot. If she were lucky, it would be Bubba and Ross, returning from their mission. If she were unlucky, it would be Tallulah, circling around the shrubs with her shotgun, intent on punishing the defacer of her precious garden gnomes.
Either way, Mia didn’t want to get caught with her tongue in a strange man’s mouth.
“Someone’s coming,” she whispered against his lips, flattening her hands on his sculpted chest and pushing him away.
But as she left the circle of warmth they’d created and scrambled to her feet, she couldn’t ignore the wave of disappointment that washed through her. It had been so long since she’d been close to someone, since she’d had anything but a hug from a friend, or a kiss on the cheek from her gram after brunch on Sunday. She hadn’t realized how much she craved this kind of intimacy. How much she longed to touch and be touched, to lose herself in someone’s strong arms, and for the first time since everything started to go to hell with Paul, to feel a little less alone.
“What’s up?” Bubba kept his voice low, but he didn’t hunch behind the bushes as he crossed the parking lot near the hedge. It was too dark to see his face, but Mia could imagine the suspicious look he was shooting in her new friend’s direction. Bubba was protective, almost to a fault, and the man she’d just finished kissing looked like someone a girl might need protection from.
The stranger was now on his feet, and looking even bigger than she’d estimated him to be. He was at least six foot three—just a hair shorter than Bubba’s six four. But whereas Bubba was built like a man who hustled up electric poles for a living and scaled mountains in his spare time, the stranger was built like a man who lifted cars off trapped kittens for a day job and hurled boulders around for fun. With impossibly broad shoulders, thickly muscled arms, and a chest Mia knew was carved from a hunk of solid rock, he was an intimidating specimen.
He would have been flat out scary, if Mia hadn’t known that he kissed with as much tenderness as confidence, and that his touch made only promises, no demands.
“Um, nothing’s up,” Mia whispered, hiding how flustered she felt by taking a peek over her shoulder at the shop across the street. “I had a close call with Lula, but it
looks like she’s gone back inside.” She turned back to the men. “My new friend helped me out. New friend, this is Bubba, Bubba, this is—”
“Sawyer,” the stranger said, holding out a hand, sparing her the embarrassment of confessing she didn’t know his name.
Bubba clasped his hand and gave it a firm shake. “Robert Lawson, but everyone calls me Bubba. You staying at the hotel?”
“Yeah, checked in this afternoon.” Sawyer released Bubba’s hand. “I was having a hard time sleeping, so I figured I’d grab something to eat, but everything around here looks closed. You two know if anything’s open close by? A diner or something?”
Bubba gave Sawyer directions to the truck stop diner by the highway, the only place in town open twenty-four hours, while Mia squinted into the darkness and cursed herself for not eating more carrots as a child. Her eyes had adjusted enough that she could see Sawyer was bald, and had a nicely shaped head, but she couldn’t make out much of his face. Just the ghost of high cheekbones, and the sharp right angles of a jaw that was every bit as hard as the rest of him.
Sawyer thanked Bubba for the directions and shook his hand again before turning back to Mia and adding in a more intimate tone, “I would say goodbye, but I’m afraid I’ve forgotten your name.”
“Oh, right, um…Mia.” She thrust a flustered arm toward him. “Mia Sherman.”
“Nice to meet you, Mia.” His warm, dry palm engulfed her hand, sending a shiver of awareness prickling across her skin. “Hope I’ll see you around.”
“I’m sure you will. It’s a small town.” She pulled her hand from his, and crossed her arms, willing her body to simmer the heck down. “But I won’t run you over again. I promise. That was a one-time thing.” She hit the words hard, hoping he would understand that she was talking about the kiss, as well as their collision. “I don’t usually go around diving through bushes in the middle of the night so…don’t worry.”
“I won’t,” he said, a cocky note in his voice Mia didn’t care for. “You two have a nice night.”
And then he turned and swaggered across the parking lot. Literally swaggered, like the hero of an action film, off to fight the bad guys, and probably blow up a few buildings while he was at it.
Mia wanted to yell that there was no need to swagger on your way to get greasy eggs at a truck stop diner at three in the morning, but then Sawyer stopped beside the vintage Shovelhead Harley Davidson that Ross had been drooling over earlier in the evening, and swung one muscled thigh over the seat. He mounted the machine with an easy grace that made Mia’s mouth go dry, and things low in her body envy the leather between his thighs, before gunning the chopper to life, and guiding the purring bike out onto Main Street without a backward glance.
“Am I crazy,” Bubba said, as the rumble of the Harley’s motor faded into the distance, “or were you kissing that guy before I walked up?”
“Where’s Ross?” Mia asked, affecting greater concern than she felt for the man, who was probably at her place making nachos as she spoke. “Is he okay? Did you two get caught?”
“Because it looked like you were kissing him,” Bubba said, obviously not prepared to let the subject drop. “I kind of hope you were, Mia. This schoolmarm thing is a dumb idea.”
“Spinster, not schoolmarm,” Mia corrected. “And it’s not a dumb idea; it’s my destiny.”
Bubba stepped closer, putting a gentle hand on her shoulder. “I get that you were in a bad place when you came home, babe, but you know that curse isn’t real, right? I mean, what happened to your gram was just bad luck.”
Mia bristled, but she refused to have this discussion again. She and Bubba had had the same argument a dozen times in the past year, and every time, it ended badly. Bubba came from a long line of mostly practical people, who lived off the land, and Mia came from a long line of cursed first daughters, who lived a real life ghost story, and both of them were too stubborn to entertain the other person’s point of view. It was better to table this line of questioning, and forget she’d ever kissed Sawyer. He was just another tourist. He’d be gone in a few days, and then everything would be the way it was before.
It was a strangely sad thought, but comforting, too.
At least that’s what Mia told herself.
“Is Ross making nachos?” Mia shrugged Bubba’s hand off her shoulder and started across the parking lot. “Because I’m starving.”
Bubba sighed, but fell in beside her. “He was chopping up onions and cilantro when I left.”
Mia moaned in anticipation. “Oh, good. I love them with cilantro.”
“I told him to throw some cookies in the oven, too. Just in case we needed sweet after the salty.”
“Sounds perfect,” Mia said, but as she and Bubba walked through the warm night, with a sky full of diamonds twinkling overhead, and a gentle breeze kissing their skin, she wasn’t thinking about nachos and cookies, or even good friends and beer.
She was thinking about kisses that made your toes curl, and a man who tasted like long summer days and hot summer nights.
LEATHER AND LACE is available now!