The checker hung up the phone and came over to the glass. She said something that sounded peculiarly like “Criminals deserve discomfort” before backing away to the safety of her check stand. As if Mara was about to draw a gun or something.
“Now I know what the goldfish at the office feels like,” she muttered, still holding her hands over her ears. She pushed one foot against the inner and outer doors, but neither budged.
Finally the beepers stopped and everything quieted. Mara took her hands from her ears and tried the doors again. They didn’t budge. She repeated her call through the thick glass.
“I’m here on a security check. I need to speak with Michael Mallard.” The clerk shot a glance behind her toward an area marked Employees Only. No one appeared. The crowd began to disperse, lessening the goldfish effect.
She tugged at her earlobe when a low siren began to wail. Was this some kind of second-tier warning system? The clerk crossed her arms over her chest as if in triumph. The wailing became louder, and it wasn’t coming from inside the store. Mara pressed her face against the outer door, looking left and then right.
“No, no, no. Please, no.”
The siren grew louder, and a few cars passing on the street pulled to the side.
“Let it be a fire. Let it be a fire.”
But it wasn’t a red fire truck that entered the parking lot. It was a big black SUV with Wall County Sheriff plastered along its side. She was definitely not making it to the B and B for snack time.
As the SUV came to a stop, she could make out the driver, a large man with brown hair and big aviator sunglasses over his eyes—eyes she knew would be the color of molten chocolate. This man had been interrupting her dreams since she’d hit puberty and began to figure out why male and female body parts were made so deliciously dissimilar.
“Crap, crappity crap.”
* * *
JAMES PULLED INTO the parking lot of Mallard’s Grocery and sighed. He could see a tall, thin woman caught between the double doors, and she looked annoyed. Her long hair was pulled through the back of her Kansas City Royals baseball cap, which obscured her face. Probably another customer who’d reentered the store after making a purchase. He’d been called out here at least a dozen times since Christmas, when the store’s security system started going wonky. Not once in all the calls he’d answered had anyone actually been stealing from the store. Of course, that didn’t stop CarlaAnn from acting like she’d been deputized every time. And, crap, was the bag boy wielding a broom at the woman?
That alarm system was a menace. Mike should invest in better locks and leave it at that. There was no need for expensive—and defective—security systems in Slippery Rock.
He got out of the SUV, blistering afternoon sunshine reflecting off the pavement. Since the tornado, the summer temperatures had been relatively mild, but according to the local weatherman, this heat wave would continue for at least a week.
James knocked on the glass of the entrance, his attention focused on the woman still caught between the doors. She turned and faced the store, her shoulders and spine seeming rigid beneath the vibrant blue of the tank top she wore. Cropped jeans hugged the curves of her lower half, making his mouth go a little dry.
CarlaAnn, the clerk at the checkout, pressed the button that disabled the alarm, allowing the doors to whoosh open, but the woman caught inside didn’t budge until the door pushed her gently forward. She stepped from the doorway, holding on to her oversize shoulder bag with both hands, gaze focused intently on the empty aisle leading to the butcher counter. Maybe she wasn’t a typical customer. James put his hand on his holster just in case as he motioned for her to follow him to the check stand.
“We’ll get this straightened out in a moment,” he said.
“I wasn’t stealing anything. I had a reason for being in this store,” she said, and her husky voice sent a shiver down James’s spine. He knew that voice. Even after two years, he knew it.
“Mara?” He turned his shocked gaze to her. She’d let her hair grow, and she wasn’t the stick-thin girl he remembered either from high school or the day she’d walked out on him two years ago.
“I swear,” she said, reaching into the bag and pulling out a box of cookies and a small carton of milk, “I have a really good explanation for this.”
Well, that much, at least, was familiar. Mara Tyler always had a good explanation, both before she acted and after the fact. While in high school, the six of them—he and Mara, her brother Collin, Levi Walters and the twins, Aiden and Adam Buchanan—had pulled a number of pranks on the town. They’d painted Simone Grainger’s phone number on the water tower after she dumped Aiden before the last basketball game of their senior year. They’d all brought dogs to school on the same day, and had switched the cables from the principal’s computer to the secretary’s. They repainted the downtown parking spaces and put up Tractors Only parking signs. There were countless other pranks, but each one had been orchestrated by Mara, and every single one of them he’d gone along with because he would rather have been with her than without her.
Whenever Mara came around, his law-abiding side warred with his reckless side, and usually the reckless side won, leaving his law-abiding self to clean up the mess.
Like the mess the two of them made graduation night.
Correction: the mess he’d made all by himself when he took one of her pranks to a whole other level.
No one except him and Mara knew exactly what happened that night, and he planned to keep it that way.
“Yeah, it just figures Mara Tyler would set off the store alarm.” CarlaAnn had joined them. “I thought I recognized her when she walked in, but I wasn’t sure until the alarms went off.” She shook her head, her shoulder-length, salt-and-pepper hair shaking from side to side. “This alarm system isn’t good for much, but it finally caught her in the act.” She stabbed a finger toward Mara’s chest. James stepped between them.
CarlaAnn was Simone’s mother, and she’d always blamed their group for the water tower incident—with just cause. A few weeks after that incident, Simone ran off with the biker she’d dumped Aiden for, and she had never returned to Slippery Rock. CarlaAnn blamed only Mara for that offense, and her blame had turned into a raging hatred before the six of them graduated.
“I have a perfectly good explanation for being here, and for setting off the alarms. I tried to tell you that through the glass,” Mara said, stepping around James’s arm. “I need to speak with Mike.” She glanced at her watch, and she tapped the toe of her shoe against the tile.
CarlaAnn crossed her arms over her chest. “Mike is on vacation. You’ll have to deal with me.”
Mara kept her gaze trained on the other woman for a long moment. CarlaAnn was the first to look away. “Then I need a phone number or email address where he can be reached.”
CarlaAnn pressed her lips together and scowled. “I don’t have either of those,” she finally said.
James noticed the crowd of shoppers gradually inching closer to Mara and CarlaAnn, probably expecting some kind of girl fight now that Mara had been identified. Small towns meant there was always a helping hand around, but they also meant long memories. Everyone remembered the water tower prank, among others. The love-hate relationship between Mara and the town had turned to flat-out hate after the fiasco of graduation night, though.
Since then, James had done his best to prove he was a man worthy of being the next sheriff. Mara setting off alarm bells at the grocery store would only reinforce their belief that she was a felony charge away from jail time.
He knew she wasn’t a felon,