“I was looking out the window.”
“Princess.”
“Fine. Your forearms are distracting.”
The boutique sits next to a bakery, warm light spilling through the windows. Striker drives around to the back lot, scanning the street before he kills the engine.
“You coming up?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “Viv’s the boss here; I’m due back at the bar.”
The passenger door opens before I can ask anything else. The woman waiting outside is extraordinary. She’s in her sixties, dressed in an emerald silk blouse and leather pants, silver hair pinned back, her bangles chiming softly as she moves.
“You must be Bethany,” she says. “I’m Vivienne Lambert. You can call me Viv.”
She glances at Striker and waves.
“Back around six,” she tells him. “Not before.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
An hour later I’m standing in front of a mirror in jeans that actually fit my body and a blue silk shirt that makes my skin glow. Viv moves around me with quiet efficiency, adjusting, swapping, refining.
Viv is a mix of efficient, practical and kind. She tells me how the colors suit me and how beautiful I look. She makes tea in a polished silver teapot, telling me about the history of High Vale. Her parents moved here from France and she grew up here, then left to work in Paris. She came back to look after them, then stayed on in the family house after they died.
“I’m sorry, I don’t have any money right now. But I can pay you back as soon as I do.”
“De rien. And Striker has already settled the bill. I have a few bags here with socks, bras, underwear, shoes… you choose what fits you the best. He asked me to go shopping.”
By the third outfit, her kindness makes tears spring to my eyes. I blink hard, and she hands me a handkerchief without looking at my face.
“Cherie,” she says, pinning a hem, “has Striker kissed you properly yet?”
Heat floods my face.
Viv smiles to herself. “Ah,” she murmurs. “That explains why he was looking at you like something precious he was scared to let you out of his sight.”
When we’re finished, Viv takes me onto her porch with my bags of new clothes. A soft golden light has settled over the town. It’s beautiful here, trees in blossom lining the street, and a fountain sparkling outside a big old building that must be the library.
Across the road, the diner door opens, and a man in a sheriff’s uniform steps out. I don’t know him. But there’s a flicker of something, maybe a memory, instinct, I can’t tell which, that makes the back of my neck prickle.
He glances in my direction, then looks away and heads for his cruiser.
The feeling lingers.
“Bethany?” Viv says quietly.
“I thought I knew him,” I admit.
“The sheriff? Cherie, he gives me the creeps. But he’s Prez’s cousin, so he can’t be all bad.”
The truck pulls up before I can respond and Striker’s intense gaze finds mine immediately. The drive back is quiet. The air between us is thicker now, like something has changed. He glances at me more than once, each look lingering a fraction too long.
By the time we pull in behind the apartment, my pulse has climbed steadily. My nipples are hard points, poking at the slippery silk of my new blue shirt. He cuts the engine behind the apartment building, and silence drops into the cab.
I can still feel his eyes on me from every red light on the way back from Viv’s. Every glance he tried not to take and failed. The blue silk shirt suddenly feels like a terrible idea.
Striker keeps both hands on the steering wheel for a second longer than necessary. A muscle in his jaw leaps as he looks over at me.
