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Chapter One
Hey, handsome, maybe next time you’ll let me fiddle with your nightstick?
The question, delivered with a smile and a wink, replayed in West Donovan’s mind as he steered his cruiser along Route 9. Thunderheads gathered above the treetops to the south, but the impending summer storm didn’t threaten his mood. Nonexistent traffic, a handful of miles, and a mere fifty minutes stood between him and end of shift.
An hour from now, he could be down at Rawley’s Pub enjoying a hot meal, a cold beer, and, if things went his way, a cocktail waitress with a little kink for cops. She’d been very friendly last Friday when he’d gone for happy hour with fellow officers of the newly established Bluelick PD.
As he’d settled his tab, she’d leaned in and whispered her not-so-innocent invitation. He suspected she’d called him handsome because she couldn’t remember his name. Not a problem. She might be bad with names, but he didn’t consider that a deal-breaker. He’d spent a notable portion of his adult life proving to all interested parties’ satisfaction that they didn’t need to be on a first-name basis to pass a few mutually entertaining hours together.
He glanced at the clock on the dash. He and Callie with a “C” could go at each other all night, and she could call him whatever she damn well pleased the entire time. His fingers tapped out a beat on the steering wheel as he contemplated the possibilities.
Thunder rumbled overhead. He rounded a curve just as the first fat raindrop splattered on his windshield, and the cruiser’s headlights caught a figure standing by the side of the road. It didn’t take law enforcement training to know everything about this particular figure spelled disaster—from the skimpy top sliding off slender shoulders, to the tiny skirt ending high on coltish legs. And the exclamation point on this living, breathing dress code violation? The extended arm with thumb cocked in the classic hitchhiker pose.
He slowed the car, and Hitchhiker Barbie broke into a hip-swaying happy dance, which got other portions of her anatomy bouncing.
He did not share her enthusiasm. Plans for a hot meal, cold beer, and obliging waitress slipped down a few notches on his timeline. He pulled onto the shoulder and killed the engine. Silently, he counted down the seconds until she realized she’d thumbed a ride from the po-po. Three…two…one.
The dance stopped so abruptly he almost laughed. Then she did the least logical yet most predictable thing possible. She picked up her stuff and took off in the opposite direction. Sort of. The weight of her bags prevented a quick getaway.
“Good call, genius,” he grumbled. “We’re in the middle of nowhere. Where the hell do you think you’re going?” He shoved his hat on and got out of the car. A cannon blast of thunder rent the sky. Seconds later, rain battered the pavement. The furious cadence drowned out his long-suffering sigh.
Catching her wouldn’t be a problem, but frankly, he was in no mood for a foot chase. He drew a breath and yelled, “Stop,” in the don’t-even-try-it tone he’d perfected over two years spent with the NYPD.
She skidded to a halt, dropped her things, and raised her hands cautiously to either side of her head—nice touch—before she slowly turned.
He closed in. Not fast, not slow, but at a deliberate pace intended to discourage her from succumbing to the flight instinct again. Maybe he looked a little too intimidating, because at about three feet out, she swayed.
Fuck. He moved quickly and managed to catch her before she hit the asphalt. Even as dead weight, there wasn’t much to her. When had she last eaten a decent meal?
His concern for her well-being escalated as he hefted her into his arms and her head rolled toward him. A pale cheek settled against his biceps at the same time a soft breast nestled against his chest then shifted slightly with each steady, unlabored breath she took. This imparted two important pieces of information. Normal respiration, which relieved a fractional measure of his initial concern, and, while young, she wasn’t a teen. Also a relief. No need to bring social services into the mix. He carried her to the cruiser and laid her boneless body across the backseat.
Her small build had fooled him into mistaking her for a minor. Also, her outfit practically begged for a week in detention. A decades old black-and-red Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers tour T-shirt someone had decided looked better as a tank top hung on her like a sloppy hug from a drunk ex-boyfriend, showing off glimpses of a red lace bra beneath. The jean skirt was straight out of the Daisy Duke style guide. Threads from the ragged hem contrasted with sun-kissed thighs. Scuffed black motorcycle boots put the finishing touch on an ensemble guaranteed to induce a seizure in any self-respecting parent.
But her face, though smooth and disarmingly innocent in repose, lacked the round-at-the-edges look of an adolescent, and everything from the neck down definitely belonged to a full-grown woman. The realization did little to diminish the inevitable wave of protectiveness that came from having her unconscious and in his care. And it did absolutely nothing to alleviate the immediate and uncomfortable tug of lust that came from having a rain-soaked stunner stretched out in his backseat.
Her head lolled to the side. Two scarlet cornrows arrowed away from her temple, highlighting a refined cheekbone while warning him refinement wasn’t a quality she embraced. Twin streams of red flowed from the braids like colorful tributaries into the waterfall of blond hair spilling across the seat.
Between the biker boots and rock-chick wardrobe, she looked like the result of a one-night stan
d between Harley-Davidson and Harley Quinn. The tangle of earrings dripping from her ear only reinforced the impression, as did the scale of musical notes inked along the inside of her left arm. They disappeared under a stack of skinny, metal bracelets. A silver guitar pick with the name Roxy engraved on it hung from a chain around her neck. Small, tarnished angel wings dangled from a navel piercing exposed by the rucked-up hem of her shirt. Something about the vulnerability of that tugged at him. Following an instinct that had nothing to do with training or experience, he carefully eased her shirt into place and put the thought of tarnished angels out of his head.
While her size certainly didn’t intimidate, she was still unconscious, unidentified, and an as yet unquantified risk. Runaways came in all ages and from all backgrounds. They ran from responsibilities, bad decisions, toxic relationships, or combinations thereof. Too soon to tell which category his hitcher fell into, but she fell squarely into a category called “Trouble.” The kind that, as part of the thin blue line in Bluelick, Kentucky, he got paid to detect and deter. That made her his trouble for the next little while.
His original plans for the end of shift started to look remote. Even the most accommodating cocktail waitress wouldn’t hang around all night. A rain check—ha ha—was probably the best he could hope for. He waited for disappointment to settle on him for real, but it didn’t. It rolled off quickly. Too quickly. Okay, no rain check.
He felt her radial pulse. A consistent rhythm beat beneath his fingers, which reassured him enough to defer thoughts of calling the EMTs. She wasn’t about to crash on him. But she wasn’t an immediate source of answers, either. For those he eased out of the cruiser and walked a few steps to her duffel bag and what turned out to be a guitar case. The duffel proved minimally informative—old, Army surplus, with “Goodhart” stenciled across the side in black, block letters. A crumpled Greyhound tag hung from the handle. He flipped it over. The first line read Roxy Goodhart. A thick scribble of blue ink obscured the address and phone number. The city might have been Nashville, but he couldn’t be sure. If so, she’d traveled a long way to end up hitching rides along a slow stretch of Route 9. He lifted the bag and guitar and carried them to his car.
Her gear fit securely in the trunk of the cruiser. After stowing it, he returned to the open passenger door and leaned in to check on her. Droplets of rain rolled off the brim of his hat. One landed on her upper lip, another on her lower, and still another on her chin.
That knee-jerk tug of lust returned with a vengeance.
Impatient with himself, he whipped the hat off. Then he wiped his hair off his forehead and took a deep breath. The scent of her—a disturbing combination of honeysuckle and rain—filled the cruiser, teasing his nose and provoking appetites he refused to examine too closely. Another thing he didn’t want to examine too closely? What she had under her barely legal skirt, but training and experience wouldn’t allow him to just toss someone into the back of his car without checking for weapons. Her wet T-shirt concealed nothing. The only weapons beneath were courtesy of Mother Nature. The skirt didn’t hide much, either, but he had no way of knowing if she’d tucked away a blade or a canister of pepper spray unless he patted her down.
Swallowing past his dry throat, he felt her front and back pockets and then slid his palms over the worn denim covering the curve of her ass. His hands volunteered to take a second, completely recreational sweep of the area, but his brain put a lockdown on the impulse at the same moment a husky voice murmured, “…Gibson?”
He shoved his hands down the shafts of her boots to make sure they hid nothing nefarious and then eased away and watched as long lashes fluttered open and swept him back to a vacation he’d taken in the Florida Keys, where the water had been exactly the same clear, turquoise shade as her eyes. She’d lined them with some iridescent junk that reminded him of peacock feathers and hadn’t held up well against the weather, but something about the smudged makeup made her look intriguingly debauched.
Save the intrigue for what the hell she’s doing here and who the hell Gibson is.
Her pupils were huge but responsive, the whites of her eyes clear, which brought his concern for her physical condition down another degree. Didn’t mean she wasn’t on something, but both factors had him moving alcohol or some other intoxicant down a couple notches on his mental checklist of reasons she’d passed out.
“Gibson?” he questioned. Might as well know if some asshole was hiding in the weeds.
She stared at him for a long moment and then glanced around the interior of the cruiser. The lack of shock or disorientation gave him the impression she knew where she was and how she’d gotten there.
“My guitar.” Her voice vibrated over him, raising the hairs on his forearms as effectively as if she’d whispered in his ear. She volunteered nothing more, but flags of color unfurled across her cheeks. Apparently, she wasn’t accustomed to regaining consciousness in the back of a police cruiser with an officer of the law looming over her.
Accustomed or not, she pulled herself into an upright position. He allowed it, backing off to let her swing her legs down and gritting his teeth against the flashes of lace afforded by the gaping T-shirt. When her boots hit the floorboard, he waved her over and took the space next to her. “Your guitar is in the trunk, along with your bag.”
With quick, absent moves, she rearranged the chain around her neck so the guitar pick nestled between her breasts then flicked her arm and sent the bracelets tumbling to her wrist. Beneath her lashes, she gave him the side-eye. “Are you taking me into custody, Officer…?”
“Donovan. That depends. Have you done something illegal?”
“Of course not.” The words came out fast, but her gaze skidded past him like a prisoner making a break for freedom.
“Aside from hitchhiking,” he added, “which, for the record, is illegal in the entire state of Kentucky.”
Her eyes darted to his, wide and anxious. “I didn’t know, but I was stranded and kind of out of options. Isn’t there some leeway under the law for special circumstances?”
He resisted the pull of those big, pleading eyes. “I’m just guessing at this point, Ms. Goodhart, but something tells me you’re a walking, talking set of special circumstances.”
