she was still swaying in Collin’s arms.
A HEAVY KNOCK sounded at the front door. Collin pulled a couch pillow over his head. Big mistake. His hands still had Savannah’s flowery scent on them and he could smell it through the feathers.
“Go away, Savannah,” he muttered. He’d turned her down once already tonight, he wasn’t sure he had two turn-downs in him.
The knock sounded again.
It couldn’t be Savannah. First, he’d walked out on her and she had never been the type to go running after rejection. Second, he was sleeping on the couch in the main house tonight, not in the barn that he’d turned into his office-slash-apartment a couple of years before. If Savannah wanted him, she would be at the barn, not the main house. Of course, Savannah wouldn’t know about the apartment in the barn, so it made sense she was knocking on the front door.
Collin scratched his scalp as he started for the door, tripping slightly over the light blanket he’d pulled over his hips when he’d sank onto the couch a couple of hours before.
Another knock.
If she didn’t stop trying to demolish the front door with her knocks she would wake up the rest of the house. Wait, what rest of the house? Gran took out her hearing aids at night and Amanda slept like the teenage dead. She hadn’t moved a muscle when he’d checked in on her after arriving home to work on the books.
Collin reached for the door, prepared to send Savannah on her way. At least he hadn’t been dreaming about her. He unlocked the dead bolt, opened the door and his jaw dropped.
It wasn’t Savannah.
It was James.
And his baby sister in handcuffs.
Collin glanced at the grandfather clock in the hall. Just after two thirty.
“Sorry, man, found her using these—” James held up two rolls of pink-camo duct tape “—to cut off the streets leading to the town square.”
“I wasn’t cutting off traffic, I was funneling it in a way that actually makes sense.” Amanda blew out a breath, making the wispy blond fringe around her face float up and then back down. Her eyes were green, rather than the blue of his or Mara’s, but the stubborn set of her jaw was all Tyler. For Collin, that stubbornness led to a football scholarship and a degree in Agri-Business. For Mara, it led to a top technical university and a job as a cyber-security expert.
In Amanda, that stubbornness was likely to lead straight to jail. He couldn’t let that happen.
“We have one-way streets that funnel traffic just fine,” James said. He elbowed Amanda gently. “And we don’t have the money for a middle-of-the-night traffic cop.”
“There’s no traffic to direct.” Amanda, likely realizing she’d just ruined her own excuse for taping over the streets of downtown, began talking quickly. “Except during the day, and then all Slippery Rock has are one-way streets that make it impossible to get from Maple to Franklin without making a detour down Main.”
James, one strong hand at Amanda’s elbow, directed her through the front door, gentle despite his height and weight advantage over the teen. Collin felt like a largemouth bass left on the bottom of a boat, gasping for air and getting none.
“You taped off downtown?”
Amanda shrugged. Her blond hair hung in a ponytail down her back, and she wore his old hunting jacket, dark yoga pants and shirt. She’d obviously considered the best way to go undetected during her trek. She’d been planning this for a while. And just who had he said good night to a couple of hours before? She slouched on the leather sofa in the family room, putting her booted feet up on the coffee table. Collin knocked her feet off the table and stood over her.
“What the hell, Amanda! What are you thinking?”
His sister straightened on the sofa and shrugged. “It isn’t like I took a jackhammer to the pavement,” she said sullenly.
“It isn’t like we have the budget to take a street crew off their job to take down your five rolls of duct tape, either.” James tossed two remaining rolls to Collin and put three emptied rolls on the entry table. “Look, I’m not filing a report. This time,” he said sternly. “But this isn’t like the fire you helped to put out. This is a straight-up nuisance, and it’s the third time I’ve caught her out with her tape. The last time, she taped a giant maze through the courthouse square, and the time before that she taped the high school principal into his house.”
Collin caught a hint of mirth in James’s eyes. But this was so not the time to go easy on Amanda. Even though Old Man Tolbert had been running Slippery Rock High with an iron fist since before Collin’s high school days.
“I deconstructed the maze and you can’t prove I was the one to tape Troll-bert into his house,” she said and then mumbled, “On the third snow day he screwed us out of last year.”
“Col, I know you’ve got your hands full with the orchard and all, but I can’t keep covering for your kid sister. It could mean my badge.”
“No, I’ll take care of it. This won’t happen again,” Collin promised his friend, wondering how long he would be able to keep it. He hadn’t even realized Amanda was gone tonight.
Or any of the other times she’d snuck out of the house since he’d grounded her.
He wasn’t good at this stand-in-father thing.
“If you think it’ll help, I’ll take her to the station house. She can spend the night in a holding cell.”
Amanda’s eyes widened. “You can’t send me to jail.”
“Au contraire,” James said. “I can. And if your brother wasn’t one of my best friends, you’d already be there.”
“I’ve got this one,” Collin said. He walked James to the front door. “I’ll make sure this doesn’t happen again, man.”
“I’m not always going to be the one getting the call about her antics, Col. I know you guys are going through some stuff right now, but if one of the other deputies catches her, she’ll do more than spend a night in our county lockup, you know?”
Collin nodded. “Yeah, I know.”
“This isn’t us painting the mascot on the water tower or Mara resetting the stoplight so it taps out an SOS in Morse code.”
“I know.” God, did he know.
Collin had once thought the rebellious Tyler gene had skipped his baby sister, but Amanda seemed to be making up for lost time. And he didn’t know how to help her.
How the hell was he supposed to come down hard on her when he’d done worse than she had on so many other occasions? The difference was he didn’t get caught. She not only had the Tyler Rebel gene, but their mother’s Bad Timing gene.
“Thanks for bringing her home, J. I’ll take care of it. This won’t happen
