the front legs of his chair to the floor and grabbed the rifle out of her hand.
She blinked as if coming out of a daze and aimed a wounded look at her friend. “What is he doing here?”
“I think what you meant to ask,” Jake teased as he set the muddy rifle in the corner, well out of her reach, “is why is Freddie drinking with a mean-tempered city slicker?”
Faye flushed a light red.
Freddie slammed her shot glass down and twisted around in her chair, looking behind her. “What city slicker? I don’t cotton to none of them.”
Jake grinned. Winning Freddie to his side had been easy. Faye was proving to be a lot more challenging.
“I was just telling Freddie that I’m an old friend of yours,” he said.
Faye’s eyebrows shot up. “You are? I mean, you were? Telling Freddie that?”
He nodded. “I told her some of those old stories about our high school days in Mobile.”
She went a little green. She had no way of knowing that Freddie was the one who’d told him where she’d gone to high school and that Jake still knew precious little about her.
“I also told Freddie how we planned on going to the University of Florida together but you ended up going to Florida State University instead. Funny thing is, I guess I got that wrong. Freddie said you didn’t go to FSU.”
Her face went from green to sickly pale. She glanced at Freddie, obviously wondering exactly how much she’d told Jake. “Um, no, no, I didn’t. Freddie, can you give us a—”
“University of Alabama, wasn’t that it?” Freddie wiped a trickle of whiskey from her chin, smearing her makeup like a brown streak of mud. “That’s where you went to school, right? ’Cause that’s where you and Amber met.” Freddie smiled up at Jake. “Amber Callahan was my niece. She and Faye used to come here every summer between semesters. Seems like the whole town watched Faye growing up into the fine woman she’s become. She and Amber both graduated from UA.”
“Explains the accent.” Jake lifted his glass in salute. “Roll Tide, roll.” He downed his shot of whiskey in one quick swallow. The urge to cough and wheeze was overwhelming, making his eyes water. But he managed to cling to his dignity, just barely, and make it through the storm. Good grief the stuff was strong. He suspected the name on the bottle had nothing to do with the contents and prayed he wouldn’t go blind drinking what had to be a homemade brew. It certainly wasn’t Hennessey.
He cleared his throat and met Faye’s look of impending doom with a smug smile.
“Faye, Faye,” Amy yelled from the other room. “Sammie’s in trouble out front. CeeCee has him wrapped up tight and it doesn’t look like he has his alcohol with him.”
Faye whirled around and ran down the hallway toward the front of the store.
Jake cursed and ran after her. CeeCee? Alcohol? He couldn’t begin to imagine what he was about to see.
He caught a mind-numbing, lust-inducing view of Faye’s gorgeous derriere as she raced out the door, her short, ruined skirt lifting up behind her before the door shut in his face. He yanked it open in time to see her pulling on the silver chain that hung around her neck. She lifted it out of her shirt and there were three small pouches hanging from it. She unsnapped the red one and dropped to her knees.
Right beside a man with an enormous snake wrapped around his neck and chest.
Ah, hell. Jake grabbed his gun and dropped to his knees beside her and a small group of people who’d gathered around the man being squeezed to death by the snake.
“Someone find the snake’s head so I can shoot it without shooting this guy,” Jake ordered.
“No,” the man writhing in the street choked out. “No one kills CeeCee.”
Everyone looked at Jake as if he’d just threatened to shoot a baby, or kick a dog.
Faye spilled the powdery contents of the red pouch into her hand. “Bubba, there’s his head, against Sammie’s throat. Grab it, hold it.”
Two older men, probably both in their fifties, reached for the snake’s head at the same time.
“Not you,” Faye said, motioning to one of them. “The other Bubba.”
The stronger-looking of the two grabbed the snake’s head and forced it back away from Sammie.
“Hurry,” Sammie whispered.
Faye leaned toward the snake.
Jake grabbed her around the waist, holding her back.
“I’m not letting you near that thing,” he bit out. “It could kill you.”
She gave him a surprised look. “I know what I’m doing. Let me go before CeeCee squeezes so hard Sammie has a heart attack.”
He hesitated.
“Trust me,” she said. “At least with this.”
Since everyone was staring at him as if he were the devil, he reluctantly let her go.
She immediately slathered the red powder on the snake’s nostrils and head. “Okay, everybody jump back. Bubba, release CeeCee.”
Jake swung Faye up in his arms and backed away from the now violently twisting snake. Faye blinked up at him, confusion warring with some other emotion on her face.
“Catch him, Bubba,” Sammie yelled. “I need to wash him off or he’ll hurt himself.”
Faye and Jake looked back at the street, but everyone had scattered. They were all running toward the trees between two of the buildings, including the man who’d had the constrictor wrapped around him just seconds earlier.
“I guess Sammie is okay.” Faye laughed.
“This happens a lot around here?”
She grinned. “Often enough for me to always carry a pouch of snake repellant. I’ve told Sammie to keep some rubbing alcohol in his back pocket to use if CeeCee ever confuses him with food. It works almost as well as my repellant. But Sammie tends to forget.”
Jake carried her into the store. “Sounds to me like he needs to let his pet go before it kills him.”
“That pet is the only reason he gets up every day. It’s what he lives for now that his wife is gone. He’s all alone except for CeeCee.”
He grunted noncommittally and headed down the hall.
Faye stiffened as he neared the staircase that led to her apartment. “You can put me down now. I’m not in any danger, not that I needed you to rescue me in the first place.”
“You’re welcome,” he grumbled.
She rolled her eyes.
He started up the stairs.
Her
