was grinning at her “—fine me, Deputy?”
Mara glanced up. His hands were clenched and his eyes were closed.
“Is this your way of asking for a ticket? You don’t want to plead your case?” Mara pushed his pants over his hips, and James kicked them to the floor. He wasn’t wearing boxers, and for a moment, Mara wasn’t sure what to do. She’d been expecting one more slow removal of clothing, and instead she saw him, thick and hard.
“I think I’ll just take the fine.”
Mara swallowed. The fine. The fine. She had no idea what to say next, how to keep this role-playing thing going when all she could think about was taking him in her hands. In her mouth.
Snap out of it, Mar, this is just fun and games.
She unsnapped the clasp of her bra, letting the lace fall to the floor, and then stepped out of her panties. Mara kneeled on the bed, putting her hands on either side of his head and straddling his hips before she took his mouth with hers. Screw the game, she only wanted James.
He pulled her body against his, the hairs on his chest tickling her breasts.
“Hey, I tied you up,” she said between kisses.
“You’d never survive in the wilderness with those knot tying skills. I’ll teach you a simple tie. For next time,” he said, pushing her to her back.
“Next time,” she said, and the words sounded dreamy to her ears.
Every time she met up with James, she told herself it would be the last time, but it never was. He was like that last bit of birthday cake—impossible to resist.
His mouth found her breast and Mara arched her back, wanting more.
“James,” she said, pressing her hips against him, urging him to hurry.
James reached into the drawer of the bedside table and pulled out a foil packet. He tore it open with his mouth, and rolled the thin covering over his length.
And then he was inside her. Mara wrapped her legs around his waist, loving the feel of his body against hers, inside hers. This was all she needed.
James Calhoun was everything she wanted, even if she could never be the woman that he needed.
* * *
MARA WATCHED JAMES sleeping soundly on the hotel room bed. The lights were off, but the glow of the neon on the street below was enough to illuminate the room dimly. His mouth was open slightly, his left hand over his heart and his legs tangled in the sheets. The tie draped over the pillow. A lock of hair fell over his eyes. She pushed it back.
This wasn’t just fun.
She swallowed. She wanted to slide under his arm and rest her head over his heart. Wanted to lie there for hours, listening to his heart beating.
God, what had she done?
They’d been meeting like this, in hotel rooms around the country every few months, for nearly three years. Every time it had just been about the sex. Good sex. Excellent sex.
Why did she have to go and let her heart ruin it? This was a great arrangement. He liked his small-town life, and she liked her on-the-road life. They met up for sex, they each went back to their lives, and no one expected anything more.
She took a deep breath. She shouldn’t want more, so why did she? It wasn’t fair. She should have been able to love him and leave him, the way she had every other time they’d met.
Mara pressed a quick kiss to his cheek. James rocked his head slowly to the side, but he didn’t wake.
“I don’t want to mess this up,” she whispered to the man on the bed. The man who had been her best friend for most of her life. The man she should never have fallen in love with. “This will lead to broken hearts and anger, so I’m ending it now without the anger and without breaking anything. It’s better this way.”
She slid off the bed, picked up her satchel and laptop, and quietly left the hotel room. She would arrange for the hotel to pack her things and ship them to her office in Tulsa, because if she waited for him to wake, she wouldn’t be able to leave. She would tell him how she felt about him.
He might tell her he felt the same, but it wouldn’t matter. She didn’t want his kind of life any more than he wanted hers.
More than that, he deserved better.
He deserved someone who wasn’t broken.
Present day
MARA PULLED INTO the parking lot of Mallard’s Grocery in Slippery Rock, Missouri. The lot with its cracked pavement sat at the corner of Main Street and Mariner, a few blocks north of Slippery Rock Lake. The grocery store still had the image of a duck on its sign, the paint dividing the parking spaces was still off-center from the cement blocks at the head of each space, and the same cracked glass was in the revolving door.
Despite the light breeze along the shore, it was oppressively hot in the town center. She had forgotten exactly how muggy and uncomfortable a southern Missouri summer could be. Since slipping out of town the night after her high school graduation, Mara had allowed herself only a handful of visits, all around the holidays, when the weather was significantly cooler.
She turned off the ignition and tossed her keys into the large tote she carried for work. Although the store stood several blocks from the waterfront, where a horrible tornado had leveled several buildings a few weeks before, she could hear the hammering and sawing going on in the downtown area.
This section of town had experienced a few uprooted trees, but most of the damage had been to roofs and windows. The grocery store still had one big plate-glass window boarded over, and one of the cart corrals looked as if a tree had landed on it. Maybe one had.
She hadn’t expected to feel sympathy for the town when she decided to come back, but sympathy was the only explanation she had for the tightening in her chest. Closing her eyes, she took a few deep, centering breaths. The tornado was an act of God. It wasn’t her fault. Not like so many other happenings that had befallen this town because of her. Now she was in a position to help this place that had saved her as a child.
And ideally, while she was helping the town at large, she could fix a couple of personal messes, too.
Mara activated the locks on the SUV as she exited. A few cars and trucks sat in the lot, and she decided to begin her security sweep here rather than checking in with the office first. She didn’t need a store manager distracting her from her job with talk of how little crime they’d experienced. If the stores she visited weren’t in need of a security upgrade, she would not have been dispatched to their area.
On a small notepad, she jotted the locations of several security cameras situated to capture the inbound and outbound foot traffic to the store, but as she crossed to the rear, near the row of Dumpsters and a big cardboard baler, she noted only one camera. It appeared to be slightly askew, and she wondered if it worked at all. Not a great setup despite the low crime rate in Slippery Rock. She made a notation in the notebook.
Air-conditioning
