Aiden before the last basketball game of their senior year. They’d all brought dogs to school on the same day, and had switched the cables from the principal’s computer to the secretary’s. They repainted the downtown parking spaces and put up Tractors Only parking signs. There were countless other pranks, but each one had been orchestrated by Mara, and every single one of them he’d gone along with because he would rather have been with her than without her.
Whenever Mara came around, his law-abiding side warred with his reckless side, and usually the reckless side won, leaving his law-abiding self to clean up the mess.
Like the mess the two of them made graduation night.
Correction: the mess he’d made all by himself when he took one of her pranks to a whole other level.
No one except him and Mara knew exactly what happened that night, and he planned to keep it that way.
“Yeah, it just figures Mara Tyler would set off the store alarm.” CarlaAnn had joined them. “I thought I recognized her when she walked in, but I wasn’t sure until the alarms went off.” She shook her head, her shoulder-length, salt-and-pepper hair shaking from side to side. “This alarm system isn’t good for much, but it finally caught her in the act.” She stabbed a finger toward Mara’s chest. James stepped between them.
CarlaAnn was Simone’s mother, and she’d always blamed their group for the water tower incident—with just cause. A few weeks after that incident, Simone ran off with the biker she’d dumped Aiden for, and she had never returned to Slippery Rock. CarlaAnn blamed only Mara for that offense, and her blame had turned into a raging hatred before the six of them graduated.
“I have a perfectly good explanation for being here, and for setting off the alarms. I tried to tell you that through the glass,” Mara said, stepping around James’s arm. “I need to speak with Mike.” She glanced at her watch, and she tapped the toe of her shoe against the tile.
CarlaAnn crossed her arms over her chest. “Mike is on vacation. You’ll have to deal with me.”
Mara kept her gaze trained on the other woman for a long moment. CarlaAnn was the first to look away. “Then I need a phone number or email address where he can be reached.”
CarlaAnn pressed her lips together and scowled. “I don’t have either of those,” she finally said.
James noticed the crowd of shoppers gradually inching closer to Mara and CarlaAnn, probably expecting some kind of girl fight now that Mara had been identified. Small towns meant there was always a helping hand around, but they also meant long memories. Everyone remembered the water tower prank, among others. The love-hate relationship between Mara and the town had turned to flat-out hate after the fiasco of graduation night, though.
Since then, James had done his best to prove he was a man worthy of being the next sheriff. Mara setting off alarm bells at the grocery store would only reinforce their belief that she was a felony charge away from jail time.
He knew she wasn’t a felon, and their pranks had been generated out of boredom rather than malice, but that wouldn’t matter. Nor would the fact that James graduated at the top of his class in both college and the police academy. His anonymous restitution to the school would be irrelevant. None of those things would matter to the townspeople, just as those things didn’t truly assuage his conscience. He could only hope that someday the man he’d become would matter more than the boy he’d been. Maybe that was how Mara felt, too.
“We’ll take care of this, everyone.” He motioned to the crowd to continue shopping, then turned to Mara. “Why don’t you and I go into the office area and talk this through?”
Mara checked her watch again. “Can we make it quick? I, um, have an important, uh, conference call in fifteen minutes.”
“Don’t you need my statement, too, Deputy Calhoun? Or is this a purely cursory investigation?”
James thought he heard a silent too on the end of CarlaAnn’s last question, as well, and remembered his mother confronting his father after CarlaAnn accused him of conducting a “cursory investigation” into Simone’s disappearance with the biker. James took Mara’s arm and pushed past CarlaAnn.
“Hey,” Mara said in protest, but he ignored her until the door to the back office closed behind them. “I’m not a criminal. And I have another appointment.”
“No, you’re a mischief maker. And important conference call or not, I’m going to investigate why you’re setting off alarm bells at my grocery store.”
“I thought it still belonged to the Mallard family, or have the Calhouns gone into groceries as well as law enforcement?”
“You know what I meant. This is my town, and the people here are my friends, my family. The businesses they run, I protect.”
“They were mine once, too.”
“Until the day you ran out on everything.”
Mara jerked her arm from his grasp. “You, of all people, know why I left.”
James clenched his jaw. Yeah, he knew. Only it hadn’t been her leaving ten years ago that he’d been talking about. She didn’t need to know that, though. He opened the door to the room that held the security equipment and motioned her inside. “Want to show me your reasonable explanation for stealing five dollars in snacks when I know for a fact that you don’t eat generic cookies and are lactose intolerant?”
“I can’t.” Mara looked uncomfortable. “But if you would let me get to my—”
“You’d better, or CarlaAnn out there is going to do her damnedest to make sure this misdemeanor offense not only lands on the crime blotter of the Slippery Rock Gazette but also sounds like a felony.” God, but she was cute when she was upset. Her face took on a pretty pink hue, and she wrung her hands together nervously. Mara was almost never nervous, so seeing her this out of balance was nice. Especially since she was so good at putting him off balance.
Mara motioned to the equipment on the counter. “The system doesn’t catch where I was in the store, and it misses a lot of the parking lot.” She pulled an ID badge from her bag, the move pulling her top taut over her breasts. James’s mouth went dry. Stupid reaction. He’d been hung up on Mara Tyler for most of his life, but he was not going to let himself get hung up on her again. He was a responsible adult with a responsible job, and she’d walked out on him two years ago without so much as a goodbye. He was over her.
“I work for Cannon Security.” She named a firm he had heard about during his training in Jefferson City a few years before. “Mike hired us to do a security overhaul, and I was here to conduct a cursory check before telling him what needed to be done. No one told me he was on vacation. I have emails on my computer at the B and B.”
“You work for a security company?” That was new. He had always figured Mara had gone into hacking or some other not-quite-legal profession. Although they’d had an on-again, off-again relationship, they never talked about anything important. She’d seen his badge, and knew he had always wanted to become the sheriff, but they had never talked about her plans. Or dreams. Hell, he couldn’t really call what they’d had a relationship. It was more like a five-year series of booty calls when she was near Slippery Rock or when he went to law-enforcement conferences in the cities where she worked. “I didn’t realize you were one of the good guys now.”
“Well, I don’t wear
