Part Time Cowboy. Maisey Yates

motorist.” She looked around at all of the scattered papers. “Right. But I’m not really distressed. I’m fine.”

      Wow, but he really was hot. Chiseled jaw, short dark hair. He created a response, low and deep in her body, that felt familiar in a very disquieting way.

      He bent down in front of the window and she caught the name on his badge.

       E. Garrett.

      Oh, no. No no no no. There were not enough swearwords in the English language to express all of the bad in this situation. She was stranded on the side of the road, and she’d just encountered one of the chief demons from her past. In a uniform. The welcome committee from hell. Not that she’d imagined she’d be able to avoid him forever, considering her B and B was situated on his family’s ranch, but she’d imagined she might avoid him for at least ten minutes after hitting the city limits.

      She was not in the mood to deal with him. She was revising his nickname. Not Officer Hottie. Officer Stick-Up-the-Ass. That’s who he was.

      Not only that, he was a reminder of a whole host of things she would rather just forget.

      And then his expression changed, and she knew he was catching up.

      “Sadie Miller,” he said.

      “Well, damn.” She smiled at him as best she could, but her palms were starting to sweat. Authority figures did that to her in general, and authority figures who had once fingerprinted her were an even bigger issue. “You do have a good memory.”

      “You never forget the first woman you put in handcuffs,” he said, his voice low and firm, giving zero impression of a double entendre, and yet, it hit her that way.

      Hit her and ricocheted around to parts inside of her that had gone ignored for a long time.

      She cleared her throat and straightened her shoulders, trying to look arch and serious, and everything she’d spent the past ten years turning her life into.

      Eli Garrett wasn’t allowed to make her feel like a scroungy teenage girl, because she was not a scroungy teenage girl anymore. Similarly, he was not allowed to make her feel hot and bothered like he’d done back then, either, because...well, because she wasn’t the same person she’d been then.

      “Indeed,” she said.

      “What brings you back into town?”

      He didn’t know? She looked at him, studied him. He didn’t know. Well, that was just peachy. Connor Garrett had neglected to tell his brother that he’d offered her the lease on the house. She had a feeling that was going to go down with Eli like a live leech in his breakfast cereal.

      “Am I, um...am I being detained?” she asked, fidgeting in her seat.

      “No,” he said.

      “Then am I free to go?”

      “Where? You’re out of gas.”

      Point to Officer Garrett. “Yes. I am. Maybe...maybe you could help me with that?”

      His lips, which were far more interesting than they should be, didn’t smile, didn’t lessen their tension. They simply remained in a flat line. Uncompromising. Unfriendly. Like the man himself. “Just a second.” He turned and walked back toward his squad car and she started picking up the papers she’d strewn all over the car.

      Her heart was beating so hard she thought she might have a medical event. What were the odds that he was the first person she saw when she came back to Copper Ridge? It was a bad omen. A very bad omen.

      Of course, her first thought, still, was that he was hot. She’d thought that at seventeen. But then, to a rebellious kid with an affinity for underage drinking, a man who was part of the sheriff’s department was sort of the ultimate fascination. The ultimate no-go. So of course, even when she’d resented his presence, she’d gotten a little kick out of checking him out.

      She let out a long breath. She’d sort of hoped that he’d gone on to law enforcement in another town. Or that maybe he’d given up wearing a uniform altogether and discovered a passion for pottery...maybe in the south of France.

      But no. Eli Garrett had done what most people from Copper Ridge seemed to do. He’d found his place in the little community and stayed in his carved-out niche.

       You should judge. Since you’re back and all.

      Yes, she was back.

      At this point in the game, Copper Ridge had seemed as good a place as any to give her demons the big middle finger.

      And hey, she was facing one of them a little bit early. But, considering he had a gun strapped to his lean hips, she thought maybe giving him the finger wasn’t the best idea.

      “I put a call in for you,” he said from over her shoulder.

      “Gah!” She startled. “Could you not sneak up on me like that?”

      “Do I make you nervous?”

      “No. Why would you make me nervous?”

      “Criminals do seem to get nervous around the badge.”

      She frowned. “I am not a criminal. I am a licensed therapist in eight...no, nine states.”

      “With a criminal record.”

      “I was a minor.”

      “No arrests since then?” he asked.

      “I ask again, am I being detained?”

      “No.”

      “Then...I’m free to go.”

      “Except that you’re out of gas,” he pointed out. Again.

      “Well, you’re free to go, then.”

      He lifted a shoulder. “Yeah, I could. But I feel like it’s my mission to make sure you don’t get into any trouble. Or light anything on fire.”

      “Okay, look, I didn’t light anything on fire on purpose. I knocked over a lantern.”

      “Which is why arson wasn’t on the list of things you were arrested for.”

      “Do you forget anything?” she asked.

      “Public drunkenness. Disturbing the peace, resisting arrest. Not arson, though. And that’s not even mentioning the number of times we had to come and ask you and your friends to leave a store, or stop loitering where you didn’t belong.”

      “Good lord, what a sad small life you must lead to remember my rap sheet. I barely even remember it.”

      “As I said, you don’t forget your first.”

      She screwed up her face. “That sounds possibly more sexual than I think you mean it to.”

      “How does it sound sexual?”

      She squinted. “Really?”

      She waited for a full four seconds while it registered. She could see when it did because his humorless, impassive face had a slight shift before going back to being total granite. He still had his sunglasses on, so she couldn’t see his eyes, only her own reflection. Which looked flushed and flustered. And not from heat, that was for sure.

      “Why are you here?” he asked.

      “I didn’t say,” she said.

      “I know. I tend to remember conversations that happened less than five minutes ago.”

      “Yeah, well, I don’t see how that’s any of your business, since I’m not being detained for questioning.”

      “For someone who hasn’t been arrested more than just the once, you have the lingo down perfectly.”

      “I’m a therapist. I work with some troubled souls. I’ve seen more than one arrest.”