Behind the Pines (The Gass County Series Book 3) (2 page)

“Christine was . . .”

“What?” Melanie interrupted him. “She was what? If someone tells me I shouldn’t have pulled my trigger when I came into that bedroom and witnessed what was about to happen, I swear to God . . .”

“Calm down, Mel. What I meant to say was . . . well, that I really liked Christine. I’m sorry, let me correct that, I liked who I thought she was. Apparently I was wrong, like everyone else.”

“Oh, well. She’s gone and Wayne is still here. A mind in shock and confusion, but alive and kicking.”

“It’s just hard to wrap my mind around it all. She . . .” His gesturing hands froze in front of him.

“Yes?” Melanie nodded her head from where she was standing by the wall, hands on her hips, waiting for his answer. Frustration building.

“I’m supposed to be one of the finest officers for at least three counties, and she blindsided me completely. What does that make me? My reputation? I even . . . liked her for a while.”

“Well, she was acting nicely, Brody. She fooled everyone, not you exclusively.”

“No, I mean. I
really
liked her. As in if Wayne dumped her, I would have run after her and made her mine.”

Melanie’s single step made her hip touch the side of his desk and she bent down and placed her hand on his.

“You’re doing just fine, Brody.” She looked at him close and he was glad she brought her hand back onto her lap when she noticed how his body had reacted to her touching him: hard, tense, and uncomfortable. “Don’t let that imagination up there trick you into thinking you have trust issues now.” She pointed at the top of her short brown hair pressed down into a cowlick from wearing her helmet. “Men will never understand women, you included, so leave it. Christine was a nutcase, a one-in-a-million lunatic, ain’t no more of those around here. Won’t happen.”

He spun a ballpoint pen between his fingers as he rested his elbows on the wooden desk taking up most of the space. “Don’t tell anyone I said that.” Through his lashes he peeked up at her and noticed her staring right at him.

“Your confession is safe with me, just can’t believe what this patriarchical world is doing to you men. I feel sorry for you, Brody. If I lock the door, shutting Wendy out, I’ll allow you to cry on my shoulder if it’d make you feel better.” Melanie smiled and rolled her eyes, making his grim face lighten.

“Well, I’m out of here. I’ve had enough of you sitting here holding a potential regret about Christine being dead. It was either her or Wayne.” Her voice softened as she turned in the doorway.

“Yeah.” His teeth caught on to his lower lip and with pain grinded it hard. “Thanks for saving a life, Mel.”

“No problem, Brody.” She smiled and pushed the black motorcycle helmet down over her hair. “Any time you need me back for precision shouting I’ll be here.”

As the door to his office closed, shutting out Wendy’s eccentric office techniques of blasting pop music while painting her nails and filing yet another complaint from Bernard Winston, he leaned back into the softness of the chair and let his eyes close. He rubbed the bridge of his nose in an attempt to dissolve the shooting pain creeping up the left side of his back and setting into his scalp, grabbing on like an iron fist. Two more hours, he thought, only two more hours before he could take another pill.

A soft knock on the door awoke his thoughts and he ushered Wendy inside the tight corners of his office. “I know complaints can be ludicrous, but this one is recurrent.” From her hand a paper softly fell through the air and landed in his view. “Maybe make an impromptu visit, sir?”

Chapter Three

“Is she ready? She looks ready to me.”

“Ready, my love?” His warm breath touched her ear and a reassuring whisper answered his wish. He smiled gently to the other woman waiting patiently at the other side of the room.

“I love this room, I love this bed.” The other woman’s voice filled the quiet space between them. “I love being invited.”

He nodded with yet another smile and kissed the top of Sunshine’s head leaning back against his chest, watching her breath move her bare chest up and down. He loved her like this, like he had always wanted to see her: naked, leaning against his starched shirt, his arms holding her against him, her eyes blindfolded and her legs spread wide. Absolutely gorgeous.

“Please sit,” he said, nodding to the woman across the room wearing nothing but black lingerie. Lace—he’d made sure to put that in his request.

“This is for her, correct?” The woman’s soft voice soothed any nervousness he knew Sunshine might feel.

“Only for her. Whatever she wants,” he reassured, and with a smile on his lips he kissed Sunshine’s head once more. “Whatever you want, my love,” he whispered. “Ask for anything you want from her. This is my gift to you.”

His arms tightened around hers as she moved on the sheets. He quieted, leaving himself out of the event between the two women on the bed. One, his lovely Sunshine, the other, someone he’d hired through an escort service suited for women only. Sunshine worked hard, always, on all levels: work, home, children, community. She deserved everything, and this, he knew, was a dream secretly stored at the back of her mind.

“You look absolutely amazing. Your skin, so soft.” The woman’s hand slowly ran up a leg and with thumb touched Sunshine’s pussy. She placed a soft kiss on one knee, opening Sunshine’s legs up into a butterfly, until her mouth found its way to Sunshine’s inner thigh and in a sigh of pleasure made Sunshine’s pussy the center of her mouth.

“Your pussy, so beautiful. So soft.” Softly she ran the thumb down Sunshine’s lips, swollen from the words that were spoken. With a gasp Sunshine pressed herself back against David’s solid chest and let her mouth open. David’s hand slipped under her chin and pulled her mouth to his, lavishing her tongue with his saliva.

Sunshine woke, warm and slightly sweaty under the thick duvet covering both her and the gigantic canine sleeping soundly at the bottom of the narrow bed. She pulled the cover off, waking Brutus as she did, and drank the tall glass of water she’d placed on the shelf on the wall an hour earlier. Brutus’s escapade across Farmer Gert’s fields had made them both exhausted, and the dream she’d had took more energy than a marathon, making the water go down easy.

“I’m not sure if I should tell you to cover your ears or not, Brutus. But in all honesty, I need to get laid, and surprisingly I’m not sure if a man is what I want.”

The dog twitched a black eyebrow, puffed with boredom, and stretched in the walkway leading between the bed and the seating area at one end of the trailer before Sunshine opened the door and they both started the short hike down to the mailboxes by the road.

Sunshine stared down at the pink letter in her hand. The envelope was dainty, nothing one would see from the city, and the faint scent of perfume gave away the intimacy with which the sender may have written the letter. She looked at it for a second, turned it over for a clue as to whom the sender might be, but nothing gave her the answer.

“It is for me though,” Sunshine told Brutus sitting at her feet. Her mailbox neighbored that of Farmer Gert’s other assistant, Hank—a seventy-plus, gray-haired man, not likely destined for a letter of this type. While walking the grass-covered path back to the trailer, she couldn’t help herself and gently began opening the envelope. She snorted and gave out a laugh, making Brutus attempt a face-jump in excitement.

“Listen to this,” she told him without breaking her stride. “You probably hear this all the time, so let me be the one to reassure you that it’s true: You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. With that, have a most wonderful day.”

She folded the note back in the envelope and placed it inside her pocket. “So, I guess I’m cute, Brutus. Is the sender right?” Brutus barked and returned to the big cage Sunshine had built next to the trailer at the end of the circular grassy spot they called home. She watched Brutus joyfully slop over a bone she’d given him earlier and felt content over the peace in which they were then living. “This is great, love,” she said, watching him close his eyes in satisfaction. “You and me and the end of a road, nothing but nature and freedom.” She sighed and went in the cage for the work they’d both procrastinated about for the entire week, Brutus’s bath.

Sunshine stood in front of the dog cage, surrounded by wild flowers, soaked in water droplets Brutus tossed in the air, shaking his fur after a not too successful bath, and tried not to second-guess her decision to leave a less manual job in California and reinvent her life, farm-style, for the thousandth time since she’s set foot in Primrose Valley, in the middle of fucking nowhere Midwest, less than seven months earlier.

She missed her friends from the commune, and her Toyota she’d traded in for a train ticket east. She also missed things like hearing the ocean waves crash upon rocks along the beach, the daily dresses thanks to the never-ending warm sun, and the lazy days she could spend strolling around doing nothing. 

She did not, however, miss Anthony Haines, and ever since the Sundown Festival less than a year before, she’d regretted ever opening her mouth to say hello. A greeting had turned into a conversation that turned into smiles and late-night kissing on a vacant bench behind where a local band had set up stage. He hadn’t stopped when she’d asked him to, his hand had pried hers away, getting under her shirt and grabbing her bare breast before she’d bent the pinkie on his other hand in hope it would break. And it had.

Sunshine shook away the awful memory and, with a towel hanging on a knob inside the cage, she wiped herself dry. For all the challenges, for all the doubt she’d given Primrose Valley, Sunshine knew she’d made the right decision moving away from her previous life and starting fresh. The employment given to her by Farmer Gert had been life altering and for the first time she felt like every other hardworking American—she had a full-time job and an income no one else would demand she split. She couldn’t remember if she’d ever had that.

“Brutus, you know I don’t want to keep you in here, but since your talent of cattle herding is less than successful, you have to become accustomed to this cage. I’m sorry.” Sunshine closed the wood-framed door supported by two sheets of chicken wire which she had “borrowed” from down the road, where too many deer had torn an opening in the barricade intended to save drivers from wild animals.

“On the bright side, you get to listen to birds and watch other animals from within your captivity without getting either of us into trouble. I think that’s as good as it gets, Mr. B.” Sunshine turned and walked across the driveway, the mixture of gravel and pine needles crunching with each step of her boots, bringing her farther away from the whining of her beloved Malamute. She couldn’t blame him or his adventurous nature when their surroundings were as breathtaking as a Swedish midsummer night, filled with wildflowers and green grass basking in the lazy sun at the end of a warm day. Her feet froze at the sound of tires on the narrow road to her trailer. The telltale signs of “flee and run” fueled her muscles, but her body refused to maneuver into “cover and hide.” The driver put his white cruiser into park and with a hand on his handgun he stood tall on the driver’s side of the vehicle. “Is he locked up?” He nodded at the hairy beast growling inside the large cage pushing its nose through one of the wider slots of the chicken wire.

“What does it look like?” Sunshine’s voice came out harsher than intended.

The sound of gravel crunching under his heavy boots echoed between them, birds chirping the only distraction.

“Officer Brody Jensen, Primrose Valley Sheriff.” With his pen, he tapped the shiny name tag above an even shinier star decorating the left side of his chest. “I take it that’s your dog over there?”

“You’re obviously Officer Smarty-pants of the bunch.”

“Excuse me?” His eyes slowly turned from the black beast, who had gone from trying to lick his way out of the cage with what looked like a very sizeable tongue, to finding a better use for it by cleaning between his toes.

“What do you want?” she asked, hands on her hips, shaking her loose strands of blonde hair back from her face.

“Aren’t you . . .” He squinted back in the dog’s direction then back at her. “. . . the two villains who ran me over earlier this afternoon? Making me think I had met my last seconds on earth?”

Sunshine sighed and rolled her eyes. “Wow! Smarty-pants
and
drama queen. It keeps getting better, Officer. And yes, we met earlier, but no,
no
one attempted to kill you. Can you please cut to the case, I’m kinda on my way somewhere.”

Brody caught the inside of his cheek between his teeth and chewed hard, attempting to push away the anger and irritation boiling like a pressure cooker inside him.

“Absolutely, ma’am. You’ve got not one, not two, but three complaints about your beast over in that cage. I can easily make it four, remembering how we met earlier today. I’ve got to file a report of disturbance and I need your information.” He sat the tip of the pen to his paper-covered clipboard resting in his hand.

“Name, please,” he said, his voice stern as he noticed the woman’s eye rolling yet again.
Women must have a talent for rolling their eye
, he thought, and took another big bite of the inside of his cheek, tasting the slight flavor of blood.