Troublemaker Read online

  If she hadn’t had such a wall around her in high school, would she have made close friends then? She’d never know, she couldn’t redo the past, but she had to wonder. People were pretty much the same, big city, small town, or rural; they made friends, and they protected their own.

  Eventually the procession dwindled and she settled down to work in earnest. Morgan took Tricks out for a walk. As soon as they were alone, Loretta got up and left her cubicle, coming over to give Bo a pat on the arm. “Congratulations,” she said.

  Startled, Bo looked up. “What?” she asked in bewilderment.

  “Morgan. That’s more man than most women could handle, though if it weren’t for Charlie, I wouldn’t mind giving it a shot,” she mused and went back to her cubicle.

  Well, hell. Evidently that was something else the entire town was clued in on. She thought about it for a minute, then shrugged mentally. She wasn’t embarrassed. She hadn’t even thought of telling Morgan to keep their new involvement on the down low, which said something about how drastically things had changed for her.

  The days slipped from May into June, easing from late spring toward summer. The wheels of law weren’t in any hurry and Kyle was still in jail, waiting arraignment so he could enter his guilty plea. Bo half-expected Warren Gooding to pay her another visit, but all of the Goodings seemed to be making themselves scarce. Melody wasn’t seen shopping in town, and neither was her mother. The people who worked at the sawmills had no gossip to report, nothing overheard, no threats made. Perhaps Kyle had stepped so far out of bounds this time that his parents knew there was no making this go away; Bo wouldn’t bet the farm on it, but she’d take what she could get.

  Morgan began working out like a fiend. He swam every day that it didn’t rain, and some days when it did. His reasoning was that “wet’s wet.” As long as there was no lightning, he swam. He ran; he started out with what he called an “easy hour,” which seemed to extend every day by five or ten minutes. Of course she knew he’d already been doing some running, but it was astonishing how fast he built his endurance. She could almost see the difference every day as he began packing on hard-toned muscle.

  One day he took Tricks out for a walk to give Bo some uninterrupted time to finish a tech job. She pushed hard, her concentration aided by caffeine, and finished just in time to grab a bite to eat before leaving for town. She got up from the desk, stretched, turned to say something to Morgan—then noticed that they hadn’t returned. She checked the time; they’d been gone well over an hour.

  Alarm shot through her, her stomach bottoming out. Had Morgan tripped, maybe hit his head or broken his leg? Had Tricks gotten hurt? The ideas of eating and work vanished, and she ran to the door, only to skid to a stop so fast she almost slammed into it. Through the glass she saw Morgan and Tricks in the yard. Tricks was nosing around, her tennis ball forgotten on the grass, and Morgan was doing push-ups.

  Just that fast Bo went from panic to admiration as she watched his shoulders and arms bulge with each rep. His gray tee shirt was dark with sweat, which meant he’d either been running with Tricks or he’d been doing push-ups for a while. While she watched, he stopped, lying on his stomach, and called Tricks to him. She pranced over and when he patted his back she seemed to know what he wanted, because she daintily stepped onto his back and lay down. Morgan began doing push-ups again.

  Bo’s mouth fell open. Tricks wasn’t a huge dog, her weight staying around sixty-two or sixty-three pounds, but still—that was sixty-two pounds! Push-ups were tough enough, at least Bo thought they were, but Morgan was popping them off as if he could keep going for hours. How long had he been using her dog as added weight?

  Long enough for Tricks to be comfortable with it, evidently. Her tongue was lolling out to one side as she half-closed her eyes in bliss. She liked new things, she liked Morgan, she liked going for rides. Being on his back while he did push-ups hit a lot of her likes.

  Bo opened the door. She was intending to just stand there for a few minutes—the scenery was fine—but as soon as she moved, Tricks noticed her and gave a welcoming bark. She shot straight off Morgan’s back and over his head, her paws digging into him for purchase, as she rushed to get to Bo. Morgan yelped, because those paws had to hurt, not to mention that he was startled by the way she bolted over his head. Bo laughed as she knelt down to welcome Tricks into her arms, hugging her and receiving a few enthusiastic licks.

  Morgan rolled to a sitting position and used his sleeve to wipe off his face. His dark hair was black with sweat, all visible skin glistening. He’d smell pretty rank, she thought, and didn’t care. She wanted to throw herself against him despite how sweaty he was, wanted him to take her down to the ground and get on top of her. Her lower body clenched at the thought and she tightened her muscles against the temptation to do exactly what she wanted to do. She had to go to work.

  “How long have you been using Tricks as weight?” she asked, getting to her feet and stepping to the edge of the patio.

  He squinted up at the sun. “A week or so. She caught on fast. I need to up the weight, though, so you’re on board next.”

  She gaped at him. He wanted her to get on his back while he did push-ups? “Are you nuts? I weigh a lot more than Tricks!”

  “You don’t think it’d be fun?”

  Okay . . . that put a different slant on the idea. She gave Tricks one final pat and tilted her head. “I’ll think about it. How many push-ups do you do?”

  “You don’t want to know. Hell, I don’t want to know. A lot.”

  “More than a hundred?”

  The look he gave her as he got to his feet and strolled toward her told her she’d underestimated by a lot. “A thousand?” She couldn’t imagine doing a thousand push-ups. She was healthy and strong, but push-ups had always challenged her.

  Again the look.

  “I can’t deal with this,” she muttered. “The idea of that many push-ups makes my head hurt. What am I supposed to do while you rip off fifty thousand push-ups with me on your back? Nap? File my nails? Read War and Peace? You should go to the gym and lift weights like normal people.”

  “Not quite the same thing, but I see your point.” He went past her into the house and she realized she’d been right about his smell. She was also right that it didn’t matter at all.

  Oh, shit. She didn’t mind if he stank. She’d accepted that she was in lust with him, accepted that he meant way more to her than she’d felt comfortable with, even accepted that he could cause her a lot of heartache, but until now she’d managed to avoid admitting the truth to herself. Not minding if he smelled like a bear was the kicker, and she couldn’t dance around with her emotions any longer.

  She was in love with him.

  CHAPTER 23

  TOWARD THE END OF JUNE, ANOTHER LETTER ARRIVED for Morgan. It came on a day when he’d gone to town with Bo, and while she dealt with things in the police station, he’d ridden patrol with Jesse. He’d become friendly with all her officers; she suspected it was some guy instinct, that they sensed that his level of expertise in weapons and explosives and hand-to-hand far exceeded theirs even though she knew he wouldn’t have talked about it, and they gravitated to him. After her refusal to sit on his back while he did push-ups, he’d started working out at the small gym in town, and whoever wasn’t on duty had begun working out with him. Her guys made an effort to stay in pretty good shape, but Morgan’s idea of “in shape” made theirs look like kids playing in the yard. Sometimes she marveled that they didn’t all choke on the testosterone levels, but they were trying to keep up with him.

  He executed the U-turn and pulled up to her mailbox, retrieved the mail, then passed it all to her to sort while he wheeled into the driveway. Bo sifted through the catalogs and sales papers, extracting her lone credit card bill and the plain envelope without a return address that was for Morgan. Silently she held it up to catch his attention. He gave it a quick look. “Open it. It won’t say anything you can’t read. If there was any news, he’