Irresistible Stranger Read Online Free

know her. He wasn’t sure what it meant at the time. Didn’t matter then. All he’d been concentrating on at the time was the lap of her soft tongue on Griff’s Secret.
    He’d imagined her tongue on a few other secret places of his in the days since, making him worry that he was turning into a dirty old man—before he was even in his prime.
    â€œJason.”
    â€œYup?”
    â€œYou cleaned up enough. I’m locking up. I know you don’t want to go home.”
    â€œSure I do. You think I want to work all the time?” he said under his breath, “But you’ll keep half my pay still, right?”
    â€œYup. Got it hidden. Earning interest.” This was old, touchy territory for the boy. “I’m just saying. You find trouble at home, you know where I live.”
    â€œI’m not leaving my mom.”
    That voice. So low. So defeated. So old. “I never said you should leave your mom. I said you know where I live. Just like your mom knows there’s a shelter where she’ll be safe, and they’d help her start over.”
    â€œShe won’t go.”
    â€œThat’s not on you.”
    â€œRight.”
    Griff told himself to shut up, because he knew better than to push. He’d pushed before. He had four kids working for him—all troublemakers, school flunk-outs, all of them tattooed and pierced and familiar with the holding cell at the sheriff’s office. You don’t push kids who’ve already given up. And when a kid had already given up by age eleven, you tiptoed, because you might only have one chance to earn some trust—and that’s if you were lucky.
    Griff wasn’t a good tiptoer. He wore a size-l4 shoe.
    Once Jason finally headed out, Griff thoughtfully packed up a pint-size cold tote and carried it to his car in the alley. Main Street was shutting down.
    Shops closed up early on a weekday, but the pharmacy was still open and Deb’s Diner still had a cluster of pickups in front. Although there was no sign of the fire trucks now, all the lights were blazing at the sheriff’s office.
    He noticed the lights, but didn’t linger, just turned left two blocks later on Magnolia. The street was an antebellum postcard; the houses were huge and old, built of cool cinder block, most with sweeping verandas and swings hung with chains. Big old oaks shaded the sidewalks, but everybody had flowers, cottage rosesunder trellises where there was a peek of sun, bosomy peonies in the deep shade…he didn’t know all the flower names. A fat fox squirrel chased right in front of his car—the measure of a safe town, he’d always thought, was that the darned squirrels knew perfectly well they had right of way.
    The rich didn’t hang in the neighborhood anymore, mostly because no one was all that rich—but the big old houses still looked loved, porches swept, gardens fussed over. Young couples who wanted a passel of children could afford the mortgages. The elders had already paid off theirs. Those in between had invariably turned their place into the ever-hopeful bed-and-breakfasts.
    He parked, climbed out, took his tote. In the way of a small town, he knew Louella’s even if he’d never been inside. It was the last on the block, with a red tile roof and long, long steps leading to the porch…he didn’t initially see her. At least not exactly. What he saw from the rail on the veranda, were a pair of very bare, very dirty, very feminine feet.
    Judging from the position of those feet, they were attached to someone who was lying flat on the wood plank veranda floor. A curious position for sure.
    He ambled up the sidewalk, up the steps, to peek his head over the rail.
    The glow of lights and distant voices murmured from beyond the B and B’s giant screen door, but the only one on the veranda was her.
    For a moment, his heart stopped—he wasn’t sure she was alive. She was lying there with