Run Wild With Me Read Online Free

boxer’s stance. “If I don’t get back, the whole county will be after you. Louise Roberts knows what you look like,” she warned.
    “After me?” he said dryly. “Put down your dukes, Chief. Who do you think I am? I’m not going anywhere, at least not yet. I’m sorry if I frightened you. I think the blood on my shirt must have come from your head. All I want to do is look.”
    Andrea glared at him suspiciously. She realized that she was responding to him as a woman, not as the chief of police. But at the moment she was having trouble keeping the situation professional. Being teased by a dark-eyed stranger was new to her.
    In the end it was his mouth that told her she had nothing to fear. As she watched, his tightly drawn lips began to soften. She remembered Louise’s description of a frown to cover his real feelings.
    “Are you all right, Chief?”
    Louise was right. Underneath his tough-guy manner, he was worried about her.
    “You must have cut your head when you fell. Then you brushed against my shoulder when we, when I … when the lightning struck.” He held out his hand. “Come over by the fire and let me see.”
    It took some strong doing, but gradually she began to relax and see the situation for what it was. The only danger she was in was the risk of being caught up in the moment. Sam Farley was just different from the men in Arcadia. He was a stranger with a confident way of looking at life that was new to her.
    “All right, cowboy, but I want to know why you’re here,” she said with authority in her voice.
    “Fine,” he agreed. “Come over here by the fire and let me examine your head, and I’ll level with you.”
    He added more logs to the fire, uncovered an overstuffed couch in the shadows, and pulled it toward the fireplace, inviting her to sit down.
    “My name
is
Sam Farley, I swear it. I was born in Texas. Lived all over the West while I was growing up. My mother liked oil and the men who found it.”
    “An oil man? I thought you were a cowboy.”
    “Only by birth. I was born in Texas. I’m a carpenter. I build things—houses, furniture, cabinets. If it’s made of wood, I can do it. Millie Hines was my mother. Mamie Hines was my grandmother. I have no brothers and no sisters, and unless my mother had family that she never mentioned, I’m guess you could say I’m all alone.”
    “I can’t imagine being completely alone in the world …,” Andrea said softly as she lowered herself to the edge of the couch, “… without any family or friends. At least I still have Buck.”
    Sam wondered a moment at her use of the word
still
. He liked the way she talked, all warm and soft and slow, like a woman after she’d been made love to. He shrugged his shoulders as he answered in a tone made sharp by the impossibility of his thoughts. “Maybe, but I don’t owe anything to anybody. There is nobody to tie me down, and I go where I choose.”
    “And where have you chosen to be, Sam Farley?”
    “Home has been wherever the work was, darlin’. I’ve built quarters for the workers on the Alaskan pipeline, rebuilt hospitals after the earthquake in Mexico, helped put up shopping centers all over the country, and even restored one of the houses in Williamsburg. There aren’t many places in the country I haven’t seen. What about you?”
    She was subdued, gazing at him with the wonderof a little girl listening to the story of Sinbad or Cinderella. The flames bit into the new logs, lifting orange tongues up the chimney. “Me? I … really haven’t been anywhere, and I’m not going to. I stay right here, in Arcadia, because I choose to.”
    There was something so final about her words that Sam found himself leaning forward, reaching out to comfort her, involuntarily touching her cheek before realizing his mistake. He moved his fingertips to her hair and waited for her to accept his caress before he began his inspection. When she didn’t say anything, he gently parted her hair and