Dirt: A Sexy Small Town Romance (Copperwood Book 1) Read Online Free

wore her brown hair pulled back and dressed in a casual manner hinting at the part of her personality that never minded what people thought.
    It was a welcome change from the women I normally saw in the city and the pale imitations of the women in the city flocking around the inside of the bar.
    I don’t think I ever remembered Mya wearing her hair down. I imagined it though. More times than I cared to admit. I imagined her straddling me, bent over my chest and hair brushing against my skin. I imagined the softness of the silky strands as I combed my fingers through them. I imagined it fanned across my pillows as I laid on top of her while we made love.
    We never fucked in my imagination. We only made love. A woman like Mya didn’t fuck and didn’t let men fuck her. At least I wanted to believe as much.
    I finally pushed Alene away from me. She had been rubbing against me since she walked in and spotted me talking with Mike. I guessed she wanted to relive our youth, but it wasn’t very good then and from the way she pressed up against me, I didn’t think it was going to be very good now.
    She pouted and did an impersonation of a little she perfected when she turned thirteen and discovered boys would buy her things if she gave them something they valued. In Alene’s case, the boys valued kisses and eventually sex. Hell, I succumbed to her obvious ploys, but I was a teenager back then. I didn’t know any better and the brain in my head wasn’t leading most of my decisions.
    “Her mom died of cancer a few years back.”
    Mike must have caught me looking at her. “I heard.”
    “A few months after her dad got laid off from the mine.”
    That I
didn’t
hear. I knew that when the original owners sold the mine to the corporation, the new owners laid off a bunch of miners to bring in cheaper labor. Less experienced labor, but it cost them less to get the copper and they could make a bigger profit. I just figured my dad would make sure they took care of Mya’s dad. I was wrong. And it wasn’t the first time I was wrong when it came to my father.
    I grabbed for the bottle of beer.
    I shouldn’t have let the dirt settle. I shouldn’t have let it get buried. I shouldn’t have fallen back on the training of my job. I found everything I could about men and women who weren’t very good men and women and made sure it stayed buried. I was good at it, and it had the added bonus of paying well.
    I suppose I never thought about the ramifications of my father’s dirt. I never really wanted to if I was completely honest with myself. It wasn’t ever something I bothered to examine too closely, lest I learn more than I really wanted to know.
    The corner of the label on the bottle rubbed against my thumb and I pressed down, peeling the paper from the cool glass in small strips.
    I needed to ask the question. “How’s she doing?”
    I didn’t want to hear the answer. Not really.
    “As well as anyone else here. Maybe better somedays and worse on others.”
    “I’m sorry”
    “What for? Getting out?” Mike took a swig of beer from his bottle. “Nothing to be sorry about, man. You did what we all wanted to do.”
    We both stared at the top of the scarred bar. I hadn’t seen Mike since I drove out of Copperwood ten years ago. I hadn’t even bothered to talk to him much after I graduated college. We didn’t send each other yearly Christmas cards. We didn’t bother to call one another on our birthdays. Hell, we didn’t even email one another. And since I stayed off of social networking sites, it wasn’t like we kept in touch that way.
    Sometimes silence was better than insincere noise.
    I got out. And despite all of that, I came back. Not voluntarily, but I was back in Copperwood. I was also leaving in two days. Forty–eight hours couldn’t come soon enough.
    I looked up and caught Mya looking at me. I couldn’t help myself. I smiled at her. When she looked away from me, I closed my eyes and cemented the image into my