Sugar Creek Read Online Free Page B

opposite of everything he liked in a person: self-righteous, entitled, argumentative, and reckless to boot. Plus it was clear she considered Destiny below her—she didn’t even have to say it, he could see it in her eyes. So…maybe it just pissed him off to be having such a primitive reaction to her. Me Tarzan, you Jane. That wasn’t him. Usually.
    Not that he planned to respond to his urges. Even if, in an off moment, he’d almost flirted with her. Nope, he’d keep his Tarzan-like impulses to himself.
    She just had too much going against her. Besides everything else, it bugged the hell out of him when she called him Officer Romeo. And sexy as hell or not, the girl was a Farris on top of it all.
    Mike didn’t make a habit of judging people by their families—but a lifetime of observation had shown him that most Farrises were cut from the same cloth: often in some kind of scrape, either financial or legal, and generally out for themselves. He considered it good riddance that most of them had moved away.
    And he wasn’t sure what had originally started the feud between the two families, but he did know the Farris Family Apple Orchard had once belonged to his grandfather, who’d emigrated from Italy, and that his family had always felt it should be rightfully theirs. Of course, Edna had always refused to sell, which had angered Mike as a boy—but as time had passed he’d tried to let that go, coming to know and like Edna, despite her quirks.
    Just then, he realized—maybe he did remember Rachel Farris at seventeen. Judging from the birth date on her license, he’d been doing his police training in Chillicothe around that time, but he’d never been away from Destiny for long—and hadn’t there been some cute, rambunctious little Farris girl flitting about town in those days? A cheerleader, if he remembered. And he had the vague sense that she’d driven fast even then—back before he’d had the ability to do anything about it. He suspected she was the same then as now—probably the only difference being that she’d grown from a cute, reckless, over-confident girl in a cheerleading skirt into an attractive, reckless, over-confident woman in jeans that hugged her ass real nice.
    But Rachel Farris’s jeans and Rachel Farris’s genes were two different things—and he could admire one without admiring the other. He could think she was attractive without acting on it. And besides, if he wanted awoman, he was capable of getting one whose last name wasn’t Farris.
    He knew he wasn’t exactly charming, but despite that, all he usually had to do was buy a girl a drink and she was his for the night. Logan had started calling him the Italian Stallion, claiming it was all in his genes. And maybe it was. Everyone always claimed that his late grandfather, Giovanni Romo, had had a way with the ladies, too.
    It was just then that Mike caught sight of a vehicle rounding the bend in the distance so fast the car was a blur—an electric shade of purple, but that was all he could tell as he lifted the radar gun and aimed it out the open window. The speeding car blew past in a streak of color—at ninety-two miles per hour! Shit . Now that he could haul somebody’s ass to jail for.
    The only problem might be catching the son of a bitch.
    But Mike tore out of his spot just off the road, throwing up mud and grass as he pressed the gas pedal to the floor, committed to trying. He fishtailed but straightened it out, then switched on his lights and siren.
    As the car had whoosh ed past, he’d identified it as a late model Mustang—which meant catching the bastard would be difficult at best. He didn’t know the car, had never seen it around—but this guy made Rachel Farris look like a Sunday driver.
    Mike drove as fast as possible under the conditions, thinking the guy might be slowed down by curves or—God forbid—other vehicles. And he tried to keep an eye toward the roadside—it wouldn’t take much at that speed for the