her friends. Still, you could have come up with an excuse for not showing up.”
“I keep my word, Sheriff. And I do not lie.” Her gaze was steady, and sincerity rang in her voice.
If Zach hadn’t known better, he’d have believed her.
Knowing the time had come for a strategic retreat, he left her alone with her volunteer work while he made quick work of cleaning the restrooms, then went outside to the toolshed. Earlier he had noticed that a couple of nails had worked their way loose on the back porch. Pounding nails struck him as the perfect task to do at this particular moment, so he grabbed his hammer and went to work.
Thwack. Why did she throw him off his game so bad?
You’re attracted to her.
Thwack. Thwack. Okay, fine. So what? It was understandable. She was gorgeous. Sexy. Spirited. He liked a little attitude in his women. And those legs …
Savannah Sophia Moore isn’t your woman. She will never be your woman. You can never go there. It would go against all your principles.
True. He had to squash this attraction like a bug.
Thwack. Thwack. Thwack.
With the porch nails sufficiently pounded, he reentered the building and commenced his AV equipment check. Once he completed that, he grabbed his cell phone and the folder he’d left on a table in the main room and began making the vendor calls. He was halfway through his list when a noise in the doorway to the office caught his attention and he looked up. Savannah stood in a beam of sunshine, and streaks of burnished fire highlighted the curls in her golden hair. She looked like an angel, he thought, and again, frustratingly, his blood heated.
“I’ve run short on three of the handouts,” Savannah said. “If you’ll show me how to work the copy machine, I’ll finish up. I’ve never seen one like it.”
Zach slipped his phone in his pocket. “It’s a ditto machine, and I suspect it qualifies as an antique. But it works, so I’ll use it until it gives up the ghost. Which pages do we need more copies of?”
“These. I’m short six copies of the first two and seven copies of the third.”
When she passed over the pages, their hands brushed. The touch was electric, and judging from the slight widening of her eyes, he suspected she felt it, too. She didn’t look any happier about it than he did.
That made Zach feel marginally better. It made sense that an ex-con drug dealer would harbor hard feelings toward law enforcement. It seemed only fair that if he was going to suffer, then so should she.
For the first time since he checked her rap sheet, Zach wondered how someone like her had gotten tangled up in the drug trade. She should be teaching school or baking cookies or, well, making soap. Not growing weed or cooking meth or recruiting members for her drug ring. What circumstances had caused her life to veer off the straight and narrow?
Family influence had to be part of it. Or lack of influence from a family. He’d seen that often enough.
He turned his attention to a demonstration of how to use the machine. When she leaned forward to study the paper feed, he caught a whiff of her clean, fresh scent—a blend of lavender and summer rain—and the workroom suddenly felt crowded. One of her own soaps, he surmised. She’ll make a mint.
He jabbed at the on switch with his thumb.
The ditto machine spat pages. Savannah picked up a sheet stained with fresh purple ink, brought it close to her nose, and inhaled deeply. Her full lips stretched into a sensuous smile. She literally purred. “Oh, wow. This makes me think of third grade.”
Zach went hard as Murphy Mountain. The urge to kiss her swamped him, and Zach leaned forward.
A sliver of self-preservation guided words onto his tongue and he drawled, “That’s the closest you’ll find to cocaine around here, Ms. Moore.”
She froze. The paper slipped from her hand. Her gaze flew up to meet his. Grimly she said, “You know.”
SIX
Savannah felt sick. “You ran a background check on me.”
Knowledge gleamed in his blue eyes along with the too-familiar blend of disapproval and disgust. “I keep an eye on what happens in my town.”
Bitterness washed through her. From the moment she’d discovered who had yanked her away from the point at Lover’s Leap, she’d known this would happen. Was there some sort of lawman homing beacon embedded in her butt?