Busted (Promise Harbor Wedding) - By Sydney Somers Page 0,33

to search for her, but found himself alone. Her absence gave him the chance to remember he’d been in Coach’s shed looking for his old lucky hockey stick. How he’d ended up sprawled across the shed floor was still a mystery.

She returned a minute later carrying a first-aid kit.

Shit, was he bleeding?

He tried to move again, relieved the vertigo was fading, but he still couldn’t move much without wanting to puke.

“Jesus.” He pulled at the hem of his shirt that she held gathered in her hand. “What are you doing?” He bit back a curse as she poked him with something. “Hayley?”

Only when she finished wiping at his skin with an alcohol pad and applied a bandage did she rock back on her heels.

“Hayley,” he snapped, wanting an explanation.

She offered a hand to help him up. “I tased you.”

“You what?” He jerked back from her hand, surprised he could keep the contents of his stomach where they belonged.

She nodded to the weapon lying near the door. “I thought you were breaking in, and when I saw the ax in your hand…” she trailed off, then frowned at him. “Why didn’t you put it down?”

Jackson scrambled to his feet, grabbing the edge of the counter to steady himself against the wave of dizziness that frayed the edges of his vision. Head fuzzy or not, he still put as much distance between them as the small space allowed.

“I was putting it down.” He scanned the counter for the stupid ax, then abandoned the futile search when Hayley took a step toward him.

The crammed shed closed in and he pushed past her, needing air, room to move—a fucking drink. Christ. Tased him? Was she out of her damn mind?

“Jackson,” she began.

He held up a hand before he bit her head off. Nervous energy crawled under his skin. His long, almost drunk-feeling strides ate up the grass before he pivoted back around to face her. “You actually tased me?”

“I told you to put the weapon down and you didn’t.”

He lifted one the ear buds dangling around his neck. “If I had heard you and knew I was seconds from getting a few hundred volts shot into me—”

“Thousands actually.”

He stared at her.

“Fifty thousand,” she clarified, looking like it was no big deal.

Unbelievable.

He spun away from her and scrubbed a hand down his face. First the arrest and now a tasing? Jesus.

“You’re mad.”

“Fifty thousand volts. Yeah, I’m a bit pissed.” And pissed was putting it lightly. Had he been slammed into the boards like he’d first thought, he would have retaliated and had his fist halfway down the asshole’s throat by now.

Instead he was staring at a five-foot-eight blonde in her bare feet, wearing ripped jean and a Superman T-shirt. He didn’t let the whole cute-girl-next-door image fool him for a second. Hayley Stone was as tough as they came.

And she apparently had it out for him.

“You’re mad?” she challenged, the sharp edge of frustration cutting into her voice.

Oh no. There was no fucking way she was going to turn this around on him.

“You’re mad?” she repeated, taking two threatening steps in his direction, and so help him for a second there he thought about backing up. “You roll into town and last what, five hours before you’re in the middle of a fight? I’m already on my captain’s shit list for taking so long to wrap up an ongoing robbery investigation and then I have to cuff the local hockey legend?”

“I didn’t start that fight,” he snapped.

She barely let him get that much out. “But you didn’t walk away from it either, did you? And it didn’t stop there. Right now that picture of us kissing is probably being splashed all over the Net with me as your latest flavor of the week, to help save your reputation no less. And to top it all off, you go sneaking around in the dark, leaving me no choice but to take action against an armed perpetrator, who coincidentally turns out to be the only person who could possibly get me fired, and you’re mad?”

Jackson’s head was spinning, and it had nothing to do with the aftereffects of the tasing. He didn’t have time to wrap his head around half of what she’d said before she stormed past him.

Like hell she was walking away at this point.

“Hayley!” Despite the occasional step that felt out of balance with the lingering dizziness, he went after her.

She managed to keep a few steps ahead of him the whole way back