Busted (Promise Harbor Wedding) - By Sydney Somers Page 0,34

to the house, the boards on the front porch creaking under their combined weight. She flung open the screen door and the decades-old frame screeched in protest. Half surprised it hadn’t been ripped off altogether, he let the door bang softly behind him.

Hayley moved through the house, not stopping until she reached the kitchen. The surrounding chaos slowed his pursuit, leaving him gaping at the missing cupboard doors, pieces of wood, tools, drop sheets and paint cans littering most available space.

It was an interior designer’s nightmare.

Drawers opened and closed, and he stared at Hayley digging through one after another. He might as well have not been in the room from the way she brushed past him to search the drawers behind him.

She spun back around, retracing her steps. This time she removed the drawers and reached up inside, feeling around. At her third opening, she murmured, “Knew it,” withdrawing a small package.

The trembling in her hands was apparent when she pulled a cigarette from the pack and tried using the small lighter tucked inside the package to light it. It took three misfires and a violent shaking—that should have sent the lighter flying across the room—to make it finally give up a flame she could use.

Tossing the lighter on the counter, she inhaled sharply—and coughed harder than a middle school teen sneaking her first cigarette. “Shit,” she choked out, then took another painful-to-watch drag.

“What are you doing?” One of them needed to know, and it sure as hell wasn’t him. He was still reeling from the fact that she’d zapped him with fifty thousand volts.

She half-coughed, half-laughed. “Not sure.” Her exhale was more of a sputtering wheeze, and she frowned at the cigarette. “I haven’t had one since I was sixteen. Forgot how much I hated his brand.”

So they were Coach’s cigarettes, not hers.

“What the hell were you thinking?”

As angry as he was, it was damn hard to take her question seriously when she stood there glaring at him with a cigarette hanging out of her mouth like it tasted about as good as three-day-old boxers. “Before or after you brought Annie Oakley into the new century outside in the shed?”

Unimpressed, she held the cigarette for another inhale. It wasn’t much better than her previous attempts. Jackson had tried smoking exactly twice in his life, but he was pretty sure he wouldn’t look half as disastrous as she did trying to suck the nicotine into her lungs.

Hell, the kitten could have done a better job.

He grabbed the cigarette from her lips and stabbed it out in the sink. “Coach would be pissed if he knew you were smoking in the house.”

Hayley stared at him, her eyes watery from the smoke, and burst out laughing.

Laughing was probably the last thing on earth he should have felt like doing, but in the face of those flushed cheeks, her hair sticking up everywhere and that pitiful attempt to calm herself down after tasing him—tasing him, for fuck’s sake—how could he not laugh?

He’d enjoyed himself more in the last twenty-four hours than he had in weeks, probably months. And the craziest part was that she’d done that with arresting him, making him climb a tree and then shocking the crap out of him—okay, maybe not the latter so much—along with a few less painful moments in between.

Kissing her hadn’t hurt a damn bit either.

He didn’t have a clue what it all meant, but the longer he stood there watching her clutch her stomach and wipe at the corners of her eyes, the harder it was to hang on to his anger. Maybe if she hadn’t looked so cute with cigarette ash on her Superman T-shirt, or if she hadn’t sounded downright adorable laughing her ass off, he would have gotten the hell out of there.

Watching her uncoiled the tension holding his spine in a vise grip, and when she slid to the floor and propped her back against the fridge, her laughter slowly fading to the occasional giggle, he sat down next to her.

“Don’t tell him I had one of his cigarettes, okay? Sick or not, Gramps would kick my butt from here to the Canadian border.”

“Our little secret.” He thought back to what she’d said outside and the worry that she’d be fired whether or not her actions were justified. “The tasing is our little secret too.”

Eyes closed, she let her head thunk back against the fridge. “I should have saved myself a lot of hassle and locked you up when I had