it to turn green.
Turning my head, I lift her face by the chin, and I’m about to kiss her when something catches my eye, and I glance out the side window instead. I spot three men loitering in the alley behind Devan Sicily’s quick mart.
“What’s wrong?” Chloe follows my gaze. “Who is that?”
“Trouble.” I veer across another empty lane and into the driveway. “This will only take a minute.”
I drag the tail of my shirt over my open pants and pull up a few hundred feet away from the men—Smith Gunderson, Dale Hawthorne, and Chase Maddison. Smith and Dale are eighteen-year-old seniors. Chase is a seventeen-year-old junior.
When they look over, Smith sneers, Dale rolls his eyes, and Chase grins with a good-natured “Hey, Officer Wilde.”
I lift my chin in greeting. “Chase, can we talk a minute?”
He looks at the other guys, shrugs, and saunters over. He leans on the open window ledge with both forearms and smiles into the cab. “Hey, Miss Chloe.”
She smiles and offers a warm “Hi, Chase.”
Chase turns his gaze on me again. “Didn’t know you and Miss Chloe were a thing. Nice choice.”
Chloe laughs.
“So, what’s up, man?” Chase asks.
“What are you three doing?”
“Just hanging, you know.”
“With you, yeah, I know. With them, hanging is just another way of saying looking for trouble.”
Chase tips his head side to side in tacit agreement.
“Do you know what guilt by association is?” I ask him.
“Uh…” He scratches at the burgeoning scruff at his jaw. “Getting in trouble for something someone else did?”
“Right. For example, if you all wandered inside to, say, grab a Coke, and Smith pulled a gun out of his ass, you’d be guilty of armed robbery, the same as Smith and Dale.”
His face creases in disbelief. “Nuh-uh.”
“Uh-huh,” I counter. “And if Smith lost his cool—as he’s known to do—and shot Devan’s husband, Ed, who’s working tonight, and he died, you’d be just as guilty of murder as Smith and Dale. Premeditated murder. That carries the death sentence.”
Realization dawns in his expression, fear shining in his dark eyes. “Are you shittin’ me?” He cuts a look at Chloe and flickers a smile that doesn’t hold. “He’s shittin’ me, right?”
“I’m not,” I say, relieving Chloe of having to answer. “Google it, but in the meantime, steer clear of those two if you want to hold on to that Golden Bears scholarship you’ve got.”
Chloe pulls in a sharp breath. “You got a scholarship to UC Berkeley? Oh my God.” She reaches across me to give Chase a forearm squeeze before pulling back. But her breasts are still against my biceps and my cock is still throbbing. “That’s incredible. Congratulations. Your parents must be over the moon.”
He chuckles. “They are.”
“Then they’d tell you the same thing I’m telling you,” I say. “You’re a great kid. You’ve got amazing things waiting in your future. Don’t blow it by hanging with future convicts. Make your excuses and get your butt somewhere they aren’t.”
“Okay, okay,” he says good-naturedly, “but you know I gotta throw shade.”
I smirk. “Of course.”
Chase straightens away from the car and walks backward, making frustrated gestures. “Man, that ain’t cool. Don’t dis my friends like that.”
As soon as Chase clears my bumper, I crank the wheel and continue through the parking lot and back onto the road.
“Is that what they call community policing?” Chloe asks, her head on my shoulder. “I never understood that.”
“Sort of. In a small town, almost everyone is community policing because we all know everyone. That’s community policing, walking the streets, getting to know the people, root out the bad seeds, try to either get them to grow or bury them.”
“Interesting metaphor. Is what you told him about guilt by association true? I mean in the eyes of the law?”
“Oh, yeah,” I say with emphasis. “And kids don’t understand just how easy it is to get caught in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong person. Or how easily and quickly it can ruin their lives. I’ve seen it happen way too often.”
“Looking back, I can see how lucky I was. I spent my fair share of time with the wrong people, but I never knew how close I came to real problems. Is that why you’re so strict with Piper?”
“Piper doesn’t know what strict is. But, yeah, that’s why I want her to stay away from troubled kids who are criminals in the making.”
Chloe strokes her hand up and down my thigh, rekindling the fire between my legs. “She’s lonely.”
“I know. I get