But her face, though smooth and disarmingly innocent in repose, lacked the round-at-the-edges look of an adolescent, and everything from the neck down definitely belonged to a full-grown woman. The realization did little to diminish the inevitable wave of protectiveness that came from having her unconscious and in his care. And it did absolutely nothing to alleviate the immediate and uncomfortable tug of lust that came from having a rain-soaked stunner stretched out in his backseat.
Her head lolled to the side. Two scarlet cornrows arrowed away from her temple, highlighting a refined cheekbone while warning him refinement wasn’t a quality she embraced. Twin streams of red flowed from the braids like colorful tributaries into the waterfall of blond hair spilling across the seat.
Between the biker boots and rock-chick wardrobe, she looked like the result of a one-night stand between Harley-Davidson and Harley Quinn. The tangle of earrings dripping from her ear only reinforced the impression, as did the scale of musical notes inked along the inside of her left arm. They disappeared under a stack of skinny, metal bracelets. A silver guitar pick with the name Roxy engraved on it hung from a chain around her neck. Small, tarnished angel wings dangled from a navel piercing exposed by the rucked-up hem of her shirt. Something about the vulnerability of that tugged at him. Following an instinct that had nothing to do with training or experience, he carefully eased her shirt into place and put the thought of tarnished angels out of his head.
While her size certainly didn’t intimidate, she was still unconscious, unidentified, and an as yet unquantified risk. Runaways came in all ages and from all backgrounds. They ran from responsibilities, bad decisions, toxic relationships, or combinations thereof. Too soon to tell which category his hitcher fell into, but she fell squarely into a category called “Trouble.” The kind that, as part of the thin blue line in Bluelick, Kentucky, he got paid to detect and deter. That made her his trouble for the next little while.
His original plans for the end of shift started to look remote. Even the most accommodating cocktail waitress wouldn’t hang around all night. A rain check—ha ha—was probably the best he could hope for. He waited for disappointment to settle on him for real, but it didn’t. It rolled off quickly. Too quickly. Okay, no rain check.
He felt her radial pulse. A consistent rhythm beat beneath his fingers, which reassured him enough to defer thoughts of calling the EMTs. She wasn’t about to crash on him. But she wasn’t an immediate source of answers, either. For those he eased out of the cruiser and walked a few steps to her duffel bag and what turned out to be a guitar case. The duffel proved minimally informative—old, Army surplus, with “Goodhart” stenciled across the side in black, block letters. A crumpled Greyhound tag hung from the handle. He flipped it over. The first line read Roxy Goodhart. A thick scribble of blue ink obscured the address and phone number. The city might have been Nashville, but he couldn’t be sure. If so, she’d traveled a long way to end up hitching rides along a slow stretch of Route 9. He lifted the bag and guitar and carried them to his car.
Her gear fit securely in the trunk of the cruiser. After stowing it, he returned to the open passenger door and leaned in to check on her. Droplets of rain rolled off the brim of his hat. One landed on her upper lip, another on her lower, and still another on her chin.
That knee-jerk tug of lust returned with a vengeance.
Impatient with himself, he whipped the hat off. Then he wiped his hair off his forehead and took a deep breath. The scent of her—a disturbing combination of honeysuckle and rain—filled the cruiser, teasing his nose and provoking appetites he refused to examine too closely. Another thing he didn’t want to examine too closely? What she had under her barely legal skirt, but training and experience wouldn’t allow him to just toss someone into the back of his car without checking for weapons. Her wet T-shirt concealed nothing. The only weapons beneath were courtesy of Mother Nature. The skirt didn’t hide much, either, but he had no way of knowing if she’d tucked away a blade or a canister of pepper spray unless he patted her down.
Swallowing past his dry throat, he felt her front and back pockets and then slid his palms over the worn denim covering the curve of her ass. His hands volunteered to take a second, completely recreational sweep of the area, but his brain put a lockdown on the impulse at the same moment a husky voice murmured, “…Gibson?”
He shoved his hands down the shafts of her boots to make sure they hid nothing nefarious and then eased away and watched as long lashes fluttered open and swept him back to a vacation he’d taken in the Florida Keys, where the water had been exactly the same clear, turquoise shade as her eyes. She’d lined them with some iridescent junk that reminded him of peacock feathers and hadn’t held up well against the weather, but something about the smudged makeup made her look intriguingly debauched.
Save the intrigue for what the hell she’s doing here and who the hell Gibson is.
Her pupils were huge but responsive, the whites of her eyes clear, which brought his concern for her physical condition down another degree. Didn’t mean she wasn’t on something, but both factors had him moving alcohol or some other intoxicant down a couple notches on his mental checklist of reasons she’d
