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“Ready?” Wyatt asks, coming back into the kitchen wearing a hoodie and sneakers.

“Yeah.” I accept his help when he wraps his arm around my waist to get me through the house, and I try not to think about how he takes my weight so easily, and I definitely don’t think about when he picked me up and carried me into his place like I weighed nothing at all.

“Truck,” he orders Storm when he opens his front door, and Storm runs out of the house ahead of us and hops into the open back of his pickup truck while Wyatt helps me down the front steps.

“Thanks,” I murmur after he helps me into the cab. Like the outside, the interior is beat up and dated, but it smells like some kind of warm spice and gasoline, which is an oddly comforting mixture, like cutting down a tree at Christmas.

“Where’s your place?”

“Just down the street.” I point that direction as he backs out of his driveway. Since I don’t live far, it’s not long before we are pulling in behind my car and he’s helping me out of his truck.

“Where’s your key?” he asks when we make it to my front door.

“It’s open.”

“You didn’t lock it?”

“No.” I grab the handle, turn it, and push the door in.

“You really should lock your door, Genevieve,” he tells me, sounding annoyed.

“There isn’t exactly a place to keep my keys in this outfit.” I motion down my body at my peach-colored spandex set, and my ears warm when he follows the motion of my hand. “And I wasn’t going to be gone long.”

“It only takes a second for someone to watch you leave your house and walk right in behind you.”

“In Gooseberry?”

“In any town in the world.” His jaw clenches before he bites out, “This town is safe, but no town is so safe that you can disregard common sense.”

“I didn’t disregard common sense.”

“A beautiful woman living alone and not locking her door says otherwise.”

Ignoring that he said I’m beautiful, because I’m getting pissed—no, I am pissed that he basically called me stupid—I step back into my house. “Goodbye, Wyatt.”

“Genevieve.”

“I’ll let you know if I hear anything about the house.” I shut the door and drag in a breath, forgetting all about the pain in my foot and the drama happening in my life with Anna and Kolter because I’m now pissed at Wyatt.

Chapter 5:

Not Interested

Wyatt

“With the homecoming parade and the annual Gooseberry Ridge Fall Festival coming up soon, I’m going to need a couple of you to pull some overtime,” Sheriff Mike Davison says, resting his hands on his hips as he looks around the room. “If you’re interested, just send me an email. I’ll also need someone to take over directing traffic at the school every day from three until four thirty while Morty is on vacation.”

“I got that.” Russell lifts his hand.

“Who’s covering the football game tomorrow evening?”

“Foster and Dick.” Bryan reaches over and pats my back with a grin, and I shake my head.

Working the high school football games isn’t a bad gig to have on Friday night. It’s the shit that happens after, when the teenagers have all decided where they are going to meet up, that we all dread. Some Fridays they stay in town at one of the fast-food joints and fill up the parking lot, blasting their music and causing chaos. And other times they’ll head up into the mountains with the alcohol they talked someone into buying for them, and that’s when we run into problems. More than once, we’ve had to show up at the scene of an accident after some kid drank too much and ended up in a ditch or worse. And no, I don’t have an issue with the kids all hanging out, but I do have a big issue with them drinking underage and doing that shit when they are responsible for being in control of a car, which I consider a deadly weapon that can kill them and multiple other people.

“All right, anyone have any questions for me?” Mike asks, looking around the room. When no one says anything, he focuses on me. “Foster, I need to speak with you in my office.”

“Sure.” I get up from my seat and follow him out of the room. He stops just inside his office and waits until I’m inside to close the door, then wanders across the room to his desk and takes a seat. “Did you notice the new decor around town this afternoon on your way to work?”