Didn’t finish school.
Was just there one day and gone the next.
Now he is back in town. Leather clad, motorbike riding, bad boy. Turned into a take your breath away, filled out nicely, give a girl sexy dreams, dangerous looking man.
At that moment he looks right at me. I’m mounted on the counter, mouth open, blatantly staring. And he knows it. It’s a dark, ominous look he gives me. I scramble off the counter and pretend to be busy reading receipts like they are the lost sanskrit texts of Egypt.
But after a couple of minutes, he hasn’t come up to the front of the store and my curiosity gets the best of me. Part wanting to check that it’s really him - part needing to know if he is that sexy as that quick glance showed - and part customer service, I leave the safety of the counter and walk slowly towards the back of the store.
It’s him. Falcon Kingsley. And he is standing there looking at Ms. Bubbleworth. My protective feelings for the chicken outway any fear I might have about speaking to him.
“The chicken’s not for sale.” I blurt out.
He looks at me. Slowly. Those dark, hooded eyes. “It says right here it is for sale.”
Damn he is sexy. In a dangerous, forbidden sort of way. He is taller than I remember. But the leather jacket and those big boots spell danger. His t-shirt stretched across a finely muscled chest. The cotton hangs straight, indicating a flat, washboard stomach.
But it’s his face that makes my heart pound. Almost angelic in a ruggedly handsome way. He is all man, fully grown and nicely formed. It’s the kind of face that makes you imagine what his son would look like. A little boy being hefted up by those big arms.
Holy Chicken Eggs, my brain has flown the coop. I wring my hands, a little nervous gesture.
“You can’t eat her. She deserves a good home. It’s not her fault she doesn’t get along with others.”
He frowns at me. “I’ll take her.”
“Do you promise you won’t eat her?”
For a brief moment it almost looks like he might smile. Not the full formation of a smile but his face softens ever so slightly and there is a slight uplift at one corner of his mouth.
“I promise I’m not going to eat her.”
With a sigh, I pick up Ms. Bubbleworth’s cage and carry it to the counter to ring her up.
“And you can’t use her in any satanic rituals or anything like that.”
Glancing up I watch as his expression hardens once again and he hands over his card. “I won’t hurt the damn chicken.” He growls.
I have mixed emotions as I watch Falcon walk off to his truck.
Arousal. His deep growl did something to me that got my pulse racing.
Fear for the chicken.
And an absolute certainty that I am going mad. If dropping out of college wasn’t a sign of madness, then lusting after Falcon Kingsley and caring what happens for a chicken, surely must mean I need mental help.
Chapter 2
Falcon
Damn this town! I can’t even buy a chicken without getting the third degree. All my life people have thought I was trouble. And sure, I might have been a little wild. I wasn’t good at school. My older brother’s cultivated a bad reputation. So I must be bad too. And so I played into it.
But the army has a way of making you grow up fast. The things I’ve seen. The scars I have. The boy this town remembers is just a faint memory of the past. But they don’t see it that way. And sure, maybe I drank a little too much when I came home. Maybe I was feeling a little lost and out of control.
But I should be able to buy a chicken without striking fear in the hearts of the town folk. One very pretty town folk in particular. It is laughable that Willow Brookes should be afraid of me. She is smarter than me. More educated than me. Better loved by the town than me. That girl has always had a certain class and grace about her.
She has no reason to fear me. I’ve barely even spoken to her. She is so far above me it’s not even funny. She was always on track. I’m very much from the wrong side of the tracks. She always had a bright future. I’m the bad seed.
Willow Brookes represents everything I don’t like about this small town. A town that judges people on how well mannered they are. Like that means anything in the real world. I’m here because this is where my brother dragged me, when he found me passed out in a bar too many nights in a row.
