Free Break for Me by Shiloh Walker Page A

be steady, and throw calm and rational to the wind, she figured. Wasn’t like she
     didn’t have reasons to toss back a glass or two of wine.
    She tried to push that voice to the side but then abruptly, she frowned and made herself answer that. Why did she have to be calm or rational?
    She’d been calm and rational most of her life.
    She paid her bills on time.
    She had a nice, neat little savings account.
    She never dated.
    She’d had exactly two sexual encounters prior to the weekend she’d spent with Dean. The first one had sucked,
     but she’d been a twenty-one-year-old virgin who’d decided she wasn’t going to be a
     virgin anymore. She hadn’t been looking for fun—she’d just been looking for sex.
    The second encounter had been … whoa and damn . But Adam Brascum, the town Romeo knew all about whoa and damn . Maybe not so much about emotional connection, but she hadn’t been looking for that,
     either.
    She’d just been looking for … the whoa and the damn .
    Staring at Dean’s turned back, the way his shoulders stretched the threadbare cotton
     of his shirt, the dreads secured at the nape of his neck, the sleek, elegant play
     of muscles under his skin. He was beautiful. And when he touched her, it wasn’t just whoa and damn .
    Her heart stuttered when he touched her.
    Her heart stuttered when he looked at her.
    A knot settled in her throat and she had to admit the truth. She wanted him, but it
     was so much more than that. She was going to want him when the sun went down, when
     it came up.
    It went deeper than want.
    He somehow managed to break her and remake her all at once.
    Maybe that was why she’d ignored it for so long.
    She didn’t want to face this, or handle it.
    But she was having an even harder time walking away from him now.
    Her mouth had gone dry as the Sahara, but instead of gulping the wine, she slid off
     the stool. “Mind if I get a glass of water?”
    He glanced over his shoulder at her and then gestured with a spatula to the cabinet
     on the right. “In there.”
    She found them and grabbed a tumbler of pretty, cobalt blue. “You have a thing for
     color, Dean.”
    “No. I don’t,” he said, chuckling. “My mom does. She came in like a Pinterest whirlwind
     a year or two ago and redid everything, dragged my sister, my brothers, and their
     wives into it—it was her summer project.” He glanced around the kitchen and shrugged.
     “We redid the entire inside of the house. I wanted to build a deck, but this was what
     Mom wanted to do, so this is what we did.”
    “I guess it didn’t occur to you to tell your mom you’d rather have the deck?”
    He gave her a look like she was out of her mind. “Clearly, you don’t remember meeting
     my mother. You don’t tell that woman no once she’s got her mind made up.”
    Jensen grinned. “I’ll keep that in mind.” She glanced past him, more out of a need
     to distract herself than anything else, eyeing the deck. “Looks like you got the deck
     anyway.”
    “Yeah. Did it myself last fall.”
    “It’s nice.” Nice . She resisted the urge to roll her eyes and sipped at the water instead, leaning
     against the counter and trying to think through the noise in her brain.
    She had such a bad habit of overcomplicating things.
    She knew that.
    She needed to quit thinking . The longer she thought about what was going on here, what might be going on between them, the more scared
     she became.
    Seeing what people did to each other … hurt . She thought about her parents, everything that had happened, and it made her gut
     twist. But she realized something else. Thinking about not reaching for … whatever
     might be unfolding, that hurt, too.
    She thought about putting down the glass of water and just walking out the door and
     it filled her with such dread, it almost sickened her.
    She thought about maybe quitting her job, finding a position somewhere else. She could.
     Cops were always needed.
    But the thought of never