Free Trouble When You Walked In (Contemporary Romance) by Kieran Kramer Page A

gonna call Scotty and complain.”
    “Good,” Cissie piped up from the depths of her despair, which was evaporating again. They needed trouble. They needed it badly. “As long as no students get arrested. I don’t want them to ruin their futures. Scotty can arrest me, if he has to.”
    All she had to look forward to was being a librarian in a strip mall. And withering away like a prune since she probably was never going to have sex again. Think of all the youth-preserving hormones she’d be missing out on. Sex gave them to you. Nana told her that was why she looked sixty instead of eighty-two.
    “Scotty’s not going to arrest anyone.” Boone’s voice was warm and titillating.
    For a second, if Cissie didn’t listen to the words, she could imagine him talking dirty to her in bed.
    “If I were you,” he said, “I’d think about having some fun at your sit-in.”
    The words fun and sex each had three letters, so they were pretty closely related, right? What if he’d said, “I’d think about having some sex at your sit-in?”
    Cissie almost giggled, but then she remembered she was acting absolutely deranged due to extreme sensual deprivation.
    “No,” she told him, standing firmly in her Hanes white cotton bikini briefs. “This is serious business. As soon as Edwina shows—”
    And then a country song came on, a slow one. Boone grabbed her hand. “Come with me,” he said, and pulled her out the door. “We’re gonna dance.”

 
    CHAPTER NINE
    A big gust of wind lifted Cissie’s skirt. “I don’t really know how to dance—” she began.
    “Shush,” said Boone.
    Wait— she was the shusher!
    He pulled her up against him. “Don’t think. You just have to feel it. Like this northwest wind. It’s been blowing across the mountain all day.”
    His warm drawl reminded Cissie of a scratchy wool blanket, the kind every Kettle Knob family kept in their car trunk in wintertime. You didn’t want it … but you did. No other blanket would do when it came to saving your family if your car was stranded in a snowstorm. It had to be the old army blanket or nothing.
    “But if Edwina sees me—” She couldn’t get her foot action right.
    “She’ll think you’re bold.”
    The wind tugged at his hair, and Cissie felt its wildness, his wildness. In another life, maybe he’d been a Celtic warrior and she’d been a princess he’d kidnapped and made the cook in his camp, and they’d fallen in love inside his crude tent made of elk skin.
    “This is a helluva sit-in,” he said. “Not some boring one. Anyone can have a boring one.”
    “True.” Cissie felt herself being drawn in against her will. Her feet were moving in the right direction finally. And now … now she was swaying, and bumping up against Boone—against that zipper of his that she’d noticed behind her prescription sunglasses. His chest was broad, his arm around her back strong and possessive. He had rhythm—the type that made a girl think in directions she probably shouldn’t. This was only one dance. But she couldn’t help it. She was mere flesh and blood.
    “Coach! Looking good!” The catcalls were endless.
    “Ignore ’em,” Boone said. “I’ll get them back later.”
    “Fine,” she mumbled. He was so cute and naturally good at everything. And she was awkward, just like she’d been in high school. She’d thought she’d outgrown it, but it always came out, this insecurity of hers, at inopportune times.
    “I’ve got a question for you,” Boone said, probably to break the weird silence.
    “Yes?” She was glad to say something , especially because the song, which up until now, she’d found completely harmless, was romantic enough to be embarrassing.
    “You know what you said earlier, about how I need to stop being so sexy?”
    She nodded, and her heart beat painfully fast.
    “Normally, that’d be a come-on if a girl said that to a guy.”
    “Oh, no, no, no,” she said. “Please. Don’t think that.”
    “I