Free Dirt: A Sexy Small Town Romance (Copperwood Book 1) by Reese Patton Page A

kiss with as much ferocity, if not more. Shane Crawford might have been claiming my mouth with his kiss, but I was doing the same. I was going to make sure that Shane didn’t forget our kiss because there was no way in hell it would ever fade from my memories.
    I felt his erection against my stomach and moaned into the kiss. Shane was as turned on as I was.
    But before anything went any further, Shane pulled away and I thought I saw a look of reluctance on his face.
    “Not here, Mya.” His lips moved along my jaw in a line of gentle kisses and I
heard
the reluctance in his voice.
    He stepped away from me and opened the car door. Before I realized it, we were driving through town and he pulled the car up in front of my house. The last place I wanted to be.
    Shane leaned across the front seat of the car and kissed me. This time there wasn’t any hunger. It was just a gentle good night kiss. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
    I nodded my head slowly and got out of the car. Wondering the entire time what had happened. Shane wanted me. I knew he wanted me. I felt his arousal pressing against me for Christ’s sake. But instead of taking me back to his motel, he was dropping me off at home.
    I didn’t know who was the bigger asshole. Him for leaving me hot and bothered or me for thinking anything more than a kiss would happen.

15
    Shane
    A cold shower. I needed a nice long cold shower. I sped back to my motel berating myself for leaving Mya. It would have been so easy to bring her back with me, but she deserved something better than a seedy motel in the middle of town where someone would see her. And then she’d become the center of gossip.
    Unfortunately, it didn’t stop my dick from pushing uncomfortably up against the zipper of my pants. What did stop my dick from getting any harder was finding Alene standing at my motel room door.
    I noticed her absence from the bar, but hadn’t thought anything of it. In retrospect, I probably should have.
    I got out of the car and walked past her. “I’ll let you know what I decide tomorrow.”
    “But, Shane…”
    I pushed past her. Her voice grated against my ears and the last person I wanted to see before I went to bed was Alene. She tried to follow me into the room, but I closed the door on her. Her fists pounded against hollow metal blocking her entry, but I ignored it.
    Instead, I headed for the bathroom and the cold shower.
    * * * *
    Standing in front of the aging house reminded me of the passing time and just how long I’d been gone. Before I left, Rich Sydony took care of his house. They never had much, but they never really seemed to need it. I’m sure after Lily passed, Rich didn’t think he had a reason to keep going, but what about Mya? She didn’t deserve this. She never deserved this.
    Mike shared some of what happened with Mya and guilt punched me in the stomach. Leaving was the best thing for me. I hated thinking about what I would have been like if I had stayed. I just wished I hadn’t severed ties so completely.
    I could have dropped Mya an email. I could have picked up the phone and called her. It would have been easy to blame my dad for why I stayed away for so long, and he was a huge part, but he wasn’t the whole part. I stayed away because I didn’t need any more images of Mya haunting my future. I’d have only hurt her back then.
    But things were different now. So here I was, standing at her door first thing in the morning. God, I was an asshole.
    “Are you going to stand at the door all day or are you going to knock?”
    I jumped at the sound of the deep male voice. Rich Sydony always frightened me in the way fathers of attractive young women frightened teenaged boys. At least
that
hadn’t changed.
    I turned around to look at the man who had been one of my father’s best friends and wondered if he knew what my dad had done. How my dad sold out the town just to pad a bank account he never used because he didn’t want to be found out.
    Well, that