Free At Last by Jill Shalvis Page B

gestured back to his truck. “Let’s go.”
    “Wait—What?” Her eyes got huge, and she scrambled back a few feet. “You can’t arrest me.”
    “Have you done something arrest worthy?” he asked.
    “
No.
”
    “Then you’re not getting arrested. I’m driving you into town. To your
friends
.” And then he planned to call his friend Sheriff Sawyer Thompson to run her ID to see if she was a person of interest or reported as missing.
    She looked away. “I don’t need a ride.”
    “You’re not sleeping out here tonight. Get in the truck.”
    She threw her backpack into the truck bed withenough attitude to give him a starter headache. Then she climbed into the passenger seat and slammed the door.
    Matt drew a deep breath and walked around to the driver’s side. He drove her attitude-ridden ass into town, wondering what it was with him and stubborn females this week.
    In the heavy silence of the truck cab, Riley’s stomach grumbled. She ignored both it and Matt, keeping her face firmly turned toward the window. But by the time they drove down the main drag of Lucky Harbor, her stomach was louder than the venomous thoughts she was sending his way.
    “Where to?” he asked.
    “Here’s fine.”
    Here
was the corner where the pier met the beach. “Your friends live on the pier?” he asked dryly.
    “I’ll walk to their place.” Her stomach cut her off with yet another loud rumble.
    Matt sighed and pulled into the pier parking lot.
    Riley immediately reached for the door handle but Matt gripped the back of her sweatshirt. “Not so fast.”
    She stiffened. “I’m not thanking you for the ride with anything that involves me losing my clothes.”
    Jesus, he thought, his gut squeezing hard. “I’m not looking for a thank-you at all, but I’m not dropping you off on the damn corner. I’m taking you into the diner to feed you.”
    She stared at him. “Why?”
    “Because you’re hungry. And no,” he said before she could speak again. “I don’t expect a thank-you for that either.”
    Like a cornered, injured, starving animal, she didn’t so much as blink, and he felt the punch of her mistrust more forcibly than he’d felt Ty’s right uppercut this morning.
    “I don’t have any money,” she finally said.
    “You’re not going to need any.”
    This produced another long, unblinking stare.
    In the silence, his own belly grumbled. “Let’s go.”
    Her eyes swiveled to the diner on the pier’s corner. “What kind of place is called Eat Me?” she asked, unwittingly cementing what he’d suspected all along.
    If she hadn’t known the name of the only diner in Lucky Harbor, she hadn’t come from town. She didn’t belong here any more than she’d belonged out on the mountain. And he knew what that likely meant, he’d seen it all too often in Chicago. Homeless teens, a rising phenomenon that no one had yet come up with a solution for. She was either a runaway, abandoned, or a juvenile delinquent dodging the authorities. “The food’s good,” he said. “And I’m starving. So are you.”
    The girl seemed to fold in on herself. “I’m not cleaned up good enough for a fancy place like that.”
    Eat Me was just about the furthest thing from fancy he’d ever seen, but he gave her a cursory once-over. “You look fine.”
    “But—”
    “Now, Riley.”
    She slammed out of his truck and grabbed her backpack, hugging it tight to herself.
    Matt almost told her to stop abusing his door but he thought back to all the times his dad had yelled at him for doing the same thing and kept his mouth shut. He refused to turn into his father. Not that there was anything wrong with his dad’s parenting skills, but it was unnerving to hear himself become that guy.
    As he opened the diner’s door for her, he said, “The waitress is a friend of mine. Be nice.”
    “Friend or
friend
?”
    Ignoring that, he nudged her to a booth, not happy that under the harsh fluorescent lighting, he could see a fist-sized