Free Run Wild With Me by Sandra Chastain

the back of her head.
    She drove too fast, wondering why this man seemed destined to ruin what had been a simple plan for her to assume her father’s duties. After one night in town, Sam Farley had managed to unsettle her to the extent that she was halfway to her own house before she realized that she’d turned the wrong way.
    “Now look what you’ve made me do,” she complained.
    “I think you’ll have to be a bit more specific. What exactly have I made you do? I haven’t said a word, and I haven’t touched you.”
    “Mamie’s house is in the opposite direction.”
    “Well,” he said with a smile, “I’m open to suggestions. What about a picnic under Lover’s Oak?” He didn’t know why he kept teasing her, making his interest in her so obvious. He was chasing her, a law officer, the picture of southern womanhood, complete with a town full of eyes watching every move he made.
    Andrea frowned. “I don’t know how to play clever little games like you do, and I don’t want to learn. You said you wanted lunch. All right, Farley, I’ll feed you.”
    “More chocolate-chip cookies?”
    “No, I had something like arsenic in mind.”
    “Good thinking, darlin’. Arsenic works slowly. We’ll have time to make my death a memorable demise. You could put it in the cookies.”
    “No more cookies. Louise makes those cookies for Buck. They’re … friends.”
    “I see—cookies and friendship. Is that considered an acceptable statement of intent?”
    “No, I don’t think their friendship is public, yet. I didn’t know until he broke his leg and couldn’t drive.”
    “So it is possible to be discreet in Arcadia, if a person really wants to.”
    “Yes, I suppose,” she answered thoughtfully. She could have told him that she knew it was possible. She’d been so discreet once that not even Buck had known that she’d fallen in love with a man, another outsider like Sam.
    By this time Andrea was approaching her house. In an absurd kind of way, Sam was right, about a lot of things. More and more often lately there were times when she wanted to shake the town up, to do something totally wild. Rebellion didn’t come easy, and it demanded too high a price. She pulled into her driveway and parked the patrol car beneath the pecan tree by the porch.
    “As for those cookies,” Sam went on innocently, as though he had no idea of the crisis she’d just passed through, “you won’t believe this, Chief Fleming, but I’ve heard about Arcadia’s cookies since I was a boy. It may have taken a lot of years for me to get a chance to taste them, but it was worth the wait.”
    Andrea knew he said ‘cookies,’ but from the dreamy tone of his voice, she knew that wasn’t what he meant. The cookies seem to be some kind of symbol to Sam. She just didn’t know yet what they stood for.
    Sam was looking through the window with a faraway expression in his eyes, taking in her white clapboard house, the yard, the screened front porch. “You have a swing,” he murmured. “And a honeysuckle vine shading it, making it private. I should have known.” When he got out of the patrol car and started up on the porch, Andrea had no choice but to follow.
    Andrea wished she could stifle the ever-present trembling of her nerve endings. Everything about Sam Farley kept her slightly off-key, and now his actions completely mystified her. He went onto the porch and sat down in her swing, then rocked forward and back almost reverently. She stopped beside it and looked down at him. He kept on swinging and smiling.
    “You all right, cowboy?”
    “I’m fine, Chief. Just thinking.” Except that he couldn’t organize his thoughts. Everywhere he turned he saw Andrea’s past, all safe and secure. He’d never understood his mother’s need to belong before. One place had always been as good as another to him.
    Shaking off his preoccupation, Sam forced a smile. “So this is where you live.”
    “Yes. You’d better come inside, where