Free Hold on Tight by Deborah Smith Page B

covered the dispenser opening. While he fiddled and felt, she studied him.
    “What can I do for you today?” she asked.
    He tugged his jacket sleeve back and wiggled his hand higher into the machine. A look of amused distaste crossed his face. “This reminds me of the time I went over to my cousin Lucy’s farm and the vet was payin’ a house call to an expectant cow.”
    Dinah burst into soft laughter and he looked up, smiling under troubled eyes. “I like it when you laugh,” he told her. “I don’t like upsettin’ you.” He paused. “Like last night.”
    “Oh, Rucker.” Her heart aching, she knelt beside him on the room’s stained green carpet. “I don’t like upsetting you either. I didn’t enjoy that.”
    He paused in his assault on the soda machine, his hand still inside its metal maze, to look at her with bittersweet yearning. “Will you sit beside me at the pep rally?” he asked in a mock-shy tone. “I’m scared to bearound all these teenage girls alone. They have a lot of hormones and they like mature men.”
    “Then you have nothing to worry about,” she assured him dryly. “Oh. By the way, your possum came back. If you want him—”
    “My baby!” he exclaimed gleefully, grinning. “My little dumpling wants to stay with its daddy? I never thought—” The machine emitted an ominous metallic click. “What the …” Rucker’s grin faded as he tried to pull his hand out of the dispenser opening. “Aw, come on, this is ridiculous.” He pulled harder.
    Dinah’s eyes widened in alarm. “Are you stuck?”
    “Nah. When I was a juvenile delinquent I used to rig these machines and … dammit!”
    “You’re stuck,” she confirmed.
    He looked at her with a deadpan expression. “I’m stuck.”
    Dinah sat down on the floor, tucking her feet, in their mauve pumps, under her. He sat down, too, awkwardly, then leaned his shoulder against the machine. He crooked one leg under him and drew the other up so that he could rest his free arm on it with at least a degree of jaunty aplomb. She lifted the dispenser door and slid her hand inside, contacting Rucker’s large muscular wrist.
    “Let me see.” She slid her fingers up his wrist to the imprisoned hand. “I might be able to help.”
    “It’s hopeless,” he said wistfully. “Don’t be brave.”
    “You’re trapped between two cans and the rack that holds them. Oh, Rucker, I better go get the janitor.”
    “I don’t need to be mopped or swept. I need to be rescued.”
    She began to laugh. “Some macho man!”
    He frowned in grand fashion. “Even John Wayne, God rest his fine soul, couldn’t have conquered this damned sneaky machine!”
    “I wish I had a camera! I wonder how many magazines and newspapers would love to have a photograph of Rucker McClure being eaten by a soda machine!”
    “Aw, Dee, you mean thing.”
    She laughed harder. Dinah clasped his shouldersand leaned forward, unconcerned that she was cackling like a deranged hen. Through years of beauty competitions she’d been rigidly trained to modulate her voice and her laughter. Now that training deserted her, but oddly she didn’t mind. She made boisterous squeaking sounds and rested her forehead against his shoulder. No other man in the world could provoke me this way, she thought suddenly.
    “You’re … in-incredible!” she yelped. “Fantas … tic!”
    “Well, howdy do,” he retorted dryly. “Women get turned on by the strangest things.” Then his free arm swept around her waist. Shocked into silence and gulping for breath, Dinah tilted her head back and stared at him warily. “Forget the janitor. Stay here and console me,” he ordered. His voice dropped languidly. “The least you can do is give a prisoner a little entertainment.”
    Her lips were parted in surprise when his mouth covered them. Without thinking, Dinah made a soft, grateful sound. He echoed it in gruff harmony and twisted his mouth on hers with slow, erotic intent. Several long