Chapter 14
14
FIONA
I had sex with Mr. Suit with Sexy Forearms in a bookstore.
Dax.
I couldn’t believe I did that. Had I lost my mind? Gone into some… fugue? I didn’t even like the guy, and I was well aware that he didn’t like me in return.
Yet the chemistry was insane. The sex was insane.
Dax might be insane, too. Leaving the scene of a crime, yelling at me for dealing with the armed robber. Spanking me for it. Who did that?
I was back at my vacation rental, fuming. Angry at myself. Obviously, seeing him a second time made me lose my mind. He drove me nuts. And drove me to orgasm.
God, he was skilled. Sexy. That scruff. Those eyes. Those fingers. That dick .
My pussy throbbed from it all.
“He’s working in a romance bookstore ,” I said aloud, tossing the few clothes I’d pulled from my duffel right back in. “Him. What does he know about romance? Nothing! He had a gun on him. And he spanked me. That guy wouldn’t know candlelight if he set himself on fire.”
Why was I so mad? I had sex. Really good sex.
But it had been with a bossy, take charge guy. One who thought I needed to be told what to do and spanked my ass when I didn’t do as he wanted.
I hated men like him.
I avoided them. Arrested them.
I didn’t sleep with them or have feelings for them or–
I groaned, ran my hand over the top of my head.
Except I did. I had feelings for Dax. I wasn’t sure what those feelings were, if it was interest or desire or the need to strangle him. Or all three.
That was why I was running. I didn’t need to be into a guy like him. I’d been hurt by so many men in the past. It was still happening. Neidermeyer and Trotter were two perfect–and most recent–examples of why men sucked.
A quick romp on the floor of a bookstore was one thing, but anything more than that was me being stupid.
My father had taught me that I couldn’t get attached to any man. Not because he was a loving father trying to steer me away from all the Mr. Wrongs out there and toward my Prince Charming. It was because he was an unloving, ruthless, and very dangerous narcissist who was the OG of breaking my heart. I knew better than to give my heart or any other part of me to anyone. Ever.
I’d been in Coal Springs a day. One day! Besides the cheesy rice and the orgasms, it had been a disaster.
Hannah wasn’t here. Why did she have to be on vacation for two weeks?
There was no way in hell I was hanging around her bookstore where she wasn’t and Dax was, seemingly running the place against his will, waiting for her to return.
I couldn’t hang out in this town with all the niceness . I might end up at Pops’ place giving up being a vegetarian and eating pot roast if I stuck around. I didn’t belong here.
I zipped my bag closed and headed for my car.
As I drove down Candy Cane Lane, two kids on bikes waved to me. Waved. I was a stranger. This place was like the Twilight Zone . After growing up in a mega-mansion avoiding or outright hiding from my father, Coal Springs with its bikes and cheesy rice was hard to comprehend.
“Didn’t their parents teach them not to wave and smile at strangers?” I wondered aloud.
At the outskirts of town, there was a “Leaving Coal Springs” sign with “Come Again!” written in big, cheerful letters beneath. I remembered Dax’s gruff voice ordering me to do just that, all around his dick.
My pussy clenched, remembering. Aching with how big he’d been.
“AHHHHHHH!” I shouted within my car. How dare he take over my thoughts! Was I so mad at him because he made my vagina fall in love with him ?
That had to be it.
The two-lane road between Coal Springs and the highway was twisty and turny through the mountains. Guardrails hugged the edge, the only thing keeping cars from driving over a steep drop. It was impossible to go fast, and I came up behind a camper going well below the marked speed limit.
As we went around a bend, there was a van parked in a little pull-out. I recognized the phallic pickle cartoon character on the side of it. The rear doors were open, and a man was standing between them in front of a number of white five-gallon drums loaded in the back. A second man was at the guardrail with a drum, and he was… was he dumping pickles over the edge?
I passed them and I glanced back in my rearview mirror. Yes, they were definitely dumping pickles off a cliff.
“What the hell?” I muttered.
I thought back to my run this morning. Seeing the same van in front of the Pickle Hole this morning, unloading the drums and carrying them into the store. Now they were dumping the contents off a cliff? It made me remember some voices I heard when I’d been in the bookstore with Dax. Between the car noises and toilets and women buying baby clothes, I’d heard shipment and toss the pickles.
Individually, someone throwing out food wasn’t all that strange. Maybe the pickles were bad, and they had to be chucked because of health codes and wanted to feed the mountain goats and bobcats that lived on the steep hillside. Maybe they tipped in the back of the van around a curve and had to be chucked.
It also wasn’t strange that a pickle van was delivering pickles to a pickle store early in the morning.
Nor were the words shipment or toss the pickles. At the time, the words had meant nothing, besides the fact that I’d been very distracted.
But I could now see the big picture. Or a bigger picture. What kind of company brought in stock, then dumped the stock intentionally? Obviously, pickles were a popular food item worldwide. I’d never, not once though, seen a pickle store. Sure, a pickle shelf at the supermarket or barbecue specialty shop. But in Coal Springs, where it was socked in with snow eight months out of the year making outdoor picnics pretty much impossible?
A mile down the road, I pulled off the road and stopped at a small trailhead parking lot.
I tapped my fingers on my steering wheel, thinking. Something was up with these pickle people. Something… not right. Maybe even against the law.
“Fuck,” I muttered. Could I drive back to Denver and just let this mystery go? It was pickle littering, not human trafficking. “Now I know how Scooby Doo and the gang felt.”
I should let it go. Who cared? But what was I going back to? My apartment that I was rarely in, that had one picture hanging on the living room wall because it had been left by the previous tenants… three years ago? No way was I headed back to work after only two days. I’d gone to Coal Sp rings for Hannah. I had the vacation rental for the month.
I could snoop around and figure out what was up with the Pickle Hole until Hannah returned. It would give me something to do.
“As long as I stay away from Dax, it should all be fine.”