by Sara Cate
Stuck with You
Three Steamy Stuck-together Shorts
Sara Cate
Jessica Walker
Ava Rae Harris
Contents
In Bed with the Law
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
About the Author
Into the Cave
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Epilogue
Preorder Out of the Wild…
F*ck Roses
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Epilogue
Also by Sara Cate
About the Author
In Bed with the Law
By Ava Rae Harris
Ryder Cox. The most eligible and elusive bachelor in our hometown, and well-known for being the most handsome State Trooper working this section of Middle Tennessee. Everyone around here knows Ryder Cox. I just happen to know him better than most.
Five years ago, we shared a stolen moment of passion, and haven't seen him since. Now he's back. When flood waters trap us in a remote cabin out in the woods, the main question is whether or not I'll be able to keep my hands to myself…or if I'll get hurt again.
In Bed with the Law
Copyright © 2020 by Ava Rae Harris
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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1
The hot Tennessee sun beats down on me. I am grateful for the Park Ranger cap shading my face but wish the bureaucrat that had picked our uniforms had remembered that this was the South and we have to be outside in the summer. At least we have short sleeved-shirts, even if they are a stifling polyester blend. My day is just beginning and already I am stressed, tired, and wishing I had been able to win the lottery for vacation on the Fourth of July. Only a handful of Park Service employees were allowed to have vacation on holiday weekends, and for the third year in a row, I wasn’t fortunate enough to have my name drawn from the pot. The river is a fairly common place for families to have a lunch picnic or a cookout for the holiday, and as such, we as state Park Rangers pretty much all have to work. After two and a half years on the job, I am used to it, but it doesn’t mean I have to be happy about it.
My fair skin flushes easily in the heat, and I know by this time today I have to be about as red as my hair, even with sunscreen on. I take my cap off and fan myself for a brief moment, trying to feel at least a little air movement in the heavy, humid summer air.
The radio on shoulder crackles, my boss asking for a status report. I settle my cap back on my head. “All good here,” I say into my shoulder. What do they expect to happen? Someone will vandalize a picnic pavilion in broad daylight on the Fourth of July?
“You’re getting a state trooper rotation through there in a few minutes,” my boss says over the radio. “Have a sitrep ready for them, would you?”
I sigh. “Roger wilco.” A sitrep will consist of: “It’s all good here, trooper. Thanks for stopping by.” Then the trooper will climb back into his air-conditioned cruiser and disappear, leaving me here to watch a bunch of kids run around on the edge of the river and get coated in sticky Tennessee mud.
A few minutes later, the state trooper cruiser pulls up. I don’t pay a lot of attention, my eyes following a kid who is wandering dangerously close to the edge of the water. I try to spot his guardians, but can’t see anyone specifically watching this one kid.
“Good afternoon.” The deep, masculine voice behind me sounds familiar, and I feel a strange knot in my gut.
I turn and the knot tightens. I know this one.
He’s a head taller than me, six feet of nothing but muscle. He pulls off his aviator sunglasses, revealing a pair of deep brown eyes with lashes that any woman would have killed for, set in a face that should have belonged to a Hollywood leading man.
“Oh my god, it’s you,” I blurt, before I can stop myself.
“Holy shit.” Those dark eyes light up with an amused spark, and I feel my face flush, but this time not from the heat of the sun. He grins. “Hey, Giggles.”
Ryder Cox. The most desirable prom date in our high school, then the most eligible and elusive bachelor in our hometown, and now well-known back home for being the most handsome State Trooper working this section of Middle Tennessee. The man was a football star, a valedictorian, and a decorated officer of the law. Everyone around here knows Ryder Cox. I just happen to know him better than most.
I grind my teeth to fight against the infectious nature of his grin. “Hello, Ryder,” I say. “And no one calls me Giggles anymore, thanks.”
“That’s a damn shame,” he says, his voice friendly with that down-home charm that worked on every female body at the local Kroger. He shifts a little closer and drops the Andy Griffith act. “What are you doing out here, Geena?”
“Serving and protecting, what does it look like?” I do my best to glower at him. Small talk is one thing, but now he’s being dense. I expect better.
“I remember that Mom said something about you starting with the Park Service,” he says. His eyes travel up and down my body, taking in the dark green and khaki of my uniform. “She didn’t say they’d made you a Ranger. It suits you, kid.”
Kid? He’s only five years older than me. I hide my annoyance. “How’s your mom and all them?” I ask, to be polite.
“Not too bad,” he says, stuffing his hands in his pockets. He starts giving me the rundown of the latest news from his family, but I’m only half listening. I continue to watch the kids by the lake, seeing that the smallest one is wandering even closer to the water.
I glance back at Ryder, who has been telling me about his sister’s upcoming wedding and how excited everyone seemed to be for her. I knew all this drama already; it was my mom’s favorite afternoon catch-up topic. My mom and Mrs. Cox have been best friends since before either Ryder or myself were in existence, and she is almost as involved in the wedding as Mrs. Cox. My mom has relayed every aspect about the dress, the cake, the invitations. The wedding is going to be the event of the year in our hometown. Ryder seems happy for his sister, but, from what he’s telling me, it has Mrs. Cox thinking it’s about time for him to find someone and settle down.
I feel my lip want to twist and I push the expression down, turning back to face the river. Find someone. He wouldn’t have to work to find someone. More like, he’d have to fight off all the single women trying to find him.
I think back to the last time we actually had a real conversation. It was at the last holiday cookout we had both been at, on a Memorial Day weekend. My senior year of high school was just wrapping up and I was caught up in the excitement of facing a new and wide world at college that fall. He had just finished twenty weeks of intense, military-style training and it showed in the way his Johnny Cash T-shirt strained against his biceps. He was only a week or two away from getting his first assignment as a state trooper and I was sure that I had never laid eyes on a more attractive man.
We had found ourselves alone on the dock as the final rays of sunlight had faded and the first stars appeared above the lake. No teenage girl could ever have asked for a more perfect setting to take such a dive as I did, leaning in and stealing a kiss from his sensual lips.
My stomach flips, remembering how the rest of that encounter
had gone, his lips hungrily taking mine time after time, his large and callused hands roving my body and cupping me to him. How right it had felt to be held against his broad chest. And how cold I had been left when he gruffly pulled away from me and disappeared into the darkness.
He’d managed to avoid me for the rest of that weekend, and at the next family get-together, he’d had a lithe blonde on his arm, a woman named Alexa. He’d greeted me curtly and spent as much time as possible avoiding me. In the following years, I’d found myself busy with summer internships, and he had been working almost every holiday weekend. It just seemed that we never ended up in the same place at the same time.
And now, here he is again after all this time. I drag my mind back to the present and realize he’s asking about my mom and dad. I open my mouth to respond when I hear a scream and a splash, and the little kid that had been playing on the edge of the river disappears under the water.
My feet are moving before I realize it, dashing for ripples that are already dissipating. An adult, possibly a family member, breaks away from the pavilion and is running toward the river as well, but I will get there long before they do.
The child was barely a toddler and clearly didn’t know how to swim. He hasn’t resurfaced and the river’s waters are murky from rain. I hear Ryder on the radio behind me, but I don’t take time to ask who he’s calling for. Seconds could be life or death.
The mud on the edge of the river is slick, and I fall as I head down the bank, but a few seconds later I’m up to my knees in the water. I reach for the bubbles and grab for the kid. I manage to get my hand on what I think is an arm, and I pull, hauling him out of the water. He gasps for air, coughing violently as I lift him free of the brown mud. He retches, spitting river water on my uniform. I try to walk back up the bank, but I start to slip on the mud again and barely keep from falling.
“Here, Geena!” Ryder is braced on the bank and has his arms out for the boy. I hear a siren in the distance. He must have called for the EMTs at the next swimming hole over from this one.
I hand the child off to him. He’s still coughing and the mud covering him transfers to Ryder’s spotless starched uniform. I can’t help but notice how gently he cradles the child as he carefully makes his way back up the bank.
I fall one more time in the river before I manage to make it to the top of the bank, covered in mud and looking like hell. Ryder has the kid on the grass, wrapped in a towel and rubbing his back. He’s calmly speaking into his radio, giving the chief a situation report. The parents finally get to us, crying and thanking Ryder for saving little Tommy’s life. I hang back, feeling mud pooling in my boots.
Paramedics arrive a few minutes later and take the little boy from us, checking his vitals. Ryder helps me finish up all the appropriate paperwork for the incident, then glances over at me, my wet uniform clinging to my legs and mud all over me.
“Nice save, Giggles,” he says, his voice low but his tone earnest. I feel goosebumps on the back of my neck, but that’s got to be from the breeze blowing on my wet clothes.
“Thanks for the back up,” I say, and mean it. Whatever our past, I’m glad he was there to help me get the kid out of the river as quickly as we did.
I radio the situation to headquarters and am told I need to report back to submit the incident reports, but with the busy day, they can’t spare a vehicle to come pick me up. I sigh. HQ is only three miles away from where we are, but it will be a long and humid walk in wet shoes.
“I’ll drive you,” Ryder says. “Let me radio my chief and we’ll head over.”
I watch him as he starts his radio call. I’ve known this man all my life. We grew up in adjacent neighborhoods, we went to the same school. When I started kindergarten, Ryder was in fifth grade. We both went to a private school so small all grades were in a single building. My mom and Mrs. Cox took turns picking us up from school and providing after school care, depending on the day. During the summers, it was just natural for our families to still hang out, having cookouts. I’d trail Ryder and his friends everywhere, my tall cowboy boots protecting my legs from brambles as we tramped through the woods near the cabin that our families jointly owned. He’s been calling me Giggles since my earliest memories, first as a term of exasperation and then out of habit.
But now, not having seen him or spoken to him for five years, he’s pretty much a stranger to me. His arms are muscular, the cords in his forearms standing out beneath tanned skin. The hair by his temples, visible under his hat, shows the smallest hint of gray. His eyes have some creases around them I don’t remember from the last time we met.
My uniform is clinging to me in a most uncomfortable way…but all I can think about is how broad his shoulders look under his shirt, and how his body armor does nothing to disguise the fact that he is still every bit as muscular as he was that night beside the lake. My mouth goes a little dry as I remember how hard his muscles were, as I was pressed tightly against them…
Upon finding out he wanted to be a cop, most of my friends in high school would watch him walk past with a sigh, hoping that he would be the ones to read them their Miranda rights. “Anything you say can and will be held against you,” one friend would say.
“Ryder Cox,” the other friend would say, wistful heat in her voice.
Dammit. I needed to be focusing on my job, and yet here I am staring at him, thinking I wouldn’t mind being him being held against me at all.
2
My phone rings, an extra annoying jingle that informs me it’s my mom calling. I made sure my mom’s ringtone was as irritating as possible so I would be less likely to miss her calls and set off a county-wide panic.
“Hello?” I say, picking up.
“Geena!” My mom’s voice is always excited, no matter the situation. She has unlimited energy, and often I wonder where she gets it from. “Guess what I heard!”
“What did you hear?” I ask, humoring her.
“Ryder’s mom told me about your daring rescue at the river at the Fourth of July picnic!”
I frown, confused. “I told you about that already,” I say.
“Yes. But you didn’t tell me everything, like how you dove in to save that kid without thinking about anything else. Or how bravely you pulled him from the river. Ryder told his mom everything. Oh, honey, I’m just so proud of you!”
I sigh. I’m pretty sure Ryder told his mother nothing of the sort, but where my mom’s excitement is limitless, Ryder’s mother’s imagination knows no bounds. She and my mom together is just a whirlwind of excited fantasies, and it’s one that I’ve been carefully avoiding getting caught in for a while now.
“Well?” she prompts me.
“Well?” I ask, unsure what she wants.
“How does he look? He was always such a handsome young man.”
That’s the understatement of the year, I think to myself, grinding my teeth. “He looks well,” I answer, trying to sound neutral and uninterested. He really has no business looking as well as he does, to be honest. It’s not fair. I haven’t clapped eyes on this man for five years and now, a week later, I still can’t get him out of my mind.
“You’re off work this weekend, right?” my mom asks, her subject change like whiplash to the brain.
“Yes, I already told you,” I say.
“Just double checking you weren’t getting called in for extra shifts or something. And you’re definitely going to be at the cookout this weekend, right?”
“Uh—” I start.
“Ryder will be there,” she interrupts, her voice suggestive.
I frown even deeper at my phone. “Will he now?” I ask, forcing myself to be casual.
“You know, he’s such a nice young man…” Her voice trails off, and I understand her meaning.
“Mom, don’t, please,” I say, trying to put a pin in the idea that she is hatching.
“You know you had such a crush on him when you were younger, and well, since you’re older now it’s not like he’s too old
for you anymore.”
“He’s just a friend. We’ve known each other so long; I could never think of him that way.” I’m lying, of course. I’ve thought of him many ways over the years, but after the last time, I mostly thought of him with a spike of hurt pride stabbing through my chest.
“Well, I’m sure y’all will have stories to swap if nothing else.” My mom’s voice sounds a bit disappointed. I think my soul is a bit disappointed, as well.
She tells me she’s planning to go up to the cabin on the lake on Friday to check and make sure everything is okay, but that she wasn’t sure how she’s going to get all her errands done and do that as well. I offer to go up the cabin for her, freeing her up to finish her errands in peace. It’s a nice drive and honestly, whoever gets to the cabin first gets the pick of the five bedrooms. Bedroom picking isn’t something to be sneered at, and I want to make sure I can get my favorite. I have always loved the cozy loft above the kitchen. At night, the windows set into the ceiling allow a perfect view of stars unobstructed by city lights, and I spent many happy hours staring at those stars as a kid.
3
Friday dawns warm and humid, the kind of day in Tennessee that foretells of afternoon thunderstorms and definitely calls for a sundress if leaving the safety of air conditioning. I leave for the cabin around noon. It’ll take about an hour and a half to get up there but the drive is worth it. There’s nothing like Middle Tennessee on a sunny summer afternoon to clear one’s mind. I roll my windows down and open the sunroof on my jeep and let the hot summer wind tousle my already-unruly red hair.
