Run Wild With Me

by Sandra Chastain

  Andrea handed Buck the copy of the will and walked through the connecting door to the city-hall office to escape his questions. She was still angry with Buck for assuming that she belonged with Ed.

  Two water-payment envelopes had been slipped through the pay slot in the outside door. Andrea turned her ledger to the proper page and posted the payments.

  “The boy’s got a claim all right,” Buck called from the other room. “An out-of-date driver’s license and a birth certificate. Seems to be in order. Lists his father as a Granger Farley, place of birth unknown. That name sounds familiar.”

  Andrea turned out the light and walked back into Buck’s office. “I don’t think we have to worry about Sam’s father. Sam was named for Farley Granger, a handsome movie star in the old fifties movies. Millie was a fan. Sam doesn’t know who his father was.”

  “Pretty personal conversation you must have had. Do you think Sam’ll pay the taxes?”

  “No. I don’t think so.” Andrea sat down on a bench by the door, fanning herself listlessly as she watched a small black dog lick a half-eaten ice-cream cone on the sidewalk.

  “What makes you so sure, Andy?”

  “He walks into town, carrying his belongings on his back. Says he’s a carpenter who likes to roam the country, picking up the jobs that pay the most. Everything about the man is temporary.” Andrea found herself remembering his eyes, those dark eyes that teased and seemed to make a joke out of everything, then covered his emotions with a frown.

  She sprang restlessly to her feet and pushed the screen door open. “Think I’ll walk down to the post office and get the mail,” she called over her shoulder. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

  “Don’t be long,” Buck agreed vaguely. “I’m meeting Otis at the café.”

  Andrea felt Buck watching her as she crossed the street, nodding to Brad Dixon. If he was reading the widow Tolbert’s meter, it had been moved into the barber shop.

  Andrea picked up the mail and started back down the sidewalk, coming to a stop when she spotted Buck already in the truck with Otis Parker.

  “Eh, Andy,” Buck called out guiltily, “I’m going with Otis to check on his brakes before we eat.”

  “Good idea,” Andrea agreed seriously. “I’d rather eat Louise’s fried chicken and biscuits too. Need a ride back?”

  “Nah. Don’t worry ’bout that, Andy,” Otis said, pumping the truck’s brakes vigorously, “I’m going to run on over to Cottonboro and pick up a kit to rebuild these consarned brakes. I’ll pick Buck up—no trouble.”

  She laughed. “Uh huh. I’m glad they didn’t put you in traction, Pop, or Otis would have to push you down the highway in a hospital bed.”

  It was past one o’clock when she heard the screen door open. If one more person happened by the police station to ask about the “wild-looking” stranger, she’d put her bullets back in her gun. Andrea sighed and turned around.

  “Hello, darlin’. I’m going to give the future governor a break. I’m going to take you to lunch instead.”

  Andrea groaned. Sam Farley, again. He was leaning lazily on the counter that separated the reception area from the office and cells. She wasn’t prepared for this. She hadn’t expected him.

  “What are you doing here?” Andrea asked.

  “I came to apologize,” he said softly. “The last thing I want right now is trouble with the law in your town.”

  Andrea took a deep breath and felt all her resistance melt away. They were three feet apart, gazing at each other wistfully. She didn’t know about him being in trouble with the law, but with those dark eyes scorching her with hot intensity, the law was in big trouble of her own.

  Andrea was glad the counter was between them. They were in the middle of the Arcadia Police Department, it was high noon, and she was being faced down by her own private outlaw.

  “I’m on duty, Sam,” she said quietly.

  “And police officers on duty don’t eat lunch? Look, we don’t have to go in the patrol car. Let’s just walk to the café down the street.”

  “I appreciate your apology, but I don’t need this constant upheaval in my life. It used to be calm and serene before you came to town. Why are you doing this?”

  He looked confused. “The truth is, I thought taking you to lunch would be fun.”

  “Fun? I think you like your life to be chaotic. You need the challenge of the game, don’t you. Why?”

  Why indeed? Sam asked himself, not at all sure. He’d walked into town under a broiling sun, in the middle of lush, green, humid country where hardly a breath of air stirred, all to see this woman. He truly didn’t know why he’d come. All he knew was that his pulse was racing, and it wasn’t from the heat.

  When he’d seen her in her pristine uniform earlier that morning, he’d understood why women always fell for cops. He was the civilian, and all he wanted to do was bend down and kiss the chief of police. There was something so right about her, this woman staring stormily at him with summer eyes flecked with gold.

  Lanky and lush, she was the most sensual woman he’d ever met. It didn’t even matter that she looked ready to strangle him. She was firm in her resistance and her duty, and he couldn’t figure out what kept him from giving up.

  Andrea recaptured her composure. “Get in the police car, Mr. Farley, and I’ll take you home—again.” She strode past him and waited in the doorway. “I’m not going to have lunch with you because that would give an official status to our relationship.”

  “You mean a man and woman can’t just have lunch without making a statement of intent. Come on, Chief, this is the nineties.”

  “This woman can’t, Sam.” Andrea clenched her fists in quiet frustration.

  “Hmm.” He grinned. “What will the good citizens of Arcadia, not to mention your father, think when they see you and me drive off in the patrol car?”

  “You’re learning,” she said with a grimace. “By this time tonight, the story will be that I spend more time with you than I do on my job.”

  “Well, I would be a lot more fun.” He stepped so close to her that she could feel his breath caressing her face.

  “Fun? Stop it, Sam. What are you trying to do to me, ruin my reputation?”

  “Aw, Chief.” He grinned wickedly and whispered, “Don’t you ever want to shake this town up by doing something completely outrageous? Let go, Stormy. Run wild with me.”

  Andrea had always heard the expression “dancing eyes,” but until now, she’d never seen them. Until now she’d managed to avoid looking at Sam. In the sunlight she saw that his eyes weren’t black—they were the rich brown color of boiling cane syrup, just as it was ready to be poured into the jar. The disquieting thing was, they were just as hot.

  “Get in the car, Farley,” she snapped. “I live here. Reputations are important in Arcadia. You seem determined to ruin mine.”

  “Sorry. I don’t want to cause you any more trouble than I already have.” He let himself be pushed away, then strolled to the car. “In the future I’ll be more subtle.”

  “You, subtle? I’d like to see that.”

  “You’re going to. Want me to get behind the iron screen so you’ll look official?”

  “Gracious no. By the time I got to the city limits, Agnes would be inundated by people wanting to know who my prisoner was. Just get in, Sam.”

  Sam complied, watching Andrea settle into the driver’s seat. All of this game playing was new to him. Why couldn’t his grandmother have lived in Chicago? The only reaction they would have gotten from the neighbors there would have been relief that he was in the police car instead of one of them.

  He wasn’t sure what he’d been thinking about, walking into town to apologize to a woman he barely knew for having done something to displease her. Something he was dead sure that she secretly welcomed. He’d never cared before.

  When he was with Andrea, there was a warmth that made him more aware of the lonely life he’d lived. Andrea, in some bizarre way, was mixed up with
all these conflicting thoughts of home and family, and that was making him crazy.

  “Look, Chief Fleming, I am sincerely sorry if I offended you last night and again this morning. But I’m not sorry that I kissed you.” He paused. “And I’m pretty sure that I’m going to do it again. So if you want to protect your reputation, we’d better get going.”

  Andrea stared at him desperately for a moment, then started the engine and drove away, feeling the censuring gaze of the old men sitting on the bench in front of the drugstore boring like nails into 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 it’s cooler. The sun’s straight overhead now, and you’ll get overheated.”

  “I’m used to the outdoor heat. I’m a carpenter, remember? Some of the places I’ve worked got to a hundred degrees in the shade. But I’d rather be inside with you. I like the indoor kind of heat too.” His eyes sparkled as he rose lazily and followed her inside.

  Andrea looked at him blankly for a moment. He was doing it again, wrapping her in some kind of visual electric blanket fueled by the current in his eyes. She turned around, walked inside, and picked up the phone. “Agnes, ring the station for me.”

  “I thought you were at the station, Andy,” Agnes said in surprise.

  “No, I … came home for lunch.”

  There was a click and a ring, and … “Police station. Buck here.”

  “Buck. Thought I’d better let you know where I am.”

  “Good idea, since I was told by at least two people that you left with Sam Farley.” His displeasure changed into concern. “You okay?”

  “Sure. I’m at the house if you need me.”

  “Now, just a minute …”

  “Bye, Buck. I won’t be long.” Andrea hung up quickly.

  Sam was wandering, curious, around the living room. “You leave your windows wide open,” he remarked. “Incredible.”

  He liked Andrea Fleming’s house. It was warm and happy. The furnishings were an odd assortment of comfortably mismatched pieces. The inside walls were tongue-and-grove pine, stained a soft, creamy white. The hardwood floors were polished and covered with an assortment of braided rugs of soft greens and pinks and browns. The fireplace was large with a marble inset and a carved-wood mantelpiece, holding a tall windup clock with a sun and a moon on its face.

  In one corner was an upright piano with an arrangement of family pictures on top. He wandered over and examined them. There was one of Andrea at about eight, with a bicycle and a skinned elbow. A high school photograph showed her wearing a basketball uniform, holding a trophy. She was a woman even then, with breasts that strained against the front of her jersey, and firm long legs.

  “Do you live alone?” he asked curiously as he caught sight of a man’s hat on the back of the kitchen door.

  “Of course not. I thought you knew. I live with Buck.”

  He arched one brow at her in surprise. “You still live at home, with Daddy?”

  “Of course, where else would I live?” Andrea’s answer was one of curiosity, not defense.

  “I see. Well, that must be an awful strain on the governor, having to pass muster every time he sees you. Why do you call him Buck?”

  He was making her feel uncomfortable about living at home, something that had always been normal to her. What did he think she wanted to do that she couldn’t? She closed off that train of thought. What she wanted to do was something she wouldn’t even allow herself to think about.

  “Everybody in Arcadia calls my father Buck, and I grew up doing the same thing.”

  She turned and walked down the hallway and into the kitchen, switching on the small window air conditioner. She wasn’t leaving Sam. She was walking away from … any need for discretion.

  Sam followed.

  “I guess I ticked him off this morning with my answers to his questions,” Sam commented. “But I didn’t know he was your dad. And I’m not exactly comfortable with a man carrying a gun. I’m sorry.” He pulled up a stool and sat down at the counter, watching Andrea work.

  “He’ll survive.”

  “I know. It’s me I’m worried about.”

 
From the refrigerator Andrea took a head of lettuce and tore it into small pieces, filling two small wooden bowls. She added a scoop of chicken salad to the lettuce and placed a fan of wheat crackers around the small plate beneath the bowl. Then she went back to the refrigerator for an ice tray and a quart jar of tea. She filled the glasses with ice and tea. A ceiling fan circulated the cooling air, but a sheen of perspiration glistened on her forehead.

  Sam’s statement that it was he that he was worried about still hung in the silence. “You?” she finally said. “I can’t imagine anything worrying you. You’re a man who lives his life on the edge. I couldn’t do that—without falling over.”

  “You think that I don’t? Well, you’re wrong. I’ve done that, and I climbed back out again and moved on. It’s the challenge that keeps life interesting, darlin’ ”

  “Maybe, but I couldn’t take the constant battle. I don’t put disaster behind me that easily.”

  “Maybe I don’t either anymore.”

  “Maybe we both need to change our image,” Andrea said unsteadily. “I hope you don’t mind having a salad for lunch,” she said, carrying the dishes to a shaded porch off the kitchen. “It’s too hot for anything heavy.”

  “Uh, no. A salad is fine.” She was right about the heat, but Sam didn’t think either a salad or the air conditioner would cool off either of them. He followed her and sat down at a small table covered with a checked cloth. “Tell me about yourself, Chief. How’d you get to be the head honcho?”

  “Buck broke his leg in a wreck, chasing a speeder. I was appointed to the job as an economy measure. I’m already on the payroll.”

  “How come the police car wasn’t wrecked?”

  “Buck was driving our Bronco—on his day off.”

  “And you,” Sam finally asked. “What do you do when you aren’t being a police officer?”

  “Nothing exciting, I’m afraid. I run city hall, collect water bills, pay bills, whatever needs doing. I’m just a simple country girl.”

  “I doubt there’s anything simple about you, Chief.”

  They ate quietly for a time. Only the movement of a determined bumble bee buzzing around the flower beds beyond the porch broke the stillness.