Strawberry Hill

by Catherine Anderson

  Okay, Erin. What’s it going to be? You going to roll over and show your belly? Or will you fight back? She hated when she heard her dad’s voice inside her head. It was a sound bite from the past, one that she needed to ignore, but her compulsion to measure up in Gordon De Laney’s eyes had never diminished. Besides, she hadn’t been for a run in two days, and it wouldn’t hurt her to pit herself against a mountain trail with more inclines than declines. It also stuck in her craw to be bested by a cowboy with rocks for brains. Only a dim-witted man thought that he could ignore a cop and get away with it.

  She bent her knees, straightened, flexed her legs, and then stretched to plant her palms on the ground. Then she jogged in circles to do a halfhearted warm-up. Ready, set, go! That dingledorf probably thought she would walk back to the trailhead and just call in for help, that when and if another deputy found him, he’d be able to lie his way out of trouble. Not happening. Back in Washington, she’d run marathons, not the sissy kind where they shaved off miles for participant glory, but actual marathons of twenty-six miles. She’d also completed the Ironman Triathlon twice, not to win but just to prove she could do it. She’d placed ninth in her category once and sixth the second time, earning the right to be called an Ironman. They were brutal events. She’d trained for a year prior to each one, and she’d always feel proud that she’d done it. Mostly because her dad was impressed, she supposed, but she didn’t want to think about that.

  Erin set a running pace she knew she could maintain. The cowboy had a head start, but she felt confident that she was going at a faster clip than those horses, which were undoubtedly carrying maximum loads. She’d catch up, and the incredulous expression on his face would be all the reward she needed. He probably had her pegged as a city slicker who’d get lost out here if she left the trail, someone soft and terrified of all the big predators that lived in a wilderness area. In a way, that was true. It was difficult for her to get her bearings when she couldn’t see the sky, and going nose to nose with a cougar or bear wasn’t high on her list. But she was armed, an expert shot, and it wasn’t in her character to back down from a challenge.

  She’d gone about a mile when her boots started to rub blisters on her toes and heels. When she’d started this run, she hadn’t thought about her footwear. Riding boots weren’t made for long-distance jogging. When she stepped on loose rocks, the heels tended to wrench sideways, and apparently she’d chosen too loose a fit, because her feet were slopping around in them. Damn. Oh, well, I’ve endured worse and won’t let blisters stop me. I’ve got a cowboy to catch.

  Erin fell and did a face-plant going down one hill. Aside from eating a little dirt, she would have been fine if not for the belt-clip radio that dug into her hip bone with crushing force and left her hobbling along until she ran her way past the pain. The experience spiked her temper, and she was fuming when she finally spilled out of the woods into another clearing. The cowboy had stopped at a creek to water and rest his horses. While the horses drank, he stood off to one side with his back to her. His stance indicated that he was taking a leak. For some reason that irked her even more, possibly because she needed to go herself and hadn’t taken the time to stop.

  Blistered feet screaming with every step she took, she strode across the grassy flat. “Hey, you!” she yelled. “I issued you a lawful order to halt! This may be a wilderness area, but you can’t ignore a law enforcement officer and get away with it!”

  It infuriated Erin that he didn’t so much as flinch at the sound of her voice. She was finished with this game. His dog came running across the grass toward her, which alarmed her. What if it was vicious? Equal parts black and white, it was a beautiful canine, and when it reached her, it only ran in circles around her moving feet.

  As she walked up behind the man, she was too pissed off to care if a certain part of his male anatomy was protruding from the fly of his Wranglers. She moved in close and thumped him on the back with the heel of her right hand. That got his attention.

  He whirled around and decked her.

  Erin never saw his fist coming, but upon impact, the blow sent her flying backward, and she landed on her back with a whoosh as all the air rushed from her lungs. Everything went black, and then she saw bright spots—little orbs of sparkly iridescence that bounced around like night stars doing a ballet.

  “Oh, God!” she heard him say. “I’m sorry. Are you okay?”

  Erin was okay enough to take him apart with her bare hands the moment she could see again. She blinked. Tried to focus. His sun-burnished face swam in and out. Eyes as blue as laser beams. Chiseled features. A square jaw. Rocks for Brains was handsome.

  She lay there, still too stunned to move. Finally her lungs hitched and grabbed for air.

  “I didn’t hear you walk up behind me,” he said. “I thought I was alone out here. When you shoved me, I swung around and caught you with my elbow.”

  Your elbow, my ass. No elbow on earth carries that much of a wallop. Erin worked her mouth, swallowed, and managed to push out one word. “Bullshit.”

  Sheriff Adams would scowl about her city-cop language being used in his backwoods county, where he insisted most people were still old-fashioned and wouldn’t say shit if they had a mouthful, but she was beyond caring at the moment about the virgin ears of little old ladies in polyester slacks. Her face hurt so much she couldn’t tell where he’d nailed her. Lifting a hand that felt disembodied, she touched the spot that throbbed the most. Cheekbone. She’d have a shiner for a couple of weeks that not even sunglasses would hide. And the other deputies, all but one of them male, would never let her hear the end of it.

  Erin rolled toward him to get an elbow wedged underneath herself. Never turn your back on a suspect. As she struggled to sit up, he curled an arm around her shoulders to help her. She wanted to knock it away, but it was all she could do not to flop over backward.

  “I’m sure you know it’s not okay to touch a police officer,” she said.

  He withdrew his support, and she nearly toppled. He shot out his arm to brace it against her shoulder blades again. “If you charge me with assault for trying to steady you, you’re not a very nice cop.”

  At the moment, she didn’t feel like being nice. She squinted against the stabbing pain to meet his penetrating gaze. And then, after really looking at him again, she steeled herself against a purely feminine jolt of awareness. He wasn’t merely handsome. She’d had girlfriends in Seattle who’d described incredibly hot men as “sex on a stick,” but this guy was—well, she couldn’t think how to describe him. Completely unexpected, that was for sure. There were some really good-looking guys in Mystic Creek, but their numbers were limited, and this cowboy had them so outclassed with rugged masculinity that they weren’t even in the same league. Maybe he was from another area. After working in Mystic Creek for nearly a year, she had at least seen most of the residents from a distance and didn’t think he was a hometown boy. Hair the light, golden color of a wheat field. Strong, carved features overlaid with skin darkened to caramel by the sun. A full mouth that still managed to look firm. Even the way he wore his Gus-style Stetson, tipped slightly forward to shade his eyes, was sexier than all get-out.

  “I’ll pass on charging you with assault, because you may not have meant to hit me, but you’re going down for evading a police officer.”

  His lips twitched, and his eyes crinkled at the corners as if he were suppressing a smile. “For what?”

  “You heard me.” Erin straightened her spine to put some distance between the brace of his arm and her back. Her head had cleared, and she felt almost ready to stand up. “I yelled for you to halt, and you ignored me.”

  With a fluid motion, he pushed to his feet, and then he began unbuttoning his worn, light blue shirt. When the front plackets had parted to reveal a large V of his chest, which glistened with a shimmer of sweat and gold hair, she started to feel nervous. He was a tall and well-muscled man.
Normally she would feel confident in her ability to hold her own against him, but nothing about this situation was normal. She reminded herself that she was armed, with both a nine-millimeter Glock and a Taser on her belt, but her head felt so swimmy she wasn’t sure she could even stand up. The dog whined and moved in to sniff her shirt and then her cheek.

  Upper torso now bare, the cowboy strode back to the stream and pushed the horses aside as he hunkered to plunge the shirt into the water. When he stood, the garment streamed water. Without wringing it out, he walked back to her. With every shift of his narrow hips, she felt her heartbeat flutter. He stopped a few feet from her, gathered the blue cloth in his fists, and squeezed a stream of water from its folds.

  “For your cheek,” he said as he dropped to one knee beside her. Before Erin could protest, he pressed the drippy folds of cloth to the side of her face. The icy coldness felt so good that she forgot why she’d nearly objected. “I really am sorry,” he told her. “I startle easily.”

  He spoke softly and slowly—the flow of his words deliberate with slight pauses in between. Erin held the makeshift compress against her throbbing face. “I can only assume you knew my horse took off and you didn’t think I’d be able to catch you on foot. Your mistake. If I startled you, it was your own fault for ignoring a law enforcement officer.”

  She expected him to deny the charge, but he said nothing. She angled a glance at him. He studied her with what appeared to be unruffled calm.

  “You will be cited for that,” she added.

  He finally reacted by arching only one eyebrow, a feat that Erin had never been able to master. “I’m sorry. I didn’t catch everything you said.”

  Erin bristled. She’d had enough of his innocent act. “Just like you didn’t catch it when I chased you on foot and screamed at the top of my lungs for you to stop?”

  He nudged up the brim of his Stetson. “I didn’t hear you,” he told her.

  “Are you stone deaf?” she popped back.

  At the question, his eyes went deadpan and his jaw muscle began to tic. Erin removed the wad of cloth from her cheek and plopped it on his upraised knee. Then she struggled to gain her feet, jerking her arm away when he tried to help her. The meadow around her undulated like a gigantic green lake for a moment. She could only pray she didn’t lose her balance, because her legs felt as insubstantial as overcooked rice noodles.

  “Let’s get this show on the road,” she said with as much authority as she could manage.

  “What show would that be?” he asked.

  “I have to check your hay. As if you don’t know that. And that’s another count against you. Any experienced outfitter is aware that it’s against the law to enter a wilderness area with hay that contains toxic weeds.”

  He did the eyebrow thing again, arching only one like a golden wing. “You mean noxious weeds? Yes, I’m aware of the law. But most wardens set up a checkpoint along the trail, which you did not.”

  “Oh, yes, I did.”

  “Where? I saw no one out here until you sneaked up behind me and punched my shoulder.”

  Erin narrowed her eyes. “I did not punch you. I tapped your shoulder.” He was trying to turn the tables and make all of this her fault. Well, she wasn’t about to play that game. She had left the trail to water Butterscotch and sit in the shade, but even if he hadn’t seen her, he should have heard her yelling. She turned and set off walking toward the horses, praying her legs wouldn’t buckle. She heard him fall in behind her, the impact of his boots on the grass creating a slower cadence than her own. The packhorses were milling about now and happily grazing. She stopped beside a white equine that looked as if it had been splattered with black paint. Turning toward the cowboy, she placed a hand against a huge, rectangular shape wrapped in canvas that was strapped to a frame on the animal’s back. “Hay bale. Correct?”

  “Yes. I manty them up to make sure they don’t get wet.”

  “I’ll need you to remove this one and unwrap it so I can have a look.”

  He shrugged and stepped over to do as she asked. Erin, standing beside him, was taken off guard when he loosened the knots with a few quick tugs and the manty fell toward them. She staggered backward to avoid getting knocked off her feet. She wondered if he’d done it on purpose.

  He bent to unfurl the canvas, which sent the hay bale rolling and forced her to dance out of its path again. “Please, sir, cut the twine so I can examine the forage.”

  His piercing blue eyes widened. “Why do I have to cut the twine?”

  “So I can check the hay for weeds.”

  He settled his fists on his hips, shifted his weight to one long leg, and bent his opposite knee. It didn’t escape her notice that his stance was one that frustrated males had been assuming with women since the beginning of time. His expression conveyed exasperation and incredulity. “You’re kidding. Right? Just look at the twine. It’s clearly certified.”

  Erin cast a glance at the hay. She saw no tags or anything.

  As if guessing her thoughts, he said, “Look at the twine color.”

  “What about it?”

  His gaze grew intense. “In Oregon, special purple and yellow twine is issued to weed-free hay producers to mark their bales as being certified weed free. Who sent you out here to do this job, anyway?”

  Sheriff Adams had said nothing about looking at the baling twine. And even though she’d had almost no time to read the manual that now felt as if it were burning through her uniform pants, she’d seen no mention of different colors of twine being used to mark safe hay. No way was she going to look at the book now. He’d think she was a complete idiot, and it was her responsibility to maintain an air of professionalism at all times while she performed her job. She straightened her shoulders.

  “Please, cut the twine, sir.” She kept her voice even as she issued that order a second time.

  “If I cut that twine, the hay is going to fall apart. Once that happens, I can’t transport it to the base camp. That means it’ll go to waste, and it isn’t exactly cheap. In addition to that, it means that we’ll be a bale short on feed. My boss is not going to be happy.”

  “It isn’t my job to please your boss.”

  “Fair enough. I’ll be sure to relay that message to him.” He reached for the knife that rode in a scabbard attached to his belt. “Don’t shoot me. I’m just going to cut the twine and then put the weapon away.”

  Erin bit down hard on her back teeth. Did he really think she was a trigger-happy rookie, or was he just being sarcastic to piss her off? As she’d requested, he cut the binding, and then, just as he had predicted, the hay popped free and spilled in sections over the grass. Erin stepped back, caught her balance, and then leaned forward.

  “Where’s your weed detector?” he asked.

  Weed detector? Erin wanted to cuss, and not in a ladylike way. She wanted to let fly like a dyed-in-the-wool city cop who’d been trained by and worked with male officers who thought the F word was a perfectly acceptable sentence enhancer. As one of the few female officers in her Washington district, she’d learned to talk like the men in order to fit in, and now it was difficult for her to break the habit.

  She straightened, met the cowboy’s smoldering gaze, and said, “Sheriff Adams said nothing to me about a weed detector.”

  His expression stony, he replied, “To be absolutely certain there are no noxious weeds in that hay, you’ll need a detector. What do you think, that they’ll wave hello at you?”

  Erin wanted to kick something. From start to finish, this unexpected assignment had been a shit show. She’d had no time to read the manual. She’d never been on a horse. She didn’t know one kind of hay from another. It was bad enough that the sheriff had sent her up here to do a job she hadn’t been trained to perform, but learning now that he’d failed to provide her with a necessary piece of equipment irked her even more.

&n
bsp; “I’ll have to make do. I have no detector.” As she spoke, she noticed that the corner of his mouth twitched, much as if he were struggling not to laugh. Her stomach knotted. “There’s no such thing. Is there?”

  He lifted one well-padded and sun-bronzed shoulder. “No, but you bought into it for a second, which tells me you don’t know jack shit about doing this job.”

  Erin felt heat inch up her neck. When it pooled in her cheeks, the bruise below her eye started to throb again. She bent over to examine the hay. The cowboy was right; no weeds waved hello. She glimpsed stuff that might be dried weeds, but she was no expert, and she wouldn’t pretend she was in order to save face. Instead she straightened, pulled out her citation tablet, and began filling out the form.

  “You’re writing me up?”

  At the question, Erin met his gaze. “Absolutely. I’ll let the hay pass, but you ignored a lawful order from a law officer to halt.”

  “I said I didn’t hear you.”

  “And I don’t believe you.” As she held his gaze, she studiously tried to ignore how beautifully sculpted his upper torso was. She saw bare chests a lot when she worked out at the local gym and was no stranger to striated abdomens, well-roped shoulders, and impressively pumped biceps. But this guy—well, he definitely had a gorgeous physique. Well muscled, but lean and streamlined, with none of the overblown, rubbery look common to bodybuilders. “As I said earlier, you’d have to be stone deaf not to have heard me yelling.”