Teaser Tuesday! Mad Dog and Annie

Sighing, Anne Barclay nudged her cart along the narrow aisle. A front wheel jammed against the magazine rack, and when she jostled the cart to free it, her purse swung from her shoulder and knocked a candy display off the counter.

“Mo-om!” Mitchell wailed, embarrassed.

“Got it,” a rough male voice said behind her.

She turned, her face already hot. Maddox Palmer stood in line behind her, his hands steadying the box of candy dispensers and his hooded eyes amused.

Her mouth dried. Oh, no, she thought. She didn’t want to recognize the speeding of her heart or the flutter in her stomach. Feelings like that could turn on you. Men could turn on you.

“I’m sorry,” she blurted.

“No problem,” he said.

Mitchell was watching, his green eyes guarded. Growing up with the echoes and bumps-in-the-night that marked his parents’ marriage had made him sensitive to undertones.

She touched his forearm, hiding her own misgivings to reassure him. “My son, Mitchell. Mitchell, this is Mr. Palmer. He... I...” He shot that boy and the department fired him. “We went to school together,” she finished weakly.

Maddox nodded. “Hey.”

“Nice to meet you,” Mitchell mumbled politely.

Ann lifted a plastic gallon of milk onto the moving belt. “What are you doing here?”

Maddox grinned at her, that rare, invitation-to-trouble grin he’d turned on her in seventh grade, and she almost forgot to be afraid. “In the grocery store? Buying groceries.”

She glanced back at his cart. Beer, bread and cigarettes humped together with a roll of paper towels and a carton of orange juice. “You don’t eat much,” she observed.

“I can’t cook much.”

She smiled faintly. “That would explain the cereal and peanut butter.”

“I eat out a lot,” he said defensively.

“I imagine you have to.”

He shrugged. “Don’t you? Working in a restaurant and all.”

Val encouraged Ann to take her meals at Wild Thymes, but she resisted accepting charity. And she couldn’t afford anything else. She shook her head, letting her hair veil her expression. “I don’t work dinners very often. And I like to cook.”

“Yeah? What does she make?” he asked Mitchell.

Put on the spot, Mitchell shuffled. “Well...” R

ob would have snapped at her son to speak up. Maddox just waited, like one of those Catholic priests. Or a cop.

“Tacos,” Mitchell managed to say at last. “She makes good tacos. And spaghetti and hot dogs and stuff like that.”

Cheap meals. A far cry from the beef and three sides Rob had expected on the table every night. She waited for Maddox to make some disparaging comment.

“Sounds good. Maybe I should come to your house for dinner.”

Was he angling for an invitation? Was he—Ann stumbled over the thought—could he be lonely? She had a sudden memory of him at ten, his cool pose a front for his desperate longing to be noticed. She remembered his quick flush of gratification when she’d offered him a stick of gum, and the time he’d beat up Billy Ward for calling her “Chicken Legs.”

She concentrated on unloading her squashables from the cart, aware that the checkout girl had stopped snapping her gum to listen. What was a nice person supposed to do? “Oh, my dinners are nothing fancy. Nothing you would want.”

“Try me,” Maddox said softly.

His eyes met hers, hot and hooded and intense, and her insides constricted like they did when she was afraid, only this time it wasn’t with fear.

* * *

Hope your holidays are full of wonderful reading!

MAD DOG AND ANNIE, now available on Kindle and Nook

Teaser Tuesday! from MAD DOG AND ANNIE

Maddox watched Ann walk away from him—Annie, with her grave, sweet eyes and her small, serious smile and her skin so fine a look could bruise it—feeling like he’d just been socked in the chest. Enjoy his meal? He’d be lucky if he could even taste it.

Hell. He’d stayed away for twelve lousy years, and she was separated.

He slid out from behind the table, overtaking her before she reached the hostess station.

“How long?” he demanded.

She slapped a receipt on the spindle by the cash register, her movements quick and agitated. “What are you talking about?”

He caught her elbow. “How long since you and Rob broke up?”

Broke up. Shit. Now he even sounded like some high school moron.

She turned, her face white. “Let go of my arm.”

He loosened his grip. “Just tell me how long.”

“A year. Let go of me.”

Her eyes were dark and enormous, the pupils nearly swallowing the green. Damn. He was thirty-one years old, a veteran cop, a sergeant, and the sight of the woman could still reduce him to a raging lump of testosterone. He released her abruptly.

Beneath her neat white blouse, her breasts rose and fell with her breath. “I have work to do,” she said clearly. “Customers. Would you please leave me alone?”

Customers. Right. He glanced around the dining room. People were staring. Bag lady Baggett had practically fallen into her plate in her eagerness to eavesdrop. And over by the kitchen door, the Misses Minniton were glaring at him as if he’d firebombed their garage sixteen years ago instead of merely throwing up into their rosebushes after drinking too much beer one hot August night.

“Sure thing, darlin’. You don’t have to ask me twice.”

Oh, now, that was cool. He sauntered back to his table, feeling like an idiot, and sat with his back to the wall so he could keep an eye on the room and on Annie. Gladys Baggett met his gaze and smiled, very tentatively. He stared back until she reddened beneath her makeup and looked away.

“Catfish sandwich,” the waitress said, sliding it expertly in front of him. “Will there be anything else?”

Her smile, wide and white against her honey-gold skin, suggested there could be. Not everybody in Cutler remembered him as the town screw-up. Of course, the waitress probably didn’t remember him at all. She must have been skipping rope on the playground when he’d left home.

“No. Thanks.”

He picked up the sandwich, looking over the thick sliced bread at Annie seating guests on the other side of the room. From a distance, she looked sixteen again, too skinny and so pretty with her quick, neat movements and shy smile. Her smooth light brown hair still brushed her shoulders when she walked, and she still had the nervous habit of tucking it behind one ear. From a distance, he couldn’t see the faint lines bracketing her mouth or the wariness in her eyes.

She didn’t come near his table again. Well, she wouldn’t. She wouldn’t want anything to do with him, any more than she had in high school. His fault, he acknowledged, coming on to her like a gorilla on Viagra. Again.

The catfish tasted like paste in his mouth. He needed a cigarette. Dropping a couple bills on the table, he made his way to the cash register, choosing a moment when Ann was ringing up another customer and couldn’t avoid him.

“Annie.”

She took his receipt and busily punched some buttons on the register. “How was your lunch?”

“Fine. Look, I—”

“I’ll tell Val. She’ll be glad you enjoyed it.” She handed him his change, not quite meeting his gaze.

He was suddenly, unreasonably ticked off. Maybe once upon a time, in a dumb effort to win his father’s notice, he had run wild. But he’d never done anything to make Ann afraid of him. Only that one October night... And he’d stayed away from her after that, hadn’t he?

“Maybe I’ll be back for dinner,” he said.

She looked at him directly then, and her eyes that he remembered as the color of spring grass were cool and sharp as a broken beer bottle. There was a bump in the bridge of her nose he didn’t remember at all.

“We’re closed for dinner Monday through Thursday,” she said. “But I can make a reservation for the weekend if you like.”

“Never mind. I might not be around then.”

Just for a second, her pretty lips parted, and his heart revved in his chest like a dirt-track race car. And then she hit him with her fake, hostessy smile, and he knew he’d been imagining that brief moment of regret.

“That’s too bad,” she said.

“I’ll get over it,” he drawled. So, they both were lying. He wasn’t about to admit his breath still backed up in his lungs every time he looked at her. “Goodbye, Maddox.”

She didn’t have to tell him twice.

* * *

Now available for Nook and Kindle

Teaser Tuesday! Mad Dog and Annie

Snatching a couple of dirty glasses, she got busy, got moving, got her mind off Rob’s latest threats and Mitchell’s outgrown sneakers and the things she did and should have done with Maddox Palmer back in high school.

No regrets, she reminded herself. Figure out what has to be done now, and do it. After nine years of having the spunk and the tar whaled out of her, initiative still came hard. But she was learning, she thought with satisfaction. In the past year, she’d had to learn.

The cheery little bell over the door summoned her back to the hostess station. She grabbed a menu and a smile to welcome the new customer and then stopped dead and let both of them slide.

It was him. Maddox Palmer, in the flesh. In jeans, she corrected herself, and a tan T-shirt that almost matched the color of his skin. She squeezed the menu tighter. This time the Cutler grapevine was right. He was handsomer than ever.

He had to be over thirty now, big and broad and somehow harder. Solid. His face had a lot more lines. Well, he was three years older than her, though only two years ahead in school. He’d been kept back in first grade, she remembered, the year his mama died. He had thick brown hair that his new short cut couldn’t tame and hooded eyes that still saw right through her, and a juvenile-delinquent slouch that made him look tough and ready to react to whatever punch life threw at him. He dangled a cigarette between two fingers of his right hand, and he still had that not-a-dimple in his chin that tempted every good girl to press a finger to it.

Ann damned the way her heart speeded up just at the sight of him. She’d given up Big, Bad and Dangerous to Know almost a year ago.

He smiled crookedly. “Hey, Annie.”

Like they were just passing in the hall in high school. Like he’d never shared gum or secrets with her on the school bus or filched cookies from her mother’s kitchen or stood up for her on the playground.

Like he’d never grappled with her in the back seat of his father’s unmarked police car and then walked right past her locker the next day.

Well, he could take his “hey” and...and... Her racing brain stumbled. Nice Southern girls simply did not think that way. Take his hay and stack it, she amended silently.