“That little bastard’s nineteen, and he defaced my poster. Nobody defaces my poster.” Roman gestured at the wall, at a picture that was completely covered in black spray-paint. A spray-paint can lay underneath it, along with a backpack, probably abandoned by the teenager. Great. So Roman was some kind of musician or something and the kid had sprayed over his band poster. Poor, poor baby.
“That must have really upset you. Are you going to cry? I’ve got some tissues in my purse,” Chelsea said, pretending to root around in there solicitously.
“You know, I like you.” Roman was looking at her speculatively now. “I like a woman who gives me a hard time. If you know what I mean.” He favored her with a slow, sexy grin, and stood there, thumbs hooked in his belt loops, waiting for her to melt into a puddle of lust.
Chelsea remained unmelted.
Oh, her loins were heating, all right, but her mind was sending stern signals downward: “No! Bad!”
“Yes, I do, unfortunately,” she said, frost dripping from every word. “Now let me give you a word of advice. Next time, pick on someone your own size, or I swear to God I’ll shift and we’ll throw down, and you’ll find out what kind of crazy bitches they breed in backwoods Wisconsin. Toodles!” Chelsea wiggled her fingers at him and turned and sauntered off.
“Toodles?” Roman said in astonishment.
The crowd of merchants, standing at the end of the alleyway now, watched her walk back to her car with Pepper trotting along behind her.
“Oh,” Elmer Winkleman, owner of the Grocery Depot and current mayor of Silver Peak, said happily. “I think we’ve found the solution to our problem.”
Chapter Four
“Let me get this straight,” Chelsea said again. She looked from the mayor, to Lorena, to Susan, to Calvin Castleberry, the president of the Chamber of Commerce. They had pounced on her as she was walking Pepper, several hours after her confrontation with Roman, and dragged her into the town hall, telling her it was a matter of great urgency.
She sat in an uncomfortable folding chair, surrounded by a half circle of the Silver Peak pack’s most important citizens. They were all staring at her with their hands folded in their laps and expressions of great eagerness.
“You want me to be your sheriff.” She said it very slowly. “You want me to enforce the law. And you understand that I have no law enforcement experience whatsoever. Half the time, I can’t even spell ‘Sheriff’ right. Is it two Rs or two Fs? Who the hell knows? I went to the Culinary Institute of Wisconsin, with a specialty in baking, and I know how to make twenty flavors of cake pops. Baking is what I’m good at. And yet you want to deputize me.”
“Exactly!” Mayor Winkleman beamed, nodding vigorously. He seemed delighted that she was finally getting it. “You know, it was very commonly done in the 1800s. The local citizens needed someone to enforce the law, so a committee of concerned citizens would select an appropriate candidate to help keep their territory safe.”
That was true, and in many ways shifters, living on their vast, ungoverned tracts of land and making their own laws, were like the pioneers of the Old West.
However, the fact that shifters were still working the kinks out of their legal system didn’t mean they should be drafting some totally inexperienced private citizen like herself to be sheriff.
“Wouldn’t law enforcement be the kind of thing an Alpha would normally do?”
Mayor Winkleman let out a disappointed sigh. Why couldn’t she just take the job already?
“We don’t have an Alpha. He left town.” He cleared his throat. “When the paper mill folded.” He didn’t meet her eyes when he said it.
“Or the beta?”
“Also left town.”
“Or anyone else in town who actually knows the pack members and the territory?” “But that’s why you’d be so good at it. You don’t know anybody, so you’d be impartial,” Calvin Castleberry wheedled. “And you said you were looking to be a member of a pack. You’d be a registered member of our pack.”
Well, there was that. Although she had the feeling that there was some kind of catch to this; she just hadn’t figured out what yet.
“How much does it pay?”
The mayor looked at the floor. Not a good sign.
“Right now, with the town about to declare bankruptcy, five hundred dollars a month—” He saw the look on her face and quickly added, “Plus free room and board. You can live in the house at 537 Scenic View as long as you’re sheriff, and you can also have a fifty-dollar-a-week grocery allowance at my store.”