Ginger followed him silently out to his patrol car, where he held open the door for her and let her in, and they pulled away, heading towards town.
They drove in uncomfortable silence for several minutes until Ginger couldn’t stand it any longer. He un-nerved her like nobody else ever had.
“Realistically, I know that you don’t need me to be your assistant,” she blurted. “You just need to save face after I turned you down at the dance last night. So how exactly do you want to do that? You want me to follow you around and act deferential? Like walk 10 paces behind you, or hang my head and act submissive or something? I just don’t know how it’s done out here.”
“How it’s done out here?” he echoed, looking baffled.
“I guess I don’t know how anything’s done out here. In New York, if I turned a guy down for a dance it wouldn’t be a big deal. I had no idea that it would cause such a huge stir here.”
“How about polite and respectful? You think you could pull that off?” he sounded exasperated.
“Yes,” she bit out evenly. “I’m pretty sure I can manage it.”
He fell silent, and they kept driving. She wanted to ask him what her duties were, but she didn’t seem to be able to speak without unintentionally needling him, so she kept her mouth shut.
Sitting so close to him was terribly disconcerting. He oozed sexuality even when he was doing nothing more than driving and staring at the road ahead of him; it was like he’d been dipped in a vat of pheromones. She didn’t want to stare at him directly, so she pretended to look out the window while she watched him in the side mirror.#p#分页标题#e#
His upper lip was curved like a cupid’s bow. The rational part of her brain knew that pretty much every attractive woman in Blue Moon County had sampled the sheriff’s candy; the irrational part of her brain just wanted to trace that curve with her tongue.
The radio crackled to life. “Car 11, there’s a Code 33 taking place at the Wishing Well Motel, repeat, Code Five at the Wishing Well,” the dispatcher’s voice said.
“I’m right around the corner, I’ll take it. On my way, ETA one minute,” he said, and activated the car’s lights and siren.
“What’s a Code 33?” she asked, as they quickly turned down a narrow side road.
“Burglary.”
“Somebody’s burglarizing the wishing well?”
“Happens more often than you’d think,” he said. “And it pisses me off every time, because those coins go to the local food bank.”
They turned down Wishing Well Road and raced towards a small, picturesque motel. The sheriff drove past the motel and up a small hill, where the well sat.
“Let me handle this.”
As they pulled up in front of the wishing well, they saw a skinny young man run past them, all elbows and knees poking out of holes in his clothes.
The sheriff quickly parked, and the young man dropped to his hands and knees. His clothes fell off him as he shifted into the form of a scrawny coyote. The sheriff leaped out of the car and followed suit, shifting into an enormous gray wolf and racing right out of his clothes to chase after the coyote.
He easily overtook him and the coyote fell to the ground, rolling onto his back and waving his paws in surrender. Less than a minute later, both men had shifted back and trotted over to where Ginger stood, holding out the sheriff’s clothes which she’d scooped up off the ground.
She looked away, shielding her eyes. She’d gotten a brief glimpse of the sheriff’s naked body, the solid muscles outlined in sharp relief, the massive muscles of his thighs, and the thick phallus that dangled between his legs, and she was struggling not to hyperventilate. Could she suddenly have developed asthma, at age 26? Where did they keep all the damned air around here, anyway?
“Good lord, woman, why you looking away? Haven’t you ever seen anyone shift before?” the sheriff laughed, grabbing his uniform and quickly pulling his clothes back on.
“We don’t generally run around naked in the city,” Ginger said, looking away. “That’s kind of a weekend thing, done out in the suburbs, and only with friends.”
The young man shimmied into his dirty clothes. When Ginger looked at him, she saw he was just a teenager. He was wearing an old army jacket, despite the heat, and a grimy white tank top and jeans that were too big for him.
“Ginger, meet Cletus Arbuckle. Cletus, put back all the coins that you stole before I kick your ass.”