Behind the Pines (The Gass County Series Book 3) Read Online Free PDF

and staring right back.
    “Are you just going to stand here looking at me like that or is there a reason that you are here?” Brody asked, chewing hard on the inside of his cheek.
    Sunshine coughed and tried to swallow a nervous itch stuck in her throat. “Thanks for not giving me more than a warning about Brutus that day you visited. I understand now how much that would have cost me should I have received that ticket.”
    Brody looked down on the sidewalk. “I’m not sure I heard you right?” The fabric of his shirt brushed the front of her sweater. She wasn’t sure he knew what he was doing, but if he was, he was doing it right: she found it hard to breath and her nipples beaded against the fabric of her bra. She tilted her head and looked up at his face.
    “Just saying thank you, that’s all. Now, I need to be going.”
    She began to walk away, happy she’d made her point, as hard as it had been, for not giving her that ticket that could have risked both her job and current living situation, not wanting to even think how much worse a person could actually live unless it was as a homeless person setting up base under a large bush with the help of faulty plastic sheets and cardboard boxes. She’d dug her heels into the ground the morning she’d had to walk up to the main house of the farm and received a scolding from Mr. Gert himself. She’d apologized desperately to hold her current yet meager employment.
    He’d walked closer to her then, placed his large, warm hands on her shoulders and smiled. “You’re good at what you’re doing, Sunshine, and we’d like to keep you. Just stay away from the law because it would be with sadness I’d have to let you go just because of Brutus.”
    It was one thing to be tough, she’d learned, and one thing to be strong. The two were quite the opposite. “Sunny?” Brody called.
    She stopped. “Yes?”
    “Did you talk to Gert?”
    Her lips curved and she walked back to him, making him take away the steaming coffee mug from his mouth. “I hope this doesn’t give me a ticket.” She rose to her toes and grabbed his brown shirt with both hands and kissed him—not hard, not forceful, but sweet enough to hear his breathing stop for a second.
    Sunshine stood back on her feet. “Almost worth a ticket, letting me kiss you like that.”
     
     
     
     
    Chapter Six
    “I am too.” Brody’s image spoke back to him in the bathroom mirror. “I am too . . . fuck. What an extremely dumb thing to say . . . out loud.” He spit out the rest of his toothpaste in the sink and smirked at himself in the mirror, remembering Sunshine’s stunned look as the words had left his mouth. He liked what he saw on Sunshine, had since the first day he gave her a warning about her stupid dog running loose. Beneath his touch, those nipples poking hard against the fabric of her shirt would ache for the warmth of his mouth. A hot flush spread up from his core into his belly.
    The green towel at his face felt smooth against his new-shaven skin and he turned back to take a last look at his bare body in the mirror, for the first time in a long time considering what a woman’s opinion may be if he was seen without clothes on. His eyes trailed from his face down his hard chest, down his flat stomach, landing at the bulge on the front of his white boxer shorts. It had been years since anyone had seen him naked, and just as long since a woman’s hand had caressed his skin. With a deep sigh he closed his eyes and let his large hand trace the back of his spine and slide behind the elastic of his boxer to land on his cheek. His fingers traced the long scar cutting through the skin, and he felt every indent the needle had made putting him back together. Why there? A question he often pondered. A place he always used: upon which he sat, to stretch when he moved, a place he liked to have touched when making love. Nothing erotic existed about his naked bottom any longer. The rest of his body might look that