Hold on Tight Read Online Free PDF Page A

look so neat and yet so sexy in tan trousers, a yellow blouse, and an argyle sweater vest. Her dark hair curled below her shoulders in long, loose waves. He felt her cold blue eyes trying to whittle his control away and knew they were succeeding. Why does this woman mess up my mind so bad? Rucker asked himself in annoyance. I’m suave. I’m hot. I’m a celebrity. I’m—
    “Well, Kemo Sabe, where’s your possum?” Dinah asked bluntly. He stopped right in front of her, closer than she wanted him to be, too close for her to breathe normally. He looked exasperated.
    “Back at the motel.”
    “Which motel?”
    “The Schwartz Mountain Motel,” he told her. “ ’Scuseme, I mean the Schwartz Mountain Motel and Taxidermy Shop. Little lady, I hope my possum’s gonna be safe alone.”
    She sighed. That chauvinistic
little lady
business again. “The Schwartz’s will treat him and you better than you deserve.”
    He smiled crookedly. “Guests check in, but they never check out.”
    Dinah gave him a somber look. “You came back sooner than I expected.”
    “There are a million stories in the naked city. I’m settin’ up my word processor here for a few days.”
    “Mount Pleasant isn’t naked or a city. Please go back to the city.” Her worry and sadness deepened. “I know you’re going to take literary revenge on me. That’s all right, but don’t hurt anyone else, please.”
    He frowned, his green eyes clouding with anger. “Do you think I’m that kind of man? You think I’ve come up here to look for some sort of petty trash I can print?”
    “You’re a reporter. I know all about reporters.”
    “You don’t know squat about me, Dinah,” he said tersely.
    She frowned, too, bewildered and even more defensive. “Then what do you want?”
    His mouth thinned into a line of challenge. “Well, for starters, a kiss hello.”
    He bent forward quickly and stole one from her parted lips. Dinah gasped and he kissed her again. It took nearly five seconds for her to gather her mental faculties enough to step back. Five seconds of new shock and rebellious tingles. Dinah whirled around and discovered, as she’d expected, that they had an audience of thirty open-mouthed teenage girls.
    “You didn’t see that,” she said firmly. “None of you saw that.”
    She turned back around and faced Rucker, her jaw set. “That was indefensible.”
    He arched one brow in his jaunty way, the way that told her he had already gotten over being mad and wasnow enjoying himself. “You didn’t even try to defend yourself,” he joked.
    “I mean, you pig, that you can’t justify what you did. I have a good reputation in this town—”
    “Everybody knows you got a good reputation. Now they want you to have a good man. Lula Belle Mitchum told me so when I stopped by city hall on my way in. She told me you’re the best coach the drill team ever had and she told me which way to the school to find you.” He looked around at the sprawling, tree-shaded brick building that was Twittle County’s only high school. “Looks like the one I went to,” he noted. “Old and friendly.”
    Dinah huffed loudly. “Rucker, I don’t care if you get every man, woman, and possum in this town on your side, my mission in life is not centered around satisfying your chauvinistic fantasies.” His eyes settled on her with calm scrutiny. Dinah pointed an accusing finger at him. “If you’re one of those vain men who’s looking for a beauty queen to put on his arm, then you could do a lot better than me. I’m six years older and ten pounds heavier than when I paraded around as Miss Georgia, so—”
    “What hurt you so bad that you curdled up and turned cynical?”
    His harsh words put a clamp on her diatribe. She gazed up at him feeling guilty, all too aware that she had been unnecessarily cruel to him. “Life,” she snapped. Dinah added silently, And death. Her father’s death, a puzzling tragedy surrounded by shame and scandal. What would