Peppermint Creek Inn Read Online Free PDF Page B

wrapped around his big erection while he helplessly lay in her bed. Didn’t know how he’d react to such an intimate invasion. For all she knew, he would grab her and throw her down on the bed, and fuck her ruthlessly just so he could relieve what she’d done to him.
    Not that she wouldn’t mind getting screwed at this point by her sexy stranger—anything to chase away the heated flush of arousal burning her.
    Her gaze flew to the handcuff around his wrist and her arousal diminished somewhat. A guy wearing cuffs meant nothing but trouble. It meant he’d done something wrong and for all she knew, he could be a crazed rapist or murderer.
    She needed to keep her hands off him. Needed to figure out what she was going to do with him if the phone lines didn’t get working soon.
    Most of all, though, she needed to have a long session with her vibrator.
    —
    One day later, Sara took her first worry-free break. She felt like one of the walking dead as she edged past the gnarled tree branches of the dead romance tree that had crashed onto her veranda and front yard. At the end of the porch, she leaned wearily against the wooden railing and inhaled the mild late-evening air.
    The stranger had kept her away from her vibrator, as his fever had gotten worse. She’d been terribly busy taking turns dousing him with cool peppermint water, listening to his fevered mumblings of cops trying to kill him and using her husband’s secret trick of unleashing his handcuffs. In the end his fever had come down, the handcuffs off, his wounds tended and try as she might to ignore them, Sara began believing the wild tales he muttered while he slept.
    Whispers of drug deals, gunrunning rackets, and worst of all, bribing police officers. His feverish confessions raised many questions. Questions that wrapped themselves around her neck like a hangman’s noose, threatening to rip her brain apart.
    Biting her lip, she pressed a finger to her aching temple. From his delirious ramblings, she’d figured he was definitely a criminal neck-deep in illegal activities.
    She dug into her housecoat pocket and withdrew the wrinkled note she’d found in his leather jacket. Her name and the name of her inn were scribbled on the paper. Who would send him here? And why?
    Nearest she could figure out, the man needed a criminal defense lawyer. Her father-in-law was one, but he lived in New York City now.
    She shook her head with frustration and gazed at the swirling black water of Peppermint Creek as it roared down the middle of the meadow. The normally quiet creek had swelled to three times its normal size during the Spring thaw, writhing like an out of control serpent, swallowing everything that stood in its path.
    Chunks of gray ice floated by, sometimes catching on the low banks, then being knocked loose by another hunk of ice or other debris. The unlucky ones tossed freely out of the swollen water and left to die on the shoreline, slowly melting away.
    When she’d come home the other night she’d barely been able to get the truck across the quickly flooding kissing bridge a mile down the road—her only way in and out—would by now be inundated with rushing icy water. It happened every Spring. Hopefully in a couple more days, it might be safe to cross, but with or without the truck, it would be virtually suicidal to cross before then. Unless she could find some way to mount its rough wood planked walls, climb over the steep roof and down the other side. After that another one mile hike over the gently rolling roadway would lead her out to the highway where she’d be able to flag down someone to drive her into town for help.
    But even if the stranger was well enough to be left alone, she was too tired to make the attempt. She was totally drained from the tips of her toes right up through to the top of her rip-roaring headache.
    The sweet, gentle tug of warm Spring allowed her to become lost in the soothing sounds of the oncoming dusk. The faraway cry of a