Ridin' Solo (Sisters From Hell Book 1), Marika Ray [librera reader txt] 📗

Oakley staying behind at the station to chat with Betty while she pretended I didn’t exist. Damn, that woman was ice cold. I’d had enough dead time between calls today to daydream about thawing her out, but I had no intention of actually working on that. Old me would have seen her as a challenge. New me just wanted to work and live in a quiet little town with no drama.

I decided a good day’s work needed some proper food, so I headed into Auburn Hill for a grocery run I should have done the day I moved in. Cooking wasn’t my forte, but I was learning every day. I’d mastered most Mexican dishes, as those were my favorite, but lately I’d been trying some Italian. Tonight would be manicotti if I could find all the ingredients. My cart was near to overflowing by the time I checked out and headed home.

I cranked the playlist on my phone and moved about the kitchen efficiently, getting everything together. While it baked for an hour in the oven, I could get things moved around in the guest room and lift some weights. The new house I’d bought was an old three bedroom and two bathrooms. I figured I only needed one guest room. The other could be made into a weight room. I preferred a gym, but the long hours of law enforcement made a home gym more feasible. The last thing I wanted after dealing with the public all day was to go to the gym and deal with people stealing my squat rack.

My phone kept buzzing throughout my set of bench presses. I ignored it, knowing it was just social media notifications. It had been two years, and yet I couldn’t quite let go of my previous life entirely. Keeping track of the people I used to call friends was a habit, if only to provide a counterpoint to the life I led now. I’d chosen to go a different direction and seeing how they lived, played out in selfies and late night video postings, usually reaffirmed that I’d made the right choice.

The only posts that got to me were the ones where they were on some tropical vacation or a yacht off the coast of Capri. I still missed those carefree days where everything was a party. What I didn’t miss was the bone-deep sense of dissatisfaction with myself. Money couldn’t buy self-respect, but I was finding hard, honest work could. And that was enough to spur me on to drop the phone and get back to a set of bicep curls before the oven timer went off.

My new life was quieter, simpler, and more traditional. I couldn’t hide out in Auburn Hill forever, but it was working for me so far. One day I’d have to let my two lives converge and figure out how to reconcile both sides of me, but for now, I’d never been more satisfied with my life.

Even with Captain Oakley Waldo giving me grief every step of the way.

4

Oakley

Frustrating didn’t even begin to describe how I felt at the end of a workday now that I wasn’t riding solo. The transition to having a partner could always be a bit difficult, but a partner who had the face of James Dean, the body of Thor, and the smooth flirting skills of Matthew McConaughey was even more rocky. And the bastard kept calling me Oakley instead of Captain or Lee like everybody else in the department. He was like a thorn in my side that just kept scratching away at me all day until I collapsed at home in a heap of frustration and annoyance.

The only thing getting me through this week was knowing I had tomorrow off. The four walls of my house could be my sanctuary, blocking me from the existence of Wyatt Smith for a perfect twenty-four hours. In fact, just the idea of a Wyatt break was making me feel downright giddy. Like the night needed to be celebrated.

The freezer held another home-cooked meal from Mom, and the cabinet above the fridge had the treasure of a brand-new bottle of wine I’d bought awhile back and had never gotten to. I sat and ate in perfect solitude, enjoying a first glass of wine and then pouring a second. Unfortunately, my thoughts weren’t cooperating, and they kept straying back to the tall, dark, and handsome officer I now had to spend my days with.

I didn’t want to think about him.

He vexed me. He turned me inside out with a simple smirk on his ruggedly handsome face. He left me with an itch below the skin I couldn’t seem to reach.

The doorbell rang, and I nearly fell off my chair. Eyeing the wineglass, I pushed it further away from me on the table and stood up to get the door.

“Gonna be a good night, sugar.” Poppy, the town mail carrier, stood on the other side of my door, shoving a nondescript brown box in my hands with a wink. I frowned, not understanding why she would hand deliver a package tonight when she normally left packages in a bush where I wouldn’t find them for a solid week.

I closed the door while she whistled a happy little tune back to her mail truck. The label on the box said it was from the Hardware Store. Closing my eyes on a full-body shiver of embarrassment, I knew exactly why Poppy had showed up on my doorstep, the little gossip monger. The Hardware Store was the online sex toy subscription box company that had come to town a couple years ago.

“I didn’t order anything,” I sighed to the empty house.

Great, now Poppy was spreading the word that Captain Waldo was getting busy solo in her little house in the woods.

“Please, dear God, don’t let that get back to Mom or Dad.”

I dropped the box on the table, narrowly missing my wineglass, and eyeing it like it was a