Doin' a Dime - Vale, Lynn (epub read online books .TXT) 📗

phone and gestured toward the highway in front of us.

“I don’t know this area,” she confessed. “But I’ll Google it. Just stay on this road. If anything, this’ll lead us to home. In a roundabout way.”

I did as she suggested, loving the feel of the wind in my hair.

Speaking of hair…

“One other stop I’d like to make,” I said. “If that’s okay with you.”

She looked over at me curiously. “I’m yours for the day. I have nothing else going on. It’s my day off. And I don’t have anything tomorrow, either.”

I nodded once.

“I’d like to go to a barber shop.” I told her. “My hair is driving me fucking insane.”

I liked it longer, of course. But being forced to wear it longer because I didn’t trust the barbers in prison not to slit my throat instead of cutting my hair, it made a man want to be able to make his own choices.

“I think I can handle that, too.” She smiled. “It shows that the nearest shopping mall is literally right around this… ahh, there it is.”

She pointed to a shopping mall that had a bright red Target sign in the middle of it.

I gritted my teeth at the thought of her going into a place without me.

“You think they’ll notice what I’m wearing?” I asked curiously.

She looked at my ugly orange jumpsuit.

“They’ll notice,” she said. “And since this town is built around a prison, I highly doubt that they won’t give you a wide berth. Probably expect you to kill their kids. This is Target and not Walmart, after all. Now, if you wanted to drive another twenty minutes, we could go to a Walmart and you could go in with me. Nobody would notice because half the people don’t wear any type of clothes there at all.”

I rolled my eyes and pulled up to the front of the building.

“Go.”

She giggled and went, bailing out of the car and snatching her purse up in the process.

But she did leave her phone, which was sitting on the passenger side seat. Taunting me.

I picked up her phone and swept my thumb over the screen.

A photo of my dogs was the first thing to pop up.

Wyett was in the middle of Bones and Silo, with Silo dragging her tongue along the side of Wyett’s cheek.

Wyett was laughing, and I realized that I wanted this photo for myself.

But, I’d told myself when I’d first researched her in the very beginning that I wouldn’t invade her privacy again. Which meant, as much as I wanted this photo, I’d have to get it the old-fashioned way.

And, even though my fingers were itching to hack into the phone and use it, because God did I want to stretch my hacking muscles that had grown rusty with disuse, I wouldn’t.

Not to her, anyway.

The door opened beside me, and I realized that I’d never moved from in front of the building.

And I’d been staring at her phone long enough for her to not only find clothes, but to checkout and then come back to me.

“Here,” she said as she dropped down into the seat. “Move to the back of the lot and you can change.”

I did as suggested, pulling into the back of the lot and parking next to some massive van.

I got out and shucked the clothes off my body and reached back into the car for the bag.

She was already handing the shirt to me but had stalled out as she stared at me in shock.

I wasn’t sure if it was because of all the scars, or because of my near naked state.

Whatever the reason, I had to take the clothes from her hand and pull them to me.

“You get any shoes?” I asked her.

“Yes,” she answered. “Flip-flops because that was the only thing that I could guess your size at that wouldn’t look absolutely ridiculous on you.”

I kicked the clothes off completely and started stepping into the sweatpants.

That’s when the van behind me started to go off.

Or, more importantly, the people inside the van started to knock and holler.

“Do you think that they’re someone that’s important?” I asked curiously.

“I think that it’s a church van,” Wyett said. “And you should probably hurry because they’ll likely be the ones to call the cops and tell you that an indecent man exposed themselves to them. Then you’d wind up in prison.”

I looked at the van with the severely tinted black windows, and then at the trashy rest of it.

“There’s no way in hell that this is a church van,” I said as I finished getting dressed in the clothes she’d gotten me. “I hate flip-flops.”

CHAPTER 7

My ability to remember song lyrics from the 90s far exceeds my ability to remember why I came into the kitchen.

-Wyett’s secret thoughts

WYETT

“I hate flip-flops,” Hunt muttered darkly on the other side of the car.

From where I was sitting, I could only see him from the nipples down and shins up.

But all the rest… Jesus Christ, Lord have mercy.

He’d covered his lower half—thank God for small mercies—and now all I could see was his well-defined chest, his abs, and that part of him that made women go stupid.

I’d heard Six refer to it as an ‘Adonis Belt’ and in this instance, she couldn’t have put a better descriptive word on it if she tried.

Because holy, holy hell.

The man had that deep V that made my mouth go dry.

A loud screeching from the other side of the van had me turning—reluctantly, might I add—away from Hunt and toward the man that was rounding the front of the van to come to the side.

“What the fuck, man?” the man asked of Hunt. “My wife’s in the car.”

He pointed at the van.

Hunt shrugged. “Had to change, man. And she didn’t see anything that wouldn’t have been seen had I been going to the pool.”

He had a very good point.

“Whatever.” The man took an aggressive step toward Hunt. Hunt who, might I add, didn’t look the least bit intimidated by the man’s aggressive posture.