Side Squeeze (Jasper Falls 6)

They went at it for hours, never completely pulling apart but eventually falling asleep in each other’s arms, her body wrapped tightly around his, locked as one.

Harrison hadn’t slept so soundly in years.

But when he awoke, the bed was cold. “Mariella?”

He shot up, thrusting the covers aside and bolting off the bed to search the bathroom. She was gone. He didn’t have her number and wasn’t sure where she was living. That meant, if he wanted to see her again, he’d have to show his face in town and track her down.

“Fuck,” he groaned, scrubbing his hands over his bleary eyes and grinning at the lingering scent of her covering his skin. She wasn’t getting away from him that easily.

CHAPTER 6

Jasper Falls seemed so big when Harrison was a little boy. With mountains that disappeared in the clouds and green horizons as endless as oceans, the town seemed to have no limits, no chance of escape. But as he grew older, he sensed a better life beyond the city limits, and that thirst for something different, something better, had driven him away from everything familiar into a world of the unknown.

And somehow, despite the higher crime rates and pricy cost of living, those unknown parts of the world felt safer. He never felt a familial pull to return to Jasper Falls, so he never questioned the rightness of his escape. However, he also didn’t let himself think too hard about those he left behind.

Erin was a tricky part of his childhood. They had grown apart, and now when he thought of her, his chest burned with regret. He should have done better where his sister was concerned, but he hadn’t. Those unexamined regrets still filled him with discomfort, and the only simple cure seemed to be continued distance.

Out of sight, out of mind. But in a town as small as Jasper Falls, there was nowhere to hide.

Seeing his sister and Mariella filled him with uncomfortable emotions best ignored. Soon enough, he’d be back where he belonged, and Erin could do whatever she wanted with the store and the house. She’d be fine. And Mariella…

Well, he had no doubt Mariella would eventually get married and spit out a few babies. The bittersweet thought turned his stomach no matter how easily the modest image came to mind.

How was it that everything in Jasper Falls looked so tiny? The houses were smaller, the yards nothing but postage stamps, and the streets were too narrow for cars to park and drive. Living in New York for more than a decade gave everything in Jasper Falls a hokey make-believe feel, like he was driving through a television studio or visiting The Truman Show set.

But even small things could be lethal. The sight of his father’s rinky-dink hardware store sank like a bullet into his chest, rattling around and pinging off old memories he wished would stay hidden.

Sometimes, in a nightmare, a person scraped the surface of consciousness enough to know they were only dreaming. Yet the instinct to run and hide doesn’t wane. Seeing his father’s store was along those lines. The man was dead, on a slab in the morgue, yet Harrison battled an urge to run away from his ghost all the same.

“Fuck you,” he breathed, eyes narrowing on the darkened storefront as he slowly drove by.

Ward Montgomery was a corpse. Harrison was a grown man—a far better man than the bastard who hardly raised him.

He had a condo in Manhattan, women at his beck and call, and enough money to buy and sell this town twice over. It was time for those cowardly memories and fears to die with the man who created them.

Rather than park and check on the store, he continued driving down Main Street. Everything looked strangely the same, but different. Some stores had fresh paint on the original, tired old signs, while others had been completely transformed.

Street lights were newer, and lampposts had been newly installed to look older. The town looked unmistakably better, sort of revitalized like it had been given a second wind and an injection of vitality. Younger generations could do that, he supposed, unsure why he expected everything here to look older when it appeared the exact opposite.

Even though there were drifts of snow everywhere, people still walked the sidewalks and visited shops. Pink and purple wreaths decorated the lamp posts. Hearts, perhaps for Valentine’s Day. The picturesque quaintness pissed him off for reasons he didn’t understand.

Everything looked a little too storybook for his liking. He preferred things at face value. That was one of the reasons he’d always been attracted to Mariella. She was always direct and honest.

His thoughts steered his car away from Main Street and down a side road until he was winding in and out of neighborhoods close to Mariella’s parents’ house. He wasn’t exactly sure which house was theirs, but he knew it was in this general area.