Now, with beer in hand, she got to sit out on the front porch swing wearing her favorite old baseball jersey and enjoying the late summer night. This was what she missed about living in Smithtown. Nights like this. In New York, it was never quiet, and while she adored the energy, there was something to be said about being able to hear crickets and the night-loving birds.

As she combed her wet hair, the howling started. At the farthest part of Smithtown, one wolf would start it, and it would spread until all of Smithtown was alive with the sound. Grinning, Sissy leaned her head back and howled right along with them. She simply adored that sound. Adored the meaning behind it. The power. The—

“Shut the hell up! I’m trying to sleep!”

Sissy’s eyes crossed as the howls abruptly stopped. Lord, she’d hear about this until she was in her grave.

With a sigh, she headed up to her room and closed the door. While she finished combing her hair out, she flipped through an old car magazine she’d found shoved in one of her desk drawers. It made her smile, seeing all the notes she and Ronnie Lee had made. Picking out their dream cars and marking all the necessary parts they planned to get one day. Back then, they’d liked their cars the way they’d liked their men. Big, powerful, and mean.

Of course, Mitch wasn’t mean. Never on purpose, anyway.

Wait. Where did that thought come from? Why was she thinking about Mitch and what she liked in men at the same damn time? What was wrong with her? And when did she start asking herself so many questions? And why couldn’t she stop?

An abrupt knock yanked Sissy back to the moment, and she ended up glaring at her poor defenseless door.

“What, Mitchell?”

Mitch pushed the door open and stood there looking too good to be remotely fair. He had on a fresh pair of sweatpants and…nothing else. They rode low on his hips, teasing cruelly. She wasn’t a saint, dammit!

“Sexy, sexy,” she growled at him before she could stop herself.

“You treat me like a whore.”

“You are a whore.”

He grinned. “This is true.”

She stared up at him. “You can’t sleep, can you?”

“I tried.”

“The howling?”

“No. That was just really annoying.”

“Around here, it’s nightly, so get used to it.”

“Great.”

Sissy pulled her legs up, wrapping her arms around them. “Do you have bad dreams?”

“Not like I used to. Mostly because I simply don’t sleep. Guess I’m definitely feeling better since I seem to be back to my old habits.”

“Your appetite is A-OK, though.”

“It is, isn’t it?”

He walked into her room, looking at all her pictures and toy cars.

“Did you sleep last night?”

“Uh…yeah. I did.” He glanced at her through ridiculously long dark gold lashes she’d never really noticed before. Lord, help me. “I think it was because of you, though.”

“Me?” Don’t read too much into that. Don’t read too much into that.

“Yeah. I think it was your snoring. It was quite soothing, and all that drool reminded me of a waterfall.”

See? Sissy grabbed one of her pillows and pitched it as his head. “Bastard.”

Mitch laughed. She appreciated the fact that although the man had been through hell and was forced to stay in a strange town where everyone hated him on principle, he still loved to laugh.

“So do you have a diary I can read?” he teasingly asked. “It would be a saucy tale about a young, firm Sissy Mae discovering her passionate sexuality.”

“Have a diary? Around my momma? I thought you had more sense. My daddy doesn’t call her the Great Detective for nothin’. If the woman put her mind to it, she could probably find D.B. Cooper and Hoffa. So having a diary with all my deepest and darkest secrets would be one of those dumb things I try not to do.”

She reached under her bed and pulled out a photo album. “But I do have pictures of me and Ronnie Lee in bikinis.” She moved back on her bed and patted the mattress.

Mitch removed his Glock first, then dived on the bed like a ten-year-old. Once he got himself comfortable with his back braced against the headboard and his too-long-for-the-bed legs stretched out, Sissy placed the album in his lap.

She opened the cover and flipped past a few pages, but Mitch stopped her. He stared at her when she was eight and Bobby Ray ten.

“Wow. Jess was right, Sissy. His head was huge.”

Sissy crinkled up her nose. “I know. It took him a while to grow into that thing. The Navy really helped there. His head never got any smaller, but thankfully, his body got much bigger.”

Mitch began flipping pages himself. He smiled at a picture of her when she was about eleven. She wore a bikini top with denim shorts and had her middle finger raised to the camera.

“Dee took that one. She was in the photography club at school.”

“Has your mother seen this picture?”

She laughed. “Oh, yeah. She’s torn it up six, seven times—but Dee has the negative and a darkroom.”

After a few more pages, Mitch stopped on a picture of her, Ronnie Lee, and her cousin Katie out of North Carolina. All three were in bikinis, and you could see three tigers in the background watching them.

“How old were you here?”

“Sixteen.”

“Man, even then.”

“Even then what?”