Page 58 of Trigger Happy

He snorts and nudges the box closer. “I meant a real doughnut. Enjoy this a little. What’s the rush?”

What’s the—

“The rush is that we’re running out of time, and if we can’t find any concrete evidence, we don’t get paid, and my down-payment fund—”

“Doughnut,” he commands, pushing the box my way.

“I don’t eat sugar.”

“Yeah, psycho, I try not to hold that against you.” He peruses the leftovers in the box, thinking with his tongue poking out like this is the most important decision he’ll make all day. “Here. The smoked maple bacon one’s got your name on it. There’s protein from the bacon, so it’s basically a well-balanced meal.”

“I don’t think any dietician would consider that well-balanced.”

He holds the doughnut out to me at mouth level, swaying it a little. “Take a bite. Forget your macros for five seconds and live a little.”

“My gram to body pound of protein ratio is the reason I’m alive. I have to be strict. I need muscle for times when I have to lug a box of doughnuts through the woods.”

If I had a partner I trusted, I wouldn’t have to be so rigid. That’s why I do what I can to stay in shape, but I’m not an idiot. I know an Equinox subscription won’t cut it if all two-hundred-and-twenty pounds of Lawton decide he wants to kill me in hand-to-hand combat. I’d have to use a gun. As an only child, my parents wanted to make sure I would be okay if someone took them out, and that meant planning for every possible worst-case scenario, so I stay in shape, but out-planning the future is exhausting.

“I’ll do the lugging next time.” He pushes the crumbling doughnut toward me. “C’mon, taste the doughy flesh.”

“You’re not making it sound appealing,” I say, but I know Lawton won’t shut up until I do this, so I lean in to take a bite.

My lips brush the tips of his fingers. At the contact, his eyes snap to my mouth and stay there. I hold his gaze as I bite down on sweet cinnamon, maple, and a hint of salty bacon.

A low moan slips between my lips. “This is incredible.”

Lawton swallows, his gaze fixed on my mouth. “Never thought I’d be jealous of a doughnut.”

I roll my eyes, even as I battle with my smile. This version of Lawton reminds me of the first one I met at the gala. The teasing, slightly chaotic cowboy that hadn’t been hollowed out by grief. It’s a lot harder to hate this version of him—even thinking the word hate feels dramatic.

Once I swallow, I stand from the table. “Let’s go. We have work to do.”

“Damn,” he mutters, grabbing his keys. “I really wanted to watch you eat another doughnut.”

30Sabrina

We have less than two weeks until Benson’s Harvest Festival, so Lawton and I spend all our time glued to Bobbi and Arch, but they’re just as annoyingly mundane as they’ve always been. It’s driving me to chew my nails, and this manicure cost me fifty-two dollars.

There’s nothing to tie them to the dead body. The only dead thing around here is the trout Arch brings home for dinner every night. He grills it to perfection, I’ll give him that, but there’s only so much fish a woman can consume.

“Does trout have mercury?” Lawton says as he grabs his boots the next morning. The pillow wall is becoming lower and lower. I think it’s only three-pillows high now. “He could be trying to poison us with all the fishing he does. I go almost every single day and all he does is stand there for hours, watching fish, talking about Bobbi and how great he thinks you are.”

“Me?”

“Yeah. I was surprised at first too.”

I throw a pillow at him.

He catches it. Smiles.

After he heads out, I spend the day searching the barn, but Bobbi interrupts my snooping when she bounces into the kitchen and says, “Okay, the guys are fishing, so let’s get day-drunk, watch bad TV shows, and do face masks. What do you say?”

I run through my mental checklist. Did I lock up my pistols? They’re buried in an air vent. Hide the cyanide? In the mattress cutout I sewed shut. I knew my daily fifteen-minute timed clean was a good idea.

We cozy up on a pallet she made on the floor as the sun grazes the tips of the snowy mountains in the distance. A cold front breezed through yesterday, so Bobbi builds a roaring fire. If I pretend hard enough, I can almost forget about the woman in the hot spring and act like this is a regular girls’ night.

For the rest of the day, we sit way too close together on the floor while judging every unrealistic detail on some bad crime TV show from the nineties.