Page 319 of Dirty Discipline, Vol. 2

Creamy peanut butter. There was a plastic jar of it with a bright yellow discount sticker. The sides were bent in and the lid was cracked, so it had obviously been dropped. But the safety seal was still intact, so she put it in the cart and went into the next aisle to grab a loaf of bread.

“Have you tried wheat?” Sheriff Barnes cheerfully pipped up as he came walking down the aisle behind her again. “Texas toast is fine for french toast, but it has next to no nutritional value.”

She gritted her teeth and, even as she was telling herself to keep walking, not to say anything back or to encourage him to keep hounding at her, she stopped, turned around, and defiantly said, “What if I like white bread?”

“Wheat’s better for you.”

“Stop following me!” She marched away, turning down the next aisle only to have him turn into the same aisle behind her.

She whirled around on him, but his hands were already cupped around his mouth as he mock whispered, “It’s where my next items are. I can’t help where the store puts the things I need.”

Bullshit. It echoed over and over in her head, that excuse was nothing but bullshit, and yet she couldn’t say anything. He must really think she was a major shoplifting threat, and yet she’d never stolen anything in her life. Well… not since she was five, anyway.

Snapping around on her heel, she rushed past the soups and broths, and finally found the ramen. She grabbed a case of chicken-flavored packets and threw it into the cart a little harder than was necessary.

All right, way harder than necessary.

“Gently,” he sang as he caught up to her.

“Why are you acting as if you expect me to rob the place?” she blew up, and yet her tone remained every bit as soft as his. He was whispering at her, so she whispered back. She couldn’t even make herself yell at him. Her temper spiked that much more. “Admit it! You’ve been following me, giving me the stink eye ever since I got here. And you’ve been mean every time!”

“Mean?” He arched both eyebrows behind the mirror reflections of his sunglasses. She wished she could see his eyes, but they were hidden from her. “I have been anything but mean,” he countered.

“You gave me a ticket!” She ripped it from her back pocket, showing it to him so he couldn’t pretend he hadn’t. “That’s not being nice.”

“In my defense,” he said, “I have known quite a few people who stepped off that bus. You aren’t the only lady, or fellow, newly deposited here who did, in fact, rob this place blind. Not everyone acclimatizes to life in Starvation without problems.”

“I blame the local sheriff,” she returned, giving the stitched label on his chest a frown. She dumped another box of ramen into her cart and then another after that, taking the very last one off the shelf.

“I’m trying really hard not to say how bad for you those things are,” he commented.

If she weren’t so angry, she’d have recognized his tone was gentle rather than critical, but it set her temper off anyway.

“It’s what I can pay for!” she hissed, and out of spite, grabbed the last box of beef Ramen, since she’d already grabbed all the chicken. There was no telling how long she’d have to go before she got her first paycheck and the last thing she could handle was having to deal with her new life on a constantly empty stomach. No, it wasn’t the most nutritious thing she could eat, but it was the cheapest and it would keep her from going hungry. And what business of his was it anyways?

She snapped around on her heel. Angry as she was, she hadn’t even noticed that the sheriff was trying to go around her until she smashed her cart into his. Her finger got pinched.

She yelped, snatching her hand back from the sharp pain and accidentally elbowed him in the chest. She jumped to get a safe distance between them again, tripped, and down she went.

Her wildly windmilling arms grabbed for anything strong enough to arrest her fall. He grabbed her arm, and for just a moment, she was grateful. Then she remembered who he was. She shoved so hard, they both fell backwards. The shelves caught her next, the metal edge hitting her back. They promptly collapsed.

She landed on the hard tile floor, smack on her butt amid the crash and clatter of about sixteen feet of industry shelving dumped a hundred plus tubs of Asian noodles and condiments all around her.

“Are you all right?” Bending to help her up, Jeff accidentally kicked her thigh as he caught her arm. He must have shoved his cart out of the way as he did so, because the next thing she felt was the heavy wheel going right over the top of her right ankle and the pain of it was beyond her ability to keep to herself.

She yelled, the sheriff hauling her back up off the floor and onto her feet, where her right leg let her know it was holding a grudge over the abuse it had just received.

“Oh my god,” she grabbed onto his arm, hopping to keep the weight off her injured leg. “Oh, that hurts. That hurts.”

She gritted her jaw. Her every reaction was one of pure instinct, but she refused to say that again. Her leg wasn’t really hurt. It was overreacting, and she refused to allow it to be truly injured. This one-horse town didn’t even have a horse, much less a doctor, and for sure she didn’t have money to throw away on seeing one for anything less than certain death.

“Can you put your weight on it?”

Tabitha yanked her arm out of his grasp, turned and shoved him back with all her might. He obligingly took a step back; she barely knocked him off balance.

So angry she could barely keep from screaming at him, she blinked back the involuntary flood of tears that her heightened emotions called forth. “I’m fine,” she managed, half hopping and half limping through the scattered mess of cup of noodles, Asian cookies, and half a dozen bottles of soy sauce, fish sauce, sweet and sour and specialty oils had broken all over the tiles, getting everything sticky, including the unbroken bottles and scattered food boxes.

Her cart had tracked right through the mess. So had his.

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