Page 321 of Dirty Discipline, Vol. 2

Her smile was still more like a cringe and that look in her eyes said she didn’t expect to see Tabitha come back for them anytime soon. She’d had her wallet though. She knew it, she’d had it. In her pocket, then in her hand, then in her cart… Where in the store had she stopped long enough for someone to sneak in and grab it away from her? With the sheriff standing never far behind her the entire time. Obviously he was right to be sneaking through the store, but he’d definitely followed the wrong person.

She hurried back down the destroyed aisle where two store employees had already repaired the shelf and were now loading it up again with the fallen food boxes.

The store employees were looking at her. Other shoppers had drifted into the aisle behind them and they were trying very hard to appear like they were looking at anything but her, but Tabby wasn’t fooled.

They picked up the floor cleaning up her mess while she watched, the fear growing ever more pronounced the more they cleared off the white-speckled tiles with no wallet appearing anywhere around them.

She couldn’t handle just waiting. Getting down on all fours, she scrambled to pick up the scattered boxed dinners too.

“We’ve got it,” one of the workers assured her. “It’s okay. You don’t have to—”

“Why, did you take it?” she interrupted. “Do you see it anywhere?”

How the hell was she going to replace her ID, her social security card, her credit cards—if they even still worked—without a car, stranded in the middle of Starvation?

The two workers looked at one another and then went back to rummage through the boxes in search of it.

It was gone. It wasn’t here anywhere.

Clambering painfully to her feet, she retraced her steps through the store, but she could find it. It wasn’t anywhere on the floor, on the shelves… nothing. She ended up back at the register, checking despairingly one more time, but hope died hard.

She’d lost everything. Her father, her friends, her home, her life… and now her ID and money too. Almost in tears, she threw her hands up in defeat and walked out of the store.

“Hey,” someone called after her. She didn’t care. She didn’t stop, she didn’t pause, she didn’t look back. This was all just another page in the nightmare story that had become her life. Here she had thought for the last three years that just getting out of prison would make everything all right again. She could handle anything so long as she was out. That had been the mantra that had lived in her soul through all the misery that prison had brought her. The loudness, the constant noise. The people in there hadn’t even been that bad for the most part. There were a couple of bullies and a few more bitches, but for the most part everyone was just trying to do their time and get out so life could resume. In a positive direction, or so she had thought.

How could any one person be so wrong, she mused despairingly and headed for home.

Chapter Three

Hands on his lean hips, Jeffrey Barnes stood at the front window of the store, watching that little girl with the big attitude storming from the parking lot. It was a slow storm, broken by each limping step she took.

He felt bad about that. He’d never given anyone a ticket for jaywalking in his life. A lecture, sure, but never a ticket. There was just something about her that made him itch to put his foot down.

Did he have any business to do it? No.

Had that stopped him? Also, no.

Was he proud of himself now that she was flouncing away, walletless and without her groceries? Definitely not.

He glanced back at the checkout lane where Tabitha’s groceries lay abandoned and wished he could reset this entire situation, and this time be less of a dick about it all.

“Poor girl,” the cashier said with a shake of her head. She gathered the groceries off the conveyor belt. “I feel bad for her.”

So did he.

A high-pitched squeal suddenly erupted several aisles away. Seconds later, seventeen-year-old Willow Blankenship, a one-time rider of the same bus Tabitha had come to town on, came jogging toward them, waving a glittering pink-plastic wallet with a unicorn on the front. Jeff smothered that triggering twitch that shot through him when he saw it. That was not a grown woman’s wallet, but it was the kind a Little might be drawn to.

So proud of herself, bouncing on her heels and hands clasped behind her back, Willow said, “It was on a shelf in the bread aisle. Someone must have set it there and forgot it.”

Someone.

Jeff gave her a pointed look as he opened up the wallet and checked inside. He sighed. “No money?”

She shrugged. “I never looked in it.”

“If I dust this for prints, I’m not going to find yours in there?”

She smirked, giving him an overly angelic look. Stepping in a little closer, she said in a seductively hushed voice, “For a missing wallet? You don’t have the resources.”

---