Their meet-cute? He pulled her over for speeding and got an earful of the spicy audiobook she was listening to.
Sam Smith’s car is overflowing with possessions and emotional baggage. After leaving the only man she’s ever been with, Sam’s eager to play the field and re-enact some of the bedroom moves she’s been reading about in all her spicy romance novels. But so far the only person she can’t stop fantasizing about is the judgmental, uptight, and so-hot-it-should-be-a-crime police officer who’s desperate to do the one thing she swore she’d never do again: walk down the aisle.
Officer Gray Hoffman thrives on order and structure. So when Sam shows up as the epitome of disaster–bringing chaos to his book club and favorite book store of all places–he’s determined to put some much-needed space between him and her. Especially when the feisty blonde with a too-smart mouth starts inexplicably invading his thoughts and dreams. Because the last he needs is another relationship that isn’t going anywhere, even if there’s more than enough heat between them to put her books to shame.
For you insatiable readers who finish a book and immediately want another, this is the second steamy rom-com in the Milton Women series. For those of you who fear commitment, it can be read as a stand-alone and Leigh promises there’s no cliff-hanger that will force you to read another dozen books in a series that just won’t end.
Read it now by clicking your favorite retailer link below, or keep scrolling down for a sample.
Chapter 1: Sam
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Sam muttered as she killed the engine, turned off the audio on her phone, and rummaged around for a sweatshirt or something, anything, to cover up with. The beat-up Corolla she loved and refused to replace blasted heat regardless of how much she messed with the temperature controls. Now that she was getting pulled over in a tank top and daisy duke shorts while there was two feet of snow on the ground, she could see what a mistake it had been to put off that repair.
Tap, tap, tap.
Sam plastered her best smile onto her face then hit the button to lower the window. She was well aware how suspicious she looked: scantily dressed in the middle of winter in a car full of all the possessions she could cram into it. Candy wrappers, evidence of her emotional eating thanks to her impending divorce, glistened around her feet. And since she’d never, ever broken the law or been pulled over, she didn’t know what to expect and likely looked excessively nervous or guilty. She hoped it was the former.
“Good evening, I’m Officer Hoffman. Do you know how fast you were going back there?”
“Um…yeah. I was going thirty-seven, thirty-eight max?” At the beginning she was confident in her answer, but it came out as a question in the end once she properly took in the officer. His face was clean shaven, revealing a chiseled and striking jaw. The hard lines and angles of his face fit his demeanor. From what she could see from his waist up, tall, dark, and handsome didn’t begin to describe the towering stud outside her car.
His dark brown eyes narrowed at her response. “You were going thirty-six.”
She smiled back, relieved to hear she’d only been going one mile-per-hour over the limit.
“The speed limit is twenty-five. You just passed the sign.” He was exasperated already, though that hardly seemed fair given how little he knew her.
She turned and strained to look behind her as if she could see the sign now facing the other direction. As a child, Sam had vacationed with her family in Deep Creek Lake for three weeks each summer. Just a few years ago she could have easily rattled off every street, store, boat ramp, and speed limit in the tiny town.
“Twenty-five? It’s always been thirty-five. Did they change it?” She resisted the urge to shiver as the cold air flooded the car and goosebumps covered her skin.
“For safety reasons we lowered speeds throughout the area back in August.” She could see his eyes making a sweep of the inside of her vehicle though his face gave no indication of what he thought of the dumpster fire. “I suggest you keep a better eye on the road so you’re aware of the changes.”
“Yes, absolutely. I’ll do that.” Her shoulders slumped in relief. She was only getting a warning. A ticket on top of her already chaotic life – mainly the impulsive move across the state to get away from a failed marriage regardless of having zero job prospects – could very well have pushed her over the edge of the cliff she was currently toeing.
“I’ll need to see your license and registration, please.”
“You’re giving me a ticket?” Her smile vanished and her tone dripped with indignation. She was cautious almost to a fault when it came to driving, and after this one little mistake he was going to give her a ticket? Couldn’t he see her grip on life and sanity was down to one little pinky finger poised to slip at a moment’s notice?
His voice remained even and unaffected as he repeated the command, “You were going more than ten miles over the speed limit. License and registration. Please.”
Sam pursed her lips to keep from saying anything further. She could tell he didn’t want to hear it anyway. Jerk. But if she was honest with herself, he wasn’t wrong. As a side hustle, she’d started a smutty book review blog. She had been distracted from the road when her phone’s PDF reader, an emotionless narrator set at twice the normal speaking speed, hit the big climax of the book.
Sam had scrunched her face in confusion and strained her ears, unable to fathom what was happening in the scene. Someone was kneeling in the kitchen, then suddenly they were bent over on the bed in another room. Seconds later, yet another magical character was simultaneously pleasuring four different people – how many hands did the woman have?
The monotonous, robotic voice from the phone’s default audio reader had said, “She kept pumping more and more orgasms from him,” and Sam had lost it.
Even though she had been alone in her car, she took her eyes off the road to look down at her phone on the center console as she protested, “He can’t have four consecutive orgasms! That’s not even how that works!”
Her attention darted back to the road and to her driving when she noticed the flashing lights behind her. She couldn’t help feeling at the moment that the sirens were actually sounding in solidarity. WEEooo…WEEooo…WEEooo! Sex violation: That’s not how that works.
Still fired up about the impossible sex acts from the book and from the impending ticket, she said through gritted teeth, “Of course, Officer. They’re in the center console. Give me one second.”
Sam went to move her phone from the top of the console, but her thumb must have hit a button on the screen because without any warning her car reverberated yet again with the robotic voice speaking so quickly it sounded as though she was on speed while she narrated the worst orgy ever written. Since her car’s heater roared with effort and her ancient engine was deafening, she’d kept her phone volume on the loudest possible setting to hear it. But there with Officer Hoffman at her window and her car shut off, it was ear-splitting and competing against nothing to be heard.
The unexpected sound startled the phone from her hands and she watched with utter horror as it slipped from her fingers down between the seat and the center console.
Sam had too much pride to let him witness her panic during what was sure to be a botched rescue mission for her phone, and so she let it be. The fast-paced voice continued to assault their ears with a barrage of poorly selected adjectives and adverbs, all conveying a filthy, though physically impossible, happy-ever-after sex scene. Ignoring it all, she retrieved her license and registration and handed it over to Officer Hoffman.
“Here you go, officer!” she shouted as nonchalantly as she could given the circumstances.
His left eyebrow cocked halfway up his forehead as he sized her up. Then he took her cards and glanced down at her license.
“You live in Milton, Maryland?” he yelled as her phone described one of the characters shooting ropes and ropes of cum all over the main character’s waiting and heaving bosoms.
Clearly he wanted to play erotica audiobook chicken with her – which one would be the first to acknowledge they were screaming over an audiobook porno. Normally she would have jumped at the challenge, but at the end of a four-hour car ride in which she was fleeing her old life, she was too tired for games.
Sam held up one finger to request a minute, then she turned and shoved her hands down between the seat and console as she groped around for her phone, oblivious to the sharp pieces of metal sticking and scratching her fingers here and there. A male character was in the middle of his third climax when she finally found her phone. Sam killed the audio and turned back to the officer.
“Yes, but I’m temporarily moving out here while I sort out a divorce and an early mid-life crisis.” She disgusted herself with her blatant manipulation of his emotions as she innocently twirled a lock of her blonde hair around her finger. Look at me, her eyes pleaded. I’m the biggest disaster of a human you’ve seen today. I’m sure of it. Just give me a warning and let me on my way.
“I’m sorry to hear that. Excuse me for a moment.”
In her mirrors she watched him walk back to his car and tried to size up the likelihood of her getting a ticket. The minutes ticked by and as her assurance that she was indeed getting a ticket increased, so too did her irritation with the heartless officer.
“Mrs. Thornton, I have a citation for you today,” he said when he returned. “Your arraignment date is on the bottom right corner of the citation. If you can’t make it on that day, the back of the citation lists out your next steps. There’s also a number on the back that you can call if you have questions.”
Sam gave an irritated huff as she took the citation and cards and stuffed them haphazardly into the center console.
“Perhaps if you weren’t listening to… that,” he pointed to the phone in her lap and she looked down to see the amateur-porn looking cover and the title, She Had All the Kings’ Men, by B.J. Queene, clearly in his view, “while you were driving, you’d be more attentive to the road.”
“Noted, officer.” She didn’t owe him any sort of explanation about her preferred reading genre, so she provided him with none. If he wanted the satisfaction of shaming her, he wouldn’t get it. Even though she herself was embarrassed to be listening to the erotic abomination B.J. Queene was attempting to pass off as literature, she wouldn’t let him know as much.
Just as he was about to turn back to his car he added, “I think you should know that’s not how that works with the whole -”
“I know, I know,” she said, cutting him off.
Officer Hoffman raised his eyebrows and lifted his hands in defense as if he wasn’t fully convinced she knew, but also didn’t want to argue it any further.
“Ma’am,” he said as he tipped his hat and walked back to his vehicle.
The familiar roar of her engine and the blast of warmth from the heaters settled her once more. One ticket would not break her, and that whole incident with the cop would not start her new life on a negative note.
The phone went back to the center console but stayed silent. Her review of the book was due tomorrow, but she would not be listening to the end of the story. She didn’t have to. It was becoming increasingly obvious Sam should have stopped listening somewhere around Baltimore (slightly less than midway between Milton and Deep Creek Lake) when she realized it would never get better and that the characters would not be developing beyond their basic descriptions and cringeworthy sex-scenes. Sam turned on the radio and slowly made her way through the last few miles of her journey to her parents’ vacation house which she’d be sharing with her friend Lexi for the foreseeable future.
The next morning, Sam was roused from a nightmarish dream by someone knocking on the front door. She rolled off the couch, caught the book she’d fallen asleep reading, and flung open the door dressed only in a pair of Lexi’s pajama pants and the tank top she’d worn the day before. No bra. Her nipples rose to full attention with the rush of the cold winter air.
“What are you doing here?” she demanded.