Angel's Peak by Robyn Carr Read Free Book Online

down where you are, buster.” But Sean was intent on getting up and he’d just about made it to his feet when the man took two giant steps in his direction. That was all it took for Franci to launch herself on the lumberjack with a cry of outrage. She had her arms around his neck, her legs around his waist and screamed bloody murder while pummeling him on the back.
    “I. Told. You. To. Leave. Him. Alone!” she shrieked.
    Paul Bunyan whirled around and around, trying to shake her loose, but she was on him like a tick on a hound.
    Then the scene got a lot more interesting. “No! No! No! No! No!” screamed a store manager, running up to them, followed closely by another man and a couple of young bag boys. A crowd gathered and the grocery employees peeled Franci off the lumberjack, but she was kicking her heart out the whole time. “The police are coming!” the store manager yelled. “Stop this at once! Stop!”
    And Sean absently thought, This really isn’t going how I planned.
    Right about then, Sean attempted to stand and reclaim his manhood, only to slip on some slimy melon guts and crash into the floor again. He didn’t exactly pass out, but he was on the nether edges, half listening to the conversation going on above him.
    “He threw the first punch,” a voice said.
    “You threw him in the melons!” Franci yelled.
    “He was grabbing your arm after you told him to go away and leave you alone! Shoot me for trying to lend a hand!”
    “But then the little guy did hit the big guy,” someone said. And Sean thought, I am not a little guy. I’m definitely six-one. I bench two-fifty with no problem.
    “But the big guy plastered the little guy, knocked him out.”
    “I am not little,” Sean mumbled through a swollen jaw, though no one was listening to him.
    “I didn’t ask you to protect me!” Franci shouted. “I told you to leave him alone!”
    Yeah, Sean thought. Because I’m harmless. Just how I always wanted her to see me. Harmless. And that was Sean Riordan’s last coherent thought.
    The next time he was conscious, a paramedic was waving some disgusting-smelling ammonia under his nose and holding an ice pack to his cheek. The ammonia made him gag and the ice pack hurt like hell. And what was worse, they were all in handcuffs. “Damn,” he groaned. “Damn, damn, damn.”

    Three hours later, Sean was being held in a windowless room with a locked door down at the Eureka police station. The paramedics had recommended that he go to the hospital to have his head examined, to which Sean replied, “Well, no kidding.”
    But while he was in the cell with his buddy the lumberjack, the big man apologized. Sean apologized right back. And what Sean learned was, Dennis Avery was not a lumberjack but a big rig driver who was on his way home, picking up some groceries for the little woman, when he got snared into that whole domestic between Franci and Sean.
    So, as Sean was known to do, he told Dennis his life story. Or at least the part that had to do with breaking up with Franci.
    “Man,” Dennis said, running a hand over his head. “Are you an idiot or what?”
    “Watch it,” Sean warned, though what he was going to do about it remained a mystery.
    “Buddy, I’m six-five in my sockies. I been loading crates into a semitrailer for almost twenty years. And you swing at me?” He laughed. “You got this little gal who throws herself on Goliath to defend you, because you pitched her out without thinking about it twice? No wonder she’s pissed.”
    “I told you,” Sean said irritably. “She gave me an ultimatum. We get married or she’s gone.”
    Dennis stood to his full height. “And you had to think about that?”
    Then, mercifully, the police sergeant was at the door. “All righty, boys. You’re out of here. Somebody loves you and you got cited with misdemeanor public disturbance—a pure gift. Be smart and make sure I don’t see your faces again for a very long time. Like ever. In fact, a