“I did not!” Maddie stomped her foot on the sidewalk. “The last thing I want is a man like you touching me.”
“You guys kissed?” Simon asked, looking thoroughly confused by the conversation blowing past him.
“Don’t lie, Fancy,” Emmett said. “You stood there with those pouty lips and looked up at me with big, innocent eyes, asking if I thought you were beautiful when you know damn well that you are. If you didn’t want me to kiss you, what was that all about?”
“It’s none of your business what that is all about!” she shouted. Maddie wasn’t about to admit to him that she hadn’t been kissed since Paris. That she was lonely in that big house with
nothing but her business to occupy her mind. That would just expose her Achilles’ heel to a man who was her enemy, despite everything that had happened tonight. “I don’t have to explain my actions to you.”
“You’re right, you don’t,” Emmett said, holding up his arms in surrender. “And I don’t have to explain my actions to you, either.”
“You’re both under arrest,” Simon said, his voice flat. “You have the right to remain silent . . .”
With their arguing back and forth, it took Maddie a moment to realize that her brother was reading them their Miranda rights. “Simon, what are you doing?”
“. . . if you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided to you,” he continued.
“Is your brother seriously arresting us?” Emmett asked.
“Yep,” Simon confirmed after he finished his spiel. “Sheriff Todd said that the handcuffs tonight were your last chance and if you two started any more trouble, I was to haul both of you in for disturbing the peace.”
“You can’t be serious,” Maddie said. Arrested? Her? She’d never even gotten detention in high school, much less committed a crime.
“Serious as a heart attack,” Simon said, clamping a cuff back around her newly freed wrist.
“You’re not going to handcuff us together again, are you?” she asked with a pleading edge in her voice.
“Nope.” Simon pulled out a second pair of cuffs. “This time, you each get your own set.” He twisted her arm behind her back and clicked the other handcuff into place before turning and doing the same to Emmett.
“Okay, now, off to the sheriff’s department. March or I’ll put you in the back of my squad car and Instagram it before I drive you around the block.”
Maddie immediately started down the street. She couldn’t risk this moment getting memorialized on social media. This was humiliating enough. Thank goodness it was dawn on a Saturday. Any later and someone might actually see her perp-walk down First Avenue toward the police station.
It was quiet when they arrived. It surprised her after all the police dramas she’d seen on television, but, then again, Rosewood was hardly a mecca for hard crime. Simon led them back to his desk, where he began the paperwork. To her horror, he made them pose for mug shots and then fingerprinted them both for their brand-new criminal case files.
“I can’t believe I now have a criminal record!” Maddie wailed, trying to get the black ink off her fingertips with the baby wipe Simon gave her.
“I guess you’ll never be First Lady,” Emmett said. He was slumped in his chair as though none of this bothered him at all. Apparently, this wasn’t his first arrest.
“You shut up. This is all your fault.”
“I doubt that,” Emmett said flatly.
“I certainly haven’t been arrested before,” she said.
“And I have?” he challenged.
“Haven’t you? You seem remarkably calm for a first-time offender.”
“You don’t know anything about me, Fancy, so don’t pretend that you do. You sit in your fussy little historical home and bake your snooty little pastries, all the while judging everyone around you, but you don’t know anything, little girl.”
“I know better than to let a man like you kiss me a second time.”
“Oh, good, we’ve gotten that cleared up. I was worried you might want me to do it again, and I’d hate to disappoint you.”
“Disappoint me? Please. I’ll be just fine without your whiskey-tainted breath on my lips.”
They paused in their argument as another officer came in. He sat down at a desk opposite Simon’s and started filling out some paperwork.