Page 62 of Rough Around the Hedges

My titties might have been in mild danger of exposure, but my kitty kat was fully covered.

I knew the laws.

And I’d only been running because he’d chased me. That part was really all his fault. I was protesting quite peacefully until he saw my sign and took offense at my art.

I mean, if my painstakingly painted portrait of him looked nothing like him, why was he so bothered by it?

“Well, you see,” Shaun said, scratching the side of his neck and looking away. “Rose’s, er,outfit… didn’t technically breach any public indecency laws. Ironically, it covered more than the average bikini does on a woman, so there’s nothing we can do.She really is just here until she calms down after she threw a plum at Mr Turner.”

Pfft.

I was perfectly calm, thank you very much.

They’d know if I wasn’t.

And Mr Turner deserved to be smacked in the face with a melon, never mind a blinkin’ plum, the ornery old git.

“What about a public disturbance?” Oliver asked.

“We’re a twenty-minute walk away from the nearest beach. If we arrested every half-naked woman running down the high street shouting nonsense, we’d be here twenty-four hours a day during the summer,” Shaun answered. “It’s not that simple.”

I nodded sagely. “Compared to some of the things I’ve seen, my disturbance was very minor indeed.”

Oliver glared at me. “Very minor? I think you’ve scarred me for life.”

I held out my hands, smiling. “Excellent. Then I’ve achieved my objective of cursing you for the rest of your days and shall consider today a resounding success.”

“How long is she here in time out?” he asked Shaun.

“Maybe another hour or so. We usually release her when Isa comes to get her.”

“You release her when her best friend and co-conspirator comes to get her?” Oliver blinked several times.

“Well, her mother refuses to take our calls anymore. I tried calling her from my phone, but she even ignores those. Only when Rose is in trouble, though. She answers me otherwise. It’s like she knows.”

She did.

She absolutely knew.

The woman had a sixth sense for my bullshit.

“Her mother refuses to retrieve her child from jail? What kind of place have I moved to?”

In Mum’s defense, she’d done it more times than a parent should.

My father was the one ignoring his parental responsibility. And God only knew Jake wasn’t going to get me out of here. He was such a little shit he’d conjure up some cockamamie charge to keep me in jail.

“It’s called a community,” I offered brightly. “And if you hadn’t pissed me off in the first place, we wouldn’t even be here.”

“It’s my land,” he reminded me. “Once again, I can do as I wish with it, whether you like it or not.”

“And as a citizen of the United Kingdom, I have the legal right to protest against that as long as I don’t harm anyone or cause any criminal damage,” I replied. “I did neither of those things during myorganised,approved,andpolice attendedprotest against your tyranny, so suck it up, buttercup.”

All right, so I had technically broken the law a little bit when his car and estate gates were silly stringed yesterday, but I wasn’t concerned about that at all.

There was no way the teens I’d quietly paid to do that would rat me out. Their mothers—my fellow allotmenteers—would beat them.

And rightfully so.

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