Trouble When You Walked In (Contemporary Romance) Page 13

  Why wasn’t he moving his knees? Was he even aware they were touching hers? He had to be.

  She couldn’t look at him. A horrible longing came back to her. Went straight to the breathless part of her and then to the warm center of her, which he’d so expertly trifled with, like the cotton candy man does at the circus when he waves spun sugar in your face and you get a whiff of utter deliciousness.

  Zoe laughed. “Political issues don’t bring up ratings as much as juicy human interest stories do.”

  “There’s nothing juicy about this.” Cissie’s heart pounded hard from the knee situation. She knew very well she and Boone were juicy, but she had to think about the library.

  She felt something stir in the napkin.

  “Excuse me, I need to go.” She stood and cast a hasty glance at her tablemates. “I enjoyed talking to you.”

  And touching knees …

  “Likewise,” said Boone politely.

  But she saw a glint in his eye. He was remembering her naked, she was sure of it.

  “Wish you could stay, Cissie,” Janelle lied, and tossed off a fake smile for Boone’s sake.

  Cissie was all steam, heat, and misplaced passion—it belonged on the issues, not on Boone’s body!—when she attempted to wriggle past Zoe and instead bumped hard into a man in a suit—the guy from the county. The napkin fell.

  Where?

  Cissie couldn’t tell.

  But there was a pageant-queen kind of scream. And there was the bug on the tabletop, scurrying toward Janelle, who screamed again and drew her knees up so hard she jostled the table and knocked Boone’s coffee and blackberry pie into his lap onto those khaki pants.

  “Dang.” Boone stood and stared at his crotch, which was covered in pie and coffee.

  “Where’s the bug? Where’s that damned bug?” Janelle shrieked.

  “I’m so sorry,” Cissie babbled, and grabbed another napkin off the table. She shoved it at Boone. “I was only trying to help. I’ll wash those for you tonight—”

  Zoe, who was also busy trying to calm Janelle, froze and looked at Cissie.

  Janelle instantly stopped screaming. “What did you say?”

  The man from the county said, “Sorry I’m late. Can I order now?”

  “In a minute.” Zoe looked between Cissie and Boone then reached into her apron pocket.

  “I’ll bet you’re not supposed to make calls during work hours,” said Cissie.

  “Yeah.” Boone threw the waitress his best mayoral look. “Take this man’s order, please.”

  “I plan to,” said Zoe, clutching her phone, “just as soon as I finish texting my brother that the two people running for mayor of Kettle Knob are living together.”

  “I never said that,” said Cissie.

  “Nor did I,” added Boone.

  “But she’s doing your laundry,” Zoe said.

  “That’s ridiculous.” Janelle chewed her gum faster. “Why is she doing that, Boone?”

  “It’s only temporary,” said Cissie.

  “You are doing his laundry?” Janelle’s eyes widened. She looked at Boone. “She is?”

  “No,” he bit off. “I do my own.” He took a breath and looked around. “But she and Nana are living at my house right now until their own gets repaired.”

  “What about the Hattleburys?” Janelle’s gaze was indignant.

  “Nana and I don’t know proper table etiquette,” said Cissie lamely. “I can’t tell a soup spoon from a teaspoon.”

  Janelle’s perfectly sculpted chin jutted forward. “So you’re telling me that out of everyone in Kettle Knob, Boone’s the only one you could move in with when a tree falls through your roof?”

  “No,” said Cissie. “But it’s convenient. He’s just up the mountain.” On a crag, one that was actually quite hard to get to. “Nana’s older now, and we did what was easiest for her. And it’s also none of anyone’s business.” She pretended she was in the library and looked down her nose at Janelle and then at Zoe.

  Zoe grinned. “It’s a good story.”

  “Then what are you doing working here?” Boone asked the waitress. “You should be writing for Edwina at the paper. She needs a reporter.”

  “Maybe I will.” Zoe’s eyes gleamed with new ambition.

  No one even noticed that the bug was sitting right in Boone’s empty saucer.

  Cissie swiped it off the table into another napkin before Janelle could see. “I’m leaving.” She picked up her precious clipboard, then remembered the county guy. “And you shouldn’t move our library,” she said firmly. “It’s a very bad idea.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Boone had gone a whole week without interacting with Cissie, thanks to Nana and her house rules. He’d had glimpses of the contrary librarian—two without her knowing. She liked to walk outside, and he’d watched her out his bedroom window, like a sick stalker except he wasn’t one. He was the owner of the property, and he had a right to know where everyone was, especially a single, available woman who dressed in boring schoolmarm skirts and blouses that covered everything up and got his blood hotter than if she’d been in short shorts and a halter top.

  So when she showed up at the diner, he’d been a little discombobulated by actually being in the same room as her, and then he was seriously impressed that she’d had the balls to follow him and Janelle to their table and ask them what they were talking about.

  Things started to get weird when she’d been so awkwardly friendly with Janelle while he was on the phone. But he put two and two together when he saw the bug on the table and the squashed napkin in Cissie’s fist.

  The girl had to get herself into everything.

  The best part had been sitting directly across from her in the booth. He was taken right back to the hot tub, especially when their knees had knocked together—and neither one of them backed off.

  It was a highly erotic experience.

  Either that, or it was a silly game of Who’s the Most Stubborn and Weird About Not Moving Their Knees, and he dug that, too.

  He felt the absence of her when she left the table. It made him realize he’d been bored for a very long time. But after he exited the diner—gossip flying right and left about him and Cissie—and headed to his parents’ house, he forced himself to think about other things that stressed him.

  As he walked past the life-sized portrait of Richard in his parents’ entryway, which he’d only done a million times before, he didn’t need to look at the painting to recall that his late brother’s thirteen-year-old gaze was compassionate, brave, outright heroic.

  And Boone had never known him.

  He wasn’t one to fall into self-pity telling his family’s tragic tale about Richard’s cancer, or get psychologically wrapped around the axle, especially as his parents were straight out of psych textbooks themselves: for as long as Boone could remember, they’d tried to make Richard live on in him.

  But Boone was used to it. Carried the weight lightly. He loved his parents. The more mellow he stayed about the situation, the less weird they were. It was only when he didn’t call them on it and let them play out the fantasy too long that they ran into trouble.

  So far his method had worked pretty well.

  Except for one thing.

  And there was really no way out of it now. It was embedded so deeply in their family story, Boone forgot that the lie was wrong to hide—except on a certain day in the autumn, when the weight of it was too heavy. It was a day he hated to go through every year, and that day was coming up.

  He refused to think about it now. He had something else he had to do, something almost as painful. He wouldn’t do it if it weren’t necessary, but it was. He knew when he was in over his head.

  “In here!” his mother called to him from the kitchen.

  “Where’s Dad?” he asked when he crossed the threshold.

  “In his study.” Mom leaned her cheek up for a kiss. “How’s everything at your house with those two guests of yours?”


  “Just fine,” he said, “but the cat’s out of the bag. Everyone knows. It was bound to happen sooner or later.”

  Becky Lee sighed. “What will people think about you living with your opponent? It’s all very strange. What’s the world coming to?”

  “Don’t worry, Mom. None of this is a big deal.”

  She pressed her lips together. “I think you’re wrong. It is a big deal.” She put down her paring knife. “I hear you were invited to the country club for lunch with some VIPs, including that lovely young singer back here for a visit—”

  “Who’s had a string of loser Hollywood boyfriends—”

  “And the lieutenant governor. My goodness. Yet you turned them down.”

  “Yep.” She didn’t have to know he turned them down because he was overwhelmed at work. “Hey, I need to get a book from my room.”

  “Be my guest.” Her tone was terse.

  `Everything was fine. Boone was Richard’s brother, but he was his own man, first and foremost, and his parents didn’t have the power to sway his choices anymore.

  He knew full well Frank and Becky Lee’s flaws. He could scorn their sometimes selfish, boorish ways and love them and forgive them, all at once. They were only human.

  Boone was an ambitious, bright thirty-two-year-old male.

  He also read at a fourth-grade level.

  He had dyslexia, and he hid it well from the world. It used to be his parents’ choice.

  Now it was his.

  He wasn’t ashamed of having serious reading challenges. But his parents were. And rather than risk getting rejected by anyone else—not in that mushy emotional way his parents had held him at arm’s length, but on the job, on the team, at school, or in town—he kept it to himself.

  He was a practical man who’d learned to work with his strengths and minimize his weaknesses.

  He went to his old bedroom. Found the faded Hallmark card in his desk drawer. Sat on the edge of his bed and reread it twice. Three times.

  Then he took out his cell phone and dialed. “Hey, Ella. It’s Boone.”

  “Boone! How are you?” Ella was a potter, a few years younger than Boone. She had her own little business from home.

  “Good. It’s been a long time.”

  “Yes, it has.”

  He paused and looked at the card. “Your mom once told me that if I ever got painted into a corner to talk to you. She said she’d let you know I might take advantage of that offer someday.”

  “Mama got me to promise, and I did. I’m happy to help, Boone. Hearing you talk about her really brings her back.”

  “Yep. I miss her.”

  “Me, too.”

  He released a breath. “Well, I was hoping I’d never have to call. I thought I had this thing licked.”

  “Tell me what I can do,” Ella said immediately.

  “I can only ask my assistant at Town Hall to do so much reading for me without her wondering why I’m not doing it myself. It’s for that reason that I don’t ask her to check over the Bugler’s reports on town council meetings. That’s an easy task I can do at my desk. But I missed an edition because I was swamped at school. There was a big oversight the mayor’s office should have caught. I’m pissed no one on the town council noticed, actually. But the buck stops with me.”

  “I get that.”

  “I would love for you to read the Bugler for me and call me afterward and tell me any stuff you think I should know. I’d like to hear from you how they report on our council meetings, especially. Meanwhile, every day I try to keep up with all the other paperwork a mayor has to deal with, plus I grade papers at the high school and read all the emails there from the principal and the office. Sometimes I’m up all night trying to catch up.”

  “Boone, I wish this didn’t have to happen.”

  “I’m okay with it. Honestly. I’ve always had everything under control. But these days…”

  He told her about having to spend more time campaigning the next couple weeks now that he had an opponent—and about all the hours he’d be spending on the football field in addition.

  “I’m going to be overrun with reading,” he said, “so I’m going to need this additional help. I’d love to offer you a part-time job as my personal assistant.”

  “I’m interested.”

  “I’m glad. I understand you already have your own career, your own priorities. But I’ll pay you well, and I’ll do all my own work. I just need someone to read things to me faster than I can do it myself.”

  “How many hours a week are you thinking?”

  “Ten to fifteen, whenever you can fit it in. We can do some of this over the phone. I’ll give you my direct number so you don’t talk to my assistant. Sometimes we’ll have to be together in the same room, though. I’ll have stacks of papers to go through with you. I’d like to do that in private at your house, if you don’t mind, the same way I used to do with your mom.”

  “That sounds fine.”

  “I’ll park in your backyard, okay? I want to keep this on the down low as much as possible.”

  “That’ll be easy. I have a lot of privacy here at the end of the block. In fact, you coming over here helps a lot. I don’t have the most reliable car. Let’s get started. Tomorrow sound good?”

  “Perfect.” His whole body relaxed a little. “Thanks. I’ll swing by after breakfast.”

  “Great. The kids will be at school.”

  It was hard for him to speak about Mrs. Kerrison without his throat tightening up. “I can’t say enough good things about your mother. Without her, I wouldn’t be where I am today.”

  “Don’t make me cry, Coach,” Ella said on a low chuckle. “Or should I say ‘Mr. Mayor’? I’m honored to work with you. And the cash will help. Always does. Making a living as a potter ain’t for sissies.”

  “I hear you.”

  They chatted a little more about Ella’s kids and how she was doing since her husband had left her, moved out of state, and wasn’t paying any child support. Boone wished he’d thought about hiring her for something way earlier than now, just to help her pay her bills. When he hung up the phone, he was glad their business relationship would benefit them both.

  But he’d not tell anyone. Especially his parents. They never talked about his “little problem,” as they referred to his dyslexia, as if his six years being tutored in secret by his former sixth-grade teacher had never happened.

  Richard hadn’t had any trouble reading, according to his mother. Nor had Debbie, who was a professor at Duke.

  Boone had been the only one.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  “You don’t look like no mayor,” Sally told Cissie at the library the next afternoon. “And you need to. The television people are coming.”

  “How do you know?” Cissie’s goal was to keep things normal at the library for as long as possible. She and Sally were working together on a new reading poster to hang behind the front desk—a scholarly worm sticking out of an apple, a book in its hand.

  In a cartoon bubble, the worm said, “Reading Is Good for You!” Sally had painted the whole thing herself with poster paints on a roll of white paper donated by the meat department at the Harris Teeter. It was a funky worm, like something out of a psychedelic movie, and the words above his head were equally eye-catching, all zigzaggy and crazy, like Sally herself.

  Cissie loved this poster. She could stare at it all day. Yes, a bookworm was a predictable theme in a library, but Sally’s worm was special. The older people who saw it would talk to her about the good old days when they were students and brought their teachers apples. Toddlers would wave to the worm. Hank Davis already loved it. He and Sally had done what they called the Worm Dance in front of it.

  Speaking of her two favorite volunteers, it pained Cissie’s heart to know they wouldn’t be with her anymore at the new library if Boone’s plan went through.

  So maybe it was a long shot, her winning the election. But until the outcome was made clear—and even afterward
—she was going to run that theme into the ground: keep the library in Kettle Knob, in part because she needed to keep Sally and Hank Davis with her.

  They made the library special. They made her life special.

  Sally finished painting a strangely cool top hat on the worm. “The redheaded reporter lady called while you was in the children’s section with the Amish mama and her kids.”

  “That waitress at Starla’s moved fast.” Cissie picked up an empty jar of blue paint, wondered if she should bother ordering another for the craft closet, and decided that yes, she would.

  “Oh, it wasn’t Zoe who got in touch with them.” Sally’s chest puffed up. “I did.”

  “Sally.”

  “Well, of course I was gonna call! ’Cause no one did nothin’ after the sit-in was over.”

  “You’re right,” said Cissie, her shoulders sagging.

  “You was so busy getting signatures, and I was here with your replacement, and she didn’t care nothin’ about the library moving. She got on my last nerve with the way she hums all the time. Hank Davis hated her real bad. We’re glad she’s gone.”

  “Iron Man,” said Hank Davis, and brought Cissie a Where’s Waldo? book, his favorite.

  Of course she would look at it with him. She took it and sat at a table. “Sit here,” she told him, and patted the seat next to her.

  “She cain’t, Hank Davis.” Sally ripped the book out of Cissie’s hands. “The TV people’s coming tomorrow. And Cissie ain’t ready.”

  “Sure, I am. I know exactly what to say!”

  “No one will care ’cause you ain’t got style. You gotta get some style, like me and Hank Davis. The redheaded reporter lady say you cain’t wear stripes or polka dots. They’re interviewing Boone, too.”

  “That family isn’t Amish.”

  “Don’t change the subject. Nothin’ matters but the TV people. And you. Go get your hair done. Get you something else to wear.”

  Cissie looked at her perfectly serviceable gray sheath dress and dusky pink cardigan. “I like this outfit. Gray and pink go well together.”

  “On your mama,” said Sally. “Not you. Right, Hank Davis? Shouldn’t Cissie wear bright red? Or orange? Somethin’ like what I wear?”