“Maybe...” Norah said uncertainly. Caine had said that Jim contracted with him. “He has sandy blond hair and dark green eyes.”
“Big guy?” Quincy asked.
“Not really,” Norah replied. “He’s built more like a runner or a swimmer than a football player.” He had muscles, sure. There had been plenty of strength in the way his hand had gripped hers when they shook hands, but he wasn’t overly muscled, just fit in the way of a man who was really used to doing hard, physical work on a daily basis.
“Oh, so it’s like that, is it?” Quincy said with a knowing smile.
“Like what?” Norah asked.
“You know what,” Quincy said. “You can protest all you want, but it’s written all over your face that you liked what you saw.”
“I never said I didn’t,” Norah replied. “He’s an attractive man, and yes, I noticed, but that’s all. It’s not ‘like’ anything. I barely spent twenty minutes with the man. He could be a serial killer in hiding for all I know.”
Quincy snorted. “Does he look like a serial killer to you?”
“Do they ever?” Norah asked. “Think about it. Every time something bad happens, the person’s neighbors always get on the news saying how they never suspected anything and he seemed like such a nice person.”
Quincy laughed. “I can assure you he is not a serial killer. Brent wouldn’t have let him anywhere near Corbin’s Bend if there was anything even the slightest bit suspicious in his background.”
“So you do know him?” Norah prompted. “He lives here too?”
“I’m fairly sure you are talking about the guy that Jim contracts with from Denver. I haven’t had any dealings with him personally, but I’ve seen him around,” Quincy told her.
“So he doesn’t live here then?” Norah asked. Even as she said the words, her heart sank in her chest, heavy with disappointment. It was stupid to be disappointed when she’d only met the man the day before and had barely had a conversation with him, but she was nonetheless.
“No, I don’t think so,” Quincy answered. “Not all of the building crew does. Jim does, of course, and a few of the others, but not everyone. They’re all tolerant though. No one will bother you. Whether they live here or not, they know how the community works, and they know Jim’s not going to put up with any closed-minded harassment. If on the off chance something does happen, you let me or Jim or Brent or anyone really know, and it will be taken care of. This is our home, and anyone who has a problem with what we do can go elsewhere.”
The freedom in that was overwhelming. Norah had spent her adult life hiding her interest in spanking. Even now, after three years alone, she still habitually cleaned the browser cache on her computer and erased the history for fear that someone would come behind her and use her computer without her knowledge and find out her secret. The idea that she could be as open as she chose and no one could or would criticize her about it was still intoxicating. Not that she really thought she had anything to worry about from Caine. Thus far, he had been nothing but kind and polite. In fact, Norah suspected he was more than a little shy.
“Thanks,” she told Quincy, “but I don’t think that’s going to be a problem. Caine seems like a nice guy. He was really helpful and sweet yesterday.” No, she didn’t think Caine was going to be a problem at all. It was shutting down these silly little schoolgirl crush fantasies she had been having about him that was the problem. No matter how attractive he was or how helpful he had been, if he didn’t live in the community, she needed to put him out of her mind. She’d been through one marriage hiding her spanking desires. She had no desire to do that anymore. From now on, any relationship she had would be with a man who understood what she wanted and needed. She was done with hiding.
Of course, it would’ve been far easier to banish her fantasies if she had not been meeting with the object of her fantasy first thing the following morning. Caine strode through the back entrance promptly at 8 AM. This morning, he looked every bit the consummate professional, neatly dressed in a polo shirt and chinos, carrying a binder, several folders, and a clipboard. The professional image should have logically made it easier for her to keep the meeting all about business, but if anything, the confident, professional image made him all the more attractive. If only she could get her brain and her libido to just shut up.
“Good morning,” she said cheerfully in response to his greeting. “There’s coffee if you want it,” she said, gesturing to the waiting cup she’d left sitting on the stairs. “I brought you a cup down, but I wasn’t sure how you take it.”
“Black is fine,” he told her, shifting his folders into one arm so he could pick up the cup. “You didn’t have to do that.”
Norah shrugged. “It’s no trouble. I was bringing my own down, and it would’ve been rude not to offer it to you as well. It was easier just to bring the cup down with me.” She glanced around. “Where’s Maverick this morning?”
“I left him home today,” Caine replied. “I don’t usually bring him along when I have a business meeting with a new client.”
“You could have,” Norah told him. “I wouldn’t have minded. Like I told you Saturday, he’s fine here. Besides, I’m not exactly a brand-new client. We’ve already met.”
“True,” Caine acknowledged, sipping carefully on his coffee. “Still, this is the first time we will actually conduct business. I thought it was better not to have him underfoot.”
Norah accepted that without further comment. “Speaking of business, we might as well get down to it.” If she were lucky, getting her mind on the nuts and bolts of their business arrangement would get her mind off of Caine and how close he was standing to her.
Caine set down his coffee, picked up his clipboard, and dug a pen out of his pocket. “We can do this one of two ways,” he told her. “If you have a pretty good idea of what you want down here, we can just walk around and you can tell me and I can make notes about what you want. If you need some ideas, I have my book here of things I’ve done before, and we can go through it first.” He gestured to the binder laying on the stairs.
Norah hesitated, biting her lip. “I have some idea of what I want,” she told him, “but I’d like to see your ideas too. I’ve done some research into bookstore furnishings and layouts, but you may have a better idea or solution if you have actually done this sort of thing before.”
“I haven’t actually done a bookstore before,” Caine admitted, “though I have done work with restaurants and various retail outlets before. You probably have a better idea of what you need so why don’t you tell me what you’re thinking, and then we can go through my books and see if there’s anything that sparks an idea or could be adapted.”
“That makes sense,” Norah agreed.
Caine shuffled some papers around on his clipboard, bringing several fresh sheets of paper to the front. “Ladies first,” he said, gesturing to Norah with a flourish.
Norah giggled despite herself. The exaggerated chivalry was sweet and very cute. Still, she forced herself to keep her mind on the task at hand, leading them through the bookstore and pointing out her ideas as far as furnishings and placements. “The biggest thing I need is bookshelves,” she told him. “I need ones to line the walls as well as freestanding ones for the middle.
“I’m assuming you’ll also need storage for extra books and things like that,” Caine put in.
Norah nodded. “Yes, that would be very helpful.”
“Would you prefer to have it hidden behind the shelves themselves or cabinets at the bottom of the shelves?” Caine asked.
Norah shrugged. “Either is fine. As long as I can have additional inventory within easy reach, and it blends into the overall atmosphere of the store, I really don’t have a preference.”
“I can do either,” Caine told her. “You just tell me what you need.”
Norah held back another sigh. This was the hardest part, making all these decisions. On a practical logistical level, one design over the other did
n’t really make that much difference. This is when it got hard. This is when she wished she had somebody else to tell her what to do. It wasn’t as though she couldn’t make decisions. She could and did. She’d packed up her entire life and moved to Colorado completely on her own, for crying out loud, but those were big things. Times when the path was relatively clear or she felt strongly about what she needed or wanted, it was easy. It was the times like this, when both answers were relatively equal and there were numerous decisions to make that she felt overwhelmed. That was when she wished somebody would take the decision out of her hands.
“Of course, we could do both,” Caine went on. “The wall shelves could have cabinets underneath, and the A-frame shelves for the middle could have the under shelf storage.”
Norah grabbed onto the solution gratefully. “Yes, that sounds good.”
Caine made a notation on his clipboard then took an oversized eighteen-inch ruler from his pocket and started making measurements. He moved around the room, measuring wall space, and then measured the space in the middle of the floor where the freestanding bookcases would go. Occasionally, he asked questions, needing to know how much space she wanted to leave between shelves for walkways or whether or not she needed end caps at the ends of the shelves to feature certain books. She did but only on the shelves that would be at the end of the aisle. Norah answered his questions as best she could and otherwise tried to stay out of the way. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, trying to stay back out of the way gave her an excellent view of the way his muscles moved beneath his shirt as he stretched and bent, measuring, and jotting down notations. That made it all the harder to keep her mind on their professional relationship. That in itself was a constant source of irritation. Though she hadn’t been entirely celibate since John died, she hadn’t found herself attracted to many men either. Caine was proving to be an exception—a highly distracting exception. From the moment she had met him Saturday—had it really only been two days ago?—something about him had captured her attention. He drew her eye, even when she was trying her best to force herself to be professional and not to let her eyes or her mind wander in another direction. Her body seemed determined to be aware of him whether she wanted it to or not.
Finally, she turned away and looked out the window, watching her neighbors come and go. There wasn’t a lot of traffic this early in the morning, mostly just other business people like herself. She thought she saw Abby’s car pass by on the street, heading down to Quincy’s antique shop. Quincy had introduced Norah to Abby, her great niece and shop assistant, yesterday afternoon. She had found Abby, who was roughly her own age, or perhaps just a bit younger, to be very sweet and sincere. She was spunky in her own right, though next to Quincy’s outrageous flamboyance, Abby seemed quite mellow. She was engaged to marry Harris Montgomery, a former professional gambler who owned the community’s sole carwash. The two had been together for several years now, but much to Quincy’s annoyance, were just now getting around to getting married. What’s more, Quincy was quite put out that Abby absolutely refused to let her plan a large, extravagant wedding like she felt her favorite niece deserved. Personally, Norah agreed with Abby. Her wedding had been the kind of fairytale wedding most girls dream of. It had been a wonderful day and was a beautiful memory that she still cherished, but it wasn’t something she ever wanted to do again. She hoped to marry again someday and. have the sort of stable, traditional household that had been the norm forty or fifty years ago, with a husband who loved her and had no qualms taking her to task if she needed it. Of course, their household wouldn’t be able to be completely traditional. After all, she had no intentions of giving up her bookstore even if she should meet the right man. This had been her dream for far too long. If she managed to get it off the ground and make that dream come true, she had no intention of giving it up, not even for the sake of having the kind of structured relationship she wanted and needed. She was done sacrificing her own needs for the sake of being acceptable to other people.
Surely the right HOH for her would understand that, wouldn’t he? Of course he would, just like the right man for her would understand that she needed an HOH, which, she reminded herself firmly, was why she needed to quit mooning over Caine. However attractive he might be, he was vanilla, and that put him squarely in the category of men that she did not need to get involved with. She just had to get her hormones under control and keep that thought firmly in mind. He might be cute, but he was off-limits, and that was that.
As Caine had suspected, this job wasn’t going to be all that complicated. He would subcontract people to do the painting and the flooring, maybe sheet rocking too if any mudding in was needed before the painting could be done. This construction was new enough that he didn’t anticipate needing to do much prep work on the walls, but he’d pull the painters in and get their assessment before he ruled it out. He jotted a note on his ever present notepad to talk to Jim about hiring out painters and floorers. He had contacts he had worked with before that he could easily pull in for this job, but Jim might prefer to work with certain crews who were more familiar with the community. For that matter, Jim might be able to spare people from one of his regular crews for this job. Caine was more than willing to staff the job himself, but he’d worked around the community enough to know they were very careful about who they brought in to work. Not that he could blame them. From what he’d heard around the community, quite a few of them had had trouble in the past as a result of their particular interest. There was plenty of reason for them to be wary. Knowing that, he wouldn’t bring in any more people than he had to. The bookshelves and furniture he would do himself. There were a lot of bookshelves, but bookshelves were one of those bread and butter things he could practically do in his sleep. Even the ones with additional storage like she needed wouldn’t be particularly difficult.
Bookshelves were one of the first things he had ever learned to build. He couldn’t have been more than ten. No, younger. It had been before Mamere died. In fact, it had been around the time when she had first started getting sick. Ruben had decided he needed a project so he could stay busy and out of her hair. He had been so excited, desperate for any time with his grandfather that involved positive attention. That was before he had gotten acquainted with Ruben’s perfectionistic streak and exacting standards. He’d probably rebuilt that first bookshelf a dozen times. By the time it was good enough to satisfy Ruben, he’d sworn he never wanted to see another bookshelf again. Uncharacteristically, Ruben had actually agreed to that for a little while, letting him build simple box planters and a small x-legged table. No matter the project though, Ruben had the same standards. It always had to be perfect.
There was no sense dwelling on that now. It had been a long time ago, and besides the practice had stood him in good stead many times over the years. It would be particularly useful on this project so he supposed he had something to thank his bastard of a grandfather for.
Norah was watching quietly, light green eyes following his every move. She was clearly interested in what he was doing, but unlike some of his more demanding customers, she wasn’t interrupting or rattling at him. Instead, she gave him quiet and space to work. Even if he had not already found her attractive, that consideration alone would have made her so.
That thought stopped him in his tracks. He couldn’t go down that road. He couldn’t start thinking of her as attractive. That road held nothing but madness. For one, he was working for her. For another, regardless of what she looked like, she was one of them. She was looking for things he could never be. For the sake of both their sanity, this could never have more than a professional relationship.
He took a deep breath and turned to Norah. “What are your thoughts about the checkout area?” he asked. “I’m assuming you’re going to need something there as well.”
“Yes,” Norah agreed. “I need a counter and I also need display shelves. I’ve got some books in the back with samples of things that are commercially available. I was hop
ing you would be able to build something to match the bookshelves, but maybe that would give you some idea of what I’m looking for.”
“That would be perfect,” Caine told her.
“Just let me go and find them then,” Norah said, heading toward the storage room and office area.
Watching her go, Caine breathed a sigh of relief, grateful for a moment to gather his thoughts and glad to keep the conversation on safe business topics. There would be no more silly fantasies and daydreams. He could be friendly and courteous, but that was where it needed to stop.
Chapter 3
You ready to go?” Quincy asked, striding through the back door of the bookstore and into Norah’s office later that week.
“Sure,” Norah replied, “just let me save this and grab my stuff.” Her fingers clicked rapidly across the keyboard of her laptop until the screen went blank. Then, she got to her feet, picked up the paperback book off of the corner of her desk, and tucked it into her purse before swinging the purse over her shoulder. “I’m excited,” she told Quincy, following her out the door.
Quincy was taking her to her first meeting of one of the two local book clubs. The larger of the two was a mixed group for both those who identified as HOH and those who identified as TIH, but today they were attending the smaller group, a splinter group that had broken off of the original group and was solely for TIHs. Norah ideally planned to attend both groups. She wanted to meet as many of the people in the community who enjoyed reading as possible. For one, she was a book person herself and would likely find kindred spirits among these groups. For another, it was good business practice for her to connect with the book clubs. When the store was up and running, she hoped to be their go-to resource for purchasing whatever book they had chosen to read for the month. She knew they could easily buy their books elsewhere and had probably been getting them without problem from one of the online megastores. However, she hoped that cultivating relationships in the groups would help to convince people to buy local and support her store rather than some huge corporate behemoth. To start though, Quincy had convinced her that attending the TIH group would probably be less overwhelming. Since the weather was warm and sunny, they had decided to take advantage of it and walk to Venia Humphries’s house where the group met.
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