Trouble When You Walked In (Contemporary Romance)

by Kieran Kramer

  “We’re looking into moving the county waste management office here.” Janelle tossed off the library’s long history with the same insouciance with which she flung her shiny, hair-sprayed curls over her shoulder. “They’re so cramped where they are.”

  “What?” Cissie heard her, but she didn’t believe her.

  “Uh-huh,” said Janelle. “We’re getting creative. As for the new library location, it’s time we have a place where the communities of Campbell and Kettle Knob can interact and share resources.” She sounded so phony. Like that’s a big surprise, thought Cissie. “We’ll have the opportunity to read, research”—Janelle cast a smoldering look at Boone—“and enjoy our archival documents. Together.”

  Only Janelle could make going to the library sound like a sex act.

  Cissie was about to sneeze. She turned away, held her breath, and by some miracle got the sneeze under control. But the tiny break was enough to remind herself that a Rogers always sounded reasonable. They won things with their heads.

  “Those were Rogers papers,” she reminded Janelle, “bequeathed to the town of Kettle Knob. Campbell didn’t send anyone to King’s Mountain, nor are they represented in any of our archival documents, except in passing reference as a neighboring town.”

  Campbell thought it was hot stuff because a superfamous female pop star with current hits used to go to grade school there.

  And a lot of rich people lived in Campbell, too, in Boone’s parents’ original fancy golf resort, which was now old enough that it was described in the newspaper’s crime column as an “established high-end neighborhood” every time someone got their leaf blower stolen or their Mercedes keyed. Most Campbell residents commuted to their doctor and attorney jobs in Asheville and only came to places like Kettle Knob to feel like they’d gone backward a hundred years for a few minutes.

  And now Campbell had attracted a high-tech research facility with international connections.

  But apart from that, Campbell was boring.

  “Campbell doesn’t even have a good scenic overlook for couples to make out at,” Sally said every Valentine’s Day, which was when the Campbell Country Club held its annual two-hundred-fifty-bucks-a-ticket black-tie gala to benefit heart research. “Every mountain town should have at least one.”

  “That King’s Mountain raid was definitely a Kettle Knob thing,” Boone agreed with Cissie now. “But…”

  But?

  His family had led the local charge in the historic battle. Cissie’s family had documented it.

  There were no buts!

  She told him all that with her eyes. But he didn’t appear to be able to read her anymore, if he ever had. Probably because Janelle crossed her arms so that her breasts nearly spilled out of the top of her sweater. Boone didn’t exactly look at them, but they were like the elephant in the room—two DD-sized elephants.

  “Campbell never bothered to save local accounts from the Civil War, either,” Cissie went on doggedly. “We have nine leather-bound Civil War–era journals in our collection.”

  All donated by the Rogers family.

  Janelle’s mouth soured. “Campbell was too busy to record anything.”

  It was too busy being high on itself, like you, Cissie wanted to say. But she was a coward. And maybe she was wrong about Janelle being a narcissist. After all, everyone had been wrong about Cissie in high school. She wasn’t nerdy. Much.

  “Listen.” Janelle dropped her arms. With her boobs back into place, tension eased a tad. “It’s time to put old rivalries behind us. Think of it this way: the county sent a regiment to King’s Mountain. We’re not going to get nitpicky about where those citizens lived, are we?”

  Okay, so Cissie was on the right track about Janelle, and surely, Boone wasn’t okay with this plan.

  “You gotta admit, it’s hard to find this place,” he said.

  He’d never found it, that was for sure. “It hasn’t changed location in over a hundred years,” Cissie reminded him.

  He shrugged his manly shoulders. “You’re tucked away behind Main Street. But if we move right off the interstate? The library will be hopping. Kettle Knob’s history will be more accessible than ever to more people. It’s a win all around.”

  Cissie’s ears burned. Something was happening to her fingernails, too. She’d never felt them before, but now they were all tingly and buzzy, and the sensation was going up her arms.

  “I know what this is about,” she said.

  Getting into Janelle’s pants. Spreading the Braddock glory. That was Boone’s win-win.

  “Better resources for Kettle Knob and Campbell,” he replied like it was a no-brainer. “Progress despite trying times.”

  Cissie turned to Janelle, hoping she’d have better luck addressing her. Don’t think sleeping with our mayor means you’re going to get your hands on our precious Kettle Knob documents, she wanted to say. Don’t think that Campbell can boss us around. And don’t you dare think you can ruin our stupid legend.

  But she couldn’t get the words out.

  The truth was, some part of her must have really believed all the hoopla. Deep inside, Cissie thought she’d find true love here … with a stranger who walked across the threshold and swept her off her feet.

  She was such a schmuck.

  But who could blame her? Daddy had been the librarian, working on his British lit PhD part-time, when Mother came to a writers’ retreat at nearby Appalachian State and ventured to Kettle Knob to check out the historic town, only to be smitten with Daddy instead.

  They might be in Cambridge, England, now, researching esoteric subjects and lecturing for three years, but they wanted grandchildren. She knew this because last week Mother had called and said, “I’m writing a thesis on A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh. Did you know Milne went to Cambridge?” which surely was a broad hint.

  And if Cissie had to sleep alone the rest of her life because karma boomeranged on her for not keeping the legend going, she’d be unhappy, to put it mildly. She imagined she’d start muttering under her breath and yelling at children. She might even die behind her desk at the beer joint turned tattoo parlor turned library.

  Old maid librarian. Such a cliché. And from a different century. Modern librarians were hip and together.…

  “Start preparing,” said Janelle. “It’s gonna happen.”

  Waste managers were going to take over this beloved space!

  “That’s a bit premature to suggest,” Cissie eked out, but just barely. In her head she said, Over my dead body, the way a scary, possessed person would have, in a voice that came from the depths of hell.

  But no. She couldn’t manage that. A Rogers stayed calm and logical. Except for Nana. She was a throwback to some earlier rabble-rousing generation, probably from medieval times.

  “Suzie—” Boone said.

  “Cissie.”

  “I meant Cissie—”

  Too late. He was the mayor. And he’d given her that apple. He should be ashamed of himself. How many were in their high school graduating class? Seventy-five? And they’d been together for twelve years, many of them?

  On shaking legs she stalked past him and Janelle to her desk, where she sat down with a plonk and stared stonily at the front door. She felt very alone.

  If ever her soul mate were to show up, now would be a really good time. Especially as time was about to run out.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Cissie Rogers’s back was straighter than a goal post. The way she stared down Boone, with those high-beam blues, reminded him of the blinding field lights surrounding the Kettle Knob football field at night during a big game. If you looked at them too long, you just might throw the football out of bounds straight to your overly adoring mother and her gushing friends in the stands, every cool jock’s worst nightmare.

  Janelle paused at the front door of the library. “Cissie’s a real librarian. I mean, old school.” She said it like it was something to be pitied, then winked and left, throwing him one last glance ov
er her shoulder.

  Bubblegum and cattiness aside, Janelle was hot. When she walked in those precarious high heels of hers, she didn’t wobble. Her movements were sinuous, coordinated—the sign of a true athlete, something Boone could appreciate. She had a good head on her shoulders, too. But contrary to the rumors—and he’d heard a few doozies lately—he wasn’t even remotely interested in sleeping with her.

  He could think of a lot of reasons, but he’d start and end with one: when she laughed, it was never because something was funny.

  Cissie still sat at her desk, but now she was pretending to be busy as hell.

  No wonder. He’d been to school with her. He was the mayor of a small town. He should know everyone, and he thought he did, but once in a blue moon, he’d come up against a local he’d never held a real conversation with.

  Cissie Rogers was one of them. All the Rogerses kept to themselves, except Nana.

  He walked toward her, stopped. “Cissie—”

  She looked up from her perch, her face as serious as an owl’s behind those rimless frames. An ancient memory flooded back—him giving her an apple in grade school. He’d been fascinated by her glasses, which back then had had black, rectangular rims. He’d wondered if they were like magnifying lenses and wanted to hold them over his report card, angle them to the sun, and focus a sunbeam to light that report card on fire. But then he’d decided that he wasn’t sure he was ready to have Cissie as his girlfriend, as exciting and necessary as the glasses experiment sounded. She was smart. He was afraid she’d laugh at him if she ever saw his grades.

  They always sucked.

  “The library’s closed,” she said now, firmly, the way a librarian should.

  “It can’t be.” He looked at the clock above her head.

  She stood and moved to a two-drawer wooden filing cabinet behind her chair. “I’m taking special inventory. There’s a sign on the door.”

  “There’s no sign. And it’s only two o’clock.”

  “It—it must have fallen.”

  “Cissie—”

  “It’s time for you to go.” Her shoulders looked so small. But her chin was up. She was the perfect librarian, he suddenly realized. She guarded these books the way a trained Doberman guarded a junkyard.

  “You’re not happy about this move,” he said. “I know it’s a huge change. But we have to face certain economic realities.”

  He was in mayor mode now. He’d learned at his grandfather’s feet. He knew how to handle conflict among the town council. “Talk to me. I went about this the wrong way. Obviously.”

  She said nothing for a few seconds. “Is this a done deal? Janelle said it was.”

  Voters usually loved him, but he was sure she didn’t. “I signed off on it this morning. We’re going to move out of here six weeks from today.”

  They locked gazes.

  Her pupils were large and black, her lashes long. The outer tips of her eyes curved up the slightest bit, or maybe that was the lens refracting their shape. He didn’t know.

  “I don’t have any choice here.” He wondered why he was still trying to explain when she might as well be holding her index fingers in her ears. “The county’s in charge. If I’d put up any fuss, we were going to lose out even worse than we have it now. Besides which—this library building, cool as it is, is too small”—and too decrepit—“to handle the growth that’s coming to western North Carolina. Kettle Knob’s last to see it, I know. But we need to be prepared. To be proactive.”

  Boone had always been able to see the big picture, to strategize, to win despite long odds, whether it was as a student, as a football player, or as a football coach—but especially as mayor. Kettle Knob might be quaint, but the town was investing its revenue, mainly tourism dollars, in a thoroughly modern way, seeking ways to increase its tax base without losing much of its authentic charm.

  But sometimes, authentic charm had to go.

  Like now.

  It wasn’t nice, nor was it pretty.

  It was the economy.

  It was politics.

  Someone else walked in then, a woman with two young kids. Maybe she was from the new apartment complex. He didn’t recognize her.

  “I’m so sorry,” Cissie told her. “We’re closing unexpectedly for admin reasons. I can give you five minutes.”

  “But I planned to be here half an hour.” The harried visitor looked at her oldest, a boy about five, who was holding hands with an angel of a toddler girl. “He has a dentist’s appointment. I’d rather wait here than there.”

  Boone could see Cissie give in—the way her eyes softened right before she smiled at all of them. “We have some new books in the children’s section. I put them on the table.”

  The woman smiled back. “Great,” she said, and took off with her kids in tow.

  Cissie got busy pulling a piece of paper out of the printer and writing on it with a marker.

  Boone stood and watched. This was an act. He knew it. “Hey, you can’t shut the library down because you don’t like what I just told you.”

  She wouldn’t look up. Her grip was firm on that marker, and she wrote doggedly: “Library closed for inventory. Will reopen tomorrow morning at 9 a.m.”

  She ignored him.

  “Come on, Cissie. Say something.” He was a good mayor, not a dictator.

  She tore off a piece of tape from a tape dispenser and put it on the upper left corner of the back of the sign. Then she tore another piece of tape and stuck it on the other upper corner. “I want to work here,” she said, her words flowing plain and clear, like water. “Not there. This is our library.”

  She’d never spoken so confidently before. He would have remembered. The Cissie in high school had clung to the shadows, and this grown-up Cissie … He’d never noticed her before. She didn’t hang out at The Log Cabin. He never saw her at the Campbell Country Club or high school football games. Maybe every once in a while, he caught a glimpse of her at the grocery store, or the drugstore, but she’d never made eye contact. Neither had he. It was easy not to. He was on his cell phone constantly. She was shy.

  Maybe he should have looked up. Said hello. If he had, would her mouth be trembling the way it was now, so slightly that he might be imagining it?

  A mad part of his brain was tempted to kiss that little quiver away, infuse her with a bit of gumption. “We need some energy here in Kettle Knob if we want to stay viable as a town,” he said. “I love tradition, too, but we also have to move forward.”

  “The town documents have to stay here.” The little quiver now moved to her voice.

  Huh. Maybe it came from anger and determination. Sheer stubbornness.

  Dislike.

  Might as well get it over with. She was going to hate him even more in just a second. “Janelle had it right,” he admitted. “The papers are part of the merger. The agreement is that specific.”

  Cissie’s eyes flared. “You know the Rogers family never expected that to happen when they donated them to the town. They trusted—”

  “And their trust hasn’t been misplaced,” he said, getting a little angry himself. “The papers will be archived, protected, the same way they are here—for the whole county to admire.”

  “In a tattoo parlor.” Cissie’s eyes filled with censure.

  He hadn’t been this disapproved of since he was eleven and his mom caught him stealing a whole blackberry pie off the counter to share with his friends in their tree fort.

  A tattoo parlor was a huge step down from this fine old building, and Boone didn’t like it, either. “I swear”—he wished he knew Cissie well enough to put his arm around her shoulder and give it a squeeze—“I’ll make sure you’re comfortable at the new place. No one will boss you around. You’ll have your own desk. Your own space. It will turn out to be a place you can be proud of. You’ve got nothing to worry about.”

  She brushed by him and marched to the front door, if a body could call her quiet gait a march. There did seem to be something
very forceful in it, though. Something intimidating.

  It was her upset librarian’s walk, he realized.

  He watched her tape the sign on the door window and turn back to him. She said nothing, her cheeks bright red circles. And then it dawned on him. Times were tough, and she wasn’t paid particularly well.

  “Are you worried about the gas money?” he asked, and then wondered if she even had a car. “Maybe we could work you up a small raise to cover it.”

  “That’s not it at all.” Her expression was pained. “And how would that fly when the county is cutting so much money from the budget anyway?”

  It wouldn’t, of course. He’d have paid it out of his own pocket. But he wouldn’t tell her that. Let her think he was stupid. He was used to pity from academic types.

  “Good-bye, Mr. Mayor. You can see your way to the door.” She brushed past him again, her dainty ears pink as she strode past her station to the potted palm and disappeared around the corner, presumably to visit with the family in the children’s section.

  The front desk sat untended. But disapproval hung in the air, left in her wake.

  She didn’t like him. She didn’t like him at all.

  The feeling was mutual, he told himself when he left. She was a stuffy librarian. A judgmental book snob who probably didn’t know anything about football. Or trout fishing. Or four-wheeling.

  But when he got in his truck to go to football practice, Cissie’s snapping eyes stuck with him. And on the field, he yelled way more than he usually did.

  “Something’s up with Coach,” one of the boys, the team captain, murmured by the water hose during a quick break.

  “I heard that,” Boone said. “Get back to practice.”

  He glared at the kid and his teammate hard. Which wasn’t like him, either. He didn’t use fear tactics to get the boys motivated. And he didn’t take out his own personal or professional frustrations on them.

  The picture of that forbidden blackberry pie, flaky, with syrupy juice oozing out of those three holes poked in the middle by one of his mother’s silver forks, loomed in his mind’s eye. He remembered grabbing it—a piece of crust coming off the edge and falling to the floor, to be eaten by his dog—and turning to see his mother standing in the kitchen doorway.