by Kate Angell
“I just didn’t have it in me after she was gone,” he said. “I tried, but—” He shook his head, and Sidney could see the sadness in spite of what he attempted to cover up. “So I just want to be done with it. I’m selling everything in here for whatever I can get, and moving on. Or if I can’t move on—to pay the damn rent.”
“So you’re stuck in the contract?” she asked.
“Crane,” he said, the sharp focus coming back to his eyes with the name. “Asshole has no compassion, no soul, no anything. All he cares about is his monthly rent.”
“Crane,” Sidney repeated, wishing like hell she’d brought the file so she could look remotely in the know. “I don’t have your file in front of me, remind me of his name and—”
Out of the corner of her eye, an old green pickup truck slow-rolled past. One she’d seen—damn it, it had to be his. It had been hooked to that low-boy. Sidney felt her heart speed up like a jet readying for takeoff.
“Edmund Crane,” Mr. Teasdale said, loud enough to be heard over the blood rushing through her ears. “He’s kind of a business mogul around here. Owns a bunch of land and buildings. Doesn’t give a rat’s butt about the people who pay him to use them. My wife had patience with him. I don’t.”
Sidney rubbed the goose bumps down on her arms that had nothing to do with being cold. Not in this building.
“Known him since grade school,” he said. “He was an ass then, too. Always stealing people’s milk.”
“And where can I find him?” she asked.
“You don’t have that information?” he asked. “I e-mailed it all to Orchid.”
Yes. Yes she did. Back at the cottage on her bed, where she left it when she bailed like a hormonal teenager. A place she didn’t want to go back to right now—although it would be the time to do it while he was out driving around.
Why was he driving around?
Looking for her?
Stop it.
“Yes, but not with me,” she said. “It’s back at the cottage, where I’m staying. If you can tell me, it’ll save me a little time. I can drive there straight from here.”
“I can save you more than that,” he said. “It’s right across the street there.” He pointed a slightly gnarled finger. “Catty-corner over to the left. Says ‘EC Consolidated’ on the window.”
“He’s across the—” The green truck came back the other way, turned around, and pulled in next to her. Fuck. Is he—fuck. She swallowed hard, and wiped her hand over her damp forehead. It was the heat. That was all it was. She fanned her blouse again. “Across the street, and he won’t meet with you?”
“Always conveniently gone,” Mr. Teasdale said. “Or busy. Or just plain tells me a deal’s a deal. He’s done that twice.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Sidney said. “Any contract can be gotten out of. Especially something as simple as a lease. I mean, he can impose a penalty for early departure, but he can’t legally force you to stay.”
“Well, good luck finding him,” he said.
The door pulled open, and Sidney felt her throat close up. Seriously? She was working. He was tracking her down while she was—
“Hey, Sawyer,” Mr. Teasdale said, pushing to his feet.
“Hey, Mr. T,” he said, holding out a palm as his eyes darted to Sidney. “Don’t get up, I’ll go get it.”
Sidney’s head spun. He wasn’t there for her. “It?”
“Sawyer’s picking up an antique desk for me—son, you can’t manhandle that thing on your own,” Mr. Teasdale said. “Why didn’t you bring help?”
“My help isn’t available till tomorrow,” he said, his voice muffled from wherever he’d disappeared to. “And I need them to help me with Amelia Rose’s cornucopia.” He stuck his head back around a door frame. “I’m already bribing them with a six-pack,” he said on a grin. “Didn’t think I should throw in an extra job.”
The grin made her fingertips go numb.
“You know Sawyer?” Mr. Teasdale asked, looking back at Sidney. “He works out at the cottage—didn’t you say that’s where you’re staying? You kind of have that same accent, even. Where are you from?”
Know Sawyer? Hell no, she didn’t know Sawyer.
“No, never met,” she said, hearing the nasty dripping from her tone. People skills. “But he looks a lot like a guy I used to know. A long time ago.”
“Well, they say we all have a double out there,” Mr. Teasdale said.
Sawyer walked back around and leveled a gaze at her, as she felt the sweat trickle down her spine.
“I’ll say,” she said.
“Sawyer’s indispensable around this town,” Mr. Teasdale said. “Seems like he’s got a hand in helping everybody do everything. So, how do you like the Rose Cottage?” Mr. Teasdale asked.
She couldn’t look away from him. From Sawyer. From the boy she knew who now stood maybe six feet from her, a man. Now there was no obsessing over the little details, now she was looking right at them. The dark eyes that still could root her to the floor. The tiny lines showing next to them. The hair that was a darker blond than it used to be. Her gaze dropped to his hands, where he crossed them over his chest. The hands were the same. She didn’t let her gaze fall any further. She was having a hard enough time sucking in the hot air as it was.
“Um, it’s—I really just got here, so I can’t say,” she managed. “In fact, if I can track down Mr. Crane today, I probably won’t have a reason to stay at all.”
“Oh, well, that’s a shame,” Mr. Teasdale said. “Nice place. They say it’s magic, you know.”
Sidney did a double take. “I’m sorry, what?”
“The house?” Mr. Teasdale said, nodding. “Yes ma’am. Interesting things happen there.”
Sidney laughed. “You mean because of Amelia Rose’s fortune-telling business?”
“She’s a lot more than that,” he said. “She’s—” He narrowed his eyes with a small smile. “She’s whatever you need her to be.”
“Oh, whatever,” Sidney scoffed, trying not to think too hard on the oil and the butter smell and the way she’d felt. It was probably laced with something.
“Think what you want,” Mr. Teasdale said. “But they also say that spending the night in that house will make you fall in love.” He chuckled. “Of course, I guess you’d have to be spending the night there with another person.”
Her mouth went dry as her eyes flew automatically to Sawyer’s. “I guess.” She fanned her blouse out again, feeling like the temperature got impossibly hotter. “Did you ever stay there?”
“Sure did,” Mr. Teasdale said.
“And?”
He grinned, all his wrinkles standing out. “Married fifty-two years.” He tilted his head. “You ever been married, Miss Jensen?”
“No sir,” she said, her eyes darting to Sawyer again. “Never found the right person.”
Sawyer’s expression faltered with the tightening of his jaw, and a quick blink before he turned back to Mr. Teasdale.
“I’ll have to get my friends to help me with that desk later, after all,” he said. “I was thinking it was more lightweight, that I could drag it out with a dolly, but that thing will take two people for sure. I can look at your sink while I’m here, though.”
“No problem, Sawyer—”
“Let’s see,” Sidney said, pushing to her feet and kicking off the high-heeled Manolo knockoffs. “Maybe I can help.”
Wait, what the hell did she just say? It was as if her feet were being controlled by aliens. Was she helping in order to get him to leave? Helping in order to be around him? She didn’t really want the answer to that. No, it was just about helping sweet old Mr. Teasdale. That was it.
One eyebrow moved slowly higher on Sawyer’s face. “Come again?”
She had to keep going. “I’m stronger than I look,” Sidney said, breezing past him, refusing to look up into his face as she walked past, for fear of falling. Flailing. Puking. Any and all of those things were inherently possible.
Sidney inhaled slowly once she got around the corner into what was clearly a small office. She held her hair up off her neck and fanned herself with it as the bane of that day’s existence walked in behind her.
Too close.
As she turned around, he was only a foot away, and the look on his face made her entire body break out in goose bumps. That didn’t mean anything. He didn’t mean anything. She just needed to get laid and knock the edge off. She’d get right on that as soon as she got back home. Because—right.
“Sidney,” he began, his voice no more than a whisper. “Just listen to me.”
“I’ll take this end,” she managed to force her tongue to say. “It’s lighter.”
He paused, nodded, and blew out a breath through his nose, clearly figuring out that she wasn’t going to talk or go tromping down explanation lane. That was good. Dear God, that was good.
“Fine,” he said, moving to the other end. “Do you know how to lift correctly?”
“Just worry about your end,” Sidney said.
He shook his head. Inside, she was shaking everything. The one man she’d ever let herself feel anything for—peaking out at eighteen, letting her heart and soul be crushed—whom she never thought she’d see again, was now moving furniture with her.
“On three,” he said, his gaze burning a hole through her heart.
Chapter 7
It was like something from a twisted-up movie. The kind that made people think too much and leave exhausted. Sawyer was already there.
As he and Sidney walked past Mr. Teasdale with his antique desk, and maneuvered it through the door while she glared at him, Sawyer wanted to shake his own brain loose. He was surprised the thing didn’t end up on the floor.
“Where is it going?” she asked, finally looking away, her voice sounding almost defeated by the fact that she’d spoken first.
“My truck,” he said.
That brought those blue eyes back. “I realize that,” she said wryly. “I meant, where are you taking it?”
“Why?” he said, turning so the desk was aimed correctly. “You in the market for one?”
“Won’t quite fit in my backseat, so no,” she said. “But it’s nice, so I’m curious why he’s getting rid of it.”
“It was his wife’s,” Sawyer said. “He doesn’t use it, and he doesn’t want it going with the big sale chaos, so he’s giving it to Mrs. Duggar’s dress shop a few blocks over. She and his wife were friends.”
“And you just so happened to be doing all this right this—ooph—moment?” She grunted as he shifted the desk against her so he could lower the tailgate. “Coming here at the same time I’m here?”
No, but Little Miss Haughty-Ass didn’t need to know that.
He shoved the piece all the way to the end and slammed the tailgate closed.
“Here’s a little tidbit of news for you,” he said, turning around to face her, blocking her way. “I live here. I work here. I have a life and things I have to get done.” He pointed a finger and then made a swirling motion with it. “You showed up in my world today, Squeak.”
“Don’t call me that,” she said, brushing her hands off on her skirt, then scoffing at the dirt she left there. “I never liked that nickname, but I put up with it because it was some back-assward term of affection from someone I ca—” She stopped, and Sawyer saw the emotion in her eyes that matched what caught in her throat. From someone she cared about? Shit. “That person is gone—in fact, he probably never existed at all, so you can lose the joke.”
“What joke?” he asked, close enough to smell her. To touch her if he wanted to. That thought made the words she was saying float around on tilt.
“The joke that was on me,” she said, her words hard and suddenly icy. “That night. Probably all year, for that matter.”
He felt his eyebrows pull together as he stared at her. “What?”
She blinked away the anger, the hurt, the resentment he saw there, and shook her head, her expression suddenly free of all of it, like it was never brought up. “Ancient history,” she said, looking across the street. “Doesn’t matter anymore. Excuse me,” she added, pointing. “I have some business to do.”
He watched her walk away, ass perfectly hugged in that little skirt of hers, head held high, hair swinging in the breeze that she was probably feeling big-time since her coat was still back at the cottage and she was barefoot. As if she heard his thoughts, she stopped and wheeled around. Passing him without so much as a darted glance, she disappeared into the old soda shop and reappeared ten seconds later, heels making her three inches taller.
“Good idea,” he said, knowing he shouldn’t provoke her, but unable to help himself. She wouldn’t speak to him on a normal level, so if he had to irritate her to get interaction, then what the hell. She’d made a point, and he remembered her being stubborn enough to stick to it. Whatever the hell that point was.
He deserved her anger and resentment. She had every right to tell him to go to hell. But a joke? He didn’t get that. He’d been an A-number-one prick twelve years ago, letting her believe he’d left her. Listening to—
No.
He wasn’t going down that road. That path only led him to negative thoughts and rage, and he’d buried all that a long time ago.
Tearing his eyes from watching her cross the street, he turned and went back in the soda shop. He had a sink to check out. This was his life now.
* * *
Keep walking. Keep walking. Don’t think about Huckleberry back there watching you walk away. Or the fact that he might not be. Because that would be somehow twistedly, infinitely worse.
“Shit, shit, shit,” Sidney muttered, thankful at least that the tears were gone.
At least now she could act like a grown-up, she thought as she reached the frosted-glass door with EC CONSOLIDATED emblazoned over it. At least she wouldn’t look like a sniveling, pining teenager—
“Shit!” she repeated, pushing the door that didn’t budge.
Damn it, Crane wasn’t there. Was he watching? Sidney turned partially, as if to look down the sidewalk, and checked her peripherals.
No. He was gone. Not gone gone, because his truck was still there, sporting the five-hundred-ton desk she probably threw her back out for, but she wasn’t about to wuss out of carrying once she’d thrown down that gauntlet. But gone from the street, from the sidewalk, from the image that kept burning into her retinas. Him standing just inches away telling her she was in his world. He was right. But why? Why was Moonbright, Maine, his world? Not because people couldn’t leave home, because she had, as well, but because of how he’d done it.
He’d just disappeared. She remembered the buzz around town. Principal James’s son bolting after graduation, with no plan, no clothes, no note. Leaving his dad in very much the same way his mother had left them. With no warning.
With Sidney, he’d just twisted a little extra cruelty into the mix by telling her about it first. Asking her to meet him. Then being long gone when she got there.
And her, standing there on the curb like a stupid, sappy idiot, with her heart exposed and his senior ring clutched in her hand. Ready to jump off in an after-school special and have a bad-idea adventure and break the rules for once. For tonight or forever. That’s what he’d said. Pretty words from a beautiful boy-man, used to trick the nerd girl. With kisses that had addled her brain enough to fall for it.
Until she’d finally given up and left. Heartbroken, angry, hurt, mortified at her own naïveté, and so tempted to throw his ring in the nearest trash bin. She thought she knew him. He knew her like no one ever had and ever would again, because how could she ever trust her own judgment again, much less anyone else?
Sidney remembered driving around for hours that night, unable to go home and tell her nana that her night with friends had been cancelled. It had been hard enough to pull off the lie when it was for something exciting; she couldn’t do it for that. And part of her—she wouldn’t let herself think it out
loud—but part of her was looking for a blond-haired wild boy on a motorcycle.
She’d parked across the street from his house for a while just in case he showed up. Fuming and planning twenty different confrontations, waiting for the sound of his bike. By the time his dad got home and glanced over to where the old bike usually was parked, she knew what he didn’t know then. That the bike wouldn’t be back.
She checked a local pawnshop in the coming days for her ring, but it never came back, either. Caleb James was gone. A memory.
Off becoming Sawyer Finn.
Sidney felt the old burn in her belly as she walked back to her car. That was okay. That kind of burn was what she needed. To remember the anger and not let him get under her skin.
She paused as she opened her door. Any other place on earth that didn’t have Ca—Sawyer hovering in the middle of it, being its pulse or whatever crap he did now, she would be hightailing it back inside to confer with her client. Let him know that Crane wasn’t there and see where she might need to go to find him. Now there was no way in hell. She’d have to do it the hard way. Go get her laptop and do what she was best at. Research. Followed by probably knocking on some of the other businesses’ doors and asking questions—not what she was best at.
Sidney smiled at two teenage boys walking down the sidewalk dressed in goth attire, and hoped it was a costume. Throwing one last glance at the old truck next to her, she bade it a silent farewell and closed her door. And cranked her engine—to nothing.
“Oh no,” she said.
She tried again, closing her eyes, and again a third time adding a prayer. It wasn’t a dead-battery kind of nothing. It was a sickly sounding wet kind of choking sound.
And then there were the white wisps of smoke curling up in tendrils from the general vicinity of her radiator.
“Great,” Sidney breathed, opening her door and slamming a palm on the wheel.
“Dude, is your car going to blow up?” one of the boys asked as they slowed.
“Dude, I don’t know,” she said, stepping out. “Want to come sit inside so you can get a feel for it?”
“Man, a crazy bitch,” the other one said, pushing his friend along. “Don’t stop.”