He smiled. “I would have to agree.”
He reached out to grab her elbow and it took her a second to realize he was only keeping her from stumbling off a curb she hadn’t been paying attention to.
His hand was warm on her bare skin, though, and sent little tingly currents up to her shoulder and down again to her fingertips.
He didn’t move his hand, even after all danger of her stumbling like an idiot was past, and they walked that way together the rest of the way to the redbrick two-story city hall, with its wide front steps and traditional white cupola on top.
She didn’t want to stop walking, even though she knew she had responsibilities here. Couldn’t they keep going? It had been a long time since she had walked beside a fascinating man whose touch made her feel so...warm.
But no. She had things to do here and couldn’t just throw all sense of caution into the lake.
“Thanks for walking me back.”
“No problem.”
“Are you heading back to your mom and the boat races?”
He shook his head. “I should go check on Hondo. He’s been inside for several hours and is probably ready to run a bit. Want me to let Rika out for a while?”
“That would be terrific. Thank you! My schedule is so packed today I’m not sure when I’ll have time to get her. I was just about to text the girl who helps me out with Rika to go home and let her out, but I’m not sure if I can reach her.”
“I can handle it. I’m going back and it’s just a matter of walking next door.”
“If you’re sure, I would appreciate it. There’s a spare key under the red flowerpot on the front porch.”
“Red flowerpot. Got it.”
“Thanks. I owe you. Seriously.”
He gave her a long, slow smile. “I’m sure I can come up with some way for you to repay me.”
Her insides shivered again, her mind on that moment in his kitchen when he had nearly kissed her. Her imagination orbited in a hundred different directions until he brought her firmly back to earth.
“We can start with you backing off the nosy questions about my relationship with my mother.”
“You wish,” she muttered.
“Or you could take a break for five minutes from being Haven Point’s number one cheerleader.”
“That could be a tough one, too,” she admitted. “Speaking of which, you’re coming to the barbecue and Dutch-oven dinner in a few hours, right? You have to come. Fabulous food, good people and a killer view you won’t find anywhere else but right here in Haven Point.”
He snorted. “Rah rah. You only need some pom-poms.”
“Well? Will you be there?” she pressed.
“If I make it, I’ll find you.”
“Great. I’ll see you then. Thanks. Red flowerpot.”
“I know.”
He started to walk away. Then, as an afterthought, he came back and brushed her cheek with his mouth—after which he stepped away with a baffled sort of look, as if he didn’t quite understand himself.
“I’ll see you,” he said, then walked quickly away, leaving her stunned and breathless and aching for something more.
* * *
AS SHE EXPECTED, she was crazy busy the rest of the day, bouncing between baseball games, horseshoe tournaments, public appearances and assorted crises in need of management. She was so busy, she didn’t have time to think about Ben more than, oh, three or four dozen times.
By evening, she kept looking for him to show up at the town barbecue and Dutch-oven dinner but he was nowhere in evidence.
Dratted man.
She did her best not to look for him obsessively. Instead, she was busy talking to residents of her town. She was making her way through, shaking hands and chatting, when she spotted Devin and their friend Wynona Bailey, who was on the Haven Point police department.
After disengaging from a dry conversation with a couple retired bankers who always wanted to talk to her about her time in Chicago, she made her way to her friends.
“Hey there.” Wynona grinned, looking far too petite, blonde, young and feminine to be a tough police officer—though that was probably sexist and ageist of her, McKenzie acknowledged.
Devin looked around. “Where’s your gorgeous gazillionaire? I thought you were trying to take him around to all the Lake Haven Days events so you could introduce him to more of the delights of our fair town.”
She thought so, too. It would have been a good plan, if the man hadn’t run off that afternoon and made himself scarce the rest of the day.
“Okay, let’s be clear. I don’t have a gorgeous gazillionaire. If I did, do you honestly think I’d be hanging around here with you two instead of spending the summer in my villa on the Côte d’Azur?”
Devin and Wyn laughed.
“Seriously. Where’s Ben?” her sister pressed. “I saw you with him this morning. Where did you lose him?”
“Oh, that gorgeous gazillionaire.” She shrugged. “Don’t know. He headed back to his place earlier in the day to take care of his dog and let Rika out for me. Apparently he was sidetracked there. I’m still hoping he makes it.”
“He’ll be missing some great food if he doesn’t show,” Wyn said.
“You’re not on duty?” she asked. “I would have thought Lake Haven Days called for all hands on deck.”
“I’m on call.” Wyn pointed to her radio. “And I have to go on in an hour. I figured I needed sustenance before my shift and there’s nothing better than Dutch-oven potatoes.”
She pointed to the plate of cheesy, oniony, bacony potatoes that did emit a mouthwatering aroma.
“Your arteries may disagree,” Devin said mildly. “And you can trust me on that. I’m a doctor.”
“Did they teach you how to be a buzzkill in that fancy medical school?” Wyn retorted, taking another forkful of her potatoes with obvious enjoyment.
“Yes. We had a whole class in our third year. How to ruin every future social occasion with dire health warnings.”
“And of course, you aced it, like always,” McKenzie teased.
“Naturally.” Devin grinned.
McKenzie stayed to chat with her sister and Wynona for a few more moments before she was drawn away by someone else who wanted to talk to her about a problem with water levels on the Hell’s Fury River.
After breaking away, she headed over and grabbed a plate of food for herself—and couldn’t resist including a small portion of the cheesy potatoes. She had to hope Devin didn’t catch her at it.
She took a seat at the table and listened to the laughter, the live music, the conversation of her community.
“You have room for one more?”
She glanced up and saw Ben had made it at last. She smiled broadly, telling herself the little pulse of excitement in her chest was only because now he would have the chance to experience one of her favorite sides of this town.
“Of course. But you don’t have any food.”
“I actually grabbed a sandwich before I came over.”
“Why would you possibly want to miss out on this?” She pointed at her plate, brimming with delicious items.
“I know. I must be crazy. I have heard I must try the Dutch-oven cherry cobbler and homemade ice cream.”
Her mouth watered. “Yes. Definitely.”
“Can I get you some?”
“That would be terrific. Thanks.”
He headed away and she was busy telling her nerves to settle down when she suddenly heard a commotion near the table where the volunteer fire department was serving up the desserts.
“You’re a son of a bitch like your old man and you always have been.”
No alcohol was served at the community barbecue but judging by the belligerent tone and slurred words,
somebody had brought his own to the party.
She knew that voice, McKenzie realized as dread soaked through her.
Jim Welch—big, tough, bellicose all the time. A terrible combination.
She cringed. Of all the people for Ben to bump into tonight. Hoping to deflect what had the potential to be an ugly scene, she slid away from the table and hurried over to the two men.
“My dad had forty years with Kilpatrick Boatworks,” Welch snarled. “He gave his whole life to that company, his blood and his sweat. Then he and everybody else in this town lost their jobs in a single afternoon.”
“It wasn’t a single afternoon,” Ben corrected firmly, looking not at all intimidated by an angry man, five inches taller and who outweighed him by at least a hundred pounds.
“We gave very generous severance packages to every employee,” he went on. “We provided early retirement with fully vested pension benefits to anyone within seven years of retirement age and also provided full-tuition vocational training waivers for up to five years after the factory closed. Every effort was made to make sure no one was left out in the cold.”
McKenzie blinked, momentarily distracted. This was the first she had heard about it. The way some people talked, one day the factory was open, the next everyone was out of a job. Maybe that would teach her not to listen to some people until she had the full story.
“That’s a dirty lie. Some people were left out in the cold. My old man was one of them. He was too old to learn how to do something else! Boatbuilding was all he ever knew.”
Jimmy all but chest-bumped Ben, who didn’t give an inch. McKenzie clenched her fists, ready to step in. Jimmy had a reputation for starting bar fights down at the Mad Dog Brewery. Last Christmas at the Lights on the Lake Festival, he had actually gone after Aidan Caine.
She didn’t know how she could possibly stop a mad bull on a rampage—though she was wearing red—but she wasn’t about to let a bully like Jimmy ruin all the progress she wanted to think she had made convincing Ben this was a good place for Caine Tech to expand.
Ben seemed to be handling the situation without her. “I didn’t want to close the factory,” he said with firm control, “but it had been losing money steadily for a decade. Since I had no interest or aptitude to run it, I made an offer to the employees to buy me out. They weren’t interested, either—and couldn’t have found financing anyway, given the company’s extensive losses. Like it or not, closing the plant was an inevitability. It should have been done years earlier.”
That seemed to piss off Jimmy even more. His face turned mottled and red. He looked around the crowd that had gathered, a crowd whose mood McKenzie couldn’t quite sense.
“Screw inevi—” The word was apparently too much for Jimmy’s alcohol-impaired brain to work around. “Whatever. Screw that, you smug bastard.”
Before McKenzie could move or think, he threw a hard punch. Ben clearly had the advantage, not being similarly impaired. He easily sidestepped the right hook. Carried by his own momentum, Jimmy stumbled into a table. It took him a moment to clamber to his feet again. He would have gone for Ben again, but McKenzie had finally engaged her own brain enough to move between the two men.
She wasn’t thinking about any risk to life and limb, too focused on worrying. This was a disaster. How would Ben ever see what a nice community Haven Point was if he was attacked at the town barbecue?
“That’s enough, Jimmy.”
He turned red-rimmed eyes to her. “You stay out of this, Shaw. Mind your own business.”
She had a sudden flashback of being ten years old, new in town, being bullied on the school bus every day by Jimmy and a couple of his friends. She made an easy target—new to town, half-Hispanic, illegitimate, virtually dumped on a family that didn’t know what to do with her.
She hadn’t learned to stand up for herself for a year or two. Once she learned to fight back—and fight back dirty, if she had to—Jimmy had left her alone.
This was the same principle. Stand up to the bullies and they inevitably backed down.
“This is my business,” she snapped. “I am the mayor of Haven Point and Ben is here as my guest. I don’t like to see my guests mistreated.”
Unfortunately, she had forgotten that a drunk bully didn’t have the usual common sense. Jimmy turned his belligerence on her, his huge fists clenched. “You want to pucker up because he works for Aidan Caine now and is swimming in green, go ahead. I don’t give a shit about all that. To me, he’s still the asshole who ruined this town when he closed the boatworks. Why should he be welcome anywhere in Haven Point? Who’s with me?”
McKenzie was upset to see a few heads nodding but the majority of people in the vicinity frowned.
“Settle down, Welch,” somebody said. “This isn’t the time or place. There are kids here.”
“He’s my guest,” McKenzie repeated fiercely, “and as such, I expect him to be treated with courtesy and respect.”
“Just because you’re screwing him doesn’t mean the rest of us have to bend over, too.”
McKenzie wanted to roll her eyes. Jimmy was such an idiot.
Ben apparently didn’t find that as amusing as she did. He took a step forward, suddenly looking hard and dangerous and not at all the sort of man anyone with an ounce of sense would want to mess with.
“That’s enough,” he growled. “You’re going to want to shut up now.”
“Says who?”
“Says me,” McKenzie snapped, even though some part of her wanted to turn into a soft, gooey mess. She couldn’t remember the last time anyone besides Devin had stood up for her. How was she possibly supposed to resist Ben’s chivalry—misguided though it was?
“Go home, Jimmy, and sober up,” she said firmly. “You’re not welcome here.”
“I pay my taxes! I can be here if I want.”
“Not if I say you can’t. Don’t make me call Chief Emmett.”
“Let me get this straight. You’re kicking me out, yet you let this son of a bitch stay and eat the food my taxes pay for, after what he’s done to this town?”
“That’s about the size of it. Yeah.”
He glared. “Screw this. And screw you, too.”
She should have been braced for it but he shoved past her—and shoved her on the way. Caught off guard, she stumbled and fell, her head hitting the edge of a table as she went down.
Pain exploded and she heard Ben give a vicious swear. She was on the ground and didn’t see but she assumed he had thrown a punch because an instant later, Jimmy toppled to the ground.
Somebody screamed at that point and she could only hope it wasn’t her.
* * *
“HE CAN TRY to press charges, but they won’t stick,” Wynona said twenty minutes later. They were in McKenzie’s office at city hall, the closest spot where they could find a quiet place to give their statements to her.
“Are you sure?” McKenzie pressed. She could just see Ben being charged with assault. Wouldn’t that just put the seal of doom on any hopes she had of him coming around and recommending Haven Point for the new facility?
“Positive. Two hundred people saw Jimmy knock you down. I’m willing to bet a hundred-ninety-five of those people would have taken down Jimmy if Kilpatrick here hadn’t done the honors—including Eppie and Hazel, who were halfway out of their chairs.”
“So you’re saying I performed a civic duty by knocking out the bastard.”
Wynona grinned, apparently no more immune to Ben’s all-around gorgeousness than McKenzie. “That’s one way of looking at it. You should have let law enforcement handle the situation. Barring that, you did what you had to do. Who knows how many other people he might have plowed down on his way out of the barbecue. There were senior citizens and children there. You should get a freaking medal, as far as I’m concerned.”
“I’ll pass on the medal, thanks.”
“Well, Jimmy’s in jail on a drunk and disorderly. He’ll be there overnight to sleep it off, which gives you until tomorrow morning to decide if you want to press charges, Kenz.”
She didn’t. She wanted the whole thing to go away. “I’ll sleep on it and call Chief Emmett in the morning.”
“Sounds good. You sure you don’t want to let the paramedics take a look at you? Say the word and Julio Robles will come knocking down your door to check you out. You know he’s got a thing for you.”
Her face heated. Julio was barely twenty-one. She used to babysit him, for heaven’s sake.
“I’ve got a stupid goose egg. That’s it. It’s not like it’s a traumatic brain injury or something. I don’t need paramedics.”
If she had moved a little faster, she wouldn’t even have had the stupid goose egg.
“Anyway, Devin took a look at it at the scene and assured me I’m fine.”
Wynona’s radio crackled suddenly and McKenzie recognized the dispatcher telling her of a report about underage marijuana use at Starlight Beach.
Wyn sighed. “I’m in for a fun night, if the kids are lighting up their own fireworks already. It’s not even dark yet. What the hell, right? You sure you’re good here?”
“Absolutely,” McKenzie answered. “Thanks, Wyn.”
She hugged her friend, who gave Ben a cheerful smile and headed out.
“Well. That was fun,” Ben answered.
She made a face. “I’m so sorry. Jimmy is an idiot drunk but he’s usually relatively harmless. His wife left him a few weeks ago. Smartest thing she ever did, but he’s obviously taking it hard, especially since she took their two kids with her.”
“So you’re saying I should have let him get away with bad-mouthing you, shoving you? I disagree. I should have taken him out when he first started up.”
It had been rather impressive. For a Silicon Valley tech executive, Ben was in amazing shape to knock out a big dude like Jimmy with one punch. She imagined Welch’s head would be spinning for a week.
“Well, no. I was just trying to explain that he can be a bit of a hot-tempered jerk but he’s not all bad.”
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