Trouble When You Walked In (Contemporary Romance) (3 page)

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 over 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.

“Richard would never have stolen a pie,” she’d said.

No doubt Richard wouldn’t have been so hard-hearted, either, especially to young kids who played football.

“Hey,” Boone called to the backs of his two players.

They turned around.

“Let’s get pizza after practice, okay? The whole team. On me. Tell everyone to work their butts off first.”

The team captain grinned. “Sounds good.”

“And I don’t want to hear any bad language out there,” Boone said. “We’re raising gentlemen in this town.”

The two guys looked at each other. He knew what they were thinking:
Coach is old-fashioned.

Yeah, he was. And getting older by the minute.

“Coach,” the team captain said with a twinkle in his young eye, “we heard a story about you.…”

“Oh, yeah?” This was why the kid was team captain. He was ballsy.

“About you and Mayor Montgomery,” said the other boy, his Adam’s apple bobbing.

Whoa. He was ballsy, too.

“It’s not true,” Boone said blandly, “and you’d better be glad you’re standing a good twenty feet away from me, or I’d be knocking your two heads together. Do I look dumb enough to involve myself in illegal, illicit activities anywhere, much less Frazier Lake, where half the retired population of Buncombe County spends their afternoons fishing—or involve a woman in such a scenario? That would be pretty rude of me.”

“No,” the boys said together, almost happily.

“Right answer, fellas.” It was rough being a good example all the time, but someone had to do it. Some of the boys didn’t have father figures, so Boone stepped in when the situation called for it.

“We mean it as a compliment, sir.” The team captain’s cheeks flushed. “You’ve dated all the hotties of Buncombe County.”

“Date,”
Boone said. “That’s the operative word. And the number-one rule of dating is you never, ever mislead a woman for any reason whatsoever. You treat her like a piece of your mama’s best fine china, too. It’s why those hotties still speak to me.”

“You go, Coach,” said the team captain.

The two boys fist-bumped.

“Stop kissing my butt and get out on that field,” Boone said sternly. “It’s time for some hitting drills.”

“Yes, sir!” they both cried, and took off.

But in the thirty seconds it took Boone to meet up with his players, he wasn’t thinking about practice at all. He was thinking that he’d never once made out with a woman who wore glasses, especially a librarian.

CHAPTER THREE

“I heard,” said Laurie Huffman, Cissie’s best friend, at her front door. She lived in a two-bedroom 1940s cottage on a side street off the town square. A fake stone well perched on her front lawn, the wooden bucket dangling inside it filled with purple pansies. “The library might be moving, and you and Boone and Janelle had a showdown.”

Cissie stopped on the front step. “How did you hear already?”

“Through the Kettle Knob grapevine, which is alive and well. Mom’s pretty much one of the hubs.”

“Wow.” Cissie stepped over the threshold into a tiny foyer with a toy fire engine parked at the stair steps.

“Come see the new couch,” Laurie said. “I mean, the old couch from Mom’s attic reupholstered by
moi
with an ancient staple gun. And then we’ll head out.”

The couch was soft pink with little yellow flowers all over it, very
Little House on the Prairie
. Laurie had a yen to make her own cheese, churn butter, and live off the land, although she’d done none of those things.

“It’s so you,” Cissie said.

Laurie pulled her down on it. “I also heard about Boone and Janelle at the lake. I don’t think it’s true, though. Janelle just wants him bad enough to invent stories. Believe me, Boone is not that type. He’d never be seen with his naked butt in public.”