He moved to walk between her and the corroded metal exterior. “Oh, was that a different short brunette I saw yelling at the plumbers for parking on her lawn last week? If that wasn’t you, it was your hotheaded twin.”
“Everything is thawing! I don’t want them to turn my yard into a mud pit!” She’d reached her car, which she was parking on the street as construction was ongoing.
“Hothead,” Aiden muttered fondly while her stomach pitched and rolled over how damn cute he was when he smiled at her like that. There was no way he understood just how devastating he was to the unsuspecting women around him or he’d muzzle that smile in the interest of female sanity.
And in the interest of her own sanity, she needed to quit smiling at him on the front lawn of her beautiful new home. “I have to go. Try not to let the house fall into a giant sinkhole today.”
“Small sinkholes only! Got it!” Aiden called as she climbed into her car.
She was still laughing as she pulled away from the curb, but after such a flirty start, her day had nowhere to go but down. It wasn’t one single thing that she could pinpoint that started the crappy avalanche. It was a billion small ones.
It turned out to be too cold in the office for a skirt after all, so she spent all day goose-bumpy.
Her email password had to be reset, which required an hour on hold with the Lowell Consolidated IT department in the Minneapolis headquarters.
Her Bluetooth headset hadn’t charged overnight, so she had to wait on hold on the corded phone rather than multitasking by organizing the supply closet or cleaning the copy machine innards with an old toothbrush or literally anything to help her pass the time as IT decided whether she was worthy of her own email.
The delivery guy got her lunch order wrong, and she ended up with a sandwich that seemed to be mostly onions rather than the chicken salad wrap she’d been looking forward to.
And everybody seemed to be out of the office, so she did nothing but send calls to voice mail for the ad reps and the deejays. Even Mabel was gone before noon, which made the day drag even more than normal. Usually she could count on girl talk to make the clock tick forward a little more quickly. The deejay on air right now was Skip, who was friendly but didn’t usually leave the booth during his shift, so there was no hope of entertainment on that front.
The final straw came when her email was finally up and running again and she found a reply in there from Brandon. The boss from hell unequivocally denied her request to digitize all the office forms into fillable PDFs. No explanation, just a terse “don’t bother.”
She slammed her palms on the desk with a little scream of frustration. It had been a good idea, and it wouldn’t have cost the company anything. She could’ve streamlined the forms, cleaned up the questions they didn’t use anymore for ad sales and new music requests and whatnot. But noooooo, Brandon clearly wanted her to stay in her lane, her lane being phones and faxes. Her brain was going to rot in her head thanks to corporate bureaucracy.
By four p.m. she’d been reduced to staring dully at the parking lot security footage. Brandon had insisted on cameras and a locked entrance for the safety of the employees, but absolutely nothing was stirring today, not even the ground squirrels that lived in the grass beyond the edge of the lot.
“Bored!” She wilted over the edge of her chair and wailed the word to an uncaring universe.
Her phone buzzed. The universe had heard her and sent a rescue! She snatched the device from her purse to find a photo of a beaming Mabel holding a tiny, red-faced infant. The message readWelcome to the world, Lucille Marie!
She set the phone down to glance along the empty station hallways. Isthatwhere everybody was? Ana had gone into labor, and nobody had given her a heads-up. Which… fine. Ana hadn’t been due for another two weeks, so this must’ve been unexpected, and cell reception in Beaucoeur’s hospital was notoriously spotty. Still, it hurt to be reminded that she was ever so slightly outside their circle of friends.
She shook her head. God, she was being a brat. Babies were chaotic, and she shouldn’t have expected anything different. Swallowing her disappointment, she typed back:Tell them congrats! She’s perfect!
Mabel:She is, even though they didn’t name this one Mabel either.
She was smiling as she pulled up the number for a local florist and ordered a celebratory bouquet to be sent to the new parents from their friends at the Brick. But after that was done, all she wanted to do was put her head down on her desk and cry.
What waswrongwith her? She pressed a hand to her stomach to try to diagnose it. Frustration at feeling trapped in her job? Jealousy over Dave and Ana expanding their family, which obviously included Mabel as a cherished member? Sadness that her mom and Belly had cancelled their planned ladies’ night on Saturday because Peter had surprised them with a weekend getaway to Chicago?
Of course, on top of all that was Aiden, who was so effortlessly charming that she was starting to forget that everything was fake. If his smiles were dangerous, his casual touches were lethal. She almost needed to drop him off at a bar so he could get his flirt on with somebody else, if only so he’d get it out of his system and quit turning it on her. Of course, that was equally depressing; she trusted him not to break their “nobody else” deal, but she also didn’t love remembering that he’d been the town’s biggest player before and would undoubtedly be that guy again shortly after their deal was over. She needed to keep her head on straight when it came to their relationship. Their nonrelationship.
Peter didn’t know it, but that plant actually was going to outlast them. God, he was going to gloat when that happened even though a dignified breakup was exactly what she and Aiden had planned. It was enough to make her want to set that damn thing on fire, but she wasn’t a fan of harming innocent foliage.
Still, all of it—Aiden, her mom, the plant, new baby Chilton, her cold legs, the unchallenging job—left her thoroughly demoralized by the end of the day. When the clock hit five, she wasted no time in powering down her computer, snatching her purse, and getting the hell out of the station. But once she was home, her mood didn’t lift as she’d hoped. Aiden or one of his guys had gotten her gutters under control and had started doing whatever grout repairs they deemed necessary, and the inside was starting to take shape too. The lighting throughout the downstairs was far less murky than it had been, no doubt due to some kind of light bulb magic on Aiden’s part. She could see every area that was being improved: the sanding underway on the living room floor, the walls newly stripped of their ugly wallpaper, the exposed ceiling beams in the master bedroom waiting to be stained. It was all coming together faster than she’d ever expected.
And that was a major part of her problem. The brightest spot in her life right now was her new house, but that was entirely wrapped up in the man who was renovating it. Once he was done, he’d be gone and she’d be left with walls full of memories.
That preemptive melancholy tangled with all the bad-work mojo from earlier and clumped together in a hard ball of mad in her stomach. She wandered to the kitchen and, lacking any better ideas, grabbed a fresh bottle of wine from the pantry. She poured herself a glass and stared glumly at her closed laptop.
Maybe she could spend the night clicking through shelter listings and rescue sites, bookmarking every pair of sad doggie eyes and sad doggie sob stories that tugged at her heart. How many dogs could her new house hold? Six at least, probably. She’d be the new lady on the block with a fake boyfriend, a job she hated, a sucky stepdad, and six dogs.
Cool. Very cool.
She sipped her wine and veered ever closer to self-pity territory, but recognizing an imminent downward spiral, she grabbed her phone and hit the first number on speed dial. When Faith answered, she demanded, “Tell me you’re free for drinks tonight.”
“Can’t.” In the background, a raucous chorus of voices spoke over one another and almost drowned Faith out. “I’m waiting for the District 18 school board meeting to start. They’re voting on funding proposals tonight.”
