Her phone buzzed on the coffee table.
She glanced down and read the screen and felt the small, annoying flicker she had been feeling for months now every time that particular name appeared.
Brick.
“Oh, good heavens.”
“What?” Jo Ellen leaned closer. “Who is it? Let me see. Oh, Brick!”
“That man is relentless.”
“What does he say? Read it.”
Shuttering her eyes, Maggie lifted the phone and skimmed the words. “He wants me to know there’s a hurricane coming. Apparently, he thinks I live under a rock.”
“I think he’s so sweet!”
“Sweet?” Maggie launched a brow north. “He’s a Harley-riding, beard-wearing, tattoo-covered widower who has never really said how his wife passed away. For all I know, he offed her.”
“Maggie!”
The phone buzzed again. Maggie didn’t even have to look. The man always texted in clusters, especially when she refused to respond. Which was pretty much always, until he wore her down and she had to make it stop.
She looked again. “He wants to make sure I have a plan to stay safe.”
“Mags.”
“Don’t.”
“That is extremely dear.”
“It’s unnecessary,” Maggie replied. “I have a son and a grandson, a daughter and her boyfriend, who happens to be a sheriff. And I have you up in my business. I do not needEasy Riderchecking on my storm plans.”
The phone buzzed again.
Jo Ellen shrieked with delight. “The man is a machine.”
“He is amanwithno boundaries.”
“Read it. Read it, read it, read it.”
Maggie read it. She closed her eyes. She opened them and read it again.
“He thinks,” she said, with as much dignity as a woman in a bathrobe could summon, “that we should discuss it over dinner.”
Jo Ellen practically leapt to her feet, despite her arthritic hips. “Dinner? Oh, Mags, he’s asking you out.”
“Thank you, Princess Obvious. It’s about the sixth time he’s tried in the last two months.”
“And you didn’t tell me?”
Maggie huffed out a breath as she put the phone down. “Because you’d have me in a cocktail dress and heels with an appointment to have my hair done in the blink of an eye.”
“For Brick?” she scoffed. “You’d wear jeans and a leather vest with extra eyeliner. Please say yes, Maggie.”
“No. And I don’t wear eyeliner.”
“You danced with him when we had to spend the night at Gator Jack’s.”
