Page 37 of Full Coverage (Boys of Fall)

She swallowed and looked back at the card. “I’ve never gotten a Valentine before. Well, not since elementary school when everyone gave them to everyone.”

Nolan liked that. And he wanted to kick a bunch of sorry, stupid asses. Like all of the men in Quinn. He liked being the only person to do something special for her at the same time he hated that she hadn’t had anyone crazy about her. Because that was a fucking waste.

“I’ve worked really hard not to be dating anyone around Valentine’s Day though, so that’s probably part of it,” she said, almost to herself.

“You’ve avoided having a boyfriend around Valentine’s Day?” Nolan asked. “Why?”

She shrugged. “It’s a complicated holiday. Lots of expectations. Just seemed better to avoid it.”

“Lots of expectations.” He thought about that. He supposed it could be true. “What about this year?”

She looked up from the sappy card. “Well, you went to all the trouble of getting the card.”

He nodded. “It was tough,” he said lightly. And suddenly he wanted to do something tough, to go above and beyond, overboard, over-the-top for her. He wanted to work hard, to show her she was worth it.

There was a niggle in the back of his mind, almost as if he was on to something with that thought. But then Randi stood, stepped close, wrapped her arms around him and hugged him.

With his arms full of hot, sweet woman, it was hard to concentrate on anything else.

* * *

He’d beenin town for a week. Randi was trying to remember the last time Nolan had stuck around that long. When he’d first started the book last summer, he’d been here for a couple of weeks. But usually, he was in and out in a weekend. Four days at the most.

She hadn’t realized she’d been paying that much attention.

But apparently she had, because she knew this was the second longest he’d ever stayed in Quinn since graduating.

It wasn’t just his mother’s words at the diner the other day that had Randi thinking about it either. It had been on her mind almost constantly since he’d asked her to the Valentine’s Dance. Why was he staying? He had to have most of the book done by now. She was just helping fill in football details. There was no way he actually wanted to go to the dance at the community center. She’d never been, but the fact that she’d heard zero details about it in years past, meant it wasn’t noteworthy. So that couldn’t be the reason Nolan was hanging around.

She did wonder what Teresa thought of Nolan sticking around though. Especially after her comment about how he was only here in between projects. He was still working on the book. That wasn’t between projects. Did Teresa know that he was here because of the book and that Randi was helping him?

It wasn’t a secret that Teresa Winters thought Quinn was beneath her brilliant son. Frankly, she thought Quinn was beneath her whole family. Except for her no-good, scumball, lying, cheating ex-husband. All terms she’d used to describe him in multiple public places over the years.

Teresa was the most critical person in town and very few people truly liked her. Especially those who had spent their lives in Quinn and loved it. She was an outsider. She’d come to town a little over thirty years ago with her husband, a Quinn boy who had met her when he was going to school in Dallas.

He’d, apparently, never been forgiven for getting her pregnant right away and bringing her to Quinn. He’d also, apparently, not been able to take living with her for more than six years. He’d left her behind in Quinn and had never looked back.

Randi felt a little sorry for Teresa, but it was hard not to grit her teeth around the woman. It seemed that nothing was ever good enough. Teresa showed up to school board meetings, city council meetings, Chamber of Commerce meetings. And she always had a complaint. There was always something that someone was doing wrong or not doing enough of or doing too much of. Randi had heard most of it second-hand through the rumor mill, from her mother, or in the shop. Randi wasn’t really the school board type. But, as a business owner in Quinn, she’d witnessed Teresa’s negativity at more than one Chamber meeting.

It was sad, really. Teresa had some good ideas, and she wasn’t wrong when she said they could implement a summer reading program or that the businesses could all pitch in and get the sidewalk on Main repaved. But it was the way she made her suggestions and the fact that it seemed Quinn was perpetually not good enough that made everyone defensive and less likely to listen.

It was hard to believe Nolan was Teresa’s son, actually. Nolan was a nice guy who had always seemed to love Quinn. Sure, he’d left as soon as he’d had the chance. Sure, he’d moved well beyond Quinn, literally and figuratively. But he’d never seemed disdainful toward his hometown. And he came back regularly.

He just neverstayed.

“So yesterday you told me about Marv and Dan and Chuck and Tom and how they always kept their grandsons’ stats and had an ongoing competition going,” Nolan said, from where he was sitting on the dirty overturned bucket again.

Randi couldn’t get over that. He didn’t seem to care that her shop got his pants dirty every day. He kept coming back and he’d sit on the bucket beside her work area, his notebook flipped open, pen poised. He’d been taking pages of notes every day and Randi couldn’t believe it when she was going on and on about the off-field stuff that went on at football games, and she’d glanced over to find him scribbling madly.

They got off on tangents every day it seemed, and she felt bad. He was at the shop for hours every day because she didn’t stick to game details. Like yesterday: she’d been talking about a big first-quarter stop the Titans made in their fifth game of the season, and she’d gone off telling Nolan about Marv Bennett and Dan Brady and Chuck Olsen and Tom Tyler, the old guys who had grandsons who had all played for the Titans at once. The men had sat on the very top row of the bleachers with a huge cooler of root beer and sandwiches at every single home game and made bets on their grandsons’ stats. Loser had to make the sandwiches for the next game.

“Yeah,” Randi said, leaning on her wrench to loosen a stubborn lug nut.

“You were saying something about Chuck and Tucker, and then someone came in with a hose problem.”

She grinned. A hose problem. Yeah, Paige Wilcox had needed a new water hose put in. Supposedly. Once Randi got into it, the water hose had been fine. So had all her other hoses. But Paige had gotten the intel about what Nolan was doing at the shop every day for the other girls.

“Chuck Olsen didn’t have any grandsons so he would have been left out of the bets,” Randi said. “So he kind of adopted Tucker. Tucker didn’t have a grandpa in the stands, so Chuck’s bets were all about Tucker. And then when Tucker got drafted, Chuck wore gear from Tucker’s NFL team every game that next year, just to rub in that his guy had gone the farthest.”

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