Page 11 of Rebel Secrets
Her smile made me shake my head.
“I know.I just want you to know you can call me.If you want.Anytime.I even promise to be quiet and listen.”
I shook my head, but that left my brain unsupervised long enough to hear Erin say,
“—would love to, but I’m so busy right now.I just don’t know when I’d have the time.And you must be busy with the team.And I really don’t get to Reading a lot.”
“How’s the bookstore doing?”
I’d spoken loud enough to catch Erin and Ian’s attention, and they turned back to Rain and me.
“I thought you owned a bakery?”Ian directed the question at Erin, but Rain jumped in, probably because she saw what I did—that Erin seemed to have met her match.
“She does, but Erin and I teamed up to open a bookstore in the same building.”
Ian didn’t see the look Erin gave Rain, but I did.Relief.But she was too nice a person to tell the guy she wasn’t interested in him.Not that I cared.I didn’t.But I didn’t want her to be uncomfortable while she was here.
It’s probably not Ian.It’s you.
Except the look she flashed me wasn’t filled with her usual disdain.She looked…confused.
She shouldn’t be.My mom raised me better, and, contrary to popular opinion, I could be considerate.Most days.
“So you help your granddad run the newspaper and you own your own bakery and you run a bookstore.When do you sleep?”
Rain and Erin shared a look before Rain laughed and Erin just shook her head.
“That’s a good question.”Rain reached across to Erin and poked her in the arm.“I keep telling her she needs more downtime.”
Erin shrugged, her lips twisting and her nose wrinkling.
“I like to keep busy.”
“There’s busy and then there’s working yourself into the ground.”
Our gazes connected and held.And held.I don’t think I ever realized how bright her green eyes were.Or how pretty she was with a blush coloring her cheeks.
Then she blinked, and I shifted my gaze back to my sister.Who stared at me with arched brows.I returned her stare, otherwise she’d think something was up.And she’d be wrong.So very wrong.
ChapterFour
Two months before the wedding
Erin
“Granddad,do you have that article on the fire at the Shaeffer farm?”
“Already laid out for Thursday’s paper.Did you get that story about the runaway alpaca I sent you?”
Sitting across from each other in the office of the St.David Register, our desk backs pushed together, though we couldn’t see each other over the large monitors we used to lay out the paper.Granddad was constantly complaining about his sore neck from having to twist his head to see around it.If it hadn’t been for the printer demanding the paper move to digital layout five years ago, I’m pretty sure Granddad would’ve still been laying out the pages on boards.
My brain, which had been mulling over a list of books to order for the bookstore while I’d been designing pages for Thursday edition on autopilot, did a stutter stop.
“Alpaca story?”
My brain started paging through mental notes with all the panic of a college student going into a pop quiz without reading the material.
“Yeah, about that alpaca from the farm outside of Frogtown.”
