Page 41 of The Fall Back Plan
She looks at me for a long moment, as if she can hear the irony I kept out of the words, but she doesn’t press me. Instead, she nods. “Excellent. I know where you can start. I want to offer a financial literacy class to our patrons one night a week, helping them figure out how to manage their spending and start building nest eggs and working toward their larger financial goals. Better housing or emergency car repair funds. That type of thing. You’d be perfect for the job. The unpaid, doing-it-out-of-the-goodness-of-your-heart job.”
She’s calling me on my claim. If this was the kind of giving back I’d meant, she’s offering the perfect opportunity. I hedge, unable to give her an outright no. “Now isn’t such a good time. Still trying to find my pace with the bar and all of that.”
“I understand. Let’s get through the fall tourist season, and when business goes back to normal, it’ll feel so much less crazy than when you’re dealing with the crowds. I’m sure teaching the class will fit neatly in your schedule. Let me check something.” She types on her computer, and a minute later she says, “It looks like Mondays and Tuesdays are the slowest nights for most bars. We’ll look at doing it on one of those nights.”
I smile and shake my head. “You’re not wrong. I’ll check in with you after the apple season ends and see what makes sense.” I won’t make any promises, but if it were anyone besides Mrs. Herring, I would have already given a blunt no. We chat for a few more minutes, then I excuse myself to wander the stacks. A Katherine Center novel I’ve somehow missed catches my eye, so I check it out and say goodbye to Mrs. Herring.
As I step back into the gold autumn afternoon, I’m struck again by how less than an hour in the library has already recentered me. I can’t believe I’d forgotten how this place and that woman had always been a good part of any day I stopped by.
Sure, some things didn’t change and probably never would, like Sloane and her compulsive need to be a queen bee. But Lucas had changed for the better. And some things that hadn’t changed . . .
I look over my shoulder at the library. Some things had been good all along.
“Whoa.”
“Oof,” I say, my breath leaving me as I walk into something solid. Solid and warm. Solid and warm and dressed in the familiar green of the Harvest Hollow sheriff’s uniform.
Lucas’s hands come up to steady me with a firm hold on my arms, and I step back, dabbing at his chest where I rammed a book into it like it’s spilled cocoa instead.
“Sorry,” I say. “I wasn’t looking where I was going, obviously.”
“I’m fine. You okay?” he asks.
His hands are still holding my upper arms, and we’re barely a foot apart. I should step back more, but his hands are warm through the sleeves of my thin sweater in the creeping cool of late September, and for a moment, I can’t bring myself to step away from the heat of his body.
It feels good, and I—
I step back immediately when I catch the drift of my thoughts toward how I want to stay right there, basking in his touch. Don’t need any of that.
“I’m fine,” I say. “Heading back to the Mockingbird.”
“Sure. Hey, I’m glad I ran into you—”
“Technically, I ran into you.”
He smiles. “Conceded. Anyway, I was going to see if you might be interested—”
I don’t know what’s going to come out of his mouth next, but I cut him off. I hold up my wrist with my watch. “Oh, Ry is texting. I need to go down and help out. Sorry again about the crash.” I hurry down the sidewalk. His words might have been leading up to asking me out, and I need to outrace them. Because I need to say no. And I’m pretty sure I couldn’t have.
Sheriff’s bullet dodged.
Chapter Twenty-One
Lucas
IwatchJoliewalkaway as fast as a woman can without it turning into a run.
She doesn’t even have a smartwatch. It was just a regular watch with hands. No texts.
That settles the question of whether she’s avoiding me. What I’m not sure about is why. I didn’t date during the election two years ago, and then Brooklyn came along almost right after that, but I’m not a monk or even a hermit. I enjoy the company of women, and I think I read them pretty well. Even Jolie.
She gives major standoffish energy, but I’m not imagining the tension I sense between us—and I don’t mean the angry kind that we had in high school. I feel a strong pull toward her. She’s completely different from my usual type, which always ends up being women who were former cheerleaders and beauty queens, even when I don’t know that going in.
Jolie is not that soft kind of pretty. She’s . . . I don’t know. She has the kind of face—or maybe it’s the way she carries herself—that I’d expect to see in a museum oil portrait of important historical figures. Regal. Maybe that’s the word. She’s a specific kind of hot. Librarian hot. Teacher hot. Woman-in-authority hot.
The thing is, I’ve seen her crack a couple of times. And when she does, it animates everything about her. A warmth shines through, and it pulls me in.
Except she’s pushing me away. That much is obvious. Could it be all our high school baggage? Is she still holding that against me? She’s clearly got a chip on her shoulder over a lot of things, and from what I’m gathering in bits and pieces, she had way more going on outside of school than I would have imagined for the mousy book nerd forced into tutoring me. If I’d thought about her life outside of our time in the school library at all, it probably would have been to imagine her doing extra credit at home just for fun.
