Page 73 of Story of My Life
“Who? Me?”
Those eyes flicked to me. “No. Emilie. Yes, you.”
I cocked my head and tapped out a beat with my pen against the notebook. “Why are you being nice to me? Is this some kind of red flag I don’t know about?”
“Just bein’ neighborly.”
“Yeah, because that’s definitely your thing,” I said with a nice seasoning of sarcasm.
He shrugged. “My mom’s here. I don’t want to listen to her complain for the next month about how disappointed she is in her heathen sons who can’t even be bothered to make sure a woman gets home safely at night.”
“Nowthat, I buy. But you can assure your mom that I’m perfectly capable of getting myself home.”
“And I’m capable of eating an entire large pepperoni pie myself, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.”
“Town meetings really bring out your sense of humor,” I said as we headed for the door together.
He grunted.
“Your witty repartee is unparalleled,” I noted.
“And you use fifty words when one is enough,” he fired back.
I grunted back at him. The corner of his mouth lifted.
I shook my head. “Okay, buddy. Now you’re almost sort of smiling at me. Why are you being nice to me all of a sudden? Is it because I hired you and now I have Ass-Kissing Cam to look forward to for the next several months?”
“First rule of Story Lake. Don’t have private conversations in public places,” he said as he ushered me outside. The humidity was a few percentage points less suffocating and the nighttime insects were deafening. It was kind of nice.
Cam jerked his head and started walking. Apparently that was alpha male for “follow me.” I did, reluctantly.
At least until I remembered how spectacular his rear view was. His impressive denim-clad backside stopped two more storefronts down. It looked like an abandoned insurance agency.
“Look, if you’ll excuse me, I’m walking home to eat snacks in bed.” I made a move to go around him, but he stopped me with his giant, hard body.
“Not so fast. We cleared your name. Now I need something in return.”
“A, my name would have been cleared the next time your pet bird dropped a fish on someone else’s head. And B, are you seriously trying to trade political favors for sex?”
He peered down at me with a frown fierce enough that a woman with a stronger sense of self-preservation would have backed up half a block or so. “You must be exhausted from all that jumping to all those conclusions,” he said finally.
I crossed my arms against the sticky humidity. “You have no idea how exhausted I am. What is it you want in return for telling people I didn’t murder a bald eagle?”
“I want your personal guarantee that you aren’t going to pull the plug on this job. I want you to make me believe that you won’t fuck us over. Because this money, this job, means the difference between the end of a third-generation family business and a new beginning.”
The man was surprisingly eloquent when the mood struck. I tried not to be impressed.
“You still think I’m just going to pack up and move back. Back to what, Cam?”
He shrugged. “How the hell should I know? Whatever life you have in whatever high-rise you live in with whatever fancy friends you have.”
I’d stood up for myself once tonight, and it looked like I was going to make it a habit.
I drilled a finger into his impressively hard chest. “My ex-husband evicted me from our apartment. My publisher is going to drop me if I don’t get my shit together and somehow write the funniest, sexiest rom-com of my life when I haven’t written a damn thing since the divorce. Zoey lost her job because of me, and now she’s depending on me for her entire livelihood. I moved here for inspiration, and so far all I’ve gotten is aggravation. And wow, that’s a lot of muscle,” I noted.
“Thanks. I work out.”
“Shut up. Stop dazzling me with your pectorals,” I snapped. “I dumped my life savings into a house I’d never seen. I have no life to go back to in the city. I have no home to return to. Everything I have is here, in this tiny ghost town that hates me, except for your dad and your weirdly sexy brothers.”
