Trouble When You Walked In (Contemporary Romance) (32 page)

His father’s shoulders slumped. He looked anywhere but at Boone.

“It’s not the end of the world,” he told them, but deep inside, the darkness sat heavy in him. “I don’t need or want your pity. I’m coping just fine.”

“We don’t pity you,” said his mother.

“Bullshit. You do.”

“Don’t swear at your mother,” his father said automatically.

“I’m sorry, Mom.”
And I’m sorry you got stuck with me instead of Richard
.

Only one thing held him back from saying it. He wanted to spare them the pain of having to look inside themselves and hold that ugly truth up to the light. He was already doing it. And it sucked.

Silence hung heavy in the room.

“I think you need to go,” he said quietly. “Tomorrow’s a big day.”

His mother stood. “All right,” she whispered. “Are you going to tell everyone the real reason you’re seeing Ella?”

“No. It’s no one else’s business.”

He could see that his mother was faintly relieved, although not entirely. He still looked bad. But one kind of looking bad was better than the other. He knew very well his parents thought it was preferable to look like a horny bachelor with a roving eye than let the public—your constituents, your students, your principal—know you can’t read well.

“Good plan,” his dad said. “Elections always come up again.”

“I still think he’ll win by a landslide,” said his mother.

“I agree with your mother,” said Frank. “You’ve been an excellent mayor.”

“Thanks.” Boone just wanted them gone.

He let them see themselves out, swiveled carefully in his grandfather’s desk chair, and poured himself some bourbon from Faber Braddock’s favorite crystal decanter that he kept inside a cupboard below the bookshelf.

Desperation drink in one hand, he traced the spine of a book on his shelf with the index finger of his other. It was
An Index of Appalachian Poets
. There might even be a Rogers in there somewhere. He searched the contents, turned to page thirty-eight, looked carefully down the row of
R
names, and yes—there it was: “Hiram Rogers, bn. 1889, resident of Kettle Knob, North Carolina, author of poetry anthologies ‘Petals Falling,’ ‘Heroes Tomorrow,’ and ‘War Song.’”

After the
Morning Coffee
show came out, Cissie would think he was a scumbag. Kissing her, sleeping with her—all the while he was having a so-called affair with Ella.

No doubt the rest of the town, including his football players, would think the same thing.

He topped off his drink. There was no way out of this mess. He wanted to keep his job at the school, even if it meant he had to do some backpedaling with the players and his other students to win their trust again. He wanted to be able to walk into Starla’s diner and order lunch without people assuming he couldn’t even read the menu.

He didn’t want to wear the scarlet letter
D
for
dyslexia
. It was
his
business.

And if Cissie ever found out …

He remembered how excited she was perusing his grandfather’s library. Books, words, were her life.

He put the drink down, attached a sticky note to the poetry book: “Enjoy, and please keep. Boone.” Then he laid it on the stairs.

She’d have to believe that everything between them had meant nothing more than a good time. That way, they’d have a clean break.

In his room when he looked out the window at the blanket of stars before him, he understood that he was wrong about something. He’d always thought winning was what he did best. There was a drive in him to succeed, to pull it out at the last minute, to change failure to victory.

But now he understood that what he truly excelled at was getting around the thing that had always shut him out. It had started with Mom and Dad pretending he was someone he wasn’t. They were still doing it, and it hurt.

It hurt badly enough that he didn’t want to give the rest of the world the chance to do the same thing, no matter the consequences to his heart.

He pressed a button on a remote. The window blinds hummed and began to draw together, blocking the panoramic view. Boone’s resolve hardened as, one by one, the stars disappeared.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

On Election Day at 6:30 a.m., Cissie found the poetry book on the stairs. Later on, she realized it was a farewell of sorts. A consolation prize, maybe. But at first, she was excited. A gift from Boone! She could hear him up, moving around his study.

She poked her head in and smiled. “Thanks for the cool book. And good morning.”

“You’re welcome.” He nodded in a perfunctory way and stuffed a bunch of papers into a briefcase. Maybe he just had Election Day nerves.

Cissie ignored the fact that he seemed withdrawn. “Good luck today.”

He glanced up. “To you, too.”

Their gazes held—which was what she wanted. She’d worn another new outfit, and she was really hoping he’d notice it. It was professional yet feminine and kind of sexy, and she felt very together in it, like the Librarian Who Would Save the Library by Becoming the Mayor—
that
librarian who was going to be called “best” on her tombstone, not once but twice, for her librarian skills.

Her mayor skills were untested as yet, but they were there, she believed, glimmering beneath all her glam.

But his eyes looked bleak, not appreciative or admiring. Or even friendly. She would have taken friendly.

Without looking at her again, he said, “I’ll be gone all day, pretty much. We both will.”

“Yep.” She raised her arm and leaned her elbow against the doorjamb near her ear so that her hand curled over her head in an Audrey Hepburn–ish pose. Could she look any sexier?

She didn’t think so.

“Hey,” she said super casually, “I’m available for a midnight date. Winner takes all.” She didn’t know what she meant by that, exactly, but it sounded good.

He didn’t say anything, didn’t look—but he stopped sifting documents.

“In your room,” she added. “Or the hot tub. I’ll bring champagne.”

Could she give any more qualifications to that offer?

God help him, he looked downright austere as he stared at his papers.

She could tell he wasn’t really reading them. He was using them as a prop—so he wouldn’t have to talk to her.

“You don’t have to worry about me,” she said. “If I lose—which might happen—I’ll be okay. I even believe the library will survive. It won’t be the way I think it would work best,” she added in a rush, “but it will survive in a different form, and there’s always tomorrow to rethink things.”

He finally looked up at her. She was still leaning—like a dork, she now realized—on the doorjamb. “Do you ever quit hoping?” he asked.

Just like that. Dropped into the middle of a perfectly normal one-way conversation.

“No.” She pulled her hand down, folded it with her other one. Stayed leaning because she would not admit that her posing was a trifle unnatural. She told herself it came naturally to this new Cissie, that she had to keep putting herself out there and look stupid sometimes. “I can’t quit hoping. Ever. About anything.”

“Where do you get it?”

“Nana, of course.”

“That makes sense. But she’s not as … sunshiny.”

“I know. She has that layer of cosmopolitan that I could never have. She must have gotten that in the sixties.”

He went back to his papers.

“You have a lot to be hopeful about,” she said. “You’ll probably win.”

“See?” He stared at her with a perfectly serious face. “You’re still thinking that maybe you can.” He gave a short laugh. “And guess what? You just might.”

The truth was, she understood what he was saying, and she wasn’t offended. But she wanted him to wake up from this dark mood he was in. “Of course I think I might win. Why would I run, otherwise? That’s like saying you want to ride your bicycle to the store, but you ride it in place instead. I’m not conducting a campaign just to conduct a campaign. It’s going somewhere. And even if I lose, I’m not done. Expect to see me at Town Hall.”

He shook his head. Clasped the briefcase shut. “I have to go.” He walked up to her. Stopped.

Maybe because she refused to move. “You never answered me about tonight.” There. She was moving, pumping those bike pedals,
going
somewhere.

He looked at her shoes, beautiful heels bought in Asheville. “I can’t make it,” he said quietly.

And then he walked by her. He didn’t push. He just hoped she would move, and she did. Slowly, like a rusty drawbridge, she moved, and he got by without even having to touch her.

His hard luck.

He walked out the front door, and Cissie went upstairs, picked up the consolation prize of a book, ripped off the sticky note, burned the message from Boone in a candle on the bureau (after having to look for matches for a full minute, which she eventually found in a nightstand drawer), and stuffed the book under the armchair seat cushion, where Dexter had to sit on it. It wasn’t fair to Dexter. But he adjusted quite nicely.

And that was that.

Maybe some future guest would find it there.

As for Cissie, she was off to work at the library and campaign when she could for one more day. She had twelve assured votes and trembled with love thinking of those dozen people: Nana, Laurie, Sally, Mrs. Hattlebury (not the colonel—theirs was a house divided), her new hair stylist, the manager at her new favorite clothing store at the outlet mall in Asheville (she lived in Kettle Knob), Starla’s dishwasher, and the five members of the Friends of the Library who could vote (one was a Canadian and ineligible).

She really hoped she’d crack a hundred votes so Boone would see he wasn’t quite a lock in the town of two thousand constituents. She also hoped he’d see that the woman whose free hot-tub-champagne-and-sex ticket he’d just rejected was someone he’d miss. She wasn’t going to hang out with a guy who treated her like a rusty drawbridge he needed to pass—

However much she was in love with him.

*   *   *

The polls opened at 7:00 a.m., and Cissie was there casting her vote, her confusion and heartache about Boone hidden deep away. Today, she was running for mayor. She needed to focus on that. Even so, she couldn’t help hoping that she’d see him at the elementary school, where the voting booths were set up in the cafeteria.

All she craved was a smile, some sense that what had happened that morning between them was a mistake.

But they didn’t cross paths.

Her heart was heavy when she unlocked the library earlier than usual and started going through old magazines to make up for all the time she’d lose that afternoon. She managed to stay busy—she didn’t really want to see anyone; she wished she could hide in the stacks all day—but at 8:00, she got a call from Laurie.

“You’re not going to believe this—your Sunday
Morning Coffee
segment is on the network’s national weekday morning show instead. They bumped it up! I hit record—I missed getting the first twenty seconds, but that was just Anne Silver introducing the story to the anchors.”

“Why?”

“Shush, I’m listening!”

Cissie strained to hear. “How is it?”

“Sssh!” said Laurie. “Oh, my God … There you are at The Log Cabin, looking like Annette Funicello from one of those old beach movies. You need to do your hair like that again.”

“Laurie! Put the phone closer to the TV so I can hear.”

“Don’t you have a TV down there?”

“But I have to go pull it out of the closet and plug it in!”

“Hurry. That was a preview. They’re going to commercial, and they’ll run the whole thing when they get back.”

Cissie got the TV set up in forty-five seconds. Another twenty seconds went by before it warmed up, then she had to switch channels, and there—

There was Boone, kissing her in the shed. She was leaning on his truck.

“What? Why is that on TV?” she yelled into the phone.

“Um, because it’s cute? And romantic?” Laurie said. “You two look so good together.”

“But it was private!”

Cissie watched in horror as Anne’s voice-over said, “Neither candidate admitted that they were romantically involved, although this video tells a different story.” The camera panned across Boone’s house. “The two candidates for mayor share this residence, although admittedly, Miss Rogers’s own home is uninhabitable at the moment.”

Then Cissie was on-screen. “A tree went through the roof. And we needed a place to stay. Boone’s got a very nice, big house.”

She gasped. “They edited the heck out of that. I sound like such an opportunist! I was trying to say that I was glad we weren’t going to get in his way. I told you Anne didn’t like me.”

“Gosh,” said Laurie. “The way they manipulate things, it’s … it’s not right.”

“The question is”—Anne was on-screen again—“why stay at the opposing candidate’s home at all when you have an entire small town of friends to choose from?”

And then there were brief screenshots of various residents of Kettle Knob chatting at Starla’s before the footage returned to Anne in the studio. “Most folks around here,” she said, “claim they would have let Miss Rogers and her grandmother live with them, but they also think that the two candidates living together under one roof is a
hoot
—a popular word in North Carolina. Some even hope that Cupid has struck. That scene in the shed suggests he has.”

“This is entertaining,” said Laurie.

“It’s not.” Cissie was outraged.

“It is if you’re not from Kettle Knob and you just happen to see this on TV,” Laurie insisted. “I know you’re embarrassed, but you two look so cute together. Whoever is watching this right now is sighing and hoping you’ll get married.”

“Laurie,” Cissie said, “please. Don’t talk.”

“Okay,” Laurie said meekly.

“Boone Braddock,” Anne Silver went on, “is a busy football coach, PE teacher, and mayor. He’s also apparently involved in a nearly daily activity at this home in Kettle Knob.”

A shot of someone’s house was shown.

“Where’s that?” Cissie asked Laurie.

“I don’t know.”