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Getting away from the hotel was imperative, lest I be tempted to call her into my office and lose my self-control. I’d put my hand in my pocket to hide my obvious arousal. Letting my dick control my brain was the strategy of a loser. Calling hertemptingwas like describing a giraffe as a little bit tall. She was so much more than that. I might have attempted to forget her after the Christmas her family left Peterville, but I never had. My reaction today was proof of that.
She’d seeped back into my thoughts on occasion when I’d wondered what might have been—if we hadn’t argued about staying local or not, and I hadn’t pissed her off so much that she felt she had to retaliate. Each time it happened, it took serious effort to put those thoughts and feelings back in a box and lock them up.
None of it made any sense after what she’d put me through, but seeing her like that had triggered the return of yesteryear’s attraction, and I was powerless to put it back in its box. That giant sucking sound was my self-control being dragged out the window.
Why I was such a masochist? She might be luscious and tempting, but I had to remember that underneath, she was devious and evil. Hadn’t her actions proven it clearly enough?
I spent the rest of the morning at the hardware store, a safe distance from Angela. Rosella and I tried to fix our ordering-software issue and got nowhere.Fixwas not the right word. We spent the morning getting frustrated trying to understand the problem.
For half the items we checked, it wanted to order between two and four times what common sense yielded. For the other half, it generated no orders at all. Both extremes would run me out of business in no time.
Another call to the geniuses who’d installed the software didn’t get me anywhere either. They didn’t have anyone available to come out for another three weeks. And even that date was mentioned with enough caveats that it could end up being closer to three months than three weeks.
I gave Rosella the bad news after getting off the phone. “We’re going to have to do these by hand for a while.”
She shook her head. “With Henry gone, I don’t have enough time for that.”
“Do what you can, and give me a list at the end of the day. I’ll work on them at night.”
I’d bought the software specifically because Henry, who’d handled this for years, had announced his plan to retire about six months ago. Three weeks ago, he’d moved to be near his grandchildren in Atlanta.
“This sucks swamp water,” Rosella grumbled.
I left her to work out what she could. Up front, I opened the first box of today’s shipment to restock the shelves. It was a task she’d normally do, but I needed her to get the orders in. It also put me out where I could answer the inevitable customer questions.
And, it kept me away from the hotel and the temptation to go looking for Angela.
CHAPTER12
Angela
I contemplatedmy generous advance as I drove downtown to The Boathouse for lunch. Did it mean Boone had grown out of his ogre stage? Or maybe he didn’t know what a uniform cost. Maybe he was just assuaging his guilt for how he’d treated me back then.
In the end, I couldn’t decide, and it didn’t matter. I’d do my time here and be on my way. Boone and whether he’d changed or not was only a temporary distraction, nothing more.
When I arrived, I parked at the far corner of the lot to avoid door dings. With the five hundred dollars in my purse, my perspective on life had improved immeasurably. Taking a quick peek inside, I didn’t see Callie, which gave me a chance to stand outside in the shade cast by the building while I waited for her. The weather was pleasant enough for late summer, with a slight breeze off the lake. The clean air was a refreshing change from breathing cleaning products all morning.
Two older ladies walked up and stopped near the door. The shorter one touched up her lipstick.
“I heard Lee went to New York to work out financing to buy the distillery,” the taller one said. “And it’s all hush-hush is why nobody’s heard from him.”
“Nonsense,” the shorter one scoffed. “The Pollocks would never sell. You should know that.”
The taller one pulled open the door. “I said I heard it. I didn’t say I believed it.”
The two disappeared inside.
That was the second time I’d heard townspeople gossiping about what had happened to this fellow named Lee. That struck me as distinctly different from Boston. There, everyone checked the internet for salacious tidbits about celebrities they would never meet, which were mostly manufactured by PR people anyway. Here they gossiped about local people they knew and without looking things up on their phones.
While I contemplated which was better, another couple approached. Instead of the Lee character, they were discussing an upcoming chili cook-off. “You know, old man Willard is going to be hard to beat.”
How quaint. If I’d gone to a cook-off of any sort in Boston, the chance that I knew one of the competitors would be dead zero.
The woman’s nose wrinkled and her eyes flicked to me as they passed. She probably caught a whiff of my perfume today: eau de Lemon Pledge. Get used to it, lady. I smell better than if I’d gotten the septic-tank job.
It might not be glamorous, fun, or well-paying, but I was doing it, and doing it well. That meant I had that thing they used to callgrit. I smiled to myself. I didn’t want to be proud of being a champion toilet cleaner, but I could be proud of having grit.
“Hi,” Callie called as she crossed the street toward me.
