LITMIR.BIZ

       CHAPTER EIGHT

      SHE SHOULD NOT BE DOING THIS.

      As the hungry growl of the chain saw cut through the afternoon, Claire sat in her blasted rolling chair, Chester at her feet, sneaking another peek through the filmy curtains at her bay window, like something out of an Alfred Hitchcock movie. Only instead of spying on her neighbor burying a body in the garden, she couldn’t seem to stop watching the very attractive male currently wielding that chain saw on her downed tree limbs.

      Something was seriously wrong with her.

      Riley had made short work of the storm debris over the last hour. When he finished, he had poked his head in the door to inform her—not to ask, apparently, because he didn’t seem to care when she objected—that he was going to trim a few of the lower hanging limbs and any others that had been weakened by the harsh winters and heavy snows in Hope’s Crossing.

      She had tried to insist she could hire a tree service, but he had only smiled and headed back out to work.

      She shouldn’t be gawking at him, noticing the way his T-shirt clung to his chest and the muscles that rippled in his back as he stacked and loaded the larger chunks of branches onto her woodpile.

      This was Riley. Alex’s pest of a brother, the one who used to jump around corners to scare them at every opportunity, who used to cover the spray nozzle handle on the sink so anyone who turned the faucet on would be drenched, whose favorite summer activity had been lurking in wait for them to sunbathe in the backyard so he could sneak out and soak them with the garden hose.

      He was definitely all grown up, six feet and change of hard muscles.

      You were the subject of many a heated fantasy… I had a crush on you from the time I was old enough to figure out girls didn’t really have cooties.

      She still didn’t buy it. He had to have been yanking her chain. Still, his words had chased themselves around and around in her head since that strange conversation in the early hours of the morning.

      She sighed and Chester raised his head, his eyes curious. “Sorry. Go back to sleep. Just reminding myself what an idiot I am.”

      He barked once as if in agreement, then rested his head on his paws again as Claire suddenly became aware the throb of the chain saw had stilled.

      She searched the backyard for Riley and found him kneeling near the trunk of her favorite old honey locust. The bright orange chainsaw case gaped open on the ground and he was fitting the saw back in.

      Was he finished? Yes. A minute later, she watched him close the case and then stand up again and head for the house. Only by sheer luck and Chester fortuitously lunging out of the way, she managed to wheel away from the kitchen window just seconds before he rapped on the back door and then opened it without waiting for her to answer it.

      He filled her house, large and masculine, in the space that had become rather girly since Jeff moved out.

      “That should take care of your arboreal needs for a while.”

      “Until the next big windstorm anyway. Thank you. I appreciate all your help.”

      He shrugged. “No big deal. I had a free morning. Anyway, I’d rather be outside doing yard work than holed up in my office down at the station filling out reports.”

      “Will you have some lunch? I made a couple of sandwiches.” She pointed to the table with more than a little embarrassment. The sandwiches she’d made looked clumsy and crooked on the mismatched china, all she could find in the dishwasher. She couldn’t reach up into the cupboard easily, so she’d been forced to make do.

      Riley didn’t seem to notice anything wrong with her efforts. He gaped at the table and then looked back at her.

      “You’re in pain and can barely move, Claire,” he exclaimed. “The last thing you need to be worrying about is feeding me.”

      “I’m feeling fine. Great, actually.” She didn’t add that she had felt more useful making that pitiful excuse for a sandwich than at any time since the accident. “Anyway, it’s only a sandwich, Riley. It’s not like a five-course meal Alex would fix or anything.”

      “Thank you, then,” he said after a pause. “It looks delicious and I am starving. I should probably wash some of this dirt and sawdust off first, though.”

      “The bathroom’s down the hall, first door on the left.”

      When he returned a few moments later, his hair was damp around his face and a couple of water droplets still clung to his neck.

      He looked completely delicious. She, on the other hand, was not at her best. She had chosen a plain cotton dress with tiny sprigs of blue flowers, something easy to pull over her various medical hardware. She had pulled her hair back in a headband and even put on a little makeup, but her spruce-up efforts seemed rather pathetic.

      He slid into a chair at the table and looked around her sunny, comfortable kitchen.

      “I have to say, this place has really changed since the last time I saw it, back when that scary-mean Mrs. Schmidt lived here.”

      “She wasn’t scary or mean. Just old and lonely.”

      “Do you always look for the best in people?”

      She could feel her face heat. “If you take the time to see past the gruff, you can usually find something good.”

      “Maybe you should try being a cop for a day or two. That would probably change your perspective.” He picked out a pickle spear from the jar she’d managed to wrangle down off the shelf of the refrigerator and took a chomp out of it.

      She sipped at her water. “No, thank you. I’ll stick with my bead store. I like being foolish and naive.”

      “I didn’t call you either of those things. I actually think it’s…sweet.”

      She didn’t want to be sweet. Not when it came to Riley.

      “So tell me about the house,” he said. “How did you come to be the proud owner of Mrs. Schmidt’s crumbling old brick pile?”

      “I’ve dreamed of living here from the time I used to walk past it on my way to school,” she confessed.

      “Even as creepy as it used to look, with the grime and the cobwebs and the shutters falling off their hinges?”

      “I could always see past all the dusty corners to the gem inside. The bones were good and I knew with a little elbow grease, this place could truly sparkle.”

      “So you came back to town ready to make your dreams come true.”

      “Something like that. Mrs. Schmidt died a few months before Jeff finished his residency and was ready to open his practice. When we started looking around for houses, her children were just a week or so from putting it on the market. Our real estate agent put us in touch with them and we bought it just like that.”

      Jeff hadn’t wanted an old house. He had wanted to build their own place from the very beginning, something modern and airy, but she had convinced him this was the perfect place to raise their children.

      Her

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