Story of My Life (Story Lake #1)

11. Breadsticks and accusations

11

brEADSTICKS AND ACCUSATIONS

HAZEL

Cam climbed behind the wheel and tossed the flashlight he’d used to guide us through my dark yard in the back seat.

“So what’s good at Angelo’s?” I asked him as he started the engine.

“The food,” he said shortly as he slid an arm around my seat and backed out of my driveway.

He’d changed out of his work clothes and into gym shorts and a tight T-shirt for his shift at the store. There was no doubt the body beneath was athletic. But I was more interested in the inner workings of his mind. Campbell Bishop was a walking, talking grump who seemed hell-bent on doing the right thing.

Zoey: Still finding grumpy Hot Dog Fingers attractive?

I smirked at my phone in the dark of the truck cab.

Me: He’s perfect.

Zoey: He’s far from perfect. He’s a walking insult generator.

Me: He’s the grumpy to someone’s sunshine. He’s stingy with his niceness so it means more when he’s nice. Readers are going to eat him up.

“Stop texting each other,” Cam ordered from behind the wheel. “It’s rude and annoying.”

“You’re rude and annoying,” Zoey pointed out.

“How did you know we were texting each other?” I asked as he turned off the road and into a parking lot.

“Because as soon as one of you stops typing, the other one starts smirking.” He brought the truck to an abrupt stop at the front door. “We’re here. Go away.”

“Thanks, Hot Dog Fingers,” Zoey said, sliding out of the truck and onto the sidewalk.

“I reject that nickname,” he called after her.

I grinned at him as I released my seat belt. “Thanks for everything today, Cactus Cam.”

Just as I opened my door, Cam reached out and touched me. I froze and looked down at his large manly hand covering mine. He yanked his hand away and looked out the windshield again. “I should have some numbers for you later this week.”

“I look forward to it,” I said, meaning every word. If this worked out, if I could hire Cam to work on my house, I would be guaranteed to see him almost every day. I’d be rolling in inspiration.

Another truck pulled up alongside. The passenger window rolled down. Cam swore and lowered his.

The other driver was, in a word, panty-meltingly gorgeous. Okay, that was more than one word. But that kind of male beauty deserves a proper description. In the shadows of the truck cab, he looked broader than Cam, with short cropped hair, a well-groomed beard, and tattoos on both forearms. Piercing green eyes landed on me before flicking back to Cam.

The damn inspiration was all over the damn place in this town. A “why choose” parking lot tryst with two unbelievably sexy blue-collar hotties popped into my head.

“Goin’ in?” the stranger asked Cam.

“Wasn’t planning on it.”

The man’s gaze skated my way again. His face didn’t change a single iota, but I swore I could see a hint of amusement. I wondered if he had somehow read my incredibly dirty thoughts.

“Split a pie and a pitcher?” he asked Cam.

Cam glanced at me, then blew out a noisy breath through his nose. “Yeah. Fine.”

“Come on, Haze,” Zoey pleaded from the sidewalk. “I’m starving.”

“Guess I’ll see you in there,” I chirped to Cam before slamming the door and following Zoey into the restaurant. Cam roared off to the far end of the parking lot. If the guy actually hated me, there was no way he’d have agreed to drive me around town, let me hang out behind his family store’s register, and then share the same dinner venue.

He definitely didn’t hate me. Maybe he just hated the fact that he didn’t hate me. That I could work with.

The second I walked through the door and the smell of garlic and fresh bread tickled my nose, all thoughts of grumpy hero inspiration disappeared.

“Oh my God. I haven’t eaten in days,” I groaned. Angelo’s was dark and cozy with an open kitchen where the staff shoved pizzas into and out of an oven. Booths lined the front and side of the dining room. No-nonsense tables and chairs filled in the space between them and the U-shaped bar. There was a basketball game on the lone TV above the bar.

“What about the lunch and snacks we had on the road?” Zoey reminded me.

“That was days ago,” I insisted. Or at least it was a bald eagle, a car accident, a weirdly endearing teenage mayor, and a bait-and-switch house ago.

“Help you?” rasped the voice of a lifelong smoker.

The woman behind the host stand had to be ninety if she was a day. She had a puff of gravity-defying white hair that contrasted with her all-black ensemble of bike shorts and an Angelo’s T-shirt. She wore glasses around her neck on a string of pearls that dangled over a name tag that read Jessie . Her face was pinched into a frown of disapproval.

I was immediately transported back to the fourth grade, when my elementary school art teacher, Mrs. Crossinger, caught me passing a note from Debra Flower to Jacinta MacNamara. I had to spend the rest of class standing on a taped-off square on the floor while everyone else glued cotton balls to their snowman worksheets.

“Two for dinner, please,” Zoey said, slipping into protective-but-friendly-agent-who-must-feed-her-client mode.

With a harrumph that I personally felt was undeserved, our hostess pursed her frosty pink lips and then took her sweet time producing a pair of laminated menus and utensils rolled in paper napkins. My stomach growled audibly just as the door opened and closed behind us.

I felt a tingle go up my spine and knew it was Handsome Cam and the equally gorgeous stranger. Grouchy Jessie shifted gears into flirtatious grandma mode. Her lipstick spread into a thin, bright smile.

“Well, if it isn’t the Bishop brothers,” she said, sending them a wink over her half-moon glasses.

That explained the extraordinary sexiness of Cam’s companion. It was in the genes.

“Evenin’, Jessie,” Cam said, pointedly ignoring us.

The brother nodded a greeting and hooked his thumb toward the bar.

“Go on through,” Jessie said, finally marking an X over a booth on her seating chart.

The brother shot us another quiet look, but Cam was already heading toward a pair of empty barstools.

“Follow me,” Jessie barked at us.

“Was it something we said?” Zoey whispered as Jessie shuffled along ahead of us, checking in with diners as we went. About half the tables were occupied. All of our fellow diners aimed not-very-friendly looks in our direction.

Jessie thumped the menus down on the very last table in the corner and—slowly—stalked away.

“Thank you. Nice meeting you,” I called after her.

I spied Cam and his unnamed brother at the bar. They already had beers sitting in front of them.

“She seems niiice,” Zoey said as we pounced on the menus.

“Is it just me or is it kind of stink eye-y in here?” I asked, glancing up from the pizza selection.

“Definitely not just you. But don’t worry, I have pepper spray in my purse,” she assured me.

“I thought small towns were supposed to be friendly.”

She shrugged. “Maybe they heard about our grand entrance today. Or maybe you bought the house out from under some deserving townsperson who had been saving for years for a down payment.”

“I think you’ve been spending too much time with authors,” I observed.

“You and me both,” she said pointedly.

I smacked her playfully on the head with my menu.

“Here comes Hangry Hazel,” she teased. “Split a pizza and a salad?”

“Perfect.”

“So,” she said, sliding her menu to the edge of the table. “What’s the inspiration meter at after half a day of chaos in your new hometown?”

I stacked my menu on top of hers and hazarded a glance at the bar. Cam’s eyes locked with mine briefly before looking away again. “Things are definitely percolating.”

She sagged dramatically against the booth cushion. “Thank God, because if this hellish day didn’t start those creative wheels turning in your beautiful head, I’d be giving up, hitchhiking back to the city, and looking for a job as a personal shopper.”

“I have a good feeling about this place,” I said, accidentally making eye contact with the family of four at the table across the aisle. They returned my neighborly smile with a dead-eyed “you’re not welcome here” stare. My good feeling was on shaky ground.

“At least one of us does. This is just like that time I was dating that guy who wore an Eagles jersey to the Giants home game. I’m gonna say something.”

I reached across the table and grabbed her arm. “Absolutely not,” I hissed. “This isn’t Manhattan. You can’t just call someone out and never have to see them again.”

“Well, you can’t spend the rest of your life in a town hiding from people with fucking attitude problems ,” Zoey said, raising her voice on the last two words.

“Should I come back, ladies?” Our server was a tall teen with bronze skin, a mop of curly black hair, and not one but two dimples, which were on display as he grinned down at us.

I was so relieved to see a friendly face that I released Zoey’s arm and grabbed his.

“I’m sorry for all my sins since entering town limits. Please don’t leave us without taking our order or we’ll die of starvation and then the dining room will become a crime scene with our bodies outlined in tape, which will be really hard to do since we’ll die sitting up. Our tragic deaths will make for a shitty night for you since we’ll be too dead to tip,” I pleaded.

Both dimples deepened.

“Sorry for my friend’s extensive word vomit and my f-bomb. We’re delirious with hunger,” Zoey explained.

“My uncles made sure shit was my first word just to make my mom mad. But enough small talk. I don’t want you two wasting away before I take your order and bring you breadsticks.”

“Breadsticks,” I repeated in a hallowed whisper.

Zoey gave him our dinner order. Conscious of the fact that I still smelled like a case of cabernet, I stuck with a Pepsi.

“I’ll put a rush on this and be back with your drinks and breadsticks. I’m Wesley, by the way.”

“Thank you, Wesley,” Zoey said with a flirtatious finger wave.

The parents at the table across from us looked like they wanted to squirt their ketchup bottle in our direction.

“Don’t flirt with teenagers,” I hissed after he hustled off. I wasn’t sure I could get wine stains out, let alone ketchup.

“I’m not flirting. I’m appreciating his adorableness.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Well, I suppose it’s all on the same continuum. Harmless appreciation of adorableness on one end and ‘bet you can get me naked in the next thirty seconds’ on the other end.” Zoey looked at me and snorted. “You’re trying to figure out if you can work that into a book.”

“Maybe my heroine needs a friend with a robust sex life.”

She groaned. “Maybe your real-life best friend needs a robust sex life.”

A shadow fell across our table. I looked up to find a broad-shouldered white woman with a snub nose and tightly permed blond curls glaring down at us. Her muscular arms were crossed over her chest.

“You two make me sick,” she spat out.

I shrank back against the booth cushion as every eyeball in the restaurant turned in our direction. This was not how I’d pictured my first encounter with my new neighbors.

“Care to be more specific?” Zoey asked with feigned sweetness.

“Let’s start with murdering a bald eagle in cold blood,” the woman said.

There were a few grunts of agreement from neighboring tables.

“Maybe vehicular birdslaughter isn’t a crime where you come from, New York, but in Story Lake, it is,” she plowed on.

Zoey opened her mouth to speak, and judging from the fire in her eyes, whatever was about to come out had the potential to do permanent damage.

“I think there’s been a misunderstanding,” I said quickly. “Your eagle hit me in the head. With a fish. It was actually kind of funny.”

“There’s nothing funny about animal cruelty,” our accuser said primly. “Especially not to bald eagles. They used to be endangered, and we won’t stand for you re-endangering them on our watch.”

There were nods of agreement from the other diners that seemed to fuel our permed accuser.

Zoey climbed out of the booth and got to her feet, putting herself between me and the woman. “Thank you so much for your feedback. Now if you’ll excuse us, we’re just trying to enjoy our dinner.”

“Murderers don’t get to enjoy their dinner,” the woman snapped, leaning down into Zoey’s face.

“Wait a minute,” I said, peeling off the top layer of thigh skin on the vinyl as I frantically scooted out of the booth. “You don’t really think we killed your eagle, do you? He was fine when we left. He flew away! He dropped the fish head!”

“That’s not what I heard,” the woman snarled. She loomed into my personal space like a disapproving gargoyle.

“I’d back the hell up if I were you,” Zoey warned her.

“Or what?”

The entire restaurant crackled with electric anticipation. I hoped I wasn’t about to get punched in the face.

“Maybe we should let the authorities handle this, Emilie?”

This suggestion came from a bear of a man. He towered above all of us. His face was covered in a bushy beard that came to a point over his barrel chest. He was wearing a Story Lake Ultimate Bingo Champion T-shirt that strained at the seams.

“Shut up, Amos,” Emilie snarled.

“Yes, dear,” he said glumly.

“I’ve got your…oh, shit—” Wesley said, returning with our drinks and a basket of breadsticks that smelled like heaven.

“Their kind doesn’t deserve breadsticks,” Emilie said, taking the basket and upending it onto the floor.

I gasped along with most of the rest of the crowd.

“Seriously, Emilie? Those were fresh from the oven,” Wesley complained.

“Now, that was uncalled for,” Zoey said, taking a menacing step toward Emilie the Enemy. I was feeling panicky and hungry. I didn’t know what to do. When it came to confrontations, I was better at the kind that happened on the page.

A tall white guy with no butt to hold up his cargo pants wiggled his way through the crowd wielding an iPad. “Press coming through! Make way for the First Amendment, people.” He shoved the iPad in my face. “Garland Russell, award-winning journalist for the Neighborly app. I’d love a quote from you, Ms. Hart.”

“What’s the Neighborly app?” I asked.

“A quote about what?” Zoey demanded at the same time.

“About the tragic death of our beloved town mascot, Goose, the majestic bald eagle, at your hands,” he said, blinding me with the iPad camera’s flash.

“Goose isn’t dead!” I insisted, blinking rapidly. Was I speaking a different language? Was my voice pitched too high for small-town citizens to hear me?

“You backed over him with a moving van. ’Course he’s dead,” a bald guy in a golf shirt called.

A discontented rumble rolled through the restaurant. I was starting to feel dizzy. It might have been the hunger, but I had a feeling it was mostly the unanimous rejection of my newly adopted town and the fear that I’d made a huge mistake.

“I have it on good authority that she crushed him to death when she drove an eighteen-wheeler into the sign,” said a man with a decent amount of pizza cheese in his beard from a table across the room.

“I didn’t do any of that,” I insisted as Garland, the award-winning journalist, practically shoved his iPad camera lens up my nose. The flash went off several more times in rapid succession.

“Who uses a flash?” I demanded, covering my eyes.

“Ms. Hart is unavailable for comment,” Zoey said crisply.

“She’s standing right there,” Emilie shouted. “Least she can do is answer for her crimes.”

“Listen, lady, you’re gonna want to get out of my face,” Zoey warned.

“Can we get another order of breadsticks over here?” Wesley called.

“For Chrissake, everybody calm the hell down.” Cam pushed his way to our table, irritation written all over his gorgeous face. His brother followed and subtly stepped between Zoey and Emilie.

I looked up at Cam. “Help?” I pleaded.

On a growl, Cam turned his back on me and addressed the crowd, giving me an eye-level view of his very nice denim-clad ass. “The damn bird is fine, people.”

A woman in a beige romper and a slicked-back ponytail snorted. “That’s not what I heard. I heard her fancy helicopter rotors chopped poor old Goose to bits when she flew in from the city.”

“Yeah? And last week, when Loribelle was getting her septic system pumped, someone started a rumor that she was building an underground bunker,” Cam said.

“Just because that wasn’t true don’t mean this isn’t,” Pizza Beard said.

Cam took a breath. “Goose is fine. I saw it happen. He scared the hell out of these two, ate his fucking fish, then flew away.”

The permed justice warrior scoffed. “And we’re just supposed to believe you? I hereby call for an emergency town meeting Wednesday night to settle the matter.”

“I second,” her husband said quickly.

“Seriously, Emilie? You know it’s bingo night,” Cam said.

Cam’s brother rubbed a hand over his mouth but said nothing.

“Then I guess we’ll just have to reschedule it,” she said, nose in the air.

There was a general grumbling from the crowd. Who knew bingo was so popular?

“Don’t blame me,” Emilie insisted. “Blame the eagle-murdering interloper.”

“But I didn’t do anything. I mean, I did drive into the sign, and I feel terrible about it.” The dirty looks I was getting increased tenfold.

“Wednesday night at seven. Justice for Goose,” Emilie said, pointing a squat finger in my face before dragging her husband away.

Garland raised his iPad for another picture, but Cam’s brother intervened. “Go sit down before I toss your journalistic integrity in the lake,” he said.

“You can’t silence the press,” Garland insisted.

“You’re not the press. You post bullshit gossip on a neighborhood website,” Cam said.

“What just happened?” I asked, dumbfounded.

“I think we narrowly avoided some kind of mob,” Zoey observed.

“Congratulations, councilwoman. You just got invited to your first town meeting,” Cam said dryly.

Wesley reappeared through the dwindling crowd with a new basket of breadsticks and a kid who looked exactly like him but with longer, curlier hair and a cook’s uniform. “Hey, Uncle Cam. Uncle Levi,” Wesley and the lookalike said in unison.

“Is everyone here related?” Zoey wondered.

“Hey,” Cam greeted the boys.

“Aww, man. Did I miss the fight?” the lookalike asked.

Levi reached out and ruffled his curls. “Why? You looking to throw some punches, Har?”

The boy’s grin was identical to Wesley’s. If I hadn’t been so traumatized I would have been busy pondering the trail of broken hearts the two boys and their uncles had left all over town.

“This is my twin, Harrison,” Wesley said in an aside to me and Zoey.

“Nice to meet you,” I said weakly, still processing the turmoil of the last five minutes.

Cam turned back to me. “I’m gonna suggest you get your food to go.”