Story of My Life (Story Lake #1)

38. Plowy McFuck You

38

PLOWY MCFUCK YOU

CAMPBELL

IntrepidReporterGuy:

Story Lake’s most eligible bachelor Campbell Bishop shocks entire town with profession of love for newest resident, Hazel Hart. A winter wedding is anticipated by all.

Me: Guess we need to meet up.

Hazel: Why would we do that?

Me: We’re co-chairs. Gotta make sure this Summer Fest thing happens.

Hazel: That’s going to be difficult since I’m not speaking to you.

Me: Get over it. We have a town to save from a literal shitstorm. Meet me at the store tonight at 8.

Hazel: I’m not in the mood for some elaborate ruse for a date when I didn’t want to date you in the first place.

Me: I stocked up on Wild Cherry Pepsi and fresh notebooks. I even got one that says Be Curious and there’s a dumb cartoon cat on it.

I had just finished the drawer count when I heard the tap on the glass. Familiar brown eyes glared at me over the closed sign.

I’d known Hazel would show. If for no other reason than to yell at me for publicly broadcasting our private business. And for the notebooks.

I unlocked the door and held it open for her. “Evenin’, co-chair.”

“Don’t start with me,” she said, sweeping inside.

“Still pissed I see.”

She’d spent the entire morning literally locked—I’d checked. Twice—in her office. When I returned from the lunch run for subs, she was gone. My network of blabbermouth spies informed me that she’d met up with Zoey and a few other Lakers at the lodge to discuss the impending Labor Day disaster…I mean, festival.

She stormed right on up to the endcap display of solar lanterns and bug spray. “I don’t even know where to start. You know, Old Hazel would just sweep it all under the rug. Go along to get along and all that bullshit.”

“Old Hazel sounds great,” I quipped, leaning against the door and taking her in.

She spun around and leveled me with a cool glare. All that long hair was gathered up in a high ponytail that seemed to be enjoying the late-summer humidity. She wore a long skirt that flowed around her ankles and a form-fitting tank top that highlighted some of my favorite places to touch and taste.

While I was admiring her, she was looking at me like I was a piece of gum stuck to the bottom of her shoe.

Damn. Hazel Hart was beautiful when she was mad. Lucky for me, I seemed to have an uncanny knack for getting her there.

“Okay. That’s it! What game are you playing here, you infuriating man-child?” she demanded, interrupting my perusal of her.

“Thanks for agreeing to meet here tonight,” I said conversationally. “Had to close up shop tonight. We can head up to my place. You eat dinner yet?”

“Your place? Dinner? ”

I was glad Melvin wasn’t here because he would have been howling as Hazel’s voice went up seven octaves. My plan to keep her off-balance appeared to be working. “I live upstairs. I made food.” I pointed up.

“I didn’t come here to get lured into your bedroom or eat whatever week-old hot wings you call dinner while the entire town thinks we’re a real couple.”

“It was gonna be pulled pork, but I had to make a last-minute change to turkey burgers, salad, and tots.”

Hazel pretended to look disinterested, but her stomach growled loud and long. Victory was mine.

The door at my back tried to open.

“We’re closed,” I yelled. I had a tight window of time to move Hazel along with the whole getting over “me being an ass and embarrassing her in front of the entire town” thing, and I was not about to let a customer eat into those precious minutes.

“Come on, Cam! It’s me, Junior!” my uninvited guest called mournfully from the other side of the door.

“Go away, Junior,” I said, flipping the lock. Junior Wallpeter was a born talker. One of those people who ignored every pointed “welp, it’s getting late,” and instead of taking the hint and leaving, he’d just open up his phone and start a narrated slide show of fifty of the most recent pictures of his twin girls.

“Aww, come on, man. I just need baby formula and a pack of M&M’s. The big one. Tessa’ll kill me if I come home empty-handed.”

Hazel crossed her arms. “You aren’t really going to deny a man baby formula and M&M’s, are you?”

Swearing under my breath, I faced Junior through the glass. “Stay there.”

Junior cupped his hands to the door and peered in. “Oh, hey, Hazel! I’m not interrupting date night, am I?”

“No,” Hazel called.

“Yes,” I countered. I stormed into the baby-toiletries-battery aisle and snatched a big-ass canister of formula off the shelf. Then I hit up the register display and grabbed all three kinds of M&Ms we carried. I hustled back to the door, opened it, and threw the lot at Junior.

“You just saved my behind, that’s for sure. Tessa’s exhausted and the babies are fussy. Lemme just get my wallet. Oh, I’ve got the cutest dang video from dinner tonight. It was spaghetti?—”

I slammed the door in his face and locked it. “Let’s go,” I said to Hazel.

“Bye, Junior,” she called.

“See y’all later. I’ll stop by tomorrow and pay my tab. Maybe I’ll bring the girls by?—”

I snagged Hazel’s wrist and dragged her into the back.

“That was very nice and incredibly rude of you,” she observed as I towed her up the stairs to the second floor.

“I keep telling you, I’m a complicated man.”

“A complicated pain in the ass,” she muttered.

“I heard that.”

“I wanted you to.”

We arrived on the utilitarian second floor. The back half of the floor was storage for the store. The front half was a small apartment that I’d claimed as my temporary home after Laura kicked me out of her house post-accident when the close quarters put us at each other’s throats.

I opened the door to the apartment and gestured for Hazel to enter.

“Why can’t we do this someplace public?” she asked, stalling in the hallway.

A slow, satisfied grin spread across my face. “You’re nervous.”

“I am not!”

“You’re worried you can’t trust yourself around me. Admit it.”

“You’re the worst. I’m mad at you, in case you forgot. I wouldn’t get naked with you again if you were the last big-dicked man on the planet.”

“Then you’ve got nothing to worry about. We’re just two adults discussing town business,” I said, giving her a helpful push across the threshold.

I tried to see it from her point of view. Where Hazel was turning every inch of Heart House into a home, my apartment was basically a receptacle for laundry, food, and books.

It was a one-bedroom, one-bathroom bachelor pad that was borderline cliché. There were no personal mementos. The furniture was struggling-grad-student quality. The fridge held nothing but beer and take-out leftovers. And the TV was big enough to cause vertigo if you sat too close. My things from my last apartment were still in the storage unit that I hadn’t gotten around to emptying yet.

I’d managed a twenty-minute cleaning spree between jobs. The place wasn’t exactly sparkling, but the permeating scent of Pine-Sol was working its magic.

“Well,” she said, looking around the room.

There wasn’t much to see. The kitchen was the size of a cafeteria lunch table. There was a crappy four-seater dining set under the windows that looked out over Main Street. I used it to hold stacks of mail and packages. The living room consisted of an ugly green couch and an uglier brown chair. I’d put up bookshelves on both sides of the TV but left them unfinished.

The apartment, the open-ended stay, it had all been a temporary solution. But a year later, and I still felt like I was living in some kind of limbo. In fact, the only thing that stood out in my mind from that year was standing in my living space, judging it.

“It’s no Heart House,” I admitted.

“Oh. My. God.” Hazel clapped her hands to her face as my secret weapon stirred under her blanket in the makeshift pen I’d set up in the corner. “Is that?—”

“A piglet with a respiratory virus? Yep.”

“Why do you have a piglet with a respiratory virus in your living room?”

“My mother. Peaches has to be separated from the rest of the livestock until her expensive-ass pig cold medicine kicks in.”

On cue, Peaches sneezed.

“Oh, my goodness.” Hazel kneeled on the floor and cautiously stroked a finger over the pig’s head. “No offense. But why you? You don’t seem like the nurturing-a-baby-pig type.”

I scoffed and scooped up Peaches, blanket and all, holding her like a baby. “I’m fucking nurturing.”

Hazel raised an eyebrow.

“I am. Also, Mom stuck Gage with a golden retriever that failed her service dog certification, and Levi is bottle-feeding fucking baby rabbits.”

“Note to self, visit Levi as soon as possible,” she said.

Like hell she was. I handed her the pig in a blanket. “Here. Keep her entertained and I’ll get dinner started.”

“Hello, Peaches,” she whispered as she carefully cradled the piglet.

Feeling pretty damn good about my diabolical plan, I cued up some music and headed into the kitchen.

“Who’s the prettiest little pig in the whole wide world?” she crooned as she paced around the room. Peaches grunted her agreement. “Cam?”

“Yeah?” I looked up from the grill pan.

“Why are there candles on your table?” she demanded.

“In case the power goes out.”

“You’re playing Michael Bublé. You set the table with brand-new taper candles. And you just happened to have a baby pig in your apartment tonight. You’re trying to seduce me!”

“No yelling while you hold the pig.”

Very deliberately and with an aggressive amount of eye contact, Hazel placed Peaches on the floor.

“You’re not worming your way out of this without an explanation and an apology,” she announced.

“Explain? What am I supposed to explain? I thought we were gonna discuss what to charge vendors for their stands in the park. Or do you wanna talk about how to get the word out to people who don’t actually live here?” I was the picture of innocence.

“I want to talk about your outburst last night,” she said. She stalked into the kitchen and slapped a piece of notebook paper to my chest. Not just any paper. Our contract. “Where in this agreement does it state that we’ll take our nonrelationship status public in front of the entire town without even discussing it?”

“Listen, it’s a small piece of paper, and this situation is pretty nuanced. I’m not surprised we didn’t have room for everything.”

“I swear to Peaches and the rest of your parents’ farm animals, I am a heartbeat away from giving you a second black eye to add to your collection.”

“Let’s not fight in front of the pig.”

“Campbell Bishop, we agreed that we weren’t in a relationship. We agreed that we were going to have secret hot sex and nothing more.”

I shrugged and tossed the turkey burgers into the pan. “Yeah, well. I changed my mind.”

“You don’t get to change your mind in front of the entire town.”

Peaches trotted into the kitchen and stuck her snout in her food dish. “Look how cute the baby pig is when she eats,” I suggested.

“I will not be distracted by…aww! That’s literally the most adorable thing I’ve seen in my life.”

“Do me a favor and pour the wine, will you?” I said, moving to the sink to wash my hands.

Automatically she reached for the bottle then stopped. “Stop trying to distract me, Cam! And tell me what the hell you were thinking last night.”

“I was thinking I wanna be the one taking you out to the Fish Hook. I don’t want to have to hide naked in your closet again. And I’m tired of dressing like a fucking ninja just so I can sneak into your house at night. I damn near tore a hamstring going over the fence last time.”

She scoffed and reached for the wine. “Oh, please. Don’t be so dramatic.”

“I’m too old for this sneaking-around shit.”

“And I’m old enough to know when I don’t want to be in a relationship.”

I shook my head. “You’re overthinking this. Nothing has changed. We can still just be having sex. It’s just now everyone knows you won’t be having it with anyone but me.”

“I don’t know whether to be appalled or infuriated by that emotionally stunted logic.”

I flipped the burgers. “Cheddar or Swiss?”

“Both. Why didn’t you just talk to me like an adult?”

I put down the spatula and backed her against the counter. “Because you would have panicked and spent a week overanalyzing the whole thing before deciding that us having a few drinks in public and only having meaningless, no-strings sex with each other was too much of a commitment. Then I would have had to put in another week of being extra sexy around the jobsite until you threw caution to the wind and got back in bed with me.”

“How can someone be so astute and stupid at the same time?” she mused.

“I’m right, and you know it.”

“There were better ways you could have gone about it that wouldn’t cut me out of the decision-making process completely.”

“Maybe. But I’m used to looking at the fastest way from point A to point B. And if these burgers and that pig work their magic, we can get back to business as usual a hell of a lot faster.”

“I think I’m even more mad now than I was before,” she said. But her hands were on my chest, and they weren’t pushing me away. They were rubbing small circles over my pecs. “Out of professional curiosity, how were you planning on being extra sexy around the house?”

“Work on the yard outside your office shirtless while taking breaks to dump water over my head.”

“That’s not bad.”

“Then I was going to come up with a ploy to use your shower.”

“What kind of ploy?”

“I was leaning toward spilling some kind of dangerous chemical on my skin and then letting you see me in a towel.”

“Also not bad.”

I leaned into her, wrapping her ponytail around my fist and tugging until she looked up at me. “Hazel.”

“Yes, jackass?”

God, I wanted to kiss that smart mouth.

“I like what we’ve got going on here, and I don’t want to share.”

“I’m not some toy or dumb action figure.”

I gave her a wicked look. “I’m aware. I’m not locking you up. I’m locking you down. For exclusive fucking.”

She rolled her eyes. “There’s a pig in this room, and it’s not Peaches.”

“I’m just cutting through the bullshit. I’ll admit maybe I could have found a nicer way to do it, but I didn’t. So here we are. Are you in or do we have to call up Garland to announce our breakup?”

“You’re such a romantic.”

“Hey, I plied you with wine, candles, and a baby pig. Besides, you don’t want romance. You want to be fucked. By me. Repeatedly.”

I was losing blood to the brain as it headed south. I wanted her enough that it made me stupid. I needed her to be stupid with me. Lowering my head, I zeroed in on her mouth. But just before I could make contact, Hazel shoved a hand between our faces.

“I believe I was promised dinner and a fresh notebook.”

“So we’re good?” I mumbled against her hand.

“Don’t get cocky. It’s either burgers with you or Easy Mac at home, and I didn’t clean this morning’s oatmeal out of the microwave yet. I’ll see how impressive this dinner and your ideas for the festival are, and then I’ll make an educated decision.”

“You’re gonna regret that,” I warned.

Hazel snorted into her burger. “There’s a very long list of things in life I already regret. I doubt putting the town tagline up for a vote is going to be one of them. Democracy is never regrettable.”

Peaches was asleep in her pen again. And I’d managed to calm my hormones just enough to pretend to be interested in being fully clothed while eating and to coherently discuss business. The town welcome sign had landed on Bishop Brothers’ to-do list—we just had to wait for the official slogan.

I smirked. “You ever stop to wonder why our bald eagle is named Goose? Or why elementary school is spelled with a K ?”

“That wasn’t a typo?”

“You think we ordered and screwed white cast aluminum letters into a brick building accidentally? You’re in for a rude awakening. Every time we’ve put naming rights up to a public vote, it has ended in a shit show. You don’t even wanna know the plow truck’s name.”

Hazel waved her hand in front of her face. “Let’s back the truck up for a second. You’re saying you guys voted on a name for a bald eagle and you came up with Goose. On purpose? ”

“Team Goose campaigned pretty hard. Went door-to-door with donuts.”

She closed her eyes. “Cam? What’s the name of the plow truck?”

“Plowy McFuck You.”

Her mouth fell open. “It is not.”

“Oh, it is.”

She put her head in her hands. “But Darius already let me send the email with the link to the poll. Why wouldn’t he warn me?”

“Because the kid is optimistic as a golden retriever with a pushover parent and a treat jar. I’m sure it’s fine. As long as you didn’t leave the option for voters to add their own suggestions.”

“There was a way to turn that off?” she whispered and then dropped her head to the table.

“Baby.” I reached across and squeezed her shoulder. “It’s fine. And if it isn’t, we’ll just ‘forget’ to add the saying to the sign until after Summer Fest is over.”

She lifted her head slightly. “Really?”

“See? There are benefits to exclusively banging the guy who makes the sign.”

“I haven’t decided if we’re still banging or not.” She sniffed. “In fact, the only thing I know for sure is we’re definitely not having sex tonight. Not with an entire festival to plan and execute,” she said, gesturing toward her notes.