Chapter 1 #2
She studied him surreptitiously. He was younger than she remembered. No more than thirty, if she had to guess. Brown hair that needed a trim, a quiet, angular face, and gray eyes that seemed to be somewhere far away.
Those eyes were currently fixed on a textbook thick enough to stop a door. The table around him was chaos: a jumble of textbooks, notebooks, a laptop, and the remains of a BLT. He was reading with the total absorption of a person who’d forgotten that other humans existed.
She picked up her coffee and walked over. “Excuse me. Grayson?”
He looked up. His eyes refocused with the slight delay of someone surfacing from deep water. “Bonnie, right?”
She nodded.
“Most folks call me Gray.” He added awkwardly, “Like my eyes. Easy to remember.”
She bit back a smile at how geeky that sounded and said smoothly, “We met at Jenna's Thanksgiving dinner.” She glanced around furtively and added under her breath for his ears alone, “And we've never spoken on the phone.”
His eyes lit with understanding. The main engine of the Cobbler Cove gossip network was seated only a few feet away. He nodded slightly and flashed her a smile.
She inhaled a little more sharply than necessary. He went from good-looking in a nerdy-cute way to drop dead gorgeous in a totally hot way when he smiled. His eyes were extraordinary, the color of old silver with tiny flecks of black sprinkled among the silver highlights.
She said, “I overheard Ruth saying something about something being wrong with some cows. Those wouldn't be Jenna's cows, would they?” She kept her voice light, but Jenna was one of her closest friends, a WoWS sister.
“Have a seat,” he said politely, gesturing toward the other side of the booth.
She slid onto the red vinyl bench seat.
His gaze focused on her with attention that made her feel like the only person in the room as he explained the situation with Jenna’s cows and what he was doing about it.
“I appreciate you looking out for her,” Bonnie said sincerely.
“She doesn't deserve a curve ball like this.” He added under his breath, “And thank you for pulling the building permit. It was useful.”
His eyes were steady on hers, conveying what he dared not say out loud. Not with all the shamelessly wagging ears nearby. Don't ask why. Not here.
Which was fine with her. She wasn't ready for that conversation. He'd had her pull the building permit for the barn her husband had died in when it burned to the ground with eight firefighters and forty horses trapped inside.
“If you need anything else from the municipal files, let me know.”
“Actually—” He hesitated. “The building permit application only had rough sketches attached to it. Do you know if the actual blueprints that should have been submitted with the application are on file somewhere?”
“Those get stored separately because of their size. But yes, the city keeps blueprints of every building in town.” She took a sip of coffee. “I can pull that particular set for you if you'd like.”
“I'd appreciate that.”
She looked out the window for the school bus. Out of the corner of her eye, she caught Walter looking away from her and down at his cards hastily.
Nosy old coot.
Mentally, she winced. Walter was no dummy. He would put two and two together and figure out the guy sitting with piles of fire science books was poking into the Shoemacher fire.
Shoot. She needed to throw Walter off the scent of a good gossip scoop and fast. “So, Grayson,” she said cheerfully and loudly, “how's your class project on permitting for houses going?”
Gray blinked.
She counted in her head. One potato. Two potato.
Comprehension dawned in his eyes. “Pretty boring, actually. Municipal regulations make for dry reading. It helped me to see some real permits and what the regulations look like in practice.”
“When you ace your class, you owe me a cup of coffee,” she replied.
“If I ace that class, I'll even throw in a stale donut for you.”
“Hey now!” Rose called out from behind the counter. “We don't serve stale donuts in this establishment.”
Bonnie laughed. “That's because your customers gobble them up so fast, they don't have time to get stale.”
So. Grayson wanted the Shoemacher barn blueprints, did he?
Given that he was Cooper Lawton's brother, and Cooper, an attorney, had been quietly investigating the Shoemacher fire for Sheriff Wheeler, she knew one thing.
Whatever Grayson was looking for in those blueprints, it wasn't just casual curiosity.
She didn't want to think about what he might be looking for.
The bus pulled up just then, derailing her speculation. The diner’s door banged open and her two kids tumbled in, shedding backpacks and coats and noise as they entered.
“Mom!” Noah raced across the diner, a seven-year-old with his mother's blond hair and boundless energy that suggested he was powered by a small nuclear reactor. He skidded to a stop at the booth and his eyes went wide. “Are those books about fire?”
“Noah—” Bonnie started.
But her irrepressible child had already picked up the nearest textbook and was staring at the cover, which had a dramatic photograph of a firefighter silhouetted against a wall of flame.
“This is so cool.” He looked up at Gray with unfiltered directness. “Are you a firefighter?”
“Not yet,” Gray said. “I'm studying to be one.”
Bonnie started. He wanted to be a firefighter? Whatever for? Doing that got good people killed.
Noah demanded, “Can fires burn underwater? What's the hottest fire in the world? Is lava a fire?”
Gray leaned forward with the unconscious eagerness of a person about to share something they genuinely loved. His mouth opened, but then he caught himself. Glanced at Bonnie questioningly.
She gave him a small nod of go ahead, he'll love it, and Gray turned back to Noah.
“Lava isn't technically fire,” he said. “Fire requires three things: fuel, oxygen, and heat. Lava is just very hot rock that gives off a lot of heat. It’s not a fuel source. But it's about two thousand degrees Fahrenheit, which is hotter than most structural fires.”
“Whoa.” Noah slid into the booth beside Gray, uninvited, as if he'd been sitting next to this stranger his whole life. “What's the hottest fire there is?”
“The sun is the hottest thing in our solar system. But if we're talking about fires on Earth, that would be burning dicyanoacetylene in ozone. Burns around six thousand degrees, which is pretty close to the temperature of the sun's surface and hot enough to cut through steel like butter.”
Cassidy appeared beside Bonnie, dropped her backpack on the floor with a thud, and looked at the textbook Noah had commandeered.
She was nine years old with light brown hair, her mother's hazel eyes, and the confident bearing of a kid who knew how to take charge of everyone and everything around her.
Her gaze moved from the textbooks to the man, and Bonnie could practically see her daughter filing information on him. Then Cassidy slid into the booth next to her mother.
“I'm Cassidy,” she said. “I’m sorry Noah barged in on your reading. He has no manners.”
“I have great manners,” Noah declared indignantly.
“You sat down next to a stranger without asking.”
“He never said it wasn’t okay. That counts.”
Cassidy rolled her eyes at her brother and opened her mouth with the clear intent to order her brother out of Gray’s booth.
Grayson cut in, “Hi, Cassidy. I'm Grayson. Pleased to meet you. And it’s fine if Noah sits here and looks at my books.”
“What's dicyan-cetylene?” she asked.
“Di-cyano-acetylene—” He pronounced it slowly and clearly, “is a compound made of carbon and nitrogen. Extremely unstable stuff.”
At the pinochle tables, the next round of play commenced. But there was no table talk. Bonnie realized with no small dismay that the group's attention was firmly on her and Grayson . . . and now her kids.
As if on cue, Ruth said, just loud enough for Bonnie to hear, “The youngest Lawton boy's sitting with Bonnie Watson and her kids.”
Bonnie mentally snorted. The handsome, clearly intelligent man sitting across from her was hardly a boy.
Walter retorted, sounding unimpressed, “People sit in booths, Ruth. That's what booths are for.”
Ruth declared, “Bonnie's got pink in her cheeks.”
Walter replied a little more sharply, “It's cold outside. Everyone's got pink in their cheeks.”
God bless Walter. Even if he was still a nosy old coot.
Ruth harrumphed. “There’s more to it than that. Mark my words, Walter.”
“You say that every week.”
“And I'm right every week.”
“She's right, you know,” Cassidy said conversationally, helping herself to the last bite of Bonnie's cinnamon roll.
Bonnie stared at her daughter. “Excuse me?” Was it that obvious she thought Gray was attractive?
“About your cheeks. You always get pink cheeks when it’s cold out. You forget to wear a scarf and get wind burn on your face.” Cassidy licked the frosting off her finger with complete innocence. “May I have a hot chocolate?”
“Me, too!” Noah shouted.
“Indoor voice, Noah,” she retorted. “And yes, you may both have a cup of hot chocolate while you do your homework. But promise me you won’t bother Mr. Lawton any more. He is obviously busy.”
“I’m doing homework, too,” Gray volunteered.
“Did you have hot chocolate?” Noah asked.
“I was drinking coffee. But now that you mention it, that sounds tasty. Rose, could we have hot chocolates for the whole table?”
“Thanks, but count me out,” Bonnie replied, standing up. “I need to get back to the office. Cassidy, Noah—stay here and do your homework. Rose said she'd keep an eye on you while I finish up some work at the office.”
“May I look at the fire books?” Noah asked Gray.
Gray looked at Bonnie.
Honestly, the last thing she wanted Noah to become fascinated by was the profession that killed his father. But she also hated to stifle Noah’s curiosity. She wavered for half a second, then said reluctantly to Gray, “If it’s okay with you, it’s okay with me.”
“I don't mind,” Gray said easily.
She left the diner, and the cold March air bit into her exposed skin with tiny, sharp teeth.
As she walked down the block to the mayor's office, the sun came out from behind a cloud.
It flooded Main Street with blindingly bright light that reflected off the snow and made it look as if God had tossed handfuls of diamonds across it.
Something moved inside her, slowly, as if it had been hibernating for a long time and was just starting to wake.
She couldn't remember the last time she'd seen her kids interact with a man who wasn't their grandfather or a pastor.
There'd been a . . . hunger . . . in her kids' eyes that she didn't know what to do with.
Her steps away from the silver-eyed cowboy in the diner sped up a little.
There was definitely not hunger to spend time with a man under the age of seventy stirring in her own heart, too.