Chapter 3 #2
He wasn’t about to ask her to come back to the fire station to retrieve the completed paperwork. And mailing back the forms seemed too impersonal, poor repayment for all her trouble.
At least, that was what he told himself. But in his heart of hearts, he knew he loved how she lit up when she smiled and how her laughter made him want to make her laugh more often
He arrived at Rose's Diner promptly at eleven-twenty, ordered his usual coffee, and opened his thermal dynamics textbook on the table. He was not watching the door. He was absolutely not watching the door.
By eleven fifty-five and still no sign of Bonnie, he finally accepted that he was watching the door, and that Bonnie wasn't going to come through it today.
He flagged down Rose on her next pass. “Does Bonnie usually come in for lunch on Thursdays?”
“Most days, yes. But when the mayor doesn’t come in to work and she has to do his job too, she tends to skip lunch.” Rose topped off his coffee with unhurried efficiency. “My guess is Lucas stayed home today and she’s swamped at the office.”
“Ah.” Gray looked up at her. “Could you pack two lunches to go?”
Rose smiled warmly at him. “Turkey club or the soup and sandwich special?”
“What does Bonnie usually get?”
“Turkey club. Extra pickles.”
“Two of those, then.”
The municipal building's second-floor hallway was quiet when Gray knocked on the open office door at noon. Bonnie was at her desk. A half-eaten granola bar languished on top of its wrapper, forgotten, by her elbow. She looked up at the sound of his knuckles on wood.
“Oh.” She blinked. “Hi.”
“Hi.” He held up the paper bag. “Rose sent lunch.”
She looked at the bag. Looked at him. “Rose sent it?”
He shrugged modestly. “It might have been my idea.”
He set the bag on the corner of her desk and pulled out the manila envelope. “I also brought the completed facility certification forms.”
She took the envelope with the slightly dazed expression of a person recalibrating. “You didn't have to bring those here. I could’ve picked them up.”
“You brought them to me. It only seemed fair for me to bring them back.” He nodded at the bag. “There are extra pickles on your turkey club.”
“Rose told you about the pickles?”
“She did.” He glanced at the granola bar. “When did you last eat a real meal?”
“That's what Cassidy keeps asking me.”
“Cassidy is smart young lady.” He pulled one of the visitor chairs over to her desk and sat down. “I’m sitting here and watching you eat your lunch so I can tell your daughter you ate a proper meal.”
“I’m busy right now,” she tried.
“I have nowhere to be this afternoon,” he replied mildly. “I’ll sit here until you’re ready to eat.”
Amusement coursed through him as she scowled at him. She really didn’t like to lose. He would bet she was quite the cutthroat when she played Monopoly.
She glared at him for a moment more before huffing in surrender. She reached into the bag and pulled out a sandwich. “You’re aware,” she said, “that Ruth is going to hear about this within the hour?”
“The diner staff has been remarkably discreet so far,” he replied.
“Rose has been remarkably discreet. Irma has the self-control of a golden retriever who just spotted a tennis ball.” Bonnie took a bite of her sandwich and closed her eyes briefly. “Oh, that's good. I forgot how hungry I was.”
“Better than a granola bar?”
She wagged her finger at him. “Don't you start with me. Cassidy already has that nagging base covered.”
He unwrapped his own sandwich and took a bite.
“I have a question,“ Bonnie said.
“Sure.”
“You're a geneticist and a really smart guy. Surely, you could have a fancy career in that field. Why the fire science degree? Why reopen the fire station?”
“I was curious. I got interested in the Shoemacher fire,” he said carefully.
“The science of it. I wanted to understand how it spread, why it spread the way it did. One question led to another, and the next thing I knew I was enrolled in a degree program.” He paused.
“The station was a separate thing. Getting it up and running again. That’s just practical.
This town, this whole side of the lake, needs one.
She was quiet for a moment, turning the water bottle Rose had packed in the lunch in her hands. “Most people don't respond to intellectual curiosity by enrolling in a degree program.”
“I’m a bit of an academic nerd at heart.”
She laughed—a short, surprised sound. “A cowboy nerd? You’re the first one of those I’ve ever run across.”
He felt his face heating up a little.
“Have you always been an avid student?” she asked.
“Yes. And that’s a very nice way of calling me a geek.”
“Being a geek isn’t bad,” she said quickly. “Geeks made the world go round. They invent new things and make life better for the rest of us. I’m all for geekdom.”
He risked a glance at her. The look in her eyes was earnest. Sincere. She wasn’t making fun of him.
“My brothers always called me the family geek. They said I did enough reading for all three of us.”
“You’re the youngest, right?”
“Correct. Cooper’s the oldest and Tucker’s the middle child.”
“I know Cooper rode bulls for a little while on the rodeo circuit, and Tucker was a paramedic for the rodeo. What did you do on the rodeo circuit?”
“I rode saddle broncs. How did you know I traveled with my brothers on the rodeo circuit?
She grinned. “Small town. Everyone knows everything.”
They ate their bags of potato chips in companionable, if crunchy, silence.
As Gray reached into the sacks to pull out slices of apple pie for each of them, she tilted her head. “What's the most useless fact you know? From all that reading you do.”
He didn't have to think about that one. He answered immediately, “If you remove all the empty space from the atoms in the human body, every person on Earth could fit inside a sugar cube.”
“Each person gets their own cube, of all of us in a single cube.”
“All eight billion of us. In one sugar cube.”
Bonnie stared at him. “That cannot be true.”
“It is.”
“That's horrifying.”
“Most people find it more wondrous than horrifying.”
She shuddered theatrically. “I'm going to be thinking about that at two in the morning tonight when I can’t go to sleep.”
“Sorry.”
“No you're not.”
“Nope,” he agreed, “I’m not.” He flashed her a slow, sexy smile that said he was glad she would be thinking about him alone in the dark tonight. Even if it was because he’d shared a gross science fact with her.
She looked down at the slice of pie quickly, startled by his brief flirtation. It was her fault, of course. She was the one who’d brought up thinking about his dumb fact in the middle of the night.
Outside, a pick-up truck without an obvious muffler rumbled down Main Street. Crud. That was Irma’s truck. She was nearly as bad a gossip as Ruth. The truck noise faded, but in about a minute the same loud truck was back, passing by the Municipal building again.
She groaned.
“What?” Gray asked quickly. “Is something wrong with your pie? Take my piece.”
“No, no. The pie’s fine. I just hear Irma circling the block in her truck.”
Gray frowned, obviously not understanding why that was a problem.
“Irma is Ruth Sanger’s gossipmonger minion in training. She has undoubtedly spotted your truck parked in front of this building and is now circling the block to time how long you’re in here with me so she can report back to her supreme leader.”
“Is that so?” A smile twitched at the corners of his mouth. “I’m tempted to stick around here and study for a few hours, then. Really give her something to gossip about.”
“Don’t you dare,” she exclaimed. “I have a reputation to consider!”
“People in this town love you. The way I hear it, you actually run Cobbler Cove while the mayor takes home a big paycheck for . . . Let’s see. How did Ruth Sanger put it? Drinking whiskey, smoking cigars, and slapping backs for a living.”
Bonnie clapped a hand over her mouth to stifle a snort of laughter. “That’s terrible. He actually does some work around here.”
“When he’s here,” Gray observed dryly.
“His heart attack was pretty serious. He’s still recovering.”
Gray pursed his lips skeptically but didn’t argue. The way he heard it from Tucker was Shoemacher’s heart disease was too advanced for the mayor to reverse without aggressively changing his lifestyle for the better. And fast.
But apparently, Shoemacher was still drinking hard, smoking his expensive cigars, eating rich foods, and flatly refusing to exercise.
Uh oh. He was starting to listen to the Cobbler Cove gossip network, himself. He took a bite of his apple pie, which was, as advertised, very good.
“The forms,” he said, nodding at the folder she'd set aside. “You don't have to come back to the station to drop off the next batch. I’ll pick them up.”
He met her gaze steadily, not making it into more than it was, a logistical courtesy, entirely reasonable, nothing to read anything into.
“That's kind of you to offer,” she said, after a moment.
He gathered the trash and stuffed it in the bag. “Thanks for the company.”
“Thanks for the sandwich.” She was already reaching for the facility certification envelope. “And the horrifying sugar cube fact.”
“Any time.” He paused for effect. “Just wait till I tell you about the 700 different microbes that live in your mouth.”
“What?” she squawked.
He grinned and headed for the door.
He was almost to the exit when she said, “I checked my schedule. For when I can visit the storage unit.”
He turned to look at her expectantly.
“Tuesday morning. Lucas has a doctor's appointment in Apple Pie Creek at nine AM. He’ll be gone all morning. I can get to the office late.” She paused. “Meet me at the storage company just past the fire station at eight-thirty?”
He studied her face. Her posture professional and composed, but her hands were moving restlessly across her desk, and her fair skin was suspiciously pink.
“I'll be there,” he said.
He made it down the stairs, through the building's front door, and halfway down the block before he realized he was smiling.