Chapter 7
CHAPTER SEVEN
Shane was a self-sufficient man who had lived on his own for years.
That did not mean he was above pilfering just a few snacks from his sister’s book club.
In his defense, they had offered.
And it would have been rude to refuse.
Besides, who didn’t love a fruit kebab? They were delicious and fun.
The gleam in the older lady’s eye had said that he would be paying for these snacks with stories about childhood Eleanor but that was frankly a delight for Shane too, so it was a price that he was more than willing to pay.
From his place in the kitchen, he watched happily as his sister smiled and laughed with her friends, the group of them animatedly discussing whatever book was the topic for this week’s meeting. Eleanor looked as light and carefree as he had ever seen her, and it warmed his heart to see it.
It was a wonderful life, this place that his sister had built for herself. He couldn’t think of a single person who deserved it more.
Not even if it did remind him of how his own supposedly wonderful life had soured, turned into something that made him feel so burned out that every day felt like a trial.
He didn’t want to take every example of his sister’s happiness and turn it into a “what about me” thought pattern in his mind, but his own problems seemed so consuming that it was really hard, at least for now, to see much of anything else.
He ate another bite of pineapple. No matter how tough things got, at least there was pineapple.
And books, he thought cheerfully when he saw the tall, dark-haired friend wave around her copy enthusiastically, apparently to punctuate a point.
Speaking of that, where had his book gone to?
After deciding that the volume that he had snagged from Eleanor’s bookstore wasn’t quite for him, Shane had borrowed his sister’s library card to try out a few things before committing to anything.
Eleanor had assured him that he could borrow and try whatever he pleased, but he hadn’t wanted to risk creasing the spines of a copy Eleanor could later sell.
So he’d headed to the Magnolia Shores library, which he’d found to be surprisingly well-stocked for such a small town.
He’d grabbed half a dozen options to check out.
And then, he realized, he’d promptly left them in his sister’s car, which she had lent him for the day while she worked at the store.
He grabbed the keyring off the kitchen counter and headed back outside, trying not to shiver. He might have been living in California for a while, but it was only October, darn it! And he was from Indiana!
He shivered all the way to the car, grabbed his books, and headed back toward the house, only to pause when he saw that the blonde woman, the one he had startled, was still sitting in the driveway, even though she had left the house at least ten minutes prior.
Concerned, he headed in the direction of her car.
As soon as he knocked lightly on the window though, he worried that he’d made a mistake. The woman jolted, her eyes wide and her face white as she wheeled to look at Shane.
Her eyes wide and red, he realized uneasily.
“Hey, I’m sorry,” he said when she rolled down her window. “I didn’t mean to…”
He trailed off, making an already awkward situation worse.
The woman let out a watery laugh. “No, I’m sorry,” she said. “Sitting here, alone, in the dark? It’s objectively weird behavior.” Another damp chuckle. “Do you ever just have something happen that tips you right over the edge?”
Given that Shane had basically run away from his life to hide in his big sister’s house because his job was stressing him out too much… Yeah, he understood that.
“Totally,” he said. “I feel like it’s not even the big thing that gets me either. It’s the small one that seems determined to make me feel like a dope for being so upset.”
“Yes,” she said emphatically. Shane was relieved to see that no new tears seemed to be appearing. She waved in the direction of her steering wheel. “This time, it was that my car wouldn’t start.”
His sympathetic wince was not at all feigned. There was something about car troubles that just felt so unbearable.
“The worst,” he said in commiseration. “And you didn’t want to come inside to ask for help? Nope, sorry, that was a dumb question,” he added when the woman’s face immediately screwed up in distaste. “Want me to see if I can give you a jump?”
Her shoulders slumped in relief. “Really, would you?”
“Yeah, of course,” he said, feeling his own sense of marked relief that he had finally managed to say something that helped. “Let me just pull the car around and you pop the hood.”
He hurried back to Eleanor’s car, which he knew had a set of jumper cables in the trunk. There was no way that Ellie had put them there herself, so Shane had to assume that this was another sign of how good this Garrett fellow was for her.
When Shane finally met the guy, he was going to shake his hand.
Shane pulled the car up next to the blonde woman’s sensible little sedan, realizing, only in that moment, that he didn’t even know her name. He grabbed the cables and hurried over to where she stood by the open hood of her car.
“Hey, sorry,” he said, shifting the bundle to one arm so he could stick out a hand. “I didn’t even introduce myself. I’m Shane Ridley. Eleanor’s brother.”
“Oh, right, yes. I’m Winnie, Winnie Burnett,” she said, slipping her slender fingers into his. She was pretty, he noticed with a little jolt. How long had it been since he had taken the time to notice a pretty woman?
Even if it didn’t go any further than noticing… it felt nice.
And obviously, he amended hastily, it wouldn’t go any further. It couldn’t. He wasn’t staying in town.
But, man. It had been so long since he’d even thought about finding someone attractive and all the possible things that could spin out from there. Romance. Partnership. Even, maybe, someday a family.
He was thirty-eight. He wasn’t exactly in the first bloom of youth. Most of his friends from high school and college had spouses and kids by now. His sister had a kid in college for goodness’ sake, and she wasn’t that much older than he was.
But for so many years, work had been his whole world, so he hadn’t been on so much as a single date in… goodness, it must have been at least a year now.
Winnie fidgeted, and Shane worried that he’d been gaping at her while he went down this little introspective avenue.
But it turned out that she was thinking of something else entirely.
“Does that mean that Eleanor has… said things about me?” she asked, cringing in a way that suggested that whatever stories he had supposedly heard, they weren’t good.
“Um, I don’t… oh, wait! You’re the newest friend, right? The historian?”
Something that looked like hope flickered in her expression before she schooled her expression.
“That’s really nice of her,” Winnie said with a sigh. “I was… not the nicest about town regulations at the beginning. I’m really lucky that she decided to look past all that.”
Now that she mentioned it, this did cause a tiny flicker of familiarity deep in the recesses of Shane’s brain, but he was pretty sure that saying so wouldn’t help matters.
“Ellie isn’t a grudge holder,” he reassured Winnie truthfully. “Trust me. I should know. Anything you did to Eleanor, I promise that I have pestered her a thousand times harder over the years, and she still likes me enough to let me stay in her house.”
Winnie gave him a skeptical sidelong glance, crossing her arms. It was a little snarky and a lot adorable.
“You’re her brother,” she pointed out dryly. “I feel like that’s different.”
He tsked. “Yeah, well, you didn’t see what I did to her Barbie when I decided that my toy dinosaurs needed a damsel to rescue.”
This comment earned him a flicker of a smile. “Do dinosaurs make a habit of rescuing damsels?”
“Hey, you’re the historian, not me,” he said with a chuckle. “I cannot be blamed for any inaccuracies. Anyway, my point is that Eleanor is cool. I don’t think she’s holding onto the past, not if you’re friends now.”
Winnie’s doubt was apparent on her face even before he heard her mutter, “Yeah… maybe.”
Shane didn’t push. He barely knew this woman, and it seemed like she needed some help, not somebody poking at her.
“Anyway,” he said brightly. “Let’s jump the engine?”
For a few minutes, they worked together to attach the cables appropriately, then to try to jump Winnie’s car. The engine gave a brief, promising rumble…
And then it made an extremely unpromising noise and died.
Shane crossed to Winnie’s driver’s side window. She was looking extraordinarily disheartened.
“I think you probably need a new battery,” he said. “I’m not an expert, but my car has been through something similar before.”
“I think you’re right,” she said, sounding as though she was definitely fighting tears again. “And I know that in the morning, it will all feel fine. But right now it feels super… not fine.”
Shane knew what it looked like and what it felt like when a person was at the end of their rope. He was pretty sure that Winnie was rapidly approaching that point.
“Hey,” he said, making his voice gentle. “Let me give you a ride home, okay? You’re right that it will all seem a little bit brighter after a good night’s sleep.”
“Oh, no,” Winnie protested. “I couldn’t ask you to do that.”
“One,” he said. “You could. I’m on vacation and don’t have anywhere to be. Two, you didn’t ask. And three, you can’t deny me my chance to do my good deed for the day.” He pointed at the dark sky. “I’m running out of time, Winnie. The deadline is looming. Please! You have to help me.”
He was being decidedly silly, and she did gift him one little smile.
“Well, when you put it that way…”
She closed and locked her car, and Shane made a mental note to tell Eleanor not to ask Winnie about the car for at least a day or so. Winnie’s shoulders were stiff and defensive, as though she was bracing herself for potential criticism. She really seemed like someone who just needed a break.
They piled into Eleanor’s car, Winnie shifting the pile of books that Shane had gotten that day from the library. She glanced down at the title of the top volume, then gave Shane a wry look.
“Six Ways to Determine Your Career’s Next Steps?” she asked.
Shane gave her a slightly sheepish shrug as he backed out of the bookstore’s small parking area.
“Okay,” he said. “In my defense, the rest of them are fun vacation books.”
“You’d better hope that you’re right about Eleanor being forgiving,” she teased. “Her own brother doesn’t even patronize her bookstore. How’s that for loyalty?”
Shane was encouraged that Winnie felt cheerful enough to tease him.
“She did tell me I could borrow from the store while I was deciding, but then I got really worried about bending things, so I decided the library was my friend.”
“The library is everyone’s friend,” she said with mock solemnity.
“And,” he went on pointedly, “I did ask Eleanor for the career book. But she said, and I quote, ‘I would help you, but I only sell interesting books here.’”
This startled a loud bark of laughter out of Winnie. Shane felt uncommonly proud of himself.
“And you needed a boring book?” she prodded.
He let out the tiniest sigh. “Yeah. I’m a computer programmer in San Francisco.”
“That’s cool,” she said approvingly. “That sounds like you have taken a lot of productive career steps already.”
“Oh, totally,” Shane agreed. “It’s my dream job. Or, it was my dream job. But recently it’s been a touch overwhelming. Eleanor recommended…” He hesitated. “Okay, she lovingly badgered me into coming here, taking a beat, and regrouping. The book is supposed to help me get some clarity.”
She turned the volume over in her hand, consideringly. “And is it working?”
He shrugged one shoulder, then paused at a stop sign to look around the corner. “Too soon to tell. I’m just hoping that it can help me feel a little less… stuck. I don’t know if you’ve ever felt that.”
There was a long stretch of silence. Then, Winnie sighed.
“Yeah,” she said quietly. “I know exactly what that feels like.”
He wanted to ask more. He really did. He was surprised to find himself terribly curious about Winnie Burnett.
He wanted to know why she had been anxiously standing near the door at the book club meeting, wanted to know why she’d seemed so desperate to get out of what seemed to have been a lighthearted social event.
This had to be connected to the unmistakable heaviness in her tone when she said she felt stuck too.
He knew that heaviness. It was the thing he’d come to Magnolia Shores to escape.
She didn’t offer anything more though, and it wasn’t his place to pry.
Instead, they chatted casually about the science fiction book in his stack that Winnie had already read.
Other than that, she just gave him directions to her home, a sweet little townhouse with several large potted plants on the front porch.
“Thanks for the ride,” she said earnestly as he pulled up in front of the house. “It was really nice of you.”
“Hey, no sweat,” he said. “Good luck with getting the car battery situation fixed.”
She held up two sets of crossed fingers. “Here’s hoping,” she said.
Shane stayed where he was parked until Winnie unlocked her door and headed inside, offering him one last little wave before she disappeared inside the house. He pulled away from the curb and began the short drive back to his sister’s house.
Winnie Burnett. He found her… intriguing.
It wasn’t just that she was an interesting contradiction, what with her severe bob and prim features that contrasted with the softness that had been revealed by her frustration and worry this evening.
And it wasn’t just that he found her nice to look at, although he was still rather proud of himself for looking at a woman and seeing more than a potential colleague or what have you.
He also found himself wanting to understand that sadness that lurked beneath Winnie’s surface. Something was bothering that woman, and it wasn’t just a busted battery in her car.
And a bizarre part of him wondered if there was anything he could do to make her feel any better.