Chapter 18
Chapter Eighteen
As the door shut behind the Whitmores, Evie popped out from the office, shrugging into her coat. Her cheeks were flushed pink with excitement, and her nose was buried in the stack of highlighted script pages.
Lily didn’t have to look up to know it was her sister.
They shared the same red hair and green eyes, although Evie was a librarian and very much dressed the part.
Her sedate knee-length wool skirt and cream turtleneck looked out of place next to Lily’s pink floaty wrap skirt and leggings, which had traces of glitter from the snowflake rehearsal.
And yet, as always, they balanced each other out perfectly.
“That little girl adores you,” Evie said, pushing up her glasses with her finger while juggling a mug of tea and a half-eaten apple. Her script—highlighted and color coded to hell—was jammed under her arm, the sticky notes poking out at odd angles.
Lily smiled faintly. “She’s special.” She held out her hand for the script and mug, very used to her sister’s charming brand of distracted genius. “Here. Let me help.”
Evie handed them over, taking her coat from the hook and slipping it on while she scanned the room. “Have you seen my keys? I just had them.”
Lily handed the mug back to her and tossed the apple in the garbage. “You’re the only person I know who could lose her own keys while holding them.”
Evie looked down, startled. “Oh. Well. I thought I put them—never mind.” She flashed a sheepish grin. “Thanks.”
“Did you get the lines down?”
“I was just in there rewriting the nativity scene. One of the angels had a sore throat, so I gave her lines to the donkey.”
While Lily handled the choreography and wrangled the tiny ballerinas, Evie handled the acting and singing with the joy of someone who’d spent her childhood directing her twin and all their neighborhood friends in backyard musicals.
Theater had always been Evie’s passion, and she directed several other community shows in addition to her role at the library.
“Just a heads-up—” Evie paused, buttoning her coat with one hand. “Tucker’s back in town.”
Lily froze. “What?”
A month. She’d had a whole glorious month of not seeing his smug face.
A blissful, Tucker-free stretch in which she could pretend she hadn’t been humiliated in front of half the town by the cheating dirtbag who then took their honeymoon to Cancun with his assistant.
Their honeymoon! The nerve of it still galled her.
Evie winced in sympathy. “I’m sorry, Lily. But honestly, everyone knows he’s a walking dumpster fire now.”
If it galled Lily, it was nothing compared to how the town felt about Tucker. Northfield wasn’t just small; it was loyal to the bone, and when you broke that trust, everyone took it personally.
From what she’d heard, he was persona non grata around town. And yes, the pettiest part of her—the part she tried very hard to smother—felt a tiny flicker of satisfaction hearing that.
In some ways, the aftermath of the photo was worse than the betrayal itself. Along with her privacy, she’d lost whatever thin shred of dignity she’d been clinging to. Some days she still wondered who’d actually AirDropped it. Tucker? Madison? Or someone else who couldn’t mind their own business?
She was the one being whispered about in the aisles of the grocery store and dissected over coffee at Maple and Main. And the worst part was that everyone in town truly meant well. Truly. But small-town kindness came with a side of suffocation.
Somehow, she’d become Northfield’s tragic sweetheart.
People stopped her in the grocery store, eyeing her tub of ice cream and bag of chips with sympathy, when really it was just her usual period craving.
She couldn’t walk down Main Street without someone offering tearful sympathy and unsolicited advice on everything from how to get revenge to how to win him back.
As if either of those was even on the table.
But then it got worse.
Once people realized she wasn’t actually devastated, the matchmaking started. Suddenly, everyone had a “very sweet” nephew or brother or UPS driver who was just the nicest guy and so cute and could they give him her number?
It was sweet. It was exhausting. And it was impossible to say no to without disappointing someone’s well-meaning grandma or aunt.
Yes, New Lily was a badass. She stood her ground, and she wasn’t a pushover, dammit. But Old Lily—the people pleaser—was proving harder to shake. She still hated disappointing people, especially the grandmas. They were so cute in their determination to set her up. So earnest.
Every week before class, she told herself she’d say no.
And every week, Gertie Marshall or Connie Hightower would sidle up to her with a bag of warm cinnamon buns from Morning Glory Bakery (who could say no to those?) and their grandson’s business card in the other, like she was the town’s pity case.
“That’s almost worse,” Lily muttered, rubbing her forehead. “Everyone’s been treating me like I’m made of glass since I came back. I can’t teach my senior yoga class without someone trying to hand me baked goods and their grandson’s business card.”
“They love you,” Evie said. “You’re like Meg Ryan in every nineties rom-com before the happy ending, and Tucker’s the villain.”
She wandered over to the floor-to-ceiling picture windows and looked out at the snow falling on Main Street. “I didn’t want to be the sad girl when it was me who finally left, even if it was at the last possible second.”
That rankled the most, that image of herself in their minds.
Poor Lily, being cheated on and lied to.
Ugh. She wanted her damn dignity back.
Evie’s expression softened. “You’ve handled this so well,” she said quietly. “Eventually, you knew you’d have to face him.”
Lily stifled a sigh. On that long, snowy ride across the mountain with Gage MacKenna, she’d made herself a promise. She was going to start over. Be braver. Bolder. What would New Lily do? had become her mantra as much as I am a still lake. She was in charge of her own happy ending, dammit.
She’d been trying to move on. She’d said yes to every cinnamon bun and some of the unsolicited but well-meaning blind dates, out of sheer optimism—okay, and pressure, too—even if it all felt a little too much like dating in a fishbowl, with the entire town watching to see what she’d do next.
But three dates in, she was seriously reconsidering.
The first guy, the brother of a woman in her Mindful Yoga class, asked her if she wanted to go back to his place to see his rock collection after they had dinner. And no, it wasn’t a euphemism. He was serious.
The second guy had talked about his bowel cleanse for forty-five minutes during their dinner date then taken off, leaving her with the tab because he needed to get to the bathroom.
And the third had spent two hours ranting about cryptocurrency then tried to lick her face in the parking lot of the Northfield Pub while she fended him off.
She was tired of being Northfield’s tragic sweetheart. She didn’t want to be whispered about or pitied. She wanted to take back her story.
“Poor Lily,” my ass.
She was fun and flirty and back on the market.
Okay, and maybe she wanted a little revenge on Tucker, but that was normal.
She had years of fun to make up for, a whole list of fun things she’d skipped while she played the sweet, dutiful girlfriend.
Things like kissing until her toes curled, and doing things that scared her, excited her, made her feel alive.
The problem was, the men she was being set up with weren’t exactly inspiring any of those feelings either.
“I’m proud of you,” Evie said, tying her scarf around her neck with a dramatic flourish. “You’ve been really putting yourself out there with all these dates since you got back.”
Lily snorted. “Yeah. Putting myself out there… like bait in shark-infested water.”
Okay, so New Lily was struggling a bit. But eventually, she’d meet someone without any weird obsessions or at least someone who didn’t want to talk about them over dinner.
Changing long-held habits took time. She just had to keep putting herself out there.
Keep looking for the perfect guy. Someone tall and dark with broad shoulders and the most delicious pelt of curly hair on his chest—
Nope.
Ruthlessly, she dragged her thoughts back to the present.
Thinking about Rush wouldn’t do her any good. Not when he’d made it clear that whatever had happened between them at the cabin was temporary.
“Well, tonight might be your lucky night. Bradley Benson. With a name like that, he has to be good rom-com dating material. At the very least, he must really love his mother, since he brings her to your hot yoga classes.” Evie grinned mischievously.
“Gertie said he’s cute in a banker kind of way, and he owns a dog, which is half the reason I said yes.
That’s usually a good sign,” Lily said brightly.
Maybe Bradley Benson had a hidden wild side, like a penchant for pinning her hands down while it snowed outside…
ugh. She dragged her thoughts back to the present.
“That’s the spirit.” Evie pulled out her phone and pushed her glasses up her nose to squint at the screen. “Oh, that reminds me. I need a recipe. I have a date tonight too.”
“Want to double-date?” Lily asked hopefully. “The pub does a killer Friday fish fry. And if our dates are disasters, we can hang out with each other.”
“Can’t,” Evie said. “I’m cooking dinner for him at home.”
Of course she was. Which meant Lily would have to stay out of their shared apartment for at least a few hours, since Evie had taken her in when she’d moved out of the house she and Tucker used to rent. “Who are you making dinner for?”
“Dr. Pierce,” Evie said, beaming.
Lily frowned. “Evie. You have a date with your boss? The one who wears those stupid bow ties and takes credit for all your ideas?”
“Date. Meeting. Same thing,” Evie mumbled, still scrolling. “I think I’ll make Marry Me Chicken.”
“Whoa. Let’s not move too fast.”
Evie looked up, arching an eyebrow. “Says the woman who ran off with the grumpy sheriff and had outrageously filthy cabin sex during a blizzard.”
“Are we still talking about that?” And thinking about it.
“Um, yes.” Evie crossed her arms, looking entirely too smug. “I’m living vicariously through you. You put the ‘nailed it’ in the phrase ‘nailed it’. Who knew you had that in you?”
Heat soared in Lily’s cheeks at the reminder. “It was a temporary lapse in judgment,” she muttered.
“‘Ride my face, darlin’,” Evie growled in a terrible imitation of Rush’s deep voice. “I haven’t been able to look at Sheriff Sexy the same again.”
Lily tried to look disapproving, but she grinned despite herself. “It was pretty epic.”
She had zero regrets about the weekend or about telling her sister.
They had a twin-level trust in which not much was off-limits.
Besides, there was no hiding the beard burn on her neck and shoulders for days after.
She’d practically glowed in the dark and had to wear turtlenecks for a week so her family didn’t notice.
She’d told everyone else Sheriff Callahan had dropped her off at the Pine Cone Motel so she could clear her head for a few days.
Not a lie, exactly.
She just left out the part about spending those days snowed in and losing her mind—and her panties—in a small, cozy cabin with the sexiest man she’d ever laid eyes on.
Evie, of course, had seen right through her the second she came back, but her mother and sisters believed that she’d spent the weekend doing yoga, journaling, and meditating. Lily felt a teensy bit guilty about that, but the alternative—telling the truth—wasn’t an option.
An involuntary shiver rolled through her at the memory of the silky scrap of mustache against her inner thighs.
She coughed to cover it and waved Evie toward the door. “Go. Make your chicken.”
Evie winked. “Fine, fine. But if you need a getaway, send me a chicken emoji, and I’ll come running.”
The door clicked shut behind her, and suddenly the studio felt too quiet. These were the moments when it was hardest not to think about him.
She’d done an impressive job of tucking that wild, transformative weekend away into a carefully locked box, but sometimes, when she wasn’t careful, memories slipped free.
They’d only spoken once since the cabin, and honestly, that was more than enough. Just that one time had left Lily flustered and scarlet cheeked for the rest of the day.
Alone in the quiet of her studio, Lily let out a long breath and reached for her coat.
The floor-to-ceiling mirrors caught her reflection as she buttoned it up, and she paused.
Weeks had passed, she told herself sternly.
You need to stop thinking about a man who’d made it abundantly clear he was leaving.
She switched off the lights. Tonight was about moving forward. New Lily had a hot date. A fresh start.
She was definitely not hung up on a certain broody sheriff.
Maybe Bradley Benson had a mustache…