Chapter 7
CHAPTER SEVEN
PRESTON
What was that?
The question cycled through Preston’s mind as he biked along one side of the town square. He’d been going to speak about the library collection and events. He had definitely been next on the schedule. And then.
Harmony Hale.
Interrupting the agenda. Talking not about books or the library at all but a festival. Causing them to push things back until next month. He’d have this hanging over him another month . And yet the immediate reprieve had unlocked all the tension in his shoulders and stomach. His mind went around and around again, unable to decide how it felt. Good, bad, good, bad.
Headlights spilled across the road from behind. The purr of an engine crowded nearer. “Go around,” Preston gritted out under his breath. However he did feel about the delayed agenda, things not going to plan always unsettled and irritated him in the moment. The car didn’t pass him, though, even when he rode as close to the curb as he could. He reached the stop sign at the square’s corner and waved the driver by.
A red convertible rolled through the stop sign until the driver was even with him.
“Well, hello to you too!” Harmony Hale called, waving back with a wiggle of her fingers. “We’ve gotta stop running into each other like this.”
He rounded the corner and pedaled on. “Please don’t run into me.”
She laughed. “Now, if I did that, I’d never get you to agree to lease your land to the festival.”
Preston’s wheels wobbled. “My—?” He gripped the handlebars and steadied his bike. The convertible still rolled along beside him.
“For the festival site. I’ve been trying to talk to you about it for a week.”
“So, you’re not a concerned parent hoping to censor books from the library’s collection.” When she’d started speaking to the assembly, it had taken only a minute for him to realize his mistake. He’d had the rest of the abbreviated meeting to ponder why that revelation had brought him such a swell of relief. But his land? The old walnut orchard?
“Oh, that’s what the devil talk was about earlier.” She tossed her head back, comprehending, then shook it. “Nope.” Her hair sort of shimmered over her bare shoulders when she did that—her blazer was thrown over the passenger seat. “Don’t have kids.” She cocked a brow. “But I might be interested in some of that other stuff you mentioned sometime.”
What he’d—?
Porn. The word lit up through his mind like the neon sign outside the Moonlight Bar across the street. He’d said he’d peddled porn. Don’t say porn again. That seemed like a low bar for a conversation, even for him. “Gun violence?” he asked weakly.
She laughed again. He dared another glance her way as he stopped at the next intersection, wondering if she was laughing at him. Sometimes he couldn’t tell. Didn’t get the joke—which was sometimes him. But as Harmony laughed now, something softened in her face. Like her smile shifted: false to true.
Then, still smiling at him, she rolled right through the intersection.
“That”—he kept his eyes forward even as he wanted to direct a glare her way—“was a stop sign!”
“Preston, we’re going like three miles an hour.”
“Because you’re driving practically on top of me!”
“I think that stop sign might actually be going faster than we are.”
“Your eyes should be on the road,” he said.
“How do you know they aren’t if yours are?”
Because he’d looked over at her again and caught her smile beaming at him still. It was like a fucking magnet . Like when she’d swept into that meeting and confidently spoken before that crowd, somehow getting everyone to listen and agree. Connecting so easily with people she hadn’t met until that moment. How had she done that? It was like a magic trick. One he couldn’t figure out no matter how many times he watched others do it.
Instead here he was arguing about traffic laws with her. Annoyance heated his neck. “Ms. Hale, I don’t like reckless drivers.” Reckless people . Thoughtless of others, breaking rules without considering the impact upon anyone else. Messing up town meeting agendas—even while taking the heat off Jordan and the library—was the least of it.
Preston suddenly pedaled up a cutout in the curb to a path leading across the green, leaving Harmony Hale behind. Enough of the unexpected for one night. He had to get home. Lacey should be getting ready for bed soon, and Dani would be waiting to drive back to her place.
A few people were walking home or sitting on benches eating ice cream from the shop Lacey always asked him to take her to when she’d hung out at the library all afternoon. He navigated carefully past them and came out on the other side of the square.
Where Harmony Hale waited in her car.
“Again,” she said, elbow propped on the steering wheel, “you’re going, like, five miles an hour at best.”
The foam of his handlebars compressed under his grip. He blew out a long breath. Preston knew he could go a little overboard sticking to a schedule. Plus, it wasn’t lost on him how she’d jumped in when Travis Weaver was going full school-to-prison-pipeline with a teen trying to improve the community.
He shot her a challenging look. “Then it should be easy to keep up.” And if she wasn’t a book-banner, then that wouldn’t be bad.
Satisfaction flared though his chest when she followed, stopping precisely at every stop sign, signaling every turn. Keeping pace even when he sped up. The two of them were like the tiniest, most ridiculous parade ever. As they reached wider residential streets, she pulled alongside him again. “Look, can we go grab a coffee? It’d be easier to talk.”
“Have to get home. You have until then to talk.” He still felt prickly at the idea of breaking from a plan—which included gorgeous women bringing giant festivals to town.
“Can we set a meeting for your convenience? You heard the mayor—I need to secure a potential site before I can get all that paperwork for him and make this thing happen and finally hear my bosses at Rhythmic sing praises to my name as they should.”
She was joking around, he knew that, but some deeper emotion chafed against her glibness. When he braked at another stop sign, at the turn onto his street, he dropped his foot to the pavement and stole another look, wondering if the desperation he heard in her voice would show on her face.
They’d stopped under a streetlight. It washed over her, lighting up her hair all caramel and gold, making the freckles sprinkled over her cheeks almost seem to sparkle. Revealing more freckles on those bare shoulders, spilling over her collarbones. It was like a spotlight, pulled to her like all that attention she’d drawn back at town hall.
Like the attention he was giving her right now. Because she wasn’t one of Cheryl Weaver’s clique and that, apparently, meant his mind felt free to explore the possibility of this woman being the most attractive person he’d ever met. His eyes were getting in on the exploring too, roving over her plush, undeniably sexy curves and the admittedly adorable quirk her full lips made—probably because he was still staring. Shit. He blurted, “It’s not my land.”
She raised a brow. “County records say it is.”
County records hadn’t promised their dead mother her family’s old farm would be for Lacey if she ever needed it. In his mind, it belonged to his sister. It was her last safety net, if something happened to him. “I’m sorry I can’t help you.” It was true, not mere politeness—because he knew if he agreed, she was sure to blast him with that smile again. And he wanted that.
“You wouldn’t just be helping me, you’d be helping the entire town.” The glow of the streetlight limned her hair like a halo. “You heard me back there; this is an amazing opportunity for everyone.” There it was again, as her mask of confidence slipped just a little with a tightening of her mouth: that false smile.
Preston might have wanted to talk more—to try to explain—but the words for all that, his family’s infamous past and uncertain future, were buried deep under his own careful mask he always wore. His usual scripts were failing him with this woman, and when he got like this his rule was to shut up. He lifted his foot back to his pedal. “Good night, Ms. Hale.” He headed down his street, into the shadows under reaching oaks.
“Harmony,” she corrected. Her ridiculous car rolled behind him, and she kept talking, making her pitch again for the festival, complimenting what she’d seen of Brookville so far, extolling the not-too-chilly spring evening. “It’ll be perfect in early fall; people will flock here from places back east already freezing their tits off.” Preston coasted to a stop at his driveway and Harmony took in the house. “Huh, nice place.”
He locked his bike to the porch railing, and still she was talking. He was honestly beginning to think she might follow him inside and keep commenting on his decor as he said good night to Dani and checked in with Lacey and got ready for bed. What would she think of his choice of wall art or the color of his weighted blanket? Picturing Harmony Hale in his bedroom shut down his imagination. Impossible. He didn’t bring women home around Lacey unless they were serious. And that had happened exactly never since he’d become her guardian. Not that Harmony was making him that kind of offer. He didn’t think she was, anyway. Not that he’d accept. He really didn’t like bad drivers.
He’d better get inside.
“Man, this is why I gotta move. L.A. rents are killing me.” Harmony ruffled a hand through her hair, car idling behind Dani’s Jeep. “You must have roommates?” Keys, where were his keys? “Good night!” she called with an easy wave.
Without meaning to, as he fought the door open, Preston broke the rule he’d made and answered with his own call of “Good night.”
And at this, before she at last drove off, Harmony Hale granted him a final flash of her wide, wolfish grin, brighter than the car’s headlights.