Chapter 23
Will: Liv sounds happy, you moron.
Tate: And that’s a problem, how?
Will: It’s not. I want her to be happy. A small part of me even wants you to be happy. But she’s got a stalker who knows where she lives, and he’s probably ticked off that she’s married. We don’t know what we’re dealing with, and all this tells me is that you’re getting distracted.
Tate: How is this my fault?
Will: Because I’m worried sick over here and you’re busy trying to date your wife.
Tate: It’s fine.
Will: Come on, man.
Tate: I admit that it’s been harder than I thought to be married to her.
Will: If you can’t rein it in, I’m going to come get her. It’s not worth her life.
Tate: I can handle it. I’ve got more reason than ever to take this guy out.
Over the next few days, I’d capitalized on the slower mornings and evenings to work on my manuscript.
For as slow as I’d begun, the writing had picked up easily when I started putting in things familiar to me.
I was nearly finished, with only a few tweaks to fix.
As a writer, I was used to focusing on just the tension, but now, adding romance to that proved tricky.
First, I thought I could get away with having the villain looming in the shadows, building anticipation throughout the story before he pops out at the end. I thought the budding romance between my librarian and cop/part-time farmer would be enough, but it wasn’t.
According to Elaine, if you promise your viewers tension, you need to deliver.
So somewhere near the middle, I staged a run-in.
He’d found her. And scared the heck out of her.
It worked to heighten the tension as well as re-secure the boundaries between my two characters.
They’d been getting too relaxed. Too comfortable in their cozy setup.
The problem was, in a manuscript sense, the boundaries seemed more like guidelines.
In a four-letter-word-sense, they were crap.
They didn’t make sense. There was very little to resist about a charming cop who played the role of a bodyguard.
He was too sweet. Too easy to fall for. So the danger had to be always lurking, if only to keep him focused.
Because it was too easy to fall.
I’d written a couple of self-defense scenes for my girl.
And though it was completely unrelated, I noticed that Tate and I had slowed down on our self-defense lately—a lot, actually.
True to his word, Tate hadn’t moved to kiss me since I’d changed his bandage.
He never again requested movie nights in our bed, and he’d gone back to sleeping on the floor.
We were polite strangers who occasionally stared at each other a beat too long, moving in and out of each other’s orbit.
We could all feel something coming on the stalker front. Leroy was here. He knew where I lived. And he’d gone quiet. We were in limbo again, and I hated it. Tate and the boys were watching the cameras around the house almost religiously.
I was currently sitting on the floor of a tractor while Tate drove, pulling a large disc behind the machine, breaking down the stalks and crops from this year's harvest. My unopened laptop sat on my lap as I stared out the window.
He cleared his throat, his voice sounding heavy. “I got called back to work.”
“What?” I asked, startled.
He looked at me before flicking his eyes back to the fields. “As of this morning, the investigation is officially wrapped up. There was no wrongdoing. We were justified in everything we did, except the two of us splitting up, but we’ll just get a slap on the wrist for that.”
“That’s…good,” I said, my mind whirling at what this might mean. “When do you go back?”
He sighed. “I pushed it off as long as I could. I told them I needed more time, but my boss is…” He stopped, rubbing a hand over his face. “I have to be back on November 2nd.
November 2nd. I mentally calculated. That was two weeks away. Quite the ticking time bomb, if I did say so myself. I’d have to add that to my screenplay.
“I’d just tell you to move to Burlington with me, but I can’t take you to work. And I wouldn’t feel safe with you alone anymore.”
“I don’t know. Maybe I should, and I could go to work solving all your crimes with my expertise.”
He smiled, albeit a bit sadder than usual. “I wish I could.”
I could feel him shutting down and closing off. But I didn’t want to end on that note. “I’ll be fine. I’ve definitely surpassed the master when it comes to hand-to-hand combat.”
He snorted. “You still have a few lessons to go, Rocky. Don’t get too cocky yet.”
“Too late.”
The tractor hummed in our ears as we drove in pensive silence.
“I just thought we’d get him by now. He’s here. It just…feels like he’s waiting for something, and I don’t know what, and it’s driving me crazy.” Tate’s frustration flew from him in spades.
We drove for a while in silence, both of us quiet.
“When should we get the marriage annulled? Before you go back?” I asked. I was keeping myself numb, not allowing myself to think past what I needed to say—the elephant in the room. I couldn’t attach myself to this man forever. He had a life, and he needed to get back to it.
Tate stilled, staring at me for a long time until he had to turn the tractor. When he looked away, I could finally breathe.
He never answered my question.
A few nights later, Tate left the house, leaving me in Tom and Luke’s charge. But to my surprise, he was back only ten minutes later, carrying something he immediately deposited in the pantry.
There had been an awkward undercurrent between us after our conversation in the tractor. He avoided my gaze as much as I did his, but like magnets, our eyes kept clashing. They kept finding each other, even when we were trying to hide.
And then, I did something stupid.
I made Tate dinner.
I had been helping Ann make spaghetti in the kitchen.
I thought the entire family would be here to eat, except for Ben and Jaxon.
That was the impression Ann had given me right up until Tate arrived back home and ran upstairs to shower.
About the time we heard the bathroom door lock, Ann and Tom snapped into place, suddenly making a big show about how they’d forgotten about eating dinner with the mayor and his daughter tonight, and they needed to leave, but to go ahead and eat with Tate.
Luke was still at home, nursing a head cold, but would be holed up in his room downstairs.
Tom and Ann graciously waited until Tate had descended the stairs before they hustled out the door, waving their goodbyes.
By that point, I’d begun to get suspicious, but when Tate strolled into the kitchen, freshly shaved, washed, and wearing a pair of loose-fitting jeans and a t-shirt, with a smile on his face, I was past suspicious.
“Did you do that?”
“Do what?” he asked innocently, coming to stand by me as I drained the spaghetti at the sink.
“Kick everyone out of the house?”
His brow furrowed adorably. “Why would I do that?”
“I don’t know.”
Tate pulled two plates out of the cupboard.
He set one at the head of the table and the other just next to him.
I brought the food over to the table while he filled our glasses.
So now Tate and I sat alone at the table together, eating my overcooked spaghetti and enthusiastically browned garlic toast, and the whole scene suddenly felt very… domestic.
“Should we Lady and the Tramp this spaghetti? Just in case he’s watching?” Tate asked me, holding up a long noodle with a fork.
I gave him a tight smile, but a depressive gloom had settled over me.
The squeak of the chairs. The folded newspaper tossed on the side of the table.
The casual conversation amid bites of dinner.
The warm knee brushing against mine under the table.
Such an innocent scene to throw me for such a big loop.
Tate’s plan to get married to avoid collateral damage had been severely misguided.
I needed to break through whatever spell this was. For boundary purposes. He had just finished telling me the story about breaking his collarbone swimming in the Leelands’ pond with Ben and Jaxon when I broke in, just as he was about to take a bite of his garlic toast.
“I hate the limbo.”
He stopped, mid-sentence, the bread almost to his lips. “What?”
“This limbo. Don’t you hate it? This waiting around for him. What if we just wire me up and send me outside and get it over with?”
“Wire you up?”
“Yeah. Like in the movies.”
A small smile brushed across his lips before his face grew solemn. “I’ve wondered about doing more to draw him out somehow. But I’m not willing to risk you to do it.”
“And Autumn Ridge PD hasn’t found anything?”
Tate set down his fork and rubbed his face with his hand.
“They’re supposed to be on the lookout for anybody they don’t know lingering in the area.
But it’s peak tourist season right now. We have leaf peepers coming into town by the busloads.
It’s not a top priority, unfortunately, but I’ve been checking in with them every day. ”
We finished up our meal in a pensive silence.
Together, we brought our dishes to the sink and loaded up the dishwasher.
When I started filling the kitchen sink to hand wash the big pots, Tate put his hands on my shoulders and scooted me down.
He handed me a white dish towel to dry while he took my place at the kitchen sink.
See?
How can a person go from watching Tate washing dishes at the kitchen sink…back to an apartment alone?
“Alright,” Tate said after draining the sink and drying his hands on the towel hanging from my shoulder. “We need cake.”
He walked into the pantry, pulled out a bakery box from Keller’s, and placed it on the table beside me.
“What is this?” I asked as he pulled the top off the box.
“We now have a song and a wedding cake. A couple weeks late, I know, but so far, I think I’m killing it in the husband department.”
My pulse leaped.