2. Sophie
SOPHIE
Iparked crooked.
Not dramatically crooked but enough that when I climbed out of Sarah’s old Volkswagen Jetta—which she’d graciously let me borrow after taking one look at my bank account situation and making a concerned face—and looked back at it, I briefly considered getting back in and trying again.
Unfortunately, I had already committed to the crookedness, and people were around. Witnesses.
Too late.
I had bigger problems.
Namely, the temporary stage that was about to be unloaded in the middle of Main Road, which felt like the kind of thing an actual event planner would probably have thought about before the truck arrived.
Rookie mistake.
A promising start to my first day as Maplewood Falls’ official event planner.
With Helen’s giant binder tucked under one arm and my bag hanging from my shoulder, I hurried toward the delivery truck.
The company name, ATLANTIC TENT RENTALS, was plastered across both sides in giant blue letters.
“Hi!” I called, attempting a wave with the arm currently pinning a binder beneath my armpit. It came out looking less like a greeting and more like I was having a full-body muscle spasm.
The driver’s head popped out the open window.
He looked to be in his early forties, with a faded gray T-shirt and a sunburned face that suggested he’d spent most of his life outdoors.
A cigarette hung from the corner of his mouth, and even standing several feet away, I caught the lingering smell of stale smoke mixed with something that suspiciously resembled last night’s beer.
His thinning gray hair stuck out from beneath a baseball cap advertising some brand of fishing tackle.
The driver seemed relieved, which made me nervous. People should not look relieved to see me. Not when I was in charge of something. Especially not when I’d been in charge for less than an hour.
Fake-it-till-you-make-it event planner coming through.
“Where do you want the stage?” he asked.
Right. The stage. The stage I was apparently responsible for. The stage that everyone would eventually stand on while I hoped it didn’t collapse and become part of town history.
I opened Helen’s binder, flipped through several pages, turned it upside down and then right side up again. There were maps, charts, notes, and color-coded tabs. Who made these things? Military strategists? Air traffic controllers?
“Over there,” I said, pointing toward the town square. “Facing the lighthouse-style clock tower.” I had no freaking clue if that was the right spot.
The driver nodded. “You’re the boss.”
I blinked. Holy crap. That was true. I was the boss. The statement felt wildly irresponsible. Like giving a toddler the keys to a forklift and wishing them luck.
Then a woman wearing an apron came running out of the bakery next door, waving both arms above her head like she was trying to stop an airplane from landing.
Flour dusted the front of her apron, and her dark hair was escaping from a messy bun while she hurried across the sidewalk.
She had the determined expression of a woman who had survived several morning rushes and wasn’t afraid of conflict.
Uh-oh.
“No! Not there!” she yelled. “That’s where my pastry tent goes!”
The driver stopped.
Heat rushed to my face as I pointed to the stretch of grass closest to Town Hall. “Okay. How about over there?”
And just like that, another woman appeared.
When I say appeared, I mean one second she wasn’t there and the next she was standing beside us like she’d materialized magically. Spooky.
She was tall. The kind of tall that made you take a step back just to locate her face. She wore black from head to toe and held a pair of gardening shears in one hand like she knew exactly how to use them. She looked less like a florist and more like someone hired to dispose of problems.
“You can’t put it there,” she snapped. “My flower display goes there.”
“Ah. Okay.” I should have known that. I pointed toward the only patch of grass that hadn’t yet been claimed. “Here?” I instructed the driver.
The florist slowly turned her head and followed my finger. “The petunia arch goes there.”
“Right.” No idea what the hell she was talking about. I was beginning to understand why people drank during event planning. Just enough to take the edge off conversations involving petunia arches.
Ten minutes later the truck was blocking half the street.
And I was sweating through my antiperspirant and my clothes. My pits were practically bathing in sweat. It appeared I was sweating out of every pore on my body.
I was a sweaty, stinking mess.
Wonderful.
Traffic had backed up. A volunteer was asking where to put folding chairs.
Someone wanted vendor assignments. A man carrying electrical cables wanted to know where the power hookup was.
Another woman was asking where the lemonade stand was supposed to go.
Everyone had questions, and for reasons I still didn’t fully understand, I was the person expected to answer them.
I had no idea. Not a single clue.
The worst part? I couldn’t even Google answers because everyone kept talking to me.
“Miss?”
I smiled brightly, like I was one inconvenience away from living in the woods. “Everything is completely under control.”
A deep voice behind me said, “That’s good to hear.”
I straightened and turned around.
Tall. Broad shoulders. Dark hair. Sheriff’s Department polo shirt. The name WALKER was embroidered over one side of his chest in gold letters, which was helpful because otherwise I might have spent the next ten minutes referring to him as Sheriff Hot Guy.
And a pair of brown eyes studied the scene with the exhausted patience of a man who’d seen this exact disaster coming from three towns away.
Sheriff Eric Walker.
For a second, my brain simply stopped working because no sheriff should look like that. Right?
Sheriffs were supposed to be slightly overweight men named Bob who drank too much coffee and complained about paperwork. They weren’t supposed to look like they belonged on the cover of a magazine titled Men Who Can Build You a Deck and Give You a Massage at the Same Time.
He stood with his hands on his hips, calm and steady while madness unfolded around him. The morning sun caught in his dark hair, and there wasn’t a wrinkle anywhere on his shirt.
Damn. That was one hot male specimen.
Double damn. I might have been drooling.
I casually reached up and wiped the corners of my mouth, disguising it as an itch.
No drool. Progress.
Still, even if I wasn’t drooling, I was definitely staring. The kind of staring that should probably require a permit.
Maybe I was hallucinating his hotness from stress. That felt possible. I’d slept badly and consumed too much coffee. A few hours of standing in the hot sun was enough to bring out the crazy. A hallucination wasn’t completely off the table.
I blinked several times. Then once more for good measure.
Nope. Still there.
Unfortunately, he was now looking directly at me.
“Can I help you with something?” he asked. His voice was deep and velvety. I wanted to bathe in it.
Oh yeah. I was also losing my damn mind.
“Not anymore. Nothing. Forget it. Unforget it. Forget I said forget it.” Damnit. Here I went with the nervous word vomit. It was happening again, the same condition that had once caused me to tell a dentist I loved him after a routine cleaning.
The sheriff watched me.
This was not improving. In fact, I was actively making it worse. If social interactions were an Olympic sport, I was currently competing for last place.
“Good to know,” he said finally, narrowing his eyes as he looked me over.
Oh god. He thought I was insane. Which, to be fair, was currently a reasonable working theory.
His gaze moved slowly from the blocked street to the delivery truck to the volunteers arguing over folding chairs before finally landing on me. Then to the binder I was holding upside down.
Super.
“Who are you?” he asked, finally.
“Sophie.” Why did my voice sound like that? All high pitched. Like I’d inhaled helium on the way over. I cleared my throat. “Sophie Hartwell.”
He cocked a brow. “Another Hartwell.”
It was my time to frown at him. “And what is that supposed to mean?” Okay. Captain Competent was starting to annoy me.
Hotness be damned. I was workin’ here.
For a second, I wondered if Sarah owed the town money. Or if one of my cousins had accidentally started a cult. There were a surprising number of Hartwells in Maplewood Falls. The odds of one of us having done something embarrassing were reasonably high.
His expression didn’t change. “How long have you been event planning?” he asked.
“Three years.” The lie flew out so fast I almost impressed myself.
He lifted a brow. “Really. Three years.”
That wasn’t a question. Just enough skepticism to make me want to fling myself directly into the harbor. Not swim. Just gently launch myself off the dock and let the fish judge me instead.
“And you have everything under control?” he asked, in that cop-like voice, the one that always considered you the suspect unless told otherwise. It somehow made me feel guilty about things I hadn’t even done yet. Like maybe I should confess now and save everyone time.
“Absolutely,” I answered, not breaking eye contact. See? Professional liar right here.
A car horn sounded behind me. The long, frustrated kind usually reserved for rush hour traffic and people who drove twenty under the speed limit.
The truck driver leaned out his window. “Boss, I still need to know where you want the stage.”
I looked back at the sheriff, my face feeling like I’d stuck it in Dottie’s oven. It was entirely possible my cheeks were now visible from space. Which was unfortunate because he was standing close enough to witness every second of my professional collapse.
The sheriff glanced at the truck still blocking half the street. His gaze lingered on the line of cars forming behind it and then on the volunteers wandering around holding folding chairs like confused migrating birds.
A folding chair collapsed somewhere behind me. The loud crash was followed by an offended yelp.
I sighed. “Mostly under control.”
Captain Competent nodded once. “Looks like it.”
Fantastic. I had known this man for approximately forty-five seconds, and he’d already caught me in a lie.
Not the big lie about having three years of event-planning experience.
Just the smaller lie about having any clue what was happening at this exact moment.
Although, now that I thought about it, maybe they were related.
I pressed my lips together and tightened my grip on the binder. Okay. Fine. So things weren’t going perfectly. I had a few minor setbacks—a blocked street, a missing stage location, an electrical guy looking for answers I didn’t have. Nobody had died. That felt important.
Besides, I could do this.
Probably.
People planned festivals every day. Thousands of people.
How hard could it be? Actually, don’t answer that.
I straightened my shoulders and gave myself a mental shake.
I had survived being dumped by text message.
I’d survived losing my job. I’d survived explaining to my landlord why twelve strangers were doing yoga in my living room.
Compared to that, organizing a small-town festival should have been manageable.
The fact that I had absolutely no evidence to support that conclusion felt irrelevant.
I was doing this. I could do this.
And if I couldn’t do this, I would simply continue pretending I could until somehow it became true.
A volunteer rushed over. He looked to be in his early thirties, wearing faded jeans, work boots, and a baseball cap with MAPLEWOOD FALLS MARINA stitched across the front.
He had an open, friendly face like he probably helped old ladies carry groceries without being asked and volunteered for things because he genuinely wanted to help.
Unfortunately, he had also made the mistake of assuming I knew what I was doing.
“Where do you want the petting zoo?” asked the volunteer.
I blinked. “The what?”
“The petting zoo.” He shifted his weight. “The animals are arriving tomorrow.”
There was a petting zoo? Of course there was a petting zoo.
Somewhere between the stage, the vendors, the electrical hookups, the chairs, the permits, and the growing traffic problem, I had completely missed the fact that livestock were also about to become my responsibility.
Which felt like information I should have received before accepting the job.
Or before lying about being qualified for it.
One of those two moments would have been helpful.
The sheriff crossed his arms over his wide chest. “You sure you’ve got everything under control,” he repeated.
I stood my ground. “Yes, I do.” I even lifted my chin a little. Not because I was confident. More because if I didn’t commit fully to the lie, it might collapse under its own weight.
Captain Competent watched me a beat too long to be considered polite. Long enough for me to become aware of every ridiculous thing about myself. My hair, my red face, the droplets of sweat trickling down my armpits, and the very real possibility that I smelled like a gym locker.
“I’ll be seeing you soon, Hartwell,” he said finally and then spun around and walked away. His long stride carried him toward the traffic backup with the calm efficiency of a man who solved problems for a living.
Me? I was creating them professionally.
“Can’t wait,” I told him, my traitorous heart pounding. Which was annoying. I’d spent the last six months dating a perfectly normal man who sold insurance and had never once caused my heart to do anything except maintain a steady and medically acceptable rhythm.
I thought I saw the smallest hint of amusement cross his face before he turned around. Like he’d already reached a conclusion about me and found it entertaining.
Like I was entertainment.
Was I irritated? Yes. And I may or may not have stared at his ass as he walked away.
Okay, I did.
Still, I had a horrible feeling Captain Competent was about to become very familiar with all of my mistakes. At the rate things were going, he might need his own dedicated file.
Yay me.