AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Sure you do. The lot’s empty.”
“I’m closed right now. I only open in the winter for a few weeks around Christmas. Right now, I’m just cleaning and decorating.”
“How can you make a living if you’re only open in the winter?”
“Isn’t that kind of a personal question?”
Carson’s mouth quirked. “We don’t do personal questions anymore?”
“We don’t have a personal relationship. We’re not friends. We’re not—”
She shouldn’t even say the word lovers. Too many memories attached to it. And not just ancient, sixteen-year-old, buried-deep-beneath-the-earth memories. It was only five or six years since the last time she slept with him. Before that, for about a decade, they’d hooked up practically every time he blew through town—on his initiative and hers. Her place, his car. Anywhere.
So many errors in judgment attached to the same crooked smile. The same pair of hands. The same tall, lean, hard body.
When Carson came to Potter Falls, he just sort of … happened to her.
She would drop by to see Glory, only to discover he’d turned up unannounced for a visit, and her heart would stop at the sight of him sipping coffee at his mother’s kitchen table.
She would come out of the library and walk into him on his way up the steps, and he would wrap one arm around her to steady her as she tumbled into the past with a lurch of nostalgic lust.
His first time home after college, back when he was in the Army Corps of Engineers, he’d taken her to the movies, and she’d learned that it was possible to suffocate from yearning.
Julie had never been able to resist him—had in fact only quit sleeping with him because he’d stopped trying to get her to. Which was both a profound relief and a terrible blow to her pride.
“We’re acquaintances,” she said. A little more sharply than she meant to. “Old acquaintances. At best.”
The lip quirk turned into a grin, and she felt a flush creeping up her throat and into her cheeks. He was standing too close, smiling too warm. It pinged down through her, a little sonar burst of sexual homecoming. If he kissed her hello, his lips would still be cool even though his hands were hot. His hands were always hot.
And he always did this to her. One minute in his presence, and she was thinking about kissing him. Five minutes, and her mind’s eye would be screwing him on the kitchen table. Within an hour, she’d be spinning impossible fantasies again.
In a week, he would be gone.
She brushed past him to the check-in desk and fiddled with the guest book, flipping back through the pages as if she were looking for some essential bit of information she’d lost track of.
Such as what had happened to all her goddamn poise.
“I still work at the library part-time,” she said to the book.
She’d clocked forty-hour weeks for a decade before she had enough money saved up to buy the house, then spent three years fixing it up on evenings and weekends. She’d had it open for another three, and she loved everything about it. She loved cooking breakfast for paying customers and helping them discover the beautiful corner of the world she called home. She loved decorating for Christmas and volunteering at the hospital and keeping the Chamber of Commerce on its toes.
She loved living in Potter Falls.
She did not love Carson Vance. Not anymore. Not since he’d made it clear that her home was his prison.
Learn your lesson. Grow up.
Julie flipped the book shut. “Right now, I’m closed.”
Carson stuck his hands in his coat pockets and watched her. Three beats. Four. Five.
“All right,” he said. “But if I’m going to walk back over to my dad’s, you think you could fortify me with a cup of coffee? Whatever you’ve got back in the kitchen smells good.”
“It’s dark roast. Ethiopian.”
“Perfect.”
She wanted to say no, it would not be perfect. He would not be permitted in her kitchen. She didn’t want to see him in there later, a ghost presence lingering and messing with her sanctuary.
