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Lennie, who might be part giant, crossed his heavily tattooed arms over an enormous barrel chest and stared down at her. “Fancy customers aren’t my gig.”
“But they could be,” she said smoothly despite the live thing in her stomach that had grown from a twinge to something much sharper. Channel Caleb. Nothing fazed him, and he had this charisma about him that you couldn’t ignore, even when you tried really hard. “Everyone loves antique shopping, and they’ll like that you have such an… eclectic array of goods.”
In addition to antiques, Lennie sold his artwork. He’d long given up his former trade as a tattoo artist, but he still liked to draw with colored pencils and displayed his masterpieces proudly on the walls of his shop. The pinup girls and horned demons that he favored weren’t her cup of tea, but she couldn’t deny he had talent.
Except all of that meant he wasn’t a regular antiques dealer. Or even much of a run-of-the-mill shopkeeper. He cared about Mavis J, whom he was in a relationship with, and telling stories about the old days, in that order.
“I don’t know,” he muttered. “Would I be able to keep providing services to folks?”
The antique shop also served as Superstition Springs’ local video rental swap and occasionally a barber shop when Mavis J had a slow day. She was the only one in town who had skills with scissors, and Lennie didn’t mind hair on the 1940s barstools that lined the original mahogany bar that had come with the building.
When Havana had been a teenager, Lennie had served homemade cookies on that bar to all the schoolkids once Tallhorse had finally freed them for the day. She could still feel the empty air between her feet and the floor as she perched on one of the barstools and swung her legs.
Where had that memory come from? She hadn’t thought about Lennie’s butterscotch cookies in ages, but when he’d crossed his arms, the shield with the phrase Born To Kill inked above his wrist was right in her line of sight, as it had been a decade ago. Seeing it brought back the sweet scent of cookies hot and fresh from the oven and along with it, the realization that she’d always associated antique stores with butterscotch.
But they didn’t all smell that way. In fact, none of them did except Lennie’s. His store was special.
She swallowed. Did the kids still come by for cookies? They wouldn’t if he moved into a shopping center. Because there would be no place for him to live above the shop and thus no oven available upstairs. And there would be no kids, most likely, if everyone moved on to bigger and better things.
Well, he could still sell his drawings. That wouldn’t have to change.
“Sure,” she told him. “Of course you can still give out videos and whatnot. You can run your store however you see fit. And the increased traffic alone will go a long way toward affording the rent.”
“Rent?” His expression darkened. “You never said anything about rent. I own my shop now.”
Where was Aria with that cheeseburger? A nice interruption wouldn’t be out of line. But when she glanced behind her, all she saw was the tight-jawed faces of Serenity, Mavis J, and several other townspeople who were blatantly eavesdropping. As were Caleb and his four friends.
“Well, didn’t I?” she asked brightly, knowing full well she hadn’t, but come on. He was nearly sixty years old and had owned a tattoo place in Austin. Surely he knew how the world worked. “Oversight. But of course you’d pay rent. The structure would be owned by Scott Co., Damian’s investment company. The money you’d get from the sale of your shop will help go toward your new expenses.”
Mavis J, who had apparently closed up the grocery store in time to join Havana’s worst nightmare, sidled up to stand near Lennie. He pulled her into a half embrace, cradling her against his side. They’d been a couple for something like twenty-five years, but they’d never married and didn’t live together. Plus Mavis J was half Lennie’s size, which always made for an interesting visual. Yet another oddity of Superstition Springs that she didn’t get and had no idea how to leverage.
Apparently Caleb’s slick-talking ways encompassed more than just an ability to screw a woman’s head on sideways. There was an art to this kind of persuasion that Havana lacked.
Aria saved her by bustling through the crowd with Havana’s plate held high. She plunked the cheeseburger and side of fries down on the SEALs’ table, directly in front of where Havana was currently standing. But as she moved to pick it up, grateful to have an excuse to flee, Isaiah bulleted out of the booth.
“Please, sit down,” he insisted, waving at his newly vacated patch of vinyl in the booth. The one next to Caleb.
She swallowed again. How could she graciously refuse? She couldn’t, not with Lennie and Mavis J glaring at her and Serenity standing there with her jaw clenched tight enough to sever nails. Havana needed all the points she could get, and fleeing would only leave everyone with a bad taste in their mouths over the concept of rent. Honestly. That was the thing that had them tripped up?
She sat down.
Caleb’s warmth immediately bled through the scant few inches between them, winnowing into her pores, heating them with the raw sense of awarenes
s. His thigh was right there, next to hers. Probably less than six inches. In the Yukon, they’d been separated by the center console and the curved sides of his bucket seats.
There was nothing between them now but spiky sexual tension.
“Maybe you could see your way to giving local residents a discount on rent,” Caleb suggested right as she took a bite of the mouthwatering cheeseburger.
Lennie and Mavis J perked up, their attentions riveted on Caleb. The cheeseburger turned to ash in her mouth. Somehow she swallowed it, scrambling for words. “I don’t know if I can—”
“Scott’s your fiancé,” Caleb reminded her, stressing the word fiancé in a high voice as if he was mimicking her for all the times she’d tossed that out. “Don’t you have influence with him?”
“Of course I do.”
She didn’t. Not the way he’d made it sound, like she had Damian wrapped around her finger. She’d never had a relationship like that, where a man did things for her for no other reason than because.
All at once, she recalled Caleb’s definition of a real man—one who spent one hundred percent of his time making sure you never looked at another guy twice. If Caleb was the man in question, that was a given regardless. She could barely peel her gaze from him at this moment, and they weren’t even an item.
