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“You’ll find out soon enough.”
“Tell me then.”
“No.” Sawyer ate the rest of his meal and tried not to think about Birdie and Beau Keller. Both annoying for different reasons. One he’d like to punch, and the other he wanted to… what the hell did he want to do with Birdie McAllister? A vision of her really nice ass slipped into his head.
Not that.
He also had another problem. Now that he’d told Linda he had a date, everyone in town would know, and he’d have to show up with someone. He just had no idea who.
Chapter3
Birdie woke the morning after Sawyer heard her talking dirty to Murray and lay there staring at her indigo ceiling.
Until last night, no one knew what she got up to when she closed her front door, and hadn’t since her fiancé had cut and run. The problem was, she’d lost her front door key, so she couldn’t lock it, which hadn’t been a problem until Sawyer Duke walked into her house without knocking.
A loud yowl pierced the air.
“Woodrow, don’t!”
Too late. Seventeen pounds of cat landed on her chest, making the air whoosh from her lungs. He sat and purred, amber eyes staring at her while Birdie fought to breathe.
“You are a beast,” she wheezed. His answer was to purr louder.
“You need to go on a diet, buddy.” She stroked his soft furry head just where he liked it. “Starting today.”
After a few minutes of attention, Woodrow climbed off and settled on his pillow beside hers, where he’d stay for the day.
“Such a lazy cat.”
Birdie got out of bed and grabbed clothes. Then, after a shower with water pressure that was pathetic because she didn’t know how to fix it and had no money to pay someone to do it, she dressed and fed Woodrow.
Her cottage was her haven. The walls were cream, the ceilings blue, and there was color everywhere you looked. Sawyer hadn’t liked it, but Birdie didn’t care. She loved it.
She’d collected lots of things from thrift stores and yard sales. Eclectic bohemian, she called it. Chairs held bright cushions and the floors multicolored rugs. Houseplants were everywhere.
After a quick tidy up, which was just her collecting things from the living area and throwing them on her bed, Birdie grabbed her bag and headed out the door. Looking at the lock, she wondered if she should use some of the money she’d saved to have a new one installed. That would stop Sawyer from getting in again. Not that he would, but still, it would keep people out when she was taking calls on Madame Fleur’s Flirt Line.
Jogging along the path between the cottage and her parents’ house, warm air settled around her. The day would be another hot one. Birdie looked over McAllister land. Gardens, trees, and various mismatched outbuildings were dotted everywhere. The vegetable plot was huge and provided produce for the stand at the end of the drive.
Honey, too, was collected from the hives her father spent hours tending. Reaching the farmhouse where she’d grown up, Birdie looked at the pile of timber stacked neatly outside her parents’ house.
Sawyer had put it there after he’d walked in on her talking dirty to Murray. Just the thought had her cheeks growing hot. What must he be thinking? More importantly, what if he told someone what he’d overheard?
The answering machine recording had clued him in about Madame Fleur’s Flirt Line. He, of all the people in Lyntacky, had to be the one to find out her dirty secret, and now she had to wait to see what he did about it.
Had he already told Ryder?
She felt jittery and off-balance. Birdie and Sawyer were just nodding-to-each-other people. He occasionally grunted hello, but now everything had changed.
But she knew he was a good guy, and that reassured her. He wouldn’t expose her… would he?
Sawyer might want people to see him as the eldest, grumpiest, and “someone who rarely gave a damn about anything” Duke, but Birdie knew better. Ryder had told her stories about his eldest brother that challenged the grumpy man Lyntacky saw.
She was also a watcher and had seen him do a few things others hadn’t. Like the time he’d picked up Peter Black after he’d fallen off his bike and driven him home. And the night he’d taken Sam Stevens’s keys away when he was going to drive drunk.
Knocking on her parents’ front door, Birdie then opened it. She picked up the bill that was still on the floor before she closed it.
“Seriously?” Her mom and dad must have walked right over it when they came home last night. Scanning the paper, she found the total and winced.
