Or maybe I was simply going crazy.
For him.
Heaven help me.
35
Tandem Trouble
Griff
Maisie was gone for the afternoon – something about a meeting with her bank.
The shop, however, was open. Apparently, this put me in charge.
It wasn't a big deal. Hell, I sort of liked it – the fact that Maisie trusted me with her shop. But I'd be lying if I didn't admit that the place wasn't half so interesting without her in it.
Yesterday, I'd almost kissed her.
And the way it looked, she'd wanted to be kissed.
I'd call it a win-win, except it wasn't, not with me heading for the proverbial door. Whether I stayed only a month or stuck it out through the end of the season, it would still be a shitty thing to do – to chase a summer fling when Maisie deserved better.
So that wasn't gonna happen.
End of story.
But it didn'tfeellike the end. It felt like the beginning, because no matter what I was doing, she was still in my head whether I wanted her there or not.
And today, the weather wasn't helping.
The rain from yesterday had stuck around, and business had remained brutally slow. I'd seen no sign of Devon or Sierra, but that didn't mean I wasn't keeping an eye out.
Since Maisie's lunchtime departure, I'd been dealing with only the hardiest of tourists – those who thought a little rain made for a great adventure and didn't mind getting soaked to prove it.
I could relate. They were my kind of people.
Even so, it made for a boring afternoon – untiltheyshowed up.
Not Devon and Sierra.
It was worse.
It was the two guys I'd spotted casing the shop on my very first day. I hadn't liked them then. And I liked them even less now.
One was tall and wiry with a prominent nose and jutting chin. He was dressed all in black, including a black windbreaker with the hood pulled tight around his face.
The other guy was blocky and thick, wearing a tan trench coat and dark sunglasses in spite of the rain-soaked sky. In the ridiculous getup, he looked like a gumshoe in an old black-and-white movie – the kind where men wore fedoras and women were called dames.
Today, the two guys were doing the same sort of things that had caught my attention the first time I'd spotted them, back when Mister Gumshoe had been dressed like a regular dude.
By now, they had already passed the shop at least a dozen times, sneaking obvious looks through the front window – not browsing, but casing the place for whatever.
From my spot behind the front counter, I stared through the glass, not bothering to hide it. When they caught me looking, they stopped and looked back with open hostility, as if waiting for me to look away.
I didn't.
I wasn't planning to either.
