She didn’t even have a weapon. She looked around for something to use to defend herself, and came up with a picture hanging on the wall beside the door. She removed it with some effort—it was heavier than it looked—and she probably gave away the element of surprise when she dropped her calming stone—ha—in the process. She braced the painting in front of her and headed toward the noise coming from the kitchen.
Taking a deep breath, she charged through the swinging door, raising the frame over her head, to see Samson Guillory standing in front of her stove.
Which he had taken apart.
“What are you doing here?” she demanded. And how had he gotten here so fast? She hadn’t been at Allison’s shop that long.
She had been thinking about him on her walk home, wondering why he’d come back to the town he’d been so eager to escape. And wondering at her reaction at seeing him at the bar—the attraction had come back so sharply, followed reluctantly by the resentment and anger she still held onto.
Had she somehow summoned him?
“Duval said you needed your stove fixed, so I came to fix it.”
She wanted to snatch the wrench out of his hand. Only then did she realize she was still holding the painting. She lowered the frame to the floor and leaned it against the table.
“What were you going to do with that? Smash it over my head and trap me inside it like a Scooby Doo villain?”
She choked out a laugh, carrying some adrenaline with it. “I’m not sure, actually. Maybe I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone. I always hated that painting.” She turned the image of the swamp at night, Spanish moss dripping from the branches creating creepy shapes, around to face the table. “I didn’t know what to expect.”
“No one ever does around here.” His voice was low and smooth, as it had been at the bar.
And in her dreams when she was growing up. She’d had a such a crush on him when she was a teenager. He was a few years older than her and his sister Susan, who had been her constant companion during those long-ago summers. She hadn’t seen him since her last summer here, when she’d been sent back home early.
Because of him.
But once again, curiosity won out over pride.
“I thought—last time I talked to Susan, you were in law school?”
“Architecture,” he corrected gently.
She frowned a second. She thought she would remember that. But a lot had happened in the intervening years. “What are you doing back here?”
“Dad fell a few months ago, broke his back. Needed a lot of help, and Mom couldn’t do it by herself.” He lifted a shoulder. “So I came back. Helped them out, but staying around the house all day is hard, you know, so I started doing handyman stuff. Mom asked me to look in on this place, too, now and again. I’m sorry about your grandparents, Erielle.”
The wave of emotion that struck her with his words took her by surprise. She hadn’t cried in a while, but now tears burned the backs of her eyes and her throat swelled so that the only way she could respond was with a nod.
The last person she wanted to see her cry was Samson, so she pushed past the emotion and gestured toward the stove, which her grandparents probably brought with them when they moved here in the seventies. “Am I going to need to replace it?” Maybe she could get a countertop convection oven. Those were pretty cheap, right?
“I mean, yeah, not much longer, but I think I can get it limping along for you. You’re not going to be making soufflés or anything in it, are you?”
Alarm zinged through her. But of course he would know about her. She wasn’t a household name, exactly, but she did have some fame, and surely Susan would have mentioned her, though she hadn’t talked to Susan in years.
How much did he know, though? Did he know about her downfall? That this was the only place she’d had to turn? The rest of the country did.
Her stomach tensed. She’d thought she was such a big deal, and look where she’d ended up. In an old house with old appliances, and she’d be pulling drafts tonight at a roadside bar.
“No soufflés. Just warming up frozen dinners. Too much work to cook for one person.”
He lifted his eyebrows. “Did you think about applying at the diner?”
“Mr. Duval made it sound like that wasn’t an option.”
He lifted a shoulder and turned back to the stove. “Probably isn’t.”
She didn’t know what to do while he was working on the stove. She traced her fingertips over the flaking stain on the tabletop. “Can you tell me what to expect tonight?”
“What, at Rumrunner’s?”
