Just then Pim showed up with my smoothie and gave me a stern look. “Drink it. And if you want to know what Sam is going to do, simply ask the man.” He looked over my shoulder with a tilt of his chin before returning to the kitchen. I turned around to see Sam sitting with Mikey and Tiller at the counter. He was busy scribbling notes with a pencil on a yellow legal pad.
I turned back around to face Chaya and tried not to look as flustered as I felt.
“Your cheeks are like little red apples,” Chaya said with a shit-eating grin. “Funny, you don’t get apple-cheeked about Mr. Balderson.”
“His name is Barney.”
“Babe, I grew up here. He’s been our librarian for a thousand years. We always called him Mr. Balderson. No amount of nookie with my bestie is going to change that.”
I shuddered. “No nookie, and you know that.”
“That’s not what Big Daddy told his model trains club,” she singsonged.
“What?” I cried, unaware of how loud it came out. “What the heck are you talking about?” If Barney had told his model train friends lies about me…
“Gordon Iverson told me Barney had asked the group for a bed-and-breakfast recommendation. He said he wanted someplace special to take his beau for an intimate weekend alone.”
I groaned. “I just want to be friends with the man. He’s been so good to me, especially after everything that happened in December with the Stanners confronting me and then with Mikey and Pim’s accident in front of the shop. How do I convince him I just want to be friends?”
I didn’t have many friends as it was, and I didn’t want to lose one of the few who cared about me.
Before she could answer, Chaya’s eyes widened before a shadow appeared over my shoulder.
“You okay, Truman?” a familiar and delicious deep voice asked from behind me.
I looked up into Sam’s handsome face. His blond hair was scattered about like he’d driven down the mountain in a convertible with its top down, and his eyes bore their usual intensity. I felt my stomach take a dive.
“Your eyes look like rosemary,” I blurted.
No one said anything, so I scrambled to fill the awkward silence. “Ha, but not… not like… I only mean the rosemary plant has the same sort of dusty green color, you know? Rosemary? The herb? Do you know it? Salvia rosmarinus? Never mind.”
Sam reached out and cupped my cheek gently with one of his hands before squatting down so he was on my level. His thumb brushed lightly across the remnants of the scrape from my driveway tumble the night before. He moved his mouth next to my ear, and I almost straight-up fainted onto the floor of the diner.
He smelled like pine and lemons… mint, maybe, from his morning toothpaste. I wanted to inhale every single scrap of his scent I could get my nose on. Chaya stared in shock while my dick strangled itself in my jeans.
“Can I swing by your place later?” he asked softly against the shell of my ear. “This town seems to have eyes and ears everywhere, and I’d like to talk to you in private.”
I turned my cheek against his, feeling the soft scrape of his whiskers. I let my eyes close for a second, just enough to savor the feel of his warm, bristly skin against mine.
“Uh-huh,” I breathed.
As he pulled away from me, I swore I felt his lips brush against my cheek. My heart felt like it was going to thunder into outer space.
Chaya’s eyes were wide and her lips made an o shape.
“Sorry to interrupt,” Sam said calmly to Chaya. How he could remain so relaxed after that little interlude was beyond me. I felt like the entire universe had just cracked and shifted like a brand-new Rubik’s cube. All the colors had been nice and tidy before but now they were mixed-up and jumbled. It would be impossible to get them put right again.
As he walked away, Chaya’s eyes moved over to land on me like dual interrogation lamps. “That is the hottest man I think I’ve ever seen in my entire life.”
I nodded numbly because it was true.
“And he practically made love to your face,” she added.
I nodded again.
She patted her chest. “Jesus. I might need a little one-on-one time with my vibrator after that.”
Pretty sure I was still nodding. She wasn’t the only one.
“And he’s friends with Mikey and Tiller?”
I swallowed. “Yuh-huh. He does construction for them.” Or something. My brain wasn’t quite all the way back online yet.
She snorted and reached out a hand to snap her fingers in front of my face. “Babe. Focus. I have to leave in like ten minutes, and I can’t do that until you’ve downloaded everything into my drive. Got me?”
“That sounds dirty.”
Now she was the one nodding. “Exactly. So now why don’t you tell me why you’re going to a B&B with Barney Balderson when that blond muscle beast over there wants to make bumblebee babies with you?”
I buried my face in my hands with a groan. “First of all, I’m not going to a B&B with Barney. I told you, we’re broken up. Secondly, Sam does not want to make… whatever with me. He’s just worried about me since he saw me getting bullied. I’m clearly the kind of guy who can’t handle things himself. He feels sorry for me.”
“Mm,” she said, leaning back again with a thinking look on her face. “So why is he whispering sweet nothings in your ear?”
“He’s not. He just asked if he could talk to me in private. He probably wants to make sure I follow through on filing a witness statement against Patrick.”
“He’d be right. But are you going to do it? You know I have your back, for whatever that’s worth.”
I bit my lip nervously. That note was still fresh in my mind, and I knew if I pushed Sheriff Stanner to arrest his own nephew, things would go from bad to worse.
“Thank you. I think if he asks me to be a witness to the bike crash, I’ll have to do it. Patrick will definitely retaliate.” I thought again about how to beef up my home security. Maybe I could temporarily close the shop here in town and stay home until the whole thing blew over. I had plenty of work to do on the farm, and I could send my internet orders from home.
“If he does construction, maybe he can help fix your driveway gate,” she suggested, as if reading my mind. “Might as well make himself useful if he expects you to put yourself at risk for his sake.”
I glared at her. “Obviously he doesn’t know I’d be putting myself at risk. And I’m certainly not going to tell him that. I’ll just give the witness report and suffer the consequences. I owe it to him for stopping to help me. Besides, he’s a friend of Mikey and Tiller’s. I don’t want things to get awkward with them if I refused to make a report.”
And hopefully that was true. Sam might not believe me, considering I’d told him Patrick had it out for me. Maybe there was a way for me to downplay the whole thing like it was no big deal. I’d talk to him about it when he came to my place.
Sam was coming to my place.
Chaya grunted her disapproval and dug into her breakfast like some kind of feral dog. When she was done, she took a final gulp of coffee and threw some cash on the table for her share. “Sorry to eat and run. Call me later?”