It'll Always Be Her, page 15
“I have a plan, yes,” she said. “A good one that will benefit this town.”
“But one that puts a historic part of Bliss Cove at risk.” He narrowed his gaze. “What happens to the Gardenia House if the library is shut down?”
She took a sip of her drink. “That will depend on whoever purchases it.”
“Which means it could be torn down. Apparently there’s not enough money to allocate for the house’s upkeep, it’s not protected by historical preservation regulations, and it would cost a fortune for anyone to buy it and turn it into a restaurant or a retail shop.”
“Clearly, you don’t know anything about real estate.” Marilyn’s lips compressed. “Or you’d know that the location is terrible for either retail or a restaurant. In fact, its accessibility is one of the reasons I’ve proposed moving the library.”
“That house is a lot more than just a library.”
A gleam appeared in her eyes.
He stepped back, suddenly wishing he’d kept his mouth shut. He also didn’t need word spreading that he was on Bee’s side—but she obviously needed more allies. Not even Marilyn knew what would happen to the house, or Bee, if the library was closed.
And what about the cat? What about the telescope in the cupola, and Bee’s signpost pointing the way to Treasure Island and the display of high school poetry and the colorful drawings with all the book characters?
“For someone who just arrived in town, you seem to know a lot about the Gardenia House,” Marilyn observed. “And Bliss Cove.”
Adam tried to smother his frustration—or at least hide it.
“Look, I don’t have a dog in this race,” he said. “But I’ve also visited a lot of historic places over the years, and I know how important they are.”
“So that’s turned you into the Gardenia House’s savior?” Marilyn picked up her drink. “You’ve got something in this race, Adam. Maybe not a dog, but possibly a little bee.”
She smiled and swept back to her stool at the end of the bar. Adam stalked back to his table, his spine still tense. He had no idea if he’d just made things worse for Bee…or himself.
He sat back down and pushed the plate of now-cold food away. As he closed his laptop, he couldn’t help himself from glancing in Bee’s direction. She was watching him.
His breath stuck in his chest. She said something to Scott, then rose and approached him. Adam’s pulse ratcheted up with every step she took, and by the time she was standing in front of him, his heart was punching against his ribs.
“Hi.” Though she smiled, wariness shone in his eyes. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah.” He swallowed. “Why?”
“I saw you talking to Marilyn, and you look annoyed.” She gestured to the creases on his forehead. “In fact, you’re still scowling. Is there a problem?”
Adam almost laughed. His problems were starting to pile up. He narrowed his gaze on the fire chief. “No problem. How’s your lunch date?”
Bee lifted her eyebrows. “You sound jealous again. I told you Destiny was looking to set me up. And yes, she arranged a date for Scott and me, but I texted him yesterday that I was starting to have feelings for someone else and that it wouldn’t be fair to anyone if he and I went on a date.”
Adam’s heart bumped against his ribs. He’d never wanted to be “someone else” more in his life.
“So Scott texted back that he understood but had the time off,” Bee continued, “and would I like to get together anyway to talk about the book display for the community fire safety program. I said yes, I would like that since we just got some new firefighter picture books in. Any other questions?”
Relief filled his chest along with something else—the sense that his goals and plans over the past for years, his drive to resurrect his true scientific career, were fading compared to what he was starting to feel for this woman whom he hadn’t expected. A woman who didn’t need any explanations.
Bee rested one hand on the back of a chair and leaned closer to him. “For what it’s worth, Scott is nice and a great fire chief, but I have no romantic feelings for him. Besides, Virgo isn’t my Juno sign.”
“Okay.” Adam had no idea what a Juno sign was, but it was hard to ask or even think about anything when his heart was doing a happy little jump rope-type thing.
“Sorry for being an ass,” he finally muttered.
“Thank you.” She straightened. “I was going to tell you about the lunch, but you’ve been locked up in the conference room all morning. Are you going back now?”
“Yeah. I need to get the script finished.” He tossed a few bills onto the table, adding an extra twenty for Rory as an apology for…also being an ass.
“I’ll walk out with you.” Bee started back to her table. “Just give me a couple of minutes to wrap things up.”
Adam put his laptop in his backpack and hitched the strap over his shoulder. He waited by the door, the last of his tension sliding away as Bee came toward him. It was even easier to breathe when he was around her.
“Confession.” She nudged him with her elbow as they walked out to the parking lot. “I know we agreed to the whole friendship thing, but I personally don’t need any more experiments to find proof of the fact that I like you as more than a friend.”
His heart started skipping in addition to jumping. He couldn’t think of anything to say beyond an inane, “I…uh, I like you as more than a friend too.”
She smiled. “Good to know.”
For the first time, Adam didn’t curse the tangled route between his thoughts and his speech. Because if he’d been able to articulate what he was actually thinking, he was pretty sure he’d end up telling Bee that he liked her as more than…like.
A lot more.
Chapter Thirteen
For the rest of the afternoon, Adam reviewed footage, worked on the script, and made the rounds through the library to figure out tonight’s shoot. Although he didn’t talk to Bee, he was constantly aware of her proximity to him.
Despite his determination to stay focused, his subconscious couldn’t ignore her. If he was in the mezzanine, he knew where she was on the lower floor; if he was in the conference room, he sensed her at the circulation desk; if he was in one of the alcoves, he heard her speaking to her coworkers in the fiction stacks.
He relived their parking lot kiss and wondered how he could convince her to participate in another “experiment.”
At four, she led an after-school storytime for first and second graders. The children’s section was crammed into a tiny, windowless area at the back of the house, and Bee sat on the floor with five kids clustered around her.
Telling himself he was scouting a possible shoot location, Adam hovered among the picture-book shelves. He listened to her telling the kids a story about a giraffe who loved to dance. The sound of her voice—warm, delighted, dipping and swaying along with the rhythm of the story—filled him with pleasure.
He didn’t even have a name for what he felt when he was near her, which he told himself was for the best. He’d spent much of his life examining things down to the minute detail, from all angles, and picking them apart. This time, for once, it was a relief just to leave something alone.
As Bee and the kids talked about their favorite characters in the book, Adam scanned the titles on the picture-book shelves. He pulled one out and looked at the cover of a boy in a white wolf costume leading a parade of huge monsters.
Sitting on the floor, he read the book and studied the pictures that grew bigger and bigger until the scenes were almost bursting past the edges of the pages.
He reached the end of the book, then flipped back to the beginning and started it again. He liked that Max “made mischief,” the same term John Marcus had used about Halloween revelers.
He read it a third time. It was pure fantasy of course, even including phenomena like hypnosis, but he appreciated the creativity and the artistic talent.
His eyes returned several times to one line in particular—when Max “wanted to be where someone loved him best of all.” For the boy, that was back home, where his mother had his still-hot dinner waiting for him.
“Hey, boss, what’re you doing down here?” Harry peered around the corner of the bookshelves. “We’re staging Clyde’s positions if you want to check them out.”
“Yeah.” Adam pushed the book back onto the shelf and got to his feet. “I’ll be there in a sec.”
With a salute, Harry headed back to the main room. Reminding himself of his vow to get his head back in the game, Adam left the children’s section.
Still holding a stack of picture books, Bee had stopped beside a cluster of tables populated by the library assistant Peter and six high school kids squinting at their laptops.
As Adam passed, Bee caught his eye and smiled. His pulse skyrocketed.
“Are you busy right now?” she asked.
“No,” he lied.
“Would you mind hanging out here for a few minutes?” She glanced at the clock. “I have to get these books put away. The teacher who runs the study group is late, and Peter could use an extra hand to help the kids with math and English. Lorena texted that she’ll be here in fifteen minutes.”
“Sure.”
“Perfect, thank you. Peter tutors until closing. Text me if you need anything.” Bee quickly introduced him to the kids and hurried off.
“What’re you all working on?” Adam pulled up a chair and sat next to Peter.
“Geometry.”
“Shakespeare.”
“Pre-calc.”
“Physics.”
Every word was said with an accompanying groan or eye roll.
“I’m probably not much help with Shakespeare, but I’ve got the other subjects covered.” Adam glanced at the laptop screens. “What’s your homework?”
“I can’t even access the course outline.” One of the kids stabbed the enter key on his keyboard. “The Wi-Fi here totally sucks.”
“Not to mention, it’s, like, a crappy zone for cell signals,” agreed a blond girl who was working on her phone.
“Why can’t we have our study group at Java Works?” another boy complained, putting his head down on the desk. “We could get coffee and have a decent connection.”
“Well, print books aren’t affected by bad Wi-Fi.” Adam pushed his chair back and went to the science section. After perusing the shelves, he grabbed a few books and returned to the table. “Tell me about the concepts you’re working on.”
One by one, the kids outlined the problems they were trying to solve, from cyclic quadrilaterals to rational functions and wave particle duality. Although Adam no longer worked directly with equations and problem-solving, it was an easy, comfortable return to familiar territory.
He liked explaining the principles behind the concepts, how to solve the equations, and—most importantly—why it all mattered. The kids didn’t light up with fascination, but they grudgingly did the work, and a couple of them even sat up straighter when they understood what they were doing. Even Peter took a few notes.
“Yo, Powers.”
They all glanced up to find Clyde Constantine standing nearby, decked out in his black special ops ghost-hunter gear and fully made-up and hair-sprayed.
A few audible gasps of awe came from the students. Clyde gave them a sweeping smile before settling his gaze on Adam.
“We need to start shooting right at eight.” He tapped his military wristwatch pointedly. “I’m not working a minute past ten tonight.”
“I’ll be ready as soon as I’m done here,” Adam said.
Clyde frowned. “I need you to check the lighting before we shoot.”
“I’ll get to it.” Adam turned back to the physics student and continued helping him work out the problem.
When the teacher arrived with apologies for being late, Adam said goodbye to the kids and walked down to the basement, where they’d set up tonight’s shoot.
“Yo, what the hell was that?” Clyde demanded, his fake-blue eyes hardening.
“What?” Adam picked up the shot list and scanned it.
“You can’t contradict me in front of my fans,” Clyde hissed.
Adam smothered a groan. He’d learned long ago that Constantine had a paper-thin ego, but he was still figuring out how to deal with it as the show’s director.
“It’s almost eight,” he said, turning everyone’s attention to the task. “Let’s get started.”
“Clyde, you’ve got a shiny spot.” Paul indicated his forehead.
Clyde darted over to Krista, who waited with her arsenal of makeup to de-shine the star.
The shoot itself went smoothly, with Clyde reciting his lines into the camera, discussing the results of the previous night, and widening his eyes in astonishment over some discovery that they’d figure out and edit in later.
Clyde left at five minutes to ten, and the crew started packing up the equipment for the night. As Adam wound up an extension cord, his phone buzzed with a call from his sister. He tossed the cord into a crate and answered the call.
“Have you talked to Dad?” Laura asked after they’d exchanged greetings.
“Not for a while. Why?”
“He mentioned Martin Thornwall yesterday, which was a surprise. I hadn’t heard him talk about Thornwall since you resigned.”
Adam frowned. “Why’d he bring him up now?”
“He’d heard that a professor from some German institution had accused Thornwall of stealing his data. Something about a couple of elements.”
“Not surprising.” Adam crossed the mezzanine. “I knew I wasn’t the only one he’d stolen from. Probably not the first either.”
“No, but you were the only one who made a public charge against him,” Laura said. “And an accusation from another professor might give you more credibility.”
“Who’s the professor?”
“George Klein.”
Adam blinked. “Klein? He’s one of the top physicists in Europe. If not the world.”
“No wonder Dad heard about it. Keep your ear to the ground on this one, just in case.”
She updated him on the latest party details before they said goodbye and ended the call. Adam did an quick internet search for information about Thornwall and Klein, but there was only a short paragraph about the charge in a science newsletter.
He stuck his phone in his back pocket and folded up a camera tripod. Although he still wanted to see Thornwall taken down—and Laura was right that Klein stood a much better chance of doing the taking down than Adam had—he wasn’t going to hold his breath.
Not only did legal proceedings move at the speed of tectonic plates but he’d also bet there was already a behind-closed-doors discussion taking place that would both let Thornwall off the hook and return all credit to Klein.
But it was good to think Thornwall hadn’t gotten away with it again.
He and the crew finished cleaning up, and they filed out with waves and calls of, “See you tomorrow.” When he closed the front doors behind them, Adam realized he hadn’t seen Bee in the past few hours. And now, finally, he got to be alone with her.
After searching for her to no avail, he pulled out his phone. She’d said to text him if he needed anything and, right now, he kind of needed her.
Where are you? he typed, then waited for the signal to kick in and the message to send.
Break room, just past the children’s section. Having dinner.
Adam retrieved his own dinner from his backpack and walked toward the circulation desk. The cat Puffalump was pacing on top of the New Releases shelf, though he paused to give Adam a narrow look as he passed. If Adam believed in “the creeps,” he was pretty sure he’d have them around the weird cat.
A light glowed from the break room at the back of the library. He knocked briefly on the half-open door and pushed it open to reveal what used to be the house’s kitchen.
A scuffed counter and cabinets lined one wall along with an empty space that might have once held a stove and now contained an old mini-fridge. A faded sofa sat tiredly along one wall.
Like the rest of the library, the kitchen had peeling paint and warped floorboards, but the deterioration was mitigated by a table in the middle of the room, which was covered with a paisley tablecloth and held a cheerful little bouquet of wildflowers and a lit taper candle.
Bee was taking a bottled water out of the fridge, and she turned at the sound of the door opening.
“Oh, good.” She closed the refrigerator door. “I was hoping you’d join me. Have a seat.”
He scratched his head. “This is…unexpected.”
She smiled. “I always like to set the table nicely when I have dinner. It makes the food taste better.”
She pulled out one of the chairs and sat, opening the basket. Adam took the seat across from her and watched in bafflement as she took a china plate, a cloth napkin, and silverware from the basket and arranged it all in front of her.
He suddenly felt like a caveman with his greasy fast-food sandwich and chips.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t know we’d be eating together, or I’d have brought you a plate too.” She took a glass and several covered containers from the basket. “Thanks again for tutoring the kids earlier. Peter said you’re really good at it.”
“Glad to help.”
“Would you be interested in hosting a Mad Scientist hour for younger kids?” Bee asked. “Maybe after school tomorrow? We used to hold one every month, but we had to discontinue it. I know you’re super busy, but I’d love to bring it back at least once for pre-Halloween festivities.”
“Sure. What would I have to do?”
“Help guide the kids through experiments like making elephant toothpaste and soda-bottle volcanos, then explain the science behind them.” She shot him a quick smile. “Thanks so much. You’ll be great at the explaining part.”
He’d enjoy it, too. He’d always liked seeing other people’s eyes light up when they realized how cool science could be and when they understood the why behind chemical reactions and theories.
“I’ll have everything set up for you tomorrow around four.” Bee closed the lid on the basket.
