Now And Always (Crown Creek)

by Theresa Leigh

  He waited until I was done speaking, then nodded. "That might be nice," he agreed. Ethan always listened to my ideas. It was one of the things I liked best about him. "But I was actually leaning more toward something like this. Do you mind?" He gently took the book from me and flipped through the pages before setting it back down.

  There, taking up the whole wide expanse, was exactly what I had in mind.

  "Damn," I said softly.

  He'd drawn an intricately knotted piece that echoed the way real branches grew from a tree. Somehow, it was both rustic and elegant at the same time.

  It was perfect for Rachel and Beau.

  "The smaller branches are just decorative, and it's your choice but I was thinking of leaving the bark on in a few places. Just for the tonal variation. And then the main support pieces here and here, I thought I’d strip of their bark but use different stains and lacquers for each. Really bring out the expressiveness of the wood."

  As he spoke, the skin around his eyes softened. His lips curled upward in a dreamy half smile.

  The beauty of the design and the expression on his face made a flutter of nervousness kick up in my belly.

  "I was telling my new assistant about you," I blurted.

  The skin around his eyes tightened. I sighed in relief. His face was more manageable this way.

  "Claire." It was a warning.

  But I couldn't stop myself. "Don't get all freaked out again," I snapped. "She's got a boyfriend, you're safe." I winked. "For now."

  "For now," he repeated dully.

  "Oh, she's breaking up with him soon."

  "You know this?"

  "Course I know this."

  He sighed exasperatedly. "How, Claire? You want me to ask how you know this?"

  I did. I shimmied in my seat. "Because once she'd compared her idiot boyfriend to you, she started second-guessing her life choices."

  He stared at me. Air puffed past my cheek. But that was the only way I knew he'd just sighed.

  "Look, I know you just broke up with Alex." I held up my hand. "And we're totally not going there again. But listen, her name is Kelly and she has to work for me all day, so I can vouch for her ability to put up with annoying people." My mouth was moving too fast. I caught myself and brayed loud laughter. "I really think you'd like her, Ethan. She’s sweet."

  As he met my eyes, I didn't allow myself to lick my lips nervously, even though I desperately wanted to. Keeping my bright red lipstick intact seemed particularly important at the moment.

  I was pushing too hard. I could feel it. The whole reason we'd fought last week was because he'd stood up a date I'd set him up on. And now I was pushing him to meet up with another girl.

  I was totally testing him right now, and felt pretty shitty about it, but I had to know how far I could go. Was he going to stop me? Could I stop myself?

  After a beat, he blew out a breath that made the floppy strands on his forehead rise and fall. "Will it make you happy if I go out with her?" he asked in a monotone.

  "Hey, don't get all sarcastic. I'm trying to help your undateable ass."

  "Will it make you happy, Claire?" he repeated, a little less flat-sounding. His eyes flicked up to mine, and then back down to his sketchbook. "Anything to make you happy, Claire."

  "Great!" I crowed happily. Maybe he was just blowing smoke up my ass; I didn't care. That was normal.

  Everything was back to normal. Our fight was behind us, and my slip-up last week was behind me. We'd been safe and I got tested. Clean as a whistle. No harm, no foul. "I'll give her your number once she breaks up with the loser, okay?"

  "Sure."

  I frowned at how annoyed he sounded. Why wasn't he happy I talked him up to every single (and occasionally not-yet-single) girl I met? Ethan was a great guy. He should have a great girl. The fact that he seemed oblivious to this just proved how badly he needed my help.

  All my brothers were either in serious relationships or engaged. I was the oddball in the family. Getting married and settling down wasn't something I was interested in just yet.

  But Ethan? He needed a girl. He needed someone to update his wardrobe every so often and make sure he kept to a semi-human sleep schedule. He needed someone to remind him to get haircuts. He needed someone who would read and discuss thick books with him next to a roaring fire.

  I could picture his future wife so clearly. Tiny and petite, she wore thick glasses and had an affinity for fuzzy sweaters. She liked huge dogs and tiny kittens, and she didn't mind Ethan's silences because she was shy and quiet too. And in ten years, once I'd married a CFO, we'd fly our private jet home to Crown Creek and have a couples’ date with them.

  And whoever she was, I needed to fully vet her first. She had to be worthy of a guy like Ethan.

  So I was on the hunt.

  Whether he liked it or not.

  Chapter Four

  Ethan

  The sun battled the clouds all morning, but by late afternoon it gave up. A fine, freezing rain now fell, fast enough to mist up my windshield but not fast enough for the wipers. Every third pass, they skittered across my windshield with a screeching groan that drowned out my audiobook. Annoyed, I turned off the wipers and turned up the volume.

  This book was on accounting for small businesses. I'd hoped listening would help me absorb the concepts better. I didn't want to waste the money I'd paid for classes, but reading my textbooks kept putting me to sleep. Audiobooks were a last resort.

  I hit pause as I pulled into the far lot of Crown Valley Community College. It was an ugly campus, made uglier by the November gloom. But I wasn't here for the aesthetics. I was trying to start a business, and start it right, and that meant learning how to do my own books. So, at the age of twenty-three, I'd headed back to school.

  The walk from the commuter lot to my accounting class was just long enough for the freezing rain to plaster my hair into my eyes. I raked it back as I slid into my seat at the very back of the lecture hall.

  The younger students, fresh out of high school, clustered near the lectern in the front rows. I was only five years removed from them, but it felt like an entire generation. These kids viewed me as an old man, which was a new experience for me as I’d always been the “kid.”

  I was an 'oops' baby. My sister, Heather, was eleven years older than me, a divide that widened when she got married at nineteen. It widened further when she had my nephew Johnny at twenty. I was his uncle, but we were playmates, and Heather treated us both as her kids.

  Now, suddenly, I was the old one. “Mr. Bailey,” one fresh-out-of-high-school infant had called me when asking for a ride home. I'd even used the phrase "when I was your age" in a study group.

  Claire kept threatening to buy me suspenders and a newsboy cap to go with my old-man ways. This class was making me think I should just let her.

  My text alert buzzed right as the professor walked in. That was another difference between me and the kids down front. I kept my phone tucked away. They kept theirs front and center, face-up on the desk and checked every five minutes.

  The professor stalked in and slammed her briefcase down onto the table, then launched right into her lecture. There was the usual mad scramble into bags and the sound of laptops booting up.

  I took my notes by hand because it helped me process the information, but I had the slow, methodical handwriting of a draftsman and always struggled to keep up with lectures. I'd made it through high school because Claire always let me borrow her notes. She always broke out the complicated stuff into neat bullet points, even though she was smart enough not to need to.

  Maybe she did it for me?

  I wished she was in class with me now. She wouldn’t be afraid to call out when the professor said something that made no sense. She would demand the handouts be put online. I could almost hear her politely reminding the professor that it wasn’t 1970 anymore.

  The idea made me smile.

  No, I definitely wasn’t cut out for academic life, but I wanted to gi
ve my business the best shot I could. So I sweated out the two-hour lecture and managed to stifle my sigh of relief when it was done.

  “Mr. Bailey? You want to come over to the student union with us?” The giggly fetus in front of me batted her eyes.

  Claire would have laughed in triumph and then shoved me forward, yelling, “He’ll come!”

  Maybe it was a good thing Claire wasn’t here after all.

  “Thanks, but no. I gotta get going," I told her.

  As I emerged from the lecture hall and into the twilight, the streetlights along the central walkway flickered to life, sending out pools of sickly yellow light, one by one.

  Like me, everyone headed to the parking lots. But a few huddled shapes broke away from the crowd and veered toward the library.

  One shape moved with a sinuous gait that set off an alarm bell in my brain.

  The light overhead flickered on just in time to catch the profile of Lennon Knight.

  Confusion planted me to the spot. No way. No way that was him. The youngest Knight brother in college? And headed into the library, no less?

  When Lennon turned, I forced myself to stop staring in horror, and keep moving.

  I hurried past him, but when I realized I was running, I deliberately slowed down. A flush spread from my neck to my ears, but I wasn’t sure who I was pissed at. Them or myself.

  I stopped, suddenly filled with the desire to go back. To say something, for once. Tell Lennon that his brothers were dicks. Tell him to let them know that Ethan Bailey said hi. Yeah, that’s right, Bookworm Bailey sends his regards.

  Then I spun on my heel and cursed. Why the fuck would I want to do that? Why bring up old high school shit? I didn’t want to remember any of it.

  But my body remembered. My fists balled tightly at my sides; my shoulders tensed up near my ears. Heart in my throat, I scanned my surroundings for danger as I curled into a defensive hunch.

  And I hated myself for it.

  I hated that five years had gone by and I still jerked awake, covered in sweat, the sound of J.D. Knight's jeering laugh echoing in my head. I hated that I still looked over my shoulder when I carried a book in my hands, just waiting for Rocco Knight to appear behind me and knock it to the ground.

  I hated that I still didn't cross the tracks into their side of town. I hated that I even thought of it as "their side of town."

  Because I was twenty-three years old and I still lived in fear of my bullies.

  It was pathetic.

  I yanked my door open and then slammed it shut behind me. And I hated that too. Because what the hell was wrong with me that just seeing a member of their family had me shaking like this?

  I pulled out my phone to distract myself. Then remembered the text I'd gotten in class. It was my mother, writing me back.

  Mom: Sure honey. Come by tonight.

  Relief flooded through me. I had something to do now, rather than go home and second-guess myself.

  Me: Thanks. Be there in ten.

  Mom: Do you have my book?

  I smothered my laugh behind my hand.

  Me: It’s in my bag. You think I don’t know better?

  Mom: Good. I’ve got another one for you.

  I nodded, then flicked from her message over to my music app. Then turned on my truck.

  Heavy metal blared from the speakers. I put the truck in reverse and headed over to my parents’ house, blasting it as loud as I could to drown out my thoughts.

  Chapter Five

  Ethan

  My parents lived right in town, in the same narrow Victorian on a corner lot that I’d grown up in. The outside was just as cozy and crumbling as the inside.

  I loved this cluttered place, with its weird drafts and tricky doors that stuck shut in the summer time. The slanted roof over the back porch had been my treehouse as a boy. At nine, I’d broken my collarbone trying to leap from it into the neighboring oak, the way I’d watched a squirrel do. My mother always called that my one moment of recklessness. “I suppose you are a little boy,” she’d sighed as I cried and promised never to do anything so stupid again. “And you seem just as confused about what to do with yourself as I am.” Then she’d kissed my forehead, muttered about my too-long hair, and given me a book to read since I’d be spending the summer in a cast.

  “Hey,” I called as I walked in the unlocked front door. The house was full of the smell of old cooking and the astringent scent of the wood glue my dad used on his models.

  “Hey, baby, did you eat?” My mother emerged from the back room, dusting cat fur from her lap.

  “I’ve got food in the fridge at home,” I promised her. “I’m not here to mooch a dinner.”

  “All the other mothers complain they can’t keep their grown sons from eating everything in the fridge,” my mom observed. “I tell them I can’t get my son to stop putting food back into mine.”

  I bent nearly double to kiss her cheek. “Dad knows I’m borrowing his pyrography pen, right? You didn’t just decide for him?”

  “Yeah, I know,” my dad grumbled as he emerged from the back room, the wood-burning tool in hand. “What are you planning?”

  “I just have some tests I want to run. For scrollwork. See if what I have in mind is even possible. If it is, I’ll buy one for myself, don’t worry.”

  “Keep it as long as you need,” my mom butted in. “He has at least three.”

  “I only have the one!" my dad protested.

  “I’m the one who cleans your workshop." She batted his arm. "And I am telling you, you have three.”

  I grinned. My dad retired from the post office when he was fifty-five and I was ten. I’d been listening to this all my life.

  “Do you have my book?” my mom reminded me.

  My mom always insisted I borrow her books. But she had strict time limits for how long I was allowed to keep them. And God help me if I accidentally creased any pages.

  She and Claire’s mom had that in common.

  I pulled it from my backpack and bit my tongue to keep from laughing as she inspected it top to bottom. “No dog ears," she finally approved.

  “What do you think, I was raised in a barn?”

  She set it on the hallway table with the rest of the books that needed to go back to the library. “So what did you think?” she asked.

  “Not one of her best,” I said. “And I thought the twist was pretty predictable.”

  “Well, this one is much better.” She handed me the next in the series. “You’re probably going to want to give up pretty quickly, because it’s obvious from the beginning that the husband is the killer. But stick with it, because it’s the how and the why that matter more.”

  “Did you just give away the ending?”

  “No!” She blushed, and I laughed. "Oh, stop it and just read the book, Ethan. I want to know what you think.”

  “I will, Mom. Of course.” I turned to go.

  “And Ethan? Have you talked to Heather lately?”

  I turned back around. “Not since Sunday. Everything okay?” My sister had her own "oops" baby a few months back. “Is Kate all right?”

  “She’s still skinny but her thighs have chunked up so much in the past week. She has these little rolls now.” My mom squealed in grandmotherly delight. “But Heather sounds pretty run ragged.”

  I nodded. “I’ll call her.”

  “You’re a good boy.” She yanked me down into another hug.

  “I like Kate,” I protested, stepping out of her embrace. “I’ve never met such a chill baby.” My niece was pretty cute, it was true. “Hey, these aren’t overdue, right?” I asked, pointing to the teetering stack of books.

  “Only a little,” my mom demurred.

  "Mo-om."

  She threw her hands up in exasperation. "It's only a few days!"

  A lightbulb went off in my head. “Oh, I get it. You're hoping Mrs. King will hook you up."

  She lifted her chin defiantly. “I don’t ask her to erase my fines. She does it o
ut of the goodness of her heart. And because I always ask for news about her kids. Even though I already know everything she tells me because you've told me first.”

  I wasn’t sure what to say about that.

  “So next time I go to the library, what is she going to tell me?” my mom asked with a mischievous glint in her eye.

  “Uh, well probably about Beau and Rachel's wedding.”

  “Have they set a date?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think so. Claire didn’t say anything about it. Oh, but she did say she got a promotion at work.”

  “Really?!” My mom pressed her hand to her heart, and I loved her for being so happy for Claire. “Not that I’m surprised. Claire has really put herself out there.”

  “She’s going to crush it,” I agreed. “Like she does pretty much everything else.”

  My mom let her eyes flick up at me. “You’re so proud of her.”

  “She’s my friend. Of course I am.”

  “I know, honey.” She went on tiptoe and kissed my cheek. “You tell her I said congratulations.” She pressed the stack of books into my hands. “And return these for me? It's always a gamble for me, but I know Mrs. King will definitely waive the fines for you.”

  I sighed. “Sure, Mom. See you.”

  Chapter Six

  Claire

  I slid my key into the lock and opened the door to Granger Development.

  My key.

  Mine.

  After three weeks, the novelty still hadn't worn off. With my promotion came a much bigger desk, three new accounts, and my own parking space.

  But the key to the building was the part I liked the most.

  I liked it so much, I made sure I was the first person to arrive every morning, just so I'd get a chance to use it.

  I pushed the door open, and a turkey smacked me in the face.

  "When the hell did that happen?" I grumbled at the Thanksgiving decoration that had not been there when I left last night. I recognized it as the work of Kelly, my still-new assistant. November first, she'd taken down the fake spiderwebs and black cats that adorned the office all October. Then she'd set to work scattering cornucopias and pilgrim hats. I'd gotten used to this.