by Tracy Brogan
She shut the door to her bedroom and sat down on the twin-sized mattress that had been hers since she’d grown out of her crib. Being back at home still felt like a visit, but she’d been there for almost six weeks. It didn’t look like she’d be heading back to Chicago any time soon. Or that she’d be seeing Seth in the immediate future, either. Her stomach felt queasy, as if it were full of polliwogs, swishing around and bumping into one another.
“It’s a logical question. I haven’t talked to you in days.” She meant to sound sad, but it came out cranky.
“Baby, I’m working my ass off in San Diego, and there’s the time zone thing.”
“It’s a two-hour difference, Seth. It’s not like you’re in Australia.” Now she did mean to sound cranky.
“I don’t usually get back to my hotel room until midnight. You want me to call you at two a.m. your time?” A sharp spike of irritation stabbed into his tone, too.
She stared at the tape marks on her walls from spots where ’N Sync and Goo Goo Dolls posters had once hung, back when life was simple and easy. “I guess not. I’m just really frustrated. I miss you, and I miss my job.”
“I know. I’m sorry. Any luck on the job front?”
Libby drew in a breath, about to tell him all the details of her last interview, hoping he might cheer her up and nudge away the boulder of doubt pressing down against her shoulders, but the soft clickety-click of keystrokes on a keyboard stopped her.
Seth was typing. He wasn’t even listening to her. This was the first phone call they’d had in nearly a week, and he wasn’t even paying attention. “Nope. Nothing to report,” she said.
“Hmm. That’s too bad. Listen, though. There’s something we need to talk about.”
The clicking in the background stopped, and Libby felt an urgent need to brace for impact. Those polliwogs in her belly morphed into full-sized frogs.
The last time someone had said, “There’s something we need to talk about,” she’d gotten fired.
“Okay,” she said slowly, carefully, the way a bomb diffuser might say, “Now… cut the yellow wire.”
Seth blew out a breath. “I’m pretty sure I’m being transferred to San Diego permanently.”
She should have cut the red wire. “Permanently? As in permanently permanently?”
“Yeah. Permanently.” He sounded more certain that time.
She fell back against the pillows on her bed, clutching the phone more tightly.
There were earthquakes in San Diego, weren’t there?
Libby had never been in an earthquake. But she imagined there was a millisecond—just as the tectonic plates began to shift underground—when most people thought to themselves, Holy shit. This is an earthquake! She felt that way just now. Like everything around her was starting to wobble and there was no safe place to stand. “Wow. I was not expecting that.”
“I know.” He sighed. “I should have told you sooner, but I didn’t want to say anything until I was more certain. It’s pretty much a done deal now.”
“What? How long have you known about this?”
“Awhile, but my boss told me right about the time you were getting ready to move back in with your parents. And you’ve been having so much trouble finding a new job I didn’t want to make you feel worse by telling you I’m getting a huge promotion.”
Plates shifting. Ground splitting. Libby falling in.
“You’ve known about this for two months and you’re just telling me now? Seth, I’ve been trying like crazy to get a job in Chicago. Why didn’t you tell me to look in San Diego?”
There was a long pause.
And that’s when it hit her. Dinosaur, meet meteor.
“Oh.” The word kind of wheezed from her lungs. “You don’t want me to be in San Diego, do you.”
It wasn’t a question. A question needed an answer, and she already had hers.
“Now, Libby, it’s not that. It’s just that I’m working all the time. You wouldn’t have anything to do out here. You wouldn’t know anybody. And I really need to focus on my career right now. This promotion is a big leap forward, and I can’t screw it up because I’m worried about my unemployed girlfriend. Wait. That came out badly.”
It had come out badly. But it had also come out honestly. The land had shifted under her feet, and suddenly everything in Libby’s line of vision looked different than it had sixty seconds earlier.
“Seth, are you dumping me?” How calmly she said that. Inside her head it sounded much louder and more screechy.
“No, no, I’m not. I just… I think maybe we should try seeing other people for a while.”
Libby smacked her palm against her forehead and cursed Marti silently for seeing this before she’d seen it for herself.
“You mean see them naked?” Her voice roughened. She felt like a sea urchin had just burst inside her gut, with the pointy parts hitting every vital organ.
“Uh, God, Libby, that’s not what I meant. I just… look, I should have talked to you about this sooner, and I should have done it in person. I get that. There was just no good time. The point is, I’m moving to San Diego. I don’t want to break up with you, but I can’t promise you more of a commitment right now, either. I don’t think you should wait for me.”
Breathing hurt. Not because she was shocked, but because she wasn’t. She should have figured this out sooner, but she’d thought their emotional disconnect was because she was depressed about not having a job. But the truth was, even if she’d never been fired, Seth would’ve left for San Diego without her.
CHAPTER six
“Historic bricks are a lot softer, so you have to be careful about what mortar you choose.”
Tom Murphy was presenting pre-twentieth-century brickmaking 101 to her father at the ice-cream parlor while Libby sat a few feet away on an overturned bucket and scraped at window grout with a screwdriver and a razor blade. Nothing about this project was glamorous. All those spunky remodeling shows on television apparently edited out all the tedious parts. But Libby didn’t mind. This task was exactly what her brain could handle today.
It had been a week since her conversation with Seth. At first she’d been weepy, moping around, feeling tragic and raw, until even Nana started being nice to her.
Then a couple of nights ago Marti had taken Libby out and gotten her sloppy drunk. She’d made her talk about all of Seth’s annoying habits. It turned out he had a multitude. He left his dirty clothes on the bathroom floor. His knife always screeched across the plate when he cut something. He never gave her cards on Valentine’s Day. Or her birthday. He wasn’t particularly intuitive in bed. Oh, and he moved to San Diego with zero warning. There was that, too. Turns out Seth was a lousy boyfriend. What Libby had thought was love might have just been a comfortable habit.
Libby had woken up the morning after Marti’s intervention feeling like warmed-over hippo shit, but as her hangover faded, so did her heartache over Seth. She’d been making the break from him for weeks and weeks without realizing it. Now it was just official.
“What does the mortar have to do with it?” Libby’s father asked.
She looked over at the two of them, her dad in khaki pants and polo shirt, as casual as he ever got, and Tom in well-worn jeans and a navy T-shirt with MONROE MAVERICKS printed on it. It was an old shirt, faded, with a tiny hole near the neck, and she wondered if he’d gone there for high school.
“The firing process used to be very unpredictable, so there is no continuity to the strength of the bricks, and if you use mortar that’s too strong, you run the risk of the bricks crumbling around it. It’s just something to be aware of. Are you sure you don’t want me to go to the hardware store instead?”
“No, no. I can do this. I have the list you gave me. You stay here and make sure Libby doesn’t break another windowpane.” Her dad folded up a piece of paper and stuffed it into his pocket.
Tom glanced over and caught Libby’s eye.
“Thanks for your confidence in me, Dad. By
the way, who was it that broke the front railing? Oh, yeah. I think that was you.”
Her dad nodded and shrugged. “Yep, that was me. Good thing you’re here, Tom. If left to our own devices, Liberty and I might do more destruction than reconstruction of this fine building.”
Tom just smiled and adjusted his red baseball hat.
After her dad left, it was just Libby and the enigmatic Mr. Murphy, working silently. He seemed to be a man with only two settings: Work and Off.
Asked about construction or restoration, he could answer with wikipedic knowledge, but when it came to the niceties of polite conversation, Tom was cagier. Personal questions left him flushed and monosyllabic, like maybe he had some secrets behind those black-coffee eyes.
There was one thing she had figured out about him, though. Marti was right. Tom Murphy smoldered. Maybe it was the leather tool belt strapped around those hips, or the work-rough hands that seemed capable of so many tasks. Or it could be the muscles flexing under a sweat-dampened T-shirt. Whatever it was, there was something… and she liked it.
She plucked at the front of her pink T-shirt, trying to move a little air against her skin. Her hair was twisted in a sloppy knot on the top of her head, and her back ached. Six days of painstaking labor at this ice-cream parlor was about six too many, but at least now she was wearing sturdy hiking boots. She’d nearly put a nail through her foot two days ago while wearing tennis shoes. Tom had been right about her needing thicker soles.
Libby moved off the bucket to sit on the ground and leaned back against the wall, stretching out her legs in front of her. She studied Tom discreetly. He was to the left of her, on his knees using a chisel and hammer to dislodge old baseboard trim from the wall.
She leaned over and pulled a cold bottle of water from a nearby cooler. It was hot for September, and this work made her thirsty. She held the bottle against her neck for a minute before unscrewing the top and gulping half the contents down.
Tom paused in his motions and watched her drink.
“Do you want some water?” She wiped her thumb across her lip, catching a leftover drip.
He blinked at her once, twice, and shook his head as if remembering where he was. “No, I’m good. Thanks.” He looked back to the wall and hit the chisel with extra force. The clang echoed through the nearly empty room.
Libby pressed her lips together to capture her smile before it reached her lips. Tom Murphy had just checked her out. And she liked it. Take that, Seth.
“So, how long have you been a builder, Tom?” Judging from the size of his arms, he’d been at it for a while.
“A while,” he answered, as if reading her mind.
She hoped he couldn’t read the rest of it, because she was imagining those arms just then wrapped around her waist. She was being silly, of course. Tom was not remotely her type, all down-homey and baseball-hat-wearing. She liked her men metro and stylish. The kind of men she met in Chicago who wore expensive suits and used product in their hair. Right now she couldn’t even see Tom’s hair, except for the bits that stuck out from under his hat, which he was currently wearing backward. That was a look she had never appreciated—until now.
“Did you grow up in Monroe?” she asked.
He shook his head. “Nope.”
“Where did you grow up?”
“Concord.”
Concord was a small, one-traffic-light town just east of Monroe. Libby drove through it every time she made the hour-long trek between Chicago and her parents’ house.
“Was it a nice place to live?” She took another sip of water.
“Nice enough.” He readjusted the chisel and hit it again, not looking her way.
“Do you still have family there?”
“Nope.”
This was starting to feel like a game. She could tell she was annoying him, but there was a certain thrill in watching his shoulders rise and fall, as if giving her an answer made him sigh with resignation.
“Do you have family anywhere?”
He stopped and stared at her now. “Don’t you have something else you could be doing?”
She smiled. “Nope. I’m on a break.”
A smile twitched at the corner of his mouth, and his voice held no heat. “Well, I’m not on a break, and all this chatter is a little distracting.”
She smiled bigger, deciding to tease him just to see how that might go. “I’m sorry. I assumed you could talk and hammer at the same time.”
His eyebrows rose a fraction. “Your father pays me by the hour, you know. Every time you slow me down it costs him money.”
She thought of her sacrificed wedding fund. “Technically it’s my money he’s spending.”
“What?”
“Never mind. Anyway, do you have family around here?”
Tom sat back on his heels and regarded her until she felt a flush creep up from the center of her body. “How about I ask you a question?” he said.
“Okay. Go ahead.” This should be interesting. What could the steady, silent Mr. Murphy want to know about her?
“Why is your name Liberty Belle?”
Oh, that. She took a slow, deliberate sip of water before answering. “My father is a history fanatic, and at the time, my mother was a good sport. But don’t ever call me Liberty Belle and expect to walk away unscathed.”
He stared at her for a heartbeat, his eyes dark. “It’s got a nice ring to it,” he finally said with a smile, and then he turned back toward the wall and poised the chisel over the trim.
Libby crossed one ankle over the other and chuckled in response. “Oh, you’re very clever. I’ve never heard that one before. I suppose your name is something very dull and typical, like Thomas James or Thomas Michael.”
He flicked her with a glance. “Nope.”
She took another sip of water. “Phillip?”
He jostled the chisel. “Not even close.”
“Matthew? Mark? Luke? John? Paul?” She paused. “Ringo?”
“It’s a secret,” he said.
Libby pulled her legs in then, crossing them and leaning on her thighs with both elbows. “Oh, I love secrets.” She also loved that they were very nearly having a conversation. Granted she was doing all the labor, but he hadn’t left the room yet, and that was progress. It was the first time they’d exchanged information that didn’t have to do with wiring or building codes.
But Tom shook his head. “Done talking. Working now.”
“I’ll make up something awful if you don’t tell me what it is,” she threatened.
He looked over his shoulder. His gaze roved over her in a less subtle way than it had before. “You couldn’t make up anything worse than what it is.”
Her heart thumped a little at the light in his eyes. “I’m very clever.”
“I’m sure you are.”
“Then you’d better tell me.”
He sighed, a big, exasperated sound, and turned around. He leaned one shoulder against the wall and crossed his arms, holding the chisel in one hand and a hammer in the other. “Murlan.”
A huff of laughter escaped before she could stop it, not that she would have tried. After all, the man had seen her bare-assed naked in the dirt. The scale of humiliation was still decidedly tipped in his favor. “Merlin? Like… the magician?”
He shook his head. “No, Murlan, as in M-U-R-L-A-N. It was my grandfather’s name.”
She nodded, and felt her smile widen. “You’re right. That’s pretty bad. But mine’s still worse.” She picked up the plastic bottle and tipped her head back, drinking the last of the water.
He watched her, and then abruptly turned back to the wall. He jammed the chisel in behind the wood and clanged the hammer so hard against it, the dry wood gave a loud crack and splintered into a dozen pieces. Tom jumped back and cursed, pulling his hand away and making a fist. He landed on his butt on the floor with a thud.
“Are you okay?” Libby leaned forward.
He opened his fist and looked at his hand. “Yeah,
I’m fine. I just got a splinter.”
“Let me see.” She got up and moved closer.
He held his hand behind his back. “It’s fine.”
“Then let me see it. I used to work in a vet’s office. I’m practically a nurse.”
He smirked with humor, and after a moment’s hesitation, presented her with his open hand. A thick splinter protruded from the side of his index finger.
“Oh, ouch. Do you want me to get the first-aid kit?”
He chuckled. “It’s fine.” He squeezed the pad of his finger, pulled out the splinter, and popped the injured fingertip into his mouth.
Libby watched with morbid fascination. “Wow. That is probably the most unsanitary thing I’ve ever seen. And I worked in a vet’s office, remember?”
He pulled out his finger. “But efficient and fast. That’s my motto. Get in, get done, get out.”
His lips pressed together as soon as the words were out. The sexual innuendo could not be missed, nor could the instant infusion of color into his cheeks.
“Well,” she said, very much enjoying his embarrassment. “Efficiency is what counts. As long as you get the entire job done.”
He stared at her, blinking slowly, while she grinned back.
At last, with a tiny tilt to his head, he said, “I always get the entire job done, Miss Hamilton.”
She felt her own cheeks flush at the thought. “I’m very glad to hear that, Mr. Murphy. Now I think I’ll get you a bandage before you bleed all over my father’s ice-cream shop.” Libby turned away and felt an inexplicable sense of triumph.
I always get the entire job done, Miss Hamilton? What had possessed him to say that? It was practically a flirtation, and he had tried very hard over this past week to establish himself as disinterested in anything of that sort. He’d heard Libby and her sister talking about some commitment-phobic boyfriend out in San Diego, and Tom was not about to be her rebound experiment. It didn’t matter how long those legs of hers were. Or that her smile left him weak in the knees. He wasn’t interested. His only priority in this building was to do his job and turn this place into an ice-cream parlor for Peter Hamilton. Outside of that, his only priority was convincing Rachel to come and live with him.
