“You can’t prove anything you just said.”
Erin reached into her backpack again. Seth slipped back into the first row of chairs.
“Here are pictures from your garage, here are the transcripts from dispatch for the four fires, where it shows you showing up at least a half an hour after the fires were fully involved and finally, my testimony from the fire on Fire Mountain where I saw you in your chief’s ball cap, white T-shirt and BDU pants. I’m sure they smell like smoke and probably have traces of black powder on them.”
“Chief, is this true?” the chairman asked.
“No. Of course not,” he sputtered.
“Chief,” the chairman said as a warning.
Erin raised her eyebrows at him in a challenge.
“Firefighters save lives. Miss…she’s been saved a bunch this week by firefighters. Ask her,” he said getting redder.
“I was only in danger from fires that you set.”
“Bitch. I’m saving jobs and the community. I did what I had to do to make sure that we had jobs,” the chief spat.
“Mr. Morris. Are you admitting to setting fires to save firefighter jobs?” the chairman asked in disbelief.
“This proves nothing!”
“It proves that you are done in Serenity Harbor,” Erin said, nodding to the waiting police officers who had moved closer and closer as she spoke, though she hadn’t told them anything prior to the meeting.
The police clasped handcuffs on the chief and led him out of the room.
She made eye contact with Seth. There was no emotion behind his look. She leaned into his face. “I told you I was good at my job. Maybe you should have trusted me.” Without another word, she left the room by herself.
Chief Mark Morris was arrested at Thursday’s Serenity Harbor’s town council meeting on four counts of arson. He was arraigned and his trial is set for mid-October. Bail was denied.
It had been almost a week since the show down at the council meeting as she came to think of it. There had been no more fires this week and the ex-chief’s house had been thoroughly checked over. Although all of the stuff she had taken was inadmissible in a court of law, the rest of the stuff there was enough to keep him behind bars.
“Morris was very clever in his crimes. He used the black powder because it would burn up. The tiny igniter from the rocket acted as a heat source, couple those with the dry summer we’ve had and it was the perfect way to start a fire,” said Fire Marshal Terrance Wallace.
Wallace added that the small igniter from the rocket was easily missed when investigators searched the site for clues as to ways the fires started.
Seth hadn’t called, but she’d seen him out front of the station. He wore a T-shirt when he washed the rigs now because the weather had changed and it was colder. Erin let a sigh escape.
“Hey, why don’t you call him?” Sandy asked.
“I can’t.”
“Why the hell not? You’re crazy about him and the ladies down at the nursing home are rewatching the town council meeting just to see him look at you. It makes their hearts flutter,” she said.
“I’ll think about it.” There was a pause. “Really? They watch it over and over.”
“I’ll admit I’ve watched it a few times. You were bad ass.”
Erin smiled. “Go home. You should have left an hour ago.”
“Promise me you’ll consider talking to him.”
Erin nodded. Inside she smiled. She’d been planning to seek him out tonight. She’d even talked to his friend Craig, who said that Seth had been a bear all week.
As soon as Sandy left, Erin slipped on a dress, applied mascara and lipstick and with her backpack over her shoulder left the office on her way to blindside Seth.
Craig met her at the door to the station. She was welcome there again since the chief was in prison and Craig was the acting chief.
“He’s in the kitchen. Be careful, there are knives in there.”
Erin’s low heels clicked on the floor alerting Seth and turned. His jaw dropped, then he regained his footing and schooled his features.
“I’m looking for the man they call Greenway,” she said all business like.
“You found him,” he said playing along.
“I’m Erin Ridge from the Serenity Harbor Gazette.”
“I’ve heard of you.” He set down the ladle he was holding and circled around the island. “What can I do for you?”
“I’m in need of a strong, muscular, well-built, strappy firefighter.”
“Someone’s been reading her thesaurus. What do you need?”
She moved closer to him so he could check out her plunging neckline and smell the perfume she’d put on. This was the girliest he’d ever seen her and it was having the right effect on him and the other men in the doorway watching the scene.
“I need you. I’d rather have you in my life than be right all the time.” She threw her arms around his neck and pulled him in for a searing kiss.
He stepped back from her. “I was wrong. I didn’t know how to say it. I’ve been miserable. I’m sorry I doubted you and didn’t stick by you. From now on, you’ll have to use a bomb to get me away from you.”
“Nothing that dangerous, please. I’ve had a problem with fire in the past.”
He hugged her to him, planting a kiss on her eyes, nose and lips. The men in the door roared their approval.
“I love you,” she told him.
“No more than I love you. Now get me out of here. There are too many people and you’re wearing too many clothes. I’ve missed you.”
She nodded and grasping his hand, pulled him out of the kitchen, down the stairs and out into the evening air.
“Come on Mr. Fireman, I’ll take you home and let you light my fire.”
“That’s just what I had in mind.”
The End
About Michelle Libby
Michelle Libby spends her days as an editor at a weekly newspaper she helped create. She has had many different career paths, but nothing that beats sharing the made up worlds and people who live in her books.
Born and raised in Maine, Michelle has all the inspiration she needs in her own backyard. She's married to her very own hero and spends a lot of time with her almost adult children. Michelle enjoys reading, camping, and has a strong competitive streak. She loves to hear from her readers at: [email protected]
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AUGUST
Love in the
Library
Maggie Robinson
Rob Campion is a male librarian who believes in literature with a capital L. Belle Standish is a female romance writer who doesn’t believe in love. When they spend a night with the lights out, will they wake up on the same page?
Dedication
For Ely, Kris and Tiff
Chapter 1
“Watch out for the quiet ones,” advised the Dowager Duchess of Whitford.
“They’ll break your heart every time.”
—The First Sin is the Sweetest by Belle Standish
Rob Campion was used to dealing with women. He had a mother, of course. Three sisters. He had been one of only two men in his master of library science program, surrounded by the so-called fairer sex of all ages and attitudes. One would think he’d have women all figured out by now, filed away in his organized mind like a Dewey Decimal System for Females. Like Mitt Romney’s Binders Full of Women.
One would be wrong.
He raked a hand through his prematurely-graying hair to keep himself from screaming. His sister Ely teased him about that hair and called him Richard Gere without the Cindy Crawford years, the Buddhism or the millions.
The fact was, Rob was shy, absolutely nothing like a cocky officer and a gentleman. He’d never really had a Debra Winger to sweep off the factory floor in a
grand romantic gesture. The fact that that was his Gere point of reference only showed how behind the times he was. For a film fan, he hadn’t gotten around to watching The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel yet—it was very popular with his older patrons and went out as soon as it came in.
The shoe shops and tanneries and canneries had closed in Serenity Harbor anyhow—too déclassé and smelly for all the rich summer residents and their “cottages.” But Mainers were resilient, and town folks now worked in the very profitable tourist trade, did carpentry at the big houses, lobstered. Sometimes all three.
Rob preferred to be surrounded by books, which didn’t tease, talk back and demand, or need to be banded against pinching. Thanks to him and his grant-writing genius, the town library was firmly in the information sciences business, and now he was surrounded by computers, too. And his current assistant had somehow shorted out the whole network when she frigged with the router, hence his desire to scream.
It was very unlike him. Not that he was close to being a Buddhist like Mr. Gere, but he was generally even-tempered.
Not today.
He checked the clock on the wall. Ten minutes before the doors opened.
He’d needed a part-time assistant, but had been against hiring Hailey Fuller to begin with. He had been way overruled by the library board. Hailey’s grandmother, the grand dame of Serenity Harbor, was its president. The new wing was named after her late husband Henry. The family had donated a fortune to the library over the years, which had started out in a back room of Zeke Booker’s soda shop at the turn of the twentieth century. The town owed a lot to the Fullers.
And now Rob was stuck with Ms. Fuller in her first paid position, not that she needed one. Hailey Fuller could buy and sell half the town with her inheritance from old Henry. She was not his idea of librarian material, either, even if she had a degree from a reputable school. For one thing, she had an elaborate tattoo sleeve all the way up her arm. Roses and thorns intermixed with romance novel covers, half-naked people with windswept hair clutching each other as if a typhoon were about to toss them out to sea. Good riddance to bad rubbish, in his opinion. Let them drown or fall off the mountain.
Rob was a traditionalist. All right, a snob. Who in their right mind read such trash? Sure, he’d accepted a stash of dog-eared paperback donations in his time, and he knew Nora Roberts was a multi-zillionaire, but he didn’t actually stock a romance section. He believed in serious literature, something to elevate and explain the human condition.
Hailey wore tank tops to show the sleeve off, and Rob was pretty sure she didn’t wear a strapless bra under them, not that he looked. Often. Most of the time he averted his eyes in her presence, or took off his glasses so the whole world was a blur. Hailey’s human condition was none of his business. She made him feel like some kind of perv.
Her tips of her spiky hair were green this week, the color of her grandmother’s money, and he couldn’t help but see that.
“Sorry, Rob. I can go in your office and call tech support.”
“Fine. Do that.”
Maybe the problem could be fixed remotely by some earnest soul in India. If not, a lot of middle school kids were going to be disappointed at Computer Camp. They actually might have to pick up a magazine—or, God forbid, a book—until the rec center bus picked them up in two hours.
“I really don’t know how it happened.”
Rob did. Hailey was trying to be helpful. She thought she knew everything.
She didn’t.
He watched her as she went into the glass-windowed office behind the circulation desk to pick up the phone. He really needed to speak to her about wearing more professional attire. Just because the middle schoolers thought she was cool was no reason to wear jeans that tight. He didn’t expect an assistant with a bun, twinset and pearls, but really, would it be too much to wear actual shoes instead of flip-flops? He was sure Hailey was a walking OSHA case.
Rob switched on the computer, for all the good it would do. The library’s system was connected to an online server, which was currently dead as a doornail. He would have to check out books on paper, something he hadn’t done in…ever. There weren’t even cards and card pockets in the library’s latest acquisitions. You stamped the due date on a grid in the back of a book, and the computer, when it was working, took care of the rest from swiping the barcode on the cover.
The screen blinked angrily back it him. With a sigh, Rob hit the power button and all was dark.
When the kids filed in and he announced the current situation, their groans boded ill for the next little while. They disappeared into the stacks with their hapless counselor, a college girl who no doubt wished she was waitressing at the Starlight Grille for the summer instead. Middle schoolers were the worst, always drawing dicks on Dobby and leaving rotting apple cores and chewing gum on the shelves. He’d even found an unopened pint of Allen’s Coffee Brandy behind the encyclopedias, and other things too scandalous to mention. People who worked with kids were guaranteed a place in heaven, and deserved an entire quart of Allen’s.
Unlike Hailey. She was still on the phone, most likely on hold, listening to some godforsaken new-age music. For some inexplicable reason, major corporations thought it would soothe irate customers. All it did to Rob was raise his blood pressure. Give him Mozart any day.
He had a stack of new books to catalog, but couldn’t do that with the system down. So he did what he could, inserting security strips, slapping library stamps on each book in four places, and sticking date due slips in the back. These were jobs he generally assigned to Hailey—they were pretty tedious. Of course, entering data was pretty tedious too.
The front door slammed. Libraries were supposed to be quiet. Rob would have to submit a requisition order to the town office to send one of the maintenance crew over to see what they could do when they had a chance. Hailey, of all people, had already fiddled with it and made it ten times worse. She’d actually brought a pink tool box to work one day when the bolt on his office door wouldn’t latch properly. After she’d tried to fix that, he’d been locked in for over two hours before she jiggled him free. He’d been thisclose to calling the fire department. The crew could look at that too. Rob didn’t want a repeat of that debacle.
He looked up. A youngish woman with too much rouge on and curly light-brown hair put an L.L. Bean canvas tote on the circulation desk and gave him a wobbly smile.
“Yes, can I help you?”
“I’m hoping I can help you. Did, um, Hailey tell you I was coming?”
Hailey had told Rob a lot of things, most of which he paid no attention to for his own sanity.
Jeez. Another book salesperson. Or someone who wanted to sell him library supplies. He’d been dealing with Demco for years and wasn’t going to change now. He’d have to stop Hailey from answering the phone and making unwanted appointments for him.
“I’m sorry. Where you expected?”
She faltered. “I thought I was. I spoke to your assistant. Hailey—I have got her name right, haven’t I? I’m Belle Standish.”
The squeal behind him should have deafened him forever.
“Belle Standish! I can’t believe it!” Hailey rushed by and nearly knocked him off his chair. “Squee! Big fangirl moment! Rob, could you take my phone out of my backpack on the shelf by your feet and take a picture?”
He was not going to rummage in Hailey’s bag. God only knows what she had in there. Tarot cards. Snakes. Screwdrivers. Condoms.
“Did you get the server issue straightened out?” Rob asked, reminding her that she was supposed to be at work and not jumping up and down in front of this woman, who was looking redder by the minute. Maybe it wasn’t too much rouge, but embarrassment.
“I’m on hold, probably for the rest of my life. Oh, Belle—can I call you Belle?—we’re so honored to have you here!”
Were they? Who the hell was Belle Standish?
“Oh, please,” the woman said, her cheeks turning still redder. Upon close
r inspection, Rob realized it wasn’t rouge or embarrassment—she’d gotten sunburned recently and was approaching boiled lobster status. And then, “Ouch.”
Hailey was giving the woman a hug, oblivious to the fact her fair skin was flaming.
“So clue me in. Give me the nine-one-one,” Rob said.
Hailey gave him an incredulous look. She did that a lot. “Four-one-one, Rob.”
Would he ever learn to be relatively hip? He needed to download that Urban Dictionary thing. Hailey was only ten years his junior, but she made him feel like her grandfather.
Her dead grandfather.
“This is Belle Standish! A USAToday bestselling author!”
“Just for one book,” the woman said modestly, casting her blue eyes down to the library carpet. “And it was a boxed set with six other authors. For ninety-nine cents. It couldn’t help but do well.”
Hailey clapped her hands as she peered into the bag. She was wearing black nail polish. Ugh. Maybe he should stop being so judgmental, but Hailey brought out the worst in him. He was turning more Scrooge-like by the day.
“And you brought us signed copies of your backlist! Isn’t that great, Rob? We can set them up by the door. Do a proper display. And then when you speak, you can bring more and sell them. Belle’s donating half the proceeds to the library. Isn’t she generous?”
Speak? Rob had the summer speakers’ schedule down flat. All sorts of famous people—authors, experts in their fields, politicians, diplomats, titans of industry—vacationed in tony Serenity Harbor and shared their knowledge in a series of well-attended lectures. Rob had initiated the program a couple of years ago, and the subscription fees had paid for the library’s new acquisitions.
Belle Standish wasn’t on the program.
“Uh.” He didn’t want to sound churlish. Just because he’d never heard of her didn’t make her a terrible writer. He, unlike Hailey, didn’t know everything. “What is your genre, Miss Standish?” he asked.
Welcome to Serenity Harbor Page 24
