Death in the Stacks

by Jenn McKinlay

  Mac closed her eyes and braced herself before slowly turning around, still holding the phone to her ear. Her heart was pumping hard in her chest, and when she looked at the man walking toward her, it stopped for a solid three beats before it resumed its rhythm with a thump to the chest that felt like a closed fist to the sternum. Oomph!

  “Hi, Mac,” Gavin said into his phone, bringing his voice intimately into her ear while she stared into his baby blues. A woman could drown in eyes that pretty. How had she forgotten? Mac yanked the phone from her ear and ended the call.

  “Gav,” she said on a shaky exhale. He stopped in front of her, right on the periphery of her personal space. She forced herself to smile with teeth, which felt like more of a snarl. “I wasn’t expecting you. How are you?”

  “Better now that you’re here,” he said.

  Mac gave him a wary look. What the hell did that mean?

  “I’m pretty sure if I misplaced my sister’s maid of honor, I’d have to flee the state or possibly the country,” he teased. He smiled at her, and Mac felt it all the way down to her toes.

  “Oh, yeah, huh,” Mac stammered. She resisted the urge to do a face palm. She sounded like a moron.

  “Come here,” Gavin said. He tucked his phone into his jeans pocket and held out his arms. “A proper greeting is required for the return of the prodigal Mac.”

  “Oh, right, of course,” she said.

  In her state of shock at seeing him, Mac’s legs were refusing to follow the basic one-foot-in-front-of-the-other protocol, and she lurched forward into his arms, forcing him to catch her before she took them both down.

  It was a good, bracing squeeze, the sort cousins shared at annual family reunions. But it was enough for Mac to catalog the fact that this was not the man-boy she had fumbled around in a pickup truck with all those years ago. Oh no, this was a man who stood well over six feet tall, with broad shoulders, a lean waist and powerful arms. Gavin Tolliver had grown into a hottie when she wasn’t looking.

  Amazingly, his scent was the same, and it struck Mac in the olfactory system like a lightning strike. The warm, citrusy cedar smell that was uniquely Gavin blew open the locked door of her memories, and Mac was hit like a two-fingered poke to the eyeballs with a mental picture of the man in her arms, sans clothes, holding her close and going in for a bone-wilter of a kiss. Ack!

  She jumped out of his arms so fast she tripped over her suitcase and landed in a heap on the bench seat behind her. She cracked her hip on the wooden edge, and the pain rocketed up her back, but she refused to let it show. Instead, she quickly crossed her legs and threw her arm over the seat back, pretending that she meant to do that.

  Gavin looked surprised, and then he grinned at her as if he found her adorable and not freaky, which she clearly was. Mac wondered how she could have forgotten the dimple that dented his right cheek when he smiled or the girlishly long, thick lashes that framed his eyes so becomingly. Then he winked at her, and she felt as if everything she had ever known to be true had just hopped on the Downeaster train back to Boston.

  This was not the Gavin Tolliver she remembered in his grubby Little League uniform who thought it was hilarious to stick whoopee cushions under her sleeping bag when she spent the night at Emma’s, for that was the only image of him she had ever allowed herself to recall after their one night together. It had worked like a charm to banish the memory of what had been the most amazing sexual encounter of her life. She had even convinced herself that their night together had only been spectacular because she had just been left at the altar and had been as emotionally charged as a hair dryer tossed into a bathtub.

  But now, this man standing in front of her in his well-worn jeans and work boots was making the past seven years of her carefully crafted revisionist history an utter mockery. This guy had charisma and sexual magnetism to the tenth power. When he smiled at her, she actually felt her skin get hot, and when he winked, well, her girl parts almost overheated. Dang, this guy could probably unhook her bra just by looking at it!

  There was no doubt about it: Mac was screwed. Or maybe she just wanted to be. Gah! Mac shook her head, trying to dislodge that thought. No, no, no! This was Emma’s little brother! She tried to picture him in his Little League uniform. Sadly, she could not shove the man’s body in the formfitting gray T-shirt in front of her into a dirty eight-year-old’s baseball uniform. Damn it!

  “Mac, are you okay?” he asked. “You look mad.”

  “What?” She glared at him. Then she glanced away, trying to avoid his gaze. “I’m fine. Just tired.”

  “Long day of travel,” he said. His voice was kind and understanding, which Mac found unreasonably annoying. “I’m parked right outside. Come on, let’s get you home.”

  Without waiting for her answer, he took her hand and pulled her to her feet. Then he hefted her bags as if they weighed nothing and wheeled them toward the door. Mac had no choice but to grab her purse and her garment bag and follow. She wished she had worn a better travel outfit than jeans and a T-shirt, then berated herself for even thinking about her outfit, and then she cursed Emma for not warning her that it was Gavin who would pick her up. Suddenly, the next two weeks looked more like an incarceration than a celebration, and Mac did not have a get-out-of-jail-free card.

  Gavin hefted Mac’s bags into the back of a big black pickup truck. So he still drove a truck—a different truck, but still a truck. She went to open the passenger door, but he got there first, holding it open for her to climb in. Mac squeezed by him, trying not to brush up against him as she went. Healthy boundaries were going to be scrupulously maintained if a mere smell memory had her picturing him naked. Oh, horror!

  He shut the door and jogged around the front of the truck. She turned on her phone and toyed with the screen, pretending to be doing something other than avoiding looking at him, which was really what she was doing.

  Gav pulled out of the parking lot and turned onto the road that would take them home. Mac glanced out her window, wondering if the silence felt as awkward to him as it did to her. She supposed she should say something, but she had no idea what.

  Why couldn’t she be like her friend Carly, who in her usual blunt fashion would just give his ass a squeeze, crack a bawdy joke about the last time they saw each other and move on? Or her other friend Jillian, who would say something kind but distant, which would effectively put up a barrier as daunting as razor wire between them, letting him know they were not going there. Ever.

  Sadly, it was neither of those two who had slept with their best friend’s little brother. Oh no, that was Mac, who as a corporate accountant who operated in numbers and facts and bottom lines had zero capacity to navigate life’s layers of innuendo. Damn it!

  “So . . .” Gavin said. He gave her a sideways glance when she turned to look at him. “Are you hungry?”

  “Nope,” she said. “Not at all. Not even a little. I’m good. Thanks.”

  She pressed her lips together to shut herself up and turned away from him. Ugh, she couldn’t even look at him. She could be half starved to death and desperate for a ham sandwich and she wouldn’t do anything that would prolong their time together for even a nanosecond. Seriously, if she had to go to the bathroom, she would risk peeing her pants before she’d extend this trip to include a pit stop. Thankfully, she did not have to go.

  “Okay,” Gavin said. Again, his voice was gentle, as if he were talking to an injured baby bird. “Let me know if you need anything.”

  “Will do,” Mac said. “Roger that, you betcha, by golly wow.”

  Okay, now the urge to punch herself in the temple and knock herself out was almost more than she could stand. Being unprepared to see him again had reduced her to a babbling idiot.

  He, on the other hand, did not seem to be suffering from any awkwardness. Obviously, Gavin either didn’t remember what had happened between them seven years ago, or he was so
completely over it that it didn’t occur to him that being thrown together after seven years of radio silence was weird. Now didn’t that just fluff up her ego?

  Still, if he had forgotten all about that night, it was most definitely for the best, and it made her relax just the teensiest bit. Perhaps all of her worry had been for nothing and everything was going to be just fine over the next two weeks.

  She stole a look at him, then glanced back out the window and then back at him. His hair was cut short on the sides and longer on top. It was several shades darker than his sister’s, almost brown but not quite, but not really blond either. His bangs fell over his forehead in a casual way that could have been created with a lot of product and artful arrangement but Mac suspected was more the result of a quick towel dry and a distracted manner.

  Despite the fact that Mac hadn’t seen him in years, she knew the highlight reel. Emma had kept her apprised of all the main events in Gavin’s life. He had gone to veterinary school, graduated at the top of his class and returned home to work at old Doc Scharff’s practice. Doc was in semi-retirement and was training Gavin to take over the biz fully when he was done. Emma was so proud of her brother; she practically glowed when she talked about him.

  Although she never admitted it, Mac knew that Emma had put her life on hold until she knew Gavin was settled. She always said she and Brad were saving for a house before they got married, but Mac suspected that Emma had been waiting to make sure Gavin could stand on his own two feet before she started a family of her own. Mac had a feeling Gavin didn’t realize it and would be pretty unhappy if he ever figured it out.

  Maybe that’s just how big sisters were with little brothers. Mac didn’t know, because she didn’t have any siblings. The only person who had ever been like a younger sibling to her was Gavin, and, oh yeah, she had slept with him. Even thinking about it made Mac feel dirty.

  Emma hadn’t only shared Gavin’s accomplishments, she had also kept Mac informed on his love life even though Mac had never asked and really didn’t want to know. The last girlfriend, Jane, had never been a favorite of Emma’s. She had dubbed her Jane-the-Pain, which had been shortened to “the pain” for the duration of their relationship and had then morphed into “the beyotch” after Jane ran off with Gavin’s business manager.

  Mac didn’t like knowing all of the sordid details about Gavin’s personal life, but she had never been able to stop Emma from oversharing without giving her a solid reason why. Now she was uncomfortable knowing as much as she did and not knowing what to say to him about any of it. The silence in the cramped cab of the truck was becoming excruciating, however, and she didn’t think she could take it anymore as they crossed over the Presumpscot River, heading north on Route 1.

  “So, it looks like they’ll have a nice day for the wedding,” she said. She grabbed for the old New England mainstay of talking about the weather like she was reaching for a life preserver in a choppy sea.

  Gavin looked at her and grinned. “She speaks and about the weather, too. I guess you can take the girl out of Maine but you can’t take the Maine out of the girl.”

  Mac felt herself blush, which was alarming as she was pretty sure she hadn’t had a case of the face hots in years. So, there was one more reason to avoid this man. No self-respecting thirty-two-year-old woman wanted to walk around looking rashy.

  “Ayuh,” she said, intentionally using the old Maine expression for agreement. Gavin smiled at her, which had been her intent, but it also made her face heat up again. She resisted the urge to cover her cheeks with her hands and instead asked, “Er, so what’s new with you?”

  Gavin glanced from the road to her. He gave her a look with one eyebrow raised that said Seriously? before turning back to the road.

  Mac blew out a breath. She was pretty sure she’d had pelvic exams that were more fun than this, and that was with the doctor saying “scooch down” repeatedly until her ass cheeks felt like they were hanging on nothing but air.

  “Some things have changed since you’ve been gone,” he said.

  Mac looked at him and frowned. “Like me? Are you trying to tell me I’ve gotten old?”

  “No, I wouldn’t say old,” he said. “Grown-up, maybe, and you aren’t the only one.”

  His blue eyes were steady on hers, and Mac had a sudden epiphany about where he was going with this conversation. The intense look on his face told her more than words that he most definitely remembered their one night together, every single second of it. Uh-oh!

  Alarm bells began to clang in her head so loudly that she had a hard time hearing what he said. She saw his lips moving, but it was like his sound card was broken and all she could get were random words and static.

  “I’m sorry, what?” she asked.

  “I asked you if we’re ever going to talk about—” he began, but she interrupted.

  “No!”

  “I think we should—”

  “Dut dut dut.”

  “Mac, we need to—”

  “Dut dut,” she said. She raised her hand in a stop motion. “No, we don’t.”

  Gavin clenched his jaw, and she could tell she was infuriating him. Too bad. If they talked about that night, then it was real, but if they never talked about it, she could at least pretend that it had never happened, which was about the only way she was going to get through the next two weeks, especially with this hot guy standing in place of the man-boy she had been expecting.

  He leaned over the console, clearly entering her personal space, forcing Mac back until she was pressed up against the door.

  “Pretending it didn’t happen doesn’t it make it so,” he said. Then he looked at her like he wanted to devour her. “Besides, don’t you want to find out if that night was as sexy as you remember? I know I do.”

  About the Author

  The hardest decision New York Times bestselling author Jenn McKinlay ever had to make was what to major in during college. Then she discovered the sanctuary of the library and library science—a major that allowed her to study all the subjects. She loves working as a librarian. After all, what other occupation allows you to research the ethnobotanical properties of agave, perform a puppet show for twenty wiggly toddlers and try to answer why the rabbit’s foot is considered lucky, all in the same day? Jenn is also the author of the Cupcake Bakery Mysteries, the Hat Shop Mysteries and the Bluff Point Romances. She lives in Scottsdale, Arizona, in a house that is overrun with books, pets, kids and her husband’s guitars. Visit her website at jennmckinlay.com.

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