Page 127 of Perfectly Matched: Harbor Falls Romance Collection

The open-faced beef sandwiches came and went.

They talked about school. And students. And pending snow.

They shimmied around talking about nothing but those two subjects, so much so that Will was beginning to think he was boring as hell.

No wonder he couldn’t get a woman. That’s why he said what he did next.

“So, what do you do for fun, Emma?”

The look on her face, complete with saucer-round eyes, told him that he’d likely said the wrong thing. Shit. Was that a line? Like, hey baby, what’s your sign? Surely, no. Because the last thing he wanted to do was insinuate he had asked her to lunch as a pickup.

“Fun? What’s that? I teach, remember? I stay up grading papers all night rather than hitting the bars.”

The right corner of her mouth jerked up in a half smile, and she started shuffling around, picking up her purse, moving her silverware aside. She picked up her water glass and took a sip—all the while avoiding eye contact with him.

Dammit. He’d made her uncomfortable.

“Oh yeah. That’s right.”

Stupid man.

She glanced at her watch. Okay, there was the signal. “I think…”

she started.

He tried to look straight at the clock over the dining counter.

“Oh hell. I need to get out of here. “I have this thing tonight.”

He grabbed for the check about the same time she did, their fingers knifing together.

“Oh!”

“I’ll get this,” he said.

“Oh, no. What’s my part?”

She shuffled in her bag.

“My treat.”

Man was she in a hurry. Well, so was he.

“Then I have the tip.”

She scooted to the edge of her booth seat.

“Fine.”

Those fingers he’d collided with earlier plunged deeper into her bag and pulled out a wad of bills.

“There, that should do it,” she said.

“I’ll go find ImaJean.”

“You do that.”

They stood, both facing each other, jerking first one way and then that, followed by a momentary pause halting all the skitter-skatter.

“I have a thing tonight too,”

she blurted out.

“I see.”

But he didn’t. He didn’t want her to have a thing tonight, whatever kind of thing it was.

“I’m off now,” he added.

“Me too.”

Will turned toward the counter, stopped, and glanced back.

Emma evidentially had turned the opposite way because she was half-turned too, her gaze shooting over her shoulder.

“Thanks for lunch,”

she told him.

“See you Monday.”

He nodded, noting that her bottom lip was firmly embedded between her teeth. And for the first time ever, Emma Jo Baker looked, well, vulnerable.

He gave her a wave.

“Monday. I’ll be there to help with the gym.”

She nodded and made her escape.

Will sighed and watched her go, his shoulders finally relaxing.

“I’ll take that for you,”

a woman said in front of him.

He handed the check and money to ImaJean.

****

I have a thing tonight too.

Man, how lame was that? Will must think her a total basket case.

Halfway home during her thirty-minute drive to Harbor Falls, Emma finally exhaled. Normally her radio would have been blaring, she would have been singing, and her brain would have been ticking off all sorts of to-dos for her upcoming week.

But not this day. And not during this trip.

Something strange was going on with Will and she couldn’t quite put her finger on it. She wondered if he was overly stressed, or if the kids were finally getting to him or something because it was like he wasn’t concentrating at all on having a conversation with her.

It was a thought she couldn’t get off her mind.

It was unlike Will to be quiet, and several times during their lunch, the silence had filled the air between them in the booth. Of course, it was normally unlikely for her to be so quiet too, and that’s what got her to contemplate what was going on with Will, because she knew there was nothing wrong with her.

It had to be him. He wasn’t holding up his end of the conversation.

And it was like, well…it was like he was shy or something. This was not the Will Craig she knew. The leader of the school who could bark at middle schoolers on the lawn to get them back to their side of the playground, the man who took charge of their faculty meetings even when the teacher’s got rowdy. The guy who could sooth and sway an irate parent with the best of them.

Will was way too quiet today, and for whatever reason it was bugging the hell out of her.

Wait.

But was it Will?

Or was it really her? Had she done something? Said something? Felt something?

Her heart clutched.

“Dammit.”

She had not felt anything. Nothing at all. Especially not when their fingers touched.

No. When they’d touched, there was nothing.

Definitely not a spark. Not even one twit of one.

Swallowing hard, Emma stared ahead out of her windshield and looked at the gray sky, wondering how much snow was in their forecast and tried to forget that last notion altogether.

No. No spark.

“Liar.”

****

A couple of hours later she approached the Victorian home that was Suzie’s bed and breakfast, Sweet Hart Inn. There was a sting of ice crystals in the air now, and a slant of sleet breaking through night. It was after eight o’clock in the evening, but she had called ahead to Suzie and told her she was running a bit late. Suzie told her that was fine but to get there as soon as she could, weather and all. It had been dark for a couple of hours now and Emma wondered if she really should stay very long because of the weather.

Of course, Suzie didn’t live too far from Emma. Nothing in Harbor Falls was that far away from anything. The Inn did sit on the edge of town, though, closer to the lake and the mountain, and for whatever crazy reason, storms were worse on this side of town.

“I won’t stay long,”

she muttered, gripping her bags tighter and stepping onto the porch.

“Besides this is not going to work anyway. How could it?”

She had little confidence that Suzie Matthews would find her a husband. It might have worked for Mary Lou Picketts and for Lyssa Larkin, but she held no false hopes that it would work for her.

None. But hey, she got new clothes and a makeover out of the deal.

Besides, she was just a little preoccupied with the notion of Will Craig and wondered if she should explore that option a little more seriously. What was really going on between them this afternoon?

With a sigh, she carefully approached the porch, watching for slick spots on the concrete sidewalk, and held onto the handrail as she ascended the steps. At the precise moment she raised her hand to rap on the red door trimmed in greenery, Suzie snatched it open with a smile and said.

“Emma Jo! Come on in. We’ve been waiting for you!”

It was the “we”

that gave her a moment’s trepidation, and had she listened to those kinds of gut things that told her stuff was about to happen, she might have turned tail and ran.

But she hadn’t.

She forged ahead, her packages grasped to her chest, and crossed the threshold.