Page 4 of You Had Me at Chocolate

But she was pissed. Very, very pissed.

“No, seriously, you must have some kind of head injury, because I cannot for the life of me think why you would pull that crap out there in front of almost every damn person I know in this town.”

“Well… I am a little jet-lagged.”

Which went further to explaining some of the crow’s feet. But not the turning up out of nowhere and publicly proposing thing. “So this is what?” she demanded. “A severe case of narcolepsy?”

“Okay.” He held his hands up in a placatory manner like he was trying to calm a fractious child. “You’re upset.”

Clementine’s vision turned a deep scarlet red as her pissed-off hit the stratosphere. “Don’t you dare patronise me,” she hissed and he took a step back.

“Sorry, I—”

“I am not upset,” she growled with a kind of demonic possession nobody, including herself, would ever have associated with Clem Jones, mild-mannered librarian. “I am fucking furious!”

It was his turn to blink. To look completely shocked.

“What?” she demanded, irritated by his apparent surprise.

“I just… the Clementine I knew never cussed.”

The deep scarlet turned to thick red mist as the blood vessels at her temples throbbed in unison. So, this was how it felt to blow a cerebral aneurysm.

“The Clementine you knew was twelve years old! My mother would have washed my mouth out with soap if I’d have dared to use a cuss word.”

She would have heard Clem say it too—even with three hundred miles separating summer camp from Marietta. Trina Jones had eyes in the back of her head and ears like a bat.

That had been bitten by a radioactive spider.

He chuckled for a moment but, obviously reading the room and Clem’s lack of amusement, the smile slipped from his face. “Yeah, I guess you’re all grown-up now, huh.”

His gaze dropped briefly. It wasn’t lecherous or sleezy; just took her in before returning to her face, but Clem’s belly did a weird kind of wobble. She ordered it to stop—no weird wobbles allowed around Jude. Her childhood friend. Who had never given her the belly wobbles. Even when she’d hatched that ridiculous juvenile marriage-pact scheme, he hadn’t given her the belly wobbles.

But he’d been funny and smart and he’d had a plan in life. He’d wanted to run a little inn like the one his family stayed at every year in Texas when his father went bird watching—whooping cranes to be precise—in the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge. And why she remembered that detail, Clem had no idea. Probably because she’d always thought it was kinda interesting.

Different. Something her librarian brain had appreciated.

She also remembered he’d wanted to make the best apple cobbler in the world for his guests just as the woman who owned the inn had made for her guests and that kind of detail had been attractive to an eight-year-old Clem on the day they’d first met. Her plans to become a librarian had been in full swing at that stage, so she’d admired similar dedication.

What better attribute could she have asked for in a husband? She came from a long line of planners, after all. Her father was a town planner. That was what the Jones family did—they planned. And she’d been pretty damn smug about accomplishing all she’d set out to achieve.

Until recently. Until her midlife crisis. Her very inconvenient midlife crisis.

About a year ago, Sondra, a librarian friend of hers from college, had landed a job at the Met in New York and suddenly this life Clem had set out for herself had left her feeling… wanting. In an effort to establish her career and cement her place in the Marietta library hierarchy, she’d become predictable.

Boring.

And, in her usual style, she’d taken steps to fix it. It hadn’t been her desire to throw a hand grenade into her life—she loved living in Marietta, she loved small-town life, she loved being a librarian in her small town—but she had wanted to shake it up.

A little.

So, she’d ditched the guy she’d been seeing on and off for three years who’d been more friend than lover—Reuben had been as un-heartbroken as her—and booked a six-week European Contiki tour. Which had been ah-mazing and made her want to travel more but her job didn’t allow for that kind of time off on a regular basis. She’d been trying to figure out how to have both when another friend of hers from Livingstone had been diagnosed with breast cancer—at thirty.

Clem had been shaken to the core. Macey was in remission now and doing fine but the whole experience had made Clem realize how short life was. How it was passing her by. And suddenly, a hand grenade hadn’t seemed like such a bad idea.

A hand grenade an associate of Sondra’s—Eliza Redgold from New York—had thrown Clem’s way two months ago. And Clem had gleefully pulled the pin.

The last thing she’d expected was a different kind of blast—one from her past—presenting her with a Tiffany rock and a marriage proposal. Out of the blue. Not because he was declaring undying love but because they’d promised each other at twelve. Love, passion, excitement apparently didn’t enter into the equation.

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