Page 7 of Playing for Keeps in Starr's Fall
“Are you new here?” he called just as she’d reached the door.
Maggie hesitated. Part of her wanted to pretend she hadn’t heard his question and sprint for her car. The more rational part realized you couldn’t do that sort of thing when you lived in a small town, which she now did.
“Yes,” she admitted reluctantly. “Just moved onto Main Street.”
“Oh, right.” Zach leaned against the counter, his pizza box balanced on one well-muscled arm, like he had all the time in the world. “Well,” he said with a grin that made his eyes sparkle, “welcome to the neighborhood.”
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Zach watched the woman hurry to her car with a wry smile. She’d clearly been embarrassed by their little exchange, which both amused him and gave him a strange sense of something almost like affection for her. And she was new to Starr’s Fall? Why had she moved?
“Isn’t she a little old for you, bro?”
Zach turned around to face Jake, who had opened Slice of Heaven a couple of weeks ago, Starr’s Fall’s first pizzeria, and who was now smirking at him. They’d gone to high school together, nearly fifteen years ago now, and Jake, like everyone else in Starr’s Fall, liked to rib him about being a player. “I was just being friendly,” he replied, keeping his voice mild. He’d found the best way to deal with these kinds of comments was mostly to ignore them.
“Friendly. Sure.” Jake rolled his eyes and Zach smiled, just a little tightly.
“Thanks for the pizza.”
Jake leaned over the counter. “I know her name, if you’re interested,” he drawled.
“Doesn’t that violate some kind of privacy law?” Zach returned lightly.
Jake shrugged. “Just sayin’. You know, if you get tired of Tinder.”
“Okay, well, I’ll keep that in mind.” He wasn’t evenonTinder. Not anymore, anyway. Jake gave him a mocking salute as Zach headed outside into the freezing night. The lore that had risen up around his dating exploits was really its own kind of town mythology, he reflected as he climbed into his truck. He couldn’t so much astalkto a woman in all of northwestern Connecticut without everyone in Starr’s Fall thinking he was about to date her.
Which, Zach acknowledged, was at least a little true, but he didn’t need everyone reminding him of his many failed romances. He thought about them enough as it was.
With a sigh, he started his truck and headed back home. Once again, he wondered who the mystery woman was, and why she’d come to Starr’s Fall. She’d mentioned a son, but was there a husband or boyfriend in the picture? Probably, he decided, and then he pushed the thought of the woman, whoever she was, out of his mind as he pulled into the gravel parking lot of Miller’s Mercantile that he ran with his sister Jenna.
The store, with its old-fashioned front porch and vintage signs offering pickles for a nickel and jukebox songs for a dime, was darkened as Zach got out of the truck and walked around to the back, where he and Jenna lived in the house they’d grown up in. As he came into the cluttered kitchen, he saw Jenna was seated at the table, hunched in front of her laptop, squinting at a screen of invoices, a mug of soup forgotten at her elbow.
“I got pizza,” Zach remarked as he tossed the box onto the counter, where several days’ worth of mail was gathering dust. “Thought I’d support Jake’s new venture.”
“Extra spicy as usual?” Jenna asked. “No, thanks.”
“Suit yourself.” He flipped open the box and took a slice as Jenna clicked sporadically on the computer mousepad.
“What are you looking at?” he asked after he’d chewed and swallowed a bite of pizza.
“Some invoices.” Jenna’s tone was vague, a bit of repressive, as it so often was when Zach asked her about the store. He had to keep from gritting his teeth. To say his sister was sparing with any information about the managing of the store was to put it mildly.
They weresupposedto be business partners, running it together since their parents had retired four years ago, splitting both the work and responsibility fifty-fifty, but at seven years older, Jenna had decided way back at the beginning that she was the boss and that, it seemed, was that. Zach could do the heavy lifting and the grunt work, but Jenna was the one who was in charge.
He could acknowledge that he had often let her shoulder the brunt of the decision making because it was simply too hard to fight against the stubbornly relentless tide of his sister’s, and even the entire town’s, prejudices. In addition to being some kind of womanizer, the residents of Starr’s Fall, his sister included, seemed to think he was kind of lazy. Zach had learned long ago that when it came to small-town life, there wasn’t much point in trying to change people’s misconceptions. No matter what you did, they were going to have them anyway.
“What invoices?” he asked, making sure he sounded patient and not annoyed. He loved Jenna, and he knew she loved him. From the outside, everyone assumed they were super close, especially since their parents had moved to Florida and they’d taken on the store together.
And theywereclose… sort of. It was just that Jenna liked to be in charge. A lot.
“Just for some new stock,” she answered in that same vague way.
“Jenna.” This time Zach couldn’t sound patient. “What new stock? I thought we were meant to go over all stock decisions together.” This was not the first time they’d had this kind of conversation. The last four years had been a stop and start of Jenna making decisions by herself, then Zach arguing with her about them, her agreeing not do it again, and then—guess what—doing it again. As time had gone on, Zach had started to push back less rather than more, but right now, for some reason he couldn’t quite discern, he felt like a fight.
Jenna heaved a sigh as she swiveled around to face him, her heavy auburn braid lying over one shoulder. “I know we were, but… really, Zach? You need to know about every can of beans I order for the store?”
He gritted his teeth. Again. “You know that’s not what I mean.” They’d had this conversation too many times before. Unlike Jenna, he had no desire to micromanage, but he did want to be involved in thedirectionof the store, as she very well knew. But it seemed he was going to have to remind her yet another time.
