Page 18 of Brewbies
Oh Jesus.
She wasn’t going to sneeze.
She was going to cry.
Darby could count on one hand the times she’d cried in the presence of another human and not even need all five fingers. Two of them involved caskets. One of them involved sitting in a doctor’s office mid-panic attack, waiting for him to confirm what she already knew down to her bones.
Gemma stepped back, her eyes scanning Darby’s face. “Are you okay?” she asked, concern etched on her features.
Darby nodded quickly, her comfortable mask of mannered calm gratefully clicking into place. “Totally fine. I just feel bad you guys went to all that trouble.”
“You haven’t lived in many small towns, have you?” Gemma asked.
Darby shook her head. “I’ve lived near them.” Usually long enough to make sure whatever property she’d purchased had been developed and then resold at a healthy profit margin.
“Under no circumstances are you to drink any of this coffee.” Cady crested the stairs, the handles of a large thermal dispenser clutched in her hands. “You’ll just end up judging me, and I’m already nervous that you’ll think the book club is completely lame.”
“Give me that.” Gemma quickly stepped forward and pried the dispenser from Cady’s grasp. “You know you’re not supposed to be lifting things,” she scolded. “I’m going to tell your husband.”
“He’s not my husband.” A dreamy smile played about Cady’s lips. “Yet.”
“Well, I’m going to tell your almost-husband,” Gemma reported, glancing at Darby. “She has ankylosing spondylitis. It’s chronic inflammatory form of—”
“Arthritis,” Darby finished for her. “My ballet teacher had it.” And had been regularly miserable enough that Cady’s sunny demeanor seemed a small miracle by comparison.
“I refuse to let it run my life.” A determined look deepened Cady’s eyes to the blue of a summer lake. “Just like I refuse to let this town’s population of prudes rob me of the barista that vastly improves the quality of it.”
Darby shifted, hoping to ease the unfamiliar and supremely uncomfortable feeling of her heart ballooning to fill her ribcage.
“That’s sweet of you to say,” she said lamely. “But no way is that happening. I don’t give a rat’s rectum how many notices Sheriff Townsend serves me.”
“Ethan served you himself?” Cady’s creamy cheeks took on a rosy flush that rapidly climbed toward the roots of her flaxen hair.
Oh, he’d served her, all right.
“Uh-huh,” Darby said, her Judas of a body warming in all the wrong places at the memory.
He’d looked so annoyingly handsome in his uniform, the crisp sky-blue fabric of his dress shirt clinging to his broad shoulders and powerful arms, his creased khakis hinting at powerful thighs and not quite concealing the sizable package he dressed to the left.
The way he’d fought to keep his eyes on her face.
The way anger and lust made his jaw clench in exactly the same way.
“I’m pretty sure he irons his boxers, but he’s actually not such a bad guy.” Gemma twisted the cap off one of the wine bottles and filled three plastic cups, handing one each to Cady and Darby. “He may be the only man I’ve ever seen literally help an old lady cross the street.”
“And there was that time he ran in front of a tour bus to save Kevin Costner,” Cady pointed out.
It took a minute for the mental image to take root in Darby’s exercise-exhausted brain. Ethan was absolutely the kind of man she could see heroically racing in front of an oncoming vehicle. To imagine the aging actor haplessly wandering out in front of one was a bit more of a stretch.
“That reminds me.” Gemma took a healthy slug of her wine. “Is Kevin still shitting in the garden section?”
Darby nearly aspirated her wine, falling into a coughing fit that had both Cady and Gemma looking at her with twin expressions of concern that melted into recognition.
“Kevin Costner is Cady’s cat,” Gemma explained. “She sort of inherited him?”
“And he’s only been leaving presents in the gardening section during thunderstorms, to answer your question,” Cady said, after Darby recovered her composure. “But Dr. Hill said that it’s probably because the loud noises remind him of the bus’s engine.”
“That makes sense,” Darby wheezed, tapping her chest.
