Page 22 of Make Me Love You

“Flower baskets, hey?” Mr. Elwood crossed his arms over his expansive stomach and rocked back on his heels, considering. “I like that. They haven’t looked like that since I was a boy.” Since Mr. Elwood was closing in on eighty, that would have been a good seventy years ago.

“Sure, you like it,” said Jacob Bronson, who owned the only car dealership in town—among other businesses. “People like pretty things. But there’s more to mayor than making a town pretty, and I don’t see how Emma Andrews is up to the job. Hart’s Ridge is in trouble. You think that little girl right there, scrubbing the damn lamp post, is going to get us out of it? No. One of us has to step up.”

“One of us.” Mr. Elwood snorted. “You mean you.”

“No, I don’t. You think I have time to be mayor? I have businesses to run. No, I mean this town’s finest police officer, who just so happens to also be our newly appointed deputy mayor.” Bronson clapped Eli on the shoulder. “I mean Eli Carter. He’s our man.”

Our man. Eli narrowed his eyes. He knew Bronson well enough to know that he meant those words literally. Bronson had no use for a police officer in his pocket, as he preferred to do his business legally, but he would love to have a mayor who owed him favors to make sure those legalities were smoothed away.

Unfortunately for Mr. Bronson, he was mistaken on two counts.

Number one, Eli couldn’t be bought and paid for. Eli wasn’t his man. He wasn’t anyone’s man.

Number two, this town needed a mayor with the creativity and tenacity to fix a problem that had sounded the death knell for other small towns throughout the entire country. This town needed a mayor who believed in leaving things better than she found them. This town needed a mayor who got off her ass and actually did something, even if it was only making lamp posts pretty again, while everyone else wasted time arguing about what should be done.

This town needed Emma Andrews.

The trouble was, Emma Andrews did not want to be mayor. So she said. Except there she was, painting streetlights. Because the streetlights were a problem, and she liked to fix problems. That was the truth about Emma, though she would likely never admit it: She liked to solve problems. And what was being mayor all about, if not solving problems? Damn shame she didn’t think she wanted the job.

But then, Emma never wanted anything she didn’t have to fight for.

What was it she had told him? She didn’t know what to do with herself when things were going right. She needed things to go wrong. She needed an enemy to destroy. And in her mind, there was no bigger enemy than Eli Carter, the man who put her father in jail.

“What do you say, Eli?” Bronson asked. “You want to be mayor? Make this town great again?”

Eli tore his gaze from Emma. “I’m in.”

Emma Andrews needed a fight, and he was going to give it to her.

Chapter Six

Everything hurt.

Emma groaned as she rolled out of bed, her muscles aching in protest. She had spent the better part of yesterday scrubbing the lamp posts with a wire brush and smoothing away the old paint. And she wasn’t done yet. Ten down, ten more to go.

Despite the pain in her back and shoulders, she was up before the sun. She still had a business to run, one that couldn’t be put on pause just because she now had the additional (unpaid!) labor of being mayor. Today, though, would be different. She and Cesar couldn’t stand around with nothing to do and no one to feed; they had bills to pay. If the customers weren’t going to come to them, then they would go to the customers. Which was why they were driving an hour to the SuperMart a little ways past Asheville, where they would set up in the parking lot.

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