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Niall thought of Chuck Mitchum’s crooked grin and his slow saunter out the door in those jeans. “Oh… yeah…. Let’s see.” He counted the lies on his fingers. “Alien abduction. Zombie wedding, obviously. But what a bouquet. Before a giant lizard-gorilla hybrid swam out of the bay and climbed the church tower to sing K-pop.”
“You wish. That’s because you never do anything exciting,” Winnie said with brutal fourth-grade honesty. “You should do a book signing. Or a midnight release party. Or turn the whole store into a haunted pirate ship.”
“A pirate ship?”
Winnie eyed him as if he were a mental patient. “For the summer reading program. We could have a plank and everything. I could be the ghost.”
“I’m not sure the insurance covers walking the plank and a ghost,” Niall said. “But I guess we should do something for the summer program. If we….” He trailed off.
Winnie’s eyes narrowed. “If we what?”
“Nothing. Go get your homework started in the back room. I’ll close up in an hour, and we can run grab pizza before we head up.”
“With pineapple?”
“Half pineapple,” Niall conceded, which earned a whoop as Winnie scooped up her backpack and disappeared into the tiny office behind the counter.
Left alone, Niall tried to focus on his spreadsheet, but his mind kept drifting back to Chuck Mitchum—the worn denim moving over his legs, the easy glow that filled any place he stood, the rough edge of his laugh. It had been a long time since Niall had noticed anyone like that. Longer still since he let himself.
He closed the laptop. No solving that math, not today. He had an appointment with a nine-year-old who needed better bat wings and pineapple pizza, and that was plenty on his plate.
Niall straightened the shelves in the last half hour before closing and worked his way toward Fantasy. That was where Chuck had been browsing earlier, which was odd. Chuck Mitchum had never been much of a willing reader, at least not when anyone was watching. Maybe he’d changed. Maybe he was secretly a D&D nerd who cosplayed as a paladin on weekends and hid it behind those battered jeans and that half-smirk.
Sure enough, a tattered copy of The River of Dancing Gods stuck out, wedged out of place right up against The Black Company. Niall slid it back where it belonged, thumb lingering on the cracked spine. What did Chuck Mitchum want with these old fantasy paperbacks? He said he was repairing his life. Niall understood that after six years of single parenthood, six years of keeping the shop afloat, six years of proving to himself and everyone else he could make life work solo.
Some things you didn’t fix; you boxed them up and shelved them and stopped looking.
The store’s old pipes groaned overhead. Someone was running the sink in the hall bathroom upstairs—Winnie, no doubt stalling on her fractions homework again because math came easy and she hated showing her work. The pipes squawked off—another repair he couldn’t afford, another item on the endless list that was slowly burying him.
Niall glanced at the door. He half expected Chuck Mitchum to amble back in with a smart remark and those damned jeans, possibly wiping his mouth with a tan hand.
For all his wishing, the door stayed closed. The only sound was the ticking of his uncle’s ancient glass-domed clock behind the register, counting down the minutes until closing time.
He moved down the row and nudged the last few books into order, thinking of Chuck Mitchum and a shelf of battered paperbacks nobody had touched in years.
Chapter 2
CHUCK MITCHUM had made three critical mistakes in his life. First—stealing Sheriff Gunderson’s boat at seventeen. In his defense, he only borrowed it to impress the sheriff’s daughter, which led in a straight line to mistake number two—getting caught with said daughter in said boat. Third mistake—Seattle, all of it. The job at the cabinetry studio, the relationship with Jeremy, and the mortifying public meltdown that sent him crawling back to Candle Bay with his tools in a milk crate and nothing else worth packing.
Now he sat on his aunt’s porch, the disassembled lawnmower spread around him like a mechanical crime scene. Chuck wondered if he was fixing to make mistake number four—fixating on Niall Ashworth’s handsome, cautious smile.
“You’re holding that damn carburetor like it’s a baby sparrow.” Aunt Lydia lowered herself into the adjacent rocking chair with a grunt. At seventy-one, Lydia Mitchum moved slower than she used to, but her canny eyes were bright as polished buttons.
“Trying not to break the damn thing,” Chuck muttered as he set the part down. “Or lose it.”
“Since when do you worry about breaking stuff?” Lydia wheeze-cackled like tires on gravel. “You were the kid who took apart my mama’s console TV to see if you could put it back together.”
“Which I did.”
“Channel nine never worked right again.”
Chuck grinned despite himself. “Nobody watches channel nine anyway.”
Lydia took a sip from her coffee mug. Chuck was pretty sure she put more bourbon than coffee in it, but he didn’t say anything. She set the mug down with a little thunk. “All right. Truth time.”
Chuck tensed up. He’d known this was coming, just not so soon, but he braced himself, fiddling with the carburetor like it might shield him.
She fixed him with a glare. “You gonna tell me what brought you back to this little Podunk town, or am I supposed to pretend we don’t have internet like every other place on this Earth?”
