A Date with the Other Side (Cuttersville #1)(4)
Author: Erin McCarthy

“What? I saw the man, and he’s quite a hottie. I’m so old, I’ve earned the right to say whatever I’m thinking.” Then Gran turned sly. “What did you think of him, Shelby?”

That he was a prime hunk of man and that she’d wished she’d been wrapped around him instead of that bedspread. Shelby crossed her legs. Lord, celibacy was catching up with her. “I didn’t think anything except that he was naked and in your house.”

“He’s single, you know.” Gran dipped her fork back into the inadequate fruit salad and stabbed a grape. “Works for Samson, of course. Probably rich too. Drives a fancy car and didn’t blink when I told him rent was fifteen hundred dollars a month.”

Shelby stopped inspecting the dry scaly patch on her left knee and looked at her grandmother in amazement. “You charged him fifteen hundred dollars? That’s almost double what he should be paying. You normally only charge two hundred per bedroom.”

“And there’s five bedrooms,” Gran said like that explained everything.

“So that’s only a thousand. Where does the other five hundred come in?”

“He’s paying extra for privacy. He’s got the whole house to himself.” Gran waved her hand in the air and didn’t look the least bit ashamed of fleecing a city boy. “He gave me three months’ rent up front.”

Shelby tried to imagine possessing forty-five hundred dollars all at one time and gave it up. “Dang. So what does he do at Samson? Is he here for good?”

Samson Plastics had been in Cuttersville for nearly ten years, and had saved the town from extinction. About half of Cuttersville’s fifteen hundred adults worked in the plant, which manufactured two-liter bottles and other plastic items. While it had brought employment, it had also brought outsiders, who didn’t always respect that Cuttersville had its own way of doing things.

Boston Macnamara was an outsider if ever she saw one. You only had to listen to him talk for five seconds to figure that out.

Gran shrugged. “I don’t know what he does, I just know he must be important. His cell phone was ringing left and right and the whole town’s buzzing with his arrival. Seems like nobody knew he was coming, now here he is, and nobody knows how long he’s staying. Folks are afraid he’s here to inspect the plant, maybe shut it down.”

“He can’t do that!” Whatever Shelby felt about the changes Samson Plastics had wrought on Cuttersville, she knew it would be a disaster if the plant closed. Half the town would starve.

Sweating in the June sun, even with the porch roof blocking the direct rays, Shelby picked at her tank top and inspected Gran’s petunias. White and purple, just like she had every year. There were classic and feminine, like Gran, and suited this tiny Victorian house with excessive ginger-bread detailing. Gran had moved into the house in ’fifty-six after her husband, Shelby’s grandfather, had gotten too friendly with a bottle of gin one night and his pickup truck had kissed a fence post.

Gran had moved out of the bigger White House, bought the Yellow House, and gotten business savvy enough to spend the next few years snapping up properties nobody wanted and restoring them. Shelby trusted her grandmother’s instincts and intelligence more than any other person she knew.

So when Gran said, “If he’s here to close the plant, nobody can stop him,” Shelby figured she had the right of it.

It was the next thing out of Gran’s coral lipstick-rimmed mouth that had her questioning the woman’s sanity.

“But who cares about that. He’s cute, he’s rich, and you’ve seen him naked. Let me hear your strategy for hooking him.”

Boston stepped into the Busy Bee Diner, a copy of his lease under one arm to read over coffee, along with the Cincinnati Enquirer newspaper. The first was to prove that he hadn’t been stupid enough to sign anything that allowed ghost tours through his rental house, the other to prove that the world as he knew it still existed outside of Cuttersville.

Every eye in the place turned toward him as he stood by the front cash register waiting to be seated. Mouths chewed, eyebrows rose, and no one said a word. Boston coolly met each and every gaze that dared to lock with his, and one by one they glanced away. All he needed was a six-shooter and he’d feel like an outlaw walking into a saloon.

A plump pink hand landed on his arm and he looked over at a round, smiling woman with gray hair.

“You need a table, sweetie? Just go on and grab one, we ain’t formal here.”

“Thank you,” Boston said, and picked an empty table against the big picture window overlooking the street. The view was quaint at best. Old cars and pickup trucks lined the curb, and there were a few denim-wearing adults strolling along. The occasional towheaded kid zipped by on a bike, but for the most part Cuttersville was quiet, lazily baking in the summer heat.

The waitress had followed him. “You must be Jessie Stritmeyer’s new renter.” She held a coffeepot aloft over the mug on the table. “Coffee?”

“Yes to both.” He settled in the pleather seat and set his papers down and sighed. He wanted to go back to bed. In Chicago. Where the only women to barge into his bedroom were invited there by him.

“Well, welcome to Cuttersville. I’m Madge.”

Of course she was. Every good waitress in Podunk should be named Madge. Boston gave a genuine smile. “Thank you, Madge. I’m Boston Macnamara.”

Madge finished tipping coffee into his mug and looked at him in amazement. “That your real name?”

What the hell was so odd about his name? “Yes.”

“Some folks like to be unique, I guess.” Madge leaned over him, smothering him with her ample br**sts, plucked a menu from the plastic holder, and slapped it down in front of him.

“Try the Special, it’s the best we’ve got. And don’t worry none about these folks staring at you. They just don’t like you because you’re corporate.”

Though Madge probably meant to make him feel better, it only restored his earlier surliness. He didn’t want to be in Cuttersville. He was forced there on a hazy, indefinite assignment that felt suspiciously like a demotion.

He was probably allergic to hay, he wasn’t overly fond of grease, and his idea of a good time did not involve haunted houses or cow tipping. Yet here he was, trying to make the best of it, and they weren’t going to like him?

He’d see about that.

With a charming smile over his coffee cup, Boston told Madge, “I’m hurt to hear that, Madge. I’m not a corporate shark, I’m just a poor workingman like anybody else, working too many hours and paying too much in taxes.”