Just A Small Town Girl: A New Adult Romantic Comedy by Jessica Pine Read Free Book Online

furniture is being taken good care of. Anyone can squirt a can of Pledge, but the old-fashioned lavender wax smells like you put work into it - elbow grease. One of the first things I learned in real estate was that a show house should always smell of baking bread and fresh ground coffee; to smell it is to sell it. Did you know that smell is the sense most closely associated with memory?"
     While all this was going on I was rummaging under the counter for the wax. "Yeah," I said, surfacing. "I heard Marcel Proust said something about it."
     She snatched the wax from the counter and got to work. Cassandra had her faults but laziness wasn't one of them, or maybe it was simply because she didn't trust anyone to do things as well as she could do them herself.
     So naturally I knew something was up when I saw her stop stock still in front of the window, duster in hand, poised on the tips of her toes like a cat trying to make itself look larger. "What are you looking at?" I asked.
     She beckoned without speaking, as though she were stalking prey. When I reached the window I laughed, because I realized that's exactly what she was doing. Parked across the street was a shiny black Harley Davidson.
     "I never had you figured for a biker mama," I said.
     "Just wait," she said, in a breathless voice.
     She was looking directly at Rita's Bakery on the other side of the street. The door opened and out walked the object of Aunt Cassandra's desire. A handsome beast, no doubt. He was all in black motorcycle leathers, black to match his bike and his tousled hair. He couldn't have been more than thirty.
     "Nice," I said.
     "Nice? It's like Matt Bomer beamed down from heaven into the body of a hot biker."
     "And turned straight, you hope," I said.
     She blinked at me. "You're so cynical," she said. "Just because a man is shatteringly good-looking it doesn't mean he's gay."
     "I know that," I said. "But if he has a husband that's generally a good indication that he bats for the other team."
     "How do you know that?"
     "Wikipedia. At least, I think he's married."
     She frowned, looked at me and pointed out of the window. "Wait - he has a Wikipedia page?"
     "No, but Matt Bomer does."
     "Matt Bomer's gay?"
     "Like I said, the husband was a pretty big tip-off."
     Cassandra flushed and shook her head. "Must be nice to have time for celebrity gossip," she said, which was pretty rich considering she always knew who was hot, who was not and who had just had a thoroughly regrettable boob job. It was on the tip of my tongue to make some smart remark about having no time for celebrity gossip on the grounds that she spent most of her time on local gossip, but she was preoccupied, watching her leather-clad man-candy roar away on his bike.
     "I wonder where he came from?" she said, almost wistfully.
     "I don't know. You want me to go and ask Rita if she knows anything?"
     "Don't you dare," she said. "You need to be here in case that guy shows up."
     “What guy?"
     She splayed her hands in a kind of desperate gesture, her eyes wide. In certain lights and in her biggest drama-queen moods she looked all of about twenty years old. Or maybe she'd just discovered a new moisturizer - might account for the spring in her step. "The new seasonal guy," she said. "Didn't your Dad mention him? I'm sure I did."
     I shook my head.
     "There's no way," she said. "You can't have missed a thing like that."
     "Honestly - this is the first I've heard of it."
     She sighed. "Look," she said. "I didn't want to say anything but you have been all over the place since you came back from the weekend. Did something happen in Burlington?"
     "No," I said, sounding high and unconvincing to my own ears. I tried not to smile. I wanted to stop talking but for some reason my mouth/brain interface was on the fritz and my mouth wanted to dig me deeper into the hole that my tone of voice had opened up beneath me. "What could possibly have happened in