Page 94 of Charlotte

“Cecil. Are you going to kiss me?”

“No. Not because I don’t want to.”

She could see the wanting now, plain as sunlight on the lake. He stopped because the schoolhouse windows looked out over the yard and the street was near enough for voices. He stopped because the very library he was trying to build had begun with her asking to be seen as capable and not careless.

The restraint frustrated her deeply.

Cecil reached for the folded paper in his vest pocket and handed it to her.

“This is the first drawing,” he said.

Lottie unfolded it carefully. The sketch was simple, but clear. A front door. Two windows facing the lake. Shelves along both walls. A stove in the back corner. A little desk near the front where the afternoon light would fall.

There, in the lower corner, written in his careful hand:

C. Peterson.

Lottie touched the letter with one fingertip.

Then she folded the paper and held it against her heart.

Cecil looked away.

“You may change it,” he said. “The windows. The desk. All of it.”

“No.”

“No?”

“It is exactly right.”

“You have not measured the shelves.”

“I trust the man who drew them.”

His face tightened, but this time it was not from pain. Something in him looked close to surrender.

Luke came around the side of the schoolhouse carrying a clam-shell post-hole digger over one shoulder and stopped short.

“Beg pardon. I was told to fetch—”

Cecil stepped back. Lottie nearly sighed aloud.

Every time the man was within two breaths of kissing her, Wild Rose Ridge produced a logger with business. Luke was especially talented at being in the wrong place at the wrong time from Lottie’s perspective.

Luke looked from Cecil to Lottie, then to the drawing in her hands. “I can come back.”

“No,” Cecil said. “We need the holes marked.”

Luke nodded, far too solemnly. “Yes. Holes. Very pressing.”

Lottie hid a smile. Cecil did not.

At least not quickly enough.

Luke’s brows lifted. “I will look at the ground now.”

“A wise choice,” Lottie said.