Damn. He was close enough to her now so she didn’t have to yell. “Since when? How did I not know this?”
“In a weird coincidence, I talked to the owners and finalized the details over the phone right before I met you and Tori in the woods. Have I mentioned how nice and polite and normal your friend is? Anyway, maybe you didn’t know because it’s none of your business.”
This was bad. “You’re stalking me.”
“Excuse me?”
“The woods? The library? Now you’re going to live next to me?”
He shook his head. “You are quite possibly the most irrational person I’ve ever met. And I’ve met some doozies in my line of work.”
“So it’s just a coincidence that you keep popping up in my life?”
“Honey, the last thing I need in my life is a woman like you.”
Even though she didn’t want him to want her, that pissed her off on principle. “You’d be lucky to have a woman like me. If you ever call me honey like that again, you’d better be running away at the time.”
“We both know I could just walk fast and you still wouldn’t catch me.”
She wanted to say something that would cut him to the bone, but her sense of humor was beating out her panic that she was going to have a hot neighbor who’d already caused her all kinds of turmoil, and she couldn’t hold back the smile.
Before she actually laughed out loud, she turned and walked back toward her house. Dignity in defeat.
“Hey, aren’t you supposed to bring me a pie?” he called after her. “Or a casserole?”
She didn’t slam her door, but she wanted to. Just having him in her library for six hours had caused an epic struggle between her head and the parts of her body below the neck. And now he was going to be right next door.
With a sigh, Hailey decided to burn off her sexual frustration with some house cleaning. Spotless floors and sparkling toilets were almost as satisfying as an orgasm. Almost.
*
MATT HAD THOUGHT it was funny that in this supposedly gossip-filled town, Hailey hadn’t known there was a game warden moving to town, but now he saw the joke was on him. Nobody had told him he’d be living next door to the town’s librarian. Who just happened to not like him very much and now thought he was stalking her.
Perfect. Welcome to Whitford, Warden Barnett.
The house had seemed perfect. The pictures they’d sent him had shown the garage, which he needed. A nice backyard. And they didn’t mind if he cut in a dog door for Bear, which was necessary because of Matt’s unpredictable hours, as long as he replaced the door when he left. But they conveniently hadn’t mentioned the neighbor was a pain in the ass.
Maybe that was something she saved just for him.
“Who was that?”
Matt turned to his brother-in-law, Jeff, who he had strong-armed into helping him move.
“Remember the lost princess in the woods-slash-librarian I told you all about at dinner a few nights ago?”
“No shit. That’s her?”
“That’s her.”
Jeff nodded and looked toward Hailey’s house. “I don’t think she’s going to bring us a pie.”
“Pie?” Their friend Donny rounded out the moving party, and he never passed up food.
“Sorry, dude. The neighbor lady doesn’t like our friend Matt, here. No pie for us. Or casserole.”
“Did you try smiling at her?”
Matt shook his head and pulled the work gloves from his back pocket. “Let’s finish getting this truck unloaded.”
A person didn’t realize how much crap he owned until it was time to move it all. He lost track of how many trips they made, but he was thankful he’d taken the time to write an overview of the contents on each box.
“It’s time,” Jeff told him in a voice that should have been accompanied by an ominous soundtrack.
“Did Donny measure the doors?”
“Yeah. And when I saw him trying to figure out if he was holding the tape measure upside-down or not, I went back and measured them again.”
Matt laughed and shook his head. “He gives new meaning to the expression measure twice, cut once.”
“That he does. It’s going to be tight and it’s gotta be sideways, but it should go in that study or whatever you’re calling it, where you want it.”
Matt eyed the gun safe sitting in the back of the moving truck. Even emptied out, the thing weighed a ton. Taking it out of a ground floor studio-type apartment that had French doors hadn’t been too bad, especially since he’d had a couple more guys. Now the three of them had to get it up steps and through narrow interior doors to the room the previous owners had used as a dining room. He didn’t really want to have the thing sitting in the living room, though that was Plan B. Ideally it would have gone in his bedroom, but they weren’t getting it up the staircase without more guys and a better plan, so he had a smaller biometric safe to go next to his bed.
“Are you trying to move it with your mind or what?” Jeff asked. “Because staring at it doesn’t seem to be doing much.”