“I’m worried about leaving him next week. Xander says he’ll be fine, but I don’t know. He just seems … lost.”
“He emailed me at about four o’clock this morning,” Viola said.
“Oh, yeah? What about?”
The stars. Just thinking about it made her stomach jump. “He wanted to get an update on the building restoration.”
“At four in the morning.”
“Apparently.”
Callie frowned. “I need you to do me a favor, Viola. While we’re gone, can you check on him? Please?”
Viola hesitated. Callie didn’t know her history with Liam. She hadn’t said anything about what had happened in Hawaii at first because she was embarrassed, and then there didn’t seem to be a point in mentioning it once time had gone by. Callie had no idea what she was asking Viola to do.
But how could Viola say no? Not to Callie.
“Okay. You want me to call or text him?”
“Yeah. Maybe take him to dinner one night so we know that he sees another living person.”
“Sure,” Viola said slowly.
“Thanks,” Callie said, sounding too relieved for Viola to be able to back out of her commitment.
The women walked into the store and Viola nearly froze at the sight of Liam at the register. He wore a royal blue waist apron and was ringing up a woman with a purse-dog. The woman was flirting with him, touching his arm and laughing at something he’d said. He smiled in return before his eyes flicked up and met Viola’s. The room shifted under her feet, and she grabbed on to Callie’s arm without even realizing it.
Oh, boy. Coming here was a mistake.
The feelings she thought she’d left behind in Hawaii? They’d followed her to Eureka Springs and had somehow intensified with the passage of time.
The woman said goodbye and left with a backward glance, but Liam gave the customer no notice. He closed the glass case with the baked treats, perched on the stool behind the register, and flashed a hesitant smile in Viola’s direction.
“Your sandwich.” Callie handed him the wrapped bundle.
“Thanks,” he said.
“How did things go while I was gone?”
“Pretty steady. One touch-and-go situation with the card reader, but I figured it out,” he said with faux-pride. The women laughed, and he set his sandwich on the counter to turn to Viola.
“How are you?” he asked her.
“Busy. Busy, busy,” she said, her mind completely blank of anything but that word.
His phone vibrated, and he pulled it out of his pocket instantly, frowning. How she hated that phone.
“I’ve got to go,” she said suddenly.
“Okay,” Callie said, surprised. “Talk to you later?”
“Yep.” Viola burst out of the store and raced back to her office, glad to release some of her nervous energy. She needed to be far from wherever Liam was; that was the only solution to this conundrum.
It took about an hour for her nerves to calm all the way down, and with time, she found herself immersed once again in experimenting with colors and paint samples as she prepared for the theater restoration.
She didn’t hear the door whoosh open, so intent on her sketching, so when someone cleared their throat in front of her desk, she nearly jumped out of her skin.
“Sorry,” Liam said. “I thought you heard me come in. I wasn’t trying to scare you.”
She placed a hand over her heart to steady her breathing. “That’s okay.”
“I just thought, if you had some time, we could walk through the theater.”
She bit her lip, thinking. She’d love nothing more than to go check out The Old Grand. But she’d just resolved to stay far away from Liam, and this was pretty much the opposite of that.
But the theater ...
What would a few more hours hurt, really, in the scheme of things?
“Let me clean this up, and let’s do it.”
“Tell me about your process,” he said.
“Really?” she asked, surprised he cared.
“Yeah, I’ve always thought what you did is really interesting.”
He helped her wipe up the splatters on her desk while she covered up her paint samples with plastic. She explained what she did, telling him she would do most of the color matching on her computer with a specialized program that would match paint almost exactly, but she liked to mix by hand as well, not only to make absolutely certain the color was what she wanted, but to test out the texture too. Different projects required different types of paints and brushes, and she wanted to get it right on sample materials on her desk before she took her materials all out to the actual buildings.
She knew that