Kiss Me Now: A Romantic Comedy Read online

  Copyright © 2021 by Melanie Jacobson

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without prior written permission.

  Melanie Jacobson

  11923 NE Sumner St.

  STE 317019

  Portland, OR. 97250

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, events, institutions, or locals is completely incidental.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  Ian

  I slipped on my sunglasses and tugged my baseball cap lower as I watched the wife of the third most powerful man in American politics slip out of the cheap apartment she’d rented for trysts with her pool boy. I didn’t bother sliding lower in the driver’s seat. It would only draw her attention. That was the last thing I wanted.

  Washington DC and the people who ran it never failed to be a cliché. I snapped a few pictures with a telephoto lens. She walked down the street to the Mercedes she always parked two blocks away. As if she were fooling anyone.

  Well, she was fooling her husband. He had no idea. It was mid-afternoon. My subject had to spend her evenings on her husband’s arm at his various soirees and receptions, so Pool Boy got the daylight hours. I wondered what she told her husband she did with her days. The spa? Charity luncheons?

  I settled in to wait for her boyfriend. An hour had passed with no action when my dash display lit up with an incoming call from my favorite person on earth. For the first time all day, I smiled and answered.

  “Hey, Gran.”

  “Hi, honey. I’m not disrupting your work, am I?”

  “No, it’s fine. What’s up?”

  “Ian Greene, you better not work too late.” Gran’s voice held her usual note of concern.

  “Gran, you know most people work until dinner time, right? It’s the middle of the afternoon. I’m not in danger of overworking myself.” It wasn’t exactly a lie. I might work long hours most days, but today I could tell her with a clear conscience that as of the time of this phone call, I had not yet overworked.

  “I know you work way past suppertime most days, Ian. You need to take better care of yourself.”

  The apartment door opened as she spoke, and I scooped up my camera and trained it on the young guy emerging.

  “I’m fine, Gran. I promise.” Click, click. “Now tell me about you. How’s life on the mean streets of Creekville?” I made sure I had the apartment number in the shot. Click.

  Gran laughed. “Well, Gertie Meyer got her hair colored a red that doesn’t naturally grow on any human head, and then she got her eyebrows tattooed on, and Lois told her at canasta the other morning that she ought to sign up to appear as a clown at the church fair, and now they aren’t speaking.”

  I smiled, amused at the scandals that rocked Gran’s town. It was refreshing after the truly heinous ones I regularly uncovered in DC. I snapped a couple more pictures, making sure to capture Pool Boy’s fit physique. That was really going to bug the husband. “I can’t believe Lois said that to her. That sounds downright mean, even for her.”

  “I’d agree except that when Gertie swanned in with her ridiculous new hair color, she told Lois that her sweater made her look like she was smuggling two different sized melons in her bra, so Gertie had it coming.”

  I laughed. “Good for Lois, then. I’d love to have seen that argument.” Pool Boy rounded the corner, and I set the camera on the passenger seat. Once again, all the players involved had behaved in predictably corrupt ways, and I had the evidence we needed for our client. It was unfortunate that I could reliably expect the nation’s elite to be on their worst possible behavior, but hey, it paid the bills. Handsomely.

  “You can see Gertie and Lois spar anytime you want to, you know,” Gran said. “I keep telling you to come and see me. I worry about you, breathing in all that dirty air.”

  “You usually accuse the capital of hot air.”

  “Only the politicians are full of hot air. And not all of them. Lots of truly good-hearted people do their best there. You just happen to spend all your time working with the bad ones.”

  “Not with them. More like working on them, taking them down.”

  “It’s jaded you. You forget they’re the tiny fraction. But in this case, I meant the actual pollution, anyway. Particulate matter. The stuff the EPA doesn’t even bother to check out here because the air is so pure. You should come and breathe it.”

  I wished it was that simple, but she was two hours away in the heart of Virginia, and it wasn’t easy to get away to spend a weekend. “I’ll get out there eventually,” I promised, but I felt a pang somewhere in my shriveled heart at the word eventually. Gran was eighty, and spry as she’d been twenty years ago, but she wasn’t going to be around forever. “I mean soon,” I said. “I’ll get out there soon. I worry about you alone in that big old house.”

  Gran gave a light laugh. “Don’t worry about it, hon. My neighbor Brooke has been an absolute delight, keeping me so busy I don’t have time to sit around feeling sorry for myself. She’s why I called, actually.”

  I stifled a sigh as I started the car and pulled into traffic. There wasn’t a thing that I didn’t love about Gran, but if there was one thing I liked a tiny bit less than all her other stellar qualities, it was her relentless matchmaking. She did not let up, nor would she, she had informed me, until she saw her oldest unmarried grandchild happily settled. I braced myself for the sales pitch on this new neighbor. Gran had mentioned her before, trying to casually drop in that the young woman had moved in next door in the spring, and oh, by the way, had she mentioned how pretty she was?

  But Gran surprised me with a totally different question. “How do I find a good lawyer for wills and things? Walter Sellers does them for everyone around here, but his wife Diane is always running her mouth about the details, and I don’t need her airing mine for everyone.”

  I blinked, trying to follow the thread of the conversation. “Sorry, what does an estate lawyer have to do with your new neighbor?”

  “Well, we’ve gotten to know each other so well that I’ve really come to love her like another grandchild. And you all are so busy with your lives, and I don’t want this place to become a burden to you when I pass, nor do I want anyone to fight about it. So I’m thinking I may leave it to her. There’s plenty of stocks and other things in the trust for the rest of you, but this will at least get the house out of everyone’s hair.”

  My spidey senses tingled. Why was Gran suddenly wanting to leave her property to a woman who had only been her
neighbor for a few months? I was one of the best investigators in Washington DC for a reason: I had excellent instincts and every one of them was screaming.

  “Gran, everyone loves that place. And you don’t have to worry that we’ll fight about it. Just leave it in the trust like everything else. Landon will be a great executor. We all trust him.” Landon was my younger brother, who had a steady temperament and a shiny law degree. “And can we please stop talking about what we’re going to do with your stuff when you die? It’s morbid.”

  I drove toward home, the usual urge to shower after doing surveillance work making me speed fast enough to upset the DC Metro police if they caught me.

  “Death is only morbid to the young,” she said, not sounding remotely subdued. “Death is a stranger to you, but I’ve finished up eight decades on this earth, and lately, he looks more like a familiar friend. I’m not at all worried about it. Don’t plan to go soon, but ‘soon’ is relative these days. Just want to make sure everything is in good order, so I don’t have that hanging over me while I enjoy whatever time I have left.”

  Impending death was her favorite tactic to guilt me into a visit. Every time it worked, I drove out to Creekville to find her in perfect health. I’d spend the whole weekend trying to convince her to let me take care of things around the property while fending off her efforts to spoil me. I always drove home feeling mildly annoyed but also way more relaxed than when I left.

  But this was different. She wasn’t dangling it over me to get me to come out. I tested the waters. “You know, Gran, I really haven’t been out there in a few months. How about if I come out next weekend and fix some stuff around the place? I can put up that lattice for you.”

  She’d asked me to do it last summer, and I’d meant to get to it. More guilt prickled in my chest.

  “Oh, it’s fine, Ian-boy. It sounds like your job is keeping you plenty busy. I don’t want to be a distraction. Just come out the next time you find yourself with some downtime. Brooke has been excellent company. She’s keeping me young.”

  Now I was really worried. There were red flags and then there were six-foot neon letters spelling out S-C-A-M-M-E-R. But I couldn’t let on that I was worried about the Brooke person or Gran would take offense that I didn’t trust her judgment. Good thing navigating tricky undercurrents like this was my specialty.

  “That’s a relief, honestly, Gran,” I said. “I do feel bad that work keeps me in the city so often. It’s good to hear that you’ve got someone keeping an eye on you. This Brooke...what’s her last name?” I kept my voice casual.

  “Brooke Spencer,” Gran said. “Loveliest young woman. She inherited Fred Sandberg’s place next door. Her great-uncle, I think. He was withdrawn, kept to himself, but Brooke couldn’t be sweeter.”

  The neon danger sign began to flash. This “sweet” Brooke had conveniently inherited an old man’s property and now my grandmother was prepared to hand over hers as well? Not on my watch. My mouth pressed into a grim line. I spent all my time looking for the ways in which people cheated each other and exploited the systems that ordinary folks tried to live by. I could smell a swindle a mile away.

  Well, 120 miles away, to be exact. Brooke Spencer was the kind of “sweet” that described rotten meat, and I could smell it from here. I’d gather as much information as I could without tipping off Gran, but I was getting to the bottom of this. It looked as if my weekend plans had just changed.

  Gran was my newest client even if she didn’t know I’d taken her case.

  Chapter Two

  Brooke

  I rocked back on my heels and shook out my shoulders. They were sore, but as I stared down the row of weeded tomato plants in Miss Lily’s garden, I recognized it as the good kind of ache, the kind that came from an honest morning’s work. I pulled off my gloves and was tucking them into the pocket in my garden tote when Miss Lily emerged through the French doors of her big Colonial-style house. Mansion?

  I idly considered the question as I rose and waited for Miss Lily to cross the lawn—grounds?—to me so we could confer about the garden. It probably was a mansion, I conceded as I catalogued the home’s features. It was only two stories, but long gracious wings extended from the center, and from the front, elegant windows welcomed guests arriving up the long drive. Also, the house sat on three acres, so that might qualify as more than just a yard. But Miss Lily herself was salt-of-the-earth, and it was hard to associate my gardening friend with the idea of something so grand as a mansion.

  “Good afternoon, Miss Lily,” I called.

  “Didn’t think I’d see you out here today, Brooke,” the older woman answered as she drew near. She wore her favorite straw hat for working in the garden and carried her own well-used tote of garden tools. “Thought you were going into the school.”

  “I did for the morning, but they’re not running the air conditioner until school starts in two weeks, so it got too hot and stuffy to get much done. I came home and did some more planning until I got too antsy and came out to weed. Come see.” I beckoned Miss Lily to join me among the tomato plants. “I did the whole row.”

  “Well done,” Miss Lily said. Her words were simple, but her proud smile warmed my heart. “You did a fine job.”

  “Thank you. When do you think they’ll ripen?” I asked. “I can’t wait to try one of your tomato sandwiches.”

  “It’s one of the greatest pleasures in life, I assure you,” Miss Lily said. “I can’t believe you’ve gone this long without experiencing one.” She bent down and inspected the orange fruit on a few of the plants. “Soon,” she pronounced when she straightened. “Right around the time school starts.”

  “School” caused the same small flip in my stomach that it had since Lincoln High School had hired me as their new biology teacher for the fall. I’d worked hard to complete my credential and student teaching in just a year, but I hardly felt prepared to greet the 150 sophomores who would expect me to explain the fine points of genetics and taxonomy as Ms. Spencer the Science Teacher when school began.

  Working on Uncle Fred’s—no, my house—and helping Miss Lily in her garden helped keep my mind off the spectacular ways I might fail at my new career. Well, that and the mantra that I couldn’t fail worse in this one than I had in my last one.

  The familiar buzz of anxiety began to thrum in my chest, and I crouched by the next row, looking for more weeds to pull. Unfortunately, I’d taken care of this one a few days before and there wasn’t much there.

  “It’s fine,” Miss Lily said, waving me back up. “You’ve done more than enough for today. Why don’t you come on up to the house and have some iced tea and visit?”

  I wouldn’t dream of hurting Miss Lily’s feelings by turning her down. The woman had been my first and fastest friend in Creekville, a town that wasn’t used to newcomers, but I felt a mighty urge to keep my hands busy so my mind couldn’t wander into my school worries.

  We all have to get through the learning curve. Everybody hates it, but you’ll do fine. I’d repeated this strangely comforting piece of advice from my mentor teacher more times than I could count over the last week as school drew closer and closer to opening.

  I didn’t even realize I’d gotten lost in my own thoughts again until Miss Lily’s silvery laugh broke in. “I can see you’re going to be better off if we stay out here and work longer. But the squash needs our attention more than the beans. Let’s go pick some.”

  “Really?” I darted to the end of the row. So far, I’d only been able to pick asparagus, bell peppers, and cucumbers. Every time Miss Lily let me harvest something new from the garden, it felt like Christmas. If Christmas were eighty degrees in the shade, that is. I hurried to the butternut squash and waited impatiently for Miss Lily to catch up.

  “All right, hold your horses,” Miss Lily said, another laugh in her voice. “They’re not going anywhere.” When she reached me beside the patch, she rewarded me with a big grin. “You know that these gardening lessons I’m giving you are an
excuse to get you to do the work my back is too old for these days. You have been Tom Sawyered all summer long.”

  “I’m a willing sucker,” I assured her. “I’m so glad you’ve let me do this. I feel more confident about starting my own garden next summer.”

  My place was much smaller, but it still sat on a half-acre, which was more than enough to plant a garden for one. But the very afternoon I’d met Miss Lily, I had mentioned how overwhelmed I was by renovating my uncle’s aging home while tackling a garden too. She’d insisted that I come learn in her garden and take all the vegetables I wanted when they came in. My garden time with Miss Lily had become my favorite part of every day.

  “You’ll do fine,” Miss Lily assured me, “but my garden is big enough for both of us. Didn’t I tell you it would produce more than even the two of us could ever eat? Just work it with me again next spring. Now, let’s pick some butternut squash. Mary makes a marvelous ravioli with it.” Mary was her housekeeper and cook, and I had eaten at Miss Lily’s table enough times to take this claim as gospel truth.

  I did as Miss Lily directed, looking for squash that had grown to a size I might see at the farmer’s market, then checking to make sure the color was uniform and showed no green spots on the rind.

  “Make sure the skin isn’t glossy either,” Miss Lily said when I declared I’d found one. A few minutes later, I’d twisted and plucked three lovely butternuts from their vines and settled them in Miss Lily’s basket.

  “One of these should go home with you,” Miss Lily said. “I would send you home with two, but Ian’s coming tonight.”

  Ian. Her grandson. Miss Lily had spoken of him often. “I didn’t know you were expecting him.” I tried to keep my voice neutral, but despite Miss Lily’s constant and clear pride in the guy, I wasn’t impressed. I’d lived here five months already, and he hadn’t come to visit his grandmother once.

  “I’m not sure he even knows he’s coming tonight, but he’ll be here.” Miss Lily wore a content smile.

  A flicker of irritation toward Miss Lily’s delinquent grandson fluttered through my chest. I was going to be even less impressed if Miss Lily went to bed disappointed tonight, let down again by Ian.