A Time to Fall (Love by the Seasons Book 1) Read online

  The freedom of it was exhilarating but the responsibility of it was daunting. Whatever positive feedback people had about the paper would reflect on Winnie, just like anything negative anyone said about the paper would, too.

  The whole thing was on her shoulders, and ultimately, she welcomed it. She was here to bury herself in the job, and doing the work of two or three people would make that all the easier. Walking up the narrow sidewalk in front of the building, she pulled open the glass door to the office, and braced herself for whatever came next.

  “You’re here!” a friendly woman cried out, holding up a copy of the morning’s edition of the paper when Winnie walked toward the front desk, which was adorned with several ceramic pumpkins and a colorful banner of fall leaves. Glancing at the paper in the woman’s hand, Winnie’s jaw dropped when she noticed what was on it: an excessively large photo of her alongside a brief bio, introducing her as the new editor-in-chief.

  “Do you think they could have run the picture any larger?” Winnie asked, grabbing the paper and grimacing. It wasn’t a bad picture, just overplayed. It must have been a slow news day if they’d needed to fill up that much space with her portrait.

  “Oh, it’s a lovely picture,” the middle-aged woman behind the desk assured Winnie. With her short, soft blond curls, full face and warm smile, Winnie felt immediately at ease with her new coworker.

  “And I’m Gloria, by the way,” the woman continued, extending her hand. “I’ve been the receptionist here at The Bloom for twenty-five years, which, I would guess, is just about as long as you’ve been alive.”

  Winnie laughed.

  “Pretty close,” she admitted. “And I’m Winnie, the lady from the front page.”

  “Well, honey, I’m here to help you get settled into the paper and into town. I’m a Bloomsburo lifer, so feel free to ask me anything. Plus, I’ve been typing up the police reports for two decades, so it’s always a good idea to run any potential beaus by me first. I’ll give you the real scoop on ’em.”

  Winnie’s heart skipped a beat because Cal’s striking face popped into her mind as soon as Gloria uttered the sentence.

  No beaus, Winnie reminded herself.

  Gloria escorted Winnie through the narrow corridors of the stuffy office, pointing out the basic amenities of the humble space. It was a far cry from the sophisticated steel and glass of her high-rise building in Chicago.

  This office felt more like a country motel in desperate need of redecoration. Dusty fake flowers sat on pine bookshelves and the cheap golden frames hanging on the wall, all slightly crooked, held various newspaper articles and awards.

  Taking a quick look, Winnie noticed the paper hadn’t earned an award since the late 1980s.

  She had her work cut out for her.

  When Gloria led her around the corner to her private office in the back, Winnie surveyed the big, fake wood grain desk that awaited her. The Mac computer sitting on it was older than the version she’d used back in college and one of the phones next to it actually had a rotary dial.

  She swallowed back the judgment and superiority that threatened to rise within her, reminding herself that the whole purpose of her relocation to Bloomsburo was to try something new, and she had no illusions that in this specific instance “new” meant “glamorous.”

  She had prepared herself for quite the opposite, and now, sitting in her dusty office with the fake wood paneling on the walls, she deemed that wise.

  Gloria, who had returned to her desk out front, seemed lovely though, and Winnie had worked in enough office settings to know that the relationship you had with the secretary could make or break a job.

  Before Winnie could even turn on her computer, she heard the front door bells jingle from around the corner, followed by a woman’s shrill voice asking, “Well, is she here?”

  Winnie glanced at her watch. It was only 8:32 on her first morning in the office. How could anyone possibly be looking for her already?

  “You couldn’t have an appointment with her yet,” she heard Gloria answer protectively, which warmed Winnie’s heart, even from a room away.

  “Well you know what they say,” Winnie heard the mystery woman reply, “the news never sleeps. And apparently, in Bloomsburo, neither do the idiots. They should be here any minute, by the way.”

  “The idiots?” she heard Gloria respond, which made Winnie giggle.

  “The police chief and the Chamber of Commerce director,” the woman curtly clarified, much less amused by Gloria’s deadpan humor than Winnie was. “There’s another situation.”

  Then Winnie’s brain caught up to her ears. The police chief and the Chamber of Commerce director were on their way to her office? Dread filled her stomach. She hadn’t even figured out where the office bathroom was located, yet two major town leaders were already on their way to discuss ‘a situation’ with her? So much for easing her way into her first day on the job.

  Realizing that she couldn’t hide in her office forever, Winnie reluctantly walked back through the hallway until she could spot the mystery woman standing at Gloria’s desk. Short, at least in her seventies, and clad in a bright blue velour tracksuit and a heavily made-up face, the woman looked intense and annoyed but she plastered on a forced smile when she noticed Winnie approaching.

  “Winnie Briggs, I presume,” she said, offering out a bony hand adorned with perfectly manicured nails and some seriously sizable rings. Winnie shook it, surprised by the tightness of the older woman’s grip. “I’m Betty Jean Finnegan, chairwoman of The Blooming Ladies.”

  She looked at Winnie expectantly, as if Winnie was supposed to know all about the club. Winnie just blinked, her sleep-deprived brain struggling to keep up with this whirlwind of a woman so early in the morning.

  “We are Bloomsburo’s premiere social organization,” Betty Jean continued, retracting her hand. “We do talent shows, pancake dinners, holiday parades, sweetheart dances, and of course, we help with our town’s signature festival, Bloomsburo Days, which takes place the first weekend of October. No civic organization in town raises even a fraction of what we raise for local charities and causes. Needless to say I will be in touch with you at the paper quite frequently.”

  “Well, uh, it’s a pleasure to meet you,” said Winnie, trying not to look as startled as she felt by the woman’s intensity. She looked to Gloria for moral support, and her co-worker sent her a wink, as if reading her mind. “I’m so excited to get to know the community and help spread the word about important events. Is that why you stopped by this morning?”

  Betty Jean let out a dramatic sigh.

  “Oh, Winnie, I wish it were that simple,” she said, frustration tightening her facial features. “Trust me, I have plenty to tell you about in terms of the coverage our group is going to require in the next few months.”

  Winnie doubted that Betty Jean intended for that sentence to be a threat, but to her ears, that’s how it came across. Not to mention that the idea of a community member requiring media coverage didn’t sit well with Winnie.

  “First of all I –” Betty Jean started before the bells rang on the front door once more. Both women turned their heads to view the newcomer and within seconds, nausea overtook Winnie’s body. No, she hadn’t slammed into his sweat-covered body this time, but the second coming of Cal Spencer seemed to have an even stronger effect on her than the first incarnation.

  That same sexy mouth and mischievous eyes. That grabbable golden hair. If his body had looked delectable in his casual workout clothes, it was beyond fantastic showcased in more professional attire: the dark, perfectly-fitted jeans he wore with tan oxford shoes and an untucked Chambray shirt, sleeves rolled up.

  Okay, so the man was out-of-this-world gorgeous. But what on earth was he doing at the newspaper office at this time on a Monday morning?

  “Well it’s about time you showed up,” Betty Jean scolded Cal, as if she had been waiting for him. And that’s when Winnie’s dazzled brain finally put the pieces together.r />
  No.

  Given that Cal wasn’t wearing a police uniform, her powers of deduction suggested that he must be the Chamber of Commerce director, which made her want to crawl under Gloria’s desk and cry.

  That couldn’t be his job. Surely she’d misunderstood something. Because after the mayor, the city council members, the school superintendent and the police chief, there was no one she’d have to work with more closely than the Chamber of Commerce director.

  And if that person was Cal Spencer, she might as well turn in her resignation today. She couldn’t do it. Wouldn’t.

  “Where’s the chief?” Betty Jean interrogated.

  “He’s tied up down at the station,” Cal answered, and Winnie suddenly remembered his comment yesterday, that he and the chief were good friends. “I told him I’d give him a full update about your emergency meeting.”

  She didn’t miss his slightly sarcastic emphasis on the word emergency.

  Betty Jean sighed dramatically as Winnie and Cal silently sized one another up – Winnie, looking pale and dumfounded, and Cal looking sexy and amused, and Gloria surely wishing she had some popcorn to enjoy while the drama unfolded.

  Betty Jean returned her scrutiny to Winnie.

  “Winnie, this is a man you will have to deal with quite often,” she said almost apologetically, gesturing in Cal’s general direction. “Cal Spencer, director of the Bloomsburo Chamber of Commerce.”

  She watched that lethal grin spread across his lips and cursed her stomach for its overreaction to it.

  “It’s nice to see you, too, Betty Jean,” he said, stretching the truth. When he glanced at Winnie, she couldn’t help but mirror his ornery gleam. If nothing else, she’d enjoy having Cal as a co-conspirator against Betty Jean’s managing ways.

  “Cal, this is Winnie Briggs, the new editor of The Bloom.”

  Winnie’s gaze was still locked into his when he reached out his hand and found hers, squeezing it gently. It was amazing how natural yet electric it felt to be skin to skin with this man who seemed both like a stranger and like someone she’d been waiting for. It felt like a key sliding into its mated lock, the rightness of their bodies connected like that. She held his gaze, momentarily transfixed, until Betty Jean’s barking orders snapped her out of it.

  “Well, let’s get on with it, then,” Betty Jean hollered at them from down the hall, where she had already started marching her way toward Winnie’s office. That the woman felt at home at the newspaper’s headquarters was already more than evident.

  “After you,” Cal offered, his hand gesturing toward the hall. Winnie sighed, put on her metaphorical big girl panties, and made her way to her office to try and figure out what was going on in this office. In this town. With her life. And to think she was foolish enough to believe that her first Monday on the job might play nice.

  Chapter 4

  When Cal woke up early Monday, he had exactly two items on his morning agenda: get Winnie Briggs off of his brain and start to finalize some of the planning details around Bloomsburo Days, the town’s annual three-day festival that his office organized.

  Before 8 a.m., however, one paper delivery and two phone calls suggested that both goals were unlikely to be met.

  Of course, he’d already been failing miserably on the not-thinking-about-Winnie front. Cal loved nothing more than being in complete control of his life, and everything about Winnie Briggs screamed “unexpected.” Not to mention disruptive. Even his long run home yesterday afternoon hadn’t been enough to fade the effects of his strange encounter with her.

  Maybe it was the fact that Winnie, with her ample breasts, had crashed into his body out of the blue. Maybe it was the fact that he hadn’t been with a woman in longer than he’d ever publicly admit. But he couldn’t shake this bodily awareness of Winnie, not last night at his own house, and certainly not this morning when he opened his front door and found her face plastered across the front of his morning newspaper.

  During yesterday’s interrogation at his mother’s shed, he hadn’t bothered to ask what work brought Winnie to town. He naïvely assumed that this woman would be a minor hassle in his life. As long as she paid her rent on time and didn’t create problems for his mom, he welcomed the opportunity to never think about her again.

  But when the newspaper announced that Winnie Briggs would be taking over as editor-in-chief of The Bloom, he knew that this would prove impossible. Granted, Winnie’s predecessor at the paper had been fairly worthless, but Cal worked intimately with the local media in order to promote the Chamber’s initiatives.

  And doing anything intimately with Winnie filled Cal with dread.

  Not because she wasn’t attractive. Hell, if he was honest, it was because she was. Sure, she looked cute and mussed in her rainbow-hued loungewear yesterday, but this morning at the newspaper office? All polished and professional?

  He didn’t want to think about it. About how the soft mint green of her sweater clung to her ample chest. About the way her hips flared beneath her flouncy skirt. About the effect her dark hair had on him, tumbling down over her shoulders like a rowdy invitation to play.

  About how she was the first interesting thing to drop into his predictable life in years.

  Damn it all, he didn’t need this right now, yet here she was.

  But it wasn’t just the newspaper announcement that had kept Winnie on the forefront of Cal’s mind prior to his arrival at The Bloom Times’ office. He’d started his day with a very early phone call to his mother. He’d woken her up, which pleased him, given that he still felt considerably irritated with the woman.

  “Anything you want to tell me about the She Shed, Ma?” he’d asked, his voice tempered just enough to let her know that the question was rhetorical. A brief pause on her end —a rare phenomenon when talking to his chatty mother—indicated that she knew what he knew.

  “I’ve rented it.”

  “I figured that out.”

  Another pause lingered as he waited for her to explain herself. He loved his mother endlessly, but no one could press a man’s buttons like the woman who created him.

  “I don’t have to explain myself to you, Charles Calhoun Spencer.”

  Up, up, up ticked his blood pressure, and not just because she used the full name he despised.

  “It is my job to keep you safe, Ma, and how am I supposed to do that when you go off and do something boneheaded like this without so much as warning me?”

  “Boneheaded?” she cried in disbelief. “What a thing to say about your only mother. It is not your job to keep me safe, Cal. That’s a role you gave to yourself without my request.”

  He chose not to rise to that old, familiar bait. As the oldest and only son of a crummy father, and with three little sisters following in his footsteps, it sure as hell was his job to watch out for his family.

  “What do you even know about this woman?” he asked.

  “What woman?”

  “Winnie Briggs.”

  “You met Winnie?”

  He hated the eagerness he heard in his mother’s voice.

  “I did.” He wouldn’t give his mother an extra centimeter as far as the woman was concerned, let alone an inch.

  He could practically hear his mother’s gears turning in the silence. He knew her better than anyone else on earth, and he felt certain that she was thinking very carefully about how to proceed with this conversation. Surely she’d already crafted an elaborate plan for introducing Cal and Winnie, and now she had to think about how her matchmaking could best proceed given this unexpected start.

  “Well, what’d you think of her?” she asked in a tone that might have come off as neutral to an outsider. But Cal knew his mother far too well to fall for it.

  “I thought she was breaking and entering, so I threatened to call the police on her,” he said. “What did you think was going to happen?”

  “I…well…” Rhonda sputtered. “You threatened to call the police on her? Cal, that wasn’t very hospit
able. You probably scared the poor thing half to death.”

  That twinge of guilt flickered through his gut for the hundredth time whenever he pictured that panicked look on Winnie’s face. He forced it away.

  “And what did she say in response?”

  “Oh, she made me feel guilty and put me in my place.”

  “Good girl,” his mother said and he could hear the smile in her voice.

  “You didn’t answer my question,” he growled, losing patience. “What do you know about this woman?”

  “I trust her,” his mom said.

  He scoffed.

  “Based on what?”

  “I talked to her and I sensed that she was a good person. It was a gut instinct.”

  “Jesus, Mom. Your gut? This is a legally binding relationship. By the look of things, you invested some serious money in that cottage. You can’t just let a stranger into a part of your home.”

  “Actually, I can,” she said, her voice getting testy. “People do it all the time. Every day.”

  “You’re not people. You’re my mom and I worry about you.”

  “Cal,” she said, her tone softening in that maternal way she had.

  “She filled out an application,” she continued, the bite dissolving from her voice. “We talked on the phone multiple times. She submitted three references, all of whom raved about her. And I ran a criminal background check. I talked to Jenna at the law firm in town before I started any of this, and followed all the steps she recommended.”

  Cal sighed. Of course she did. He knew his mother was a smart woman, but it frustrated him when she cut him out of the conversation. How was he supposed to be a resource to her when she refused to keep him in the loop?

  “That’s good,” he managed.

  “Now, you answer my question,” his mother countered. “What did you think of Winnie?”

  Mostly that I don’t want to think about her.

  “I did answer that. I thought she was a trespasser.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”