Molly's Mr. Wrong

And she shouldn’t be spending so much time thinking about one student whom she’d probably never see again when she had so many who needed her attention.

Some of her students had some serious deficits in their English educations, which was something she had to address and remedy over the course of the next semester. But right now she needed to head home and remember that thing about not burying herself in work. Georgina was supposed to be cooking an actual meal and she was looking forward to food that wasn’t thawed or microwaved.

A muffled thud from the other side of the wall brought her head up. For the past thirty minutes or so, there’d been a lot of noise come from the art studio room next door—tables scraping along the floor and the odd thump.

Once upon a time, Molly probably would have ignored the noise, at least until she was more secure in her surroundings, but those days were gone. No more safe route. She needed to meet people before they sought her out. She needed to forget shyness and uncertainty and put herself out there, which was why she left her office and poked her head into the room next door on the way out of the building for the two-hour break between her afternoon class and evening class.

“Hello,” she called to the woman crouched next to a large cardboard box on the opposite side of the long room. The woman hadn’t been to any of the faculty meetings, and while the old shy Molly might have waited until the two of them had bumped into each other in the hall to introduce herself, the new Molly pushed herself to make first contact. She had no trouble addressing a roomful of students, but one-on-one always froze her up. She was working on it, though, so she smiled when the woman looked up, startled.

“Hi.” She got to her feet, pushing back the long blond hair that had fallen into her face while she’d been crouched over, and sidestepped a few boxes before starting across the room.

“I’m Molly Adamson, your next-door neighbor.”

“Allie Brody, and you’ll only be my neighbor one night a week. I’m teaching a community art class on Wednesday evenings.”

“Community, as in—”

“Regular Joes,” Allie said with a half smile. “Nonstudents. People who want to expand their horizons and get out of the house one night a week.”

“Sounds like fun.”

“It’s my first time teaching at the community college. I’m a little nervous.” She wiped her hands down the sides of her pants. “What do you teach?”

“English comp. Technical writing. One literature class.”

“Sounds like a lot of work.”

“I’m not going to lie. It is. Fortunately, I love what I do.”

Allie cocked her head. “You look familiar. Do we know each other from somewhere?”

“I don’t think we do...but I did graduate from high school here.”

“Me, too,” Allie said. “Born here, graduated here, engaged, married and divorced here. I’m a lifer, it seems.”

Molly laughed. “I’ve spent my life moving, but I hope to settle for a while.” The five o’clock bell chimed and she said, “I need to get going.” Georgina had texted her that she’d started dinner a few minutes ago. “But I’m sure we’ll run into each other again.”

“Do you have a class tomorrow?”

“No. But I’ll probably be here. I promise myself every year that I won’t work late and usually that promise lasts until the first big batch of grading lands on my desk.”

“Well, if you are here, I wouldn’t mind some backup if my class gets rowdy. I’ll just knock on the wall and you can come and save me.”

Molly laughed. “I’ll be happy to oblige.”

She continued on out of the building, glad that she stopped by, but feeling a little off center, as she always did on first meeting people. She’d love to be more like Georgina, who never met a stranger. Or her brother, David, who didn’t care what people thought about him. But she wasn’t like her siblings. Or her parents. She’d been the nose-in-the-book nerd who had a difficult time leaving her comfort zone. Not that she didn’t want to...it was just that the fear factor had been so strong. Then Blake had come along and drawn her out of her shell.

It wasn’t until she’d discovered that he was a serial cheater while on the road that she realized that Blake took after his father...and that she closely resembled his stay-at-home mother who’d turned a blind eye to her husband’s indiscretions and made life as easy as possible for Blake, his father and his two brothers.

Well, that wasn’t what Molly had signed on for. She’d refused to give Blake another chance, even though he’d worked up a few man tears, and she’d insisted that they put the house they’d purchased together—stupid, stupid, stupid—on the market, then packed up and left. After getting a new place to live and a new wardrobe, so she could give away all the clothing that reminded her of Blake, she’d buried herself in her work until she felt as if she could face the world again.

Being cheated on hurt like hell. And trust...what was that? Not anything that Molly believed in anymore.

But trust issues or not, she was going to put herself out there. Step out of her comfort zone socially. She owed it to herself not to let what had happened with Blake ruin her future...she just wasn’t going to get herself into any kind of an emotional bind with any kind of flashy too-good-to-be-true guy again. From now on she was dating her own species—as in guys who were reliable, honest, predictable. She couldn’t live with lack of trust.

When Molly pulled into her driveway, Georgina was not tending to dinner—she was in Mike Culver’s yard crouched next to a flower bed. She waved and got to her feet as Molly walked to the fence that separated the properties.

“Mike is teaching me about fall bulbs,” she said happily. “If we put them in now, we’ll have flowers next year.”

“I’d like that.” Just as she was going to like living in the same place come spring that she was in now. Molly had never lived anywhere long enough to get too deeply into yard beautification, and in Arizona, her house had been xeriscaped in a minimalist way, as was common in the desert. No spring flowers except for yucca, which were pretty, but not in the traditional way.

“The people who lived here before weren’t much for flowers, but I always thought that some tulips around the trees and maybe some narcissi or daffodils in front of the lilacs would be pretty.”

“There are lilacs?” Georgina’s eyes widened.

“Those bushes over there are lilacs,” Mike said, pointing to the hedge at the edge of their lawn. “The heavy flowering kind.”

“I love the smell of lilacs. I haven’t smelled them since we lived in Iowa. Remember, Molly?”

Molly remembered, but she was surprised that Georgina did; she’d been so young then. “Didn’t we have lilacs when we lived here?” she asked her sister, who gave an emphatic shake of her head in reply. “Nope. We had those big yellow bushes—”

“Forsythia, probably,” Mike said.

Georgina looked impressed at the off-the-cuff identification. “And those pink roses that had no scent. We didn’t have lilacs.”

Molly smiled a little. She didn’t remember much about the flowers. “I’ll take your word for it.”

Mike leaned his arms on the top of the chain-link fencing. “I was telling Georgina that I can put together a mix of bulbs from the store and bring them home or I can get you a catalog.”

“You probably know what grows best.” And she would pay for said mixture of bulbs, of course, but it didn’t seem like the time to make that point.

“That’s what I thought,” Georgina said. “And I love surprises.”

“Then I’ll fix you up.” Mike smiled at Georgina, then shifted his attention to Molly, and she saw that his eyes were the same color as Finn’s. A deep, rich hazel. More green than brown. Why had she noticed that? A trickle of annoyance went through her. “Got that drain fixed yet?”

“I have a call in to a plumber. He’s working me in this weekend.” Mike had been right about all the locals being contracted to the construction companies. The Eagle Valley was experiencing a mini housing boom. “I called four before I got one. O’Malley’s Plumbing and Heating? He promised Saturday and said he wouldn’t charge weekend rates, since it’s a simple job.”

Mike didn’t look as if he fully believed the guy would honor his word. “Crazy, all this rain,” he said. “We had floods a little over a year ago, then this summer was so dry that there were bad fires.”

“I heard,” Molly said. “Some people lost homes.”

Mike gave a nod. “My nephew Dylan’s fiancée lost her ranch house in the fire.”

“That’s terrible.” Molly remembered Dylan. She’d liked him. He’d been a year ahead of her, quiet and studious. Invisible in a way. Like she had been, except that he could have been as popular as Finn, had he chosen to be. Somehow she didn’t think that popularity was one of her options. “Who is his fiancée?”

“Jolie Brody.”

Brody. Of course. Allie Brody looked just like Jolie Brody, whom she’d graduated from high school with.