Love, Special Delivery

Mandy was getting as overly dramatic as Olivia.

She smiled harder, closing the distance between them. “I’m sorry. What did you say?”

“I can’t find it.” Ben halted his search, arms akimbo, scowling down at Mandy, but not nearly as sharply as before. “And yet, you’re smiling.”

“I...uh...” Mandy had to stand up for herself if she was to succeed as postmaster. “I find a smile helps me through tough times. It keeps all the bad stuff at bay, you know?”

“Not really.” His stare tried to pierce her words, but they were the truth and held up to his inspection. After a moment, Ben smiled enigmatically and turned his attention back to the gray, warped and peeling siding. “It should be right here.” And then he stepped closer to the overgrown hedges bordering the wall, moving branches aside.

Mandy braced herself for Riley’s now-familiar growl. The raccoon had been hunkering down in the bushes since she’d nailed a board over the hole he’d made in the siding.

But not even Riley was courageous enough to stand up to the ferocious Ben Libby.

“There it is.” Ben angled so she could see the panel. He tapped the gauge. “See this? There’s no water pressure. And when I open up the valve...” He turned the spigot.

Nothing happened.

Ben’s gaze connected with hers the way a teacher’s did to a student’s when waiting for an answer to an easy question.

“I’m assuming there’s supposed to be water flowing somewhere?” she said tentatively.

“And an alarm going off.” Ben shut the valve. “This needs to be fixed before you open. Priority one.”

Such a long list. Mandy nodded numbly.

But she kept smiling.

* * *

“IS THAT...” Ben moved branches aside. “Cat food?”

“Yes.” Mandy’s cheeks bloomed with soft color. “I evicted Riley. I owed him something.”

“Owed a raccoon?” Ben stood and studied Mandy once more. She didn’t look as if she’d be full of surprises. This close, he could see the fabric of her striped postal shirt was worn at the collar, the thickness of her lashes, the weariness in her brown eyes. And yet, despite her fatigue and her smile, there was a determination to the set of her shoulders. She was a surprise, all right. “Won’t free food keep him coming back?”

That smile of hers wavered, and she stared into his eyes as if he confounded her as much as she did him. “Have you ever wondered where you’ll live?”

“No.” His answer came too quickly. “Well, yes. Recently.” After Erica died, he’d realized raising a little girl wouldn’t work in his studio apartment. He’d sublet his unit and moved in with his parents. “It was unsettling.”

“Then you understand,” she said in a voice that said volumes about the uncertainties she’d faced in life. “Change is hard, even for a raccoon.”

He owed her a smile. How could he not? They’d both ended up with more than they’d bargained for by coming to Harmony Valley. Suddenly, he was glad they weren’t writing her citations. “My grandfather would approve of you. He rescues stray cats.”

“Felix? I doubt he’d approve of me.” She blinked, adding quickly, “I mean, who would?”

“I would. I do.” The words spilled out, past the long list of safety regulations she was breaking and his professional standards. He wasn’t here looking for her phone number. With all the balls he was juggling—Dad’s health, launching the fire department, caring for Hannah while trying to find her real dad—he had no energy to put himself out there, no time for the slow ramp that led to friendship or perhaps something else. It was just...she had a way of making his gaze linger.

Mandy’s gaze slid to the bushes, and the color in her cheeks deepened. She hadn’t expected his endorsement, and given his intensity inside, he couldn’t blame her.

“What’s the word?” Dad called from inside the post office.

Thankfully, Dad couldn’t see them from where he sat because Ben would never hear the end of it if Dad witnessed how near he stood to Mandy, how long he’d been staring at her, the near foolish tilt to his grin.

“It’s as expected,” Ben called back gruffly, feeling just the opposite. He took a step back. Straightened. Cleared his throat. “The fire panel is offline.” Offline. It was where he needed to store his unexpected fascination with Mandy.

* * *

THAT NIGHT, MANDY was too tired to cook.

She was too tired to wash dishes.

Good thing it was Olivia’s day to do both.

Mandy dropped her purse and shoes in the middle of the living room floor and collapsed into a recliner. She stared at the black screen of the small TV, too tired to get back up and look for the remote. Although perhaps not too tired to indulge in a brief fantasy where a hunky fireman retrieved it for her.

And, despite the hunky fireman of her dreams bearing some resemblance to Ben, her hunky fireman didn’t lecture. He just smiled and looked hunky, as Ben had when they’d talked about her feeding Riley cat food. For a few minutes, she’d felt as if they were as comfortable with each other as a pair of well-worn sneakers. And a moment later, she’d felt as if she’d been caught wearing those sneakers on prom night when everyone else was in new sparkly heels.

“I’m home,” she called out for Olivia’s benefit, spotting the remote across the room next to Grandma’s sewing basket.

“I heard.” Olivia drifted in, blowing on her painted fingernails. Except for her manicure, everything about Olivia was minimal—light makeup, bare feet, lemon-colored spaghetti-strap blouse and those dreadful short-shorts. “Look what I did. It’s an American flag.” She angled her hand so Mandy could see. There were red-and-white stripes on some fingernails and white glittery stars on blue backgrounds on her thumbs.

“Very nice.” It was hard to deny her sister had talent when it came to nails, but, “How long did that take you?”

“All day.” Olivia flopped onto the blue plaid couch. It said something to their cleaning skills that no dust billowed.

“I thought we agreed that you’d apply for work today,” Mandy said carefully. That was the trick with teenagers. You had to walk on tiptoe when what you really wanted to do was screech about laziness and lost opportunities and, therefore, break some eggs. That’s what Mandy called the loss of control over her emotions. And losing control meant a pile of eggshells.

Olivia’s innocent brown eyes turned Mandy’s way. “I couldn’t go out without doing my nails.”

Eggshells. Eggshells.

“You realize you have one more day to find a job and then you’re coming to work for me.” Mandy could use her help. Anticipating that need when she’d landed the job, she’d made Olivia take the postal employee test. “I don’t like the idea of you being home alone.” What she would have preferred to have said was Olivia needed to earn her own nail polish money. But that would have been unnecessarily mean.

Olivia admired her nails, as relaxed as Mandy was uptight. “I looked online and there were no job listings.”

“Hence the obvious need to do your nails.” Unable to filter a brief spurt of sarcasm, Mandy drew a deep breath and tried again. “A town as small as Harmony Valley won’t have jobs posted online.”

“We might just as well have moved to the north pole.” Olivia flopped back against the couch, resorting to her best defense—drama. “We’re in the middle of nowhere. There’s no mall or movie theater. What if there’s an emergency? What if I get sick?” She was winding up like a pitcher about to throw a third strike. “What if—”

“We’ve been over this.” Mandy was afraid her smile was slipping. “The nearest hospital is thirty minutes away. Plenty of time to seek care.”

Olivia changed tactics as swiftly as a guppy changed course in a fishbowl. “I didn’t want to move here.”

“Harmony Valley isn’t so bad.” Mandy stared longingly at the remote, wondering how much longer her sister’s energy for an argument would last.

“Mandy.” Olivia said her name as if Mandy was the one being unreasonable. “I meant I didn’t want to move here.” She patted the couch cushion with the heel of her hand, careful of her patriotic nails.

Mandy’s battered patience felt as brittle and treacherous as a thin layer of ice on a blind curve. “I told you. We have bills.” From Olivia’s follow-up medical care, the extras her insurance hadn’t covered. “And we need two months’ rent saved to get a house.” The town had only a few apartments available, and those were mostly studios above the old shops on Main Street.