Author: Kristan Higgins

She shook her head. “Why? Did he die?”

“No,” I answered. “Ava told me he’s retiring.”

“And Ava knows this because she slept with him?” Kiki, like Ava, lived on campus, and they hung out together sometimes.

“Now, now.”

“Well, if he is, that’s great for you, Grace! Only Paul has more seniority, right? You’d apply for the job, wouldn’t you?”

“It’s a little early to be talking about that,” I said, sidestepping the question. “I just wondered if you’d heard. See you later.”

I pulled carefully out of the parking lot—Manning students tended to drive cars worth more than my annual salary, and nicking one would not be advisable—and headed through Farmington back to the twisted streets of Peterston, thinking about Dr. Eckhart. If it was true, then yes, I’d apply to be the new chairman of our department.

To be honest, I thought Manning’s history curriculum was too stodgy. Kids needed to feel the importance of the past, and, yes, sometimes they needed it jammed down their throats. Gently and lovingly, of course.

I pulled into my driveway and saw the true reason for my trip home, Angus’s bowels not withstanding. My neighbor stood in his front yard by a power saw or some such tool. Shirtless. Shoulder muscles rippling under his skin, biceps thick and bulging…hard…golden…Okay, Grace! That’s enough!

“Howdy, neighbor,” I said, wincing as the words left my mouth.

He turned off his saw and took off the safety glasses. I winced. His eye was a mess. It was open a centimeter or two—progress from being swollen completely shut yesterday—and from what I could see, the white of his eye was quite bloodshot. A purple-and-blue bruise covered him from brow to cheekbone. Hello, bad boy! Yes, granted, I’d given him the bruise—actually, make that plural, because I saw a faint stripe of purplish-red along his jaw, right where I’d hit him with the rake—but still. He had all the rough and sultry appeal of Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront. Clive Owen in Sin City. Russell Crowe in everything he did.

“Hi,” he said, putting his hands on his hips. The motion made his arms curve most beautifully.

“How’s your eye?” I asked, trying not to stare at his broad, muscular chest.

“How does it look?” he grumbled.

Okay, so he wasn’t over that. “So, listen, we got off to a bad start,” I said with what I hoped was a rueful smile.

From inside my house, Angus heard my voice and began barking with joy. Yarp! Yarp! Yarp!

Yarpyarpyarpyarpyarp! “Can we start over? I’m Grace Emerson. I live next door.” I swallowed and stuck out my hand.

My neighbor looked at me for a moment, then came toward me and took my hand. Oh, God. Electricity shot up my arm like I’d grabbed a downed wire. His hand was most definitely a working-man’s hand. Callused, hard, warm… “Callahan O’ Shea,” he said.

Ohh. Oh, wow. What a name. Regions of my anatomy, long neglected, made themselves known to me with a warm, rolling squeeze.

Yarpyarpyarpyarpyarp! I realized I was staring at Callahan O’ Shea (sigh!) and still holding on to his hand. And he was smiling, just a little bit, softening the bad-boy look quite nicely.

“So,” I said, my voice weak, letting go of his hand reluctantly. “Where’d you move from?”

“Virginia.” He was staring at me. It was hard to think.

“Virginia. Huh. Where in Virginia?” I said. Yarpyarpyarp yarpyarp! Angus was nearly hysterical now. Quiet, baby, I thought. Mommy’s lusting.

“Petersburg,” he said. Not the most vociferous guy, but that was okay. Muscles like that…those eyes…well, the unbruised, unbloodshot eye…if the other one was like that, I was in for a treat.

“Petersburg,” I repeated faintly, still staring. “I’ve been there. Quite a few Civil War battles down there. Assault on Petersburg, Old Men and Young Boys. Yup.”

He didn’t respond. Yarp! Yarp! Yarp! “So what were you doing in Petersburg?” I asked.

He folded his arms. “Three to five.”

Yarpyarpyarpyarp! “Excuse me?” I asked.

“I was serving a three-to five-year sentence at Petersburg Federal Prison,” he said.

It took a few beats of my heart for that to register. Ka-bump…ka-bump…ka… God’s nightgown!

“Prison?” I squeaked. “And um…wow! Prison! Imagine that!”

He said nothing.

“So…when…when did you get out?”

“Friday.”

Friday. Friday. He just got out of the clink! He was a criminal! And just what crime did he commit, huh? Maybe I hadn’t been so far off with the pit-digging after all! And I had clubbed him! Holy Mother of God! I clubbed an excon and sent him to jail! Sent him to…oh, God…sent him to jail the night after he got out. Surely this would not endear me to Callahan O’ Shea, Ex-Con. What if he wanted revenge?

My breath was coming in shallow gasps. Yes, I was definitely hyperventilating a bit. Yarpyarpyarpyarpyarpyarp!

Finally, the flight part of the fight or flight instinct kicked in.

“Wow! Listen to my dog! I better go. Bye! Have a good day! I have to…I should call my boyfriend. He’s waiting for me to call. We always call at noon to check in. I should go. Bye.”

I managed not to run into my house. I did, however, lock the door behind me. And dead bolt it. And check the back door. And lock that. As well as the windows. Angus raced around the house in his traditional victory laps, but I was too stunned to pay him the attention he was accustomed to.

Three to five years! In prison! I was living next to an ex-con! I almost invited him over for dinner!

I grabbed the phone and stabbed in Margaret’s cell phone number. She was a lawyer. She’d tell me what to do.

“Margs, I’m living next to an ex-con! What should I do?”

“I’m on my way into court, Grace. An ex-con? What was he in for?”

“I don’t know! That’s why I need you.”

“Well, what do you know?” she asked.

“He was in Petersburg. Virginia. Three years? Five? Three to five? What would that be for? Nothing bad, right?

Nothing scary?”

“Could be anything.” Margaret’s voice was blithe. “People serve less time for rape and assault.”

“Oh, good God!”

“Settle down, settle down. Petersburg, huh? That’s a minimum security place, I’m pretty sure. Listen, Grace, I can’t help you now. Call me later. Google him. Gotta go.”

“Right. Google. Good idea,” I said, but she’d already hung up. I jabbed on my computer, sweating. A glance out the dining-room windows revealed that Callahan O’ Shea had gone back to work. The rotting steps of his front porch had been removed, the shingles mostly gone. I pictured him stabbing trash along a state highway, wearing an orange jumpsuit. Oh, shit.

“Come on,” I muttered, waiting for my computer to come to life. When the Google screen came on, finally, I typed in Callahan O’ Shea and waited. Bingo.

Callahan O’ Shea, lead fiddler for the Irish folk group We Miss You, Bobby Sands, sustained minor injuries when the band was pelted with trash Saturday at Sullivan’s Pub in Limerick.

Okay. Not my guy, probably. I scrolled down. Unfortunately, that band had quite a bit of press, recently…they were enraging crowds by playing “Rule Britannia” and the clientele wasn’t taking it well.

It was then that my Internet connection, never the most reliable of creatures, decided to quit. Crap.

With another wary glance next door, I let Angus into the fenced-in backyard, then went back into my kitchen to scare up some lunch. Now that my initial shock was wearing off, I felt a little less panicky. Calling on my vast legal knowledge, obtained from many happy hours with Law & Order, two blood relatives who were lawyers and one ex-fiancé of the same profession, I seemed to believe that three to five in a minimum security prison wouldn’t be for scary, violent, muscular men. And if he had done something scary…well. I’d move.

I swallowed some lunch, called Angus back in, reminded him that he was the very finest dog in the universe and not to so much as look at the big ex-con next door, and grabbed my car keys.

Callahan O’ Shea was hammering something on the front porch as I approached my car. He didn’t look scary.

He looked gorgeous. Which didn’t mean he wasn’t dangerous, but still. Minimum security, that was reassuring.

And hey. This was my house, my neighborhood. I would not be cowed. Straightening my shoulders, I decided to take a stand. “So what were you in for, Mr. O’ Shea?” I called.

He straightened up, glanced at me, then jumped off the porch, scaring me a little with the quick grace of his move. Very…predatory. Walking up to the split rail fence that divided our properties, he folded his arms again.

Ooh. Stop it, Grace.

“What do you think I was in for?” he asked.

“Murder?” I suggested. May as well start with my worst fear.

“Please. Don’t you watch Law & Order?”

“Assault and battery?”

“No.”

“Identity theft?”

“Getting warmer.”

“I have to get back to work,” I snapped. He raised an eyebrow and remained silent. “You dug a pit in your basement and chained a woman there.”

“Bingo. You got it, lady. Three to five for woman-chaining.”

“Well, here’s the thing, Callahan O’ Shea. My sister’s an attorney. I can ask her to dig around and uncover your sordid past—” already did, in fact “—or you can just come out and tell me if I need to buy a Rottweiler.”

“Seemed to me like your little rat-dog did a pretty good job on his own,” he said, running a hand through his sweat-dampened hair, making it stand on end.

“Angus is not a rat-dog!” I protested. “He’s a purebred West Highland terrier. A gentle, loving breed.”

“Yes. Gentle and loving is just what I thought when he sank his little fangs into my arm the other night.”

“Oh, please. He only had your sleeve.”

Mr. O’ Shea extended his arm, revealing two puncture marks on his wrist.

“Damn,” I muttered. “Well, fine. File a lawsuit, if a felon is allowed to do that. I’ll call my sister. And the second I get back to school, I’m going to Google you.”

“All the women say that,” he replied. He turned back to his saw, dismissing me. I found myself checking out his ass. Very nice. Then I mentally slapped myself and got into my car.

RECALCITRANT CALLAHAN O’SHEA might not be too forthcoming about his sordid past, but I felt it certainly behooved me to know just what kind of criminal lived next door. As soon as my Twentieth Century sophomores were finished, I went to my tiny office and surfed the Net. This time, I was rewarded.

The Times-Picayune in New Orleans had the following information from two years ago.

Callahan O’ Shea pleaded guilty to charges of embezzlement and was sentenced to three to five years at a minimum security facility. Tyrone Blackwell pleaded guilty to charges of larceny… The only other hits referred to the ill-fated Irish band.

Embezzlement. Well. That wasn’t so bad, was it? Not that it was good, of course…but nothing violent or scary. I wondered just how much Mr. O’ Shea had taken. I wondered, too, if he was single.

No. The last thing I needed was some sort of fascination with a churlish ex-con. I was looking for someone who could go the distance. A father for my children. A man of morals and integrity who was also extremely goodlooking and an excellent kisser who could hold his own at Manning functions. Sort of a modern-day General Maximus, if you will. I didn’t want to waste time on Callahan O’ Shea, no matter how beautiful a name he had or how good he looked without a shirt.