Molly's Mr. Wrong

She marked his paper, the last of the evening, and slipped her grading folders into her bag as the phone rang. Please, don’t be the plumber canceling...

“Molly? Hey.” She froze at the rich deep tones of her ex’s voice. “Molly?” he repeated.

“Yes.”

“How’re you doing in Big Sky Country?”

“I’m doing well, thank you.” If she didn’t make small talk, he’d get to his point and they could end this conversation all the sooner.

“I’m doing pretty good down here in Arizona, too, thanks for asking.”

She drew in a breath, but kept her mouth shut. “The season is winding down, but it’s been a good one.”

“What do you need, Blake?”

“I need the sale of the house to hurry along so I have some money to live on during the winter.” Twice the small house they’d shared had been in escrow and twice it had fallen through as the market fluctuated.

“And I’m supposed to do that how?”

“Would you let me borrow some money against the sale?”

“Are you kidding?” She used to be nicer about this. So much nicer.

“I need it.” His voice went flat.

“No.” Blake was still having trouble getting it through his head that she wasn’t in the make-Blake’s-life-easier club anymore. When he hit a wall, the first person he’d turn to, if he didn’t have a current girlfriend, was her. For old time’s sake. Because he’d made mistakes. Because he’d always loved her best.

Because he was a narcissist and she’d been stupid.

“Molly, I don’t have the resources to get through the winter.”

“Get a job.” She ended the call, then scrolled through her menus and blocked his number. There. Problem solved.

She should have done that the second time he’d called for a date. But no. She’d been blinded by his beauty, in awe of the fact that the gorgeous guy who sat next to her in English 405—an athlete, for Pete’s sake—wanted to go out with her. And he’d continued to go out with her. At first she thought he’d wanted help with his studies, but he did all right in his classes without her. That was when she’d given herself a good hard look in the mirror and realized that she really wasn’t that different from other women her age—she only perceived herself as different. As lacking in areas that other woman took for granted. Blake had even seemed charmed by her awkwardness and because of that, it had started to fade.

Her gift from Blake—a jump start to her self-confidence.

If she owed him for anything it was that, but not enough to lend him money. Especially when his behavior at the end of their short marriage had knocked her newfound self-confidence sideways.

She was still getting over a few of the knocks.

Molly pushed the thought aside. She’d moved back to the Eagle Valley because she’d been happy here. There’d been the usual high school traumas—cough, homecoming with Finn, cough—but in general she’d been a happily invisible nerd, with happily invisible nerdy friends. In Eagle Valley she’d found a sense of peace she’d never gotten anywhere else.

And it was a thousand miles away from Blake.

Yet still he called her to make things better.

She walked down the hall to her bedroom, glancing into Georgina’s room as she went by. One wall was stacked high with clear plastic bins that had become the temporary wardrobe solution. One bin sat on the floor next to her bed, which was scattered with the clothes she’d tried on before deciding on the perfect thing to wear for a Friday night out. Being as outgoing as Molly had been shy at the same age, she already had a circle of friends she’d met the first week of classes and had connected with two people she’d known when she’d attended third grade at Eagle Valley Elementary. Molly was in awe. To be born with confidence...what a gift.

But maybe if one had to fight to develop confidence, one appreciated it more.

And maybe they always had that tiny niggling fear that if they didn’t hold on to it with an iron grasp, it might just slip away.

* * *

FINN FOUND WALKING into English class the second time a lot easier than it had been the first. He held the door open for Debra and her friend Sharla, smiled back at them when they thanked him, and took the same seat he’d sat in the week before. Molly was busy talking to a student, but she glanced over at him as he sat and he nodded at her. Last week had been stressful. This week he was ready to light this candle.

Debra sat up a little straighter when Molly announced she was going to hand back last week’s papers.

“If your grade isn’t what you expected, don’t worry. The purpose of this class is to identify trouble areas and learn what to do about them. If you got over a 90 percent, you really don’t belong here.”

Debra leaned forward as Molly set her paper facedown on her desk, then eagerly flipped it over. Finn shot a quick look at the grade—85 percent. Debra beamed and started reading comments.

A 70 percent. That was all he wanted. Average. Nothing wrong with average.

Molly glided by his desk, set the paper facedown. Finn flipped it over. Then he almost flipped it back.

His gaze shot up to Molly, who happened to shift her gaze toward him just then. She gave him an unreadable look and walked toward the front of the class.

“As you can see we have some work ahead of us, but again, let me emphasize that this is a starting point.”

Finn’s starting point was almost at ground zero.

Okay, he had some problems putting words down, but...this grade smacked more of payback than it did of assessment.

“What did you get?” Debra whispered. Finn automatically shifted his paper, planning to say something along the lines of “not as good as I’d hoped,” but she caught a glimpse of the percentage before he’d managed to hide it. “Oh.”

Yes. Oh. He smiled gamely at the older woman. “It’s been a while since I’ve written anything.”

“That’s what this course is about. Getting comfortable with writing again.” She gave him an encouraging nod, then fixed her attention back on Molly, who explained that they’d start with sentence structure.

The sentence structure made sense as Finn listened. And he knew he was doing exactly what she was talking about, although according to Molly’s comments, he wasn’t. The remainder of the class was spent on simple exercises. Molly circled the room while Finn stared at his paper, a slow burn building into a flame. He didn’t get much done by the time class had ended, and Molly had avoided coming his way. He left the class with everyone else, but lingered in the hall until he was certain the last person, who seemed bent on telling her life story to Molly, had finally left. The hall, and probably the entire building, was empty when he walked back into the room. Molly did not look surprised to see him.

“Finn.” She held her folders to her chest as if they were a shield. “I assume you want to talk about your grade?”

“You assume correctly. What gives?” He set the paper down on the table. “If this had any more red, the white wouldn’t show.” He leveled a long, hard look at her. “Is this because of what happened back when we were kids?” Like an eon ago.

“This is because it’s that bad.”

He stilled for a moment. “That’s hard to believe because this is basic English, pretty much the equivalent of high school English, and I got straight Cs in high school English. I couldn’t have forgotten that much.”

“And I don’t think your grades in high school reflected your abilities.”

His gaze snapped up to hers. “What the hell does that mean?”

Molly let out a sigh. “You were an athlete...? A good one...?”

“You’re saying my grades were fixed?”

“I admit I have no way of knowing that, but this paper—” she pointed at the bloodbath sitting on the empty desk next to her “—is not C work in high school. Or here at EVCC.”

“According to you, it’s not even D work.”

“I have to be honest.”

He stared at her, at an uncharacteristic loss for words, then when nothing brilliant popped into his head, he snatched the essay off the desk and headed for the door.

“We can fix this, Finn.”

Like hell. As soon as he was out of her line of sight, he crumpled the paper, tossed it into the nearest trash can and headed out the door.

* * *

FINN HADN’T DROPPED the class. Molly couldn’t say why that was important to her, but she scanned the class lists on Tuesday and Wednesday, fully expecting to see his name missing. It wasn’t, but he didn’t show up for the Wednesday class, either. As she started the lesson, she saw Debra glance over at his empty chair and give her head a sad shake.

Molly didn’t feel sad. Reality was reality, and Finn couldn’t write. He could tackle the matter and try to improve himself, or he could ignore it. It appeared he’d chosen to ignore it. His choice. There was no reason that the class should feel empty without him.

Empty and a lot more comfortable. The nervous edge Molly had felt during the first two classes was gone and she traveled around the room, answering questions, offering suggestions as her class worked on skill-building exercises, feeling very much at ease. Therefore, she had no reason to look up Finn’s address and drive by on her way home—just to see if he was there. He lived just past the city limits, so it wasn’t as if she could tell herself she was taking a different route to her place. Nope. She went well out of her way to discover that Finn’s house was well lit and there was a truck and a car parked in front of the garage.

Finn was home. He just hadn’t come to class.

Molly drove on by, wondering why she had a sinking feeling. Finn had made the choice to screw up his high school education. Now he was living with the consequences. She’d only told the truth.

Maybe it was remembering the stunned look on his face as she’d told him that truth. The complete shock to discover that she wasn’t indulging in petty payback. She was doing her job. She let out an audible sigh that made her shoulders drop as she looked for a place to turn around so that she could drive back home. Too softhearted. That’s what she was. That was why Blake had been able to play her.

When she drove back by Finn’s house, she kept her gaze straight ahead. Right where it should be. If Finn chose to drop her class, it was none of her concern.

So why did it feel as if it was?

CHAPTER FOUR

FINN WASN’T A guy who backed away from trouble—if anything, according to his dad, anyway, he ran forward and embraced it—however, academic trouble was foreign territory. And apparently he was traveling that territory with an expired visa. So what was he going to do? Quit school? Tough it out? Risk flunking?

After glancing around to make certain that no customers had wandered into the warehouse, he peeled out of his T-shirt and shook out the grain dust. The stuff made him itch like crazy and he had to wear a paper face mask when moving the bags, which put up dust every time he set down a pallet a little too hard. He was tired of itching.

Mike loved his business, and until he returned from the service, Finn had been perfectly fine working there, too. Now he needed more. When he’d gone overseas, he’d discovered what it felt like to be part of something important. To make a difference. It didn’t help that he was becoming more and more convinced that the store no longer needed him. Before he’d left, he’d essentially been the only employee with the exception of the bookkeeper. The place had been dusty and lonely and he hadn’t cared as long as he could hook up with his friends after work, or go home and work on his cars and trucks.

Those things were no longer enough. He wanted to teach automotives and shop and, as he saw it, he didn’t need stellar English scores to teach hands-on courses, but he did have to pass the class to get a degree. Molly Adamson was standing in his way and he still believed that their past was firmly tied to the score she gave him.

Finn pulled his T-shirt back on, grimacing as he tugged it into place. Still uncomfortable, but not as bad. He walked across the warehouse to the small dust-covered fridge on the opposite wall and pulled out a water. He fumbled the plastic top after opening the bottle and it fell, rolling across the floor. A split second later, Marcel, the cat that had adopted the place as a scraggly kitten years ago, shot out from behind the pallet and attacked. After whacking the cap into submission, the cat stared at it as if daring it to move, then hit it with his paw, causing it to slide across the floor like a hockey puck.

“Good one, Marcel.”

The cat gave him a golden-eyed blink, then disappeared back behind the pallets. The cat was certainly a whole lot tamer than he’d been before Finn had gone overseas, but actually, so was he.

He finished the water, dropped the bottle in the recycling container that Lola had put next to the fridge, then started across the concrete floor to the forklift. Before he could fire it up, Lola announced over the intercom that a customer needed loading. Eighteen bags of alfalfa pellets.

Codie James. It was her usual order.

Finn smiled a little. He and Codie had had some good times, and maybe that was what he needed. To go out with someone like Codie who enjoyed life and seemed to know what she wanted.

When he emerged from the warehouse and approached her big red Dodge, though, she was talking to a guy who nodded and then headed for the store proper, and as she handed him the load ticket, he noted a big rock on her left hand.

“Hey,” he said. “Congratulations.”

Codie beamed. “I know... I said I was never settling down, but I met this guy...” She rolled her eyes toward the sky and gave a goofy smile, which made Finn smile in return.

“Must be some guy.”

“He is. Hang around and you can meet him.”

Finn glanced at the ticket, then gave her a quick nod. “I’ll get this loaded for you.”

“Thanks, Finn.” She reached out to run her hand over his shoulder and down his arm. “Good to have you back.”

“Good to be back.”

After Codie and her beau, Colin, who did seem really decent, left, Finn disappeared back into the warehouse, even though he didn’t have that much to do. Chase would arrive soon and then he was free to do...whatever. Everyone, it seemed, was moving on, and it aggravated him that he’d barely started his own moving-on process before hitting a major roadblock named Molly. Maybe he deserved some comeuppance, because he’d been a jerk with that whole homecoming dance thing, but he’d been a self-centered, hormone-driven teenager at the time.

And she’d been an insecure, quiet girl whose feelings you didn’t give much thought to.

Finn snorted. Well, now she’d gotten a few licks in of her own.

A vehicle pulled into the lot as Finn reached the warehouse door. He didn’t have to look back to know it was Chase—the loud 427 under the hood told the tale. The kid really needed to get a tune-up and he probably couldn’t afford one.

Chase disappeared into the store and Finn walked into the warehouse, where he stood for a few seconds, watching the dust motes drift about in the sunlight filtering in through the fiberglass roofing. The obvious solution, the one in which he didn’t cut and run, was to change English instructors and see if someone new, someone without an ax to grind, had the same opinion as Molly.

But what if that instructor told him he was incompetent, too?

He was no coward, but after what Molly had done...yeah, kind of hard to face the prospect of someone else announcing via red pen bloodbath that he was stupid. And he’d yet to discover what the math teacher was going to do to him.

But he would. This was just a bump in the road. He’d overcome it, because if he didn’t go to school, then that meant he was stuck here in the family business, or in some similar occupation. The life that had seemed so comfortable before going overseas no longer fit him.

He needed a way out, and Molly Adamson was not going to stop him.

* * *

SHE’D DONE THE right thing. No question about it. She had to be honest. Right? She’d been no harsher on Finn than she would have been on anyone else. It wasn’t as if she’d written insults in the margins. She’d even tapered off marking it up toward the end, when it became apparent that he wasn’t joking—that he was actually trying to write an essay.

Unfortunately, there was a lot of red ink on the paper by that time, and...well, maybe she had felt a certain level of glee during the first couple comments. And usually she read through the entire essay without writing anything, but with Finn she’d started marking as soon as she saw something to mark, which had been in the first sentence.

Not good, that.

And then he’d reacted just as Blake would have—with extreme outrage that someone had dared point out his faults.

Well, the faults are real, buddy. There was probably a root cause that could be addressed, but he’d left before she could speak to him about it and then failed to show up at the next class.

Typical spoiled-jock behavior.

Molly gathered the grammar pretests she’d given her freshmen into a neat stack and put them into the wire basket on the edge of her desk. Actually, she was kind of surprised that Finn was in school at all. From what she’d gathered, he’d followed the classic peak-in-high-school path and joined the family business. Nothing wrong with that, but it wasn’t exactly ambitious. Molly liked guys who were open to new adventures—as long as they were safe and well-thought-out.

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.”