Read Online Every Little Kiss by Kendra Leigh Castle - Free Book Online Page A

until I take the hint that you’re always going to be busy when I ask you out?”
    “Look, Seth,” she said, closing the lid of the box and stepping back—safely out of touching distance, should he be so inclined. “I really appreciate what you did for me the other night, and you seem like a nice guy. I just have too much on my plate to be getting involved with anyone right now.”
    The rejection stung, even if it was expected. It was his own damn fault for asking in the first place, he thought irritably. His good mood wilted like a flower left too long in the sun.
    “That makes two of us,” he replied, and it was true. . . . Hadn’t he decided a long hiatus from outside complications was in order while he built a life here? So there was no reason for him to feel this defensive. Not thatknowing it seemed to help any. “I just thought you might want to grab dinner or something. I don’t know that many people here yet. People are friendly, but I’m not local. It’s taking some time.”
    It wasn’t a play for pity, just the truth. He might not be interested in a whirlwind social life, but he missed having a few go-to people when he wanted company. There were a handful of candidates he thought might turn out to be good friends, but he didn’t tend to dive into things all at once. That was a great way to end up with people in your life who made you want to hide when the doorbell rang.
    “I’m sorry,” Emma said, and the regret in her voice was clear. “It’s not you, really—”
    “Don’t be sorry,” he replied, cutting her off smoothly. “It was just an idea.” She was having none of the interruption, though.
    “You didn’t let me finish,” she said, an edge creeping into her voice. “It’s not you. It’s the situation. Even if I wasn’t busy, if I went out with you, all it would do is keep people talking. You’re not from here, so I wouldn’t expect you to understand, but rumors about people in my family tend to snowball.”
    His eyebrows rose. “Snowball into what?”
    “Small missteps become legendary screwups. For instance, the Henrys were one of the founding families of Harvest Cove. Guess which family has stories told about one of its female ancestors being a witch?”
    Emma’s obvious annoyance about that surprised him.
    “That’s just local color, though,” Seth said. “People never take that kind of thing seriously. Normal people, anyway.”
    She looked at him intently, not even cracking a smile.
So serious
. He wondered why. He wondered a lot of things about her, for all the good it was doing him.
    “How about this, then? One of the eighteenth-century Henrys married a Native American woman,” Emma said. “They were apparently happy and had a bunch of kids, but that Henry—George, I think; there were a lot of Georges—was, in his day, blamed for everything from crop failures to bad weather to the occasional hangnail. He’d married a heathen, didn’t make her convert, and so invited a good, old-fashioned smiting of the town from the powers that be.”
    “Okay,” Seth said. “That’s time-specific superstitious weirdness, but I see your point.”
    “Oh no,” Emma said. “You really don’t. There were Henrys who were famously unlucky, or famously stupid. Henrys who supposedly had a Forrest Gump–like influence on major events. If a thing went bad, a Henry had to have caused it. We’re known for marrying badly, making money we don’t deserve, and a general lack of dependability. We’re like the human cooties of Harvest Cove.”
    That made him laugh, though he tried to stifle what he could because she looked so grim. “It can’t be that bad. I haven’t heard anything like that.”
    She arched an eyebrow. “You haven’t heard that my mom is a tie-dyed hippie running a massive drug-dealing operation out of the house?”
    “Um, well . . .” Okay, so he had heard that, and thought it was insane.
    “Well, there you go. And my sister . . .” She trailed