Read Online Small-Town Girl by Jessica Keller - Free Book Online

He pushed the cart until they were next to the large tubs of paint suitable for using on the paddle wheeler.
    The first sunset cruise was scheduled for Friday, leaving them only four more days to finish getting the boat into shape. He’d yet to iron out a deal with Sesser for a dock at the downtown pier, but they didn’t want to hold up operations waiting on that.
    â€œWhich color do you think we should use?” Brice looked over his shoulder to meet Kendall’s gaze. She seemed distracted this morning, her deep brown eyes full of emotion. He sensed her mood went beyond her stress. “Hey.” He dipped his head a little to be right on her level. “Are you okay?”
    â€œI’m fine.” Her smile looked forced. “Just distracted, is all. I never realized how much I’d have to accomplish every day to run a business.”
    â€œIt never really ends.” If he didn’t write down every little thing, he’d lose track of the repairs his boats needed each week. But she didn’t need to hear about how busy or stressed he was. Biting her lip, Kendall looked just as breakable as she had the night her mom showed up on the pier. A need to protect her filled his chest with so much force he took a step back, making the cart bump against the metal shelving with a loud clang . Where had that come from? The urge to protect wasn’t foreign, but it usually only came around with such ferocity when his siblings were in danger.
    Brice shook his head. He only felt that way because she was so petite and she’d confided to him that she didn’t have any friends in town. And yes, he liked her smile and her laugh and the way she made him forget that he usually had a hard time talking to people.
    He took another deep breath of the comforting warehouse air and then swallowed hard. “You’ll do great.”
    â€œI hope so.” Her tentative smile made his stomach kick. “Thank you, you know, for believing in me.”
    â€œKnow what? This paint will work.” He grabbed the first one he saw, heaved it into the cart and steered toward the checkout lanes as if he and Kendall were playing tag and he needed to run away from her.
    Maybe they were, but he couldn’t let her catch him. The situation with Audra had taught him that once he fell for someone, he fell hard. And Brice was done falling.

Chapter Five
    P aintbrush in hand, Kendall jogged over to the old-school boom box in Brice’s warehouse and turned the music up. Dust motes trailed through the air in her wake. He’d left the building’s huge rolling front doors open, so sunlight streamed in and a gentle but steady breeze wrapped them in air carrying a mix of fresh-caught fish, dampness from the lake, something frying at the nearest restaurant and oil. To her surprise, Kendall discovered the eclectic smell didn’t bother her.
    When they returned from the hardware store, his men had already moved the paddle wheeler inside to what Brice called a dry dock, which Kendall realized was exactly that. The boat was hoisted in the air inside the building so people could work on every inch of it and the paint on the bottom could dry. To her disappointment, Brice’s crew had disassembled the paddles and repainted them the day before. She’d been looking forward to splashing them with bright red. Instead she and Brice were working on covering the bottom and lower sides in a respectable gleaming white. Boring. But he promised her they’d paint the top half a deep hunter green, so that had to count for something.
    She fast-stepped to the beat back toward the boat and dipped her brush in the tub of paint on her way. “Don’t you love this song?” she hollered to Brice as she applied a liberal amount of the white to the boat’s side.
    Brice had been quiet on the way back from the hardware store, which wasn’t abnormal for him. In the past week she’d noticed that he tended to stay