“If it works.” It wasn’t surprising that Noelle hadn’t wanted to talk to her predecessor about this. It could be difficult to talk to anyone about sexuality, but an older man might be a young woman’s worst nightmare. Or her dad. “Okay, we can deal with this.”

Luckily, she had some practice with this and she knew exactly what to do.

chapter seven

Armie was well aware that everyone in the diner was looking at them. “Maybe we should have gone to Guidry’s.”

When he’d decided to have this conversation over lunch, he’d thought he could use it to get to know her in a low-key setting. He hadn’t realized they would be the center of attention.

Damn town.

She shook her head and folded her menu, shoving it back in the holder. She’d ordered a salad and taken off the cheese and eggs and then put them back on. Twice. He still wasn’t sure which salad would show up, and he wasn’t sure Dixie knew, either.

“I can’t take that much time,” Lila explained. “I actually have a couple of patients this afternoon. Apparently they called while I was in with Noelle. I’m doing physicals and drug testing for an oil company on a couple of new hires. It’s very exciting. Is it wrong that I’m kind of hoping I find something horribly wrong with one of them? Not like cancer. That would be terrible. But something curable would be nice.”

She was odd. He wished that made her less attractive to him. And then there was the fact that when Noelle had come out of her checkup, she’d had the biggest grin on her face. He glanced over at her. His daughter was sitting at a table with Beth Burns, her best friend. They were leaning in and giggling while waiting for lunch to be delivered.

She’d been tense lately, as though something was bothering her, and Lila seemed to have set her mind at ease.

He hated that he was about to shake Lila’s calm. “It’s hard when things are slow. It can be difficult to get used to the pace of life around here. I know it was for me when I came back. It still is sometimes. I often pray for tourists to get lost and fly through town so I can at least say I wrote a ticket that day.”

She stared at him. “Yes, you do that a lot.”

She was cute when she got mad. Not that he wanted to make her really mad. He got the feeling she could be mean. He should get her to forget the ticket. “So I mentioned I went out to visit Carrie Petrie.”

“And?” She said the word with the expectation of someone who wasn’t sure she would like what he had to say.