Tempted Again by Cathie Linz

cowardly.
    “Good morning, ladies.” Connor was irritatingly cheerful.
    Marissa hadn’t seen him much since that early morning when he’d called her Rissa. She’d welcomed the break from his company in the interval but she’d always been on her guard against running into him. One time she’d waited in her car when she’d seen him walk intothe Kroger until he came out a short time later. Luckily, no one had knocked on her car window the way they had a few days later in the library parking lot.
    “Having car trouble?” Roz had asked.
    “No.” Marissa had started the rust-bucket VW, whereupon the sound of Copper’s “Heartbreak Lullaby” began to blare out of the demented sound system. She’d turned the demon lime car off again. “It won’t even let me eject the darn CD.”
    “I know a good mechanic if you want to get that fixed,” Roz had told her.
    Marissa had copied down the info even though she knew she couldn’t afford to pay a mechanic. First she had to get an apartment.
    And now here she was, with her lease in her hand and her nemesis a few feet away.
    “You’re just in time to meet your new neighbor,” Sally said. “Connor Doyle, meet Marissa Bennett.”
    “We’ve met,” Connor said.
    Marissa didn’t know which would be worse—him saying they’d been a couple a decade ago or him saying he’d pulled her over for being in the parade. She should have known he wouldn’t elaborate. Maybe he was hoping she’d jump to fill in the silence and stick her foot in her mouth. Not gonna happen. She was learning when to keep her mouth shut and this was one of those occasions.
    “Well, that’s great then. You two already know each other.” Sally reached for the vibrating cell phone at her waist. “Sorry, I have to take this. Excuse me for a moment.” She moved away, leaving them alone in the foyer between the four upper apartments.
    “So we’re going to be neighbors, huh?” Connorgrinned at her as if able to read her tumultuous thoughts. “I’m guessing by the panicked look on your face that you didn’t know I lived in this building.”
    “I’m not panicked.”
    “No?”
    “No.” She was, of course, but she’d rather eat bugs than admit that to him. “Everything is not always about you.”
    “Fair enough.” He shoved his aviator-style sunglasses on top of his head so he could fix her with a don’t-lie-to-me stare. “So what were you thinking about to make you look so panicked?”
    “My thoughts are my own.”
    His grin widened. “That’s the first time you really sounded like a librarian. All prim and proper.”
    “Librarians are not all prim and proper any more than cops are all boorish buffoons.”
    “Just me, huh?”
    “What?”
    “You’re calling me a boorish buffoon.”
    “That’s not what I said.”
    “Of course not. But it
is
what you meant, right?”
    “I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I might incriminate myself.”
    “Was that ex-husband of yours a lawyer or something?”
    “Or something,” she muttered. Brad was actually in middle management at a telecom company but he had plenty of lawyer friends.
    “Did you pick up a lot of legalese from him?”
    “I learned a lot from him. Some of it good. Most of it very bad.”
    “I’m sorry to hear that.”
    “Are you?” she said. “Why?”
    “What are you insinuating now?” Connor demanded. “That I want bad things to happen to you? I don’t. Why would I?”
    “Not bad things, no. You’re indifferent,” she said. “You could care less, so why pretend otherwise? It’s too late to pretend to be polite.”
    “Hey, I am very polite. Ask anybody.”
    “I don’t have to ask anybody. I already know from my own experience with you that you’re not polite or even nice, because someone with either of those sterling character traits wouldn’t have done to me what you did.”
    “So basically you’re telling me that I suck.”
    “That would be a pretty accurate assessment,