It was only the day he told her he was retiring that he talked about Franky and what the younger man had done to her. That was the day he offered to sell her the building that she lived and worked in. The insurance business would be sold separately. Ruth immediately agreed since she hadn’t spent a penny on rent since she’d moved in. She had been saving for something.
So, now she owned the entire building. Oddly, she didn’t think Anderson Miles knew. Every month he had her mail the rent check to the owner, never letting on that it was her. And when something was broken, it was her job to call to get it repaired.
Once she had taken ownership of the building, she still had money in savings and started to look around town. Quickly and quietly, she had bought five other buildings downtown. Some had been for sale for years, including the one next door where Tess lives and the building across from them that Mia lived in, which now housed the only clinic in a forty-mile radius. Ruth was one of the biggest property owners in town if you exclude all those who have farmland.
She had learned to love the beginning of the month; the money would roll in. Most people who rented from her didn’t know it was Ruth Kennedy that owned the building. When she had bought her first building, she had hired a rental managing company to do all the dirty work for her. Mia was one of the few renters that brought a check to her on the first of the month. Oddly, the town’s biggest gossip had never told anyone else that Ruth owned the buildings; she just dropped it off and headed back to work. Sometimes they didn’t even say a word to each other.
In the first year she had worked for Frank, she had realized that being Frank’s secretary was kind of boring, especially during the early afternoon when he would nap in his office. That first summer, she started to write fun things to send to Franky to read, just to kill time. Most she was sure went unread by her lover, who wasn’t into love notes. When he stopped coming home, she slowed down on the notes and started writing other things instead. It then evolved into the kind of books she was reading at the time.
The summer after Franky had dumped her, she had sold her first book. Since then, she wrote around eight books a year, sometimes more. Now she wrote under four pen names for different types of books, all from her drab, boring office.
Four years ago, when Anderson had bought the company and kept her on as his secretary, she thought she would have to stop writing at work. And she had, now only editing during working hours. He had never questioned what she did to fill her time, and she just had to be a bit more secretive about it.
Sometimes she felt guilty that she used her work time to write for personal gain. Then she felt guilty that he had to pay her rent for the building also. But so far, she had gotten everything done he had ever asked her to. He could probably get by without her, but he kept her on.
On top of that, she got to spend her days writing about people falling in love while watching Anderson just being handsome and sexy in his office. Guilty pleasures. For four years, no matter what her hero looked like on paper, in her head he always looked like Anderson.
Until recently, he had spent almost every weekend back in Grand Forks, where he came from and where he lived with his girlfriend. Can it be called ‘living with’ if he was only there on the weekends? The woman never even came to Landstad; he had always gone there. How they had kept that relationship going for so long, Ruth didn’t know, but now it was over.
Now he was around on the weekends, though she usually wasn’t. But today they were both at the café together, and he was all sexy in a brown sweater. His hair was even styled a little differently. She wondered if she was drooling when she had seen him there. Then Rafferty had wrecked it.
Rafferty. She cringed at Tess’s suggestion that they were sexually attracted to each other. Even when they had been in high school and were only friends, there was never anything more than that. In fact, she had so few conversations with him that she wondered how they could live in the same small town. Now she knew that he was friends with Anderson, which was no fun.