Forever With You (Bayou Dreams Book 5) (7 page)

“How soon would all this happen?” Gabe asked, hoping he didn’t sound too eager.

“You would officially take over as assistant principal at the end of this school year.”

Yes. That was less than two months away. It meant his new salary would kick in around that time, too.

“There’s just one thing,” Superintendent McCabe said. “The residents of both Gauthier and Maplesville have to approve of the merger. School-board elections are in less than four weeks, and there’s not a single member of the board who will support the merger if residents are against it.” He looked from Gabe to Principal Williams. “I’m counting on the two of you to rally the support of the parents here at GEMS. You must get them on board with this if we’re going to go forward.”

Dammit
. Gabe knew it was too good to be true.

Half the parents at GEMS still didn’t know him and the other half didn’t trust him because of the rumor Ardina had started about the Lock-In. How in the hell was he going to convince them to support
anything
he advocated for?

Gabe’s eyes fell shut as he blew out a deep breath. Now more than ever he would need Leslie Kirkland’s help to get him back in the good graces of the parents in Gauthier.

Chapter 4

“C
assidy, you have exactly one minute to get out of that bathroom,” Leslie called from her own bathroom. “The school bus will be here any minute.”

“I’m almost done.”

Leslie pitched her head back and sighed at the ceiling. The child was only nine years old.
Nine
. And already she was a bathroom hog. How was she going to handle the teen years? Leslie had considered adding on a third bathroom in a few years, but she wasn’t sure she would be able to wait that long.

Leslie stopped in the middle of putting on her eyeliner.

If she followed through with the plans that had been floating around in her head, they wouldn’t be in this house by the time Cassidy became a teenager. They wouldn’t be here by the time she reached age ten.

Leslie tried to ignore the nauseating sensation that began to swirl in her stomach as she threw on a touch of mascara and swiped gloss over her lips.

When she arrived in the kitchen, Cassidy and Kristi were slipping on their backpacks.

“Have you two checked to make sure Buster didn’t have an accident?”

They nodded in unison.

“You looked in all of her usual places?”

Cassidy ticked the list off on her fingers. “At the end of the hallway, in the corner in the living room and in Kristi’s room.”

“Under the coffee table?” Leslie asked.

“Yes,” Kristi said with a firm nod. “No accidents. Buster is becoming a big girl.”

“With a stupid name,” Cassidy said. She stuck her tongue out at Kristi when the five-year-old protested.

Leslie would never tell Kristi that the name she’d chosen for the dog—which was purchased on her birthday, thus giving her naming privileges—was stupid. However, she could think of a million more appropriate names for a female Yorkshire terrier with pink ribbons at her ears.

The screech of the school bus’s tires set them all into motion.

“Okay, okay, get going,” Leslie said, ushering the girls out of the house. She gave them both pecks on the cheeks and stood on the porch steps to watch them board the bus. She waited until it made a right on Oak Street before going back into the house to grab her laptop.

The time it took to deal with Kristi’s tantrum over Cassidy using the strawberry-scented lotion that Shayla had given her for a birthday present had stolen any chance Leslie had of sitting at the table for a nice breakfast. She would have to find something she could eat on the road.

Just as she was pressing the button on the single-serve coffeemaker, Leslie caught a whiff of a foul but familiar odor.

“Dammit, Buster! You
would
wait until the girls were gone, wouldn’t you?”

The puppy, which was currently dancing around her feet, let out a squeaky bark.

Leslie followed her nose to the pile of dog poop in the arched entryway that led from the kitchen to the rarely used formal dining room.

“Looks as if you’ve got a new favorite spot.”

She cursed under her breath as she returned to the kitchen for paper towels. One of the contingencies for getting a dog was that the girls were supposed to be responsible for cleaning up after her. Leslie was convinced they had made some sort of pact with Buster. The dog never made a mess when Cassidy and Kristi were around.

Just to rub salt in the wound, Buster followed after her, yapping and jumping up and down at her legs, as if taunting her. Leslie gave her the meanest stare she could muster.

“I’m not a violent person, but sometimes I really want to strangle you.”

The dog yapped again and then started to pant, her tongue hanging out in the most adorable way. Leslie exhaled a tired laugh. It was either that or choke the little fur ball.

After cleaning up the mess and scrubbing her hands like a surgeon before surgery, Leslie grabbed a granola bar from the healthy-snack basket she kept on the counter and her travel mug from the coffeemaker.

Buster’s accident had put her another ten minutes behind, but at least the early risers who worked at the local concrete factory and oil refineries had made their way out of Gauthier by the time she got on the road. Her smooth sailing came to a screeching halt when she hit the tiny town of Talisheek and encountered a wall of traffic.

Leslie’s head fell back against the headrest. She’d forgotten about the restriping work that started today. It was scheduled to last two weeks.

“Reason number one hundred and twelve to move to Houston.”

She’d grown so weary of the forty-minute commute into Slidell—forty minutes if she didn’t get stuck behind a slow-moving vehicle along the twenty-mile stretch of one-lane-only highway, that was. Thank goodness for her boss and his giant, understanding heart. After a decade of getting caught behind school busses with a dozen stops or tractor trailers hauling sugarcane during harvest season, Stewart Campbell no longer batted an eye when she walked into the office a half hour late.

But she was tired of handing Stew excuses. And she was tired of this long, solitary drive that gave her too much time to think. Too much time to reminisce about the life she’d once led, to contemplate a future that was no longer possible.

A familiar pain tightened Leslie’s chest.

Never again would she witness the joy on her daughters’ faces when they hugged their dad after a year-long deployment. Never again would she rest in Braylon’s arms while they swung lazily on the porch swing and made plans for the day he reached his twenty years with the Army and was able to retire.

This frustratingly long drive gave her too much damn time to remember. Remembering hurt too much.

Leslie swallowed the lump of emotion bottlenecking in her throat and blew out a deep breath.

She needed to meet with Stew. It was time she broached the subject of transferring to the office in The Woodlands, a suburb due north of Houston. She’d debated it back and forth for months, weighed the pros and cons.

The cons were winning by a landslide.

Aside from the upheaval that came with any major move, Leslie also knew that uprooting the girls right now would be hard on them emotionally. They were both enjoying school and their friends. Cass loved being one of the best players on her softball team, and Kristi had joined the Diamond Dolls, the adorable cheerleading squad at GEMS.

But Leslie knew the hardest thing for the girls to endure would be leaving their aunt Shayla.

Shayla had lived on the West Coast for two decades, seeing the girls only a couple of times before moving back to Gauthier after Braylon’s death. Since her return she had become an integral part of their family. It wasn’t just Shayla; Xavier had slipped so effortlessly into the role of being the male figure in the girls’ lives. The thought of taking Kristi and Cass away from two people who had come to mean so much to them made Leslie’s stomach hurt.

But it was more than just her girls’ love for their aunt and uncle tying her to Gauthier. She couldn’t just pack up and leave during her term as president of the PTO, could she? And what about church? She’d been a member of the choir for eight years and had served on the finance board for three.

Even Buster had climbed onto the list of cons. The puppy was just starting to acclimate herself. Who knew what moving to a new house would do to her.

Yet, despite the horde of items crowding the con side of the list, there was one thing on the pro side that outweighed everything else. If she left Gauthier, then maybe she could finally,
finally
put these memories of Braylon behind her and move on with her life.

Leslie knew she could not continue living this way. The memories were like quicksand, slowly pulling her down, keeping her in this mental space she no longer wanted to occupy.

“Which is why you have to leave.”

She turned up the volume on the radio and sang along to the gospel CD she kept in case of emotional emergencies.

When she finally arrived at the office, she felt marginally in control of her emotions. She got out of the car and headed straight for Stewart Campbell’s office, the determination to finally make this move pushing her feet forward.

“Where’s Stew?” Leslie asked when she walked into the darkened office.

“He had to fly to New York this morning for an emergency meeting at headquarters,” Kianna Sims, her boss’s executive assistant, said as she breezed into the office and set a collection of files on it.

Leslie couldn’t deny the relief that washed over her at the reprieve from asking for the transfer. She was
such
a coward.

“Why the urgency?” she asked Kianna.

The executive assistant shrugged. “Don’t know, but the quarterly report is due to be released next week.”

Leslie grimaced. They all knew that an emergency trip to headquarters so close to a report release didn’t spell good news.

With Stewart gone, Leslie was the most senior employee in the office and technically in charge, but in this office, which ran like a well-oiled machine, it didn’t really matter.

She’d joined the financial capitalist firm as an analyst shortly after she and Braylon were married, and in that time she and her coworkers had become a family.

The office was located in Slidell, but most of their clients were based in downtown New Orleans, requiring multiple analysts to make the hour-long drive several times a week. Everyone in the office had agreed that, as the only single mother in the group, Leslie should be exempt from making the trek into the city just in case her girls had an emergency at school that required her to return quickly to Gauthier.

She loved these people. They had seen her through two pregnancies and helped her through the death of her husband. Leslie could not begin to comprehend how much she would miss them if she transferred to Houston.

When.
When she transferred to Houston. She’d already made the decision to leave. But if she could, she would take them all with her.

The morning coasted by without incident. After lunch, Leslie and two of her coworkers sat in on a conference call with Stewart. To everyone’s relief the news out of New York wasn’t bad at all. In fact, it was fabulous. The firm had exceeded expected profits for the quarter. There was so much patting on the back that Leslie figured they would all have bruises by the end of the day.

As they filed out of the conference room, she grabbed a cup of tea from the break room before returning to her desk to tackle the emails that had sprouted and multiplied during the past hour. An email from the GEMS Connect system caught her eye. She should have been ashamed of the excited tingles that erupted throughout her belly when she spotted Gabriel Franklin’s name in the sender section, but she was too busy darting for her computer mouse to feel shame.

Mrs. Kirkland,

It was a true pleasure seeing you at this past Tuesday’s Parent/Teacher Conference night. I wanted to thank you again for being such a supportive and engaged parent. You make a difference not just in Cassidy’s education, but in the academic lives of all GEMS students, who benefit from your involvement in the school.

I’m writing in hopes that we can meet to discuss the agenda for the special PTO meeting we talked about on Tuesday. It is imperative that parents get the full story regarding my changes to the Lock-In event. Would you be willing to have coffee with me this evening so that we can discuss?

Sincerely,

Gabriel

Leslie stared at the screen for several moments, unsure how she should respond.

Coffee? He’d asked her out for coffee? And look at the way he’d signed it.
Gabriel
. No Mr. Franklin. No GEMS Interim Assistant Principal. Just Gabriel.

“Leslie?”

Leslie’s head popped up. Kianna stood in her open doorway, a sheaf of papers in her hands.

“You needed something?” She minimized the email on her computer screen.

“Stewart asked if you could sign off on these security statements.”

“Has he read them?”

“Yes. They just need a signature.”

Leslie motioned for her to bring the papers to her and signed the flagged pages. Then she began to pack up her work to take home with her.

“I have to meet with the assistant principal at the girls’ school, so I’ll be leaving a little early today,” she told Kianna.

“Uh-oh. Who’s in trouble, Cassidy or Kristi?”

“No, no, no. It’s nothing like that,” Leslie said with a laugh. At least the girls weren’t in trouble. She, on the other hand, had better control these pesky little tingles that kept going off in her stomach before she found
herself
in trouble.

Once Kianna left, Leslie pulled up the email again and went through a mental list of why it would be a bad idea—a stupid, horrible, ridiculously terrible idea—to have coffee with Gabriel Franklin. Even when coffee was just coffee, there was always the risk of someone seeing it as something more than
just
coffee. What if someone saw them together and took it as something more than what it was meant to be? What if Gabriel
meant
for it to be something more?

They had chemistry. There was no way to deny it. Leslie had run out of benign explanations for the palpable attraction that had soared between them Tuesday night. There had been only one other time in her life when she’d connected with another person so immediately, so intimately. And it scared the hell out of her to think of connecting with someone else on that level again.

Leslie rolled her eyes. “It’s just coffee, for crying out loud.”

Yet, when she replied to his email, she suggested they meet in his office at the school. Because she really was the biggest coward on the face of the planet.

She quickly packed up her briefcase and asked Kianna to send an office-wide text for anyone to contact her via her cell if they needed her.

The girls were both going over to The Jazzy Bean after school today, per Shayla’s request. She was trying new healthy bakery recipes and wanted to use the girls as guinea pigs, a role both Cassidy and Kristi relished. Leslie was just happy that she didn’t have to pay a babysitter.

Less than an hour later, she pulled into the visitors’ parking lot at the school just as the last yellow bus was turning onto the highway. She entered through glass double doors and headed for the front office. Ardina Scofield stood at the copier, catching papers as they shot out of the machine.