Jeannie Watt - Molly's Mr. Wrong

And she’d been an insecure, quiet girl whose feelings you didn’t give much thought to.

Finn snorted. Well, now she’d gotten a few licks in of her own.

A vehicle pulled into the lot as Finn reached the warehouse door. He didn’t have to look back to know it was Chase—the loud 427 under the hood told the tale. The kid really needed to get a tune-up and he probably couldn’t afford one.

Chase disappeared into the store and Finn walked into the warehouse, where he stood for a few seconds, watching the dust motes drift about in the sunlight filtering in through the fiberglass roofing. The obvious solution, the one in which he didn’t cut and run, was to change English instructors and see if someone new, someone without an ax to grind, had the same opinion as Molly.

But what if that instructor told him he was incompetent, too?

He was no coward, but after what Molly had done...yeah, kind of hard to face the prospect of someone else announcing via red pen bloodbath that he was stupid. And he’d yet to discover what the math teacher was going to do to him.

But he would. This was just a bump in the road. He’d overcome it, because if he didn’t go to school, then that meant he was stuck here in the family business, or in some similar occupation. The life that had seemed so comfortable before going overseas no longer fit him.

He needed a way out, and Molly Adamson was not going to stop him.

* * *

SHE’D DONE THE right thing. No question about it. She had to be honest. Right? She’d been no harsher on Finn than she would have been on anyone else. It wasn’t as if she’d written insults in the margins. She’d even tapered off marking it up toward the end, when it became apparent that he wasn’t joking—that he was actually trying to write an essay.

Unfortunately, there was a lot of red ink on the paper by that time, and...well, maybe she had felt a certain level of glee during the first couple comments. And usually she read through the entire essay without writing anything, but with Finn she’d started marking as soon as she saw something to mark, which had been in the first sentence.

Not good, that.

And then he’d reacted just as Blake would have—with extreme outrage that someone had dared point out his faults.

Well, the faults are real, buddy. There was probably a root cause that could be addressed, but he’d left before she could speak to him about it and then failed to show up at the next class.

Typical spoiled-jock behavior.

Molly gathered the grammar pretests she’d given her freshmen into a neat stack and put them into the wire basket on the edge of her desk. Actually, she was kind of surprised that Finn was in school at all. From what she’d gathered, he’d followed the classic peak-in-high-school path and joined the family business. Nothing wrong with that, but it wasn’t exactly ambitious. Molly liked guys who were open to new adventures—as long as they were safe and well-thought-out.

And she shouldn’t be spending so much time thinking about one student whom she’d probably never see again when she had so many who needed her attention.

Some of her students had some serious deficits in their English educations, which was something she had to address and remedy over the course of the next semester. But right now she needed to head home and remember that thing about not burying herself in work. Georgina was supposed to be cooking an actual meal and she was looking forward to food that wasn’t thawed or microwaved.

A muffled thud from the other side of the wall brought her head up. For the past thirty minutes or so, there’d been a lot of noise come from the art studio room next door—tables scraping along the floor and the odd thump.

Once upon a time, Molly probably would have ignored the noise, at least until she was more secure in her surroundings, but those days were gone. No more safe route. She needed to meet people before they sought her out. She needed to forget shyness and uncertainty and put herself out there, which was why she left her office and poked her head into the room next door on the way out of the building for the two-hour break between her afternoon class and evening class.

“Hello,” she called to the woman crouched next to a large cardboard box on the opposite side of the long room. The woman hadn’t been to any of the faculty meetings, and while the old shy Molly might have waited until the two of them had bumped into each other in the hall to introduce herself, the new Molly pushed herself to make first contact. She had no trouble addressing a roomful of students, but one-on-one always froze her up. She was working on it, though, so she smiled when the woman looked up, startled.

“Hi.” She got to her feet, pushing back the long blond hair that had fallen into her face while she’d been crouched over, and sidestepped a few boxes before starting across the room.

“I’m Molly Adamson, your next-door neighbor.”

“Allie Brody, and you’ll only be my neighbor one night a week. I’m teaching a community art class on Wednesday evenings.”

“Community, as in—”

“Regular Joes,” Allie said with a half smile. “Nonstudents. People who want to expand their horizons and get out of the house one night a week.”

“Sounds like fun.”

“It’s my first time teaching at the community college. I’m a little nervous.” She wiped her hands down the sides of her pants. “What do you teach?”

“English comp. Technical writing. One literature class.”

“Sounds like a lot of work.”

“I’m not going to lie. It is. Fortunately, I love what I do.”

Allie cocked her head. “You look familiar. Do we know each other from somewhere?”

“I don’t think we do...but I did graduate from high school here.”

“Me, too,” Allie said. “Born here, graduated here, engaged, married and divorced here. I’m a lifer, it seems.”

Molly laughed. “I’ve spent my life moving, but I hope to settle for a while.” The five o’clock bell chimed and she said, “I need to get going.” Georgina had texted her that she’d started dinner a few minutes ago. “But I’m sure we’ll run into each other again.”

“Do you have a class tomorrow?”

“No. But I’ll probably be here. I promise myself every year that I won’t work late and usually that promise lasts until the first big batch of grading lands on my desk.”

“Well, if you are here, I wouldn’t mind some backup if my class gets rowdy. I’ll just knock on the wall and you can come and save me.”

Molly laughed. “I’ll be happy to oblige.”

She continued on out of the building, glad that she stopped by, but feeling a little off center, as she always did on first meeting people. She’d love to be more like Georgina, who never met a stranger. Or her brother, David, who didn’t care what people thought about him. But she wasn’t like her siblings. Or her parents. She’d been the nose-in-the-book nerd who had a difficult time leaving her comfort zone. Not that she didn’t want to...it was just that the fear factor had been so strong. Then Blake had come along and drawn her out of her shell.

It wasn’t until she’d discovered that he was a serial cheater while on the road that she realized that Blake took after his father...and that she closely resembled his stay-at-home mother who’d turned a blind eye to her husband’s indiscretions and made life as easy as possible for Blake, his father and his two brothers.

Well, that wasn’t what Molly had signed on for. She’d refused to give Blake another chance, even though he’d worked up a few man tears, and she’d insisted that they put the house they’d purchased together—stupid, stupid, stupid—on the market, then packed up and left. After getting a new place to live and a new wardrobe, so she could give away all the clothing that reminded her of Blake, she’d buried herself in her work until she felt as if she could face the world again.