Stirring Up Trouble Read Online Free PDF Page A

open later on the weekends, but the hardware store was closed. The fire station was manned 24/7 by people who needed to stay awake, so they didn’t care about the noise.
    That just left the narrow strip of houses on Daisy Drive. The old Victorian with the wraparound porch and big bay window was the closest, but it’d been empty until recently. Now it was Madelyn’s house.
    He knew she didn’t go by her formal name, but he couldn’t make himself call her Maddie. Maddie was what you called a woman who was sweet and fun-loving. She was far too self-righteous for him to call her Maddie. When he was growing up, his grandmother had a friend named Madelyn. Emmett wasn’t certain if it was spelled the same, but they were definitely cut from the same cloth. His grandmother’s best friend had been a wealthy widow with a distaste for everyone and everything. She was old money; migrating to Florida from New England in search of better weather for her husband’s ailments before he passed.
    She’d always looked at Emmett like he was a bit of wildlife that had gotten in the house. A piece of dog shit on her shoe that she couldn’t fully get off. Emmett hadn’t been a poorly behaved child. He never knew why the woman didn’t care for him. But he knew whenever Madelyn came over, he wanted to go to a friend’s house to play.
    That was one difference between the two Madelyns. The gifted baker didn’t look at him like dirt, despite what words came out of her mouth. She looked at him in a way that made him more curious than he wanted to be. Sometimes, her pert little nose would turn up and she’d watch him from beneath her dark lashes like she expected him to try something funny. Other times, when she thought he didn’t see her, there was the heat of open appraisal in her eyes. It was usually followed by a squirm of discomfort.
    He wanted to laugh at her predicament. Poor little rich girl. What to do about an unwanted attraction to an unsuitable boy? The secret knowledge that she was both disgusted by him and attracted to him at the same time made Emmett bold. It was a weakness he could exploit if she insisted on pressing him over the noise issue.
    Emmett finished off the last of the sweet roll and tossed the napkin into the trash under the sink. Checking the locks on the front door, he headed down the hallway to his bedroom. Until he switched on the lights, the room was dark as night. He’d professionally installed in each window blackout panels that wouldn’t let a single beam of sunlight through it. They also muffled the street noise—something Maddie should look into.
    He wasn’t unsympathetic to her plight. As a day sleeper, the whole world conspired against him. Between postal deliveries, telemarketers, and the sirens of the fire station next door, there were plenty of attempts to wake him up. The difference was that none of those people were breaking the sound laws because it was the middle of the day. He had to suck it up, and Maddie needed to learn to do that, too.
    In his bathroom, he switched on the light and cussed when he saw himself in the mirror. He still had on that damn hairnet. He ripped it off and tossed it into the wastebasket.
    He made quick work of brushing his teeth and stripping down to his briefs to go to bed. As he crawled between the sheets in the darkened room, he tried to figure out what he was going to do about this issue with Madelyn.
    He didn’t want Woody’s to be a public nuisance, even if he enjoyed irritating her. He would put in an effort to keep things quieter during the week, but there wasn’t a lot he could do on the weekends. To drum up more business in the fall, he was kicking off some special events at the bar. People rushed in to watch the college football games, then disappeared. To keep them at Woody’s, he was bringing in a live band on Friday nights. Saturday, after the last game, they were doing