I Want Candy (17 page)

Candy parked her junker of a car in its usual spot, hidden behind the senior vans at the edge of the lot, and trudged inside, balancing the cake in one hand as she entered the double glass doors.

She was greeted by Mr. Miller.

“Just what do you think you’re doing?”

At first, Candy wasn’t even certain she was the target of his attack. “Pardon me?”

He flicked his fingernail on the foil-covered cardboard she was holding. “This. This …
cake.
Just who do you think you are, bringing unauthorized food items into the dining hall?”

“Uh…” Candy’s first instinct was to laugh. This guy could not be serious.
Unauthorized? Food items?
Who talked like that? “It’s a dessert, Mr. Miller.”

His lip curled. Sweat began to bead on his bulbous forehead. “I have never liked you, Miss Carmichael,” he hissed. “You are a condescending girl, which I find particularly odd seeing as how you are a guest here only because I allow you to be.”

It was right then that Candy realized she’d be sleeping in her car that night if she couldn’t find a way to deal with Mr. Mean-n-Chubby standing in front of her. And the truth was, she was dog tired. She was heartbroken about the apartment. She was still all worked up from seeing Turner at lunch. And dammmit, she did not want to sleep in her car again! She’d slept in her car for three nights before finally agreeing to stay with Gladys Harbison—something she’d never admitted to anyone! She’d parked in a deserted warehouse parking lot and taken showers at the Tip Top Truck Stop for a dollar-fifty a pop. Compared to that, Jacinta’s couch was pure luxury, and that’s where she planned to stay that night. After Hugo had been thoroughly entertained, anyway, since it was Saturday.

Oh, shoot—it was
Saturday
! Candy rolled her eyes at the realization that it would be many hours before she could relax.

“You think this is some kind of joke, don’t you?” Mr. Miller asked.

Just then, Candy noticed the usual predinner-bell crowd beginning to gather outside the dining room doors. But on that particular evening, she and Mr. Miller were more interesting than the menu posting, and several residents began to move closer in order to hear what was being said.

Candy answered his question politely. “Not at all, Mr. Miller. I meant no disrespect.”

The crowd continued to inch closer. Out of the corner of her eye, Candy saw Mildred Holzmann pushing through, her stare focused like a laser on the large rectangular-shaped cake topped with rows of brown-sugar-drizzled pineapple slices.

Mr. Miller wasn’t finished. “As executive director of Cherokee Pines, it is my duty to see that our residents receive the highest-quality meals and snacks…”

Uh-oh. Mildred looked really excited. And now Hugo and Jacinta were advancing from the other direction.

“… and our qualified staff sees to it that meals are designed…”

Miller was too busy lecturing Candy to notice that about three dozen old people were now giving him the stink eye. It was all Candy could do not to laugh out loud.

“… with the specific nutritional needs of the elderly in mind. And that’s why you cannot go around tempting our residents with just any old high-fat, high-calorie, sugar-coated—”

“Step away from the pineapple upside-down cake and no one will get hurt,” Mildred said from her position, which was all up in Mr. Miller’s face.

Though he gasped in surprise and tried to retreat, Hugo and Jacinta blocked his escape. Mr. Miller scanned the hallway to discover he was outnumbered.

Mildred shook a knobby finger at him. “This young lady was nice enough to bake that for me and you’re not going to take it away. Do you understand? I haven’t had a decent dessert since I moved into this place!”

“Besides,” Hugo added, his nose in the air. “We’re old as dirt and we’re gonna die anyway, so let us at least die with a smile on our faces.”

“The food here stinks!” someone yelled.

“The tapioca pudding tastes like glue!” Candy was almost certain that complaint came from Lorraine Estes.

Just then, the intercom system rang out with the series of electronic beeps that signaled dinner was served, and the crowd began to shuffle toward the open dining room doors. “I’ll take this,” Mildred said, relieving Candy of the cake. “We’ll save a seat for you at our table, dear.”

Mr. Miller’s lip was still twitching when Gerrall Spivey arrived for his Saturday shift just moments later.

“What’s happening?” he asked, setting his laptop on the front desk and staring at Mr. Miller and Candy as if they were the oddest sight he’d ever seen.

Miller pointed at him. “In my office—now!”

Chapter 12

After the library reading room closed, Candy passed a good thirty minutes in the health and beauty aisle of the Piggly Wiggly, trying to decide between the mascara brand that promised length and definition and the one that would plump and curl. What if she wanted all those things? What if, as a modern American female consumer, she wanted mascara that plumped, curled, lengthened,
and
defined the living hell out of her lashes?

“Shit outta luck, I guess,” she mumbled to herself, tossing her lackluster selection into her little handheld shopping basket. She wandered around the rest of the store, snagging some off-brand deodorant, shampoo, conditioner, and moisturizer. Then she compared prices on disposable shavers, thinking back to the old days when you didn’t need a quadruple-blade, pivoting-head, no-slip-grip wonder of engineering to scrape the stubble off your kneecaps.

In a last-minute surge of wildness, Candy grabbed a bag of caramel corn from the snack aisle and headed for the checkout.
Damn
—she shook her head as she handed over the cash—more than twenty-seven dollars for a grocery bag of no-name toiletries and high-fructose corn syrup. That seemed like an awful lot of money to waste on stuff that didn’t amount to anything, that wouldn’t get her any closer to renting her own place or getting out of this town.

As she walked to the car, Candy tried to recall the orgy of the senses that was once her lifestyle, the best of anything and everything, and all of it taken for granted. Chanel perfume had been dabbed on her wrists. Perfectly prepared cuisine was paired with just the right wine. Only the richest fabrics and butter-soft leathers brushed against her body. Cleanly designed fine furnishings filled her home. Then there were the decadent
services
she’d convinced herself she couldn’t function without. Exfoliating scrubs and silky body wraps that left her skin like velvet. Aromatherapy massages that loosened her muscles and relaxed her mind. The pedicures, the manicures, and the dancing fingertips of spa professionals upon her brow and cheekbones. God, she’d wasted so much of her life shopping for—and living in—luxury.

Now she shopped and lived in Bigler.

Candy tossed the Piggly Wiggly bag in the passenger seat of the Chevy and decided to take a walk around town. She still had an hour to kill before she could even think of going back to Jacinta’s, and it was a warm, still summer night, the kind she’d loved when she was a kid. Candy laughed with delight as every one of Main Street’s historic streetlights flickered on at once, as if putting on a show just for her, turning the old downtown into a storybook scene. She gazed up just in time to see the very last flash of orange before the sun settled behind the dark mountains.

All right, so her hometown had its own kind of subtle charm—Candy admitted it. If a person actually wanted to live in a small Appalachian mountain village with no obvious purpose for existing, she supposed they could do worse than Bigler.

She strolled along, though most everything in town was closed. Lenny’s Diner was dark and Lenny was no doubt home watching TV while chowing down on a piece of his profit. The sewing shop, the hardware store, and the half-dozen mountain craft stores were shuttered, along with the chamber of commerce office, the electronics repair shop, and the …

Candy stopped, sticking her hands into the back pockets of her jeans and standing in silence. She’d driven past this storefront every day since she’d returned to town, but she could honestly say that tonight was the first time she’d really noticed her father’s old office. The painted lettering was still visible on the glass display window—
JONES CARMICHAEL INSURANCE, AUTO, HOME, AND LIFE
—though it was beginning to peel away from the effect of weather and time. Obviously, the place had sat empty since his death, and Candy wondered why that was. She also wondered who owned the three-story brick building. She’d have to ask Jacinta.

Candy continued down Main Street and was pleasantly surprised to see that the corner ice cream parlor was open. She quickened her step, drawn by the shop’s bright white light pouring onto the curb and the remembered taste of the butter brickle of her childhood.

She passed by the wide marble steps of Trinity Lutheran and its gated courtyard garden, then reached the corner, stepped into the ice cream parlor’s open door, and Turner nearly knocked her over.

“Candy!”

She grabbed onto him to keep from falling on her behind, and screeched when an ice-cold blob landed on her bare chest and began to slide down into her cleavage. “Ohmigod!” she yelped, bending and pulling at the neckline of her stretchy cotton T-shirt, trying to prevent the painfully cold confection from slipping down her belly.

“I am so sorry!” he said. And then, unbelievably, Turner just reached down into the opening of her shirt to retrieve the ice cream, which had come to a stop in the vee between her underwires. In doing so, his fingers brushed over the swell of her breasts. What the
hell
? All Candy could do was stand there on the sidewalk with her eyes bugging out, breathless from the shock of cold ice cream and the touch of Turner’s fingers on her flesh. She watched as he doubled over in laughter and tossed the melting scoop in the trash can, along with his now useless sugar cone.

“Glad you think it’s funny,” she said, still holding the neckline of her shirt away from her skin. “Can you get me a napkin or something?”

“Of course. Sure. Sorry.” Turner continued to laugh as he jogged into the shop and came out with a handful of napkins and a couple packages of moistened towelettes, which he displayed proudly.

“I sincerely apologize,” he said, looking sheepish. He tried to stop laughing but wasn’t particularly successful.

Candy shook her head. “Whatever,” she said, fighting her own laughter as she reached out to snag the napkins from his grasp. But Turner pulled away.

She frowned at him.

“What are you doing here, anyway?” he asked.

Candy snorted, thinking that a sheriff should be able to figure that one out. “I wanted some ice cream.”

“Ah, just as I suspected,” he said, and then … oh, damn … right there under the historic streetlight, Turner let his gaze drop to the now stretched neckline of her shirt, and his mouth began to turn up at the corners in that sultry, sexy, oh-so-slow way that it did, the way that made Candy lose her ability to think straight.

“Did you have a particular flavor in mind this evening, Miss Carmichael?” he asked, his eyes not straying from her ice-cream-coated breasts.

Candy felt her heart pound and her breath go shallow. Why didn’t she have the presence of mind to smack him? Why didn’t she bring the two-inch heel of her gladiator sandal down on his instep? Why didn’t she simply spin around and march down the sidewalk to her car in protest against the completely over-the-top way that Turner enjoyed hitting on her.

Because she’d lost her damn mind—that was the only possible answer—and all she managed to do was stand there and let him eat her up with his eyes. In fact, she had the urge to take off her shirt completely, followed by her bra, then her jeans and panties, all so this beautiful man could continue his visual feeding unencumbered.

“Mocha latte,” she whispered, her voice all breathy and sexual.

Well, that did it. Suddenly, he was up against her, his face inches from hers, close enough that she could feel the heat pulsing off his body. She felt a fistful of napkins at the small of her back as she was directed down the sidewalk toward the Lutheran church. By the time Turner unlatched the wrought-iron gate of the courtyard and gently nudged her forward, Candy’s vision was swimming. His hand returned to her lower back, and he must have ditched the napkins somewhere because she felt the flat of his palm and the wide spread of his fingers against her body. And suddenly, his hand slid up under her T-shirt, pressing hot and firm against her bare skin as it traveled up, up … then quickly back down, down … into the waistband of her jeans and panties and right smack onto the naked flesh of her ass.

In a single motion, he scooped her close, spun her around, and pressed her tight up against the front of his body, all the while pulling her farther into the shadows of a large beech tree.

Turner’s lips were so close they were nearly touching hers. “Sorry for getting you all sticky,” he whispered, gripping her ass tighter and making sure she could feel what she was up against. Candy counted three noticeable bulges poking against her body, and figured one had to be his gun, one was probably the wad of napkins, and the other was nothin’ but Turner. The fun part was going to be figuring out which was which.

Candy leaned her head back and looked up into his face. She melted at the sight of his heavy-lidded hazel eyes, dark lashes, and that overtly sexual mouth, pulled into a wicked smile. Right at that moment, she wanted nothing more than to feel that mouth on her. Somewhere. Anywhere.

“You made the mess,” she said. “You should clean it up.”

Turner’s eyes flashed in the shadows. “You sure about that, girl?”

Am I?
Of course she wasn’t sure. In fact, she was sure she
shouldn’t
want that. So why was she allowing this to happen? Honestly, sometimes she wished she were a stronger human being. “Just hurry up before I change—”

His lips touched down on her breastbone, and the sensation was so achingly wonderful that Candy leaned her head back to offer her throat and chest to him. She felt her hair swing down her back.