Julia's Chocolates (19 page)

He had called every day. Sometimes two or three times.

He’d joked with me about my paper route, asked if I was having breakfast with anyone else. We’d talked about the farm, and an upcoming Psychic Night called Reinventing Your Pleasures and Passions—which he asked to attend, and I told him to forget it—and the chocolates I was making, and his legal cases, and life in Portland, where the traffic and the noise and the stress were getting to him. And we talked a lot about Carrie Lynn and Shawn and Story Hour and Stash and Lydia and the girls at Psychic Night.

Each time, though, there were silences between us. I could almost feel him smiling at his end. At my end I certainly was, and then I felt like a fool.

And I missed him.

Running a paper route is no fun if you don’t have a Dean Garrett waiting for you at the end of it.

I frosted another truffle, this one made with white chocolate and a raspberry filling, and then dropped the frosting tube as the roar of Dean’s truck coming down our country road filled my senses until I thought every nerve end would explode.

Dean was back.

He was one day early.

He was in our driveway.

I gripped the counter and watched through the window as he shut the door of his truck and walked toward the house, his stride long and sure. He climbed the steps to the door, and then there he was, standing on Aunt Lydia’s porch, right outside the screen.

My breath caught in my throat when I saw him, but not in the way that makes me feel like my throat has closed up, shut down, and turned off, but in a heart-fluttering type of way.

He rang the doorbell. I swallowed hard. I remembered that my curls were piled up on top of my head, many of them falling out of the loose knot around my face. My blue sweatshirt and jeans were splattered with chocolate, and I wore zero makeup.

He rang the doorbell again.

Answer it,
I told myself.
Please. Do. Answer it
!

I opened the screen. I knew I was smiling like a fiend. Dean had on jeans and boots and a blue shirt and a cowboy hat, and if any more raw masculinity poured out of that man I thought I’d probably land on my rear. Right splat in the middle of Aunt Lydia’s entry, which was painted—appropriately, I thought—pink.

“Hello, Julia.” And there was that voice. Honey over gravel. Yummy.

“Hi, Dean,” I managed to squeak. Belatedly, I realized I probably smelled like a giant chocolate bar. I hoped he really liked chocolate.

He smiled at me.

I smiled back.
Breathe, Julia. Remember: air is your friend.

“I missed you this morning.”

Instantly, the thought of me curled up in his arms hit, and I blushed.

His smile got even broader, the lines near those bright blue eyes crinkling. “That didn’t come out right.”

I had another graphic thought, and my face decided it should blush even more.

He laughed, low and rumbly. That laugh went from my head to my heart and then to the nether regions where it lodged, hot and tingly.

He smiled at me.

I smiled back. I could almost breathe.

“What I meant is that I just got back from Portland.”

“Oh.”

Dean had a square jaw, a very square jaw. I wondered if it would taste a little bit like aftershave, a little bit like man, a little bit like fir trees and mountains, and a little bit like Dean.

“So I missed you on your paper route this morning.”

“Ahh.” And I liked his hips. He didn’t have any fat on him, but neither was he thin. There was enough to grip. I didn’t even feel fat standing there next to him.

“You do still have your paper route?”

He smiled at me.

I smiled back.

“Julia?” He laughed a little. I loved that laugh. I realized he’d just said something, and I thought quick.

“Yes! Yes, I do have a paper route!” I could die. Really die. “Are you looking for Lydia? Or Stash?”

I couldn’t be presumptuous here. No need to make a fool of myself again.

“No. Neither.”

I pushed my hair off my forehead, feeling brown chocolate streak across my skin.

“Would you like breakfast?”

“Breakfast?” His mouth tilted up on the left-hand side. Really, men who look this sexy should be illegal.

“Or lunch?”

“Actually, I haven’t had breakfast yet. I left Portland early this morning. That’d be great.”

I stepped back so he could enter the house.

He lifted a hand up to my face, his thumb rubbing across my cheek, then my lips. I felt so hot I would not have been surprised to see tiny flames erupt from my skin where he touched me.

Then he bent his head, and I didn’t move, and his warm lips came down over mine, and I knew I was standing in heaven. He put one arm around my waist and brought me close to his body, every one of my curves sinking into his hardness, and he put his hand under my head and kissed me and kissed and kissed me.

When he was done and I was leaning heavily against him and smiling like a goon, he brushed a finger across my cheek and then licked the chocolate off his thumb.

“Delicious,” he told me, smiling again. “Really delicious.”

I have to say that I am proud of my pancakes. Years ago, one of my mother’s boyfriends’ father used to come over on Saturday mornings and make pancakes. This boyfriend only lasted, I think, about a month, because my mother dumped him, but in those four weeks I learned how to make buttermilk pancakes from scratch.

As Aunt Lydia had pure maple syrup, and as I whipped up butter until it was so light and fluffy it could almost be used for angel’s wings, Dean was delighted with the results.

I was delighted that he was delighted.

“Best breakfast I ever had.”

Of course, the compliment made me choke up, so I got up to get us more coffee. I poured him some. I believe he had room in his cup for four drops, but it gave me a second to compose myself into some semblance of a normal woman.

“I’ll bet you’re glad the trial is over,” I said. He had told me about it, and the trial had been in the newspaper, too. As the plaintiff’s attorney, he had been quoted many times.

The paper had also discussed the “remarkable, decisive victory,” noting that the jurors came back with a verdict in under an hour. His client won on all counts and was awarded an absolutely amazing amount of money.

“It went fine.” He took another sip of coffee, looking at me over the rim of the cup, those eyes crinkling in the corners again.

“Congratulations.”

“Thank you.”

“It sounded very complicated.”

“No, not really. Good versus evil, that type of thing.”

“Are you tired?”

He fixed me with that blue gaze. “I was. I’m not today. How is all the chocolate-making going?”

“It’s going well.” I let him change the subject. “We’ll see if anyone buys it at the fair.”

“I’ll buy some.”

“Good.”

“I’ll buy all of it. Your chocolate is the best damn chocolate I’ve ever had. When I was in Portland, I went to three different chocolate shops to sample your competition, and yours was always, always better.”

I almost chortled with glee. About the second week into our morning meetings by the mailbox, I had given him a bag of my chocolates. The look on his face when he tried one almost made my boobs dance with pleasure, and then picturing that he-man wandering through Portland sampling chocolates and thinking of me, well, that made me wiggle. “Maybe you’re biased. I give it to you for free.”

He thought a minute. “All right, I am biased about you. But I’m not biased about your chocolate.”

I could hardly eat with him so close, but I managed to choke down a few bites as we chatted about everything fun and everything pleasant. He cleaned his plate.

“Stash told me about your ex-fiancé, Julia.”

I dropped my fork, and it clattered onto my plate. A boulder the size of Colorado lodged in my throat. I reached for my coffee and knocked it over. Dean reached for it the same time as I did, and our fingers bumped together. He righted the cup, then took my hands in his.

“Julia.”

I tried to pull my hands away, but he wouldn’t let me. I couldn’t look at him. I was humiliated. Lydia had told Stash, of course, and Stash had told Dean.

I felt a little angry, then smothered it. I could see how it had happened. Dean had probably asked about me, and Stash had told him what he knew because he cared.

“Julia.” Dean’s tone insisted that I look at him.

I raised my eyes to his, then wished I hadn’t. Those sharp, honest blue eyes were why jurors believed him. They were also why witnesses probably withered under his gaze into squished prunes and spat out everything they were trying to hide.

“I wish he hadn’t told you.”

“I understand, but he did.”

“What did he say?”

Dean looked down for the briefest of seconds, then squeezed my hands. At any other moment, I probably would have been melting into my chair, but my whole body was cold.

“He said that you left him.” The left corner of his mouth curved upward. “That it was a rather abrupt departure.”

I nodded, thinking of my wedding dress flapping on that tree, covered in dirt. I could still taste what that dirt tasted like.

“Yes. You could say it was rather abrupt.”

“You’re still scared of him, aren’t you?”

So Stash had told him a little bit more. Was I scared of Robert? No. Not scared. I was petrified. And I was scared of Dean, too, for altogether different reasons.

Oh no. I could feel it coming. The Dread Disease was on its way. It must have been the mention of Robert’s name. I took one last deep breath before I knew my air would be cut off. I felt my hands tremble under his, and I felt the pressure around my hands increase.

“Julia?”

I heard Dean’s voice, low and concerned, but then it mixed with Robert’s voice. I saw Dean’s face, the blond and white hair, the square jaw, but then it morphed into Robert’s face, twisted and ugly.

I remembered the time that Robert had held my hands together with one of his, then cracked me across the face with his other. He had put a foot under my ankles, and I fell hard onto the floor of my kitchen. I remembered seeing that the door of my refrigerator was slightly ajar. I remembered how I couldn’t breathe under him. I remembered how I begged him to get up, but he wouldn’t, and he pressed himself hard into me until black fog started to seep in around the corners of my vision.

“Julia?”

The air was now almost completely gone, my body freezing-cold. I clenched my jaw, one part of me scared to death of this mysterious Dread Disease, another part of me scared to death of what Dean would think, and still another feeling Robert’s presence all around me and in between me and Dean.

I tried to look him straight in the eye while my body shook, my mouth going dry, the air so completely gone I could almost feel my brain cells shutting down and turning off.

“God, Julia, what is it?” Dean strode around the table and picked me up in his arms.

I made a gasping sound that was truly humiliating. My left breast was crushed against his chest, not unpleasantly, and I had one arm around his shoulder. Within a millisecond we were on Aunt Lydia’s blue couch, with me on Dean’s lap.

One large hand pulled my head down to his shoulder. I tried to breathe and couldn’t, tried again through my nose. A shiver skittered right down my body, and I crossed my legs to control the other trembles and quakes that I knew would follow after a bout with the Dread Disease.

“Are you all right?” He said this with so much concern, I thought I’d bawl right there. Tears on his neck, mucus on his shirt. I bucked up. The latter was not attractive.

I breathed in again, as much to live as to inhale that man’s scent. I rested for a second, then tried to pull myself off his lap.

“Stay a while,” he drawled, settling me back in as my whole body shook.

The exhaustion that follows the trembling that follows the problem with breathing descended like a black blanket over my head, but this time the black blanket was comfy and warm and safe.

I snuggled in a bit, just for a moment, and felt Dean’s arms pull tighter around me. Eventually I started breathing like a normal person. “What’s wrong, Julia? God, honey, what is it?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” I said, automatically. A disastrous childhood does that. You get in the habit of telling people that “nothing’s wrong” because no one wants to hear it anyhow. Except Aunt Lydia.

“Julia, if we have to sit here all day until you tell me why you’re so cold, why your heart is racing and your body is limp, we will. I have all day.”

All day
? I sighed. Couldn’t help snuggling up again just a tad. Now, that would be fun. I wondered if he’d play with my hair.

He laughed, feeling my body cozy into his.

But the laughter was short-lived. “It does have its appeal, Julia, but I’m not accepting that for an answer. You need to go to a doctor.”