Midsummer Sweetheart (10 page)

The days had gone by quickly, filled to the brim with supply runs, learning the new office computer system and refreshing her basic triage nursing skills after two years spent exclusively working in maternity.

The contractor would only start on the building interiors only after it was free of garbage, so José hired some migrant workers, but Katrin and Gabrielle also lent a hand, and he had been right, many hands made light work. What had seemed impossible on Monday was completed by Sunday; the old building was now a tidy, empty space ready for a build-in.

The builders would start tomorrow, and while they spent the upcoming weeks re-wiring, updating plumbing, carpeting, patching and painting, Katrin and Gabrielle would continue familiarizing themselves with the clinic’s operating system, while José headed into Kalispell for start-up medical supplies and obtained the necessary permits for them to open their doors in about two weeks.

Gabrielle was nothing like Katrin had imagined. After hearing she had spent time in the service, she expected someone stern and older, but Gabrielle was a lot like Ingrid. Young and attractive, she had served her requisite ten years after nursing school and then retired from the Army Medical Corps last year at age 30. Tall and dark, with springy black hair and deep brown eyes, she spoke with the lilting Jamaican accent of her birth country and peppered her speech with patois. As they broke sweats of frustration helping to pull water-stained, filthy carpet out of every corner of every room, Gabrielle would call out “We a-steady working now,
Tiki-tiki
.”

Initially unfamiliar with Gabrielle’s expressions, Katrin asked her new friend what “tiki-tiki” meant, and Gabrielle replied with a wide smile: “It mean you a small thing, Katrin. Like a little child. You tiki-tiki.”

Gabrielle’s cheerful expression made it clear that it was more endearing than insulting, and Katrin couldn’t disagree: she
was
tiki-tiki, although the hard work was helping her find her lost appetite and she was pretty sure she’d regained a few pounds since arriving in Skidoo Bay.

In her new life, Katrin was Tiki, and Gabrielle was Paca, a nickname bestowed upon her many years ago by José when they worked together in Germany. Katrin couldn’t help but feel, sometimes, that she was missing something between them; they spoke in a mixture of patois, Spanish and English, a personalized shorthand only they seemed to understand, and more than once, Katrin caught Gabrielle gazing at José before she would look away, as if fighting some internal battle.

After a few days, Katrin was too curious to keep her questions to herself, and she tried to ask Gabrielle casually about their history.

“Paca, were you and José ever…” She let the question dangle there suggestively while Gabrielle turned her head to Katrin, her expression severe.

“You don’t know de half, Tiki.”

“You two were together?”

Gabrielle had looked away, mumbling from across the room. “What you think you see between me and him?”

“I don’t know. It just feels like maybe there’s some….history there.”

“History. Mmm. I like that, Tiki. Maybe a little history.”

“Bad timing?”

Gabrielle retied the bandana she wore over her head during work hours, which kept her riotous black springs under control. She called it her
bandu
. “No. It never happen for me and José, Katrin. Now, we don’t be chatty-chatty anymore ’bout this.”

For José’s part, he treated both of his employees with cheerful—or
upful,
as Gabrielle called it; “He always be upful, José, even on de bad days.”—enthusiasm for their work. They were a good team, working long hours and swapping stories over beers on the porch at the end of fruitful days. Katrin greatly appreciated the camaraderie, a change from her previous hospital position where she’d been treated with nothing more than professional civility.

José would tease them each in turn, and occasionally tell a story about Gabrielle from their days in Germany, especially the early days when she was newly deployed and missing home.

“Paca, you remember the first Christmas? Oooo-eee, this Jamaican girl was missing Nueva York.”

“And if I ‘member right, José, you was missing your fambly too.”

“Maybe I was, at that.”

“Maybe you was.”

They almost never made physical contact, and Katrin came to realize that they both purposely avoided it, shifting sideways in doorways so they wouldn’t rub shoulders, and Gabrielle always took the backseat of the car when they went anywhere together, leaving Katrin up front beside José. They never said anything overtly flirtatious or inappropriate to each other. When they did make eye contact during work hours, it was professional and they ended it quickly.

While Katrin was sure that
something
had happened between them at one point or another, she couldn’t figure out what. Both were about as cagey as mountain cats, skittering away from one another the second she thought things might get interesting.

She dug her phone out of the back pocket of her jeans and checked the time.
3:52 p.m. He’ll be here any minute.

Katrin could hear the firehouse band three doors down practicing. There would be a Memorial Day concert in the town park tonight at six. After supper with Erik, Katrin had promised to meet José and Gabrielle for the concert. She still wasn’t a hundred percent comfortable going places by herself, so she’d decided to ask Erik to walk her to the park. Logically, she knew that Wade wasn’t a threat up here, but try telling that to the heart that had been threatened with the word “kill.”

Katrin and Erik had exchanged several texts during the week, all kind and solicitous, but without a hint of the teasing, flirty banter she had enjoyed last Sunday after he drove away. He texted her in the evenings, at bedtime mostly, to touch base, and he always signed off the same: “Söta drömmar,” which meant “Sweet dreams” in Swedish and which made her tummy flutter as she turned off her light before bed. Indeed her dreams
had
become sweeter and sweeter since moving to Skidoo Bay.

She’d be lying if she said she didn’t think about Erik a lot. Even though Katrin had been an “I do” away from marriage six months ago, she was relatively inexperienced, having only dated Wade Doyle her entire life. But, even when she sifted back through her memories of those first days of dating Wade, she didn’t remember it feeling anywhere near as exciting as the only day she’d ever spent with Erik Lindstrom. She had relived the moments of their recent meeting many times over the course of the week—daydreaming about him calling her “
min Älskling
” that first amazing time, his body behind hers in her bedroom, his thumb rubbing her palm on the stairs almost hypnotically.

She was asking for trouble in setting her sights on Erik. After all, Ingrid had made it clear Erik was a well-known player and Erik, himself, had been very clear about his lack of interest in anything resembling a healthy, mature adult relationship. She snorted, remembering his words: “I guess that’s okay for some guys, but not me. I’m not one. Romantic. I’m not. I don’t really even, you know, commit.”
No, Erik, but if your actions tell me anything, they tell me you wouldn’t mind a little fooling around.

Katrin frowned. She wasn’t a no-strings-attached sort of girl, and she wasn’t the type to fool around without a commitment. It’s not like she was a virgin, of course, but Katrin thought of herself as a “good girl,” the marrying kind, and consummating her relationship with Wade before marriage had always weighed heavy on her heart. She had lost her virginity to Wade the year she lost her father. In her grief, she had turned to him in pain, and sharing her body with him had seemed like the most comforting thing to do. But, in the end, it hadn’t comforted her; she had been plagued with thoughts of her father’s deep, intense disappointment in her as he watched her from heaven. And as what felt like punishment for her loose morals, Katrin had become pregnant, which had resulted in an impromptu marriage proposal that she never should have accepted, but felt compelled by shame. She had lost the baby a week later, but the ring, like a shackle, like penance, was already soldered around her finger, and staying with Wade felt like the only way to make cosmic amends for her waywardness.

Wade.
Her mother and Ing had both called to check up on her this week, and both had mentioned run-ins with Wade. He had banged on her mother’s door on Wednesday night, three days after Katrin left, demanding to know where Katrin was. Her car was in the garage but he screamed, in a drunken rant, she hadn’t been to work in three days. Lisabet Svenson had called the police, and as they were tucking Wade’s head into the cruiser, her mother had confronted him, informing him that if he ever showed up on her doorstep again, she would press charges.

Wade had tried a softer, albeit creepier, approach with Ingrid later in the week, finding her at the community playground on Friday morning and sitting down on a bench beside her, uninvited, as she watched Anna play beside another toddler in the sandbox. Ingrid said he looked like hell, but that she didn’t think he was drunk. He spoke too coherently to be on a bender.

“Where’s Kat?” he had asked, calmly, directly, staring at the children playing in the sand.

“You need help, Wade.”

“You tell me right the fuck now,” he snarled. “Where the hell is Katrin?”

Ingrid had gotten up off the bench, picked up Anna from the sandbox, and stood before the still-seated Wade, with her baby safely on her hip. “She’s gone, Wade. She’s not coming back. So, you let it alone now. Get some help, you’re a mess.”

Ingrid had turned to leave but Wade jumped up, putting his hand on her shoulder roughly. Ingrid said she hadn’t turned to face him, but had demanded he take his hand off her, or she’d scream. He had removed his hand and she hurried to her car, not looking back, bravado wearing thin.

“My training’s only going to help me so much if I’m holding Anna and trying to protect her,” she had explained, alluding to the defensive training she had learned in the military. “But, if he ever comes at me when I’m alone, he’ll regret it.”

Wade hadn’t been back to Lisabet’s place after that, and neither Ingrid nor Kristian had seen hide nor hair of him since Friday. Katrin knew Wade would probably be spiraling even further downward now, and she was sorry that her family had to deal with these threatening and upsetting confrontations. She hoped that Wade would accept that she was gone, and give up on her sooner rather than later.

As for Katrin, her fears were slipping away, and she was starting to trust her surroundings. Wade felt further and further away, and Katrin hated herself for wasting all that time in Choteau putting up with his behavior. Out of habit, she would still think of her life in the “Wade timeline” sometimes and wonder if they’d have been pregnant again by now. She thought of having a cumbersome, pregnant body and trying to help her drunken husband into the back of their car when she went to pick him up at one of the local bars, and she’d shudder, grateful to be in Skidoo, just as Ingrid had predicted. Mostly she felt sorry for Wade, as she would for anyone on the road to certain destruction, and she wished that he could get help and recover his life, find a new path, be happy.

More and more she was able to divert her thoughts of Wade entirely, though, and she was grateful for the distraction Erik Lindstrom provided. Erik, so different from Wade, so tall and blond and protective…and unavailable. So unavailable, in fact, that it made him the safest possible person to moon over as she lay in her bed that week looking forward to today, remembering the heat between them.

Harmless mooning aside, she had firmly resolved that she and Erik must just stay friends, despite her potential to fall for him, and his possible interest in something purely physical with her. With their families as entwined as they were, a fling—rife for complications and confusion—was absolutely impossible, and she knew it.

On one hand, she pouted. If he weren’t so handsome and kind, it would be easier to keep him in the friend zone, easier to see him as nothing more than a brotherly friend.

On the other, she pulled up her big girl pants.
Don’t be an idiot, Katrin. He’s not for you, so you keep him in the friend zone. Anything other than
looking
at Erik, is only
asking
for trouble, and you don’t need any after what you’ve been through. You just think of him like Sam or Kristian. Like family.

And she told herself that if she weakened in the presence of his handsome, funny kindness, she should remember that her days of bad decisions with men were behind her, dying a swift death when she’d escaped from Wade. Erik had made it entirely clear he wasn’t interested in relationships. And she wasn’t the sort of girl who just fooled around without one.

She sat up and adjusted her sunglasses, smoothing out her white long-sleeved cotton cable knit sweater, and crossing her legs. She was admiring her new flip-flops when his car approached and without thinking, her face exploded into a grin as she jumped up to greet him, running over to his window to say hello.

***

In the week they’d spent apart, Erik had done a number on his head, seriously readjusting his image of Katrin Svenson from last Sunday afternoon, and brainwashing himself until he believed her plainer, less interesting and more vulnerable than he’d found her last weekend.

He had started by reasoning with himself that getting involved with her was a recipe for disaster. Katrin wasn’t some anonymous tourist whom he could bed and forget, as Ingrid had helpfully pointed out. She was family by extension: his brother-in-law’s cousin. And he didn’t want to risk friction between him and Sam, and—by extension—Jenny. He couldn’t risk being at odds with his siblings; he loved them too much. So, first and foremost, it was important to remember that she was
Sam’s Cousin
.

He thought about her recent heartbreak too, being left at the altar by her drunkard, stalker boyfriend, and honestly he had no interest in doing anything that could harm her delicate spirit, poor thing. It was obvious she’d been through the wringer, and he wasn’t up for some super emotional, vulnerable girl getting attached to him. He’d end up hurting the poor dear. She needed his kindness and sympathy more than anything else, poor girl. So, any sparks he’d felt around Katrin were doused mercilessly until she was
Sam’s Cousin, Poor Little Thing
.