The Trouble With Valentine's Day (18 page)

She didn't really believe she and Rob could be anything that even closely resembled friends. For some reason that defied logic but probably had a lot to do with anthropology and absolutely nothing to do with common sense, her body reacted to his. It was natural. In her DNA. Programed into females since prehistoric times, and Rob Sutter happened to be the biggest, baddest Neanderthal in the cave.

Kate set the hors d'oeuvre plate on the counter, then hung her coat by the back door. She didn't want to get a club to the head. She'd been there and done that with other men who couldn't make a commitment to one woman. There was no doubt in her mind that if she was foolish enough to get involved with Rob, he'd leave her battered like a baby seal.

She removed the plastic wrap from the tray and threw it in the garbage beneath the sink. Not only was he a bad bet, he believed sex could “make women psycho,” which was ridiculous on so many different levels. One of which was the fact that men were much more likely to kill their coworkers, sniper cars on freeways, and wipe out their entire families. The only thing she did agree with Rob on was that you couldn't tell a psycho by looking.

Reaching into a cabinet, she pulled out a few plastic containers with snap-on lids. Almost a year later, she could still recall the absolute average-Joe looks of Randy Meyers the day he'd walked into her office at Intel Inc. She remembered the family portrait he'd brought in with him. The light blue muted background, contrasting with matching red sweaters. Doreen sat frozen in time with a pleasant smile on her lips. Her children on each side of her—Brandon with his short blonde crew cut and Emily with her blonde ponytail and missing front tooth. Randy stood behind his family, his hands on his wife's shoulders while a normal smile curved his mouth.

On the surface, the perfect family. But if Kate had bothered digging, she would have found out that normalness was a carefully constructed facade. She would have discovered that Randy had exerted a systematic control over every facet in the lives of his family.

He hadn't physically abused his wife, but he'd ruled her life just the same. He hadn't isolated her from her friends and family, but he'd alienated her from them. He'd made sure he was invited and included in every aspect of Doreen's life. He hadn't allowed her to work outside the home, but he had allowed her to attend college classes. The catch was that he took them with her. He'd been his daughter's soccer coach. His son's Cub Scout leader. He was always there. Always directing. Always watching.

When Doreen left, he couldn't accept the fact that he was no longer the center of their lives. He'd driven for two days straight to find them. Then he'd perpetrated his last act of control. He'd made sure they were all together. Under the same headstone in a Tennessee graveyard.

No matter how many times Kate told herself that she wasn't responsible for what an insane freak had done to his family, she could not separate herself from her part in it. She felt the weight of their deaths in her soul, and she could not completely wash the blood from her hands.

She didn't know if she would ever get over what had happened in that small house in Tennessee, but she was going to try. She was going to get on with her life. She was going to help her grandfather get on with his, too.

She placed the olives in a container and snapped on the lid. For her grandfather's sake, she would try to be friends with Rob. If he really did have feelings for Grace, Kate didn't want to cause friction. Because despite what her grandfather thought, she was a “people person.”

Damn it.

Kate went into work early the next morning and shifted through bread recipes her grandmother had kept in a recipe box at the M&S. Kate would have loved to bake focaccia bread, but the store didn't carry fresh cake yeast. She settled on cracked wheat bread and got busy. When her grandfather arrived to open the store at six-thirty, she was just taking the loaves out of the big ovens.

“That smells wonderful, Katie,” He hung his coat and knit cap next to the back door. He rubbed a hand over his bald head.

“You got home late last night,” she said as she sliced off a hunk for him and spread it with butter.

“Grace read me a few of her poems and then was kind enough to give me some pointers.” He took the bread from her and bit into it. She didn't know if it was the chill clinging to his cheeks, but they were definitely pink.

She moved to a cabinet and reached for bread bags on the top shelf. “You're writing poetry now?”

“Poetry feeds the soul of mankind.”

She dropped on her heels and slowly turned toward him. The man in front of her looked like Stanley Caldwell. He stood there eating his bread, getting butter on his mustache, and he had the same white pants and shirt her grandfather always wore. Same apron he tied in place before he left the house every morning. But he didn't
sound
like her grandfather. “Did Grace say that?”

He nodded and took his bread out into the store. A few moments later, she heard him starting the coffee machines.
He has it bad
, she thought as she shoved the bread in clear bags and closed them with twist ties. He was moving on. Starting to live again. She was glad. Really.

She got out the sticker gun and marked each loaf. Yeah, she was happy for him, but at the same time, a tiny part of her wondered when she was going to get her life together enough to move on. He was seventy-one. If he could do it, she certainly could too.

She dragged out a card table and set it at the corner of the bread aisle. She draped it with a green-and-white-striped cloth and set her ten loaves of bread on it.

Eden Hansen, owner of Hansen's Emporium, was the first to bite.

“A dollar seventy-five is a lot to pay for a loaf of bread,” she complained. “Melba used to sell her loaves for a dollar.”

“That was several years ago,” Kate explained, purposely keeping her gaze locked with Eden's so she wouldn't get distracted by her pile of lavender hair. “With inflation, the cost of utilities, and my labor, you're getting a bargain, Mrs. Hansen.”

She pursed her purple lips. “How do I know it tastes as good as Melba's?”

“I used my grandmother's recipe,” she said, determined to be pleasant even if it killed her.

“I don't know.”

“Wait one minute.” Kate held up a finger, then went into the back room and carved off a slice from the loaf she'd cut into earlier. She quartered it, then brought it out on a small paper plate for Eden. “Try it.”

Eden chewed. “Will you take a dollar fifty?”

“Sure, but only if I get to come into your store and haggle over the price of T-shirts and Cow Pie candy.”

Eden tipped back her head and laughed, or what might have been a laugh if it hadn't turned into smoker's hack.

See,
she told herself and smiled.
I'm a people person.

“Everyone says you're stiff as a dead dog in January,” she said when she quit coughing. “But I think you're all right. I'll take your bread for a dollar seventy-five, and I'll tell my sister to get down here too.”

Stiff as a dead dog in January?
That wasn't very flattering, but Kate was too happy over her first sale to let it bother her. After Eden left, she went into the back room and cut up the extra loaf of bread into bite-sized chunks. She set them on the card table, and by the end of the day, she'd sold every loaf of bread and had requests for more.

Later that night she found some wholesalers who sold the prefect ingredients for focaccia. She tracked them down on the Internet, and by the time she was through, she'd also ordered pickled asparagus and smoked cheddar.

She searched the house for her grandfather to tell him about her orders, and she found him sitting at the kitchen table working on a poem. His hand held a pencil stub over a sheet of notebook paper, and his gaze was fixed somewhere near the ceiling.

“What rhymes with
change
?” he asked.

“
Strange
?”

He looked at her, then wrote on his paper. “Thank you. That's the perfect word.”

It certainly was the perfect word to describe his behavior lately. “I ordered some things for the store,” she told him and expected him to raise a fuss.

“That's nice.” He was so absorbed in his poem that he didn't care.

The next morning, she made fifteen loaves of wheat bread and sold ten of them by noon. Also at noon, a delivery call came in from Sutter Sports. As always, her grandfather handed her the grocery bag he'd already filled. Kate hadn't spoken to Rob since the night they'd decided to be friends, or at least decided to give it a try.

“Why can't he walk over here and get it himself? We're just across the dang parking lot.”

“Katie, we don't complain about business.”

“We should if the business is just across the parking lot,” she grumbled as she left the M&S.

Twelve

The sun was out, and she didn't bother
throwing her coat over her lime green bebe sweater and black jeans. On her way across the parking lot she glanced in the plastic grocery bag and discovered a Paper Mate mechanical pencil, some Krazy Glue, and three granola bars. She'd never been inside the sports store, and a set of bells hanging on one side of the double doors announced her arrival.

Her first impression was of dark varnished wood and forest green wainscoting. Canoes and kayaks were suspended from the ceiling, and a row of mountain bikes were lined up in front of several aisles of fishing poles and camping equipment. She glanced around for the owner of the store, but she seemed to be the only person around.

“Kate.”

She looked up past a wall of hiking gear to the loft. Rob stood looking down at her, his hands gripping the half wall that extended across the loft and down the stairs.

“Could you bring that up here, please?”

The sound of her shoes on the hardwood echoed off the walls. He watched her progress as she climbed up the stairs and entered the loft. An oak desk sat in the center with a flat-screen monitor and keyboard on it. Stacks of papers and folders and magazines cluttered the top of the desk.

“Finally. Lunch,” he said as he walked toward her wearing a pair of jeans and a deep beige chamois shirt with the sleeves rolled up his arms. He reached for the sack, and the sleeves slid up his forearms, the color of the shirt closely matching the deeper shades of his tattoo.

“I didn't see a snake when I was at your house,” she said as she handed him the grocery bag.

He looked into the sack, then returned his gaze to hers. “I had to sell Chloe back to the breeder once Amelia came home from the hospital. Couldn't keep a six-pound baby in the same apartment as a python.”

“No. I guess not.” And because she was dying to know, she asked, “How long were you married?”

He moved to the far corner of the room and, for the first time since she met him, she watched the way he walked. “From beginning to end, a little over a year.” His long, graceful strides showed no lingering sign of injury. He moved as easily as if he'd never been hit with a .22, and his knee shattered. He set the bag on a scarred workbench crowded with feathers and thread.

“Short marriage.”

“We'd been together off and on for about four years. We never should have married, but Louisa got pregnant so we gave it a try.” He took the mechanical pencil and glue out of the bag and set them on the workbench. “Come over here. I want to show you something.”

Kate didn't think cheating was giving a marriage much of a try, but she really didn't want to pass judgment when she didn't know anything about the relationship. Or maybe she was rationalizing his behavior because he looked incredibly hot today.

She moved across the room and stopped next to him. He was bent at the waist, inspecting something through a magnifier clamped to the front of a small vise about the size of a medium, needleless syringe. “I just finished this elk wing caddis. Trout in the Big Wood River won't be able to resist it. Isn't it beautiful?”

She knew it was a fly. The kind you fished with, but beautiful? No. The silver Tiffany cuff she'd just gotten in the mail was beautiful. “What's it made of?”

He reached out to adjust the gooseneck lamp and shone the light directly on it. “The body is dubbed fur and the wings are elk hair.”

She had no idea what dubbed fur was. “Real elk hair?”

“Yep.”

Why?
“Where do you get real elk hair?” She placed her hands on her knees and leaned in for a closer look.

“Usually I buy it, but this particular elk hair came off of Lewis Plummer's six-point buck last fall.”

She turned her head and looked at him. His face was a few inches from hers, close enough to see the different shades of green in his eyes. “Yuck,” she said, but the word came out kind of low and lacked conviction. “Can't you get fake hair?”

He shook his head. “I only use organic materials.” His gaze continued to stare into hers as he asked, “Do you want to see my yellow humpy? It's a beauty.”

His habit of inserting sexual innuendo was really juvenile. “Gee, Rob, I don't know. Does it require you dropping your pants?”

His brows drew together, then he chuckled, a soft caress of a sound that touched her cheek. “You have a dirty mind, Kate.” He ran his gaze over her face. “But I happen to like that in a woman.” The shoulder of his chamois shirt brushed her shoulder as he placed a palm on his workbench and leaned past her.

Kate straightened and watched him open one of four wooden boxes about the size of a makeup case. Several levels folded out like stepladders, revealing hundreds of flies. “It should be right here,” he said as he lightly sifted through them with his fingertips. He shut the case, then opened a drawer in the bench. “Ahh, here it is.” He stood up straight, took Kate's hand in his, and set a brown-and-beige fuzzy fly in her palm. Coarse hair stuck out around the eye of the hook like bushing. The hair continued down the shank wrapped in yellow thread, and shot out the end like a little tail.

“Humpy is the style,” he explained as he touched the fly. The tip of his finger brushed her life line and scattered her nerves.

“This is your humpy?”

“Yeah. The dark hair is grizzly and the lighter yellow hair is yearling elk. I spent most of the winter getting this one just right.”

Okay, maybe she'd been wrong about the sexual innuendo this time, but she didn't dwell on it because the insides of her elbows started to do the odd tingling his touch always seemed to inspire. And this time her stomach got a little light, too. She swallowed hard and told herself not to be ridiculous. This was not the man she should get all weak over. He had heartache written all over him. And yeah, she was supposed to be working on her pessimism, but that didn't mean Rob wasn't a heartbreaker.

While her sensible head fought for control of her foolish body, Rob seemed oblivious to the chaos he caused. He also seemed so pleased with the fly that she didn't have the heart to tell him that grizzly and elk hair was gross. “Have you been tying flies long?”

“Oh yeah.” His gaze traveled up her arm to her lips, then finally her eyes. “My dad taught me when I was a kid.” He took the yellow humpy from her and replaced it with a fly that looked like a little mouse. “This is a muskrat. The trout in the Big Wood won't go for this, it's more for bass and pike.”

With her hand still cupped in his, she looked down at the incredibly real-looking rodent. “Don't tell me that's a real ear?”

He chuckled. “No. It's leather.”

Thank God.
She glanced back up past the little white scar on his chin, over his nose with the slight bump she'd noticed the first night she'd seen him, and into his eyes. “You made this too?”

“Yeah. It took me awhile to shave the hair perfect.”

She didn't know which surprised her more, that a former hockey player with big hands could tie something so intricate, or that he was interested in tying flies at all. Or perhaps it was the fact that they were actually having a real conversation. Like real adults. “This is nice, Rob.”

“I have over a thousand.”

“Wow, that's a lot.”

His gaze dropped to her lips. “Tying helps me take my mind off things.”

“What things?”

Without taking his eyes from her mouth, he shook his head. “Don't ask.”

“Why?”

“It's one of those things I'd have to show you?” His gaze returned to hers and his voice lowered. “Do you want me to show you, Kate?”

The way he said her name, all smooth and rough at the same time, as if he were making love to her, made her throat go dry. She swallowed hard, but he didn't wait for an answer. He slid his hand up her arm to her shoulder and the side of her neck. His fingers combed through her hair from underneath, and he held the back of her head in his hand. Slowly he pulled her to him, and she did not resist, sucked in by the sexual promise in his green eyes.

“I thought we were just going to be friends,” she managed before she lost her mind completely.

“We both knew that wasn't going to last long.” He lowered his mouth to hers, and she turned her face at the last moment. His lips touched her cheek, and he kissed his way to the side of her throat.

“But it was your idea.”

“I have a better one.” She felt his hot open mouth just below her ear. “Do you wanna hear what it is?”

She placed a hand on his shoulder and shook her head.

He told her anyway. “I think we should make out like teenagers. Just rub up against each other and see what happens next.”

Kate knew what would happen next, and a traitorous side of her wanted that too. The traitorous side that wanted to forget. Forget that she was better off not liking him. Forget that he was a bad risk and get on with kissing and rubbing and other things. A side of her that hadn't felt this good in a long time, but she was stronger than her traitorous side. “This is a bad idea.”

He chuckled against her jaw, and a shivery warmth slid down her neck. “There's a part of me that thinks it's a very
good
idea.”

She was afraid she knew what part he was talking about. The part of him she'd felt a few days ago.

“I want to feel you up like we're sixteen in the backseat of a car. On the outside of your clothes,” he said just above a whisper. “Touch you all over, then slide my hands up under your shirt.” But he didn't touch her with his hands. Instead he pulled her head back and slid his open mouth to the hollow of her throat. “Mmm, you taste good right here. Your skin is like dessert.”

Kate closed her eyes as he gently sucked her flesh into his hot, wet mouth. She liked dessert. Dessert was a good thing, and this man was very good at making her want to
be
his dessert. Very good at waking desire in every cell in her body. His every breath against her skin whispered his hunger and need, and her body responded. Her breasts tightened and her nipples got hard. She locked her knees to keep from sliding to the floor. He was very good at making her want him back, of forgetting that she had to stop him. “You have to stop now,” she said and opened her eyes. The mouse fly fell from her free hand, and she placed her palms on his chest. She couldn't quite force herself to step from his embrace. Not yet.