The Trouble With Valentine's Day (20 page)

“Because I think you and I should give our relationship another try. We're older and wiser now. We have Amelia's future to think about.”

There it was. Right out in the open now, and he could no longer ignore it. “Why are you bringing this up now, over the phone? I'm going to be there in a few days.”

“I didn't want to hit you with it when you walked in the door. I wanted you to think about it before you got here.” She took a deep breath and let it out. “We can make it work this time, Rob.”

He walked from the room and turned off the light behind him. “We talked about this when I moved to Gospel. You wouldn't be happy living here, and I'm not happy living in Seattle.”

“We can work something out.”

He entered his bedroom and walked past the entertainment center to the big window. “You'd hate it here. No Nordstrom, or jazz clubs, or dinner at The Four Seasons.” He looked out at the dark shores of Fish Hook Lake and added, “The closest movie theater is an hour away.”

Silence stretched across the distance and he didn't think there was anything she could say to make him consider a reconciliation. They'd screwed it up too many times in the past. “Amelia misses you.”

Except that. He closed his eyes and leaned his forehead against the cool glass. “What's she doing?”

“She's asleep.”

He hadn't been there to put her to bed. He loved when she fell asleep in his arms and he carried her to the crib he'd converted into a little bed. Guilt ate him up inside, but he reminded himself that he would miss putting her to bed every night even if he lived full time in his loft in Seattle.

“I think we can work it out and be a family. Will you think about it?”

A family. They'd never really been a family. He loved his daughter, and at one time, he'd loved Louisa. The idea of a happy family life held a lot of appeal for him. He was often lonely, but the key word was happy. Could he and Louisa be happy together? He didn't know. “I'll think about it,” he said.

After he pressed disconnect, he tossed the phone on a chair to his left. He scrubbed his face with his hands and looked out at the lake. The wind had picked up in the last few hours and blew black ripples across the surface.

He thought of his ex-wife, pictured her gorgeous face and killer body. At one time she'd seemed like the ideal woman. The perfect balance of natural beauty and expensive grooming. And she wanted to try and live together again. Problem was, when he was around her gorgeous face and killer body, there was no urgency to grab her up and bury his nose in her neck. There was no twist and pull of desire that made him want to run his hands all over her.

Kate made him feel those things. He wanted her like a man should want a woman. She made him feel the biting, animalistic urge to pick her up, throw her down, and get on with it. The kind of urge that a man should feel for an ex-wife he was thinking about getting back together with. But was desire, or lack of desire, a reason to reject the notion out of hand? Wasn't there more to a good relationship than sex? When he and Louisa had been married, the sex had been good but everything else had pretty much sucked. So if everything but the sex was good in a relationship, could it work?

The more Rob thought about it, the more confused he got. His temples began to pound, and the longer he let it all tumble around in his mind, the bigger his headache got until he could hardly think at all.

There was only thing he was real clear about. Until he got it all sorted out in his own mind, he'd have to resist Kate Hamilton.

He'd learned his lesson about talking reconciliation with one woman while having sex with another. He'd been there and done that, and he didn't need that kind of trouble.

Thirteen

Instead of bread, the next morning Kate
made something different. It was five days before Easter, so she baked cupcakes and topped them with a thick layer of white frosting. She dyed coconut green for grass and placed tiny hummingbird candy eggs in the coconut grass. As she stuck pipe cleaners in the cupcakes to look like little handles, her thoughts turned to Rob, where they'd been stuck since yesterday.

You can't say no forever, Kate Hamilton. Someday I'm going to make you say yes,
he'd said.
Someday real soon.

His threat worried her. Not on a physical level. She didn't believe for a second that Rob would force her to do anything. She was worried about her attraction to him—worried that if he whispered her skin was like dessert, and that he fantasized about her, she'd get all weak and brain dead—again.

She knew Rob. She'd dated men just like him. She didn't want yet another bad relationship, but there was a part of her that tended to forget all of that when she was alone with him. The next time he called for a delivery, her grandfather would have to make it.

Kate placed the last tiny egg on the last cupcake and took a step back to view her work. “Martha Stewart, wherever you are, eat your heart out.” By noon, she'd sold all five dozen and had orders for five dozen more.

At two, while Stanley sat in the back office working on a poem, Regina Cladis came in for a rump roast, a bag of baby carrots, and some red potatoes. “Tiffer's home for a visit, and he loves my roast.”

“How long will he be staying?” Kate asked as she rang up the meat and placed it in a bag.

“Until the Monday after Easter,” she answered and dug around in her big purse.

“Perhaps you and Tiffer might enjoy a bit of jalapeño jelly.”

Regina looked up and pushed her heavy glasses up the bridge of her short nose. “Jalapeño what?”

“Jalapeño jelly. It's very good served with cream cheese and spread over crackers. Or you can spread it on bagels.”

“No thanks. I don't eat bagels, and that jelly sounds horrible.”

“I don't understand why no one in this town will try it.” Kate sighed and rang up the carrots.

“We like our jelly made with fruit,” Regina explained. “When I first moved here from out of town, I had a hard time fitting in, too. I was treated like an outsider, just like you.”

Kate wasn't aware that she was being treated like an outsider. “Really?”

“Yes. Myrtle Lake and me applied for the same job at the library, and when I got it instead of her, there was a big dust up because I wasn't a local. People were all bent out of shape and wouldn't come into the library.”

“Where did you live?”

“I was born and raised in Challis.”

Challis sounded familiar. “Where's that?”

“About forty miles north.”

Kate pointed out what she thought was the obvious. “But that's local.”

Regina shook her head and said with an absolutely straight face, “No. It's in the next county.”

Kate was about to ask why a city forty miles north wasn't considered local, but she stopped herself. It was best not to ask too many questions. Especially since you'd get the answers. And the answers were usually followed by a tightening of Kate's forehead and a tick in her left eye. The tightening could cause wrinkles, the tick a tumor, and Kate didn't need to borrow that kind of trouble.

“Folks did eventually warm up to me though, and they will you. Shoot, Sheriff Taber married a gal from California. If the town can get over that travesty, they'll accept Stanley's granddaughter being from Vegas. 'Course we all go to Sin City occasionally to gamble and see the shows. So that's an easier pill to swallow.”

“What's wrong with California?” Kate asked before she thought better of it.

“Filled with hippies, potheads, and vegetarians,” Regina answered with equal disdain. “ 'Course now that Arnold is governor, he'll have that state turned around faster than you can say ‘I'll be back.' He has a house in Sun Valley, you know.”

“Yes, I know.” Kate's forehead tightened as she hit Total. Wisely, she didn't ask any more questions.

Rob stuck a folder stuffed with invoices and price quotes under one arm and headed home for the evening. A full moon and an eighty-watt bulb lit up the small lot in back of Sutter Sports. It was a quarter past eleven, and he'd spent the five hours since closing putting together a special rental package for a Boy Scout group planning a camping trip the first week in June. He was leaving in the morning for Seattle, and he wanted the packages finished before he left so he could devote his full attention to his daughter.

He still hadn't figured out what he was going to say to Louisa about a reconciliation. He'd pushed it to the back of his brain, concentrating instead on getting his work done. His work was done now, but he still didn't want to think about it. Maybe it was best to wait and see how he felt once he was in Seattle.

He locked the store behind him and jumped into his HUMMER. The store had been open for the season less than a week, and the rental side of the business was already keeping him extremely busy.

As he drove around the side of the building, he noticed that a light was on deep inside the M&S. More than just the light Stanley always left burning in the corner near the produce. Rob pulled around the back of the grocery store and shut off the vehicle. He got out of the HUMMER and pounded three times on the solid wood door.

He rocked back on his heels and wondered what he was doing. It was late, and he still had a ton to do before he left in the morning.

A few moments passed before Kate called out from behind the closed door. “Who is it?”

“Rob. What are you doing here so late?”

The dead bolt clicked, and she stuck her head out. The light from inside lit her from behind, shifting through her beautiful red hair and surrounding her in a soft glow. Suddenly he knew why he'd come. “I'm working,” she answered. “What are you doing out here so late?”

No matter how hard he tried or what was going on in his life, he couldn't seem to stay away from her. She drew him in like a ship to a bright shiny beacon. “I'm just leaving work.” The scent of warm cake escaped the building, and he didn't know which made him more hungry—the sight of Kate or the smell of cake. “Are you baking something?”

“Yes.” She opened the door wider and stood before him in a white T-shirt with a pair of red dice on her breasts and the words Feeling Lucky? over the top in black. A brown belt was threaded through the loops of a pair of tight jeans. “I'm baking seven dozen cupcakes for tomorrow.”

Without a doubt, Kate was definitely better than cake. She didn't invite him in, but she didn't protest when he moved past her into the back of the store. He walked by a meat slicer and grinder toward the bakery tucked in the corner of the large room. A few dozen white cupcakes sat on a stainless steel table a few feet from the duo commercial ovens. He told himself that he wouldn't stay long.

Instead of the usual Tom Jones pouring through the speakers, a female voice sang about not missing someone once she got to Jackson. Rob didn't recognize the song, but he really wasn't into chick music. Especially the folksy angsty stuff that was always about the same three issues: love, broken hearts, asshole men.

“I hear you're pulling the elementary school's float in the Easter parade this Saturday,” she said as she shut and locked the door behind her. “How'd you get roped into that one?”

Rob turned and watched her walk to him. He purposely kept his gaze off those dice on her breasts and on the relative safety of her hair. It hung loose about her shoulders and shimmered deep red and gold beneath the long tubes of fluorescent lighting. Just yesterday he'd held her hair in his hands while he'd kissed her throat, and he knew her hair was as soft as it looked. “The principal asked me.”

She opened a cabinet and stretched to reach something on the top shelf. Rob's gaze ran down her long body to her feet in a pair of Tasmanian Devil slippers. “You're easy,” she said and pulled down a box of Ziploc freezer bags.

“Where're your shoes?”

She looked down, then back up. “At home. These are more comfy.” She set the box next to an industrial mixer. “I think my grandfather is getting serious about your mother.”

He knew his mother liked Stanley, but she'd never mentioned that she cared for him more than as a friend. “What makes you think it's getting serious?”

Her pink lips turned up at the corners. “He writes poetry now, and they've started critiquing each other's poems.”

“When do they do this?”

She stuck her hands in two Tom Jones oven mitts. “Every night after he gets off work.”

“Every night?” His mother hadn't said a thing. He leaned his butt into the stainless counter and folded his arms across his green dress shirt with his store name and fish logo on the breast pocket. “How long has this been going on?”

“Since we had dinner at her house last week.” She took out two cupcake trays and set them on the counter next to him. “He's been getting home late each night.”

Rob watched her bend at the waist and take out two more trays from the second oven. “How late?”

“Ten. Which is late for him. He's usually in bed right after the nine-thirty news on Fox. Sometimes he doesn't even wait until the sports report is over.”

“Mom really hasn't said anything, but I'm glad she has someone to share her interest in poetry.” Someone who didn't happen to be him.

Kate dumped the cupcakes on the counter and began to set them upright.

He told himself to leave. That if he stayed, he'd touch her. If he touched her he was a goner, but he just couldn't force himself out the door. Not yet. “Do you need help?” he asked.

She looked up at him out of the corners of her brown eyes and smiled. “Are you volunteering to help me bake?”

Except for granola, which he made because he was addicted to the stuff, Rob wasn't into baking. He'd leave in a minute. “Sure.”

“That's sweet of you, but you're in luck. These are the last.” She handed him the box of freezer bags. “If you want to help, you can put six cupcakes in each. Not the hot ones, though. They get too mushy if you don't wait until they cool.”