The Trouble With Valentine's Day (26 page)

“Lead the way.” He moved behind the counter, and his gaze slid down the back of her white shirt to the waistband of her black pants. He'd finally seen her tattoo. It was blue and gold and covered one cheek on her nice, smooth butt. He liked it. He liked all of Kate. Except for one thing.

“Why did you leave last night without telling me?” he asked as soon as they were alone.

She leaned back against the closed door, her dark red hair falling to her shoulders. “You were asleep and I didn't want to wake you.”

“Why the hell did you leave at all?” When he'd woken and found her gone, he'd been angry, and not just because he'd wanted another shower with her.

“I couldn't stay. Not after the lecture I got about fornication from my grandfather.”

In the past, he'd used women and they'd used him. He didn't want that with Kate. He'd had a bad marriage. He didn't want that either. He wanted something in between. Something he'd never had before. A woman in his life that he actually liked out of bed. He took a step toward her and combed his fingers through the side of her hair as he looked down into her eyes. Eyes that had just the night before gazed back at him, shimmering with the same aching desire he'd felt for her. “If you won't stay the night, at least tell me you're leaving. Even if I'm asleep. That way I won't wander around looking for you, thinking maybe you got lost in my house.”

She bit her bottom lip. “You did that?”

“Well . . . yeah.” Maybe he shouldn't have admitted that. Before he could confess anything else potentially embarrassing, he kissed her. He meant to give her a quick peck, but he stayed a fraction too long, and the want and need that had not been sated the night before settled low in the belly and twisted into a hard knot. Her lips parted and her tongue touched his, slick and warm and tasting of cocoa and whipped cream and Kate.

When he came up for air, his hands were beneath her shirt on her breasts. Her nipples were hard against his palms and her fingers were wrapped around his wrists. Through the door, he heard Stanley moving around in the storage room.

“Rob, we can't do this here,” she said in a shaky voice just above a whisper.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. This is my grandfather's office. He's right outside the door.”

She was right. This time. “Sorry,” he said as he slid his hands to her waist. “I got sidetracked again.”

She licked her lips, moist from his kiss. “That seems to happen to you quite often.”

Only with her. She made it hard to breathe. Made him lose his mind. Maybe because he felt safe and comfortable with her enough to lose his mind. Knowing that he made her lose her mind as well was a huge turn-on. He squeezed her waist and forced his hands from her. “Come over tonight.”

Her eyes were a little dazed, and she blinked a few times as if she were trying to clear her head.

“We'll have dinner,” he added. “Shoot pool. Six-thirty?”

She nodded and tucked her shirt back into her pants.

“If you don't show up,” he warned for the second time in less than twenty-four hours, “I'll come looking for you.”

“I'll be there.” She took a deep breath and opened the door. “I'm going to kick your butt at pool.”

“Right,” he scoffed, but a few hours later, she'd won four out of six games. Probably because he got distracted by the way she looked leaning over his pool table.

He grilled steaks, and they ate in his dining room again. Then he took her to bed, where he scored big.

Over the next week, they knocked out a few more fantasies, including a quicky in the alley behind Rocky's and—Rob's personal favorite—a hummer in the HUMMER.

She brought over a picnic basket, and they ate in bed while watching the Chinook's Avalanche game on the big-screen television in his bedroom.

She knelt in the center of his blue plaid quilt wearing a T-shirt from his old Red Wings days. It covered her from shoulders to her upper thighs, and he wondered why she bothered with the shirt at all. He'd just spent a pleasant hour getting up close and personal with the parts she covered.

“Ouch.” She winced as the camera zoomed in for a close-up of Chinook goalie Luc Martineau thumping Teemu Selanne in the back with his stick. When that didn't seem to faze the Fin, Luc hooked his skates and took him down.

“Yeah,” Rob said through a laugh.

She spread Brie on a slice of baguette and handed it to him. “That wasn't very nice.” She picked green grapes from the stem and handed those over too. “That number sixty-eight is kinda cute?”

“Selanne?” He popped a grape in his mouth and frowned.
Cute?
Something that felt a little like jealousy jabbed his chest. Only he didn't think it was jealousy because he wasn't a jealous guy. “Selanne hits like a girl, and his accent is so thick, you wouldn't be able to understand him.”

“Who cares about talking,” she said and glanced at him out of the corners of her eyes.

He grabbed her wrist and pulled her onto his bare chest. “No more staring at Selanne.”

She rose above him and straddled his hips. “Too bad I never saw any hockey games when you played.”

“I have a lot of old game tapes.” He slid his hands up under the T-shirt to her waist. “Maybe someday I'll show them to you.” But not today. The tapes were packed up in a box, where they'd been since he'd been forced to resign. He had more important things to do today.

And the next day, too. For the first time in his life, Rob began inventing reasons to see a woman. He checked up on her in the morning while she baked bread, and he convinced her that she needed to drive out several nights a week to help him perfect his granola. He told her that he had to find just the right balance so it didn't taste like cardboard and vitamins. He said he wanted to hire someone to make it for him so he could sell it to campers and backpackers in his store. He knew that would appeal to her entrepreneurial spirit.

It was pretty much a lie and he wasn't the least bit sorry.

On the first Sunday in May, he picked her up at six in the morning and they headed to a little spot he knew on the Big Wood River where the trout couldn't resist a chamois nymph this time of year.

“These are
not
cute,” Kate said as she stepped into the neoprene waders he'd given her. Rob helped her pull the straps over the shoulders of her sweatshirt and put on the fishing vest he'd rigged for her. She shoved a ski cap he'd given her over her hair, and she watched him tie a creamy beige fly to the end of her leader.

“We're using that for bait?” she asked as she leaned in for a closer look.

“No, babe. This is a lure. Not bait.” And just as she was about to remind him not to call her babe, he dropped a kiss on her mouth, then waded into the river. She followed close behind him, hanging on to the back of his vest as he tested the slick rocks before committing his weight. The icy current pushed at the backs of their knees as he showed her how to hold her rod. He stood behind her, his arms alongside hers as he taught her the basic cast just like his father had taught him.

“Keep the tip between one and eleven o'clock,” he told her, and when she'd mastered the basic cast, he showed her how to add line. “Now we'll strip about twelve feet.” He pulled the line from the reel to float on the current in front of them. He showed her how much line to let out at each back and forward cast. “The idea is to have the fly barely touch the water before bringing it back up.”

Her nymph got hooked in the thickets behind them, and rather then waste time retrieving it, Rob reached into his vest, pulled out his scissors, and snipped the line.

“Sorry I lost your fly,” she said as he plucked another from his vest.

“Don't be sorry. I lose them all the time. It's part of the sport, and I've got thousands.” He took his place behind her once more and slid his hand around her waist as she stripped line and started casting. “No, you're snapping your wrist. Smooth strokes.” He lowered his mouth to her ear. “You know about smooth strokes, don't ya, babe?”

“You're not going to distract me,” she said as she worked, keeping the tip of the pole between one and eleven. “And don't call me babe.”

“Why not?”

“Because you've probably had a lot of ‘babes' in your life.”

He thought a moment. “No. Only you.”

The third Sunday they went fishing together, she caught her first fish. An eleven-inch rainbow that took off downstream and gave her a fight. The bright morning sun shot sparks off the water swirling about her long legs encased in dark green waders. Her laughter mixed with the rush and ripple of the river as she fought to land her trout.

While he removed the hook for her, he watched her admire the brilliant colors of the rainbow. She slid her fingers down its slick body. “It's beautiful, Rob.”

Her bright eyes glanced up into his, and her cheeks were a shiny pink from the crisp morning air. He'd never known a woman like Kate. One who wore Tiffany bracelets and lace underwear while she stood in a freezing river fishing beside him.

She took the fish from his hands and carefully lowered it into the water. The fish flipped its tail and splashed her waders. Then it darted beneath the surface, and she rinsed her hands in the freezing water. She looked up at him with pure pleasure and said, “That was awesome.” He felt a pinch in his chest. A confusing little compression near his right ventricle. It wasn't as if he'd never seen pleasure on her face. He'd seen it a lot because he put it there.

He stripped ten more feet of line, brought the tip of his pole up and cast his fly near the head of a pool. The nymph started to drag, so he rolled the rod tip upstream and mended the line.

He glanced at Kate out of the corners of his eyes as she checked the condition of her fly. No pinch or tug this time. Nothing to get confused about. He rolled his head and relaxed. There was nothing he had to try and figure out.

The next Sunday was Mother's Day and they didn't fish. He and Kate ate dinner with his mother and Stanley. Over mint-crusted lamb chops and red potatoes, they listened to the wedding plans. The date was set for the second Saturday in June. Stanley and Grace were getting married in the park by the lake, and both planned to read poems to each other. They asked Rob and Kate to stand up with them.

“Sure,” Kate said as the corner of her lips twitched.

“How long are the poems?” Rob asked.

“Oh,” his mother answered, “fifteen or twenty minutes.”

He groaned inwardly and Kate cleared her throat behind her cloth napkin.

When the meal was over and everyone had pushed their plates away, Kate offered to help his mother clear the table.

“No, you stay out here and keep your grandfather company,” Grace insisted. “Rob will help me.”

Rob was leaving for Seattle in the morning, and he figured his mother wanted to talk in private about his trip.

“What's going on between you and Kate?” she asked instead.

“What?” He looked at her and set the plates in the sink. He hadn't seen that one coming, but he wasn't all that surprised.

“Don't play games.” She placed a serving dish on the counter, then reached into a cabinet and pulled out a can of decaffeinated coffee. “I see the way you look at her.”

“How do I look at her?”

“Like she's special to you.”

He opened a drawer and took out several plastic bowls with lids. “I like her.”

“You look at her like you more than like her.”

He spooned red potatoes into a bowl and didn't comment.

“You weren't fooling me. I know you were playing footsies with her under the table.”

Actually, his feet hadn't been that close to her, but his hand had been on her thigh most of the evening. Nothing sexual, just touching her. He shrugged. “So, I like her a lot.”

“You're thirty-six.” She filled the carafe with water then said, “In three weeks you'll be thirty-seven.”

“And next year I'll be thirty-eight. What's your point?” he asked even though he knew.

“Just that Kate's a nice girl. Maybe someone you could get serious about.” She paused, and he didn't have to wait long for the rest. “Maybe marry.”

“Maybe not. I've done that, and I sucked at it.”

“You got married because Louisa was pregnant.”

“Doesn't mean that I didn't love her.” He looked at his mother and asked, “Where's the pie?” Subject closed.

There was nothing that could mess up a good thing like talk of marriage. Thank God Kate wasn't pushing him in that direction. She never asked where he was going or when she would see him again. She didn't get jealous when he talked to other women or paranoid when he had to work late and couldn't see her. She didn't get all girly and want to talk about their “relationship.”

As far as he was concerned, that made their relationship just about perfect.