by Amie Denman
Kate nodded and, even in the darkness, he could see that she was standing perfectly still, almost holding her breath. He wished he knew what she was thinking.
“And we could enjoy the rest of the summer together,” he said. “Without any strings attached if that’s how you want it.”
In answer, Kate touched his cheek and brushed a quick kiss over his lips. Brady had no idea how to interpret her wordless action, so he kissed her back and it made one fact perfectly clear to him: the memory of last summer’s kiss had not been overrated. And this kiss was going to be even harder to forget than the last one. Even though he was the one to suggest a no-strings relationship, he wasn’t sure he could downplay the way her lips felt under his.
Kate pulled back and cocked her head, observing him. “That was a test,” she said.
Brady almost choked. “I didn’t even get a chance to study. Did I pass?”
She laughed and put a light hand on his chest where he was sure she could feel his heart thundering below the surface. “That kiss was just as nice as the one last summer,” she said, her voice just a whisper over the sound of the waves.
Brady waited, letting Kate drive the decision. If she told him to go away, he’d walk her to her car and say goodbye. She would probably be doing him a favor since he had a very hard time keeping his feelings on a surface level when Kate was involved.
“Beautiful summer nights like this can be...nice...with someone else,” she said. “As long as we keep things in perspective, we could share fries and face down hungry seagulls together every now and then until the summer’s over.”
Every now and then was better than nothing, and Brady let his heart persuade him that some of her time was worth the risk, even though he’d be alone come autumn.
Kate grabbed his hand and tugged him toward the end of the boardwalk where the mermaid statue rose up from the edge of the beach. “The ice cream vendor is down here, and I’m not going back to my apartment without some.” She dropped his hand as they walked toward the floodlights illuminating the forlorn mermaid looking out to sea and waiting for her true love to return.
Brady didn’t mind that Kate had let go of his hand. He would have plenty of good thoughts to hold in his heart when he went to bed that night. For a second, he imagined Kate curled up next to him in that beautiful living room he’d seen that morning with his Realtor. But then he made himself be realistic and remember that he’d just agreed to a summer something with no strings. He would have to be content with that.
CHAPTER SEVEN
KATE HEARD HER phone chime with a text. She had the day off, and she had a lot to think about. Two nights ago, she had—sort of—agreed to a short-term summer romance with Brady Adams, one of the most appealing men she’d ever met. She wouldn’t admit to him or anyone that she’d thought about their September kiss more than once throughout the long winter she spent driving around.
She looked at the name on her screen, almost expecting it to be Brady asking her to spend the day with him. They had already planned to see each other at the employee beach party that night.
The text wasn’t from Brady. It was her boss, George, instead.
Call me, please?
Instead of returning his text, Kate tapped the phone button and heard George’s voice five seconds later. “First of all, thank you for calling me on your day off. I know those are rare during the summer,” he said.
“I don’t mind,” Kate said. She really didn’t. She’d never had a boss who treated her as if she were a human being. Driving freight or flowers or the many other temporary jobs she’d done to get by and preserve her independence had not come with the luxury of respect from employers. “Do you need help with something?” she asked.
“Too much,” he said, his voice sounding tired and defeated. “I was fine running the trolley service and bike rental last year without any real office staff, but now that I’ve added an ice cream parlor and a miniature golf course, I’m over my limit of organizational skills.”
Organizational skills was something Kate had more than her share of. Her mother had organized every moment of Kate’s day, and every item in the house in its place. Colored pencils had a special cubby and they had to be lined up in it. Her clothes were coordinated right down to her socks and underwear. Even her book bags for school were chosen the night before to complement her jacket, the weather and which matching top and skirt her mother had laid out in her closet. Some girls would have loved such attention, but Kate had found it stifling. Despite her abhorrence of being tied to such lockstep thinking, she had absorbed enough skills for keeping things in place to be useful.
“What can I do for you?” she asked. “I could work in your office today and help get things arranged for the party tonight. Everyone is really looking forward to it.”
“What was I thinking?” he groaned.
Kate laughed. “I’ll be there in half an hour.”
She had already showered and brushed her hair back into a ponytail with the intention of going for a walk and trying out one of the new restaurants in downtown Cape Pursuit that she’d heard tourists talking about. With her spare time, she also planned to pop into the stores and boutiques she usually drove past. Wherever she had traveled across the country, she’d taken some time to enjoy the local culture. Otherwise, she had reasoned, what was the point of traveling?
* * *
KATE PUSHED OPEN the office door near the beach and found her boss with his elbows propped on paperwork and his head in his hands. She had already taken on part of the computer system, but George needed help with filing, employee paperwork, ordering supplies and managing the work schedules. She wondered if his secretary, Elena, had the day off or was just falling behind.
“You’re a lifesaver,” he said. “I have to go to a meeting downtown with the chamber of commerce. You can use Elena’s desk.”
“Sure,” Kate said. “Where’s Elena?”
“Quit. Got a better offer in Virginia Beach. She said she’d stay two weeks if I insisted on it, but I didn’t want to stand in her way. Her parents live there, and I know she wanted to be closer to them, so I told her to go ahead. She left two days ago.”
“That was nice of you,” Kate said. She tried to imagine what it would be like to have parents she wanted to live closer to. All she could picture was getting sucked into their neatly ordered and suffocating world.
“It was stupid. I thought I’d be fine until I got a replacement.” He tilted his head and gave Kate a serious look. “Would you consider replacing her?”
“No,” Kate said, shaking her head quickly. “I’m not a huge fan of being tied to the office, even though you’re great to work for.” She didn’t want to sound ungrateful or make her boss out to be an ogre. “I just really like driving and the freedom of the road.”
“You’re not really free since you’re on a predetermined route and a tight timetable,” George said.
“True. Maybe I just like driving,” Kate said.
“Well, if I can’t persuade you to give up the trolley, at least I appreciate your help today. I know you have some clue about the computer system, and you’re not afraid to take charge if you have to. I’ll be back around two this afternoon. And thanks, Kate.”
When he was gone, Kate started with the piles on his desk. If his office had gotten this out of control in just two days, there was no time to lose. The phone rang with a message from one of the trolley drivers who was calling in sick for the evening. They were already stretched thin on staff because most employees were planning to attend the beach party, just as Kate and Brady were.
The trolley had to go on its route as scheduled because tourists were expecting it. They’d paid for their trolley pass, had plans, needed someone to shuttle them safely home from the bars and beaches. Kate used the former secretary’s computer and pulled up the roster of employees, searching for the evening schedule and a poss
ible replacement. Even as she searched, the sinking feeling that the replacement would be her settled over her.
Instead of immediately thinking about the extra money she would make, she thought of the disappointment in Brady’s eyes when he found out she wasn’t going to the party.
And that was exactly why getting into a relationship with Brady—with anyone—was a bad idea. Freedom to make her own decisions was the driving force in her life, and tying her time and interests to anyone else gave her a flashback of the life she’d abandoned. She pictured her mother saying, “I’ll have to see when your father gets home. I couldn’t say,” whenever anyone invited her to anything. Kate’s dad was a nice man, loving even in his own way, who never cheated on his wife, as far as Kate knew, and never failed to pull his gray BMW into the garage at exactly the same time every day.
She glanced at her watch. It was ten o’clock on a Tuesday. Her mother would be at the local grocery store getting a newspaper and a chicken to roast. She didn’t trust newspaper delivery after the New York Times had shown up late twice and wet once. Kate’s dad read the paper while her mother finished dinner. Every night. No matter what.
Sorry, she texted Brady, I have to drive the trolley tonight so I won’t be able to go to the beach party. I hope you enjoy it.
She thought a message would ping into her phone within a minute, and she set it next to her computer so she would hear it when it came.
An hour went by, and she had heard nothing from Brady. Not that she had been checking or anything. Her work schedule, her day, her life, did not depend upon his approval or his opinion.
But still. She wanted to know if he had received her message. Would he go to the party, anyway, without her? Ask her to skip out on trolley driving? Tell her he’d find someone else to go with who was prettier than she was and far sweeter?
That last one was so out of character for Brady that Kate almost laughed. She tried to forget her phone and concentrate on untangling whatever system Elena had used to organize employee records and work schedules. It wasn’t a typical spreadsheet, but once Kate found the passwords to unlock it written down on the desk calendar, it all began to make sense. She planned to have it at least partially decoded and organized before two o’clock when George returned.
At noon, she grabbed some cash from her bag and locked the office door so she could make a quick run to the sandwich shop on the edge of the beach. Kate got a turkey sub, chips and a drink, knowing it might be the last food she saw that day if she went straight from George’s office nightmare to the late shift driving the trolley.
When she returned to the office, there was a message waiting on her phone.
Sorry I just saw your text. Was out on a fire. Want me to bring you food from the party?
She immediately pictured Brady wearing his helmet and gear, fighting a fire. Had they saved a person, a building? Were they all okay? She had lived somewhat dangerously crossing the country dozens of times by herself, but Brady’s job was a different kind of danger. She almost texted him to ask if he was okay, but that would be crossing a line she was already teetering on.
She read the third sentence of his message again. So he was going to the party without her? Good. That showed he wasn’t going to be clingy or difficult, exactly what she meant when she agreed to a short-term, no-strings relationship. And he was offering to bring her food while she worked. Very friendly and nice. Considerate and polite.
It was just the kind of response she would have wanted...so why was she a little sad that he was cheerfully going to the party without her?
* * *
THE FIRE HAD been out for an hour. Brady had spent most of the previous sixty minutes cleaning the hose, restoring the trucks to ready-status and pondering how he should respond to Kate’s message. He had glanced at his phone while he rode back to the station with his friend Kevin Russell at the wheel, but he didn’t respond right away. He knew very well that his gut response, his first response, would be a big mistake because he wanted to either ask her to choose their date over work or offer to take the trolley shift in her place so she could go to the party. She’d been working hard, and he thought she deserved a night off.
Kate wouldn’t like him interfering with her work or her life. He had been filled with hope and excitement after their kiss on the boardwalk two nights earlier, but the reality of having a relationship—even a temporary one—with someone who didn’t really want a relationship had sunk in during the hours since.
And so he had settled on the kind of friendly response he’d send to anyone—one of the guys at the station, his brother, the mechanic who serviced their fire trucks once a month. He put his phone on the top shelf of his locker while he cleaned and stowed his coat, pants, boots and helmet. To his surprise, she responded before he even got the coat on a peg.
He was not surprised at her message.
Thanks, anyway, but I’ll be busy.
Of course she would be busy, she was driving the trolley. But he knew every timed stop and it wouldn’t be that hard to take her some dinner even if she said she didn’t want him to.
Brady finished his shift at the fire station with several hours to spare before the evening beach party and cookout. He went home, showered and sat at the tiny kitchen table with his brother while Bella watched a princess movie in the living room next door. With such a small rental house, it was easy to keep an eye on the little girl because she couldn’t be very far away.
“Any luck with the job search?” Brady asked.
Noah shoved a résumé toward him. “Will you read this over? I’m nervous that there’s some comma out of place and I won’t get the job and my child will starve.”
Brady laughed. “I don’t know all the comma rules, but I do know Bella will never starve while either one of us is alive.”
“I’ll take her a bowl of crackers while you look that over,” Noah said. He poured a bowl of fish-shaped cheddar crackers and took it to his daughter. Brady heard them talking over the princess singing on the television, and he tried to block it out and focus on his brother’s résumé. He noticed the permanent address Noah listed was Brady’s rental house. For his little family, the modest half of a ranch house was as permanent as he could provide at the moment, but his dream was getting closer all the time, he hoped.
That evening, Brady put on shorts and a summer T-shirt. He parked in the beach lot and crossed the sand in his flip-flops. He almost skipped the party, but he needed to eat and the promised barbecue was tough to resist.
He was also hoping Kate might have a change of plans and show up, too. Brady scanned the dozens of people on the beach already loading up plates of food or playing volleyball. He recognized nearly all of them and knew their names. Kate’s friend Holly sat with three guys on a beach blanket. She looked happy and relaxed, and he wondered how much Kate worried about her friend and if Holly really did make such bad decisions. Even though Kate was reluctant to get involved with people, she behaved like a true friend to Holly.
“Glad you could make it,” George said when Brady lined up at the buffet with his plate. The food had been brought in and set up on tables under a tent, and the aroma was just as tempting as Brady had imagined. He’d missed lunch while out on an emergency call, and then decided not to eat much when he got off work, saving his appetite for the party.
“Thanks for having this for us,” Brady said. “It’s nice being appreciated.”
“Couldn’t do it without you. I just hope you’ll keep coming back every year, because I’ve got some plans for expanding and I’ll need good people.”
Brady wanted to ask about the expansion plans, but he didn’t want to pry into George’s business. Did Kate know about these plans? She’d been spending time on and off in the company office.
“Unless the fire service suddenly starts paying us millionaire salaries, you can probably count on me for next summer’s roster,” Brady said
.
George clapped him on the back and walked away.
Brady filled his plate, found a place to sit and talked with one of the summer workers he knew. Marty was the son of one of the older firefighters on the department. He’d just graduated from high school and was trying to decide on his future. Brady remembered being eighteen and knowing he had to figure things out for himself because there would be no one to help him.
“College or the circus?” Brady asked as Marty finished off a can of soda and tossed it into a recycling bin.
“Your guess is as good as mine. I never thought I wanted to be a firefighter like my dad, but I don’t want to sit in a classroom or get stuck in an office.”
Brady stretched his legs out and crossed his feet at the ankles. “It’s a big world with lots of choices.”
“How did you decide to be a firefighter?” Marty asked. “Was your dad in the fire service?”
Brady shook his head. “No.” It wasn’t the time or place to tell Marty how lucky he was to have firefighter Bill Sherman for a dad. The kid probably already knew it. “You’ll figure it out soon, and until then, driving the trolley’s not a bad way to spend the summer.”
“I’m getting more food,” Marty said. “They seem to have plenty.”
Brady glanced toward the food tent. Marty was right. No one was going to go hungry. He thought of Kate driving the trolley, possibly by herself. Everyone else seemed to be at the party. Did she even have a narrator tonight? Someone to give her a break while she got something to eat?
He got up and went to the food line. “Can I get a plate to go for one of the workers who couldn’t get the evening off?” he asked.
The woman serving up barbecue sandwiches nodded. She produced a roll of aluminum foil. “Fill a plate and I’ll wrap it up for you.”
