The hot chocolate stand was closed by the time I reached it. I cursed to myself. I left through the mall exit and was about to cut through the parking lot to Nick’s truck when I saw Aguilar, the rotund security officer who’d checked on Catnip the night we found George’s body, loitering on the sidewalk outside of Catnip not fifty feet away from me. I dropped down and hid behind the end of a public bench, squinting through the darkness at him.
Aguilar’s presence should have been calming. Nick and I were there to keep an eye on the store, and apparently we weren’t the only ones with that idea. I should have felt better knowing mall security had taken an interest in protecting Catnip, but something about the officer had felt off from the first moment he’d come to check up on the store after we’d interrupted the burglary in progress.
His hands were in the pockets of his jacket, and he looked from the bottom left corner of the door frame, up to the top left corner, across the top and then back down the right-hand side. He stepped past the door and peered into the bushes. A truck lumbered past. Aguilar lit a cigarette and sat down on a bench not unlike the one I hid behind.
It could be he was just doing his job, keeping an eye out on a store that was involved in a recent crime. Or—
The door to Cat’s store swung open and a woman came out. She locked the door behind her and then headed to Aguilar. I recognized the blue-black dyed hair and the shine on her pleather pants immediately. An oversized black leather jacket with the collar turned up hid most of her face, but that didn’t stop me from making an identity. I was looking at Shana Brice, Cat’s assistant manager with the crappy attitude and the Herman Munster shoes.
As I watched, she set a shopping bag by her feet and locked the door to Catnip. She turned back around, reached into the bag, and pulled out a brown bundle. She tossed it in the trash can and then walked along the sidewalk to the end of the mall.
When Shana vanished from view, Aguilar stood up. He put out his cigarette and then went to the trash can. He reached inside and pulled the bundle out. He stuck it inside his brown flight jacket and pulled up the zipper then jogged across the lot to a beat-up car, climbed in, and drove away.
I crossed the parking lot to Nick’s truck and yanked the door open. “Did you see that?” I asked.
Nick was asleep, his head resting against his window. His right leg was stretched out along the seat. I moved his leg and tucked a blanket around his waist. His eyes opened slowly.
“Come here,” he gestured with his head, and without thinking about a master plan I slid over to him. His arm wrapped around me and the next thing I knew, we were kissing.
His hands moved to my waist, and one thing led to another. The steering wheel was behind me. The windows fogged up, and even though we were parked in the lot outside of a shopping mall the week before Christmas, it felt like a private room. And because it felt like a private room, we did things that should have been done in a private room. I may have thought briefly about the placement of the Ribbon Designer Outlet security cameras, but I don’t remember. Nick had been out of town for far too long and, to be honest, I was a little distracted by what he was doing with his hands.
Once our X-rated activities came to a close, I felt around the floor boards for my panties. The insanity of the holidays had officially infiltrated my world.
I snuck a look at him. He was buttoning his shirt. He held his hand out and I grabbed it and sat up. My foot had left a print in the condensation inside of his window. He didn’t seem to notice. He put his fingers under my chin and raised my face so I was looking at him. “It’s been eleven years since I first saw you on a street corner outside of my showroom trying on samples that fell out of the back of my truck.”
“Eleven years since I saw you in your Rocky T-shirt. I thought you were a delivery man.”
“I thought you were the first woman I’d seen who could pull off a bucket hat.” He smiled at the memory and put his arm around me. “It might make me seem like less of a man to admit this, but that’s the first time I’ve ever done that in a truck,” he said.
“Me too.”
We kissed again, which set us off toward a round two. I put my hands on Nick’s chest. “Focus. We have to focus. We’re here to focus,” I said. I held the binoculars up to my eyes, but the windows were too fogged to see out.
Nick cracked his window. “Give it a minute. It’ll clear.” I nestled under his arm and stared at the mall.
I don’t remember the rest of Nick and my surveillance mission. What I remember next is being shaken awake inside Nick’s truck. We were parked in front of my house.
“Kidd, wake up,” Nick said.
I pulled myself away from the crook of his arm and sat up on my side of the truck, blinked a few times, and ran my fingers though my hair. The clock on Nick’s dashboard said five forty-seven. It was dark, but the glow of the sun peeking up from the horizon cast the neighborhood in a pinkish-orange glow that matched my favorite Instagram filter. After a few labored breaths and wide eye blinking I looked at him.
“What are we doing here?”
“You live here.”
“I know that.” Another labored breath. More for emphasis than anything else. “What time is it? Why aren’t we inside? Why aren’t we in bed?”
He raised his eyebrows.
“You know what I mean. Why aren’t we on surveillance?”
“I don’t know. We were in the truck, and then we…and then that’s about it. I woke and you were curled up next to me under a blanket I’ve never seen before.” He ran his hand over the red plaid blanket on his lap. “I’m hoping you can tell me?”
“You fell asleep before I could tell you. I went into the camping store for supplies.” I blinked several times and thought back over what else I recalled. “The security officer was outside Cat’s store.”
“That’s good. That means he’s keeping an eye on things.”
“Yes…” The details came back to me slowly. Aguilar outside Catnip. Shana exiting the store and throwing something away. Aguilar taking it out of the trash and then leaving. There was something odd about that. “You don’t remember anything?”
“When I woke up, you had your elbows propped on the dashboard. You appeared to be very focused on your task. It wasn’t until the binoculars dropped from your hands that I realized you fell asleep while holding them.”
“I fell asleep while on surveillance?” I asked. Talk about letting yourself down.
“It was as much a surprise to me as it was to you,” he said. “I had four cups of coffee on the flight home from Italy because I thought I was going to have to keep up with you.” He yawned. “It’s good to know you’re human.”
“So that’s it? You didn’t see anything suspicious?”
“Kidd, it was five o’clock in the morning. The most suspicious thing in that parking lot was us.”
I held my hair back away from my face. “Why are we here and not inside?”
“Because I thought it set a bad relationship precedent for me to go through your handbag in search of your keys.”
I pulled my bag up to my waist and dug around the interior for my keychain. It wasn’t there. I tried to remember if I’d grabbed it when we left. I looked at the house and then froze. Not because of the temperature but because someone was moving around my living room.
17
MONDAY MORNING BEFORE NORMAL PEOPLE ARE AWAKE
Nick noticed the activity inside my house too. He hopped out of the truck and stepped in front of me, using his arm to keep me back. We crept the few steps necessary to get to the front door, but circumstance wasn’t on our side when it came to being unseen. The door pulled open and we found six strangers in my living room adjusting lights and placing the finishing touches on a Christmas tree. Correction: five strangers and Eddie.
Eleven months of the year, Eddie was my best friend, confidant, and occasional voice of reason. During December he was more like a figment of my imagination thanks to his responsibilities at Trada
va, which was just one of the reasons I thought I was being Punk’d.
“What’s going on here?” I asked.
“I think the words you’re looking for are ‘thank you for decorating my house,’” Eddie said, undaunted by the rising tone of my voice. “You’re so busy helping Cat that you didn’t put up so much as a twinkle light, let alone a tree. My visual staff is fried and we needed an off-site project. So, voila. A new tradition.”
“I grew up here. I’ve had more Christmases in this house than any other place I’ve ever lived.”
“So an old tradition. Either way, you’re now ready for the holidays.”
Nick came out of my kitchen with a wooden tray filled with mugs of coffee. I doubted the caffeine was going to get in the way of sleep, so I took one just like everybody else. Eddie’s team packed up random items that they hadn’t used and left one by one, touching base with him on what time they’d get to the store and where they should start working. Nick hovered next to me, watching them make their exit. When everyone but Eddie had left, Nick handed me his empty mug and asked for a refill.
I went to the kitchen and filled the mugs to the brim, sipped a few sips from my cup and refilled it again. I was returning to consciousness, which started to become a problem when I recognized words like keeping her away, good timing, and not yet. I set the mugs down and went back to the living room in time to see Eddie pull a set of keys out of his cargo pants and set them on the Halston book that sat on my coffee table.
“You had something to do with this?” I asked Nick. “Is that why you agreed to go on surveillance with me?” My eyes went wide. “Is that why we…in the parking lot?”
“You did what in the parking lot?” Eddie asked.
“Never mind,” Nick and I said in unison.
“Dude,” Eddie said. “I have to go. We did Cat’s house before yours. I’m on call all day. You’re on your own.” Eddie looked at me, at Nick, and then back at me. He shook his head and left.
“I get the ‘keeping her away’ and the ‘good timing,’ but what did he mean by ‘not yet’?”
Nick crossed the room in about three strides and tipped my face up to his. Before I knew what was happening he kissed me.
At first his lips just brushed over mine, then connected. When the kiss ended he pulled away from me and ran his hands gently down my cheeks to my neck, then over my hair. His pupils were dilated, darkening his eyes. He took my hands and walked me to the sofa, and then sat down next to me.
“Kidd, I don’t know what to do about you. You’re in my head. You’re in my shoe collection. You’re not the kind of woman I want to fool around with in my truck in a parking lot outside of a mall.”
“There’s another type of woman you want to do that with?”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“Nick, I’m not going anywhere. You’ve seen what my life’s been like since moving back to Ribbon. Our relationship is the most stable thing I have. I don’t want that to change either.”
“So if I were to, maybe, make things a little more permanent, you’d say yes?”
“More permanent like how?”
He let go of my left hand and reached into his jacket pocket. He pulled out a small black velvet box. Suddenly I wasn’t all that tired. A burst of electricity shot from my heart out to my fingertips and my breath caught. Nick dropped my other hand and opened the box. Inside was an engagement ring with a single square cut diamond nestled against a pale pink satin interior.
“More permanent like this.”
A cocktail of emotions cycled through me, excitement and nervousness and happiness and nausea. I felt my hands shake and I balled them up to stop them. After a few seconds, I looked from the ring to Nick.
“You had that with you all night?” I asked quietly.
He nodded.
“Even when we…”
He nodded.
“And you’re asking me to…”
“I’m asking you to marry me, Samantha.”
“You didn’t call me ‘Kidd.’”
“It didn’t feel like a ‘Kidd’ moment.”
I didn’t know anything about my future. What I knew was that I’d moved back to Pennsylvania to live in the house where I grew up because I’d felt like my life in New York wasn’t me, but the happiest I’d been during the nine years I’d spent climbing the Bentley’s New York corporate ladder were the days when I worked with Nick. Ever since I’d left, I’d been searching for something, a place where I fit. That need to find something had led me into a lot of dangerous situations and even though I’d managed to come out of them alive, each time, I was left wondering what I was really looking for. I’d had career and financial security when I was in New York, but that hadn’t been enough. Nick was offering me something different. An acceptance of who I was and a promise for the future. I put my hands on his forearms and leaned in to kiss him.
I saw a new emotion in his face, one I hadn’t seen before. Vulnerability? Hurt? Why was I hesitating? Why hadn’t I just grabbed the ring and said yes? I knew I wanted to. I'd thought about it more than once, and if he looked on the Chinese food takeout menus in the junk drawer, he’d even see that I occasionally doodled the initials “SKT” to see what my monogram might look like.
“I’m scared,” I said. It came out closer to a whisper than words.
He set the ring box down on the floor and pulled me to him. I put my arms around his neck and his were around my back and we hugged closer and longer than we ever had before. I could feel my heart beating hard in my chest—or was it his?—and I realized that this was the most secure I’d felt in a very long time.
“I don’t want to scare you or rush you.” he said in a soft voice next to my ear. “Just know that I love you, Kidd. I love your craziness and your impulsive nature and your need to try to fix other people’s problems. I love your loyalty and your style and your sense of humor. When you put yourself in dangerous situations I wish I didn’t love you so much, but I do. I’ve been in love with you for a long time. Nothing is going to change that. You don’t have to give me an answer right now.”
I felt his embrace relax and I pulled away from him. He picked the black velvet ring box up from the floor and set it into the palm of my hand.
“Where did you get the ring?” I asked.
“It was my mom’s.”
Emotion and exhaustion overwhelmed me. “Thank you for asking me,” I said.
He caught my face between his hands and held it. Our faces were close. He leaned in for a kiss that was decidedly less innocent than the others. The fear and nausea left my body and a couple of new sensations took over. I hadn’t felt this with my prom date or my college boyfriend or Sal from the deli counter across the street from Bentley’s. So this was how it felt to be in love.
My body was sending clear signals that it was ready, willing, and able, but my brain sent up a warning flare that our first time together had been in the front seat of his truck in a parking lot, and maybe going round two on my living room sofa with the curtains not quite shut wasn’t a good follow-up performance. To be honest, I’m not sure the thought was that fully formed. What I was sure about was, despite a very large desire, at least one of us needed a shower and that one of us was me.
Nick didn’t appear too surprised by my gentle resistance.
“Not now,” I panted.
“I know you’re right,” he said. “But—”
“But you know I’m right.”
“I thought I was the voice of reason in this operation?” he said. He stood up and tucked his shirt into his jeans. I sat up and adjusted my bra. “I’m going to head home and spend the day with my dad. Chop down a tree, buy some presents. Do the whole men-at-Christmas thing. Talk to you tomorrow?”
“Sure.”
“Take your time, Kidd. It’s a big decision and I want you to be as sure about this as I am.”
18
MONDAY MORNING
I gave Nick a ten minute lead and took off las
t night’s surveillance clothes (was my sweater on backward?). I showered and dressed in a taupe scoop neck sweater, brown leather leggings, and brown wedge-heeled sneakers. I transferred my wallet, phone, keys, and lip tint into a small cross body bag. I blow-dried my hair upside down and then slipped in a quilted brown leather hair band. Twice I slipped on the engagement ring and admired the way it changed the look of my hand. Okay, three times. It was my version of dragging my big toe through the water of the deep end before jumping in.
As tempting as it was to climb into bed, I needed to check on Cat and Logan. I grabbed a couple of cans of diet cat food, pulled on an ivory car coat, and left.
Like just about everything else these days, the weather was pretending to be something it wasn’t. The temperature was in the 40s and would no doubt climb during the day. Trees were bare of leaves and lawns were the color of uncooked wheat pasta. Aside from the occasional light display in a neighbor’s yard, it did not feel like the holidays.
I parked in Cat’s driveway and, after tapping on the front door, let myself in. Logan was curled up on top of Dante’s black leather jacket on the middle of the sofa and Cat was in the kitchen.
“Good morning,” she said. She seemed to be in good spirits. “I’m making banana, avocado, and yogurt smoothies for breakfast. Want one?”
“I think I’ll just have coffee. I didn’t get a whole lot of sleep last night.” I debated telling Cat about Nick’s proposal and the truck incident, but it didn’t feel like the right time. She had her own issues to worry about, and my news might only serve to upset her.
She pulsed the blender a few times and then turned it off. “You shouldn’t have had to worry about me. It’s my problem and I need to figure it out. I should never have involved you.”
“Cat, you’re eight months pregnant. Whether or not this happened, you would have needed my help with the store, and even if you didn’t ask me I would have volunteered. You’re about to become a very busy woman and I think right now you should be resting.”
Pearls Gone Wild Page 9
