By Candlelight

by Janelle Taylor

  “It’s like telling someone where to go,” Jake concurred.

  “Exactly!” Sandra smiled and reached a hand across the table to his. “I knew you’d understand. Those morons at my office are so dense!”

  It was all Jake could do not to slide his hand from beneath hers. Irritated with himself, he ground his teeth together and determined to try harder.

  “So, where were you?” Sandra asked casually.

  Jake didn’t want to get into it. “Following up on something my brother handled.”

  “What do you mean?” Her fingers rubbed his.

  Trapped, Jake saw no way out other than the truth. “Phillip found someone he thinks would work for our spokesperson.”

  “Phillip!” she sneered, sitting back in her chair. As soon as his hand was free Jake stuck it beneath the tabletop. “He’ll be the downfall of Talbot Industries.”

  “Why can’t you two stand each other?” Jake asked without any real curiosity. Their antipathy was mutual and had been immediate. Sometimes it happened. Maybe it was because he, Jake, had shown an interest in Sandra and she in him. Maybe it was bad Karma. It hardly mattered, but Jake was searching for any conversation that would get him through this date. All he wanted was to be alone.

  “Phillip’s rude,” she said, making a face. “He thinks I’m wrong for you.”

  Jake’s brows lifted. “We’ve only gone on a few dates.”

  “It’s been a little more than that,” Sandra reminded him with a secret smile.

  Jake silently called himself a bastard once again. They had been dating a little over a month, and yes, they had slept together a few times. If he were truly honest, the physical interest had been more on Sandra’s side than his. He just hadn’t cared enough to really pursue her. What he had wanted was companionship, and the time to really get to know her. But Sandra had come on like gangbusters. Maybe that’s why Phillip resented her.

  To Jake’s relief their meals came before he had to answer. He had ordered a salad. He hadn’t been hungry earlier; he wasn’t hungry now. Sandra picked at her pasta, pushing the plate aside, a tiny frown darkening her brow.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “Nothing. A long day.”

  “You seem so distant.”

  “Do I?”

  Sandra gave him a look. “Why do I get the feeling you’re keeping something from me. Is there someone else?”

  Jake couldn’t hide his surprise. “What?”

  “Are you seeing someone else?” she asked tightly, as if he were totally dense.

  “No.”

  “How come I don’t believe you?” Sandra’s dark eyes probed Jake’s. Though he had spoken the truth, he wondered if she could read the turmoil of his thoughts.

  “Make me a promise,” she said suddenly. “If you fall for someone else, or think you are, give me a chance. I know I’d be good for you. We’re a team. I felt that from the start.”

  “Sandra, don’t put more into this relationship than there is,” he suggested softly, trying to be kind but honest.

  “Oh, I’m not. I know exactly what I’ve got. Just don’t count me out too quickly, that’s all.” Her smile was tight.

  Jake didn’t respond. Superimposed over her smile was another one in his mind. Kate’s smile. Kate’s mouth. Deep pink and curved with mirth. Like it used to be. Years and years—eons—ago. He thought of her lips, and desire rushed through his veins. A feeling he hadn’t experienced in years! He sucked in his breath and expelled it slowly, bothered deeply by his roller coaster reactions.

  “Promise?” Sandra warned.

  Uneasily Jake realized he was seeing what Phillip had felt from the start when it came to Sandra Galloway. “I promise I’ll be honest with you,” he answered.

  Her dark eyes studied him carefully. “Then everything’s okay, isn’t it?”

  He nodded.

  She seemed to want to say something more. Jake braced himself, realizing that their relationship had already subtly changed. Katie Tindel’s fault, or his own?

  Sandra dropped her combative attitude and slid him a sideways smile. “How about if we cut this short and go to your place?”

  With a feeling of taking the first few steps down the gangplank, Jake stated firmly, “I can’t tonight. I’ve got a ton of work and a lot of issues waiting for me. I’ll have to take a rain check…”

  Kate’s coffeemaker dribbled a thin stream of coffee into the pot while the whole contraption audibly pumped as if in labor. It was seven o’clock in the morning, and her kitchen was bright with summer sunshine. She poured herself a cup, then looked up in amazement as April appeared from her bedroom.

  “What are you doing up so early?” Kate asked.

  “Coffee,” April murmured, running a hand through her tousled hair. Kate grinned and poured her daughter a cup. It wasn’t fair for someone to look so good in the morning. Youth was dangerous, she thought.

  “I want to go to work with you,” she said, stifling a yawn. “I want to get ready for next Tuesday.”

  “You don’t have to be there until three.”

  “I know. I’m just preparing myself. I want to go with you to Delilah’s shoot.”

  Kate held the cup to her lips, considering. “Don’t get your hopes up too high, okay?”

  “They’re not. I know I’m just one of the sheep.”

  “Just checking.”

  April frowned in serious thought, holding her cup, but not drinking. She might ask for coffee, but she hadn’t really gotten used to drinking it yet.

  “What?” Kate asked.

  “Nothing.” She shook her head and turned back toward her bedroom. “I’ll be ready super quick. Wait for me.”

  “That audition’s five days away!”

  “Just…wait for me.”

  Kate sighed. This was going to be a problem any way you looked at it.

  While April took a shower, Kate sat at the kitchen table and reflected on the events of the night before. Sleep had been impossible. She had spent hours tossing and turning, running through the scenario with Jake a thousand times, only to run through it once again. Now, this morning, she recalled it again and shuddered. Why did he still cause so many feelings? Good Lord, it had been almost eighteen years!

  April showed up in faded blue jeans and a soft yellow shirt that brought out the golden streaks in her hair. She slid into the chair opposite Kate’s.

  “Why are you looking so guilty?” Kate asked, recognizing all the signs.

  Wrinkling her nose, April pulled out her wallet. No purse for her, just a small leather wallet to keep her bills and coins. Chapstick in her front pocket was her only traveling makeup.

  “This,” she said, tossing over a stack of fifties.

  “Oh, no,” Kate groaned.

  “I couldn’t leave it as a tip,” she admitted. “I picked up Mr. Talbot’s money.”

  Hot emotion raged through Kate’s veins. She leapt to her feet, hands clenched, realized how ridiculous she looked, and sat back down, hard. April’s mouth dropped open.

  “Mom?” she inquired, perplexed.

  “You can’t take his money!”

  “I’ll give it back to him on Tuesday.”

  “No! Just—put it down. Now.”

  April did as she was bidden. Kate was shaking all over. She stared at the money as if it were about to sprout horns and attack. April said in a scared voice, “Mom?”

  “It’s all right. I just don’t want—anything from him.”

  “I never intended to keep it. I was going to give it back at the audition. Maybe I can take it to him earlier,” she said uncertainly.

  “No! Don’t—” Kate reached out a hand toward her. “He won’t…he won’t like it. He meant to leave it there.”

  “I’m sorry.” April swallowed, truly worried.

  “No, it’s okay. It’s just—” Kate drew a long breath, knowing there was no way to explain. “I don’t trust people with lots of money.”

  “Like the Talbot
s.”

  “Like the Talbots,” she agreed. “Jake Talbot left that money on the table to make a point. He’s got tons of it, and to him it’s as unimportant as confetti. Might as well be used the same way.”

  “That’s not how it was,” April protested. “He just kind of dropped it, like he was in a fog or something.”

  Kate shook her head. “You don’t know him.”

  “Neither do you,” her daughter pointed out.

  She was right. Kate didn’t know him anymore. Her memories from those teen years hardly mattered now. How could they?

  “Let’s not talk about it anymore,” Kate murmured, scooting back her chair. “You ready?”

  Wordlessly April climbed to her feet, her worried gaze touching on the bills lying on the table; but she preceded Kate out the door to the car, and neither of them mentioned the money again.

  Three hours later, as Kate headed over to Delilah’s “turkey” shoot, she knew she would never rest until she had put those memories of Jake back in the bottle. Somehow they had become uncorked and the genie had escaped. Seeing him again had resurrected feelings she had prayed were long dead, and she suspected, with the sharpness of painful truth, that unless she trotted them out one-byone, she wouldn’t be able to get through these next few meetings with Jake.

  Pulling into the lot, she urged April to go on ahead, and then she strolled across the hot concrete of the parking lot to a small park where ducks paddled lazily on a tiny man-made lake in the center of some developer’s designed commons. Probably Talbot Industries, she thought with an inner snort. They were known for creating office communities, commercial buildings and even doing some renovation of historical sites at discounted rates.

  But she wasn’t feeling particularly charitable toward any Talbot right now, so Kate shoved those thoughts aside. Instead, she concentrated on the past. Closing her eyes, she leaned her head against the sun-warmed slats of a wooden bench and gradually thought back to that last year of high school when Jake Talbot chose her to be the girl he fell in love with…

  Chapter Four

  Go Wildcats! Go Wildcats!

  The chant blasted from the crowd of frantic fans. Pompons on sticks danced in navy and gold, shimmering in a frenzied wave as the fans of Lakehaven High crowed for their team. It was a hot night, made more so by the blinding stadium lights. Football players moved through patterns on the field while everyone else watched the clock count down until opening kickoff.

  Katie Tindel squeezed through the crowd, smiling apologies as she made her way to the senior section. It wasn’t exactly designated only for seniors, but woe be to any underclassman who inadvertently stumbled onto their territory. She had seen senior boys actually tote the interloper on their collective shoulders to be dumped unceremoniously with his own kind.

  Senior year. School was almost a memory already. Fanning her hot face with her hand, Katie perched on the end of the row where her friends grudgingly made way. There was nowhere to sit. Everyone was here for the first football game of the season. And what did it matter that Lakehaven was ranked bottom of the league? They still had some great players, and that’s what it was all about anyway.

  “Look!” Andrea Walters pointed. “There’s Jake Talbot. Number two!”

  Katie squinted at the navy figures on the field. They all looked like Storm Troopers with their helmets on. She picked out number two, who was in a line of players sent out for passes. While she watched, he leapt up and caught a spinning football, making it look easy.

  Andrea had subsequently moved on, pointing out other senior boys on the team. She was indiscriminate in her adoration of football players. Katie, however, held a special place in her heart for Jacob Talbot, and though he barely knew she existed, she still nurtured her secret crush.

  “I thought you had to work,” Andrea said, practically screaming in Katie’s ear to be heard above the crowd, though they were seated right next to each other.

  “I did. I do. I’m sick.” She made a face, feeling like a traitor.

  “Oh, ho! You’re playing hooky!”

  “I tried to get someone to replace me, but nobody was interested. I couldn’t miss the first game!”

  “You work too hard anyway. You deserve a break, and if they can’t see that, just quit.”

  Katie smiled at her friend for her words of encouragement, but the truth was, it wasn’t that easy. While Andrea’s family planned to pay for her college education, Katie was going to have to earn her own way. For the last two years she had worked as a bus girl and sometime hostess at the Shoreline, a steakhouse at the south end of the lake. The lake itself was really a misnomer. In actuality, it was merely a wide bend in the Bryant River and therefore had no real reason to be called a lake. The town of Lakehaven collectively turned a blind eye to this minor detail. The locals preferred to think they lived on the lake, and no one disputed them. The more chichi houses bordered the water, and Jake Talbot’s home was a minimansion on the lake’s northwest corner.

  Once in a while Jake had appeared at the Shoreline with his parents. She had offered him a quick smile and even quicker service. Her reward had been a flash of his white teeth in a silent “thank you.” She savored the memory as if it were a declaration of love.

  Tonight, though, Katie just couldn’t go to work. She had wrestled with her conscience when she had been unable to find a replacement, but in the end, she had called in sick. She had missed out on a ton of fun already, while her wealthier friends regaled her with the stories of their weekend exploits time and again.

  What could one night hurt? she reasoned, although throughout the football game she glanced to and fro, afraid she might recognize someone who would guess the truth. Guilt. She was fraught with it.

  With a sigh she glanced down at her right ankle, currently wrapped in an elastic bandage. She had twisted it the night before while at work, and a part of her wanted to use it as an excuse to stay home. But that wasn’t the real reason. She just hadn’t wanted to miss this game, and though, yes, her ankle hurt a bit, it wasn’t as injured as she might want to think.

  Pushing her uneasy thoughts aside, Katie concentrated on the football game. Against all odds the Lakehaven Wildcats appeared to be holding their own. The score seesawed back and forth until two minutes before the half when Jake Talbot caught a spinning pass and raced in for a touchdown ahead of a nipping opponent to pull the Wildcats ahead.

  The crowd leapt to their feet, stomping and cheering until the stands reverberated and Katie’s own throat ached from screaming.

  It was, however, the last perfect play of the evening. The second half slid into the Wildcats’ normal routine of tired, battered play. Still, when the horn blew, Lakehaven had only lost by six points, and the festive mood remained as the stands slowly cleared.

  Beneath the lights the crowd surged around the players. They had removed their helmets and were meeting the fans’ questions earnestly. With their padding, they all looked like Arnold Schwarzenegger wannabees. Jake was no exception. His shoulder pads bulged, and the football pants hugged tightly, increasing the disparity between torso and legs in a thoroughly interesting way. Jake’s hair stuck wetly to his forehead as he listened to the advice of a middle-aged gentleman who seemed determined to school him on the ins and outs of football.

  “You gotta want that ball. Pull it into your chest. Cradle it. Love it. You gotta want that ball…”

  Jake’s gaze shifted briefly, catching Katie’s eye. The faintest smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. Katie grinned. She could feel her cheeks redden with heat and silently bemoaned her expressive face.

  “You listening?” the man demanded.

  “Yes, sir.” Jake was polite.

  Since Jake hadn’t dropped the ball, Katie couldn’t see why the man cared. He wasn’t the coach, but then, some people went nuts over football at any level.

  The man clapped Jake on the shoulder. “Good game, son.”

  “Thank you.”

  Jake turned to Katie, gl
anced at the retreating man, then shrugged as if to say, “It’s all bullshit, but who cares?” Katie liked sharing in the moment. She was astounded that he seemed to be eager to talk to her, but before a word could pass his lips, another well-intentioned, middle-aged would-be coach jumped in with another round of advice. The crowd moved in closer, and Katie was forced to step back. She hung at the periphery of the fans. Other players began marching into the locker room to change, but Jake was still surrounded by adults and teens alike.

  What was she thinking? There was no room in Jake Talbot’s life for the likes of Katie Tindel. She was just too poor. Someday, she determined, when she had made it on her own, she would find a guy like Jake, and it wouldn’t matter what their backgrounds were. She was determined for that to be her fate.

  She wanted a guy like Jacob Talbot.

  “Hey! Wait!”

  She heard his voice and glanced around to see whom he was calling to. In amazement, she saw he was signaling her. With a few last words to the group still huddled around him, he sidled away, reaching Katie in a matter of moments.

  “I didn’t think I’d survive another post mortem on the game,” he admitted. “So, where are you going?”

  “Ummm…nowhere special.” Katie linked her fingers together to stop her hands from quivering. They were such betrayers. She couldn’t do anything without them giving her feelings away as they quaked and shook.

  “You going to Trey’s party?”

  Trey was a member of the squad whose parents didn’t mind having a bunch of the team over after the games. It was an open invitation, but Katie had never felt comfortable dropping in. Most of the kids who went were part of the wealthy, more popular set.

  Not that she wasn’t accepted by them, she reminded herself. For reasons she didn’t care to speculate on, Katie Tindel had been okayed. Her looks and figure had caught the eye of several of the more noted males of her class, and the girls had been forced to follow. A shallow victory? Undoubtedly, and one Katie was a bit reluctant to grab with both hands. It was safer to stay on the fringes, and until this moment, that’s where she had happily been.