All He Ever Wanted

by ALLISON LEIGH,

  “Honey, what you are,” Diana murmured, “is over your limit.”

  Frannie looked as if she were going to take exception to that. But then she laughed. And nodded. “One drink’s all it takes,” she agreed. “I know. Call me bitter. It’ll pass. Right, Faith? How long ago was your divorce?”

  “Two years.” Faith caught the waitress’s attention, and signaled for a refill for their iced teas.

  “Do you ever talk to Jess?” That came from Sharona.

  “No.” Faith handed over her glass when Juliet returned with the pitcher of tea. When she realized she was staring at the waitress’s pregnant abdomen, she quickly averted her eyes. “Nothing to talk to him about. He remarried about two minutes after the ink was dry on our divorce papers.” In the two years since, she figured her ex-husband’s new wife had probably capably produced at least one child, if not more.

  “When does it stop hurting?” Frannie stared at her over her fruity drink.

  Faith murmured her thanks to Juliet after she’d finished filling the glasses, and the waitress flashed a pretty smile before moving off, her thick dark hair bouncing behind her shoulders. She thought about Frannie’s question. “I don’t know that I hurt about Jess anymore,” she admitted. Jess had done what was best for him. And she hadn’t been part of that package any longer.

  It was the reason she wasn’t suitable that hurt. She’d had a staph infection when she was a teenager. But not until she had failed to conceive with Jess and had grown concerned enough to seek a medical opinion had she learned the infection had left her so damaged.

  “Puhleeze,” Sharona drawled. “If you weren’t still hurting over that jerk’s defection, then why on earth aren’t you seeing other people by now?”

  Faith eyed the other woman. “Maybe because I’ve been busy?”

  “Not all of us have alimony settlements the size of yours,” Becka added dryly, and the women laughed again. “Some of us actually have to work for a living.”

  “I’m dragging us all down,” Frannie admitted. “Aren’t I?”

  “Yes,” Diana agreed. But she winked. “We still love you anyway.”

  Frannie made a face. “Well, at least there’s that.”

  Juliet returned with the check. “Anything else I can get you this afternoon?”

  “You look like you should be sitting down here with us waiting on you.” Tanya nodded her head at Juliet’s expanding waistline. “I’ll bet your feet are just killing you after your shift here.”

  Juliet’s cheeks flushed a little, which seemed to make her liquid dark eyes sparkle even more. Her palm curved over the thrust of her abdomen. “Sometimes, a little,” she admitted. “But everyone who comes in here is always so nice.”

  “Honey, I used to wait tables here—”

  “—about a hundred years ago.”

  “—and I know not everyone who comes in here is nice,” Becka continued, ignoring Sharona’s interruption. She pointed at the painting hanging over the bar of a woman wearing nothing but strategically placed gauze. “And the Shady Lady there could attest to it.”

  Faith glanced up at the painting. She was so used to seeing it there that she hardly noticed it anymore. But it did remind her that the bar and grill had once had a considerably more spicy reputation. “She probably shocked the hell out of the good townspeople in her day,” she murmured. The painting wasn’t lurid. But it was…suggestive.

  Sharona reached out and took the check from Juliet. “Ladies. This lunch is on my third ex-husband.” She produced a gleaming gold credit card. “God love him. My bank certainly does.” She laughed.

  Faith knew the laughter wasn’t completely true, though. Every time Sharona married, she did it believing that it would last forever and a day.

  Juliet took the credit card and check and disappeared again.

  Becka lifted her iced tea. “Here’s to another Valentine’s Day sans a loving Valentine. Let’s hope next year at least one or two of us is missing.”

  They all clinked glasses. Faith wondered if they were all wondering which of them would be there to share the day with old girlfriends.

  She would probably be at the top of the list.

  Which was just a little too much of a pity party to tolerate. She took a last drink of iced tea and stood. Hugged all of her friends, who were also gathering up purses and shopping bags and cell phones. Juliet returned, and Sharona was busy signing the charge slip.

  Tanya hooked her arm through Faith’s as they left the restaurant and headed to their cars. “So. Are you okay?” She clearly hadn’t lost the thread of their whispered conversation.

  “I didn’t have nightmares about the search,” Faith admitted as she reached her SUV and pulled open the door. She’d had dreams about Cameron not pulling back from her. And wasn’t that the ultimate fantasy? “So, yeah. I guess I’m okay.”

  “Glad you came?”

  Faith nodded. Tanya had goaded her into it, promising that if Faith didn’t show at The Hitching Post, Sharona had threatened to come and haul Faith out of her condo by her toes. “I still have to make those cookies I promised Chris, though,” she said. “I think he’s planning to use ’em with the new residents. He told me yesterday that things are just going crazy at the hospital lately.”

  “I thought ‘crazy’ was standard operating procedure over there.”

  “Yeah. But he said it’s been worse than usual.” Faith shook her head a little. “You know, I’ve actually had two reporters come to me, wanting statements about the mine. That is what is crazy. I can’t believe that gold fever is hitting this town. So, Toby’s completely over his flu?”

  Tanya nodded. “Thank goodness. I love that boy o’ mine, but he isn’t exactly the sweetest of patients.”

  “Give him a hug for me.”

  “Give Erik a hug for me.” Tanya waited a beat, then laughed gently. “Oh, girl, you should see your face.” She gave Faith a quick hug. “I’ll talk to you later. I’ve gotta run into Bozeman. See if I can find some sexy lingerie that’ll keep Derek awake for a few minutes tonight when he comes off duty.” She wiggled her eyebrows and hurried toward her car.

  Faith watched her go for a moment. Tanya was really lucky. She and Derek had fallen for each other the moment they’d laid eyes on one another when they were only seventeen years old. They’d married two weeks after graduating high school, throwing both sets of parents into fits. But here they were, fourteen years later—a child, a demanding career and a successful retail business later—still as giddy as newlyweds with one another.

  Everyone should be so blessed.

  She tilted back her head, looking up into the pristine blue sky. For the first time in weeks, she wasn’t on call. She could have driven to Bozeman, too, if she’d wanted.

  But she had a date with some flour and eggs and her oven.

  And the fact that Erik and Cameron hadn’t had much in the way of home-baked cookies didn’t figure in at all to her unwarranted enthusiasm.

  Four hours later, though, Faith’s heart was in her throat and it irritated her to no end. So when she rapped her knuckles on the Stevensons’ front door, the knock was a little louder than necessary.

  She hoped Erik answered the door.

  It would be much easier. She could hand over the frosted cookies to him, he’d probably be goggle-eyed over the prospect of a major sugar high, and she’d head on down the road again, giving her heart absolutely no reason to remain in her throat, threatening to make her pass out either from dizziness or from choking.

  But the door wasn’t yanked inward by the energetic boy.

  It wasn’t yanked inward at all.

  She stood there staring at the firmly closed, heavy, dark wood-paneled door as her heart took a slow, anti-climactic slide back down where it belonged.

  Well, what had she expected? It was Valentine’s Day. Erik and Cam were probably out doing something…valentiney.

  She smoothed her hand over the sealed box of cookies. She was not going to stand there
and knock again. Not that there were any neighbors close enough to notice Faith loitering on the front porch. And even if there were, she figured her presence there on a Saturday afternoon was a lot less salacious than Cam calling for Todd to sit with Erik in the middle of the night.

  She set the container on the slightly bedraggled welcome mat and went back down the steps to the snow-shoveled walk. She may have had plenty of fun at the grill that afternoon, and she may have enjoyed her baker stint, but now the evening stretched out in front of her with yawning emptiness.

  She actually found herself wishing that her pager would go off, which was fine thinking, given that it took someone’s safety being in jeopardy for her to be summoned.

  And since she wasn’t on call for once, why did she even have her pager on?

  She fumbled with the car door, her bare fingers flinching from the cold metal. Maybe she’d take herself to a movie.

  She abruptly nixed that idea. She ordinarily didn’t mind going to a movie on her own. But on Valentine’s Day? Major date night?

  No thank you.

  Two years ago, if she’d had time on her hands, she’d have kept them busy with crocheting. But she’d stopped crocheting when she’d started facing reality. Now, she just had a closet full of items that reminded her of what she couldn’t have, that she used for baby shower gifts.

  “Faith?”

  Her fingers clenched around the edge of the door. She looked up. Cameron stood on his porch, the container of cookies in his hand. “I thought I heard the door,” he said. “What’s this?”

  Her heart had taken its trip upstairs to her throat again.

  She closed the car door and leaned against it. Maybe the chill penetrating her corduroy pants would keep some starch in her knees. “Cookies. You know. For Valentine’s Day. I made too many. I could only pawn off so many on my brother. I thought maybe Erik would enjoy them.” Which was a pretty blatant lie. Chris would happily have taken every single cookie. She just hadn’t chosen to give them all to him.

  Cam had flipped open the lid and was looking inside.

  Her heart ached more than a little at the sight. Particularly when she knew good and well that she wouldn’t be seeing him at all, if she hadn’t taken this uncharacteristic step and approached him.

  “He will love ’em,” he said as he lifted out a bright pink-frosted heart and bit into it. “If there are any left by the time he gets home.”

  She realized she’d somehow traveled halfway up the walk again. “Gets home?”

  “He’s spending the night at Josh Lampson’s.”

  Her jaw very nearly hit the concrete sidewalk. “He must be excited about that,” she said cautiously.

  Cameron shrugged, and something soft curled inside her because she knew the movement was not the casual thing he’d meant it to be. “I spoke with Josh’s mom. She got switched the other day to a day shift. She’ll be home all night tonight.”

  Faith took a few more steps. Cameron finished off the cookie in another bite, then licked his thumb, his glance sliding over her.

  “Wanna come in?”

  “Oh.” She looked back at her car. “I, um—” Had nowhere else to go but home, she thought. And anywhere else to be that would be safer than being around him. “Sure. For a few minutes.”

  He cradled the container in his hand as if it were a football, and stood aside when she joined him on the porch, pushing the door inward. “After you.”

  She went inside, and silently chastised her foolish sense that entering his home felt different now than it had the other time she’d been there.

  Just because Erik was gone—

  She nearly jumped out of her skin when his fingers brushed her shoulders.

  But he was only helping her out of her coat. She quickly pulled her arms free and he hung it by the collar over the tree stand in the foyer that was already fat with several winter coats—some sized seven-year-old boy, and the rest sized full-grown man.

  He passed her, his fingers poking inside the cookie container again. “Come on back. I was grading papers.”

  She realized he wore only socks on his feet. For some reason, it felt intimate seeing those scrupulously white, thick tube socks with a thin line of gold stitching over his toes.

  “Seems you do a lot of that,” she said very brightly, looking elsewhere. But “elsewhere” proved just as distracting. His hair had grown in the few weeks since the mine incident. Even in the few days since he’d come to her condo in the middle of the night because he’d needed to know she was okay.

  And the rich, dark auburn strands did show a tendency to wave around his neck just as she’d suspected they would.

  She surreptitiously rubbed her palms down the sides of her jeans. Cam slid the cookie container on the rectangular farmhouse-style table, and glanced back at her.

  “Your hair’s down.”

  She barely restrained lifting a self-conscious hand to her loose hair. “Guess it is. Is, um, that all stuff you have to grade?” She gestured toward the desk where papers were spread across the entire surface. A stack of folders, fat with assignments, she assumed, sat on one side. Two enormous textbooks were pushed to the other side. She also noticed a playbook among the mess.

  “Yeah.” His lips quirked a little. “And I used to complain about the massive amounts of paperwork back when I had my own finance firm.” He picked up the slender bottle of beer he’d obviously been nursing, and tilted it. “Want one?”

  She shook her head. His gaze was inscrutable, yet she still felt herself flushing at the steadiness of it on her face.

  “That blue color’s good on you,” he said after a moment. “Got a date later?”

  She knew she was blushing at that, which should have been ridiculous. “No.”

  “Why not? It’s Valentine’s Day. Evening,” he corrected, as his gaze slid to the windows, which clearly showed the purposeful descent of the sun in a truly glorious display of fiery color.

  “So?” She crossed her arms. Uncrossed them. “You’re here doing schoolwork. Unless you’re going out later,” she added belatedly. He had let Erik spend the night at a friend’s, after all. Which was highly unusual. Maybe he’d had a personal motivation behind that decision.

  After all. He hadn’t exactly answered her question about whether or not he’d been involved with anyone since his wife’s death. Just because she couldn’t think beyond him to another person, didn’t mean he felt similarly toward her.

  She was such a head case.

  He plucked another pink cookie out of the container and demolished half of it in one bite, then followed it with a beer chaser and still his gaze stayed on her.

  He’d looked at her that way the afternoon he’d kissed her, too. Before he’d backed away as if she were some sort of biohazardous material, that was. And he’d looked at her that way in her kitchen the other night. Before he’d put twelve feet of kitchen tiles between them.

  “Do I have dirt on my face or something?” she finally asked, vaguely exasperated, as much from those particular memories as anything.

  His lips quirked again, a little stronger this time. Enough to hint at the slash of a dimple he’d passed on to his son. He placed his bottle on the table, taking his time. “No. You don’t have dirt on your face. No, I didn’t ship off Erik for the night so I could go out later and score.” His gaze burned over her face for a moment. “With anyone.”

  Her cheeks heated.

  His lips tilted a little more. “You just look different.”

  “Great,” she murmured. “That either means I’m barely presentable ordinarily, or I’m barely presentable now.”

  “Fishing for compliments?”

  “No!”

  He smiled outright, and the power of it bathed over her like seductive summer sunshine. “And do you know how to handle a compliment when it’s given?”

  “When I can tell it’s a compliment,” she countered. So she’d changed into her brand-new blue turtleneck after her close encounter with h
er oven. So she’d dashed a little more makeup on than her usual smear of clear lip gloss. Next time, she wouldn’t bother.

  Next time?

  What was she thinking?

  “You look as beautiful as you always do.” His deep voice had turned matter-of-fact. “Just different. So I figured you must have a reason. A date.”

  “I don’t date.” Which he undoubtedly had figured out for himself.

  “Why is that?”

  “Why do you care?”

  “You asked me.”

  No. What she’d asked was whether he’d been with anyone in the years since Laura died. Definitely a different question. At least to her. But maybe not to him. And did it matter anyway?

  Either way, the answer was no.

  Silence ticked between them. She shook her head. “I should go.” Before she made more of a fool of herself than she already had.

  “What’re you going to do?”

  “I don’t know.” She wouldn’t think about how she’d manage to fill the empty hours until she was on duty again. “Maybe make another batch of cookies so Erik might actually get one.” She added some starch to her tone.

  His lips tilted and he finished off the one still in his hand. “Wouldn’t have taken you for a pastry chef.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “I told you I used to bake with my mother and sisters. So, if that’s an example of your compliments—”

  He lifted his hand peaceably. “No. They’re great. Which is clearly obvious. But to save you the extra work—” he deftly snapped the lid back on the container “—I’ll preserve the rest for Erik. Good enough?”

  “I like baking. It’s nice to have a reason to do it.” Her mind flitted to Erik’s open house and she knew Cam was thinking about the same thing. Maybe his steady gaze wasn’t quite as inscrutable as she’d thought. Which made all manner of warmth stir right back up inside her. “Well. I should let you get back to your work. Tell Erik I said happy Valentine’s Day.”

  He nodded and she turned to go. She was halfway to the door when he spoke.