The First Kiss

by Grace Burrowes

  Why did he have to smell so good? Not like a grease monkey, but like a jeans commercial made sniffable.

  “Could we, Mom? Breakfast, lunch, and dinner?”

  “We’ll ask James how his experiment goes instead,” Vera said, breaking off a corner of her brownie. “That will save on our dentist bills.”

  “I hate the dentist,” Twy said, sculpting ice cream with her spoon. “We go during summer break, and it’s the worst thing about summer.”

  “What’s the best thing?” James asked.

  Point to James for diversionary skills.

  “I had riding lessons last summer, and that was the best,” Twyla said. “We go swimming when Mom doesn’t have to work, and we go on picnics, and sometimes make a trip to see the ponies at Chincoteague and hike on the Appalachian Trail or the C & O towpath, and all over. What’s your favorite thing to do in the summer?”

  James studied his empty spoon, holding it at mouth level.

  “I like to do nothing. To put a book over my face and hang out in the hammock for an hour or two. I built my niece a tree house last summer, but my brothers had to help, which was sorta fun, and sorta not, because they’re my older brothers. I take the occasional walk in the same places you do, but I think I should get a dog to go walking with me. I also like to sit on the porch swing at night and listen to the crickets and cicadas, and enjoy some of my favorite music as it gets dark.”

  Quite a speech for him, and his low, lovely voice brought sleepy, sultry summer nights to mind as if conjured by magic. What would he listen to? Country? Blues?

  What would it be like, to lie in that hammock with him and do “nothing”?

  Chapter 4

  Vera was rescued from further inappropriate musings—about hammocks, summer evenings, and James Knightley—by Twyla’s chatter.

  “I want a dog too,” Twyla said. “We have lots of room for a dog, and I’d take real good care of it.”

  “Dogs take a lot work, Twy,” Vera said. “They’re a commitment for life. Even a hamster costs money and requires constant care.”

  “This would be a perfect property for a dog,” James said—the dolt. “I’m sure when the time comes, you’ll pick out the very best dog in the whole world for it, but right now, I need to get up and move around, or I’ll sit here and help myself to another brownie.”

  “He can have seconds, can’t he, Mom?”

  “I cannot have seconds,” James said, which spared Vera the next step in the argument: If James could have seconds, why couldn’t Twy? “I’ll become a fixture in this kitchen if I take another bite, like Winnie the Pooh when he ate too much honey. I noticed something about your garage door, though.”

  “What did you notice?” Twy just had to take the bait.

  “Your garage door locks down nice and tight, but the service door doesn’t have a dead bolt.”

  “What’s a dead bolt?”

  “Come here, I’ll show you.” He led Twyla to the kitchen door, and showed her how the mechanism on the dead-bolt lock worked. Twyla had used the lock herself many times—locking doors was a house rule—but now she was fascinated with it.

  “When I was at the hardware store, I picked up a dead-bolt assembly, and I would be happy to install it on that garage door,” he said, and now he was watching Vera, no hint of teasing or flirtation in his blue eyes.

  “I can’t believe that door has no dead bolt,” Vera said, abandoning her last bite of brownie. “I’m certain I ordered dead bolts installed on every outside door, but now that you bring it up, I can’t recall throwing the bolt on that door. Show me.”

  She followed James and Twyla out to the garage, and sure enough, no additional lock had been installed on the service door.

  “This solves a mystery, in any case,” she said. “A credit card ought to be sufficient to slip this open.”

  “Not for long,” James said. “Let me get the hardware out of my car, and we’ll take care of this before I’ve digested my brownie.”

  Vera wanted to tell him no, that he wasn’t allowed to get anything from his car, he wasn’t allowed to correct this troubling oversight, but she kept her mouth shut. She could install a damned lock, but not until she’d bought a power drill and some other tools and figured out how to use them.

  Besides, she was too relieved at the realization that Donal hadn’t somehow managed to get his hands on a key.

  “Twy, didn’t you have a recipe written down for James?”

  “It’s up in my room. I’ll go get it, and maybe write down the one for raccoon droppings too.” She scampered off, leaving Vera alone in the garage with James Knightley.

  “Raccoon droppings?”

  “Chocolate peanut butter oatmeal no-bake cookies. Some people call them school-lunch cookies. Alexander said they looked like raccoon droppings.”

  “I have seen raccoon spore,” James said, one corner of his mouth tipping up. “The man was mistaken.”

  Well, of course James Knightley had seen raccoon droppings, and he could probably describe them in French too, while building palaces with his bare hands and arguing arcane law before the World Court at The Hague.

  Men. “Weren’t you going to get some hardware from your car?”

  The second corner of his mouth tipped up. “Be right back,” he said, going through the unlocked door.

  Minutes later, he was drilling and squinting and muttering to himself, a man transported by the mysterious task of installing a lock, while Vera wrestled with an uneasy mix of gratitude and resentment.

  “Don’t take this the wrong way,” Vera said, talking to his long, muscular back, “but I’d appreciate it if we didn’t see much of you after today.”

  The power drill went silent. “Hand me that rag, would you?”

  He didn’t turn, but instead inspected the doorknob, turning it this way and that, then turning the knob that controlled the dead bolt.

  Vera passed him a rag. “I said we’re grateful, but I’m concerned Twyla will get attached to you, and that wouldn’t be good for her.”

  Concerned Twy’s mother—who hadn’t noticed the lack of dead bolt on her own garage door—might be tempted to call on James for something other than handyman skills she ought to have acquired herself by now.

  “I think that about does it.” James closed the door and shot the bolt, then packed up his tools in a metal box Vera could probably not have lifted to save herself. When he straightened, he seemed taller to Vera, more imposing.

  “Now what are you going on about, chasing me off the property like I’m some stray dog you don’t want getting into your garbage?”

  “It isn’t that,” Vera said, for stray dogs never made a pair of worn jeans look half so good. “It’s that Twyla lost her father, then she lost her stepfather, and I’m protective of her. She’ll get ideas about you.”

  James set the toolbox down with a solid thunk, all the tools rattling about the way Vera’s insides rattled when she had to manage a confrontation with anything other than classical repertoire.

  “Twyla is about as well adjusted as a kid can be, Vera, and that is thanks to you. I could tell you we’re neighbors, and you’d be within your rights to occasionally ask me over to see to something like a lock, or a squeaky hinge, or a dead battery. I’d gladly accept some homemade cookies in return, but you wouldn’t believe I could be that kind of neighbor.”

  Was that how it was supposed to work? “You live two miles away.”

  “By the road. As the crow flies, one farm and some woods are all that separate us. That makes us neighbors out here in the country. The problem isn’t Twyla. The problem is you, and whatever that damned Donal or sainted Alexander did to annihilate your confidence.”

  “He didn’t annihilate my confidence,” Vera said, except he had, and that wasn’t the worst of it. “Maybe the problem is you, James, and the fact that I’m n
ot interested in being neighbors, as you put it.”

  Unfair. Vera knew the words were unfair. She used to be a fair woman who could control her own mouth, one who didn’t feel like crying for no reason at the worst possible times.

  James stared at the newly installed dead bolt, then hefted the toolbox. “Please ask Twyla to get me those recipes, because her feelings will be hurt if I don’t take them with me. But, Vera…”

  The expression he turned on her was somber to the point of sadness, as solemn as the key of B-flat minor.

  “You’re snakebit and gun-shy. I understand that because maybe I am a little too, but I am not who and what you need to be afraid of. I’ll go—I’ve worn out my welcome, clearly—but I want a promise from you. Two promises.”

  She nodded, because he was leaving. He’d said he was going, and that was what she wanted. Sort of.

  “First, call my brother. He’s a damned fine family-law attorney, and if anybody can spike Donal’s guns, it’s Trent.”

  “I will call him. I’ve been meaning to, but I’ve been busy.”

  “Stop thinking you have to take on an idiot like Donal by yourself. Trent can make him go away, and stay away, and you deserve at least that.”

  “What was the second promise?”

  “Second, keep my number, and show Twyla where it is. You’re isolated here. If you’re concerned about Donal coming on the property in broad daylight, you really ought to get the place posted, and put a damned gate across the foot of your driveway. Failing that, keep my number.”

  Was it controlling behavior to ask woman to keep a phone number? To steer her back to the attorney who’d done such a good job for her in the past?

  No. It was not. Not by any sane lights.

  “I tossed your number out, James. I didn’t mean to. I was tidying up. I don’t have your number.”

  Even his smile was solemn. “I’ll give it to you again,” he said, taking out a pen and a scrap of paper, “and again, and as many times as it takes. The whole world is not your enemy, Vera.”

  “I know,” she said, but when the man she’d married turned into an enemy, the man she’d entrusted her entire career to, she’d stopped relying on her ability to gauge who was a friend and who wasn’t.

  James waited in the garage for Vera to fetch Twyla and the recipe card. He made a fuss about how to halve the recipe—“How ’bout that? Fractions everywhere!”—before stuffing it into his jacket pocket.

  “When you’re in school on Monday, bossing around those fractions,” he said to Twyla, “you take a minute to spot Merle and Grace on the playground, and tell them you helped me install a battery and a lock. They’ll be no end of impressed that you have your own car already. Might even want to come over and see it, assuming your mom’s willing for you to have some company of your own.”

  As closing arguments went, James’s suggestion was dead-on, because nothing would do but he had to write down a phone number for his nieces, and suffer another hug from Twyla before he left.

  Vera walked him to his car, wishing this morning, like many parts of her life, had come equipped with a do-over button.

  James scanned the wintry landscape of her property, set the toolbox in the back of his vehicle, then leaned in close, close enough that Vera could catch a whiff of expensive, spicy aftershave.

  “You know,” he said, speaking almost into her ear, “if you were any other female who’d treated me to a brownie and some company on a Saturday morning, I’d be kissing your cheek when we parted, maybe sneaking in a friendly, innocuous hug. It wouldn’t mean much, just a gesture of casual affection, but you might have enjoyed it. I know I would have.”

  He drew back, his expression still very much in B-flat minor.

  “Thank you for installing the lock, James, and the battery, and for being so nice to Twyla.” And to me, which was the real problem.

  “Call Trent, Vera. Please.”

  Because she was an idiot, a cold, lonely idiot who felt a lot safer thanks to the man she was about to run off, Vera balanced with a hand to James’s shoulder and planted a swift kiss on his cheek.

  Before she could thank him again, or apologize, or make some other kind of fool of herself, he was gone.

  His SUV had disappeared down the lane and into the trees, and Vera was still standing in the chilly breeze, her fingers tracing the cold curve of her unkissed cheek.

  Why, why in the name of all that was sensible, sweet, and lovely, did the first kiss she’d given a man in years have to be a kiss of parting?

  * * *

  “I do believe this is a historic moment.” Mac plopped his briefcase down on the conference table and settled into a chair catty-corner from James. “You are in the courthouse archives, doing research, and no delectable clerks are fluttering about, stepping and fetching. You have no patience for research.”

  James had no patience for fluttering.

  “I don’t dislike research,” he said, though he disliked the file in front of him very much. “I’d lose my edge as a litigator if I didn’t occasionally read an appellate opinion, but this isn’t quite research.”

  He tossed a glossy color photo across the table, then another.

  “Well, shit.” Mac didn’t pick them up, but he studied them where they lay in all their appalling and dubious glory. “Somebody done somebody wrong.”

  “Vera Waltham’s second husband,” James said. “She’s lucky she didn’t lose an eye or suffer permanent scarring. He didn’t land a lot of blows, but the one she took counted.”

  “She’s one of Trent’s clients? The cookie lady, right?”

  “Was one of Trent’s clients.” Vera still baked a mean batch of cookies. “The decree is final, and a restraining order is in place.”

  “I expect this kind of evidence when I’m defending an assault and battery, or assault with intent to maim, but in a domestic…” Mac passed the photo back, handling it by one corner, as if it were contaminated with some nasty virus. “I cannot imagine this happening between people who promised to love, honor, and cherish each other, but it does. All the damned time.”

  “A woman is abused in this country every fifteen seconds, according to this morning’s reading. I don’t know how Trent stands it.” And if the mother were abused, what chance did the children stand?

  Mac sat back, as if seeking distance from the evidence James had been studying.

  “Trent fights the good fight, and I imagine it helps for him to think of all those battered wives as somebody’s little girl, somebody’s Grace or Merle. It gives him an edge, a determination.”

  “Never thought of it like that.” James stuffed the photos out of sight, back in the court file.

  “You might have asked Trent about this. Did Vera press charges?”

  “She didn’t. She damned well should have, but she didn’t. I haven’t checked with District Court, but I’m guessing she would have invoked spousal privilege to avoid testifying against her husband. The divorce hadn’t been filed when this happened, and the restraining order was by consent.”

  “Hard call to make,” Mac said, his gaze straying to the court file. “Most guys don’t get more reasonable when you put them behind bars, but this wasn’t a wild punch after a long night at the bar. This was purposeful.”

  Like harassing Vera by phone had to be purposeful. “Her ex has kids. My guess is that carried weight with Vera.” Two kids in the hellacious throes of adolescence.

  Poor Vera, poor Twyla, and as for those teenagers… They needed horses, or dogs, and different parents.

  Mac wrinkled his nose. “So Vera dumped the guy and left those kids to deal with him alone?”

  James tipped back in his chair, feeling a headache start up at the base of his skull. “Vera had to choose between his kids and her kid, and she did what any sensible mom would do. She took her kid and got to high ground, but st
ays in touch with her stepchildren as best she can.”

  “Hard to do with a restraining order in place.” Hard to do legally, was what Mac meant. “What prompted you to dig into this particular file?”

  “I’m not used to being given the bum’s rush,” James said, closing the file. “This makes it easier to understand.”

  But not easier to accept.

  “Vera Waltham turned down a chance to tango with Lance Romance himself?”

  “You’re just jealous.” The ribbing was inevitable, and yet it grated. “When’s the last time you enjoyed the intimate company of a willing woman, Mac?”

  “That’s a state secret. You truly never get turned down?”

  “I don’t do the asking. Less chance of rejection that way.” Though right now, James did, indeed, feel rejected. He’d taken three days, a gallon of whole milk, and two batches of brownies to figure out even that much.

  “You must have asked something,” Mac said, “because she gave you the bum’s rush. A lady doesn’t turf a guy out for standing around looking adorable.”

  James felt about as adorable as a hungover porcupine. “Maybe she does, if she’s so tired, disillusioned, and rattled she can’t notice how adorable he is.”

  * * *

  “Vera, a pleasure to see you again.”

  Trent Knightley got to his feet when a lady entered the room, but he didn’t offer his hand. He was old-fashioned enough to wait until the woman made the overture first.

  Which Vera did—she liked her lawyer, and had found his courtliness a much needed comfort when her second marriage had been in shambles. Then, too, to go with his fine manners, Trent Knightley had the litigating instincts of a buzz saw, and those had appealed to her just as strongly.

  “Good to see you too,” Vera said, “and these are a wedding present.” She passed him a tin of turtle cookies, which he set aside to help her off with her coat.

  “Partner cookies,” he said, waggling dark eyebrows. “Not for distribution to the lowly associates, if I don’t want my brothers giving me grief for the next three weeks. Have a seat.”