by Ciara Knight
Her stomach swished and swooshed, and the only thing that calmed it was activity, so she scrubbed the refrigerator and the espresso machine, wiped down the counters, cleaned the large glass windows, and swept the floor.
She stopped when she spotted herself in the mirror and decided she needed to make herself look like she hadn’t been up all night. No reason to let Tanner know how much he still affected her, so she retrieved her makeup bag and dotted some concealer under her eyes, stroked on some mascara, and painted on some lipstick.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
She dropped her powder into the bag and swung around to find a damp Tanner at the front door of Maple Grounds. A quick glance at her watch revealed five in the morning. She shoved the makeup bag behind the computer and hurried to the door. “What on earth are you doing out in the rain and at this hour?”
“I didn’t sleep, and I have a full day, so I need a pick-me-up. Figured you had the best coffee in town, right, Coffee Whisperer?”
“You mock me. Why should I let you inside?” She winked but opened the door.
“Because I’m helping you save your brother from a horrible mistake.”
She closed and locked the door behind him and grabbed a towel from the kitchen for him to mop his hair and face before he dripped all over her floor. He shrugged off his rain jacket at the door, hung it on the coat rack, and wiped his shoes on the mat like she knew his mama always taught him. “What are you going on about?”
“That’s why I wanted to speak with you before I met with him.” Tanner rolled up his long sleeves, as if about to dig into some hard labor.
“Oh.” She tossed the rag at him, knowing she didn’t hide her disappointment well.
“That and about what happened all those years ago and where we stand now. You were right about one thing. I may not have known it, but I was running from this town.”
She paused at the second bistro table and eyed the memory-come-home. “You were?”
“Yes.” He swiped his face. “But we’ll get to that later. How ’bout that cup of coffee and our discussion about Andy first.”
“You got it.” She eyed the wrought iron leaf pattern in the chair back. “But what do you want?”
He shrugged. “Just coffee, I guess.”
She hid behind her espresso machine before he could see her disappointment. That was the problem. He knew her too well, even after all these years.
He slipped into her personal workspace and handed her the coffee filters.
“Thanks.”
“Why couldn’t you sleep last night?” she asked before grinding the coffee beans with a loud squeal that drowned out his answer. “What?”
“I said because I was thinking about our conversation today,” he said at a shout that echoed through the shop.
“About my brother ruining his life?” She busied herself, attempting to keep her mind and hands occupied at all times. Did he know how sexy he looked in the muted light, fresh out of the rain? Why did that man affect her just by entering a room or speaking in that deep, gritty tone?
“Yes, and about us.”
She knocked over the metal mug for frothing milk, and it clanged louder than a high-pitched gong on the Chinese New Year. “Oh. Okay, so talk.” She chased after it, kicking it twice before retrieving it, washing it, and placing it back on the counter. This time over by the espresso machine where it belonged.
“I know you want me to encourage your brother and help him earn a college football scholarship, but I can’t do that in good conscience. Not when I know that course could ruin his life.” He paced the kitchen area, running his hand through his dark, wavy hair. He’d always looked sexy with wet, disheveled hair like he’d just walked out of the lake and lay down by her side on a beach towel with water sliding down his chiseled muscles.
“Do you hear me?”
“Yes. I hear you, but I don’t understand. You went after the football scholarship. You gave up everything when a full ride came along, without a word to anyone. Why do you want to deprive my brother of something like that? Are you jealous because you don’t get to be the hero anymore?”
“Because he could give everything up, only to lose his so-called dream and everything else along with it.” He breathed hard, looking like a wild bull stuck in a pen.
She finished pouring the grounds into the basket and turned on the urn to brew before dragging her eyes to his lips that spoke with such passion. “What are you trying to say? That you regret going after your dream?”
“No. Not if it was really my dream. But was it? I mean really. And even if it was, look at how it turned out. Don’t you want better for your brother? Don’t you want him to have a good life, full of love and family? Trust me, fame and fortune are fleeting and lonely.”
She saw it, the regrets and unhappiness behind his chiseled façade. “But then, you wanted the dream when you left high school. I know you did. We talked about it often, and we had a plan. We were young and foolish, but I know one thing… Tanner McCadden would’ve given up everything to be a football star. Even the woman he vowed to love forever.”
Chapter Twelve
Her words of abandonment sucker-punched his gut. He bent over, holding the counter for a moment. “Mary-Beth. No. That’s not true.” His memory of her never speaking to him again stuck in his brain like a poisoned splinter. “I waited for you. For months.”
“What are you talking about? You decided at the last minute to run off to a different school. You told me you were going after the big scholarship, so we broke up and I left.”
“Yes…I mean no. Yes, we broke up, but then I came after you and you were gone. That night, I’d left a note… I…” He threw his hands up. What was the point of all this? It wouldn’t change anything. “I texted you, but you never responded, so I went to your house, and they said you’d left to go visit campus, but you’d return that Monday, and your parents promised to give you my messages. I waited for weeks to hear from you, but nothing. You never came, you never called, you never responded to my note, my texts, my messages left with your parents. What was I supposed to think?”
“I never got any of them.”
They stood there staring at one another for several moments.
“Tanner, you broke up with me. I went to your parents’ house to tell you goodbye because I didn’t want to leave things between us after that horrible fight. They told me that you were already gone. Your father told me that he was sorry, but sometimes the promise of fame and fortune will change a man, and did I really want to go chase after you, only to be tossed aside later?”
“He said that to you?” Hatred, resentment, and anger rose up, and he wanted to hit something. He turned and punched the wall, sending plaster and dust floating into the air.
“Tanner!”
He rested his head against the wall, his eyes closed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to lose it.” He breathed through the anger. “I didn’t mean to.”
“Forget the wall. Your knuckles are bleeding. Come here.”
He didn’t move. Shame filled him. A temper that he thought he’d left behind in childhood just bubbled back into his life. If there was one thing he never wanted to do, it was to lose his cool in front of Mary-Beth. His father would be ashamed of him.
She rubbed circles on his back, the way she had the night he’d been so mad, he’d punched a kid and sent him to the hospital when they were in middle school. That night, he’d sworn never to hit anyone or anything again. And he hadn’t. Until now.
“It’s okay. It sounds like we were both manipulated, and that hurts us both.”
“That’s no excuse.” Tanner pushed from the wall and faced her—the bright-eyed beauty who hadn’t run away without him, hadn’t broken his heart. And despite believing all this time that he was the one who had been mistreated, Mary-Beth had believed that of him. He rested his head to hers. “I didn’t and would never have run off without you. Not like that. Not without speaking to you first.” He fought the venomous realizat
ion of family betrayal. “Our parents. They did this.” His muscles tightened, and he wanted to yell or scream or punch something again.
“Shhh.” She touched his face, caressing his cheek. “It’s in the past. I suspect your father did it out of love to give you the freedom you never had. Mine, I have no idea why they did it. But I intend to find out.”
When she pressed her palm to his heart, the stinging in his chest soothed. She’d always had that effect on him. No matter what happened, when she touched him, the world became a perfect place. Their world together had always been perfect.
He wanted to pull her close and promise her the world again, but before he could say a word, she slipped away. If only he could hold her one more time, all would be well.
“Come on. We need to clean up your hand before you bleed all over my floor.” Her voice had returned to sounding distant and protective.
“Mary-Beth. I want—”
“Don’t. Not right now. There are so many things we probably both want to say, but we need time to process all of this. It’s been a decade of thinking you didn’t want me, that fame meant more to you than me.”
“Never.”
Mary-Beth wet the cloth and dabbed it at Tanner’s knuckles. The sting made him retract, but she kept hold of his hand. If only she’d kept hold of him ten years ago. “We’re seriously not going to talk about it?”
Footsteps stirred overhead, telling Mary-Beth that Andy would be down soon. “Not right now.”
“Later, then?” His blood turned the white rag crimson, but the wound wasn’t bad. The wall was worse off than his injury.
“Yes.”
“This evening, after everyone leaves the farm.”
“Sure.” She dunked the rag under cold water, her gaze far beyond the sink.
“I’m sorry again about the wall. I’ll be here in the morning to fix it. I promise.” He allowed her the space she asked for and slumped at the table near the window. His mind flipped through every conversation he’d had with his family, with her, with himself, but he stalled on the night before he’d left. The fight they’d had over his decision to change to the other university, when they had a plan set, housing set, their futures set. He’d gone home, sure he’d done the right thing, believing his father’s words that if he and Mary-Beth were meant to be together, they’d both graduate debt free and have an amazing life together. That only lasted until the first rays of light the next day. The day that he went to the store and bought the only ring he could afford and went after her, only to discover she was already gone.
He’d been devastated but had still believed in them enough to place the letter with the ring in their hidden compartment of the tree house for her to find when she returned home. He’d waited for her call, but it had never come.
The back door flew open, so Tanner took a gulp of his coffee and settled in for a chat with a young man he wanted to save from his dreams, but one glance at the boy holding the football, and he knew it was hopeless. He saw himself ten years ago, and no one would’ve stood in his way.
“Hey, there.” Andy bounced with each step, as if he’d already had three cups of coffee before he’d come down.
“Hi.” Tanner took another sip, crafting his words carefully. “You know, it won’t be easy. You’ll have to work like you’ve never worked before.”
“Hard work’s not a problem for me. I’m a Richards.” Andy tossed the ball up in a spiral and caught it. “I promise, I’ll do anything to earn that football scholarship. I can’t believe Tanner McCadden’s my coach.”
“Whoa, I didn’t agree to be your coach yet. I simply attended a practice. And before I agree to anything, including making some calls, you need to listen to me.”
“I’m listening.” The boy’s gaze was expectant and excited.
“You know, college won’t be just about football. It’s about academics. You’ll be torn between parties after games and studying for your exams. Without grades, there isn’t college.”
“Yes, but without football, there’s no college for me either. I mean, Mary-Beth will find a way to send me, but she just finished paying off her own student loans. I don’t want her going back into debt for me. She found a way to put herself through school. I can too.”
“She paid for her own college? I thought your parents said if she didn’t…well, it doesn’t matter.”
“No, they reneged on the whole if-you-dump-your-boyfriend-we’ll-pay-for-your-college thing. She was told to come home and help out or pay her own way. She chose to pay her way.”
“Of course she did.” He wasn’t surprised that she’d managed on her own. She’d always been the strongest, bravest woman he’d ever known. “Listen, you understand that you could be injured the first play of your first game. I’m living proof of how a career could end abruptly.”
“I know, and if that happens, I’ll finish college on loans like you did. Listen, I know you didn’t get the dream that you wanted. But that doesn’t mean I can’t. If you make a call, you’d be doing me a huge solid, man.”
Tanner traced the rim of his coffee. “There’s no talking you out of college ball?”
“Nope.”
He sighed, a decade-long, loss-of-dreams sigh. “Then I’ll make the calls. I’ll be with you through the entire process to guide you. Do you have any questions for me?”
“Yeah, just one.”
“What’s that?”
He eyed Mary-Beth, who was working in the kitchen and attempting to appear uninterested in their current conversation. “Are you still in love with my sister?”
Chapter Thirteen
As Mary-Beth had suspected, the light rain drove people into the coffee shop all morning, and despite the rain stopping by lunchtime, the crowds didn’t let up until her afternoon break from two to five. Luckily, she had help coming in to handle the evening shift and closing. It took a lot for her to trust someone to run her coffee shop, but Carissa was going to drop in to check on Mary-Beth’s assistant manager, Serena.
When Mary-Beth locked the door at two in the afternoon, she decided to call her mother for a chat before heading to the farm. Mary-Beth wanted all the facts before she could face a wounded-looking Tanner again.
At the realization he might have suffered with their breakup as much as she had, everything she’d believed for a decade had flipped upside down. In that moment of realization, she’d had a plethora of emotions colliding at once: relief, grief, joy, sadness, hope, fear, and so many others. She pulled her cell phone from her jeans pocket and called her mother. Not to Mary-Beth’s surprise, it went to voicemail. Her mother was always too busy to chat with her children.
When the phone beeped for her to leave a message, she forced as calm a tone as possible and simply said, “Call me back ASAP. We need to talk.”
She grabbed her keys and drove to the farm. Halfway there, just after the bridge, her phone rang. It hadn’t taken long to get a response to her message. “Good afternoon, Mother.”
“Hello, Mary-Beth. What’s going on? Is it Andy?”
Mary-Beth almost felt bad for making her mother worry, but she deserved to be punished for what she’d done to Mary-Beth and Tanner. “No, it’s not about Andy.”
“Well, what’s the emergency? I’m not on an official break and need to get back inside. You wouldn’t want me to lose my job.”
Mary-Beth forced herself to take a breath before she spoke. “Mother, we need to talk about what you and dad told me when I left for college.”
“What are you going on about? Listen, I’ll call you after work.”
“Did you lie to me and send me away so that you’d break Tanner and me up?” she blurted.
A gasp sounded through the car speaker. “You don’t understand. You’ve never been a parent.”
Mary-Beth turned into the McCadden driveway. “That’s your answer? So you did lie to me? It’s true?”
“Listen, that boy was going to take off on you. Mr. McCadden even warned us that Tanner would be a huge star
and then you’d be nothing to him anymore. You couldn’t see that he was using you for emotional support, only to toss you to the side when he didn’t need you anymore. I was protecting you.”
“Is that what you think of your daughter? That I’m not good enough?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. That’s not what I’m saying. I just wanted to protect my baby girl from heartache.”
“That wasn’t your choice to make.” Mary-Beth pulled to a stop out front and shoved it into park. “My life could’ve been different,” she mumbled, but apparently her mother heard her.
“He didn’t come riding back into town in a white limo to win you back, not even after he lost his big, important future.”
“That’s not fair. He thought I’d chosen to stay at college instead of wanting to be with him.”
“And you received your degree and opened your own business. You’re doing better than I or your father could ever do. I never wanted you to end up working double shifts or having to choose between paying the electric or your phone bill.”
“Money isn’t everything, Mother.”
“You can only say that because you haven’t been without heat or having to decide between feeding your children or paying the mortgage. Listen, when Andy’s done with school, we think he should go to college near us. Your dad’s new job is paying double what he made in Sugar Maple.”
“No, he’s going to get a football scholarship and go to a great university. He’s got strong grades and potential. You’re not going to promise him that you’ll pay for his school and then change your mind the way you did with me.”
“Not that again. Tell me you’re not encouraging him to chase after unrealistic dreams. He’s smart. He can go to two years at the local community college, and then Dad and I will be saving to send him to his final two. I know we couldn’t pay for your school—things happened, and your dad and I couldn’t afford it—but we hope to do two years for Andy.”
