by Erin Wright
“Is it the animals? Did they give you fits again this morning?” He was already cursing himself for not coming out first thing this morning. The happy, accomplished feeling he’d had while bounding up the driveway leaked out of him like a deflating balloon.
Once again, he’d let someone down whom he cared about. She’d told him last night when he’d dropped her off that she thought she had it and she didn’t need the help anymore, but obviously, he shouldn’t have believed her. Maybe Dumbass had—
“They’re fine,” she said curtly. “I’d really like to go to work now.” She brushed past him and towards the truck, climbing inside, not waiting for his help up into the cab.
He walked slowly around to the driver’s side and climbed in, starting the rumble of the diesel engine, thankful for the noise. Anything to help hide the silence that had descended like a brick wall between them. Where the hell was the Kylie from yesterday? And the last two weeks? This morose person sitting next to him bore no resemblance to the Kylie whom he’d come to know.
In conclusion to the longest drive in the history of mankind, they finally pulled up in front of the clinic and again, Kylie jumped out before he could help her out, hurrying to open the front door using her own key. By the time he got through the front door after her, she’d already put her lunch away, flipped on the open sign, turned on the computer, and was making coffee. She was a whirlwind of activity – a tornado of efficiency – but still, no sound was coming out of her.
Oh, and she wasn’t meeting his gaze.
If he didn’t know any better, he’d think she was royally pissed at him, but for what, he couldn’t begin to imagine.
After doing a quick check of the few animals in the back and filling his coffee mug, he headed out the front door.
“I’ll be back at five,” he said as he headed out. She nodded in acknowledgment but still said nothing.
He slid into the driver’s seat of his truck, pulling his phone out automatically to check his schedule for the day, even as he turned the situation over and over in his mind. He couldn’t make heads or tails of it, and with a muttered curse he was glad his mother couldn’t hear, he put his truck into reverse and headed out of the parking lot.
Whatever was going on with Kylie, he could only hope to God it didn’t have a damn thing to do with him. Maybe a day by herself in the office to think it over would help.
God only knew it couldn’t hurt at this point.
Chapter 20
Kylie
As soon as Adam headed out of the clinic parking lot, Kylie sank into her chair at the front desk and just stared off into the distance, the vaguest pretense of being fine disappearing without a trace.
What a hellacious night.
She hadn’t slept well, she’d cried her body weight in tears and then some, and then this morning, all she could think was that Adam deserved so much better than her.
In fact, as soon as he knew she was pregnant with a married man’s baby, he’d never want to talk to her again. No one would. Dammit all, this was a small town. People didn’t forgive or forget easily.
And, by convincing Adam to hire her without telling him the truth, she’d dragged him into her disaster of a life, and knowing some of the judgmental asses out there, she might actually cost him some business with this little stunt of hers. Some rancher could totally choose to use a vet out of Franklin or Copperton rather than associate with a business who hired people like her.
Her being unmarried was bad enough, but the unforgivable part was the fact that the father of the baby wasn’t unmarried. That was the part that would earn her the most scorn and judgmental looks.
The hardest part of all was that Kylie had been so damn naïve not to have seen it before the pee stick came back with a plus sign. If she hadn’t gotten pregnant, would she have ever found out about Norman’s other life? How long would she have continued on in ignorance, thinking that he was going to propose to her any day now?
And, oh God, if he had…she would’ve said yes in a heartbeat. She really thought she loved him.
Truthfully, she really ought to be locked up for her own good.
She dragged her ass out of her chair and forced herself to start working on putting the office back to rights. If someone came walking in and saw this mess, they’d think Adam was a terrible vet, or at least had terrible taste in employees. She couldn’t let herself sink into a funk and do nothing but keep her chair from floating away all day. It wasn’t fair to Adam.
She made a quick stop in the employee bathroom, scrubbing her face with cold water before redoing her ponytail. The first iteration had more closely resembled the hairdo of someone who’d just stuck a fork into an electrical socket, rather than the secretary of a veterinarian clinic. She couldn’t embarrass Adam by looking like that in front of his clients.
And then, she got to work.
The more she worked, the better she felt. The raw, rough feeling of the lining of her eyelids disappeared, and they no longer felt like they were made of sandpaper. She got a rhythm going, her heart pumping and her breath quick as she scrubbed and swept and shoved the worn furniture where it needed to go.
When she’d finally finished, she sat back with a critical eye and then smiled to herself. The smile grew into a grin. The office looked amazing – a thousand times better, and she felt a thousand times better.
This was the second time she’d allowed herself to drown in self-pity because of Norman and this pregnancy, but screw it, it was gonna be the last.
She was a doer, through and through, and just sitting around and thinking and whining to herself about poor, poor pitiful Kylie VanLueven, taken advantage of by an older, wiser man…
Well, it just wasn’t her, and she wasn’t gonna let it be her in the future. She owed Adam an apology for her surly attitude that morning, for starters, and that evening when she got home from work, she promised herself that she’d get started on the Keep Adam Fed project. Bringing some muffins to work the next morning would help make up for the start of today.
She gnawed on her lower lip with worry. When Adam came back at five and was met with a cheerful, upbeat Kylie, he was gonna think that she was bipolar, and she couldn’t blame him one bit.
How could she explain pregnancy hormones to him without, you know, mentioning being pregnant?
Dammit, she needed to just tell him. Sure, it’d only been a little over two weeks since he’d hired her and she’d been hoping to make it longer than that before having to confess the truth, but after all that he’d done for her, he deserved to find out from her before he somehow found out from someone else.
God forbid.
It was just her and her mom who knew, but still, this sort of thing tended to spread through whispered rumors and sideways glances when waistlines began to change shape. Kylie had gone to school with a gal who’d gotten pregnant their junior year, and the rumors were flying fast and thick way before she officially told anyone. She ended up dropping out of school and marrying the baby’s father, some guy from Franklin, in the middle of what should’ve been their senior year.
They got a divorce two years later, the stress of marrying too young and caring for a newborn baby destroying whatever love they’d once felt for each other. At the time, Kylie had been a little smug – how did you accidentally get pregnant in an age of condoms and birth control pills? Hadn’t anyone explained the birds and the bees to her?
But now…
The phone rang, pulling Kylie out of her swirling thoughts, and she hurried across the office to the landline. “Whitaker’s Veterinarian Clinic, this is Kylie speaking,” she answered, trying to hide being out of breath.
“Hey, sugar!” her mom said cheerfully. “How are things going?”
For a moment, Kylie felt the burn of unshed tears well up in the corners of her eyes, but she quickly blinked them away. Damn pregnancy hormones. She didn’t used to cry this much, truly she hadn’t.
“Pretty good,” she said, trying to hide the warble
in her voice.
She failed, of course.
“What’s going on?” Her mom pounced immediately. Trying to hide this sort of thing from Carol VanLueven was an impossible task, frankly. “Do you need some money?”
Kylie wanted to laugh a little to herself. It wasn’t hard to notice what her mom wasn’t offering: A place to stay.
“No, no, I’m good. Adam took me grocery shopping this weekend, and I have enough to get through to payday. Life is good, I promise.”
Her mom paused for a moment, and Kylie could see, clear as day through the phone line, that she was debating whether or not to press the point. She held her breath, hoping that her mom would just let it go. She didn’t want to tell her mom about last night. She’d start crying all over again and she was done with crying.
Done.
“Welllll,” her mom finally said, deciding to leave the topic alone, at least for the moment, “I was calling to find out if you wanted to attend the Knit Wits meeting with me tonight. I was thinking about it earlier today and started to worry that you’re out there in that house all by yourself. Maybe it’d be fun to get out and socialize.”
The Knit Wits? Kylie debated her choices.
If she started baking as soon as she got home from the clinic, she could probably get the muffins made and on the counter to cool before the start of the monthly meeting of her mom’s knitting club. That way, she could get her Keep Adam Fed project going right away, and God only knew, after her performance that morning on the way to work, Adam deserved whatever kind thing Kylie could think of to do for him.
But on the other hand, her mom’s idea of socialization…? It wasn’t exactly thrilling. Unless things had drastically changed in the last four years since Kylie’d left for college, Mom was the youngest knitter in the group. Kylie would be young enough to be the granddaughter or even the great-granddaughter of every other knitter there.
Honestly, though, her mom was trying to be helpful, and really, an evening spent with a bunch of kindly old grandmas wasn’t a half-bad way to pass a couple of hours. It sure beat curling up in a ball on a hardwood floor and crying a flood of tears.
Not that that was much of a benchmark, but Kylie was setting the bar low.
“That’d be great, Mom,” she finally said. “Could you pick me up and drop me off? Adam hasn’t finished working on Ruby’s car yet, so I’d need a ride into town.”
“Absolutely,” her mom reassured her. “I’ll be by a little before seven. We meet at the Muffin Man and everyone buys a dessert and a drink to thank him for being open later for us, but I’ll pay for yours.”
“Thanks, Mom,” Kylie said gratefully. She really didn’t want to spend her precious cash on something as frivolous as coffee and a donut from a bakery, and as always, her mom was thinking ahead.
She really had been blessed with a wonderful mother.
She hung up with a grin on her face, feeling roughly a million times more cheerful now than she had been that morning. As she looked around the clean office, smelling like lemons and glass cleaner, every surface polished to a high shine, she decided that she’d tell Adam the truth about being pregnant in the morning. She’d make him muffins tonight after work and have them ready for him to eat tomorrow morning when he came to pick her up; tell him the truth while he was still grateful that she’d cooked for him.
It was just as good of a plan as any, and a large part of her was thrilled at the idea of having the truth out in the open. Lying, even through omission, wasn’t right, and even if she’d done it for a good reason, it’d still been bothering her, like a sliver under a fingernail.
She celebrated her decision by getting to work on the cramped employee bathroom. She could put in some elbow grease there, too, and really surprise Adam. If she worked hard enough, he wouldn’t even care about the rest of it.
Chapter 21
Kylie
Kylie went walking into the bakery with her mom, the yeast and sugar smell almost overwhelmingly powerful, but in the most pleasant way possible. If she could drown in delicious smells, she’d die a happy death here in the Muffin Man.
She looked around, spotting a few signs of the recent remodeling after the fire Adam had told her about. There were some ladders and paint cans scattered about, and a big plastic tarp that separated the back from the front. Kylie didn’t personally know the owner, Gage – he’d moved back to Long Valley to take over his grandparents’ bakery after she’d already left for college – but she’d heard all of the comments down at the vet clinic. He was rumored to be Long Valley’s most eligible bachelor, and after the amount of drooling that the man inspired, Kylie was curious to see if he lived up to the hype.
Her mom called out a greeting to some of the other ladies in the Knit Wits group, and then made her way over to the grouped tables to chat with them. A little overwhelmed at the idea of meeting such a big group, Kylie wandered instead up to the front counter to inspect a handwritten sign, informing customers that until further notice, only coffee, tea, and muffins would be served at the Muffin Man, while the bakery was under renovation.
Kylie was impressed that they were even partially open, and wondered if Gage had been forced to do it to try to keep the bills paid while the remodeling work was being done. Based on what Adam had told her, the fire had been fairly significant.
Just then, a muscle-bound guy who looked like he could swing a fifty-pound bag of flour up over his shoulder without breaking a sweat, came pushing through the plastic curtain, carrying a tray with an array of muffins on it. He saw her standing there and smiled, revealing a row of white, straight teeth.
“Hi, you must be Carol’s daughter,” he said in way of greeting, shifting the tray to the other hand so he could push his glasses up his nose. With his square jaw and brilliant blue eyes, he looked like he could grace the cover of a romance novel.
Kylie laughed. “Is the family resemblance that strong?” she asked dryly. Gage shrugged.
“Carol mentioned that you’d come back to town, and honestly, there aren’t many people who attend the Knit Wits who are under the age of 90,” he winked, “so it wasn’t a hard deduction to make.” He held the tray out to her. “Want one?”
“Oh sure!” she said delightedly, dithering over her choices before finally picking out a lemon poppyseed concoction. She followed him over to the gathered tables, watching him as he passed the muffins out with ease to all of the older ladies, charming them with his smile and his laugh.
Well, it was plenty obvious to see why every woman in town under the age of 102 was in love with him.
Everyone, that is, except for her. She could tell why there was an attraction there for other people, but he just didn’t do much for her. He needed to be taller, leaner, replace the flour dusted across his jeans with straw and shit instead, change his eye color from deep blue to whiskey brown, and…
Well, then you’d have Adam Whitaker, of course.
Kylie tried not to groan out loud. She really was a hopeless case.
As Gage disappeared into the back, carrying a now-empty tray, Carol began introducing Kylie to everyone in the group. She remembered some of the ladies from functions around town when she was back in high school, but honestly, they weren’t exactly in her age range. Her guess that she’d be the youngest person in the group by a half-dozen decades or so, wasn’t too far off.
“Oh, and today we have Tiffany and Ezzy with us again,” her mom said, gesturing towards two gals who weren’t as young as Kylie, but certainly weren’t as old as even her mom.
“Good to meet you,” the Tiffany chick said, putting her hand out to shake, but it was a limp-wristed shake with lifeless fingers, the kind of handshake that Kylie just hated. She always felt like she was gripping a dead fish.
Not exactly appealing.
Her mom pulled out a chair for Kylie next to Ezzy, who flashed a quick smile at Kylie but said nothing, and then began pulling out needles and yarn for them to work with. Kylie snagged two knitting needles and a bal
l of fluffy, purple yarn. It’d been ages since she’d tried to wrestle yarn into submission, but she was surprisingly excited about giving it another attempt. Maybe it was that nesting instinct that the internet had told her would start kicking in, but she wanted to make a warm, soft blanket – nothing complicated, just cozy and inviting.
The chatter about gardens and the weather – the wind had finally died down – and who was sleeping with who swirled around Kylie but she only half-listened as she struggled to get her needles to cooperate. She’d thought that knitting would be like riding a bike and it’d all just start coming back to her, but either her analogy was wrong or she was slow on the uptake, because she couldn’t seem to cast on more than a few loops before she found herself stuck.
She leaned over to her mom to ask for help but before she could say anything, the conversation died down and Tiffany turned to Kylie. She cleared her throat loudly and asked, “So, you’ve moved back to Sawyer, huh?”
Kylie straightened up, putting her yarn and needles on her lap for the moment. She could ask her mom for help just as soon as this conversation was over. Since Tiffany had waited until there was a lull in the conversation and had cleared her throat before talking, every eye in the group was now trained on Kylie.
She gulped.
“Yeah,” she said lightly, trying to pretend as if it wasn’t a big deal. “I worked full-time while going to school part-time so I could stay away from student loan debt as much as possible, so it took me four years to get a two-year degree.” She laughed a little. No big deal. None of this was a big deal. Not a big deal at all. “Now that my generals are out of the way, I’m trying to decide what I want to do with my life, so I came back home for a bit. Once I decide which degree I want, I’ll be heading back out again.”
