by Alison Kent
“Sure, but I don’t believe in being dishonest to anyone I call a friend.”
“Would you expect me to tell you the same things I tell Ten Keller? When I’ve known you less than a week and known him for years?”
“You and Ten good friends?”
“Are you changing the subject?”
“Just wandering a tangent. But no, I wouldn’t expect you to tell me the same things you might tell Ten. If,” he added quickly, holding up an index finger, “it wasn’t something that involved us equally. In that case, yeah. I probably would because I wouldn’t care that you’d known him longer. Not if what you knew was just as important to me.”
And what she’d told Mitch mattered deeply to Kaylie, too. She frowned, staring down at her plate. “That’s not fair. You’re generalizing, not taking the individuals, their situations, into consideration.”
“And you’re rationalizing the decision you’ve already made about who gets to know the truth and who doesn’t.”
“I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”
“Because it makes you uncomfortable?”
“No, because…” She sighed. “Okay, yes. It makes me uncomfortable, though it’s the whole situation, not just talking about it. Thinking about it’s just as bad, and I’ve done nothing else now for a week.”
“Why a week? What happened?”
“That was when I found out about the child my friend’s been looking for.”
“It’s hard keeping secrets.”
“It is. They…hurt.”
“Do you think it’s going to get better? With time?”
She thought again about Sierra and Angelo. “It won’t. I know that for a fact.”
“More secrets?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe I want to talk about you now.”
He looked away. “There’s nothing about me worth talking about.”
“No secrets of your own? No rationalizations making you uncomfortable? No choices to regret?”
“Regrets? You’re asking me if I have regrets? Knowing where I’ve been the last three years?” He shook his head, laughed, and dug into his spaghetti.
“But I don’t know why you were there. It’s possible whatever sent you to prison is something you had to do. A situation you had to fix because no one else would. An ongoing wrong you couldn’t live with yourself without righting.”
He snorted as he reached for his wine. “I leave those things to better men than me. Party leaders. Movie stars. Action heroes.”
What in the world had he done? And why couldn’t she let it go, give him the same privacy she valued? “If you don’t want to tell me, just say so.”
“I don’t want to tell you.”
“That’s fine.”
“But you still want to know.”
She shrugged, toyed with her fork. “It’s human nature to be curious.”
“I thought that was the nature of felines.”
“Are you sure your girl didn’t dump you because you were so horribly frustrating?”
He laughed again. “Now that’s a real possibility. She said that about me a lot. And I don’t think she meant in bed.”
Heat spread over Luna’s chest and rose up her neck. “I’m sure that’s too much information.”
“I’m sure it’s not.”
“What are you doing for Easter?” The question was out of her mouth before she could think better of it. Did she really want to spend more time with him when he was so confrontational? When he pushed so aggressively for answers she didn’t want to give? And did she really want him meeting Mitch when he already knew Kaylie?
“Easter, huh?” He finished his wine and sat back. “Boiling bunnies?”
“That’s not funny.”
“Boiling eggs?”
That was her job. “I’m being serious.”
“Why are you being serious?”
Oh, good grief. “My family has a huge Easter barbecue every year at the farm. I was seriously thinking of inviting you. But now I’m seriously not.”
“Aw, c’mon,” he said, full of petulance and charm. “I love barbecue.”
“Who are you, Will Bowman?” And what am I getting myself into with you?
“Just a boy—”
“—raised by wolves. I got it. You invite me into a loft you shouldn’t be able to afford with what Ten Keller is paying you. You cook me spaghetti from scratch. You don’t make a pass at me. You challenge me at a deeply personal level when you know nothing about me.” She took a deep breath. “That was some kind of wolf pack.”
He stared at her for a long moment, his gaze sharp, almost cutting. “Do you want me to make a pass at you?”
That’s what he’d pulled from her speech? Over everything else, that’s what he’d heard? “That’s not what I said.”
“Do you want me to make a pass at you, Luna? Because I can,” he said, going still.
“That’s not how this works, asking if I want you to.” He was frustrating her. He was heating her up. He was so aggravating. So gorgeous.
“You like rules, don’t you? Conventions. Laws.”
“Unlike you?”
“I have a lot of questions. And I don’t need someone else doing my thinking for me. But I try not to cross any lines without very good reasons. Or invitations.”
“Like a vampire waiting to be asked into someone’s home?”
“Some rules can’t be broken. Consequences.” He shook his head, made a tsk with his tongue. “Consequences can be a bitch.”
Never in her life had she had dinner with a man and fallen into a conversation that felt more like an inquisition. Or therapy. Her head hurt, and she knew it wasn’t from the wine. But she also knew she wasn’t going to get any of the answers she wanted tonight. And she might be a lot better off without them. She was safe. If he answered all the questions she had…
“I want you to make a pass at me,” she said, wondering how she would respond if he did. Wondering, too, if she was only wanting him to in order to see if he actually would.
He’d been twirling the spaghetti dangling from his fork into the bowl of the large spoon in his other hand. He stopped, and his head came up, his dark hair falling forward over one eye. The other shone bright enough for two, blue like a gas flame, blue like the Caribbean Sea, stealing what breath she hadn’t pulled in to hold.
He reached across the bar, took her headband from her hair. The heavy strands closed like a curtain to hide much of her face, her ears and her jaw and her cheekbones. She leaned on one elbow, using the fingers of that hand like a rake to clear her field of vision.
“Why do you wear it so long?”
Except to trim the ends, she hadn’t cut it since high school, since the accident, since losing Sierra. “I just do.”
“There must be a reason. Convenience. Fashion. To use like Mary Magdalene.”
At that, she sat straighter. No challenge was worth this one’s aggravation. “I take it back. I don’t want you to make a pass at me.”
“You do. But not tonight.”
So now he was a mind reader? She placed her napkin on the bar next to her plate, slid from the bar stool, and found her purse and her keys. “Thank you for dinner. The spaghetti was wonderful. And the bread.”
“And the company?”
“The company has been…interesting.” Intoxicating. Insufferable.
“Just not what you expected.” He came around the bar, his body long and controlled, and loomed over her. “Or wanted.”
“Unexpected, yes. But since I obviously don’t know what I want—”
“Don’t go away mad.”
“I’m not mad. I’m—”
“Frustrated?” He came closer. “Wet?”
This was when another man would have reached for her. This was when she would have made it easy for him to, and gone willingly. Not Will. Another man. One who was less of an enigma. And less…worthy. Even thinking such a thing left her feeling like she needed to pull her nose out of the air,
and yet it was the most authentic thing she’d felt in ages. He made this happen. This self-reflection. This honesty.
“Good night, Will.”
“Good night, Luna. I’ll see you on bunny day.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Kaylie stared at the framed permits hanging on the kitchen wall. Ten had picked them up from the city this morning and displayed them as required by ordinance. Though he and Will had been around the last week, their work had been confined to taking down the shutters and dealing with the unexpected insect damage.
She wasn’t surprised it was taking them so much time; the house had been empty and left to the elements longer than she’d realized when it came up for sale. She just hoped the Colemans’ neglect wouldn’t cause Ten to have to repeatedly revisit his schedule. She didn’t want to push back her Memorial Day opening.
It wasn’t like she couldn’t make use of the downtime should Ten have to deal with additional unknowns. She’d been here a week and had done nothing toward finding her parents. Even after the Internet service had been installed on Friday, she’d done little more than respond to what e-mail she hadn’t already taken care of from her phone.
She had plenty of time, she told herself. She’d waited this long; what did another month or two matter? She was here now, and she was safe; surely her earlier desperation to find them was an exaggerated memory, her anxiousness fueled by May’s passing and the reality of being alone.
But none of that was the truth.
She didn’t want to face the truth—the fear that she would never find what she was looking for. Or that she would, and hate her discovery. She wasn’t sure which idea depressed her the most, but both weighed her down so that she wasn’t sleeping; she was barely eating. She was going to have to take that first frightening step and jump.
Hearing the click of Magoo’s nails on the floor, she turned around, her gaze going from her dog to the two men standing in her dining room, talking. She couldn’t hear what they were saying; Ten’s voice was pitched low, his hands animated as he used the canvas of the air to illustrate his words for Will.
Will nodded, did some drawing of his own, and then gestured overhead, at which point he and Ten walked out of the room. Moments later, she heard knocking against the far wall of the kitchen. Though Ten had initially seemed suspicious of Mitch, he’d agreed it was a good idea to move the buffet line. That left Kaylie to mourn the loss of her solarium, but since Two Owls would benefit, she hadn’t pouted long.
Men. She wished she understood them better, how they thought, what drove them, where they went when they stopped listening. She’d worked with men, knew them as employers and employees, and she’d had lab and study partners in college. But she’d never had the emotional intimacy that opened the doors to her answers. Which left the questions to pile up and get in her way.
Winton Wise had been the best male role model she’d had, and he’d spoiled her for anything less. She’d learned so much from him, and oodles of that when he wasn’t looking. She’d watched him with May, how he would hand her a knife or a stick of butter or a cup of coffee before she could ask.
She’d seen him with the other children she’d lived with, how kind he’d been to Cindy, who’d suffered unfathomable abuse, how patient he’d been with Joelle, whose development had been halted by complete neglect. How eager he’d been to answer every question Tim had asked about what he was reading.
The men who’d been charged with her care before did little more than drop her off at school on their way to collect their monthly check from the state. None of them read to her from Jack London and Victor Hugo, even when she was too young to understand much of Les Misérables. None of them played Scrabble with her and the other kids in the house and refused to go easy on them.
None of them had showed her how to run a lawn mower or change a flat tire. Granted, she’d been too young to do more than fold laundry and wash dishes before coming to live in Hope Springs, but she’d been old enough to know what little guidance or true parenting her previous families had provided.
She’d wanted badly during those years to find her real father. The only thing she could think to do was ask her caseworker, but those visits were few and far between and only rarely made by the same person. They’d promised to look into finding him, to let her know what they learned, but nothing had ever come of those promises, and all she’d learned was to deal with the disappointment.
Looking back, it was a wonder with the turnover she wasn’t the one who’d gone missing. Or maybe she had. She’d always wondered about that. Had her father ever returned to that apartment and realized what his absence had cost him? Had he searched out her mother, learned what had happened? Or had he felt a huge relief at having escaped the burden of a kid?
She’d had Winton. She didn’t need a father now. But just like she wanted to know what had happened to the woman who’d given birth to her, she wanted to know where the man who had fathered her had ended up. What had happened to him. Where he had gone and why.
She’d spent too much time wondering and she needed to tie up the loose ends of her past. They’d been dragging behind her too long, tripping her and tangling up in the threads of her present life, an umbilical cord binding her to a place she would never return to.
“Enough,” she said, pushing her hair from her face, startling as Ten appeared in her peripheral vision. “How long have you been there?”
“Just came in,” he said, and stopped beside her. “Though you’ve been standing in that same spot for a while.”
Embarrassingly, she had. “And how would you know that? Have you been spying on me?”
“No. I haven’t been spying on you.” He gestured over his shoulder. “I saw you from the dining room when I was talking to Will.” Then he nodded toward the wall. “I can’t imagine those permits are what’s holding your interest.”
Ah, but he was wrong. “Are you kidding? I love the permits. They mean we’re really moving forward.”
“You thought I was kidding about making that happen?”
She heard the frown in his question and looked over. “You’re not the one I doubted.”
His frown deepened, and he crossed his arms as he looked at her. “Why would you doubt yourself?”
“Doubt’s probably not the right word,” she said, heading for the coffeepot and her empty mug. “It’s more that I didn’t believe everything would fall into place.”
“You knew what you wanted. You made plans and followed through. That’s how dreams become reality.”
“I’ve never been much of a dreamer. I’ve had to be practical.” She filled her mug, asked with a lift of the pot if he wanted any.
He raised a hand, shook his head. “I’m pretty sure you can be both.”
“Is that how you got to where you are?” she asked, stirring in sweetener and cream. “Being a practical dreamer?”
“My case was more about having decided early on what I wanted,” he said, coming closer and boosting up onto one of the bar stools at the island. “So I guess I was a practical planner. And then just practical when my original plans fell through.”
“Really? What happened?” she asked, holding her mug in both hands and bringing it to her mouth.
“Keller Construction was supposed to be Keller Brothers Construction. But Dakota, my brother, his life took an unexpected turn and I ended up going it alone.” He picked up the pen she’d left with her legal pad, clicked it on, clicked it off. “It worked out, so I can’t complain, but I know some of what you’re going through. Wanting something. Planning for it.”
He had a brother and he had a sister, but he wasn’t close to or in touch with either. Who was Tennessee Keller? What had happened in his life to alienate him from those he should love? And why did it surprise her that his background wasn’t any more all-American than hers?
Strange that she’d made up her mind that such was the case before getting to know him at all. “I’ve thought about that. What I’ll do if Two Owls isn�
�t the success I’m hoping for.”
“And?”
“Most likely I’d go back into the bakery business. I know it, and even when things are tough people want desserts. There are still weddings and holidays and office birthday parties. Plus, between working for Saul and for myself, I made a lot of contacts. I could almost pick up where I left off.”
“Where would you go?”
Go? “Nowhere. This is home.”
“I’m not sure Hope Springs can support another bakery.”
She hadn’t yet visited Butters Bakery, but loved the irony in their slogan: Heavy on the Butt. She needed to go by and introduce herself, start off on the right foot. Not leave Peggy Butters to wonder if she was here to put her out of business.
She wasn’t. Not at all. “Then I’ll wash dishes for Max Malina. Or flip burgers at one of the fast-food joints on the interstate. Or see if Peggy Butters might want a partner. I intend to take my last breath in this house.”
He gave her a wry grin. “And you don’t think you’re a dreamer.”
“That’s not a dream.”
“So if I want it, I’ll have to pry this house out of your cold, dead hands.”
“Something like that,” she said with a laugh. Then what he’d said registered. “Do you want this house?”
“I did some work for the Colemans and pretty much fell in love with it. Told Bob to let me know if he ever decided to sell and I’d see about taking it off his hands. Either he forgot or didn’t think I was serious.”
“But you were.”
“Yeah. It’s a good house.”
“I’m sorry. Well, I’m not sorry you didn’t get it, but I am sorry for your disappointment. Though I have a feeling mine would’ve been worse.”
“Red cowboy boots. A sparkly pink plush puppy.”
She couldn’t believe her middle-of-the-night confession of what this house meant to her had stuck with him. “You remembered.”
“I pay attention. And, yes, sometimes I jump to conclusions. I’m working on that,” he said, his smile a devastating revelation of dimples. “Thanks to you.”
