She doubted the Faulk Street Tavern overcharged. According to her father, Augusta Naukonen, who owned the place, was fair, down-to-earth, unpretentious, and a whole lot of other things that made her worthy of replacing Maeve’s mother in his heart.
That was another reason why Maeve hesitated outside the bar. She wasn’t sure she was ready to meet her father’s girlfriend.
But if she was going to return to Brogan’s Point to live—and Harry had reached out from beyond the grave to make sure she did—she couldn’t avoid her father or his lady friend. Sooner or later, Maeve would have to meet Gus Naukonen. Might as well be now.
Her father would be shocked to see her, though. She hadn’t yet told him she was moving back to town. Obviously, she would see him sooner or later—sooner, rather than later. That was the whole idea, after all; Harry thought she should be with her family, even if her family amounted to Ed Nolan and no one else.
Harry had urged her to go home. He’d sensed that, after living in Seattle for a decade, she still didn’t belong there. Now, thanks to his machinations, she was back in Brogan’s Point. She had found an apartment to rent in one of the old triple-deckers on Atlantic Avenue, she’d bought a few essential pieces of furniture, she’d helped Cookie adjust to her new home, she’d renovated the bakery and had the place and all its equipment inspected, and she’d hired a counter clerk, Joyce, who’d worked in the same building when it was still Torelli’s Bakery and knew the facility better than Maeve did.
Maeve had done everything except tell her father she was home.
The thing was, she wanted to be…ready. She wasn’t sure what ready entailed, but as she hovered beneath the overhang shielding the tavern’s door, rain misting the back of her jacket and frizzing her hair, she was pretty certain she hadn’t gotten to ready yet.
Just do it, she whispered, quoting the old advertising slogan. She was no longer the fragile, grief-stricken girl she’d been the day she’d left town. She’d lived on her own, mastered her craft, learned a lot, and become self-sufficient. And now, thanks to Harry, she was an heiress.
For not the first time, she sent a silent prayer of gratitude to that sweet man, her confidante, her buddy. Her guardian angel. The meddlesome old codger who’d found a way to lure her back to Brogan’s Point.
Drawing in a deep breath, she shoved the door open and stepped inside the bar.
It looked like…a bar. Nothing special, nothing pretentious, nothing like the sleek, stark, aren’t-we-hip watering holes that dotted the streets of downtown Seattle. No exposed pipes, no chic industrial lighting and glossy black tables. The Faulk Street Tavern looked the way Maeve imagined it had looked when it was first built, umpteen million years ago. The walls were a drab tan, the floor a bit sticky, the lighting amber. Booths lined one wall, and plain wooden tables filled the rest of the space except for a clearing at the center of the room, a scuffed parquet dance floor. The far end contained the bar itself, which looked like what it was, just a long, clean counter lined with stools, the wall behind it full of shelves that held bottles and glasses. Against the wall across from the bar stood an antique-looking jukebox, easily the prettiest thing in the room.
The place was fairly busy for a Tuesday afternoon. A group of paunchy, gray-haired men, engrossed in an amiable argument about the Bruins, sat around a table covered with a multitude of glasses and a couple of trays of flatbread pizza. Several booths were occupied, one by some middle-aged women, one by a group in business attire, their table covered with open laptops and bottles of beer, and a few by fishermen still in their boots and canvas overalls. They’d probably sailed back to port early due to the rain and figured that if they weren’t fishing, they might as well be drinking. At the bar, a man perched precariously on a stool, his shoulders hunched and his face downcast. A barrel-chested guy stood behind the bar, wiping it down, his hair dark and his biceps bulging. If he’d been stationed near the door, Maeve would have assumed he was a bouncer.
A pony-tailed waitress in tight black slacks, a white shirt, and a black apron bounded from table to table, taking and delivering orders, one hand gripping a round metal tray. She wasn’t Gus. Maeve had seen a photo of the woman during one of her father’s Skype chats, but even if she hadn’t, she doubted her father would have felt comfortable dating a woman as young as his own daughter.
One person she didn’t see was her father, and his absence provoked a twinge of relief inside her.
She shouldn’t have come here. There was still so much work to do at the bakery. She’d ventured over to the tavern only because she’d needed a break after scrubbing the showcases all morning, wiping the glass and polishing the chrome—and because she’d told herself to stop being such a ninny and get the reunion over with. Her shop was in good shape, on pace for her grand opening Saturday. The coffee machines would be delivered tomorrow morning, as well as the café tables and her bulk orders of ingredients. She couldn’t start baking until they arrived, and she could spend only so much time cleaning the place. And only so much time avoiding her father.
Apparently, she could avoid him for a little longer, because he wasn’t where she’d expected to find him.
A door at one end of the bar swung open and a woman emerged. She was several inches taller than Maeve’s five-seven, and her face was square and plain, unadorned by cosmetics. Short tufts of hair the color of Maeve’s pumpkin spice squares fluffed around her head. She looked strong and solid.
Apprehension fluttered in Maeve’s throat, tiny spasms that made swallowing difficult. She resisted the urge to cough as she stared at the woman who had healed her father, who had helped him put his life back together, who had filled Ed Nolan’s empty heart with new love. Maeve didn’t know whether to be grateful or resentful. She supposed she was both.
Gus Naukonen had been tapping her finger against the screen of a tablet, but when she looked up, her gaze immediately locked onto Maeve’s, and she spoke Maeve’s name. Given that a good thirty feet separated them, and the air vibrated with the chatter of men bickering about whether the Bruins coach knew a hockey puck from a cow pie and women debating which movie stars they suspected of having undergone plastic surgery, Maeve couldn’t hear Gus’s voice. But she could read her lips.
Those lips had taken the shape of Maeve’s name. This shouldn’t have shocked her. She recognized Gus. Why wouldn’t Gus recognize her? If her father had shown Maeve a picture of Gus, why wouldn’t he have shown Gus a picture of Maeve?
She was tempted to flee. But she’d made it inside the tavern, so she figured she should say hello to the woman. Whether she was ready was irrelevant. She was here.
She walked toward the bar. As she stepped onto the empty dance floor, a song suddenly started playing behind her, a rock-and-roll oldie from her father’s era. She glanced over her shoulder at the jukebox; one of the fishermen was strolling away from it, back to his table. He must have chosen a song and started the machine playing. It looked too ancient to be functional. Probably a fake, hiding a modern sound system behind its old-fashioned façade.
Gus’s stare remained on Maeve for the duration of her walk—which took less than a minute, although it felt like a century. “Maeve,” Gus said again as Maeve neared the bar. This time, Maeve heard her.
“And you’re Gus,” she said.
Gus nodded and extended her hand, and Maeve shook it. The woman had a firm, hard grip. Not a surprise.
An awkward silence stretched between them, and then Gus spoke. “Does your father know you’re in town?”
“Not yet,” Maeve admitted.
“Should we call him?”
“No.” Maeve answered so sharply, she felt ashamed. Her cheeks, still damp from the raindrops that had spattered her face when she’d walked from her parked car to the bar’s entry, grew warm. She was probably blushing. “The curse of Irish complexions,” her mother used to lament.
Gus said nothing for a minute, and then, “Okay.”
Maeve felt herself relax. “I’ll get in touc
h with him when I’m ready,” she said, telling Gus what she’d been telling herself for two weeks now. “I thought he might be here and I’d surprise him. He told me he stops by your bar most afternoons.”
“Not today. He’s in Salem, testifying at a trial.”
It struck Maeve as odd that this woman, this total stranger, should know where Maeve’s father was when Maeve herself didn’t. But then, Gus wasn’t a total stranger to Maeve’s father. “A trial,” Maeve echoed, recalling that her father did indeed testify at trials sometimes. He was a police detective. Part of his job was to arrest people and then go to court to explain why he arrested them.
This was Brogan’s Point. Her home. Her father. She felt disoriented, everything so strange and so familiar at the same time.
“How long will you be in town?” Gus asked.
Forever? Or only until her business crashed and burned, and the money Harry had left her ran out, and she discovered she couldn’t stand to live in the town where she’d once been so miserable? “I don’t know,” she admitted.
The waitress approached the bar, twirling her empty tray. “I need a merlot and two cosmos,” she said.
Gus nodded and reached for a glass. “Can I get you a drink?” she asked Maeve.
“No, thanks. I just…” She floundered, not sure what to say.
Gus worked efficiently, pouring cranberry juice and then vodka into two martini glasses, measuring the amounts with her eyes. “You just came here to see your father,” she finished Maeve’s sentence for her. “And he’s not here. He should be home this evening.”
“Maybe I’ll stop by his house, then,” Maeve said, knowing she wouldn’t. Her father’s home had once been her home, too. She’d grown up there. She’d lost her mother there. She’d experienced pain and grief and rage there. Among the many things she wasn’t ready for was reentering that house and getting gobsmacked by all the awful memories. Two days ago, she’d driven to her father’s street, idled at the corner, and then U-turned without cruising past the house. Her only thought then, and now, was, I’m not ready.
Another old rock song began to play. It sounded familiar; she was pretty sure it had been used as the soundtrack of a TV commercial a few years back. The opening chords conjured an image of a revving sports car in her mind.
She watched Gus finish preparing the cocktails and then fill a goblet with red wine. She ought to say something, yet she felt lost. What did you say to a six-foot-tall woman who knew her way around bottles of liquor, whose every motion was executed with grace and certainty? Maeve couldn’t imagine ever being that confident.
She felt even less confident when a young couple entered the bar. She recognized them both. They’d gone to high school with her, and they’d been the king and queen of—well, not just the prom. The entire school, pretty much. He’d been the quarterback and captain of the football team. She’d been the captain of the cheerleading squad. Quinn Connor and Ashley Wright, the reigning royalty of Maeve’s high school class.
They’d been gorgeous then. They were gorgeous now. Ashley’s hair looked a little lighter than it had been in high school, the honey strands streaked with platinum, spilling in lush waves around her face. She was slim and elegant, dressed in tight jeans and an embroidered jacket that had probably cost as much as Maeve’s car. Quinn was less beefy than he’d been in high school but just as handsome, his hair as black as Maeve remembered, his eyes the same icy blue. He still had the thick lashes all the girls used to sigh over, and the broad shoulders, and the tall, rangy body. His jeans were not skin tight, however, and his blazer was shapeless in a cozy, comfortable way.
So Quinn and Ashley, the Zeus and Hera of Brogan’s Point High, were still together and still in town, ten years after they and Maeve had exited the school building for the final time. Maybe young love could be true love. The thought pleased Maeve, even though it left her a little pensive. She’d been with a few guys in Seattle, but she’d never been that crazy about any of them, and now, well past adolescence, she was too old to experience young love.
The golden couple strolled to a booth and sat, Quinn facing the bar and Ashley across from him. Maeve had to exert herself not to gawk at him. Even though she’d been a loner in high school, and a total wreck, she’d had a crush on him, just like every other girl in the school, and probably a few teachers. He’d aged remarkably well.
She didn’t bother to cross the room and say hello to her former classmates. They wouldn’t know who she was. She hadn’t spent her years at Brogan’s Point High traveling in their exalted circle. Quite the contrary—she’d spent those years searching for dark corners with deep shadows.
She turned away from them and gave Gus another forced smile. “I should be going.”
Gus smiled gently. “I’m glad you stopped by.”
Maeve wished she could say she was glad, too, but the words wouldn’t come. She managed a quick nod before turning to leave. She was a few steps from the dance floor when a new song blasted from the jukebox. She wasn’t sure she’d ever heard it before—no growling sports cars flashed across her mind—but it was bouncy and catchy, sung in a clear, high tenor. She couldn’t make out most of the words, but the refrain was clear: take the long way home.
A silent laugh escaped her. She knew a thing or two about taking the long way home.
And then she stopped laughing, because she realized Quinn Connor was staring straight at her.
***
He knew that woman. He wasn’t sure where he knew her from, but he knew her. He knew the heart-shaped face, the soulful hazel eyes, the hair the color of wet sand, straight, limp locks dropping past her shoulders. She looked so damned familiar…but he couldn’t place her. Sometimes when you saw people away from their usual milieu, the lack of context made it hard to identify them.
Well, hell—the context was Brogan’s Point. He’d probably known her when he’d last lived here. He and Ashley were twenty-eight, and the woman on the dance floor looked a little younger. Maybe she’d been a couple of years behind them in high school. Not that he’d ever paid much attention to underclassmen.
He hadn’t paid much attention to anyone back then, other than his coach, his friends, and Ashley. He’d been such an asshole in those days.
Across the booth from him, Ashley presented him with a cute little pout. She’d loved having his undivided attention when they were in high school, and she seemed to want it again now. But they were different people today, older and—he’d like to think—wiser. She was still beautiful, still blond and curvy, stylishly dressed and impeccably made-up. Maybe that was why the woman ambling toward the exit looked younger. She wore no make-up.
“Quinn?” Ashley only uttered his name, but in her intonation, he heard, Look at me! I’m here. She’s no one.
That woman wasn’t no one.
His gaze had locked with hers the instant the song had erupted from the jukebox on the far wall of the bar. An old rock number, probably from the seventies. Dave Herschberg, one of the most gifted orthopedists Quinn had ever had the privilege of working with, liked to blast old rock and roll tunes in the OR when he was performing surgery. Thanks to Quinn’s residency at Mass General, he’d learned almost as much about seventies rock as he had about repairing torn ACL’s.
“Take the long way home,” the singer crooned. “Take the long way home.”
Yeah, Quinn knew about that. He’d taken the long way, for sure. Maybe that was why the woman was gazing at him. Maybe she was seeing him and thinking, there’s a guy who took the long way home.
Maybe she was looking at him and thinking, there’s a first-class asshole who took the long way home.
The possibility made him want to confront her, to assure her he had changed. Except, of course, that she might not be thinking anything of the kind. She might just be staring at him because he had bird shit on his shoulder.
He glanced at his shoulder, just to be sure. Just a few wet spots where the rain had caught him on the way from the car into the tavern
.
“Quinn, pay attention,” Ashley said, rapping her knuckles against the table as if it were a door and she demanded entry. “I went through a lot of effort to make this happen. I want Saturday to go smoothly. They’re giving us as much of halftime as we want, and—”
The song was winding down, fading out. As if released from a spell, the woman started moving, resuming her stroll toward the exit, averting her gaze as if she could no longer bear to look at Quinn. He sprang to his feet.
“Quinn!”
“I’ll be right back,” he told Ashley, ignoring the indignation in her tone. Several long, quick strides brought him to the door one step ahead of the woman. Before she could pull the door open, he touched her wrist. “I’m sorry, but—do I know you?”
She raised her eyes to him. She looked bewildered and uncomfortable. “How should I know if you know me?”
“You look familiar, that’s all.” That wasn’t all. She had shared that song with him somehow, the song about taking the long way home.
“We were classmates in high school,” she said.
“I thought that might be it.” He extended his hand. “Quinn Connor.”
“I know who you are.” But she let him shake her hand. Her fingers were cool and delicate, so slender his hand seemed to swallow hers.
Of course she knew who he was. Back then, everyone had known who he was. “I know you, too,” he said, feeling guilty that he really didn’t know who she was. “But I’m sorry, I can’t remember your name.”
“You never knew my name,” she said, not sounding terribly judgmental about that. “Maeve Nolan.”
Maeve Nolan. He did know her name. She’d been…God, she’d been a head case in high school. A cop’s daughter. Everyone had been afraid to break any laws around her—no drinking beer in her presence, no lighting up a joint—and she hadn’t seemed to mind. She’d dressed in black a lot. Rumor had it she’d sometimes walk out of a classroom in the middle of a lecture; Quinn hadn’t had any classes with her, so he had no idea if that was true. Rumor had it she would sometimes hide in one of the girls’ bathrooms and cry; Quinn had never been in a girls’ bathroom, so he had no idea if that was true, either. But yes, he’d known who Maeve Nolan was: a sad, gloomy loner.
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