by Wendy Warren
He saw the redhead toast him, offering a dazzling, if artificial, smile. The brunette didn’t even turn around. Dean pushed a responding curve to his lips. You’re welcome, he nodded to the redhead. It was done. Time to go.
He was about to suggest to Len and Fred that they try the new Italian place in Honeyford, when the brunette stirred. Leaning forward, she put a thumb and delicate forefinger on the fine straws in the frosty drink.
Len said something about barbecue, but Dean only half heard. He waited, gazing like a landlocked sailor staring out to sea, engrossed and longing, hoping for some action to release him from the spell.
And then she moved, turning her head before she lifted her gaze to his. Their eyes caught and held. Eyes the color of butterscotch taffy, big and curious, acquired a spark of surprise when she saw him. Her smile, tentative at first, grew progressively wider and more relaxed, turning the elegant portrait of her face into a masterpiece.
Thank you.
She mouthed the words. Or perhaps he simply couldn’t hear her from where he stood.
Thank you was not an invitation to join her, but he wanted to ask her, at least, to dance one dance, to talk, to spend just a few moments getting to know each other before they returned to their real lives. The moments of gazing into her eyes enclosed him in a bubble that floated him lightly above the practical, the mundane. Above his ambivalence about his life and the path that awaited him.
He wanted to remain where he was, sharing a long mutual stare, even if it went no further than that.
But she surprised him.
Raising a loose fist, she briefly rested her knuckles against her mouth, then unfurled her index finger, crooked it, and beckoned him over.
Instantly, Dean knew: though Tavern on the Highway was not a place he frequented, and although he believed much more in free will than manifest destiny, he—pragmatic, levelheaded Dean Kingsley—knew that for perhaps the first time in his life he was in exactly the right place at exactly the right time.
Chapter Two
Honeyford, Oregon
March
“Here you are, Mrs. Bowman. One copy of What to Expect in the First Year.” Rosemary twinkled at her heavily pregnant customer. “Just in the nick of time, by the looks of it.”
Elliana Bowman placed her canvas book bag atop the checkout desk of The Honeyford Public Library and slid the parenting tome carefully inside. “Two more weeks,” she told Rosemary, her handsome, bespectacled face as giddy and enchanted as a child’s. “I meant to order the book online months ago. Ordinarily I’m highly organized, but ever since I met my husband, I’m very…distractible.”
Her high cheeks turned furiously red, and Rosemary smiled. She hadn’t known Elliana at all prior to the other woman’s marriage to Dan Bowman, Honeyford’s resident mechanic, but she’d been told that although Dan and Elliana had lived in Honeyford all their lives, they hadn’t hooked up until they were solidly in their thirties. Now they were expecting their first child.
Rosemary waited for the pangs of envy she used to feel when confronted with another woman’s pregnancy. Through her teens and her twenties, she’d been certain that motherhood was her mission.
Not anymore. Her mission now was her work, and the residents of this darling town she’d been fortunate enough to find were becoming her makeshift family.
“I’m going to make myself a note,” she told Elliana, “to renew that book for you automatically if you don’t return it on time. You just enjoy your pregnancy and don’t worry about a thing.”
Elliana beamed, waving goodbye as she left, and Rosemary told herself once again how lucky she was.
“Plug your nose! Incoming!”
Rosemary turned to see her assistant, Abby, a twentysomething library clerk who wore shoulder pads and had a predilection for World War II novels, approach the circulation desk. In one hand, Abby held a book as far from her body as possible. With the thumb and forefinger of her other hand, she pinched her nostrils shut.
“Brady Silva just upchucked on Captain Underpants,” Abby announced nasally. “His mother’s in the bathroom, cleaning him up.”
“Oh, dear.”
Glancing at the grandfather clock that, Rosemary was told, had graced the entrance of the Honeyford Public Library for more than fifty years, she felt a rush of relief when she saw there were only seventeen minutes left to closing time. Since beginning her job as head librarian here, she’d stayed late more nights than not, finding any number of delightful tasks to perform. In two months, she had implemented a new literacy program benefiting local youth and had several more programs planned. She didn’t mind staying late.
Her sole motivation for wanting to leave on time tonight was the flu that had been snaking through Honeyford like one of the evil Dementors in Harry Potter. Because she’d felt funky on and off since morning, Rosemary feared she, too, might be coming down with the bug. Brady Silva’s accident with the book made her more than a little queasy.
“Not to worry.” Rosemary reached for one of the used plastic shopping bags she kept beneath the desk, shook it open and had Abby drop the book inside.
“We’ll all be puking by tonight.” Abby shook her head, depositing the book and plucking a moistened wipe from the box Rosemary kept on the counter. “My fiancé has it, too. The first twenty-four hours are sheer misery.”
Rosemary swallowed. She detested throwing up. “Wash your hands with soap and hot water every hour for as long as it takes you to sing ‘Happy Birthday,’ and whatever you do, don’t touch your eyes, nose or mouth.”
Abby gaped at her. “Are you phobic or something?”
“Germs can live eleven hours on nonporous surfaces like door handles, steering wheels and shopping carts. I’m not phobic—I’m cautious.”
Abby’s full lips twitched at the corners. “Cautious about everything or just germs?”
“Every—” Rosemary stopped abruptly.
Almost three months ago, she would have completed that sentence without a second thought. I’m cautious about everything. Now she avoided her clerk’s curious gaze and muttered, “It’s still cold-and-flu season. It can’t hurt to take extra precautions.”
Nodding, Abby moved off to return a stack of books to the large-print section. Rosemary pressed a computer key so she could check in DVDs, but her mind was a mile away.
Make that ten miles and two and a half months away.
As if she’d pressed a play button in her brain, her head filled with images.
Tavern on the Highway…Faith Hill on the jukebox…a drink called a Honey Slide that she’d barely touched…and a man named Dean, whom she had touched a lot, in ways she would never, not in a million years, have imagined she could touch a stranger.
Not that he had remained a stranger for long.
By the time the library closed and Rosemary was able to head to her car, she had replayed that night with Dean a dozen times…and felt herself blush almost as many.
That evening in the bar, she had intended to thank the tall, handsome man for the drinks, perhaps to chat just a bit so the girls wouldn’t rag on her later and then to say goodbye. That was all. Harmless.
Seated in her car, alone in the library parking lot, Rosemary clapped her hands over her face and groaned.
After dancing, Dean had escorted her back to her table and chatted amiably with her friends, but his demeanor with them had been nothing more than courteous. Brotherly. So different from the way he’d looked at her. They had returned to the dance floor again and again. At some point in the evening, leaving the bar with him had seemed perfectly sane. In her entire adult life, she could not recall feeling the sexual urgency she’d felt that night.
Flushing anew at the memory, Rosemary flipped her visor down to check her face in the mirror. Mascara was smudged beneath her eyes. Licking a finger, she carefully wiped it away and thought that if she lived a hundred more years, she would not understand how she had morphed in one evening from the woman who never went anywhere withou
t her AAA card, cell phone, a calling card in case the cell phone went dead and at least half a dozen quarters in the event the calling card didn’t work, to the woman who jumped into the arms and the bed of a total stranger.
Despite her brave talk of carpe diem dating, in her heart the words casual and sex were antonyms.
Now somewhere in the world there was a man with whom she had gotten naked and made love with the lights on, yet whose last name, age, address and occupation she still did not know.
What kind of woman did that?
“The kind who’s finally joined the twenty-first century,” Vi had assured her approvingly the day after.
Right. The kind who believed in carpe diem dating. No strings. No hope. And no recriminations.
That last part was gonna take a while.
Lifting her head, Rosemary turned the key in the ignition, gripped the steering wheel with fingers stiff from the March chill and threw the car into Reverse.
Chicken soup.
The sudden craving for something warm, uncomplicated and comforting gave her a direction, and she headed for Sherm’s Queen Bee, the grocery store on the east end of town. With a population of nearly nineteen hundred people, Honeyford was large enough to support two markets. Sherm’s was the larger, and it stayed open later.
On her way into the store, Rosemary grabbed a handled basket. The act of shopping distracted her from troubling thoughts. By the time she’d picked up aspirin, tea and orange juice, she felt a bit better. Grabbing a box of saltines from the cracker aisle in case her nausea returned, she started toward canned soups, one aisle over, when she overheard a conversation that managed to make her smile.
“You do not need to use canned soup to make macaroni and cheese.” The woman’s voice was vehement and vaguely disgusted. “Get a good English Cheddar.”
“Cheddar-cheese soup makes it feel more like comfort food, Amanda,” came the man’s much gentler reply. “Trust me. This is the best mac and cheese you’ll ever taste. You’ll feel like you’re ten again.”
“I don’t want to feel ten again….”
Rosemary laughed to herself. Right there was one of the perks of being single. She used to use cheddar soup to make macaroni and cheese, but Neil had loathed that particular meal, saying it tasted “cheap.” During the first year of their marriage, she’d found a recipe for fettuccini Alfredo and had abandoned her beloved mac and cheese altogether.
With no need to please anyone but herself tonight, and hungry for the first time all day, she skirted a display of Goldfish crackers and rounded the soup aisle, intent on making a big casserole of creamy pasta tonight. She wanted to thank the gentleman with the macaroni craving for reminding her about this treat and then tell him to grab his own can of soup and run, before he spent the better part of his life acquiescing to someone else’s desires, but, of course, it was none of her beeswax.
As she entered the aisle, Rosemary couldn’t help but glance at the woman with the firm opinions on cheese and the strongly judgmental tone. Tall enough to partially block Rosemary’s view of the man, the blonde wore black-rimmed glasses, a belted coat, stiletto-heeled leather boots and a perturbed expression. “I’m going to call Beezoli’s and have them make a fettuccini Alfredo to go,” she said as she fished her cell phone from her pocket. “Do you want one?”
Hiding her grin, Rosemary stepped in front of the couple to reach for the soup. “Excuse me.”
As she straightened, she angled her body, hoping to take a quick, nosey-bones peek at the man. Good English Cheddar was clearly a gal who got her own way. The poor guy might never enjoy a decent mac and cheese again.
Sorry, buddy, she told him mentally as she turned, deciding to give him a smile. Believe me, I relate—
Dear God!
The can of soup dropped from Rosemary’s hand, clunking onto the hard floor.
She stared stupidly, frozen as a statue, while Dean Whose-Last-Name-She-Did-Not-Know stared back at her.
“You dropped something,” the blonde intoned drily, which should have snapped Rosemary out of her stupor, but didn’t.
Dean, however—as neatly groomed and handsome as he’d been two and a half months ago—dived for the can of soup, rose and handed it back to her, his blue gaze glued to her face.
“Hello,” he said.
She should have recognized his voice right away. Smooth and rich rather than deep, like the best milk chocolate, it had wrapped her in delicious sensation that magical night.
Rosemary couldn’t answer him. Her mind buzzed with a dozen questions.
Do you live in Honeyford?
Does Good English Cheddar live in Honeyford?
Were you and she together when you and I…?
Mortified, by the possibility that she had slept with another woman’s man, Rosemary could feel her face flush and perspiration build beneath her heavy clothing.
“Do you two know each other?” The blonde sounded bored as she flipped her hair back and brought her cell phone to her ear.
Rosemary glared at Dean. He seemed not to have heard his companion’s question. His brows lowered in deep thought.
She turned toward the woman, wondering whether she should answer, then saw something that strangled any words that might have emerged.
From the hand holding the phone, a simple ring glittered. A simple, emerald-cut diamond engagement ring.
Fury sped through Rosemary’s veins like fire along a line of gasoline.
“We should do this again…for the next forty years.” The words he’d murmured while they’d danced came back to taunt her.
She knew better than to trust in forever. That was one reason she’d left before dawn—so she wouldn’t be tempted to buy into a fairy tale. But she’d assumed, at least, that her prince-for-a-night was as charming and decent as he’d seemed.
Snake! Rat! Philanderer! She was tempted to pick up the can of cheddar-cheese soup and aim it at his head, but then another thought struck. Because of Dean’s dishonesty, she had done to another woman what had been done to her. She had become a mistress by mistake!
The blonde—Amanda, was it?—lowered her chin, peering at Rosemary above her rectangular glasses. “Are you all right? You look like you’re going to pass out. Dean, take out your phone in case you have to call 9-1-1. Beezoli’s has me on hold.”
The last thing Rosemary saw before she turned and ran through the store was Dean’s hand reaching toward her. As she chucked her basket of goods and raced for the door, she heard him call, “Rosemary, wait!”
And then Amanda’s voice, more faintly: “You do know her.”
For the third morning in a row, Rosemary huddled on her side beneath a fluffy white comforter ninety minutes past the time her alarm went off. She’d missed two days of work, and now, on her regularly scheduled day off, she could no longer deny the facts: from the moment she opened her eyes in the morning, nausea hit so hard she could barely raise her head. She’d thought she had the flu that was going around, but by midday she typically got better, and around dinnertime she was ravenous…only to begin the cycle again the next day.
And, she’d missed two periods.
At first, she’d chalked the interruption to her monthly cycle up to the stress of her recent move and a new job. Now it seemed far more ominous than that.
Grunting, Rosemary pushed the covers aside and slowly sat up. Her feet had barely touched the hardwood floor when her stomach rebelled, and she raced to the bathroom.
“I hate throwing up,” she told her sad reflection as she brushed her teeth after the fact. More than anything, she wanted to crawl back into bed, pull the pillows over her head and stay there.
She’d worked so hard to create a new life for herself after her divorce. Now, if her suspicion proved correct, that sweet new life was going to turn into a very bad soap opera.
“Stupid, stupid, stupid!” Sniffing back tears, she returned to the bedroom to get dressed. She hadn’t been on birth control since her divorce. There hadn’t been an
y need since she hadn’t intended to be sexually active.
On that now deeply regretted night in December, she and Dean had used a condom….
The first time. And the second.
But the third? She honestly couldn’t remember.
A glance in the mirror above her dresser told Rosemary that she looked like death warmed over. She shrugged as she dressed in jeans and a heavy wool sweater then twisted her curly hair into a knot atop her head. From her hall closet, she withdrew a shin-length camel-hair coat with a collar she could turn up to partially hide her face, and a pink cloche that she tugged down around her ears.
Honeyford wasn’t small enough to run into people one knew every day, but she hoped to minimize the odds that someone in this quaint, conservative town might stop her to strike up a conversation as she ran her errand: the purchase of an at-home pregnancy test to determine whether she was knocked up from a one-night stand with an engaged stranger.
Grabbing her purse and heading into the brisk March day, Rosemary fought back tears once again. She’d thought her divorce was the low point in her life. Now she was deeply afraid she was about to hit a new bottom.
It took ten minutes to walk from her home on Oak and 4th Street to downtown Honeyford. As a string of bells jingled merrily against the glass door of King’s Pharmacy, Rosemary began to wish she’d driven to another town to make her purchase.
It certainly didn’t escape her that if Dean and his fiancée lived in Honeyford then she was likely to bump into them again sooner or later. She comforted herself with the knowledge that this was a workday for most people, and given that it had taken her over two months to run into Dean the first time, she could reasonably expect luck to be on her side today.
In fact, if she was really fortunate, her nausea would turn out to be some exotic disease or possibly intermittent salmonella or merely garden-variety stress. Anything other than pregnancy. And then she could simply ignore her one-night stand and his bride-to-be the next time she saw them.
