“Don’t microwave much, I take it?”
“I don’t do much in the kitchen.”
“I see. Well, I’ve got you covered.” Grinning, he pushed several of the numbered buttons. “Just put in how many seconds you want and push this green one to start.”
Green for go, I thought. “Right. It seems obvious now.” I flushed, again.
The microwave let out a low steady hum. I moved to the sink, picked up my drink where I’d left it and sipped, careful this time not to gulp. Running my finger across the backsplash, intricate tiles in a green that matched the firs of Blue Mountain, I thought about my sister, what her life was like here with Kevan and the girls. The counter was a foot or so higher than the sink, designed for the cook to talk to the diners, I supposed. Blythe probably fed the little girls breakfast here, as she used to in her old house before her husband decided to leave her for a thirty-year-old. The thought of her ex-husband still caused angry heat to travel through my body. It doesn’t matter now, I thought. Joke’s on you, jerk. Since Michael had announced his decision to end their marriage, I refused to call him by his name. “Jerk” was just fine. Not in front of the girls, of course. Blythe had made sure of that. She was a better person than me in every way. I don’t know if I would have been able to pretend he was Mr. Wonderful in front of their children like Blythe did. But I guess that’s the difference between a mother and someone like me.
“So, you don’t cook?” He crossed to the counter and picked up his beer before sitting on a stool, watching me.
I shrugged and took another sip of wine. “I’m more of the various-takeout-restaurants-on-speed-dial type of girl.”
“Well, you’re a working girl. No time to cook.”
“Right.” I would have added a smart comment about some of us having to work for a living as opposed to jet-setting all over the world, but the reverent tone in his voice stopped me. He’d meant it as a compliment. “Do you cook?”
“I do. One of my favorite pastimes. Bit of a passion for me.”
The microwave beeped. I brought the plate over to Ciaran. “Go ahead. Start.” I didn’t want him waiting for me like we were on a date or something, and there was no way I was sitting next to him. Way too close.
“No, a gentleman always waits for a lady.”
“Are you a gentleman?” I raised my eyebrows, before putting the second plate in the microwave. As I turned back to look at him, I saw a hint of something, a possible kink in the armor of self-assured, party boy Ciaran. Had my comment bothered him? I’d seen a hesitation, a flash of something across his face that could be interpreted as pain. But just as soon as it had appeared, it vanished.
“Don’t believe everything you read in the papers.” Grinning that infectious grin, he toasted me with his beer before putting a napkin on his lap.
“How long are you here for?” I asked, trying to think of something to say. Why did this feel like one of those awkward interviews I’d had with potential employees?
“Extended stay, I think. I flew into Hailey yesterday afternoon.” He spoke conversationally, as if we were old friends. Apparently I was the only one who felt awkward. “Took a few runs on Baldy today. Felt great. I’m staying through the holidays, at least, maybe longer. Haven’t spent as much time here as I’d like to.”
“Baldy?”
“Bald Mountain. That’s what the locals call it.” He took a swig of beer. “What about you?”
I pointed at my chest with my thumb. “Me what?”
“How long are you staying?”
“Oh, I don’t know exactly. I planned on just the weekend, but Blythe’s trying to talk me into staying longer.”
“Why’s that?”
“I’m between jobs. And I have some things to figure out.” The microwave beeped again. I took the plate out, careful not to touch the hot, melted cheese that threatened to run over the side, and set it on the counter near the sink. Steam rose as I poked it with my fork, smelling the red chilies and fresh tomatoes Blythe used for the sauce.
Ciaran sliced his casserole into small bites. He indicated the seat next to him by pointing at it with his fork. “You want to sit?”
“No, I’ll just eat it here. Standing up,” I added, as if that weren’t obvious.
“Suit yourself.” Taking a bite, he closed his eyes and made an appreciative grunt. “Delicious. How is it one sister can cook and the other can’t?”
I brought a forkful of food near my mouth, blowing on it. “Blythe took care of things when we were little because our mother wasn’t exactly the domestic kind.” My voice threatened to crack. This is why I didn’t speak of my mother. Just thinking of her brought back all the old resentments and memories.
For as long as I could remember, Blythe had been the one to cook meals, pack my lunch for school, clean the house. There was a list, near the telephone, where Blythe would write what we needed from the store, never more than a few items because she had to ride into town on her bicycle and could only bring back what she could fit in the basket. I could see that basket, now, without even closing my eyes—white with red, plastic flowers, two of them—like eyes Blythe always said. She saw things like that, with eyes of an artist, elephants in the clouds, the president’s face in the way the last of her breakfast cereal happened to float in the milk. I saw nothing but the truth—no symbols or shades of gray, or glimpses of the extraordinary in the ordinary. My eyes were those of a realist, ruthless with my judgments, unyielding to our mother’s manipulation. When one views the world around them without sentimentality, without emotions, as an analyst, an observer, rather than a participant, the truth is obvious. Blythe, with her kind and sensitive artist heart could be influenced by our mother’s half-truths and passive-aggressive behavior. It made her soften. Not me. I was hard, unyielding. It had served me well in many ways.
He poked another bite of casserole with his fork before looking over at me with a quizzical expression, as if he’d been able to read the language of the past on my face. “What do you have to figure out?”
I sighed, reaching over the sink to the counter, where I grabbed the napkin, bringing it to my mouth to stall for time. What didn’t I have to figure out? “Just the rest of my life.” I stabbed the fork’s tines lightly into the palm of my hand. I’d lost my appetite. I pushed the plate a few inches away, set the fork aside, and rested my elbows on the counter, catching a glimpse of my distorted reflection in the sink’s faucet. “As I mentioned, I’m between jobs at the moment.” This came out sounding bitter and I felt the acid rise in my stomach. I purposefully softened my tone. “I was fired, very unexpectedly.”
“I see.”
“I’ve had a job every day since I was fifteen.”
“Are you scared?” he asked.
“Scared?”
“To not work? Of all the time that opens up to think?” He looked at me, with his head cocked to the side and unflinching eyes upon me, listening with what I came to think of later as his whole body, as if every cell of his being had stopped to lean toward me. It was intoxicating.
Without meaning to, I began to tell him the truth of my life. How focused I’d been on work and that I’d neglected my personal life. “I’m hoping to make some new friends. Maybe travel. Take up a hobby.”
“Not cooking, I suppose?”
I laughed. “Not likely, no.”
He smiled, no teeth this time, with a soft expression in his eyes. “Your laugh makes me think of jingle bells.
I ducked my head, studying the floor.
“What then, if not cooking?” he asked.
“I have no idea.”
“What do you like to for fun?”
“Fun?” I picked up the fork and prodded at the enchiladas before taking a bite.
He took another bite, chewing and watching me. “You don’t have fun, do you?”
“Not really.”
>
“Well, since we’re practically family, I’d be happy to aid you in this pursuit. Fun happens to be my specialty.”
“So I’ve heard.”
He shrugged, smiling, but his eyes were flatter than the moment before. “My reputation is somewhat exaggerated.”
I thought of the photo of Ciaran and Hope Manning. She wore a pink bikini, hardly larger than a hanky, which showed half of her tiny bottom, while the top covered her nipples and not much else. A girl that skinny with D-cup breasts? I didn’t buy it. They had to be fake. Which surprised me. I would have thought Hope Manning above the Hollywood pressure to have giant breasts. I supposed she had to make some compromises in order to remain on the A-list.
I found it somewhat disconcerting that I’d thought the whole thing funny when I’d seen it this afternoon. But now, mere hours later, it irritated me. I decided to change the subject back to me. “I do have this little project, though, that’s proving to be interesting.”
He raised an eyebrow. “A project? That sounds like work.”
“Not exactly.” I launched into the story of Henry, Sam, and Sweetheart, along with Blythe’s suggestion earlier, surprising myself once again by how easy it was to share the details of my thoughts with this man I barely knew. “I’m out of my comfort zone. I don’t know anything about homeless people or muteness or how to help someone like that get back on their feet. I certainly don’t know if Sam and Sweetheart staying here is a good idea or not.”
“I’ve been involved with a charity that helps homeless people work back into mainstream society. I’d be glad to help, if you’d like,” he said, casually.
I stared at him, unable to think of anything to say. Blythe hadn’t mentioned anything about his charitable work. Maybe she didn’t know?
He was smiling at me, his eyes twinkling. “What? Didn’t think a spoiled rich kid like me had done anything worthwhile?”
“Kind of.”
“Acts of charity shouldn’t be done to advertise what a great guy you are.” He took another bite of food. “If you’re looking for recognition then your heart’s in the wrong place.”
I nibbled from my plate, thinking. Had I misjudged him? Just because he was a womanizer didn’t mean he couldn’t do good work. And it wasn’t like he was hurting anyone. If the women knew what they were getting into, they had no one to blame but themselves.
“Like this thing you did for Sam. You didn’t do it to get credit, right?”
“Of course not.”
“Same with me. Plus, my real friends know what kind of guy I am, regardless of the tabloids.”
“So, your escapades with women? Widely exaggerated?”
He grinned. “Well, I’m not a virgin.”
I laughed. How could such a scoundrel be so utterly charming?
“This jingle bell laugh of yours. It’s enough to win a man over.” His eyes sparkled at me as he took another sip of his beer. “Speaking of which, where is your man? Surely you have one?”
“No. Not at the moment.” I said this as if it were just a temporary hiatus but then thought better of my outright lie and spoke the truth. “Not ever, really.”
“I find that hard to believe. You’re single on purpose, then?”
“Something like that.”
“Bliss Heywood. Bliss—so aptly named,” he said.
My eyes opened wide with horror. “I am not anything like my name. As a matter of fact, I’ve spent my life proving I’m not the hippie name my mother gave me.”
This time he laughed, with his head thrown back, like he’d done in the other room. “Like the boy named Sue.”
I stared at him. How had he known that’s how I thought of it? “Exactly like the boy named Sue. Did Blythe tell you that?”
He put up his fork, as if in self-defense. “No. It just popped in my head.”
“Have you ever heard a respected businesswoman with the name ‘Bliss’?”
“If it’s so bad, why didn’t you change it?”
That question gave me pause. Why hadn’t I just changed it? I could have been Ruth or Mary or Elizabeth. Maybe Ella—that was the name of a sophisticated woman, not some hippie kid who had to be smarter and scrappier than everyone else. Suddenly, I knew why I hadn’t changed it. “It’s spurred me on over the years. Reminded me of where I came from so I never got complacent. I’ve worked harder than anyone else I know, and I have my flaky mother and my ridiculous name to thank for it.”
He didn’t speak for a moment, simply looking at me with soft brown eyes. “Do you ever grow tired of being so angry?”
“I’m not angry.”
He raised his eyebrows but remained silent.
“Well, anyway, anger’s good. It fuels you. Plus, if you’d been raised by my mother you’d be angry, too.”
He laughed. “Have you met my mother yet?”
“No, just stories from Blythe, who always makes people sound better than they are, by the way.”
“What did she tell you about me?” He took the last bite of his food and pushed his plate away.
“That you’re a party waiting to happen.”
He laughed and toasted me with his beer. “That’s one way to put it.”
“Translation: party boy, womanizer, jet-setter.”
He put his beer on the counter. “You know what’s funny?”
“What’s that?”
“My brothers and sister should know me best out of anyone in the world, and yet they know the least. They have no idea who I really am, how I spend my time, what I care about.”
“So none of those things are true?”
“Not really.” He finished his beer and took the empty bottle and his plate to the sink, so close to me now I could smell the spiciness of his cologne. I stifled a shiver and I moved away, putting a couple feet of distance between us. He placed both hands on the counter and looked down, taking in a deep breath. His back muscles expanded and then contracted as he let out the breath before turning to look at me. “There are stories in every family that are told over and over until we become the stories. These roles we all play in a family, I guess you could say. Labels. My mother and father did a great job of comparing us to each other, classifying us early. Kevan was the achiever, the business mind, the one who followed what Father wanted without question. Finn was the peacemaker, the heart of our family, who could do no wrong in any of our eyes. Ardan was the spiritual one. My mother assumed he would join the priesthood and always treated him with a certain reverence. Teagan was Father’s little princess. Ours, too. Mother said she was surprised she learned to walk because my older brothers carried her around so much. She had these red curls no one could resist.”
“What about you? What was your role in the family?”
“Me? That’s easy. To my siblings, the goofball who could make them laugh so hard they peed their pants. The party. To my parents I was the screw-up. My father hated me and my mother never took me seriously. No one bothered to look any little deeper, so I stopped trying.” He pushed away from the counter and went to the refrigerator, coming out with another bottle of beer.
“Did your father hate you, really?” I couldn’t imagine that was true. Ciaran was decidedly lovable.
He took a long pull from his beer. When he looked back at me, I spotted the wounded look I thought I’d seen earlier. This time he didn’t try to hide it. “I was the scapegoat. That was my role. I did everything to get my father to view me differently. But he never did.” He peeled the label from his beer and set it on the counter. “The question is like the chicken or the egg. What came first? The reputation or the screwing up?”
“My mother wasn’t actually the nurturing type, either.”
“Why do you say that?”
“She should never have had children.” I didn’t elaborate further. No need to go down the memory lane of her drug use and a
ll the idiots she brought home or the sounds that came from her bedroom, one thin wall apart. Blythe bought headphones and one of those cheap Walkmans and cassettes to drown out the noises. “We were invisible to her.”
“And you’ve spent a lifetime trying to prove you’re not invisible?” asked Ciaran.
“Something like that.” I lifted my eyes to his. And there, right then, something shifted between us. I saw his humanity beyond his gorgeous face and that hair that curled above the collar of his sweater. This was a man with a hurt little boy just beneath the surface. Two hurt children in adult bodies, I thought, staring into one another’s souls. “I’m different than you, though.”
“How’s that?” he asked.
“She doesn’t hurt me any longer.”
“That right?”
“Yes. Blythe cares, or cared, anyway. I do not. I learned early on how to turn my feelings off. It’s been a great asset in business.”
His mouth went up in a slight smile; the corners of his eyes crinkled. “But maybe why you don’t have any friends?”
I smiled and raised my glass to him. “Touché.”
“You simply disconnect. Isn’t that right?”
I sipped the last of my wine, mourning its disappearance suddenly.
“You don’t want another?” he asked, as if he’d read my mind.
“No, thanks.” I looked up, into his eyes. The color of his eyes, this particular brown that bordered on hazel—how would one describe it? Blythe would know. She always had the names of crayons to describe colors. It was surprising how many crayons there were. These were things you learned after becoming an aunt.
I yawned.
“Tired?”
“Suddenly, yes. It’s been a long day.” I hesitated. Was it appropriate to ask him to walk me to the guesthouse? I didn’t want to admit I was afraid to walk alone. What if there were bears? Or cougars? As cold as it was, surely the blanket of snow had turned icy.
He smiled, setting aside his beer. “Come along, Bliss Heywood. I’ll walk you home.”
Chapter 13
Blue Moon (Blue Mountain Book 2) Page 12
