“Amen, sister!” Maddie said, just as the men returned with food and drinks.
Cal regarded them suspiciously. “Do we even want to know what you two had your heads together about?”
“I doubt it,” Dana Sue said breezily. “You macho men never give two hoots about girl talk.”
“I can always fill you in,” Kyle said, giving them a wicked grin. “They forgot all about me being right here. They were never that careless when I was a kid. All Katie, Ty and I ever heard around the house when the Sweet Magnolias got together was ‘little pitchers have big ears.’ We missed all the good stuff.”
“What’s it going to cost for you to pretend you didn’t hear any of this?” Dana Sue inquired.
Kyle’s smile spread. “I could use a coupon for dinner at Sullivan’s. I have a hot date tomorrow night.”
“Don’t you dare!” Maddie said to Dana Sue. “I will not have one of my children blackmailing you.” She whirled on Kyle. “As for you, you’re not too old for me to ground you.”
“Mom, I don’t live at home anymore,” he reminded her patiently. “I can always head back to college.”
Maddie buried her face in her hands. “What ever made me think that parenting would get easier with experience?”
Cal draped a comforting arm over her shoulders. “You were delusional, all right.”
She turned an accusing look on him. “And just when I had three almost grown and out of the house, thanks to you I have two more little ones.”
Cal laughed. “How can you complain when creating them was so much fun?”
Maddie shook her head. “Let’s have this conversation again when they hit their teens.”
“The teens,” Ronnie said, nodding knowingly.
“Oh, don’t even try to sound like you suffered through those years,” Dana Sue said. “We were divorced most of the time when Annie was a teenager and you weren’t even living here in Serenity.”
Ronnie winced. “Probably best not to revisit that time right now. Sorry.”
She pressed a kiss to his cheek. “It’s okay. I’ve forgiven you. Mostly, anyway.”
But an occasional reminder of that awful time did wonders to keep their marriage on track these days. Just like Maddie and Helen, she found herself counting her blessings when it came to love. Who could have imagined it would take the drastic step of a divorce to get her and Ronnie to such an incredible place?
* * *
J.C. glanced surreptitiously at his watch and realized that the football game at the high school would already be well under way. He enjoyed stopping by the games. The whole community usually attended, and he liked feeling a part of things. He should have noticed the time when Sullivan’s had started emptying out a half hour ago.
“Am I keeping you from something?” Laura asked, studying him with concern. “I’m so sorry. It never occurred to me that you might have other plans. It’s a Friday night. Of course you do.”
He smiled, enjoying the flustered rise of color in her cheeks. “I mentioned before we came that I’d planned to stop by the game. You said you were planning on going, as well. I lost track of the time and just now realized it’s probably started.”
She looked even more nonplussed. “Oh, my gosh, we did talk about that. I need to make a call. The other teachers will wonder what on earth has happened to me.”
“Why don’t we drive over together? It’ll be faster than going back to my office for your car.”
“Are you sure you don’t mind?”
“Of course not.”
He quickly paid the check, then led the way to his car, which he’d wisely parked on the street, rather than in the crowded lot. Now that lot was almost empty.
Ten minutes later he found a parking space a block from the field. As soon as they got out, he could hear the shouts of the crowd and smell the aroma of popcorn.
“Sounds to me as if we just missed a great play,” he said, as he helped Laura out of the car.
“Are you a big football fan?”
“Big enough,” he said. “I played a couple of years in college, but it was tough to do that and keep my grades high enough in premed. Since I knew I’d never go pro, I dropped off the team. Let me tell you, it put a crimp in my social life.”
She studied him curiously. “Then you weren’t always averse to dating?”
“Not always,” he said, leaving it at that.
“There’s a story there,” she said, holding his gaze. “Maybe you’ll tell me sometime.”
“Maybe,” he said, evasively. Surprisingly, though, the thought of revealing that time of his life didn’t seem as depressing as it usually did. The best thing about moving to Serenity had been the fact that not a soul in town knew a thing about his marriage to his childhood sweetheart or how it had blown up in his face.
When he’d paid for his ticket and Laura had shown her pass, they walked into the stadium just in time for the Serenity team to score a touchdown on a pass from quarterback Greg Bennett.
“That kid has an incredible arm,” he commented.
Laura nodded, but there was something in her expression that suggested she wasn’t half as impressed with him as J.C. was.
“You don’t like him,” he said intuitively.
“He’s a good player,” she said carefully.
“But you don’t like him,” he repeated. “Why?”
She hesitated, then said, “If you really want the truth, he has a massive ego and I’ve seen the careless way he treats the girls at school. It’s a bad combination.”
J.C. nodded. “I don’t really know him personally. He’s Bill’s patient. All I know is what I see on the field.”
“Lucky you,” she said, then winced. “What is wrong with me? I’m not usually so indiscreet when it comes to students.”
“I think we’re past worrying about being careful with each other. If we’re going to get to the bottom of what’s happening with Misty, we need to trust each other enough to speak frankly.”
“But one thing has nothing to do with the other,” she said.
J.C. hesitated. It was a shot in the dark, but it was something worth considering. “You sure about that? You just said Greg’s careless with the girls he dates. Could Misty be one of them?”
She shook her head at once. “I’d say she has better sense, but at that age, who knows? The problem with your theory, though, is that he’s not in either of the classes she’s been skipping. And the word around school is that he’s seeing Annabelle Litchfield.”
“Oh, well, it was a thought.”
“And not a bad one,” she said, then caught sight of her friends who were waving from the stands. “I see the other teachers. I should join them. If you’re not meeting anyone, you could come along.”
“And stir up even more talk?” he asked, grinning at her.
She smiled back at him. “That ship sailed long ago. First Sullivan’s and then we walked in here together. Haven’t you noticed that since the touchdown more eyes are on us than on the field? I can’t imagine having you sit in the bleachers with a bunch of women would make anything worse.”
“All women? Where are the men?”
“Sitting with their wives,” she said. “There’s not a bachelor on the faculty. Trust me, you’ll feel like a king.”
He laughed. “How can I possibly resist that? Lead the way.”
They climbed up to the top row, where three women moved over to make room for them. He already knew all of them, at least by sight.
“You sly girl,” Nancy Logan said in what was meant to be a whisper but was easily overheard. “How’d you snag the hottie?”
Laura blushed furiously. “I haven’t snagged anyone. J.C. and I were just having a quick bite to eat and realized it had gotten late and we both had plans to be at the game.”
“So you had dinner and then you came to the game together,” Nancy said, her grin spreading. “In my world that sounds a lot like a date.”
“Mine, too,” the others echoed
.
J.C. saw that their teasing had Laura even more flustered. He leaned down to whisper in her ear, “Don’t panic. I can handle the talk, if you can.”
She turned to him wide-eyed. “But there shouldn’t be any talk, not about dating. You don’t date at all. I don’t date you. I just explained what happened.”
“And they’re obviously not buying it,” he said, impulsively taking her hand snugly in his. “Let’s just go with it.”
“Go with it,” she repeated, her eyes widening with alarm. “What does that mean, go with it?”
“It means tonight you and I are on a date. We’ll think of it as an experiment. Maybe I’ll discover that I’ve been wrong to forego a social life since moving to Serenity,” he added, though he suspected the opposite was more likely. All the talk might very well reinforce his conviction that he was better off alone.
Laura already looked uneasy. She swallowed hard at his assertion. “This is a bad idea, J.C.”
“Not to worry,” he consoled her. “Tomorrow we can break up. Happens all the time.”
“Not to me. Not in this town.”
He winked at her. “Then I’ll be your first.”
Something in the way she blanched at his choice of words set off alarm bells. No way, he thought. It wasn’t possible, was it? Could Laura Reed possibly be as innocent as all that? It should have terrified him, but suddenly he found himself more intrigued than ever.
5
Laura had spent most of the night wrestling with the covers and her confusing thoughts after spending the evening with J.C. To her surprise he’d fit right in with her friends from school. Once the teasing remarks had quieted down, they’d all cheered themselves hoarse as Serenity had managed to prevent a tying touchdown in the final seconds of the game.
Outside the stadium, he’d offered her a ride back to her car, but she’d insisted that Nancy could drop her off. He’d looked vaguely disappointed, which had surprised her after his insistence earlier in the evening that she wasn’t to construe his dinner invitation as anything other than a chance to discuss Misty and the problems she was having at school.
On the way to the parking lot by the medical practice, Nancy had had a million questions, which Laura had managed to sidestep fairly deftly, she thought.
“The man just offered to bring you over here himself. What is wrong with you?” Nancy had asked, regarding her with dismay. “I know his company has to be far more scintillating than mine.”
Laura had laughed. “Despite what he said at the game, we were never on a date, Nancy. Scintillating doesn’t enter into it.”
“Well, it should,” Nancy told her. “He’s the most available bachelor in the entire town, a doctor, no less. The competition has been fierce for years, and you’re the first woman I know of, at least locally, that he’s been out with.”
“Well, I happen to know for a fact that he has a date with a nurse practitioner in the morning,” she said, hoping to silence any more uncomfortable speculation about the two of them. J.C. might be a mystery she wouldn’t mind unraveling, but it simply wasn’t in the cards. One bit of wisdom she’d taken from past experience was an understanding of when to cut her losses.
“He told you he has a date tomorrow?” Linda asked. “What kind of man brags about a date when he’s out with someone else?”
“The kind of man who wants to make it clear he isn’t on a date with me,” she told her. “Do you get it yet?”
Nancy shook her head mournfully. “Well, I say it’s just sad. You looked cute together, and there were sparks. I could feel them.”
“Because you have a vivid imagination. It’s all those romance novels you read.”
“True, I want sparks like that,” Nancy admitted wistfully. “I have this sinking feeling, though, that I’ll never find them in Serenity. You know what slim pickings there are in this town. There are a few decent guys our age, but finding the whole package—intelligence, a sense of humor, good looks and a solid career—that’s all but impossible. Those guys get snapped up the minute they cross into the city limits. And now you already have the last man standing in your clutches.”
“Will you quit saying that?” Laura begged, though she couldn’t argue with Nancy’s premise that exciting, stimulating men were hard to find in Serenity.
“Only if I never see the two of you together again, which, if you want my opinion, would be a crying shame.”
“Thanks for the input, and for the ride,” Laura told her, quickly climbing out of the car. “See you on Monday.”
Unfortunately, even though she thought she’d managed to curb Nancy’s wild imagination for the moment, once she was curled up in bed, she couldn’t seem to stop herself from daydreaming about all sorts of scenarios that could play out between her and an intelligent, thoughtful, compassionate man like J.C. He was everything Rob Jefferson hadn’t been. Of course, Rob hadn’t really been a grown man when Laura had fallen for him. He’d been an irresponsible bad boy, which had been the allure for the quietest girl in school.
Don’t go there, she warned herself. Thinking about the disaster that relationship had become and the repercussions that haunted her still would keep her awake the rest of the night.
After banishing thoughts of both J.C. and her past, she’d finally fallen into a restless sleep around three in the morning, only to be awakened at six by the ringing of the phone.
“Yes, what?” she murmured sleepily.
“Not a morning person, are you?” a man’s voice inquired with a hint of laughter.
“Who is this?”
“It’s J.C.”
“At six o’clock in the freaking morning on a Saturday?” she grumbled, all of the kindly thoughts she’d had about him fleeing.
This time there was no attempt to hide his laughter. “Definitely not a morning person. Good to know. I was hoping to persuade you to go for that run with me.”
Sufficient blood finally reached her brain for her to comprehend what he was asking. “You woke me up to ask me to go for a run?”
“That’s the invitation,” he confirmed. “Breakfast after.”
“Was there absolutely anything in our very brief acquaintance to suggest that I run?”
“Nope, but I don’t mind if you’re a beginner.”
It suddenly dawned on her what he really wanted. “You’re looking for a buffer to warn off that other woman.”
“Congratulations! For that you get a giant mug of coffee to chase away the rest of those cobwebs.”
“You’re certifiable, you know that, don’t you?” She felt totally within her rights to declare that. No sane man made the sort of request he’d just made.
“But you’re considering this, right?” he pressed. “What’ll it take to push you over the edge? Danish? Croissants? An omelet?”
Since she was awake by now and surprisingly hungry, she gave up the fight. “I’ll take the omelet,” she said decisively. “With hash browns. And I need an hour to get ready.”
“Nobody needs an hour to get ready for a run,” he said. “I’ll give you fifteen minutes, twenty if you insist on me stopping to pick up that coffee.”
“I insist,” she said fervently. “I’m going to need a lot of coffee.”
She hung up without waiting for a response or offering him her address. If he couldn’t figure out where she lived, so much the better, but something told her he wasn’t the sort of man to leave a detail like that to chance.
* * *
J.C. pulled to a stop in the alley behind Sullivan’s. Half the town knew that sous-chef Erik Whitney was there at the crack of dawn and that he always had a pot of the best coffee in town brewing. Thanks to the occasions when they’d hung out at the gym and the frequency of late-night calls when Erik and Helen’s little girl had earaches, he allowed J.C. to take advantage of that from time to time.
“Sarah Beth’s next appointment is free if you’ll give me three cups of coffee to go,” he told Erik.
Erik grinned. “You sound
like a desperate man. Late night with the pretty schoolteacher? And exactly how does that third cup of coffee fit in? Sounds mysterious.”
“It wasn’t that late a night,” J.C. admitted, figuring there was little point in denying that Laura was involved. “But apparently by her standards, it’s an early morning. I convinced her to go for a run by promising her coffee. Yours is far more likely to impress her than Wharton’s.”
“Interesting,” Erik said grinning. “So, the two of you really are an item? That was the hot topic in here last night, anyway, after your cozy meal together. I suspect there’s already a pool going at Wharton’s. Grace loves a romance.”
J.C. winced. “Whoa! We’re just acquaintances,” he insisted. “I asked her to bail me out of a jam this morning, and she’s gone along with it. I need to hurry, though, before she changes her mind.”
“You’re in a jam that involves going for a run?” Erik asked with unmistakable confusion. “Do I even want to know? And you still haven’t explained the extra cup.”
“If you’re like everyone else in this town, of course you want to know,” J.C. said, amused. “But I don’t have the time or the inclination to fill you in. Coffees, please.”
Erik handed over the cups. “Okay, but you owe me more than a free office visit for Sarah Beth. My wife’s not going to be happy if I come home without details. Then, again, she’s getting together with Maddie and Dana Sue this morning. If anything’s going on, they’ll already know about it.”
Sadly, J.C. thought, they probably would.
* * *
Laura was waiting outside on the front steps of her apartment building when J.C. rolled to a stop on the street. She walked in his direction, regarding him with suspicion.
“There had better be coffee,” she said before even touching the handle of the passenger door.
He held up a cup. “Freshly brewed, as promised.”
“Gimme,” she said, getting into the car. She took a deep sniff. “I don’t recognize this aroma. It smells amazing.”
“Sullivan’s.”
“They’re not open this early,” she said, regarding him with amazement. “Who’d you bribe?”
Catching Fireflies Page 6
