by JoAnn Ross
“What makes you think I’m out of practice?”
“Do you own a car?”
“No. That’d be impractical in the city. But they do have car rentals in New York.”
“When was the last time you drove?”
She hesitated. “Two years ago,” she conceded. “But I’ll still need a car while I’m in town.”
“No problem. As it happens, I’ve got two vehicles. The guy who funds my whale research showed up with one for me last month and between the night research, my classes, and the fund-raising, I’ve been too busy to list my SUV for sale. You can use it for as long as you want.”
“That’s very generous.”
“You’re the one who’s going to be bringing in big bucks for the museum,” he pointed out. “Seems like giving you wheels while you’re here is the least I can do.”
“Well, I’m grateful. Since the only thing the rental place had left was a compact, which honestly concerned me.”
“You’ve already checked.”
It was not a question, but she answered it anyway. “Yesterday afternoon. When I booked what appeared to be the last ticket out of New York. It’s a middle seat in the back row, but you’ve no idea how much I’m looking forward to being back in Shelter Bay.”
Not nearly as much as he was looking forward to having her back in town. After she gave him her flight number and times, Adam ended the call.
Then before going into his classroom, he pumped the fist holding the phone in the air.
3
“You never said you knew Meghann Quinn personally,” Dillon Slater said as he and Adam sat at the bar at Bon Temps, a Cajun restaurant and dance hall, scarfing down oyster po’ boys. Adam had just related his earlier phone call.
“It’s a small town. You know how it is. Everyone in school pretty much knew everyone else. Besides, it wasn’t important.” Adam dunked a French fry into a dish of the restaurant’s signature spicy red “come back” sauce.
“Yet you emailed her without having mentioned anything about it.”
“You suggested I write because we’d been in the same graduating class. I didn’t bring up having been friends because I didn’t want to get everyone’s hopes up. When I sent the request for autographed books for the fundraiser to her publisher I had no idea it’d even get to her.”
“If you were friends, why didn’t you just write her? Why go through her publisher?”
“I didn’t have any contact information.”
Dillon lifted a brow. “Like you couldn’t hack into the publisher’s system and retrieve it with both hands tied behind your back,” he said. “Hell, I don’t have half your mad computer powers and I could probably pull it off.”
“And geez, wouldn’t that be an excellent role model for the kids we’re trying to inspire?” Adam asked dryly. “Besides, I prefer to use my superpowers for good.”
“There’s also the fact that my wife would have to arrest you,” Sax Douchett, a former Navy SEAL and owner of Bon Temps said as he washed glasses in the bar sink. Not only was Kara Douchett Shelter Bay’s sheriff, local gossip had Sax having been secretly in love with her back when they’d been kids and she’d only had eyes for his best friend. Who’d later tragically been killed after surviving two tours in Iraq.
“There is that,” Adam agreed. Not that crime was a major problem in this small coastal town—though there were stories of a couple of more recent incidences that would have made good Dateline Real Mystery episodes—but the sheriff, a former Shelter Bay High School valedictorian a few years ahead of Adam, remained ever vigilant.
He crunched through the cornmeal and panko breading on the deep-fried oyster and decided if heaven actually existed and had a taste, Bon Temps’ po’ boys could well come close. “And speaking of your pistol-packing wife, can I ask you a question?”
“Shoot.”
“How did you move Kara from the friend zone to getting her to agree to marry you?”
“Well, there were a few steps in between,” Sax said. “But the key was that although it wasn’t easy staying patient, especially when I wanted to jump her every chance I got, I took things slow.” His smile was obnoxiously satisfied. “Still do, most of the time. Except when I don’t.”
“Damn. TMI, Douchett,” Dillon complained as he jabbed a fry into the red sauce.
“Hey.” Sax shrugged. “Don’t blame me. Mr. Peabody here is the one who asked.” He picked up a towel and began drying a pilsner glass. “You got someone in mind who has you asking? Like that hot writer you’re not willing to risk jail time for?”
Adam shrugged. “I didn’t say anything about her being hot.”
“I didn’t know Meghann Quinn back in the day, being that I’d already left town when her family arrived, but I saw her latest in a window display at Tidal Wave Books. Even if I didn’t have a thing for redheads, having married one myself, the woman would definitely classify as hot.”
“Between magma and the center of a black hole,” Dillon agreed.
Adam knew he was entering a danger zone when a spark of jealousy flared. “You guys are married.”
“Happily,” Sax agreed.
“Deliriously,” Dillon echoed. He took a swig of Captain Sig’s Northwestern Ale, wiping the foam off his mouth with the back of his hand. “But for the record, marriage doesn’t turn a guy blind. I’ve been looking at that woman’s photo on the back of books ever since I started teaching. Seems every girl in school, and not a few guys, are carrying them around. She’s totally a fox.”
“She’s a nice woman.” Granted, he hadn’t seen Meghann in person in over a decade, but she’d been a really smart, nice girl, and from their phone conversation, fame and the fast pace of New York life hadn’t changed her.
Dillon’s dark brows climbed his forehead. “Did I say she wasn’t?”
“Sounds as if he’s a little sensitive where the lady’s concerned,” Sax offered.
“No. I’m not. And did you learn that damn look from your cop wife?” he shot back as Sax gave him a straight-on, slitted-eye stare.
“No. I developed it all on my own, while trying to decide whether or not some goat farmer in Afghanistan was going to blow me up or take me prisoner,” the other man, who for a time had been held captive in an enemy village, countered.
“Fine. Play the damn war card,” Adam muttered.
“Just saying,” Sax said as he began dusting the higher-priced bottles on the top shelf, which didn’t get a lot of orders.
“There’s something I don’t understand,” Dillon said.
“What now?” Adam wasn’t used to having his personal life dissected. Maybe because, up until now, he hadn’t really had anything resembling a personal life.
“The autographed books will bring in some donations. And having her do that name-a-character thing, especially putting it out there on social media, should score big bucks. But she doesn’t need to come here to do that.”
“So?” Adam could hear the question coming and didn’t want to admit he’d been wondering the same thing.
“So, why is she coming all the way across the country during the worst travel week of the year?”
“Maybe because she felt like it. Plus, she told me she didn’t have anything else to do.”
“Yeah. I can imagine finding something to do in New York City would be a real challenge,” Sax said over his shoulder.
It was Adam’s turn to take a long drink of his Dead Guy Ale. “Hell, I don’t know. I’m not her damn social secretary.”
“You should take her to the Snow Ball,” Sax suggested. Having finished his dusting, he began hanging the newly washed glasses in their rack.
“Yeah,” Dillon piled on. “Her being there will draw more people to the silent auction.”
“Not to mention the fact that the Shelter Bay Beacon will write a story with photos, which could get picked up by search engines and gain more attention to your museum,” Sax said.
“You do realize that the appeal of a small to
wn might be to avoid things like balls and getting your picture in the paper.” Adam would throw himself off the Shelter Bay drawbridge before admitting that the fantasy of taking Meghann Quinn to the Snow Ball had gone through his mind. Okay, he wouldn’t lie. It had also stuck there. “She’s a writer, not some movie star or socialite who thrives on publicity.”
She’d also been shy back in high school and just because she’d appeared chatty and engaging on those videos didn’t necessarily mean that wasn’t an alter ego she’d taken on for her audience. Adam knew a lot about pretending to be someone you weren’t.
Back in the day when he’d had to go begging for grant money for his study, he’d put on the charcoal-gray suit and white dress shirt his sister, Jill, had made him buy. He’d ended up having to buy a second after he’d left the room to add something to his PowerPoint presentation and returned to a rust-brown imprint in the shape of an iron on the shirt’s front. And thanks to the same YouTube that had made Meghann an Internet star, he’d learned to tie a half Windsor knot in the yellow tie Jill had assured him was a power color.
Then, decked out in the business equivalent of Tony Stark’s Iron Man suit, he’d go out into the world, trying to convince billionaire captains of industry on the idea that saving endangered whales might possibly earn them some karma points to help make up for having endangered the world’s largest and most intelligent mammals in the first place.
Not that he’d added that last part. But he’d definitely thought it.
Ultimately, proving the Henry David Thoreau axiom about not needing new suits for new ventures (which he’d first learned when Meghann had made him read Walden), he’d gotten a seemingly unlimited grant from a thirty-something gazillionaire tech mogul who’d been comfortably and, to Adam’s mind, sensibly dressed in faded jeans, an open-necked plaid shirt and well-worn Nikes.
“If you ask her to the Snow Ball you’ll get to dance with her,” Sax pointed out.
“And maybe get lucky afterwards,” Dillon said in a reminiscent way that suggested he had personal experience in that area. “And don’t even try to claim you weren’t thinking along those lines when you first wrote that email.”
“It might have crossed my mind… Okay,” he said at Sax’s knowing snort. “If only I only had a DeLorean, I’d go back in time and change a lot of things. Like letting her go off to college at Columbia without telling her how I felt about her.”
“Now we’re getting somewhere. Which allows me to return home since I know Claire’s going to grill me for details,” Dillon said. Having finished his lunch, he scooped up a handful of bar nuts. “How did you feel about her?”
“It was complicated. We were both only eighteen.” And virgins, but some details didn’t need sharing.
“An age when guys are thinking more with their little heads than their big ones,” said Sax, whose reputation with women was Shelter Bay legend. That was before Kara had managed to mostly settle the former bad boy SEAL down, making Adam wonder if she kept a lion tamer’s whip and a chair up in their oceanfront house.
“It wasn’t like that,” he said. “Okay, hell, maybe it was, but having sex back then wouldn’t have been logical.”
Dillon spit out the drink of ale he’d just taken to cool the flames from the infamously fiery nuts. “Holy shit. You actually used logical and sex in the same sentence. Next you’ll tell us you’re from the planet Vulcan.”
“We were kids. I was going to school in California and she was off to New York—”
“And they didn’t have planes back then?”
“Sure. But we had life plans all mapped out. Do you have any idea how many people’s lives get screwed up because a girl gets pregnant and they get married too young?”
“I haven’t a clue,” Sax said. “And even if I did, I’d feel the need to point out that Kara married Jared right after high school and if he hadn’t gotten killed on a damn domestic violence call, they probably would’ve made it.”
Which would’ve meant there never would’ve been a Sax and Kara. As a scientist, Adam had never believed in fate or destiny. But more and more, as a man, looking at two friends whose twisting personal roads had led them to the women they were obviously meant to be with, and especially when his mind drifted to a certain woman with emerald eyes and hair the bright and shining color of a setting sun, Adam sometimes wondered.
4
As if fate, Mother Nature, or the airline gods had conspired to be on her side, Meghann’s flight proved uneventful. She even lucked out when whoever was supposed to be sitting in the window seat had either missed his or her flight or just didn’t show up. Which allowed her to claim it, leaving an empty seat between her and a seemingly mute teenager who was content to isolate himself with headphones while playing a video game.
Because she’d lived in the east so many years, where the mountains had been worn down by age, the view along the Columbia River Gorge as the plane approached Portland took her breath away. Moments later, she was looking directly into the snow-topped summit of Mt. Hood, with Mt. Adams appearing equally close on the other side of the plane. Right before they descended into a cloudbank, she also caught a glimpse of Mt. St. Helens, with its lopsided top due to that eruption in the ’80s, and in the distance, the towering Mt. Rainier.
Despite being crowded with holiday travelers, the terminal still managed to lack the manic stress-producing energy usually attributed to airports. Once again, Portland, Oregon was living up to its mellow, laid-back reputation.
She made her way past the restaurants and shops, all decorated for the season, to the baggage claim at the lower level where she and Adam had agreed to meet.
The moment she saw him, looking so much like the boy she’d once been in love with but still so different, Meghann’s heart stopped. As did her feet, which seemed to be glued to the floor.
But she must have been the only one of them uncomfortable because his bearded face lit up with a smile and his gray eyes, which had once been nearly covered by a thick fringe of bangs due more to not getting regular haircuts than any fashion statement, warmed to the color of burnished pewter.
Instructing her feet to move again, she walked toward him as he walked toward her. “Hi,” she said when they met in the middle.
“Hi, yourself.” His eyes crinkled as he grinned down at her.
Having gone through a growing spurt that summer of her tailor-made-for-the-Lifetime-channel teen romance, Adam had been tall and painfully skinny, which had had the boy campers tagging him with the name Jack Skellington, the skeleton character from The Nightmare Before Christmas.
The girls apparently were more discriminating, since most of them had harbored crushes on the teenage science instructor. He’d filled out during the intervening years, possessing the rangy, lean-muscled body of a long-distance runner.
“You look great,” he said.
She ran a hand over her hair, which she could feel springing into Little Orphan Annie corkscrews. The constant opening and closing of the automatic doors leading outside was bringing in the humidity from the winter drizzle falling outside.
Remembering what she’d told her sixteen-year-old self on that first YouTube video she’d done at the urging of her publisher, she refrained from pointing out that the expensive frizz fighter potion she bought in bulk was having a total smoothing fail moment. Instead, she smiled back up at him. “So do you. I like your hair.”
Unlike hers, his was behaving, rocking a Jake Gyllenhaal spiked up bedhead. Which took her mind to a place it really didn’t need to go.
Shaking off the vision of Adam Wayne climbing out of bed (Would he wear boxers? Briefs? Nothing at all?) she said, “It’s been a long time.” Talk about stating the obvious. Even the most socially inept of her characters were better conversationalists.
“Too long,” he agreed.
Then, putting his hand on her back, he guided her through the throng of travelers toward the luggage carousel. His light touch felt both protective and a bit possessive, wh
ich should have irked. She’d come a long way from that shy wallflower she’d once been. She was a New York woman who didn’t need a man to physically direct her through traffic as if she were some frail flower that might get her delicate petals trampled. But since she didn’t want to start things off with negative behavior, and because, damn it, his hand felt so good against the back of her jacket, she didn’t pull away.
They managed to make small talk as they waited for her luggage. About her flight, the meal, that was no longer served in coach—but hey, she could buy some sunflower seeds—and the wonder of flying over the Rockies and Cascades, which had made the lack of any meals worthwhile. He caught her up on the fundraiser and she told him how good it felt, after the past months spent deep in Fictionland, to rejoin the real world.
Adam did not say how much he liked the way her ivory sweater, which was woven from some fluffy material that reminded him of clouds, hugged her breasts beneath that open yellow rain parka. Nor did he add that as pretty as she looked in it, he wouldn’t mind lowering that metal zipper running down the front.
And even as he could hear Sax and Dillon ragging him, he didn’t ask her to the Snow Ball.
She didn’t say how she’d been hit by that unexpected lightning bolt of lust the moment she’d seen him. Nor how his touch had brought back last night’s too-vivid dream where that hand he’d placed so casually on her back had created havoc over every inch of her needy, neglected body.
And, although she knew that Caro would never have been so tongue-tied, Meghann couldn’t figure out a way to ask him if he was taking anyone to the Snow Ball. And if not, would he take her?
It was, she thought with a long, inward sigh, just like high school all over again.
“That’s mine,” she said, pointing out the bag as it rumbled toward them.
“Got it.” He leaned forward, scooped it up and put it down beside them. “How many more?”
