Love in a Pickle: A Silver Fox Small Town Romance (Green Valley Library Book 9)

by Smartypants Romance

“I don’t care about your millions,” I mutter, and his brow lifts, questioning me. I try to remember what Gideon said—think before you react. “I simply meant I didn’t realize you were still hands-on with your business.”

  “I’m very hands-on in all manners.” His dark eyes narrow. I wonder if he means outside of business, say, with the likes of me, or does he mean he was handsy with his date?

  “A woman enjoys a man with large hands,” I mutter through clenched teeth.

  “What does that mean?” Chet asks, his voice rising as do his brows.

  Large hands equate to other large body parts, but I certainly cannot mention that in front of the boys. “Nothing,” I grumble. “I hope you enjoyed your date.”

  I snap shut the book I haven’t finished reading to Malik and abruptly stand. Suddenly, I’m too warm despite the coolness near the large window. I lean down to run a tender hand over Malik’s cheek. Then I step over to Louie and Hunter and press a kiss to each of their heads. Hunter hates it, but Louie smiles up at me.

  “Scotia.” Chet follows me as I hurry to the front hall to retrieve my winter jacket and bag. His hand grips my upper arm, stilling me from the frantic movements of rushing to put on my coat.

  “No, really, Chet. I hope you had a nice time.” I grin through the gritted teeth smile I’ve perfected over decades. Mask in place, Scotia. It almost hurts to restore the barrier.

  He shakes his head. “It was only drinks. What is this?” he questions slowly as if asking why I’m upset, but that can’t be what he’s asking. To question if I was upset would mean he has feelings for me, concern for my feelings, which he doesn’t. “She’s only a friend.”

  “And what am I?” The question tumbles forward before I think. His silence gives me the answer I expected.

  I’m nothing to him.

  Chapter 20

  Stranger Visits

  [Chet]

  “Hey, boss, someone’s here to see you,” Todd calls out to me when I arrive at The Fugitive.

  Between my drinks with Henny and then the showdown with Scotia, last night was total shit. I’d had a shit day consulting with my board, who was approached by a potential buyer. I could sell my company tomorrow and make enough money to last me the rest of my life. I could retire and spend the remainder of my time with the boys and this bar and motel. But do I want to sit still at forty-six? I haven’t sat still in so long I’d go crazy if I tried, so the thought of turning my company over to someone else does not sound appealing to me. The last thing I can tackle is another shitstorm.

  “Who?” I snap, knowing my agitation isn’t with Todd.

  “Put her in the bus,” he clarifies, not answering my question but smirking at me.

  “Her?” I pause. “You what?” I clip. He has some balls, that one, even if he is my best friend.

  “Figured you didn’t want the mouse to get away.” He winks.

  “Mouse?” I question, glaring at him. His smirk turns into a guffaw, and he winks at Striker sitting at the bar.

  “I certainly wouldn’t let her get away, but then again, she already slipped by me,” the biker-regular teases.

  “What the hell?” I retort, not understanding these guys and not in the mood for riddles.

  “I’d be willing to trap that one,” Bones adds beside Striker, and my blood boils even though I don’t know who they are referencing.

  “I am not in the mood for this,” I grumble, and Striker interjects.

  “I’m in the mood. Send her to me.”

  “Shut it,” Todd warns. Whoever he’s protecting, she’s someone important. “She’s Big Poppy’s.”

  “Uh . . .” I don’t have anyone belonging to me, and that’s the way it needs to stay. Women just mess with your mind and your heart, confuse your body and drain your soul. I stalk toward the exit through the pool room, having parked in front of the bar as I typically do.

  “You can thank me in the morning,” Todd calls after me, and I flip him the bird. Just what I need, more headache.

  As I near the bus, I see the lights are on, but I can’t get a read on who is inside my home. It pisses me off that Todd so casually let someone in, and I press at the front door with a little more force than necessary.

  “Alright, just what the—” I freeze when I see Scotia sitting on the loveseat that doubles as an extra-large lounger for me alone. She sits at the edge of the cushion, elbows on her knees. Her head pops up at the rush of my body entering my space. “What are you doing here?”

  “I don’t know,” she whispers. Her eyes question me, as if wanting me to tell her why she’s in my home. My shoulders sag, and I hang my head.

  Between her aggravation the other night and her reaction over Hennessy, I don’t know what to say to her. She’s been all salt and vinegar, and I need sweet right now.

  “Darlin’, it’s been kind of a rough few days, and I can’t play games with you right now.” I exhale heavily after admitting the truth. I’m just tired. My mind has been all over the place after drinks with Henny. I’ve been trying to figure out what my ex-lover wants from me after all these years, and what the woman before me wants from me now.

  What am I? I didn’t have an answer. There are so many things I could want Scotia to be to me, but I’m not willing to tell her. I’m afraid to tell her what I want.

  She doesn’t remark on my plea not to play games, but she also doesn’t move. She’s dressed in jeans and that barn jacket again, which surprises me. It’s different from the business suits I’ve typically seen her wear. She’s also wearing knee-high boots and a scarf at her neck. The entire ensemble makes her softer, less intense, and reminds me of a woman under a hotel sheet one morning, looking vulnerable and scared.

  “Feel like a beer?”

  She wrinkles her nose before she lies. “Sure.”

  I step around her to the small fridge and remove two bottles. Before cracking them open, I turn back to her. Wondering if she’d be up for something, I ask, “You warm enough in that outfit?”

  Her brows crease in question.

  “Follow me somewhere?” I continue.

  “Sure,” she says again, her forehead furrowed. Her quiet one-word answers are unnerving. What is she doing here? What does she want from me? Who am I to her? The questions are too much, and my brain needs a break.

  I place both beers in one hand and tug the coverlet off my bed, tossing it over my shoulder. Opening a cabinet, I remove a second blanket and lug it over the first. I tilt my head for Scotia to follow me and we exit my home. Once outside, I lead her to the back of the bus.

  “I’ll help you up,” I tell her as I nod toward the metal ladder hanging down from the roof. It doesn’t reach the ground. I shove each beer bottle in a back pocket and grip her waist. She lets out a little squeal as I hoist her upward. She reaches out for the rungs, and I hold her until her feet land on the bottom step. “Up you go.”

  She slowly climbs upward without question, and I follow her. On the top of the bus is a platform, flat and hanging over the rounded roofline just a little bit. The deck isn’t terribly wide but is still big enough for two to lie down on. Not that I’ve ever brought someone up here before to measure it in that manner. I only know it can hold me. I spread one blanket, so we aren’t on the cold wooden boards.

  “Lie down,” I softly command as I set the beer bottles on the platform. Scotia drops down to the blanket and lies back. I settle next to her and tug the second blanket primarily over her. I’m not cold despite the November air. We both gaze upward.

  “Wow,” she whispers. I tuck my arm behind my head and just stare up at the star-splattered sky. The night air is crisp, and the darkness overhead is filled with pinpricks of light. After a few low breaths, I calm from the past forty-eight hours. Scotia is stock-still next to me, and eventually, I roll my head to look at her. She’s still gazing up at the nighttime covering.

  “Why are you here?”

  “I had something to tell you last night and didn’t when I learned about your
date.” She exhales. There’s more she isn’t saying, and I should ask what is so important she drove nearly an hour to see me, but instead, I interject with clarification.

  “It wasn’t a date,” I defend, and she twists her neck, so she faces me.

  “It was drinks, but as Dewey so eloquently explained, it’s all just semantics.”

  I sigh and turn my attention back to the stars, recalling last evening with Hennessy.

  “Fine. She was more than a friend once. She was my first love, but it’s old news.” When Scotia doesn’t respond, I continue. “She stopped by the house a few nights ago, just out of the blue, after all these years.”

  “How many years?” she asks softly. The weight of her gaze presses on the side of my face, but I don’t look at her yet.

  “Twenty-one. Twenty-one long years and she stood at my front door like it was yesterday.” I’m quiet again, recalling how she looked last night. Her makeup a little heavier than I remembered. Her eyes hesitant when I asked her about her husband’s death. She admitted again she had children—two boys aged nine and six.

  “What happened?” Scotia questions. On the one hand, I want to tell her she probably doesn’t want to hear my tale. I’m not certain I want to share it with someone like Scotia, who might judge me for my history, but then I consider what she told me about her husband and how I’m the only one she’s ever told.

  “When I met Hennessy, she was seventeen, and I was twenty. I was working in a gas station, and I pumped her gas. She didn’t want to get her pretty dress dirty, and I wanted a closer look at her shiny red sports car. Our eyes met, drifted apart, and then met again. She smiled at me, and I was a goner, but I knew better. Hennessy Miller was out of my league. I was raised in the system.”

  “System?” Scotia questions.

  “I was a foster kid.” Like the boys I now foster, only my life was nothing like theirs. “I didn’t have nice things like my boys, though.” I don’t want to go into detail about trailer parks and small apartments. Fists and insults. People working the system only for a check. There are bad people in the foster industry. Then again, there are also angels, like Maura Hawes.

  Scotia doesn’t respond, so I continue. “Later that night, Henny returned to the service station and bought a soda. She lingered in the store, and we chatted.” I exhale hard, recalling how Henny flirted with me, and how I gave it right back to her. “I was everything her silver-spoon, rebellious spirit needed to piss off her daddy, and she was just everything to me.” Everything I longed to have. The woman. The family. The home.

  “I wasn’t good enough for her,” I state, staring up at the sky but no longer seeing the constellations. The dots of light blur together.

  “That can’t be,” Scotia whispers, and I close my eyes.

  “She went off to college after we had a summer fling, and I worked my ass off to learn everything about running a gas station. Fast-forward five years, and the owner died, leaving me everything.” Frank Sepco didn’t have any family. He left me that old service station and a nest of money.

  “Kid, I see something in you,” he muttered around a burning cigarette and a haze of smoke. “You can ride, but don’t you die for anyone else but yourself.” He didn’t want me mixed up with some of the local motorcycle clubs within the surrounding valleys and manning his service station kept me out of trouble.

  “You remind me of myself, but I want you to be bigger than all this.” He waved his cigarette around the garage attached to the shop, and I held my breath, hoping the ashes didn’t hit a gas spill.

  “What an incredible gift,” Scotia says, and I finally turn to her.

  “I turned that one station into two and then acquired a third. By the time Henny graduated and returned to Knoxville, I had a plan for another. I didn’t have much to offer her when she went off to college, but I promised her I’d make something of myself.”

  “I’ll wait for you,” she’d promised me in return. Lies. Everything had been a lie.

  “You certainly have,” Scotia mutters, and my stomach sours. Is she another woman only interested in status and finances? She was certainly curious about me when she knew me as only Chester Chesterfield. But she knows more about me now than most women ever have. We’ve discussed my net worth, but the other night, she told me she wasn’t interested in my money. The way she said she wasn’t interested led me to believe she was telling the truth. Could she want something else from me? Something more meaningful?

  “It wasn’t enough.” I pause, taking a second to collect my thoughts before speaking again. “I’d never had a home, so I built her a house. I wanted to marry her. Instead, she got engaged to someone else and married him.”

  “Jeffrey Heiner asked me to marry him.” I remember staring at Henny in disbelief.

  “But I want to marry you. I’ve built you a home.” We were sitting in the driveway of the house. Me in the driver’s seat. Her in the passenger side. She didn’t even ask to see inside the mountainside mansion I’d constructed over the previous year for her.

  “I never asked for this,” she replied.

  “You said you’d wait for me,” I reminded her.

  She didn’t answer me.

  “What are you doing with me, then?” I’d snapped at her, wondering why she was even sitting in my car if she didn’t want the house or my heart. She shrugged and then gave me a sheepish grin.

  She wanted a part of me, which was all too willing to please her.

  “How could she do that to you?” Scotia sighs, interrupting my memory with displeasure in her tone.

  I turn back to her. “She wanted his money, his name, and his status.” The bitterly spoken words hit the mark, and Scotia flinches. She shifts to peer back at the sky, and I take in her profile. Her midnight hair nearly blends with the night sky, but that white stripe is like a beacon shining out at me. Her eyes glow despite the darkness around us. She chews at her lip.

  “I guess you have a habit of attracting shallow women.”

  Do I? Is it that I attract those wanting something from me? Or am I attracted to them for some sick reason? Am I the one trying to prove I’m good enough for them?

  I definitely have my concerns that Scotia would eventually walk away from me. I’m keeping her at arm’s length because of those doubts. She’ll grow bored of various parts of my life, realizing I’m not three slivers but one man. A man trying to do right by three boys and build them a future.

  I blame Henny for the triggers inside me—the doubt and the fear that I’ll never be enough for someone.

  “So how did your date go?” Scotia’s voice turns edgy, and I don’t bother to correct her for the hundredth time.

  I nervously sat at the bar, downing a whiskey before Henny arrived at the Knoxville pub where we agreed to meet. She entered, and I expected my heart to beat right out of my chest. I was so anxious. Why now? This question riddled me over and over again. Why was Henny knocking on my door now? Was it the death of her husband? Was it her two fatherless children? Was it her move to a cabin in the woods?

  Nothing made sense to me.

  “It’s so strange that you found me again, Hen. After all this time.”

  “Is it strange? We were always meant to be,” she stated, and that’s when I needed another whiskey. She was playing with me, just as she’d done all those years ago.

  “If we were meant to be, we would have been,” I stated, not wanting to hurt her but protecting myself.

  “We can be again,” she said, her voice lowering as her lids dipped. Once upon a time, a simple smile from her would have brought me to my knees. I would have done her bidding and her pleasuring. Now, I wasn’t so eager to kneel.

  “Life is more complicated now,” I told her, and she snorted.

  “You have no idea,” she muttered under her breath, then rapidly finished the drink before her.

  What I did know was the pattering in my heart was not an attraction to her. Her forehead was too smooth, and her lips were too big. She did look
plastic like Hunter said. Then there was the hesitation in her voice when she told me about her husband’s death. She hardly mentioned her children, only stating her oldest was a handful.

  With Henny’s list of woes, I’d wondered if she needed money. She seemed aware of my continued success, but I wasn’t offering a handout. I told her I could give her a job, asking if she possessed any skills. With narrowed eyes, she told me she’d never worked a day in her life, relying on her husband for everything. He ran her father’s company.

  “She propositioned me.” I finally answer Scotia’s question, finding the admission strangely similar to how I met Scotia. Was Scotia another woman to prove myself to? Was I worthy of her?

  “Bless her heart,” Scotia mutters beside me, and I continue to stare at her as she closes her eyes and swallows.

  Is she jealous again?

  “I turned her down.”

  “You did?” Scotia’s voice squeaks as she returns her focus to me. Her quiet question echoes softly around us. Those gray eyes of hers sparkle with their own set of pinpricks, softening at my confession.

  Henny laid a hand on my forearm, giving me a look that would have worked in another lifetime, but did nothing for me now. When her blue eyes met mine, I realized they weren’t the right color. I wanted silver eyes gazing up at me—like the ones sparkling in the dark beside me now. Henny’s blonde hair was a little too golden, and I found myself thinking again the coloring was wrong. I preferred midnight ink with a streak of white. That undefined stripe was like an undefined part of the woman looking at me.

  “I’ve kind of had someone else on my mind lately,” I admit.

  “You have?” She rolls to her side, angling toward me. Her lips slowly curl into a smile while her eyes sparkle. I shift my head from the arm it was on and reach out for her.

  “I’m not interested in Henny . . . or Savannah,” I clarify. We still haven’t discussed what happened the other night—why she pushed me away when Savannah caught us kissing.

  “You were embarrassed to be kissing me,” Scotia whispers.