by Cara Colter
She turned on the ladder, felt the shock of who was there as if she had conjured him by thinking of him so much!
Her fingers felt strangely numb and she nearly dropped her container of paint. In her attempt to keep her hold on it, she lost her balance.
He was beside her in a second, lifted her easily from around the waist and settled her solidly on the floor.
The dog, of course, went crazy as soon as David touched her, and ran a frantic circle around them, barking.
“I got paint on your nice suit. Sorry.” She stepped away from him, trying not to stare, trying not to drink in his features like she was parched and he was a long, cold drink of water.
“David,” she said, and heard some softness in her voice—the softness she had revealed to him and he had then used to hurt her. Keeping that in mind, she recovered, set down her paint and folded her arms over her chest.
She tried not to feel dismayed that he looked so unwell. Had he been sick? He looked like he had lost fifteen pounds, and there had not been any extra flesh on him to begin with! There were dark circles under his eyes, and his cheeks were whisker shadowed. His hair was a little long in the back, touching his white shirt, curling a little around his ears.
Kayla realized she wouldn’t be much to look at at the moment, either. She really regretted the disposable painter’s coverall that made her look a little bit like a snowman.
“What are you doing here?” she demanded, so afraid to hope for anything anymore, steeling herself against the crazy flip-flopping of her heart.
“Full price, Kayla? Are you crazy? You could have waited for spring to buy. That’s closer to your very small money-making season.”
She should have known that’s why he would have come! A poor business decision was as irresistible to him as she had once hoped she would be!
She stripped the disappointment from her voice. “How do you know I paid full price? Have you been spying on me?”
He looked a little sheepish.
She had no intention of letting him know that her heart quickened at the very thought he was keeping tabs on her, that he cared even a little bit. She wanted desperately to ask him how his mom was doing, and how he was coping, but his last words reared up in her head.
And he was right. Feeling for people was always what got her in trouble—trying to fix their pain was her worst flaw.
“You should have offered less if you were taking it at the end of the season. You think people are going to be eating ice cream for Thanksgiving? If, by some miracle, you manage to reopen by then?”
“I’ll be open by then,” she said stubbornly. “I’m doing two specialty ice creams for Thanksgiving, a pumpkin and a cranberry.”
“Appealing,” he said sarcastically.
“I don’t care what appeals to you,” she lied.
He flinched, and she wanted to take it back, but she didn’t. She stood there waiting to see why he had come.
He drew in a deep breath, shoved his hands in his pockets and studied his shoes, which looked very expensive.
Bastigal ventured in and sniffed them, backed off growling. He managed to leave a white paint mark on the toe of one.
“Understandable,” David said, “that you would not care what appeals to me. I’m afraid I hurt you.”
“Nonsense,” she said quickly, but her voice had a little squeak in it.
He went on as if she had not denied it. “The last time I saw you, I was a jerk, Kayla.”
“Yes, you were.”
“You aren’t going to make this easy for me, are you?”
“No, I’m not.”
“I wanted to hurt you,” he said slowly. “I wanted to drive you away.”
“I’d say that worked. I had a very nasty bus ride back to Blossom Valley.”
“I offered you a driver.”
“Big of you. I made the most of my bus ride. I thought of ice cream flavors the whole way,” she lied, and then, as if she could convince him it was not a lie, “Hot Banana Pepper, Cinnamon and Pear, French Champagne, Chinese Noodle.”
She had not really thought of any of those flavors until just this second. All of a sudden it penetrated the almost panicky sensation that she could not let him know how she really felt, what he had actually said.
I wanted to hurt you.
That was not David.
I wanted to drive you away.
“I couldn’t leave it the way it was,” he said. “Kayla, I could not leave you with the impression that it was about you. That it was because I didn’t care about you. Or need you.”
Her heart felt like it stopped in her chest. What was he saying? That he did care about her? That he did need her?
She took in his ravaged features, and suddenly saw, as if a light had been turned on in a dark room.
She saw so clearly it felt as if she would explode.
David Blaze loved her.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“KAYLA,” DAVID SAID, his voice barely a whisper. “My family has a long history of health problems. I wouldn’t wish them on anyone.”
From her memory bank she pulled a sentence. No sympathy, remember? he said. But keep that in mind. Bad genetics.
He had said it lightly, but there had been something in his eyes that was not light at all.
It had been that day when they were walking home, dripping from the lake, and the young policeman had reminded him of his father.
And he had told her how his father had died.
“You think you’re going to have a heart attack. Like you dad,” she said softly. She was aware her voice was trembling as the truth of why he had come here filled her up. To the top. And then to overflowing.
“That might be a mercy compared to the other thing.”
“The other thing?”
“It can be genetic,” he said softly. “What my mother has. They’ve isolated a gene. It’s called the E gene.”
He pulled an envelope from his pocket and handed it to her. She took it, not understanding. She glanced at if briefly and read the return address: Billings and Morton. It meant nothing to her.
“It’s from a laboratory. They do independent genetic analysis.”
“Oh, boy,” she said. “And you’re lecturing me on wasting money foolishly? What did this cost?”
“That’s not the point!”
“I bet this cost nearly as much as my new flooring,” Kayla said.
“You are missing the point. This is very serious business, Kayla,” he said tersely. “I was tested. Open it. And then we’ll know.”
“Know what?”
“Whether,” he said softly, “I am worth taking a chance on.”
She stared at him, and then she began to laugh. Into his astonished features, she said, “Oh, you stupid, stupid man.”
He looked stunned. Well, obviously as the head of one of Canada’s most successful companies he had never heard that before.
Then he looked annoyed, and folded his arms over his chest.
Who was really the stupid one, Kayla asked herself? She should have figured this out. She’d known from the moment she saw him sleeping on his mother’s back lawn, guarding the door, that this was what he did. He protected those he loved.
And when he could not protect? When it was not in his power?
Then he retreated, to nurse his sense of failure, impotence in the face of what mattered most to him.
She saw in a brand-new light why he had never renewed their friendship after she had married Kevin. Had it ever been about Kevin at all? Or had it been about his own love for her? And how he would hide that, especially when he saw she was unhappy or needed his protection.
The love had been there between them for so long, constrained, and now it was breaking free.
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She felt her love for David quicken within her. It felt as if a light had gone on, that was filling her and then expanding beyond her, filling the room and then beyond that, the street.
It felt as if the love within her could, unleashed, reach out and fill up the whole world.
Kayla looked down at the envelope in her hands, and then, without opening it, she ripped it to shreds.
“Hey!”
“No,” she said firmly, throwing the pieces of paper up in the air and watching them scatter. “We’re going to pretend we opened it. And we’re going to pretend it said yes.”
“Yes?” he said, flummoxed.
“Yes.” She nodded emphatically, and crossed the space that separated them. She reached up and ran her palm over the rough surface of his whisker-bristled cheek.
“We’re going to pretend it said yes. And that you went to the doctor and he told you that you had heart disease, too. We’re going to pretend you could die any second.”
He stared at her, baffled. And annoyed.
And yet she could see the hope in his eyes, too, so she went on, her confidence and her certainty increasing with each word she spoke.
“And while we’re at it,” Kayla said, “we’re going to pretend I went to someone who could tell the future. Who is famous for it and never gets it wrong. A gypsy woman with a head scarf and too much makeup and earrings as big a pie plates looked into her crystal ball—”
“You are not comparing a legitimate medical laboratory like Billings and Morton to a fortune teller!”
“Yes, I am,” she continued, unperturbed by the interruption. “The gypsy woman said I was going to get hit by a car and die instantly.”
“Stop it,” he said.
“No, you stop it.”
He looked stunned. Really, being the head of a large company had made David Blaze far too accustomed to being listened to, even when he was wrong.
“Don’t you see?” Kayla asked him, suddenly serious. “Don’t you get it, David? We are going to live like it said yes. We are going to live each and every day as if one of us could be gone. Instantly. Or just disappear without warning from the face of the earth. Or change beyond recognition.
“And that is going to allow us to celebrate this moment. We are going to drink each other in, as if this day, this very second, might be our last together. As if everything could change in a moment.
“And we’re going to start like this.”
She stood on her tiptoes and she took his lips with her own. For a moment, he held himself stiffly, resisting.
And then with a moan of complete surrender, he kissed her back. He wrapped his hands in her hair and pulled her so close to him that not even air could squeeze in between them, and certainly not her overexcited dog!
Bastigal ran frantic circles around them, yapping hysterically.
“Bastigal,” David said, taking his lips from hers for just a second. “Hush up and get used to it.”
The dog fell silent. Then he sat down abruptly and stared at them, worried. And then his tail began to thump cautiously, then joyously, on the floor.
If there is anything a dog recognizes, it is the absolute essence of what is going on.
* * *
David let go of his last need to control, to protect Kayla from the folly of loving him. He drank in what she was giving him.
She loved him. She loved him completely and deeply and he realized, astounded, that he needed the way she loved him.
Kayla’s way of looking at the world was opposite to his own.
He was pragmatic. She was whimsical. He was sensible. She was impulsive. He was ruled by his mind. She was ruled by her heart.
Her way was not wrong. And neither was his. But each of them only formed half a picture. They needed each other to come into perfect balance.
And he was aware that maybe he needed her a whole lot more than she needed him. He had walked alone for too long, battered by the ravages of love: his father, Kevin and now, his mother.
She, too, was battered. But she was the one with the courage to say yes to all of it. To the storm, and to the rainbow. To the tears and to the laughter.
It occurred to him that Kayla would show him the very heart of what love meant. And as he took her offered lips, it felt as if he was sealing a deal.
That would give him the life he had always dreamed of, and been afraid to ask for. A life that was so much more than a great condo and a fleet of cars and a successful business.
A life that was full in a different way, and a better way.
A life that was full in the only way that really counted.
And so David began his courtship of the girl he had always loved. And he courted her as if she might be gone from him at any second, or he from her, and as if it was a sacred obligation to cram as much joy and as much life into those seconds as they could.
He soon realized it didn’t matter what they were doing, whether they were jumping into the amazing colors of the sugar maple leaves that they had raked in her yard in Blossom Valley, or attending a black-tie art auction in New York.
It didn’t matter if they were throwing snowballs at each other after the first snow, or getting ready for the charity Christmas Ball Blaze Enterprises held every year. It didn’t matter if they were having a quiet glass of wine in his apartment, watching the New Year’s Eve fireworks explode over the city or sitting with his mother, taking pleasure from her enjoyment in the CD Kayla had picked out for her.
It didn’t matter if they were having a croissant at a bakery, after he’d convinced her they should go to Paris for springtime, or whether they were supervising the installation of the new ice cream cooler at Dandy Lion’s Roaring Good Ice Cream getting ready for the grand reopening.
It didn’t matter if he was watching the awe on her face as she saw the Louvre for the very first time, or if they were paddling a canoe across the lake, trying to keep Bastigal from jumping in after the ducks that swam beside them.
It didn’t matter if she was asleep with her head on his shoulder in the airport lounge after their flight had been delayed because of fog, or if he was covered in grease from trying to get that old lawn mower going for one more season. She wouldn’t let him buy a new one. She claimed that old lawn mower was going in her memory box someday.
“Everybody else gets a memory box,” he teased. “Trust you to get a memory crate.”
But the truth was they were going to need a crate to store all these memories in!
As spring began to turn to summer once more, David watched his calendar, and a year to the day that he had seen Kayla riding her bike down the main street of Blossom Valley, a year to the day that she had been stung by the bee, he proposed.
He had the ring put in a special box that he had custom made. The box was yellow and black and shaped like a bumble bee.
For the ring he had chosen a perfect, brilliant white diamond mined in the Canadian arctic. He had consulted on the design of the setting, wanting it to reflect Kayla’s personality, simple but complex, light but deep.
On the day that marked the anniversary of their meeting again, while Kayla was busy overseeing things at her astonishingly busy ice cream parlor—people were actually driving from Toronto to sample some of those crazy flavors like jalapeño Havarti, for Pete’s sake?—he brought a team into her backyard.
And they transformed it.
White fairy lights were threaded by the thousands through the trees and shrubs. A structure was erected at the center of her yard, a gauzy tent, and inside it was a table set on a carpet that covered the lawn. The table was covered in sparkling white linen, set exquisitely for two.
Every available surface inside that tent was either full of candles or flowers.
A chef was working magic in her kitchen and at her barbecue. A wa
iter stood by, elegant in tails and white gloves. A string quartet was set up in one corner of the yard to supply music.
David had even managed to get Bastigal into a tux that matched his own, right down to the subtle pink of the bow tie, and pleased with himself for this detail, he had fastened the ring box onto the back of Bastigal’s suit, and then locked him in the house.
And that’s where things went wrong.
Or right, depending what kind of memories you wanted to put in your memory box.
Because everything had gone perfectly. The dinner was exquisite. The music was beautiful. The summer evening night was soft with warmth and fragrance.
Kayla was gorgeous, sitting across from him, in her white Dandy Lion uniform, laughing and crying, and then laughing again.
Once, he had seen himself as pragmatic, and her as the believer in miracles.
But wasn’t he living a miracle? He and Kayla had had a chance to love each other once, and circumstances had taken that chance from them.
Now they had been given what he saw as the rarest and most beautiful of gifts.
“Here’s to second chances,” David said, lifting his champagne flute to Kayla’s.
A second chance that was made better by the fact that both their lives had given them things that had made them stronger and ultimately better, more ready for what an adult love required.
On cue, just as they finished dinner and before dessert, when he could not wait another second with his secret, with a quickly lifted finger from David, the waiter casually went across her back deck and let Bastigal out of the house.
David knew the little dog, having missed her all day, would make a beeline for Kayla and deliver the ring.
Except at the very moment when the dog was hurtling himself across the yard in a paroxysm of excited welcome for Kayla, the chef was flambéing dessert at their table.
At the sudden poof of blue flame, Bastigal stopped. Then he tucked his tail between his legs and with a single startled yip, ran away and, though it seemed impossible, squeezed himself underneath the gate and was gone.
It seemed like a full minute of stunned silence fell between them.
