by Maggie Wells
Mortified by both his clumsiness and the crass language, Jake scrambled for a way to recover. Women, though he loved them, had a way of making him feel like an awkward adolescent again. In high school, he’d learned to hide his awkwardness behind mediocre athletic skills. By the end of his first year in Tuscaloosa, he’d cultivated a kind of hipster-intellectual thing girls found bafflingly appealing. But as he moved on to his post-graduate work, he’d found himself surrounded by fewer women and more men. Engineers and scientists. Men without his father’s appreciation of the absurd and his mother’s slyly sharp sense of humor. A bevy of colleagues so dry he looked like the class cut-up by comparison.
Knowing he’d blown any chance of appearing suave or even mildly cool in front of the woman on the other side of the round table, he snatched up Saturn and dropped onto a knee. He held the ringed planet out in front of him like an offering and peered at the black-clad figure hanging back in the shadows. “I know you said you wanted at least a full carat, but this one has almost twice the mass of the whole Earth.”
His spur of the moment proposal was met with a surprisingly girlish giggle.
Though the sound made him cringe, he didn’t let the disconcerting laugh stop him. “The core is probably iron and nickel, but I can promise you, you’ll never want for ammonia.”
Again, the woman giggled. She sounded young. Too young for him. Disappointment flared inside him but immediately subsided. Those flashes of want had been popping up more and more lately, and he didn’t need his PhD in observational astronomy to determine its source. He was jealous of his brother. Sort of. Jealousy implied envy, which essentially meant he thought Brian didn’t deserve what he’d found in Brooke, and that conclusion was light-years off the mark. He didn’t begrudge his little brother one bit of his happiness. He wanted a relationship like theirs for himself. One day. With a girl who wasn’t a giggler.
His fingers trailed over the rings and he was startled to find not only were the materials anchored to the foam ball evenly spaced, but whoever had built this particular model had taken the time to coat some kind of bubbly paint over the top of the rings. He smiled. Replicating continuous and discontinuous arcs of rocks, ice, and dust wasn’t easy, but some kid had tried.
“May I….” The soft, tremulous request jolted him from his marveling. “I, um, that one’s mine,” his companion said in a rush. “Can I have that?”
Jake’s head jerked back, but his hands shot out as if he were actually holding a ball of Saturn’s toxic gasses. The girl removed the Styrofoam planet from his grasp, turned as if she hadn’t committed an intra-galactic mugging, then disappeared into the darkness at the edge of the room. Planting his hand on the table top, he staggered to his feet, all the while groping in his pocket for his glasses.
Electrical tape be damned.
Back in focus at last, Jake turned in a slow circle, scanning the room with eyes far more attuned to darkness than light. He almost skipped right over her. Would have, if she weren’t momentarily spotlighted in a shaft of light courtesy of the swinging door leading to the kitchen. She had the entire solar system laid out on an abandoned table near the door, a big orange and yellow papier-mâché Sun at the center, the precisely beringed Saturn in its place between Jupiter and Uranus.
And she was a girl. A tall, slender girl with dark hair and the pale skin of a bookworm. He was always really bad at pinpointing ages. Middle school. His mother had said the centerpieces were made by middle school students. The girl looked to be fourteen or fifteen, but if she’d made the replica of Saturn, as she claimed, she had to be in middle school still. Jake was still trying to figure out the appropriate age range when she pulled a small brown ball out of her pocket and placed the orb on the very edge of the table.
Pluto.
He’d proposed marriage to a fellow Pluto fan.
If not for the age difference, and the obvious legal and moral entanglements, he might have thought he’d met the girl of his dreams. As it was, he’d settle for knowing he’d encountered a kindred spirit at this tedious event.
Caught in a geek-to-geek gravitational pull, he crossed the room. She looked up at his approach. Color rose in her cheeks. Little curling tendrils of her dark hair escaped her ponytail. Round hazel eyes widened even farther. She took a step back toward the kitchen door, and he held up both hands in the universal sign of surrender.
“I come in peace.”
Up close, he could see he’d been way off in his initial assessment. The girl was probably closer to twelve. Her height made her appear more spindly than slender, and her face retained the unformed fullness of a child’s. But her eyes. No longer wide with surprise and fear, he caught the sharp gleam of wary amusement in them. This was a girl long accustomed to humoring lesser earthlings.
She looked past him to the people crowded around the bars and dance floor. “Are you boldly going where no man has gone before?”
He returned her steady gaze, careful to keep his expression appropriately solemn. “The bit is better with the split infinitive.”
“I can’t do it.” The girl shrugged, tossing off the idea of using bad grammar as blithely as she’d swiped the planet from him. “Incorrect grammar is bad for the complexion.”
She fired that little salvo as if she’d heard or used a similar sentiment a dozen times before. Unable to hold back any longer, Jake grinned. “Hey, I’m Jake.”
“Grace.” She offered her name with a regal nod. “Thank you for not crushing my planet.”
“That would have been a travesty. I like what you did with the rings. The bubbles.”
The girl blinked as if he were speaking Klingon. Something he hadn’t done since he was twelve. Not in public, anyway.
“Bubbles?” Her untamed dark brows drew together in a slashing vee. They reminded him of the way he’d drawn birds when he was boy. Then his meaning sank in and her eyebrows took flight. “Oh! You mean the debris? I used glue, sand, and a little bit of pea gravel for the bigger chunks.” She paused and he caught a flash of gleaming silver braces as her teeth sank into her lower lip. Suddenly, the confidence she’d projected like a force field fled. “I swiped the gravel from Mrs. Anderson’s driveway, but I only took the smallest pieces.”
“I won’t tell.” Without thinking, he leaned over and moved Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars slightly closer to one another, adjusted Jupiter and Saturn, then nudged Neptune another inch closer to the edge. “You seem to know your stuff.” Satisfied with his contribution, he straightened and placed his hands on his hips. “Are you a big donor? Platinum level?”
Grace giggled, but this time the sound didn’t grate his nerves. She might be tall, and, judging by her obvious interest in things space-related, a little nerdy, but the way she laughed was not an outlier. Girls her age were supposed to giggle. In this case, the high-pitched laugh was entirely appropriate. Which was good. Jake preferred the times when his data lined up.
He jerked his chin toward her model of Pluto and sat in one of the chairs to take a closer look. “I see you’re a bit of a rebel, bringing your dwarf friend there into the picture.”
“My mom is working,” she said, darting a nervous glance at the kitchen door. “She told me to stay out of the way, but...”
She grimaced, and he almost laughed out loud. He had a lot in common with this girl. “Got bored?”
This time, only one of those dark eyebrows moved, arching upward in challenge. “I didn’t want some drunk guy smashing my planet.”
“I’m not drunk. I was visually impaired.” Jake tapped the taped arm of his glasses to back up his story. “My mom didn’t want me looking like a nerd with tape on my glasses.”
She nodded as if she understood his predicament completely. “Tape on the eyeglasses would be an indication of nerdiness.”
Her too-easy agreement shocked a laugh out of him. “I believe a bit of tape might be the first indicator,” he said with a pointed look. “But hardly conclusive.”
“Hey, you were the one who went Star Trek on me,” he pointed out.
This time, he got to see the whole array of metalworks when she smiled, complete with neon pink and green rubber bands. “Star Trek is a classic.”
“Only the original.”
“And The Next Generation.”
“Next wasn’t bad, neither was Voyager, but I couldn’t get into Deep Space Nine.”
“I think it’s underappreciated,” she said, dropping into the chair beside him.
“Space stations are boring,” he asserted.
“You want to split infinitives,” she shot back, a teasing lilt softening the accusation.
Jake barked a laugh, then sat back and crossed his arms over his chest. “I think you’re flirting with me.”
Her cheeks glowed Mercury red, but her chin tipped up. He had to admire the kid’s confidence. At her age, he would have crawled under the table before attempting to spar with an adult. She wasn’t attempting. He was beginning to think she was winning.
She looked down her snubbed nose and lifted one shoulder in a shrug so dismissive he almost fell out of his chair. “Well, you did ask me to marry you.”
“What’s going on here?”
The question sliced through the middle of their conversation like a lightsaber. Jake jerked upright as Grace scrambled out of her chair. He looked up to find a woman with short dark hair glaring down at him. His brain took a full thirty seconds to compute that the woman breaking up the party was none other than Darla Kennet, one of the regular waitresses at The Pit barbecue joint and a former St. Pat’s Academy student.
“Oh. Hey, Darla.” He came to his feet like the well-brought-up man his mama raised. “I didn’t know you worked here, too.”
“She moonlights for catering companies at night,” Grace supplied helpfully.
But the tiny woman next to him was obviously not in the mood for friendly conversation. She crossed her arms over her chest and sneered at him. “Perhaps I can get a discount for your wedding.” She added a tinkling little laugh to the end of the comment, but her brittle tone made her displeasure painfully clear. She was not the least bit amused.
“We were, uh….” He pressed a finger to the bridge of his glasses. A nervous habit—one he’d tried countless times to break—but something about the fire burning in Darla’s dark eyes disturbed him. “A joke.” Stymied, he waved a hand toward the collected centerpieces. “Grace did a great job with Saturn. Very realistic.”
Grace darted a glance at him before turning her full attention back to her mother. Her voice pitched up an eager octave. “He’s one of the ones who sponsor the It IS Rocket Science program, Mama.”
Darla gave her daughter’s arm an absent pat. “Hey, sweets, I’m almost done. Why don’t you go in the kitchen? Marcel has some leftover mousse cups.”
“But we were talk—” Grace began, but her mother cut her off.
The woman he’d seen at least once a week every week for as long as he could remember didn’t take her eyes off him. “Go on. I’m gonna have a chat with Mr. Dalton here.”
“Dr. Dalton,” Grace corrected too quickly.
Jake wanted to pat the girl on the shoulder and tell her he was taking no offense to her mother’s blatant disapproval, but judging by the tight lines appearing at the sides of Darla’s mouth, he was half afraid he’d lose the hand. He could see she didn’t much care if he were Dr. Seuss himself. She was gonna take a chunk out of him for talking to her kid.
Resigned, Jake drew a deep breath then exhaled slowly. “You’re so lucky. The mousse was awesome.” He inclined his head in a courtly nod. “Nice to meet you, Grace.”
Undeterred by two dismissals, Grace gestured to the table. “Mom, look at the—”
“Grace Mary Kennet.”
Darla ground all three names out from between clenched teeth, and Grace’s instincts for survival finally kicked in. “Nice to meet you, Dr. Dalton,” she said in a rush, then beat a path for the swinging door.
Anger flared deep inside him. He’d done nothing wrong. How dare Darla Kennet look at him as if he were nothing more than primordial ooze? Hell, he and Darla’d been acquainted for most of their lives. He’d never done anything to justify her thinking the kinds of thoughts so clearly running through her head.
He tore his eyes from Darla long enough to meet her daughter’s gaze, then smiled as wide as he could. He’d be damned if he let her suspicious mind drag him down to her level. “The pleasure was all mine, Miss Grace,” he returned with exaggerated courtliness. “You’ll think about my offer? My mother thinks I’m a good catch.”
Darla watched until her daughter disappeared through the swinging door. Then she turned on him, nostrils flaring. “She’s thirteen years old.”
Darla hurled the words at him in a hiss and Jake instantly went on high alert. “Hey, I don’t know what’s going on in that perverted mind of yours—”
“You’re the one out here chatting up little girls,” she shot back.
He sneered at her assessment. “I was not chatting her up.”
“You were flirting with her!”
“I was joking with her.” His voice rose, but a blast of brass from the band kept it from carrying. “She looked bored and lonely. She’s the only kid in the room—”
“Are you trying to imply I’m a bad mother?”
He blinked, wondering exactly how she’d managed such a tremendous leap. “No, I was simply stating the facts.”
“Like the fact that you proposed to my daughter.”
“I offered your thirteen-year-old daughter my hand in marriage and the rings of Saturn,” he snarled. “You know what? I’m not sure she ever gave me a straight answer. Maybe I should ask her again. I mean, what girl can resist the promise of a nice debris field?” He took a menacing step toward the kitchen door, but Darla literally threw herself in front of it to stop him. “Jesus, Darla,” he cried, incredulous.
“Young girls are impressionable. And they love attention from older guys.”
Stupefied by the whole conversation, he turned his head to stare at the throng on the far end of the ballroom. Never in a million years would he ever have thought he’d wish himself back over there, but life was funny that way. Sometimes, when you least expected, a fucking asteroid came hurtling at a guy out of nowhere and what do you know, Bruce Willis was not around to blow the damn thing up.
“I was talking to the girl about planets and Star Trek,” he muttered. Turning back to Darla, he cocked his head to the side as he searched her expression for a hint of what might have spurred such a gross overreaction. “I did not, nor was I even thinking about touching your child in any way.”
“Maybe you’d be better off talking to a girl your own age.”
He stared down at her, trying to wrap his mind around the turn the evening had taken. While he and Darla had been a couple years apart in school and were never anything close to friends, he’d always been friendly when he saw her at The Pit. He said please and thank you, rarely asked for anything more demanding than an extra cup of sauce, and always over-tipped. In short, he had no earthly idea why she took one look at him tonight and leaped directly to the worst possible conclusion. And he didn’t know what to say to her other than what he said every time he waved good-bye to her at the barbecue joint.
“See you, Darla. Have a nice day.”
His polite dismissal wasn’t exactly a proportionate response to the ugly implications she’d made, but sometimes, when faced with a ridiculous hypothesis, the best thing a man of science could do was focus his energies someplace else.
Chapter 2
Darla crossed her arms over her chest and the tailored white shirt she wore pulled tight at the seams. As she glared at Jake Dalton’s back, she tried not to notice how well his stark black tuxedo jacket clung to broad shoulders and tapered down to narrow hips in a perfect vee. He wore a tuxedo
as easily as he might wear a second skin. She supposed, in a way, wearing a monkey suit was natural for him. The Dalton family was blessed. Not just with good looks and an unsullied reputation. They had brains and they weren’t afraid to flaunt them. Darla had always liked that about them. Even when Jake’s younger brother, Brian, was blowing the curve for the rest of them.
Young John Junior. That’s what Zelda Jo called Jake Dalton. Most of the time, Darla didn’t pay much attention to the older waitresses movie star comparisons. She had one for everyone. She’d dubbed Jake as John F. Kennedy Jr. long before Darla started working there, and there was no point in arguing. A late night internet search proved the comparison to be dead-on. There was no point in saying otherwise anyhow. Zelda Jo was the boss man’s main squeeze. And she kept twenty years’ worth of People magazine issues stored in the shed behind the barbecue shack.
With his lean, angular features, thick dark hair, and earnest brown eyes, Jake Dalton did indeed resemble the late president’s late son.
But Jake was alive. Very much alive. Handsome in a way that made a girl jittery, but always kind and respectful. Funny in an awkward sort of way. But sure of who he was. Even back in high school. That confidence was one of the things that appealed most to her. She’d had a major crush on him through her sophomore year, but he’d never noticed her. Of course, he was a senior. And, unlike his brother, Brian, he was popular. With both the boys and the girls.
Bet he noticed her now.
Mortification burned in the pit of her stomach with the heat of a thousand suns. Darla coughed up a silent laugh at her lame joke, then shifted her focus to the table beside her. The diorama of the solar system stretched the diameter of the seventy-two-inch round top. Splotches of the evening’s dinner dotted the heavy white linen. There was a large brown stain left from someone’s slopped mousse cup. Knowing Grace, she’d probably repurposed the glob as an asteroid, meteorite, or some other kind of space flotsam. And, from what she knew about Jake Dalton, he’d probably been able to give her terrifyingly bright baby the proper name. Not something silly like Andy Asteroid or Mario the Meteor. A scientific name. One more along the lines of Cassius or AvalonXJ5.
