Love and War

by Peg Sutherland

“Being mostly alone,” he said.

  Confused, Sandy frowned. “What about the high school kids?”

  “They bailed out.” He grinned and shrugged. “One by one, they dropped out. By the end of June, I was on my own. Sometimes you’d encounter others on the trail, trying the same stunt you were. Or you’d go into town for supplies and a shower. But mostly, you’d better like your own company.”

  “And did you find yourself charming?” she teased.

  “Not at first. But I grew on me.” He smiled. “Your turn.”

  Her spoon paused on the way to her mouth. “Oh, I don’t have any amazing stories.”

  “Okay. I’ll settle for intriguing.”

  Sandy thought about what to tell him, and nothing quite measured up to the Appalachian Trail. “Well, I was the most sought-after baby-sitter in the entire junior class.”

  Drew frowned, seemed to consider that, then shook his head.

  “No, huh? Okay, I, uh, painted my toenails green once.”

  “Was it summer or winter?”

  “Well, it was winter.”

  Another stern expression crossed his face. “Sorry. Doesn’t count. If it was sandal weather, I’d consider it. But winter? I don’t think so.”

  “Okay, I confess. The most interesting thing I ever did was Critter Crackers.”

  “Critter Crackers? You worked on the Critter Crackers campaign?”

  She nodded, taking some satisfaction in the fact that he did, actually, look amazed after all. Critter Crackers had been the smash-hit snack food of the past year. Three-fourths of the kids in America knew the jingle by heart. The product wasn’t simply tasty, it was nutritious. And it had been marketed more effectively than any product Sandy could name. In fact, the ad campaign had won the advertising industry’s equivalent of the Academy Award.

  “I was part of the team, yes.” She saw the look that flashed across his face and decided to acknowledge it before he even had a chance to express it. “And I wasn’t on the bench, either. I was a starter.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “I thought we weren’t going to talk business.”

  “You’ve introduced the subject. I now have the right to cross-examination.”

  “Why don’t I show you the portfolio Monday?”

  He shrugged. “It doesn’t really matter. A small company like Yes! Yogurt can’t afford to make that kind of impact on the market.”

  “And we don’t have to,” she stated. “Critter Crackers is mass market. Yes! Yogurt has a very specific target audience. We don’t have to reach every household in America. So we reach the ones we want with a much smaller budget.”

  “Look—”

  “We’re probably talking about the difference between advertising on every housewife’s favorite talk show four times a week versus a print ad once a month in The Healthy Gourmet, for example. With a new logo—”

  “Oh, no!” Drew glanced around, as if aware his voice had just risen. “Look, we certainly don’t need a new logo.”

  “Not entirely new,” Sandy conceded, remembering too late that she had a very good reason for not wanting to mention the logo this soon. She knew by heart the often-told story of Britt’s brainstorm for the folksy logo, a goat in a straw hat, a red rose between its teeth. “Updated, that’s all.”

  “Have you mentioned this to Britt?”

  “Not yet.” The expression on his face was smug, and she guessed what he was thinking: that she’d never get it past the boss. “Look, I know this is a sacred goat I’m talking about defiling. But we can improve on it without losing its charm. Before it’s over, we’ll all agree that we’ve made a good change.”

  “You probably already have drawings, don’t you?”

  Sandy thought of the rough illustrations she’d been working on nearly every night since Britt called to offer her the job. “Listen, we were right to start with. This isn’t the time to talk business.”

  “It’s a little late to back down, Sandy.” He wadded up his napkin and stuffed it under the rim of his soup bowl. “What other plans do you have? What else do you think we need to scrap?”

  “I said I don’t want to talk about it now.” She pushed aside her half-eaten stew. “Thanks for sharing your table.”

  She was aware, as she made her way across the diner toward the door, that people were watching. Those who weren’t at first certainly were by the time Drew followed her to the checkout, saying, “Now, this is childish, don’t you think?”

  “Childish?” She put a bill on the counter and turned to confront him. “I’ll tell you what’s childish. Name-calling is childish.”

  Then she whipped her scarf around her neck and pretended not to hear him calling after her, just as she also pretended not to hear Tisha Olsen, who, as they passed her table, said, “Guess nobody’s surprised if those two are already feuding.”

  She heard boots crunching on the icy sidewalk behind her and crossed the street to get away. Asinine, she chastised herself. A really brainless move, Murphy, throwing a logo change at him like that.

  “If I slip and fall on thin ice, let it be on your head.”

  She heard his voice behind her and smiled in spite of herself. “That’s what happens when you try moving too fast,” she called back over her shoulder.

  “You should know.”

  Suddenly, it all seemed exactly what he’d called it: childish. She laughed and turned as he stepped onto the curb.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t be defensive. If you didn’t have new ideas, I’d be complaining that you showed no initiative.”

  There he went again, with that disarming humility. He didn’t have to be right all the time, could admit it when he didn’t have all the answers. In spite of everything, she liked that about him. She smiled. “I’ll remind you of that when I bring in my logo drawings.”

  He chuckled. “I knew it.”

  They walked in silence for a block. Sandy considered the inadvisability of what she was doing, walking the silent, dark streets of Tyler with a man who unbalanced her the way Drew Stirling did. Around him, she seemed to be constantly on the verge of abandoning her common sense. Lunging forward instead of hanging back and studying the lay of the land, formulating a strategy. Reason fled, replaced by impulse.

  By emotion.

  Even now, when she should have remained cautious and distantly professional with him, she instead felt a push to open up. She wanted to see more of Drew the person, and wanted to show him the same.

  “I know you think I have a lot to prove,” she said, surprising herself with her openness.

  “Maybe I’m not being fair. Just because you’re young...” He shrugged.

  There it was, as she’d expected; her age was an issue for him. She was silent as they crossed Elm Street. The elegant Ingalls mansion loomed ahead, shrouded in creeping ivy vines, looking as dark and brooding as it had always looked to her as a child.

  “I always imagined the Ingalls house was haunted,” she said, lowering her voice automatically to a near whisper, already forgetting that the last thing she wanted to do was remind him how recently she had been a child. How did he do that to her? Well, too late to worry about it now. “We used to sneak into the backyard in the dark, just to scare ourselves.”

  He studied the tall, silent house. “Maybe it is haunted. Do you know for a fact there isn’t a ghost in the Ingalls mansion?”

  “In a town this size, everybody would know about it.”

  “You don’t sound entirely thrilled to be back.”

  She wasn’t entirely thrilled with how insightful he was, either. She wasn’t accustomed to that in a man, and it was one more of the things that kept her off-kilter around him.

  “Strange, when I came back to Tyler to visit, all I wanted to see was how much t
he same everything was, how little things had changed. As if that were some kind of condemnation.” They passed under a streetlight, then back into darkness. “But so many things looked different to me in recent years. I was beginning to think the old Tyler had disappeared. But now the longer I look around, the more I realize how little things have changed.”

  “And is it still a black mark against the town?”

  “No. Not against the town. Just against me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Of all the people in Tyler, Drew Stirling was the one she shouldn’t be saying these things to. Why give him the ammunition of knowing her fears?

  “How does Tyler look to you, coming from a place like Chicago?” she asked instead. “Is it awfully small-town?”

  “You might not have noticed, but that was a definite change of subject.”

  “Was it?”

  She looked over and caught him smiling at her. Why did that smile look so intimate to her? He was a virtual stranger. Someone she wasn’t entirely sure she liked, although things to like about him were turning up at an alarming rate.

  “Am I walking you home, Alexandra?”

  Anxiety fluttered in her heart. She hoped she sounded lighthearted. “Heaven forbid.”

  “It would be that bad?”

  “In Tyler? That would definitely make us an item.” There she went again, blurting out things she would never say if she weren’t so nervous. She was losing control of this situation. And that simply couldn’t happen.

  “I see.”

  In the short silence that followed, Sandy realized her heart was pounding unnaturally fast. She tried to concentrate on all the reasons that this entire conversation was a bad idea, but she couldn’t. Couldn’t think.

  “Then it’s a good thing we’re big-city folks,” Drew said. “It would take a lot more than an innocuous walk for us to think of two people as an item.”

  “Oh, much more,” she said. Her breathing had grown shallow, too.

  He stopped. She stopped. Moonlight made his gray eyes more luminous than ever.

  “A kiss, for example,” he whispered. “A kiss would make a couple an item. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  “A kiss?”

  He seemed to rock forward, then back. Wavering, it seemed to her. Then he grew still, and she wondered if it had been Drew who wavered or herself.

  “Or would it depend on the nature of the kiss?” he asked. “Would a simple brushing of the lips constitute something serious? Or would it have to be more? Longer? Deeper?”

  “I’m not sure I can answer that question,” she said, aware that her voice was little more than a breath of mist on the cold night air. “Not without further research.”

  He smiled. “A focus group?”

  She remembered then, thank heaven, who he was and why she stood on the sidewalk with him in the first place. They were co-workers. Whatever threatened to happen between them was not an option. Feeling like someone who hovered on the brink of a cliff, she took a step back and mustered a cool smile. She had to treat this offhandedly. Pretend it was nothing.

  It was nothing.

  “I’ll have a recommendation on your desk Monday,” she said.

  “About further research?”

  “On the logo. I think a focus group would work fine.”

  “Oh.” His smile lingered.

  As did the trembly, warm feelings he had elicited with his talk about long, deep kisses. Drew turned off toward the boardinghouse, leaving her alone. But all the way home, the feelings stayed with her, reminding her that perhaps she wasn’t as mature as she liked to think, after all. Would a grown woman—an intelligent woman who knew the dangers—react this way?

  Sometime during the long weekend, Sandy began to suspect that this must be exactly how a grown woman would react.

  CHAPTER SIX

  SANDY PRETENDED THE reason she was spending so much time out of the office the next week was to reacquaint herself with Yes! Yogurt operations.

  But as she spent a day in manufacturing, then another day on the road with their midwestern sales rep, she wasn’t fooling herself for a minute. She wondered if she was fooling Drew.

  That question had plagued her all weekend. Had Drew perceived what had happened between them Friday night as she had? Had he, too, felt the magnetism between them, the charged atmosphere? Or had it all been her imagination? True, he had been the one to mention kissing. He had lowered his voice, had locked gazes with her, had stood close enough to touch.

  But each time Sandy relived what had happened—and she found it necessary to relive the moment countless times in the days that followed—she saw room for doubt.

  He could have been teasing her. He could have meant everything he’d said in some other way, and she’d simply misinterpreted everything. He could have been testing her professionalism. In which case she’d flunked the test.

  So she decided to stay out of his way until she had herself under control again.

  That was easier said than done.

  “Staff meeting!” Britt had chimed cheerily first thing Monday morning. “High-test coffee in the conference room, in case you aren’t awake yet.”

  Sandy passed on the coffee. She was jittery enough without extra caffeine. Drew already sat at the conference table, looking casual and easygoing in an ice-blue cardigan, his white Oxford-cloth shirt open at the collar. He sipped juice, not coffee. Suddenly, Sandy’s wool suit felt warm.

  “The outer walls are up,” he was saying to Jake as Sandy and Britt entered the room. “They say they’re on schedule, but how am I supposed to know? At this stage, it’s about as unfathomable to me as it was at the blueprint stage.”

  “Is this the house we’re talking about?” Britt asked, filling her mug with coffee. “I drove by the other day. Looking good.” She slid into the chair beside Sandy. “He’s building a house, a mile or so beyond the plant. He found this terrific wooded lot with a view of the lake and Timberlake Lodge.”

  “A glimpse,” Drew said without looking directly at Sandy. “A glimpse of the lake. And only in the fall and winter.”

  Sandy felt herself flush, remembering the day Renee had told her about the house. Remembering how she’d overreacted when she thought he had a wife to put in that house. She was grateful he seemed so unwilling to look at her.

  After a few more minutes of small talk, the meeting started, with sales figures and various other status reports. Drew barely acknowledged her presence, and every reminder of his calm made Sandy feel a little warmer, a little more nervous. She had no trouble mirroring his laid-back demeanor, but still found it next to impossible to concentrate on what was going on at the meeting.

  Not, she told herself, that she was in any way mesmerized by Drew. No, it was simply that she wondered what he was thinking about her. If he had seen anything strange in her reaction Friday night.

  When the discussion came around to Sandy and her plan of action for the week, Drew spoke before she had the chance.

  “When do we get to see your ideas for the new logo?”

  She could have thrown yogurt on his cardigan sweater.

  “New logo?” That was Britt. Sandy heard the surprise in her voice.

  “Drew is exaggerating, Britt. I mentioned to him at dinner Friday night that we might want to look at updating the logo. Nothing drastic. A refinement here and there.”

  Britt was either easily appeased or easily distracted. “You went to dinner Friday night?”

  Jake’s focus remained on the business at hand. “A logo change? Wouldn’t that cost a fortune?”

  “Only a small one,” Drew added, ever helpful.

  Sandy didn’t lower herself to glare at him. “Drew is also a bit ahead of himself. We won’t be making any changes until we’ve heard from our customer
s.”

  “That’s right.” Drew looked up from his notes. “We’re all looking forward to some market research. When do we start?”

  “This week,” Sandy said, knowing she needed to wrest some kind of control over this discussion of her territory. She told them about her plans to spend time in manufacturing and with the front-line sales force. “Then the first order of business, it seems to me, is to make sure this town can support an outlet store.”

  “Nobody told me the two of you got together Friday night,” Britt said.

  “Wait a minute,” Jake protested. “I thought the outlet store was a done deal.”

  Sandy had, indeed, decided to keep her nose out of any further plans for the outlet store unless Drew asked for her help. But as long as he saw nothing wrong with making her life a little more difficult, she saw no reason not to reciprocate. She leveled her most confident look at Jake. “Would you rather back down now or lose your shirt in eighteen months?”

  “You think that’s a possibility?” Britt asked.

  “Of course not,” Drew said.

  “I don’t know,” Sandy said. “Nobody does. Because we haven’t done our homework.”

  The only sound for a moment was the rapid clicking of Drew’s ballpoint pen. “Okay. How long is this going to delay things?” he asked finally.

  Sandy smiled. “I can have enough information for us to make a decision by this time next week.”

  “No longer,” he warned.

  “Consider it done.”

  To keep from pressing her luck, she decided to stay out of his way for the rest of the week. First the day in the factory, then the day on the road. And the end of the week she spent wandering Tyler, armed with a clipboard and the survey she had developed to help her come up with a recommendation on the outlet store.

  The survey, it turned out, was the best distraction of all. For she might be asking questions about how many dairy products her respondents bought each week, but what she was getting in return was a quick refresher course in what was going on in her hometown.

  She ran into Sheila Lawson coming out of Gates Department Store. Her former baby-sitter, still a girlish-looking blonde now working as manager of Timberlake Lodge, seemed unusually subdued, until Sandy recalled hearing about her mother’s death a few months before.