by Jeannie Watt
Heaven knew she wanted one.
JUSTIN WOULD HAVE dearly loved to pop Robert what’s-his-name in the face for bringing Melinda to a bar that Layla obviously thought of as her place. Not only that, he was taken aback by the rather primal protective instincts that had ripped through him when the bitch made that remark about Sam’s “porn shop,” even though Layla had handled the situation masterfully.
Extreme protectiveness.
Probably not a good sign.
Ceol was Justin’s favorite bar, even though he hadn’t had as much time to hang out there as he used to. They made their way inside, past the dartboard, where two young guys were deep into a game, an Akita dog sitting next to one.
“There’s a dog in here,” Layla whispered.
“His name is Seby. He’s a regular.”
Her eyebrows shot up. “How often do you come to this place?”
Justin smiled down at her. “Quite often up until about a year ago. Since the cakes took off, I haven’t had time to do much of anything except work, eat and sleep.”
“How about your social life?”
“I squeeze that in here and there.”
“Justin!” A guy appeared out of the crowd to clap his arm. Layla gave him a how-much-time-do-you-really-spend-here look.
“Good to see you,” Justin said, before introducing Layla.
“What’ll you have?” he asked. “I can’t get you a seat just yet, but I can get you a drink.”
“Beer okay?” Justin asked.
“Fine.”
“Two Smithwick’s.”
“You got it.” They stood next to the wall, watching the dart game. “I don’t think they’re following the rules,” Layla said.
“Sometimes it’s more fun not to follow the rules. Flaunt authority.”
“You’ve never been much for authority,” Layla agreed.
“And you have.”
“Authority comforts me. Follow the rules and all will be well.”
“How’s that worked out?”
“Really good up until recently, but it wasn’t like I didn’t pay a price for sticking to the straight and narrow.”
“Yeah?”
“I’m not even certain how high a price. I’ve been afraid of losing control of my life for so long.... I don’t even know where the fear came from. My brothers and sisters? Fearless.”
“Derek maybe. Eric? He wienered out on a few things.”
“Roof? Skateboard?”
“Among other fine adventures.” Many of which had involved getting a rise out of Layla. It couldn’t have been easy being the responsible older child when her three younger siblings were such hellions and, because Sam was barely ten months younger than the twins, all in the same grade. Her siblings were like the three musketeers. Throw himself into the mix and… Justin let out a breath. “Would you believe I’m sorry for the crap we—I—did to you?”
“No.” She leaned against him, their shoulders and upper arms touching. And stayed like that as she studied the bar patrons.
Justin finally gave in to temptation and put his arm around her shoulders, drawing her close, telling himself to stop now. But she was soft and warm and smelled fantastic.... No biggie. Two people snuggled together, waiting for a table, watching the crowd while becoming superaware of one another. Of the moment. Of possibilities.
He realized then that it wasn’t the here and now that was concerning him. It was the future. With Layla he felt as if he could skip a couple steps. Fast-forward because he knew her so well.
Fast-forward to where?
Therein lay the rub.
Every one of Justin’s relationships followed the same path. If he fast-forwarded, the only place he had to go was to the end.
Layla smiled up at him, looking, well, beautiful in a way he’d never appreciated when he was younger. His arm tightened for a second before the owner of the bar came up to them and said, “There’s a free table near the rear entrance.”
“Thanks, Ron.”
“Do you know everyone here?” Layla asked as his arm fell away.
“Pretty much.” Justin held out a chair for her and had barely sat down himself when someone hailed him. He turned in his chair to see Paula Diaz, former cheerleader and senior class secretary, waving at him. He waved back without much enthusiasm, then noticed she was sitting with at least six other people from their graduating class.
Damn.
The reunion committee. He’d received a letter a while back asking for help, but had no intention of even going to a reunion. He had no good memories of his last year of high school. Not one.
“You okay?” Layla asked when he turned back.
“Yeah. Just some people from high school.”
Layla narrowed her eyes as she looked over his shoulder at the group. “I recognize a couple of them. Would that be the infamous reunion committee?”
“How do you know that?”
“David Heinz is there. He’s after Sam, trying to take advantage of her artistic abilities. And I remember Paula. Kind of.”
“Yeah, I guess it could be the committee. Most of the class officers are there.” Three of the four, anyway.
Layla laughed. “How would you know who the class officers were? Did you even go to school?”
“It was my freshman year when I skipped so much. Reggie took care of business once she found out, and I went to school religiously after that.”
“Do you ever see your father now?” Layla asked, picking up on the fact that it was Reggie who’d yanked him back onto the straight and narrow, not his dad.
Justin gave a quick shake of his head. “No. We get the occasional call, and he pretends everything is normal. You know—a dad abandoning his teenage kids. Normal.” Justin focused on the table for a moment. “He did support us, though.”
“But he wasn’t there enough,” Layla said quietly.
Justin shook his head. “Nope. Can’t say that he was. He’d promised no more long-haul truck jobs, but always took the next one that was offered.”
The Smithwick’s came and neither of them spoke as they both took a long, long draw.
Having the committee there was creeping him out to the point that he didn’t mind talking about his father—mainly because of the one prominently missing member. Behind him chairs scraped against the floor just as a three-man band started to tune up, and a second later a hand clapped on to his shoulder.
“Hey, Justin. How fortuitous to run into you here. Did you get our letter?”
Justin looked up at a smiling David Heinz. “I did.”
“Well, in addition to needing help on the committees, we’re looking for a caterer for some of the reunion events and we have a very set budget. Any chance we could negotiate a price break?”
“Send me the info and I’ll see what I can do.” But he wasn’t going to serve at his own reunion. He wasn’t even going to be there.
“Great.”
“You wouldn’t happen to be in contact with Rachel, would you?” Paula Diaz asked.
Justin had half expected the question—after all, they’d dated and she’d been a class officer, so she should be in on the planning sessions, too. “No.”
“None of us have. And the funny thing is we can’t even get any cooperation from her parents.” Paula shook her head in a mystified way. “Even though she moved just before graduation, we wanted her to come to the reunion.”
“I tell you,” David said, “she joined a cult. Couldn’t face life after losing skater boy, here.”
“I heard that was why she moved,” Paula said. Justin’s heart stalled out for a moment until she added, “Rumor had it her parents thought you were a bad influence.” She waggled her eyebrows up and down in a humorous manner, making it obvious that she had no inkling of the truth.
Justin tried to smile. Truly he did. And then he changed the subject. “Just email the specs to the business and I’ll get you the lowest price we can offer,” he said, trying to get them the hell out of there. What
did it mean that Rachel’s parents wouldn’t help them out?
It shouldn’t bug him, but it did, although he could understand why Rachel wouldn’t want to attend this reunion any more than he did.
His tactic had worked and Paula and David moved on. Justin looked up to see Layla quietly watching him. Try as he might, he could not bring himself totally back to the place he’d been before the committee had stopped by their table and blasted the shit out of his evening.
“Will you be attending your reunion?” Layla asked.
“No. Did you go to yours last year?”
“Helped plan it. I wasn’t a class officer, but I was in town and people remembered me as being a workhorse.”
“Did you enjoy yourself?”
“Not much. I was too busy worried about logistics and everything going smoothly.” She smiled without humor. “I hope I can move past behaving like that.”
She hadn’t touched her beer other than that first draw, but instead sat with her hands in her lap. Justin took a long drink, met her eyes. Smiled.
Layla wasn’t biting. “It bothers you that they can’t find Rachel.”
“I’m sure she’s all right. Her parents weren’t the most cooperative people in the world.”
“Did you two date a long time?” Layla asked, tracing a path in the condensation on her glass, focusing on it rather than on him.
“Almost a year.” The words came out clipped, and Layla looked up at him, probably wondering why a relationship that’d been over for more than ten years was making him respond like this. If their positions were reversed, he would have been wondering the same thing.
“Bitter breakup?”
“It’s in the past, Layla.” He reached across the table and took her hand, squeezed gently, but she didn’t squeeze back.
CHAPTER EIGHT
LAYLA SAID NOTHING. What could she say? Perhaps she could make the observation that something was bothering the hell out of Justin and it was pretty obvious what it was.
Rachel.
Or the mention of her.
But Layla had enough Taylor in her to know not to push. Her gut said back off now, back off fast.
Justin was backing off even faster.
Time to put him out of his misery. Either that or spend a long, uncomfortable evening together. “You know, maybe we should call it a night. In all ways.”
A look of sheer relief crossed his face. “I, uh—”
“It’s been a strange evening. Not a good time to… Not a good time.”
He nodded in agreement. A few minutes later he’d paid the tab and followed Layla past the dartboard and the Akita, out into the cool, early-evening air. They walked to his car without saying much, and he drove to her house a few silent minutes after that. He walked her to her door, dropped a kiss on her forehead.
“How chaste,” she said.
He looked down at her and opened his mouth as if about to explain, but then closed it again. Instead he pulled her close and held her against him. She pressed her face to the soft corduroy of his jacket, inhaled and wondered what on earth was going on.
“Maybe we’ll talk about all this sometime,” he said when he stepped back a few seconds later, but Layla knew they wouldn’t. Justin was a keeper of secrets. She’d always assumed he was an open book, but there was more to him. And somehow getting close to her threatened him.
“We’re not going to go out again, are we?”
His expression didn’t change, didn’t take on any hint of regret as he said, “No. I don’t see that happening. But we will still be friends.”
Layla nodded and opened her front door. She stepped inside and closed it without looking at him. Simply shut it in his face. And then she leaned back against the solid wood in her beautiful green dress and wondered where the evening had gone so wrong.
COULD HE HAVE RESPONDED more transparently? Justin asked himself in disgust. Made it clearer that hearing about Rachel disturbed him?
No. There was something about Layla that made it harder to keep up the front. Probably because she’d known him for so long.
After dropping her off, Justin drove to the kitchen, parked in front and let himself in that way. Like all sane folk, he avoided back alleys after dark—even his own.
He shrugged out of the blazer and hung it in his locker, then went into his room and turned on the music. He’d get ahead of the game tonight, do as much of tomorrow’s work as possible.
Justin pulled his stocking cap down to his ears.
The evening was unfortunate, but in some ways a godsend. Maybe Layla had had such a rotten time that she’d no longer be interested in seeing him in any capacity, and then he wouldn’t be in danger of edging toward territory he had no intention of traveling through.
Maybe now they’d both go back to their own lives, hang with their own kind. Justin would find another party girl who understood just how temporary he was, and Layla could find a stable guy that wasn’t an A-l jerk.
LAYLA DECIDED THAT with the green dress she’d be just like Sam. Wear it once and discard it, because it reminded her of one of the strangest evenings she’d ever had.
Yes, she’d stood up to Robert and Melinda, and that had held a certain satisfaction. But nothing else had gone according to plan. Even before the reunion committee had stopped by in the bar, the connection she’d felt with Justin up until tonight had gone missing.
What had happened between the frosting kiss and this evening?
She was damned well going to find out, because she didn’t feel they were done yet.
THE NEXT TWO DAYS were crazy busy. Justin got up at five o’clock to work on the cakes he’d booked, then he drove up to the lake to fill in for a vacationing chef, arriving home around one in the morning and then getting up four hours later. And he welcomed the numbing exhaustion. Between the emotions Layla was stirring up and the reunion committee looking high and low for Rachel, he was doing way too much thinking.
Eden and Reggie weren’t helping—at least not on the Layla front. Somehow they’d gotten wind of the bust of a date. Someone other than Robert and Melinda and his graduating class officers must have seen them out and about, and ratted him out to his sisters. The only reason he knew was because Eden asked him if he’d enjoyed his date with Layla. He said yes, and left it at that.
Eden didn’t. She didn’t ask a lot of questions, but those she did ask were carefully planned and delivered in a nonchalant way. What were Layla’s plans for the future? He didn’t know. Any chance that they might see her at their yearly summer picnic at the lake? He didn’t anticipate that happening. Finally…are you still seeing Layla? No. Why? Mind your own business, Eden.
She smiled with an odd sort of satisfaction when he snapped at her, as if she’d just figured something out. Well, he’d let her think that way all she wanted, as long as she left his private life alone.
His decision to back off fast from an entanglement with Layla, before any damage was done, had been a good one. He might have given her ego a knock during a vulnerable time, but better now than later.
The only problem was that if he wasn’t thinking about her, he seemed to be thinking about his son, his speculations about the boy made worse by the almost ninety-nine percent guarantee that he’d never get answers.
Was he having such a hard time with this because his son was approaching his teen years, and Justin didn’t know if he had someone to guide him through those turbulent times? He’d so wanted a father figure in his life back then, when the pain was still so raw from losing his mother. The one time he’d needed his dad, when he’d confessed that he was going to be a father, he was told that he’d made his bed and now had to lie in it.
Thanks, Dad. That was a lot of help for a frightened eighteen-year-old kid.
“Hey, Justin.” Tammy Barnes, one of the waitresses who had just gotten off shift with him, sidled up as he unbuttoned his chef’s jacket. “Want to get some coffee before you head down the mountain?”
He was so buzzed at
the moment from a mixture of service-induced adrenaline—it had been a busy service for a Sunday night—and caffeine that he couldn’t see having yet another cup.
“Maybe tomorrow,” he said, folding the coat over his arm. He grabbed his jacket, then smiled at Tammy. “If I leave now, I may get an extra forty-five minutes sleep.”
“You look done in,” she said with a concerned expression.
