by Sophie Gunn
Lizzie was swamped with customers. When the throng finally cleared, she picked up the paper. It was folded to the crime blotter, with one item circled in red pen:
Man Fixes Gate, the headline read. 6:32 A.M, 47 Pine Tree Road—30-year-old female reported unknown male fixing her front gate latch. Officer responded 6:38 A.M. Discovered Caucasian male, 34, brown hair, 6 foot 2, 190 pounds, armed with screwdriver.
Jill had double-underlined Tay’s stats and added a few exclamation points.
Male stated he had overheard female head of household wish for free handyman. Female corroborated story, alleging she didn’t think anyone would actually grant her wish. Male claimed top hinge screw was rusted out. He replaced screw, oiled hinges, and left property in proper repair. No charges filed.
Written in Jill’s handwriting in the margin was a note: You called the cops on him?!?! Now you’re going to have to fight off every single woman in Galton. Including me. Ta-ta!
She had added a PS at the bottom of the page, next to the coupon for a half-off oil change at Pacco’s Garage. Next time, take MY advice. Get that man while the getting’s good. PPS: Georgia Phillips is the ninnyhammer. Why would you ever side with her?
CHAPTER
15
Two nights later, the first waves of the dinner rush ended and Joy came in to take over just as Lizzie’s arches were starting to ache.
Lizzie shrugged on her purple faux-fur coat and headed for home, her head down against the chilly fall night air. She glanced up just long enough to check for cars, and stopped.
Tay Giovanni’s truck was parked at the curb.
Why couldn’t she live in a bigger town, with more than one main street? She glanced into the cab. The white cat was curled up on the driver’s seat with the mini Lassie dog. Did these animals follow him everywhere? The cat opened one eye, regarded her, then closed it again. The dog slept soundly, his head on his paws.
Lizzie looked up just in time to see Tay Giovanni duck into Lucifer’s Pub.
She checked her watch; it was barely six. She had some time before Paige expected her for dinner. Still, she ought to head home. Lately, she’d been trying to sneak in time with Paige every chance she got. She’d bought Scrabble and Parcheesi and a backgammon set. Paige, needless to say, did not appreciate the newfound attention, or the old-fashioned entertainment, which she’d dubbed “totally lame.” But Lizzie was finding it hard to back off and give the girl space.
Lizzie crossed the street and slipped into Lucifer’s before she could think about what she was about to do. Her heart was pounding. She hadn’t been this terrified since—
Oh, hell.
Since the first time she talked to Ethan fifteen years ago.
Why did she keep equating these two men in her mind?
She spotted Tay at the bar. His back was to her, his broad shoulders—
She started to back out of the bar. Her hands were shaking. Was this really the first man she’d truly wanted since Ethan? Why? She didn’t even know him.
The bartender, Chrissie, who had gone through school two years behind Lizzie and came into the diner every morning for a poppy-seed bagel with cream cheese and large coffee to go before her day job at the pharmacy, called out, “Hey, Lizzie. We never see you in here! To what do we owe the pleasure?”
It was too late to turn back.
Lizzie steeled herself. She could do this. That she hadn’t been interested in a man in ages didn’t mean that she couldn’t act like a rational woman around Tay. She reminded herself that this wasn’t about romance. It wasn’t about her at all. It was about making a deal in order to make Paige happy.
She crossed the red-themed bar. Red walls, red-painted concrete floor, red shades over the lightbulbs. And on the wall behind the bar, a huge mural that Nina had painted ages ago of Lucifer himself, winking and drinking a beer.
In true Nina style, she’d painted a yin-yang pendant around his neck. Naturally, she’d made him gorgeous.
Lizzie tried to quell her nervousness by focusing on anything but Tay, or Lucifer. The muted horse races on the television played to two students lounging at a back table with a pitcher of beer. A lone woman sat at the end of the bar reading a paperback novel. Pinball games blinked and buzzed behind her like children desperate for attention. The rest of the wooden chairs sat empty, ready for the long night ahead.
Tay didn’t turn. He was keeping his head low, as if he didn’t want anyone to see him.
Lizzie left one stool between them.
He didn’t look up. His scuffed brown leather jacket over a hooded black sweatshirt camouflaged him in the red glow of the bar. His wavy black hair fell forward, covering his profile so she couldn’t see his face. He was hunched over a map of Galton, marking something on it.
More houses to fix in the dead of night? She was going to ask, but couldn’t find her voice. She cleared her throat, but he was obviously engrossed. She had to get his attention somehow.
“What’s new?” Chrissie asked.
“Hey, Chris. How are the kids?” Lizzie would wait for the perfect moment. Her palms itched with anticipation. Her mouth was dry. This was the craziest thing she’d done in a long time. What if he said no? What if she was making a perfect fool of herself?
“Eloise is teething. It’s awful. You want something?” Chrissie asked.
“Oh, poor you. And poor her. But mostly, poor you. I’ll have a club soda.”
The impossible man still didn’t look up.
Chrissie nodded and finished topping off Tay’s beer.
Lizzie had an idea. She shouldn’t, she couldn’t. But she was getting exasperated that he hadn’t noticed her and she didn’t have time to think.
Chrissie slid the beer in front of Tay on a faded Buffalo Bills coaster. Just as he reached for it, Lizzie jumped over a stool and grabbed the mug. “You can take this back,” she said to Chrissie, sliding the beer back to her. “He’ll have a club soda, too.”
Tay looked at Lizzie. Then at the beer just out of his reach. His eyes narrowed and it occurred to Lizzie that he might not know who she was, which made her double her resolve. No one messed with her and then forgot her.
Chrissie stared from the beer to Lizzie to Tay, not sure what to do.
Lizzie rushed on, feeling the surge of nerves that being too close to Tay gave her. “You might say it’s none of my business what he drinks, since I don’t know him. He’s a stranger, actually. But if I want to fix him, I will, no matter what he says. So no alcohol. Club soda. Slice of lemon or lime, Tay?”
She had his full attention now, his steady eyes locked on hers. “Lemon,” he said. He wasn’t smiling, wasn’t frowning—he was a cipher, his dark face a mask in the shadows of the bar.
She wanted to touch that mask, ease it off him carefully, see what was underneath. “Bummer. I say let’s go with lime.” She was trying to hold her resolve, hoping he couldn’t see her shaking hands. She licked her lips, but it didn’t help the dryness.
Chrissie stared at them as if Lizzie had grown a horn. “So. I’ll get those club sodas. And maybe a bulletproof vest.” Chrissie stepped away, backward, her lips twitching in delighted bewilderment. She left the beer on the counter between them, too confused to take it away.
Tay eyed his beer, and Lizzie wondered if he was going to make a grab for it. “Try it, buddy,” she said. “Not so tough without your sidekicks, huh?”
Silence. Stillness. The pinball games blinking to no one. He still didn’t smile, but she felt she was making some kind of dent in his silent exterior. “Maybe they’re on their way,” he said.
“Nope. I saw them in your truck. They’re sound asleep.”
“Guess I’m on my own, then,” he said.
Me, too, she didn’t say. But she thought it, and she didn’t want to think it because it was too close to the truth and she wanted to keep this light, keep it business, keep it safe.
His knee shifted ever so slightly and it touched hers and they both jumped away from the contact
as if it set off sparks.
Which it had. At least for her. He probably hardly noticed.
Make a deal, she reminded herself. “So, have I successfully demonstrated how inappropriate your actions at my gate were? How a normal person doesn’t barge into a stranger’s life, touch her things, then refuse to leave when it’s clear he’s not wanted?”
“I hate normal people,” he said.
So do I, she thought. That rush she felt in her stomach, she told herself firmly, was not affection. The yearning wasn’t need or desire. And even if it was, he certainly didn’t feel it, so she might as well ignore it.
“And who said you’re not wanted?” he asked.
She rushed forward. “So, I’ve been thinking about our impasse. If you’re going to insist on being impossible and fixing my place, which is incredibly nice and all—just very inappropriate—then I get to fix something about you. I don’t accept charity. It has to be even.”
A slight upward turn of the right corner of his mouth, nothing near a smile. “That so?” he asked.
“Yes.” She coughed. “What do you want, then?” She fixed him with as serious a stare as she could hold. She felt a humming tension between them. If she reached out and touched his shoulder, she was sure it would be vibrating.
She knew she was going to dream tonight about those shoulders.
“What do you need, er, fixed?” she asked.
He considered her, all of her, in his maddening, slow-motion way. He cocked his head to the side and ignored her question. “Maybe I don’t need fixing.”
“Sure you do. First, there’s the going where you’re not wanted,” she said.
The quirk of his lip again. “It’s Boy Scout Possession,” he said. “Can’t help helping strangers. It’s like a disease. But I’m starting to doubt that there’s a cure.”
He was so serious, she didn’t know how to respond. She was distinctly aware of how she was sitting, how she had just sucked in her stomach and sat up a little straighter. Was she flirting? Was he going to think she was flirting? For heaven’s sake, she’d followed him into a bar and stolen his beer! What else could he think? She cleared her throat. “When did this, um, affliction strike?”
“’Bout a year ago.” He shifted just slightly toward her.
“So a year ago, you were a perfectly ordinary man who would leave strangers alone?”
“Yep. No matter what they wished for. I minded my own business. Didn’t go out of my way to help anyone. Perfectly normal guy out for women and money and a good time. Think you can get me back to that?”
“So now, you’re not out for, um, women and fun?” Lizzie asked.
“Not a chance.”
“Really?”
“Really. Part of the Boy Scout thing. When I’m around, you have to fear for your peeling paint, but that’s about it.”
“I’m not sure I believe you.”
“I tell the truth.” He shrugged. “Because I, unlike you, know what I want and what I don’t want.”
That was hard to argue with. She didn’t think she’d ever met a man who was so focused on doing exactly as he pleased. So why shouldn’t she do what she pleased? She took a deep breath. “I have a problem.”
His eyebrows rose.
“The father of my daughter, the man who abandoned her fourteen years ago, is coming in three months. She thinks he’s going to see our run-down place and flee in terror.”
He nodded. “Couldn’t blame him.”
“That’s why I want to fix the place up. For Paige, my daughter.”
He didn’t say anything, but a shadow passed over his face.
She rushed on. “I want her father to help her out when he comes. But I don’t want Paige to think it’s okay to believe that men are the answer. I know that doesn’t make sense, but I want both those things at once. For her to be independent, and for her to be able to take whatever help her father can offer.”
“Makes sense to me,” he said.
“Good! So you see my problem. That’s why I was thinking that maybe we could make a deal. If you would help me fix my house up, then I would repay you in some way. But I’m kind of broke.”
“I don’t want money,” he said.
“And of course, anything, um, inappropriate is off the table for both of us.” Her words came out like a squeak. “I certainly don’t want to teach Paige, um, that.”
“Lizzie, I have to tell you something up front.” His jaw clenched and unclenched. “About a year ago, I—” He paused. “I came between a mother and a daughter.” His voice faltered for just a second, then resumed its slow, low pace. “I’m starting to see that I won’t ever be able to make that up to them. And I’m seeing now from talking to you why. People hate help from the people who’ve wronged them.” He paused. “Heck, they even hate to accept help from people who remind them of people who wronged them.”
She wanted to ask him what happened between him and the mother and the daughter. But the tenseness of his jaw told her that he’d said all he was going to about that.
“But I owe you,” he said.
“You don’t owe me anything. I don’t even know you.”
“I do,” he said. He fixed her with his intense green eyes. “You let me smell the coffee.”
She looked around. There wasn’t any coffee. She couldn’t smell anything but stale beer and old perfume.
When she looked back, he had swiped his beer. “Hey!”
He chugged it in one long gulp, finishing the entire pint. “And you let me taste my beer. Believe me, I owe you big-time.”
“Tay!”
“Look, tell your daughter that you’re giving me whatever you want to tell her. I’ll back you up. She doesn’t have to know our deal.”
“But I’ll know that really we have no deal.”
“So this isn’t about her, really. It’s about you,” he pointed out. “Why not just say what you mean, Lizzie?” He leaned in close.
Lizzie was starting to panic, as his face seemed awfully close to hers, his eyes even more intense than usual. “You have to tell me what you want. This doesn’t work unless we’re even,” she repeated.
“Even?” he asked. “Is that ever possible? Especially, Lizzie, for people like us who either don’t know what we want, or know that what we want is impossible?”
“Nothing’s impossible,” she insisted.
He leaned in closer.
Or maybe she leaned closer.
It was impossible to know, impossible to breathe.
Their lips touched.
A light kiss. Soft. A friendly kiss, if a kiss on the lips could be friendly. Still, it set Lizzie on fire. She was too shocked to move. It was more a touching than a kiss. A connection. And yet, she’d never felt anything quite so intense as this man’s lips on hers. She let her eyes flutter closed and her thoughts fell away and she felt him, his intensity a physical vibration through her just as she knew it would be. Yes, you fix my fence and I’ll meet you in bars and kiss you… It’s a deal…
He separated. Or maybe she did. It was hard to tell.
She opened her eyes.
While she was trying not to fall off her stool because her bones had melted into a puddle, he was intensely rigid, his face tight, as if he’d seen a ghost.
“Tay?”
He startled, then looked at her as if he wasn’t sure why she was there. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”
Sorry? For kissing me? “Are you okay?” Had she kissed him or had he kissed her? Had she attacked him? She felt humiliated, her face already hot. She was glad for the red tint of the bar. Maybe he wouldn’t notice.
“I’m sorry,” he said again. “Really. I don’t know what happened. I didn’t mean to do that.” He stood, threw a five-dollar bill on the bar. He looked as if he didn’t know where he was or what he was doing. He stepped away, stopped, looked back.
“Are you leaving?” she said. “What about our deal? You can’t fix my place unless I can give you something—not that!�
��something else in return.”
“I have to go.” He was already halfway across the bar.
“Hey!” she called. “No! That’s not okay! Wait!”
But he didn’t wait.
She considered chasing him out, but Chrissie was watching. Lizzie didn’t want to start the town talking any more than that kiss or her neighbor Mrs. Roth already had. So then, Lizzie snatched this hot guy’s beer, and started kissing him like she was on fire…
“He’s cute!” Chrissie said when the door had shut behind him. “New friend of yours? Don’t think I’ve ever seen him around here.”
“No. More like a new enemy,” Lizzie said. What had just happened?
She looked at the bar, where his map of Galton still lay. He had circled all the bridges over all the gorges between the diner and campus. She stuck the map into her bag, hoping Chrissie wouldn’t notice. “Well, I better go. Um, Chrissie, can you, you know, not mention this to anyone?”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Chrissie said.
But Lizzie knew that was a lie. It would be all over town by the next day.
Tay sat in his truck, his head on the steering wheel while he tried to breathe. Dune and White kept their distance.
He had drunk that beer and he had tasted it, smelled it, had even felt its coolness as it trickled down his throat into his empty stomach, and he was so grateful that he had kissed her. And then he tasted her and he had been so turned on by the softness of her lips—
Until his body slammed shut, all systems misfiring. The attack that followed had been as intense as if the accident had happened yesterday. Not that he couldn’t take the sudden cramps, the panic, the slicing pain through his gut. That was all becoming a part of his life that he accepted, even welcomed, as pain was better than numbness.
But he couldn’t go around starting something with Lizzie that he couldn’t follow through on. That he could smell his coffee, taste his beer, taste her, didn’t mean that he could act like a fully functioning human again. He had just proven that, needing to pull away from her kiss to stop the blackness from rushing in.
