by Holly Jacobs
“From what I know about her mother, I’m sure she was.” Even if Marion had had to do without something, she’d have seen to it.
“And you’ll have to find a pediatrician for her,” Joe said. “I’ve worked with Mavis Samuels at the hospital. She’s a good doctor and is great with the kids.”
“I’ll call her next week,” Mac said.
“Can I get you something to drink?” Mia asked.
“No, but thanks,” Louisa said. “As much as I’d like to stay and play with Katie some more, I’d better get back. Elmer’s watching Aaron, but he has a hot date later.”
“Is he still seeing Mabel?” Mia asked.
Mabel was the Square’s acupuncturist, and she and Elmer were the latest Perry Square romance news.
It amazed Mac how small town-like the Square felt. After all, Erie might not be New York City, but it was a city…a city that seemed to disappear on the Square, which lay in the heart of Erie’s downtown.
On Perry Square everyone knew everyone’s business, and no one hesitated to offer advice and opinions.
He shook his head.
“Yes, Mabel and Elmer are still dating,” Louisa said with a happy little sigh. “They’re so cute together. And I’ve never seen him like this. That’s what a good relationship can do for you…make you happy.”
Mac felt as uncomfortable at that statement as Mia looked. After all, they didn’t have a relationship. They had a couple kisses. Nothing more.
“I’m happy for them,” Mia said.
“Me, too,” Louisa stood and passed Katie back to Mia. “Elmer deserves finding someone who makes him happy…everyone does.”
Louisa gave her husband a look. One of those couple-speak looks Mac had seen the Zumigalas use over the years. It made him feel even more uncomfortable.
Louisa looked away from her husband and added, “Thanks for letting me get a baby fix.”
“Anytime. And congratulations, again,” Mia said.
“Thanks,” Louisa said.
Mac had heard the expression about pregnant women glowing, but he’d never given it much thought until now. Louisa was positively beaming as she continued, “It’s like a dream come true. Having Joe back in my life, being a family. Everything seems so perfect that sometimes it almost scares me.”
“A good kind of scary?” Mia asked.
“The best. I love The Chocolate Bar, love that it’s doing well. But without Joe and Aaron, and now this new baby, it wouldn’t mean anything. Love. Family. They’re what make life sweet.”
Mia was still mulling over Louisa’s statement the next morning.
After Joe and Louisa had left, she’d helped put Katie to bed, then made a quick escape.
She didn’t want to be alone with Mac. She needed distance, time to think about what was going on between them. About what it meant.
And yet, leaving had been hard. She’d wanted to stay and just talk to him, as much as she’d wanted to leave.
The conflicting desires didn’t make sense.
And a restless night’s sleep didn’t make figuring things out any easier. She felt decidedly unrested and out of sorts when she arrived at the office the next morning.
The door was still locked, which meant she was the first one there. Good. She’d have a few moments to try to gather her rather frazzled wits. There’d be a few precious minutes to herself before the day kicked into high gear.
She unlocked the front door and let herself into the quiet office. She took off her coat—the new coat Mac had given her. It was such a thoughtful gift. She probably should have protested that it was too expensive, too extravagant.
She was hanging it in the closet when the door burst open. For a moment, Mia’s heart rate picked up speed, thinking it was Mac and Katie.
But it settled right back into place when she saw that it wasn’t. It was Pearly Gates, the self-proclaimed busybody of Perry Square.
“Now, I’m hearing rumors flying,” Pearly said with a faint touch of the South in her voice and no preamble at all, “and you know me, I hate rumors…unless I happen to be the one spreadin’ them. No beating around the bush here. What’s going on between you and Mac? And what’s this about him having a baby.”
The older woman took a seat next to Mia’s desk and waited expectantly for an answer.
Mia followed and took her own seat, knowing there was no way out of offering up some explanation. Pearly was as tenacious as a bloodhound when she was on the scent of a story. She wouldn’t let go until she was satisfied she had all the news.
“Nothing to the first part,” Mia said. “There’s nothing between Mac and I,” except a few kisses she wasn’t going to mention, “and he doesn’t really have a baby to answer the second part of your question.”
“You answered my questions, but left me with more, so spill it. Not some short little explanation you hope will satisfy me. It won’t. I want the whole scoop.”
Sighing, Mia began telling Pearly everything. Everything except the kisses. “…and the snow finally let up and Mac took me home. He’s looking for an adoptive family for Katie. Until he finds one, he’s taking care of her.”
“Mac?” Pearly asked, picking up on Mia’s slip.
“Larry,” Mia corrected. “I’m helping Larry.”
“Helping Larry Mackenzie?” Pearly shook her head. “I never would have believed it if I hadn’t heard it from your own lips.”
“Me either,” Mia confessed. “But I feel better assuring myself that I’m not really helping Mac, I’m helping with Katie. There’s a difference. One’s big, annoying and hard to like, one’s small, cute and ever so easy to love.”
“You called him Mac again,” Pearly—obviously in her bloodhound mode—persisted.
“What?” Mia asked, though she’d heard Pearly just fine.
“I’ve never heard you call Larry Mackenzie Mac before today. And now you’ve done it twice in one conversation. Everyone else on the Square calls him Mac, but not you.”
Darn.
Mia shrugged and tried to play nonchalant. “I just slipped. He’s not as annoying when he’s not here, so sometimes I forget to call him Larry, at least when he’s absent.”
“It wasn’t just that you called him Mac,” Pearly said, speculation in her look. “It’s that you said his name with a certain softness in your voice. The kind of nuance that only comes when a woman’s been kissing a man.”
“Pearly. You know I’d rather kiss a toad…” Frog, Mia mentally corrected, a small smile playing on her lips. Like Mac had said, the analogy required a frog, not a toad. “…than kiss Larry Mackenzie.”
“You might rather, but you didn’t kiss a toad. You kissed Mac.”
“I did not.”
Mia crossed her fingers as she made the denial, even though she was telling the truth.
She hadn’t kissed Mac.
He’d kissed her.
There was a difference.
A big difference.
And the second time they kissed didn’t count.
“Have I ever told you about the time I was the belle of the county fair?” Pearly asked, changing the subject.
Mia was happy to switch the topic of conversation to something else. The more she denied kissing with Mac, the more likely she was to slip up and admit the truth.
“No,” she said. “I’ve heard a lot of your stories, but I don’t think I’ve heard one about being belle of the county fair.”
“Well, my class had a kissing booth at the fair to raise money for our trip to Atlanta. And oh, what a trip that was, why—”
“The kissing booth?” Mia prompted, trying to get the older lady back on track.
Pearly had a habit of veering off onto conversational tangents. Since her stories were hard enough to follow when they were linear, most of the Square had learned to try to keep her from diverging.
“Right, the kissing booth. Well, I didn’t plan on working it, but a friend, Shirley was her name, volunteered me to take a turn. I kissed a hund
red boys that weekend. But there was one boy, Buster McClinnon…he was different. Buster was the first boy I ever kissed. But we hadn’t done much kissing of late. We fought a lot, Buster and I. But the moment his lips hit mine, pow. It hit me hard and I forgot all about our current fight.”
Pearly drifted a moment. Her gaze had a faraway quality about it, and Mia knew the older woman had slipped into the past, to a time when she fought and kissed one Buster McClinnon.
All of a sudden, Pearly returned to the here-and-now and started right back into her story, “Afterward, I tried to figure out what made the touch of his lips so much different than all those other boys.”
“Did you figure it out?” Mia asked.
“When I talked to Shirley, she had an answer. She said there are all kinds of kisses. There are kisses you share with family, there are kisses you share with friends. Kissing booth kisses are an entirely different breed of kiss…not really a kiss at all. Just two sets of lips touching.”
Pearly paused and got a far away look in her eyes again. “And then, there are the ones that matter. The kisses that people can see on your face, can hear in your voice. That’s the kind of kiss you gave Mac. It’s the kind of kiss I gave Buster. It’s special. It means something.”
“Kissing Mac doesn’t mean anything. It’s not special.”
“Ah ha,” Pearly crowed with glee. “You admit you kissed him.”
Darn.
Now that Pearly Gates, aka The Perry Square town crier, knew Mia had been kissing Mac, the news would be all over the Square before dinner.
Heck, knowing the speed that the Perry Square gossip-mongers moved at, it would be all over the Square by lunch.
“Who are you, Perry Mason?” Mia grumbled.
“Evading the question,” Pearly declared, looking triumphant. “The guilty tend to try that sort of thing.”
“I’m not guilty,” Mia protested.
“Never said you were. And if you are, you shouldn’t be. You and Mac would make a perfect couple. You…” she said, pausing, searching for a word, “…balance. Yeah. You balance each other.”
“I don’t want to balance with anyone, especially not Larry Mackenzie.”
She purposefully added an extra umph to Larry’s name to prove that despite her slips, she thought of Mac as Larry. “I have plans. Plans that go beyond a car with leather seat-warmer seats. I’m going back to school.”
Before Mac and Katie’s concerns had taken over her thoughts, Mia had been desperately trying to decide what to do next. Where she wanted her life to go.
Saying the words I’m-going-back-to-school aloud to Pearly solidified the thought. It made sense. It felt right.
She rummaged through a pile of papers and found the brochure from Mercyhurst. “Yes, I’m going back to school and finishing my degree. I quit so I could help my brothers through school. But now that Ryan’s graduating, it’s time to go back.”
“Good for you.” Pearly seemed genuinely happy at Mia’s pronouncement.
“That means, I can’t get involved with anyone,” Mia said slowly.
“I don’t see why not.”
“Because I’ll be busy. I’ll be working and going to school. I won’t have time for a relationship. But even if I had time, I wouldn’t pick M—” she caught herself almost saying Mac again, and quickly switched to “—Larry. We’d kill each other. In case you hadn’t noticed, we fight like cats and dogs.”
“That friend Shirley, I mentioned? She worked the kissing booth as well. And who should end up in her line? Stucky Peters. Those two had fought like cats and dogs as well, all through school. But Stucky, he kissed her and…well, it wasn’t a quick peck on the lips. It was one of those long, special kisses. The other guys in line started hootin’ and hollerin’, but old Stucky he just held on to Shirley for dear life. That kiss—it was the beginnin’ of the end for the two of them. Sometimes it’s like that with kisses. A little peck on the cheek can change everything.”
“What happened?” Mia asked.
“Well, they both tried to make a show of fighting, but it was as if the wind had gone outta their fightin’ sails. Soon kissin’ took priority, and after that…well, last I heard they had twelve grandchildren from their four kids.”
“That’s not going to happen with Ma…Larry and me.” The problem she was having with Larry Mackenzie’s name was that she was starting to think of him as Mac rather than Larry.
That just wouldn’t do.
Names had power. And calling him Mac instead of Larry changed their relationship too much for Mia’s comfort. She was going to force herself to think of him as Larry rather than Mac—a way of reminding herself that the only reason her relationship with Larry had changed was because of Katie.
When he found the baby a new home, they’d go back to their previous non-kissing, sniping sort of relationship.
Which was just the way Mia wanted it.
“Our kisses were just aberrations,” she told Pearly. “We were stranded with a baby in a snowstorm. Unless that happens again, I think we’re pretty much kiss-free.”
She wasn’t going to mention to Pearly that she’d kissed Larry again last night, with very little snow, no storm and a sleeping baby who caused very little stress.
“Now—” Pearly started, but the door to the office banged open and Mac came in with the car seat.
“Are you game again today?” he asked.
“No problem,” she said, grinning as he held out the car seat.
The feeling of lightness that permeated her body was because she was going to get to spend time with Katie. It didn’t have anything at all to do with seeing Mac…er, Larry.
Nothing at all.
“Hi, Pearly,” Mac said.
“I came to see your baby,” Pearly said, taking the car seat from him before Mia could.
“Not mine,” he corrected quickly. Too quickly. “I’ve got to be in court again this morning, but I have a lunch meeting to start the adoption process rolling for her. We’re going to find her the perfect family.”
Mia wanted to say no. To find some excuse to keep Mac from starting the process. Katie didn’t belong with strangers. The baby belonged with him.
Pearly unwrapped, unbuckled, unzipped and took off Katie’s hat.
“Look at that hair. I haven’t seen hair that red since I sat behind Mickey Martin. Aren’t you a sweetie,” she cooed as she lifted Katie from the car seat. “How on earth are you ever gonna give her away?”
“She was never mine, so there’s no giving away. I’m just doing what her mother wanted…finding Katie a perfect home.”
“And what if the perfect place for her is with you?” Mia couldn’t help but ask.
He laughed.
It wasn’t a jovial sound. Instead Mia heard something else in it again. Pain.
He’d been adamant from the outset that he wasn’t keeping Katie. Now she asked herself, why?
She didn’t think it was simply that he was a young lawyer with a busy, growing practice. She’d sensed something more, something deeper in his denial this time.
“The perfect place for a child, any child, would never be with me,” he assured her. Looking decidedly uncomfortable, he added, “I’ve got to go. You’ve everything under control?”
“Sure,” Mia said. “No problem. Leland will be thrilled she’s visiting again.”
After he’d left, Pearly sat quietly holding the baby for a few minutes.
Quiet and Pearly…two words that rarely went together.
“She is beautiful,” Pearly finally said. “It would be easy to lose your heart to her.”
“Yes,” Mia said. “It was.”
“Sometimes love’s like that. Easy. So easy you don’t even realize it happened. And sometimes, love is a bit harder. It takes some work. I think that kind of love—the kind you have to work for, to fight for—I think that it’s the stronger for it.”
“Well, I love Katie and it feels awfully strong, no fighting or working involved.”
/>
“I’m sure you do,” was all Pearly said as she handed the baby to her. “Well, I better get going. Thanks for introducing me. You just think on what I said.”
“Sure, Pearly, I will,” Mia promised as she bounced a delighted Katie on her knee.
She kissed the baby’s forehead.
Yes, Katie was easy to love. No fighting or working involved with it.
Easy love.
That’s just the way Mia liked it.
Chapter Seven
They’d fallen into a routine Mac realized the following Friday afternoon on his way back to the office.
Even though Brigitta’s house was once again illness-free, Katie kept coming to the office to spend her days with Mia.
Actually, Mia claimed she was more of a scheduling director for the baby, than anything else. Katie had become the belle of the law firm, visiting the various attorneys throughout the day. A sort of unofficial mascot.
Leland Wagner was the worst offender.
“He snatches her all the time,” Mia had complained, with a smile rather than any real ire.
Mia not only kept Katie every day, she came home with them as well. In just one short week, the routine felt…routine. A part of the new rhythm to Mac’s life.
A part he found he was enjoying.
He counted on sharing a meal with Mia. He looked forward to trading stories about their days. They cared for Katie together, marveling in her every small development.
Mac was beginning to count on all of it, to look forward to their new partnership, their evenings together.
The only part he didn’t like was Mia leaving each night.
Even with Katie in the house, when Mia left it seemed to lose some of its spark, some of its warmth.
And every night she left, he realized he hadn’t managed to kiss her again.
And even worse, he realized he wanted to.
Every night when she said, “I’ll see you and Katie in the morning,” he wanted to pull her into his arms and kiss her senseless.
Kiss her and more.
But every night he let her go without so much as a chaste peck on the cheek. Knowing it was the right thing to do, that toying with a forever sort of woman wasn’t just unwise, but cruel. But knowing it didn’t stop him from longing to do so many things with her.
