The Michigan coach had been furious. His teammates had been bewildered.
Ashley had dumped him. She’d wanted to be with a football star, not a drudge grinding it out in pre-med courses, struggling through organic chem labs, pulling all-nighters, and stressing over every B that should have been an A.
He’d been relieved to discover he actually was pretty smart—not a scholar, not a genius, but he knew how to learn. Years of football training had taught him discipline. Hard work wasn’t exactly a new concept to him. But Ashley hadn’t wanted him working hard at anything except whatever would lead to a career in professional sports. She’d resented him for telling her he couldn’t phone her every night because he had to study. She’d been pissed off that he no longer had money to spend on her. When he’d traveled from his parents’ new home in Maine to Brogan’s Point to visit Ashley during the Christmas holiday that first year of college, she’d broken up with him. Clearly, she’d wanted nothing to do with some ordinary college student sweating bullets to make good grades. She’d wanted a star.
She’d found one, a nose guard from her own school. They’d gotten married a week after graduation. They’d gotten divorced less than a year later.
Apparently, she’d come around to thinking that a doctor was almost as prestigious as a professional football player. Somehow, she’d found out that he was now a graduate of U-Michigan’s medical school, doing his residency at Mass General, and he was once again good enough for her.
He’d loved Ashley once. Maybe he could love her again. After she’d ended things with him and he’d immersed himself in pre-med studies, he hadn’t had much time to socialize. He’d lacked the time and energy for love. He’d had a few drive-by relationships, but nothing significant, no one who came close to replacing her in his heart.
When Ashley had contacted him a month ago, he’d been surprised. What they’d once had was now ancient history. He’d had no illusions that they would pick up where they’d left off, but he’d been curious.
Just as he was curious about Maeve Nolan. She might have been a freak back in high school, but they weren’t in high school anymore. She intrigued him. She was courageous enough to open her own shop, and enough of a magician to fill that shop with an aroma that could be bottled and sold as an aphrodisiac. And unlike Ashley, she’d never broken his heart.
He chewed his sandwich, watching her as she watched him. It occurred to him that she expected him to say something more than that abandoning the within-reach dream of a professional football career for the far greater challenge—for him, at least—of pursuing a medical career had been crazy.
In fact, sometimes he thought that choice had been the sanest move he’d ever made.
“I’m no genius,” he admitted, smiling sheepishly. He was just stating the obvious, but maybe she didn’t know that. Maybe she really thought he was brilliant. “A lot of medical training is just memorization. You don’t have to be Michelangelo with a scalpel to be a good orthopedist. Bones are bones. Joints are joints. Connective tissue is connective tissue. Orthopedics is one of the more mechanical specialties. It’s engineering.”
“But you really enjoy it,” she said.
His enthusiasm must have leaked through his bland description of his work. Funny, but Ashley had never even asked if he enjoyed what he was doing, let alone sensed how much he did.
Stop comparing Maeve to Ashley. He popped a few fries into his mouth, savoring their unhealthy coating of salt. One thing he’d learned as a medical resident was that knowing what was healthy didn’t always lead doctors to make healthy choices. He’d been stunned that several residents who’d started with him at Mass General smoked. Less stunned but bemused by the dangerously heavy drinking some of his colleagues indulged in, and their abuse of sleep aids and amphetamines, helping them get through their ridiculously long shifts. Scarfing down greasy, salty fries seemed pretty benign in comparison to some of his colleagues’ bad habits.
“Yeah,” he said, responding as much to the sinful but delicious flavor of the fries as to Maeve’s comment. “I really enjoy it.”
“It isn’t always easy to know what you’re meant to do,” she said, her eyes steady on him. They reminded him of sunlight on the ocean—green and gray, with those golden glints of light in their depths. “But if you’re lucky enough to figure it out, you have to do it. It sounds like you’ve figured out what you’re meant to do.”
She made the process seem so simple, as if he might have found his way to medicine even if that Ohio State tackle hadn’t sacked him, as if the years of doubt, the financial crises, the all-nighters and stress and the loss of the girl he’d once imagined marrying hadn’t tied his life in knots.
Maybe, to Maeve Nolan, it was that simple. She’d clearly figured out what she was meant to do. Not that he had any idea of her business plan or whether her shop would survive, let alone flourish. Not that he had a clue whether her cookies were good enough to justify the prices she’d written on that whiteboard behind the counter in Cookie’s.
Screw that. He knew they would be that good. He’d smelled them, and that smell had taken him home.
Chapter Six
Perhaps it was because she’d grown up in a seaside town that Maeve often felt she was on a boat—a small dinghy, or maybe a life raft. When her mother had died, she’d felt as if that tiny boat was caught in an ocean storm. She’d been far from shore, buffeted by violent waves, without oars or a sail. All she could do was cling to the gunwales and pray that the boat wouldn’t capsize or a rogue wave wouldn’t crash over the side and sweep her away.
During the past few years, the storm had abated. Preparing for the opening of Cookie’s, she sometimes actually felt as if she were standing on dry land. Her footsteps were sure, her legs no longer wobbly, her vision no longer swaying.
Listening to Quinn tonight, she was out at sea again. Nothing was quite steady. Her surroundings seemed unfamiliar. Yet the waves were gentle, and the boat beneath her soothed her with its rocking. You may not be home, she told herself, but wherever you are, this is really nice.
So he wasn’t the hot-shot jock she’d believed him to be. He wasn’t the self-assured alpha dog he’d seemed in high school. He was a doctor, eager to work miracles like the doctors who’d fixed his broken leg. He was attentive and soft-spoken and…
Nice. She hadn’t expected him to be nice—in her experience, no guy as handsome as Quinn ever turned out to be nice. But he was. Really, truly nice.
Her lobster roll tasted delicious. She hadn’t realized how hungry she was until she’d taken the first bite and her body had hummed with gratitude. She’d been working the entire day, and other than the fruit and cheese she’d packed for herself that morning, all she’d eaten had been a peanut-butter cookie that had fallen off the spatula and broken while she’d been transferring it from the cooking tray to a container, and a date-nut bar that gotten burnt around the edges. She drank her coffee black, so no nourishment there. For most of the day, she’d been on her feet, fueled only by caffeine and those few small snacks.
Now, at last, she was sitting, relaxing, and eating something substantial. The mayo in the lobster salad had been spiced with a touch of curry that added zing to it, and the roll had a deliciously crunchy crust. Honestly, though, she would have been happy to sit here eating dry saltines and drinking clam juice. Everything tasted delicious when you were in good company.
To her amazement, Quinn Connor was good company. In high school, she had never even said hello to him. She’d assumed they were alien species, unable to cross the gulf that separated his tribe from hers—if, all by herself, she could qualify as a tribe. He’d spoken the language of success; she’d spoken the language of despair.
She’d also assumed she’d been more or less invisible back then. At least she’d tried to be. She hadn’t wanted anyone to notice her, since any attention she received had usually brought pity with it. She’d hated being pitied.
“All we’ve done is talk about me,” he
said after polishing off the last of his sandwich. “Tell me about you. How did you wind up becoming a champion cookie maker?”
“I don’t know if I’m a champion,” she said with a modest laugh. “I used to bake with my mother, though. It was a special thing we did together. After she died, I found a loose-leaf notebook of hers, filled with cookie recipes. She would take traditional recipes and add her own twists. Butter-nut cookies flavored with coffee, or lemon cookies sweetened with honey. Some of her experiments worked better than others, but she took notes on everything and put them in her book.”
“Kind of like a lab notebook,” he said, then reached across the table and gave her hand a squeeze. “I’m sorry about your mother. I didn’t know.”
His touch surprised her, yet it also felt right. His hand enveloped hers, large and warm. She supposed football players needed large hands in order to hold and throw that strange-shaped ball. But the warmth—that was unexpected. And welcome.
After a moment, he withdrew his hand, as if he’d suddenly had second thoughts about touching her. He smiled hesitantly. “So your store is like a tribute to her. You’re keeping her alive by baking her cookies.”
“I hadn’t thought about it that way,” Maeve admitted. It was a lovely notion, though. “The store…” Should she tell him? Would he think she was nuts? If he did, so what? She’d long ago stopped caring what people thought of her. “The store came about because I was selling my cookies through a café where I was working in Seattle, and this man—Harry—loved them. He thought I should have my own store, so…” What Harry had done for her did sound nuts. But here she was, because of him. “He bought the shop on Seaview Avenue from the Torellis and gave it to me.”
“Wow! I wish I had friends like that.” Quinn laughed.
“Harry was special. He was always telling me I should come back to Brogan’s Point, I really didn’t belong in Seattle, my father was here. And he was—well, I didn’t realize how rich he was until he died. He left me the shop and some start-up money in his will.”
“Wow.” No longer laughing, Quinn sounded thoughtful. “This guy must have been really significant in your life.”
She recalled her father’s suspicion when she’d mentioned Harry to him. Of course her father would be suspicious. He was a police detective. Skepticism was bred in his bones.
Quinn seemed much more respectful of the elderly gentleman who’d befriended her in Seattle. His tone didn’t imply that he thought Harry might have had ulterior motives, or Maeve might have been in some sort of sleazy relationship with him to justify his generous bequest.
“I didn’t realize how significant he was until he died,” she admitted. “We were friends. He’d come to Seattle on business, stop in at the café where I worked, eat my cookies and visit with me. He was such a sweet man. I could talk to him. I was…kind of alone while I was living out there.” Just as she’d been alone in Brogan’s Point, once her mother had died and her father had basically gone AWOL. “Harry was someone I could talk to.”
It struck her that she could talk to Quinn, too. She was talking to him. She found it easier to understand her friendship with an elderly businessman who’d stop by to see her when he was in Seattle than this unexpected rapport with a boy who’d awed and intimidated her all through high school. Quinn wasn’t a boy now, and as with Harry, she found confiding in him surprisingly easy. Just as his having reached across the table to touch her hand had seemed easy.
Quinn continued to regard her thoughtfully. When the waitress approached their table and asked if they wanted dessert, Quinn eyed Maeve, who shook her head. He asked for the check, but his gaze never left Maeve. “Some people would think you were lucky to have a rich guy buy you a store and give you enough money to get your business off the ground,” he said. “But it wasn’t luck. You worked damned hard for this.”
She shook her head and grinned. “How would you know how hard I work?”
“You’re putting in more hours than most medical residents.”
“I’m hoping things will lighten up once we open.”
The waitress returned with the check. Quinn stood and pulled a few bills from his wallet. Then he offered Maeve his hand and helped her to her feet.
Outside on the wharf where the Lobster Shack stood, the sky was dark and the air was nippy. Maeve wished she’d brought a jacket, but when she’d bid Cookie farewell that morning, she’d expected to be driving directly back to her apartment when she was done working—and she’d expected to be done working a bit earlier. Maybe she had put in a medical resident’s hours today, but she was sure that once she worked out her routines and rhythms, her work load would ease.
And if it didn’t, she’d work long hours. She was determined to make Cookie’s a success. She owed it to Harry, after what he’d done for her. Maybe she owed it to her mother, too, if Quinn was right and the shop was a way to keep her mother’s memory alive.
A cold gust of wind off the water caused her to shiver. Quinn wrapped an arm around her shoulders and drew her closer to him. His torso was as warm as his hand had been, as if he had an internal oven heating him. Cuddling up to him didn’t seem appropriate, but she was cold and he was willing to share his warmth.
She ought to thank him, and clarify that his casual embrace meant nothing, but although she moved her lips, no sound emerged. Walking along the wharf with him this way felt too good.
A tiny voice inside her skull nattered that this was Quinn Connor, the Adonis of Brogan’s Point High, and she was Maeve Nolan, the school’s primo head case, and there was no possible way it made sense for someone like him to put his arm around someone like her. She silenced that voice by reminding herself that they were ten years out of high school. Who they’d been ten years ago no longer mattered. What mattered was now: letting his long, muscular arm hold her close, letting his lean, hard chest radiate heat into her. Feeling herself tucked protectively within the shelter of his shoulder. Strolling step by step with him, her sneakered feet keeping pace with his, her breath matching his.
She was no longer in a boat, no longer at sea. Walking the short distance to his car, she felt as if she were walking home.
The long way home. They moved in a straight line, strolling along the sea-weathered planks of the wharf toward the loose gravel of the parking lot, just a short distance. Yet the song echoed in her head, serenading her with the truth that few journeys were direct, that life was full of detours, that a person might think she was heading one way when she was actually heading another, but no matter which way she journeyed, eventually her path would bring her home.
He unlocked his car and helped her onto the passenger seat. When he stepped away she felt the chill of his absence. She pulled the door shut but still felt cold until he climbed in behind the wheel and started the engine. “Fall is here, for sure,” he said.
When in doubt, talk about the weather, she thought, wondering what exactly she was in doubt about. “I’m not looking forward to winter. It gets cold in Seattle, but nothing like Massachusetts.”
“What made you decide to go to Seattle?” he asked as he coasted out of the lot, his tires crunching against the gravel.
“My mother had visited there once. She told me it was a pretty city.”
“So you decided to move there, just like that?”
She hadn’t lied to Quinn so far. No need to start now. But she couldn’t quite look at him when she spoke the truth. “I wanted to get as far away from Brogan’s Point as I could,” she admitted, addressing her hands, which her folded in her lap.
“You didn’t want to go to college?”
A sound escaped her, half a laugh and half a snort. “That wasn’t even on my radar. I just wanted to get the hell away. Life here was too sad.”
He shot her a quick look, then returned his gaze to the road. “Well, you’re obviously a survivor. Some people who think life is too sad take a different path.”
As a doctor, he probably saw what happened to people who took that differ
ent path: losing yourself to drugs or drink, jumping off a roof, obliterating yourself. She’d never wanted that. She’d been raging and hurting, but she’d treasured life, perhaps even more than most people. “I don’t think of myself as a survivor,” she said, tossing the idea around in her mind before she rejected it. “I’m just…someone who isn’t ready to die yet.”
“Good.”
That one brief word warmed her the way his arm had. She felt as if her insides were smiling, her guts. Her soul. Yes, it was good. This conversation, while difficult, was good. This evening was good.
They’d reached Seaview Avenue. All the shops, including hers, were dark. She pulled her key from her bag. “You need to come in so I can give you a few cookies,” she reminded him.
“Twist my arm, why don’t you?” He shot her a grin as he pulled to the curb and shut off the engine.
She unlocked the front door and swung it open, causing the bell to jingle. A flick of a light switch illuminated the overhead lights, three large hemispheres hanging from brass rods fastened to the pressed-tin ceiling. She moved around to the other side of the counter, snapped open a bag imprinted with the Cookie’s logo, plucked a square of tissue from a box, and slid three cookies into the bag: a mocha toffee, an oatmeal walnut, and one of her childhood favorites, a peanut-butter cookie with a layer of strawberry jam hidden inside. Her mother used to call those cookies PB&J’s, just like the sandwiches Maeve and all her friends used to bring to school in their lunch boxes. She planned to rotate the PB&J cookies into and out of her inventory as specials, since they were admittedly kind of odd.
She circled back around to Quinn’s side of the counter and handed him the bag. He reached in, pulled the PB&J cookie out, and took a bite. His eyes widened with surprise when he discovered the jam hidden inside. He chewed, swallowed and grinned, his eyes bright with laughter. Had she thought those beautiful blue eyes were icy? Tonight they were as warm as the rest of him.
Take the Long Way Home Page 6
