“And you hope it’s only once.” She and Scott had amused themselves planning their retirement: where they would live, where they would travel, what adventures they’d take with their grandchildren and great-grands. It had never occurred to either of them that they could possibly have less than three years together. Even if the thought had crossed their minds, they wouldn’t have believed it. They’d been too young, too much in love, too invincible.
And even if they’d believed it, they still would have gone through with it: gotten married, started a life, planned a future, because they’d been young, in love, invincible, and incredibly hopeful.
That lovely, smoky residue of food cooked on the grill drifted on the air, adding its perfume to the white-flowered bush blooming one house over. Fia’s stomach growled, making Elliot chuckle, a good sign to her. She ate because life required nourishment, but she couldn’t remember the last time she’d actually been hungry. Food smelled good. It tasted good. In the last year or so, it just hadn’t seemed worth the effort.
Elliot gently elbowed her. “I hope you have a good appetite. I’d hate to go through all this effort just to end up sharing it with Mouse.”
“No, you wouldn’t,” she disagreed. “You like the prepping part. And you like Mouse.” She shifted so she could see him better. Unfortunately, that meant putting a few inches of space between them. Her left hip, rib cage, and arm cooled after losing contact with his body. “Where have you lived since you got out of the Army?”
“Nowhere. Everywhere.” He shrugged. “I spent a few weeks with my folks at their new place in Arizona. They ranched in West Texas, which is never a very easy proposition. After a few years of drought and unstable market prices and skyrocketing expenses, they decided to head someplace friendlier. Dad works for another rancher now—gets to do the things he likes with the livestock and the cowboys and doesn’t have to worry about the stuff he doesn’t like, like paying bills and making a profit.”
Tired of checking out her new location, Mouse climbed the steps, looked at Fia for a moment, then slid between Elliot’s knees so he could scratch her head. Like the well-trained creature he was, he immediately accommodated her.
“It was kind of hard when they told me their plans. That ranch had been in my dad’s family since the 1880s. It had always been tough, but the Rosses always made a go of it, and I was afraid it would take a toll on them, losing it after all those years.” He smiled. “Turned out, he and Mom couldn’t wait to shake the dust of West Texas off their boots. They live outside Phoenix, a short drive to everything they could possibly need, and they have a lot of friends who’ve never set foot on a ranch or branded a cow or castrated a steer. They love it.”
For a brief moment, Fia wondered what her parents were doing with their lives. In the time she’d known them, neither one had ever held a job for any length of time. They had never accepted responsibility for that, either, or for anything else. They’d brought her into the world with no intention of taking care of her. When she was little, she’d wondered why. What was so wrong with her that even her mother and father couldn’t love her? What had she done to deserve their neglect?
It wasn’t her, Scott had insisted. The failings were her parents’; they’d been selfish, lazy, too focused on themselves. It was the first time anyone had told her she wasn’t to blame, and he’d been so sincere that she’d believed him. She had given up trying to love her mom and dad, had quit trying to maintain some semblance of a relationship with them.
But Lord, there was still a place way deep down inside her that wanted to know how a mother’s and father’s love felt. There was still a part of her that regretted she would never know.
Beside her, Elliot exhaled. “So I decided Arizona wasn’t for me, and I didn’t want to cramp Mom and Dad’s life by trying to fit in where I didn’t. Next I went to New Mexico and stayed a few weeks with Emily and her family.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone, then began swiping one finger across the screen, scrolling through pictures fast enough to create a blur of color and activity. “You’d like Emily. She’s a tyrant but in a good way. Her kids are well behaved and respectful, and they say stuff like ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and volunteer to do chores. They live in a little town about an hour out of Albuquerque where everyone knows not to cross Emily. Everyone gathers at her and Bill’s house—all the school kids, the neighbors, the folks from church—and everyone is happy.”
She leaned close to see the photo when he held out the phone. The woman was a few years older than him, tall, lean, and really pretty in a wholesome-girl way. In the shot, she hugged her husband and kids close. Everyone is happy. They really looked it.
“But you didn’t stay there because…you’d already spent enough years under her thumb but in a good way?”
“Nah.” He gazed at the photo a moment with pure affection before looking back at Fia. “She and Bill have lived there six years. She loves it, and it works for her. It’s her place. But not mine.”
“How will you know your place when you find it?”
Even though his attention turned serious, there was still a hint of amusement in his eyes. Fia wondered if it ever totally went away. “I made a list once. Maybe sometime I’ll show it to you. In the meantime, let’s get this dinner on the grill.”
He stood, then offered his hand. She laid hers in it, liking the feel of his warm callused skin and the way his fingers folded around hers. With little effort, he pulled her to her feet. With just a little more, he could have pulled her into his arms. She would have been startled—or just plain happy—and he would have smiled and his blue eyes would have lit up. Her breathing would have gotten fast and shallow, and his slow and raspy, and then slowly he would have pulled her even closer, until nothing more substantial than a breath could come between them, and by then she would have been shivery and hot, and he would have—
“Aw, come on, don’t pee on the patio. That’s just not dignified.”
Fia blinked, and the shivers and fever disappeared. Instead of moving closer, Elliot had taken a step back and was chastising the dog near his feet, who looked back at him from the other side of a puddle, her expression as unrepentant as any rebellious teenager’s.
His scowl good-natured, he shook his head. “I’ll clean that, then start cooking. Want me to get you a chair?”
Fia was still in a daze, still thinking about contact and intimacy and other girly desires. She shook her head to clear it. “No, I’m fine. You go on and get the food, and I’ll get the hose.”
He protested but went inside when she insisted. As the door closed solidly behind him, she gave Mouse a measuring look. The dog gave back the same expression.
“Consider yourself lucky if I don’t turn it on you and me both.”
Chapter 3
Elliot quickly prepped the last few vegetables and loaded them onto a baking tray—zucchini sliced in thick planks, seasoned and drizzled with olive oil, and portobello caps—and swiped oil across the surface of the buns before carrying the tray outside. He found the patio rinsed clean and Fia sitting on the grass near the grill, Mouse curled up a short distance away.
That dog and her bladder…First, she’d dragged him out into the rain so he could meet Fia, and then she’d pulled him totally out of the moment when he’d thought he was going to kiss Fia. She’d looked so sweet and soft and willing—Fia, not the dog—and he’d felt the tiny tremors in her hand, and he’d wanted more than anything to lean forward and wrap his arms around her and slide his tongue inside her mouth and—
And. Who knew how far it would have gone, but he did know one thing for sure: It would have been a hell of a good time. The best he’d had in months. Maybe ever.
He set the tray on the side shelf of the grill and lifted the lid, fierce heat escaping into the evening. The zucchini and the mushrooms hissed when he put them on the grate, smoke rising into the air, hanging there before drifting away. After closing the lid again, he faced Fia. “What kind of workouts do
you do?”
“What makes you think I’m not lazier than Mouse?”
“Because you don’t get muscles like that being lazy.”
She considered her long, lean legs for a moment. “It used to be the most strenuous thing I’d do all day was dancing in the clubs all night. Then I met Scott, and his idea of a perfect date was a long walk or jogging three miles to breakfast. I kind of got hooked on the activity, so I went back to school and got licensed as a personal trainer. After a while, I decided running was more stress than I wanted to put on my joints since I intended to chase after my grandkids when I was old, so I began mostly swimming, weight training, walking, yoga.”
“Did you work as a trainer?”
“Yeah. I still work at the gym, but I gave up my clients after…” A pensive look on her face, she shrugged one thin shoulder, and he finished the sentence himself: after Scott died. “I see them around while I do other stuff at the gym.”
Loss was a bitch, Elliot thought as he used tongs to flip the zucchini slices. His grandmother had been widowed fairly young: She was thirty-nine when his grandfather’s horse had thrown him and broken his neck. She’d had family living right there on the ranch, though—Elliot’s dad and mom, him and Emily, Uncle Vance and Uncle Marvin and his wife, Amy. Grandma had sucked it up and gone on with the business and with life, but she’d never stopped missing Grandpa until the day she died.
Just like Fia would never stop missing Scott, and her friends would never stop missing their husbands. It could prove a bit of tough competition for some people, but Elliot was nothing if not tough. And competitive.
Facing the grill again, he loosened the foil covering the two fat burgers, then slid each one onto the grate with a smoky sizzle. “The perfect sound: beef over heat.”
“Pretty near the perfect aroma, too.” Fia pushed to her feet, nudged Mouse with her toes, then laughed before joining him. “I’ve never been much of a burger griller.”
“Aw, it’s easy. First you start with your own grass-fed beef, tomatoes off your vines, and onions so fresh that there’s still clumps of dirt clinging to them.”
“You didn’t grow any of this,” she pointed out.
“Nope, you’re right. But back in the day, that’s how we did it. Grandma made the buns, and Aunt Amy made the cheese with milk from her own cows, no kidding. The only thing they ever bought was the mustard and the mayonnaise. Even the pickles were homegrown and canned.”
“Let’s see, hamburgers in my family back in the day meant unwrapping the paper and biting into a piece of mystery meat, a squirt of mustard and one of ketchup, and a single slice of pickle. If you wanted cheese, they slapped on a cold slice just before they wrapped it and handed it to you.”
Elliot gave her a phony pitying look. “That’s just damn sad. You should have grown up in West Texas, where people know how to eat right.” And live right. And, especially, treat their kids right. He hated the casual, straightforward way she’d thrown out comments about her family: There was nothing in Florida to go back to. I never really expected anyone to want me because my mom and my dad sure didn’t. As if they were simple facts of life, deserving no more importance than any other detail.
Tamping back that annoyance, he continued with the same phony tone. “I take it your mother didn’t like to cook.”
“She preferred a liquid diet most of the time. Food was just one more thing she didn’t bother with, along with housekeeping and working.”
And child-rearing. What a shame.
To shake off the gloom that line of thought brought, he pointed to the burgers with the pancake turner. “Rare, medium, shoe leather, or in between?”
“Medium well. I’m not a fan of any pink food except strawberries mashed with vanilla ice cream.”
“Home-churned ice cream and served with a thick slice of fresh-baked angel food cake.”
She gave him a look. “Or those little round sponge cakes that come four to a package and are usually piled next to the berries in the produce section.”
“Man, you’re killing me here. Your life has been so deprived.”
To his surprise, she shifted until her shoulder bumped his. It was similar to a thousand nudges Emily had given him growing up, but it felt like a whole different universe. “Yeah, but I also didn’t have to get up at oh-dark-thirty to feed cows and horses and chickens.”
“Can’t-see,” he murmured. When she glanced at him, brows lifted, he shrugged. “That’s what Grandma called it. You work on a ranch from can’t-see to can’t-see. Dawn to dusk.” For a moment, he concentrated on the food, removing the zucchini and portobellos from the grill, testing the doneness of the burgers with the press of the pancake turner, sliding the buns over the heat. He’d learned the perfect timing of burgers and buns years ago, always finishing one just as the other was ready for it. It was his singular talent, Emily claimed. That, and being every female’s knight in shining armor.
Hey, some men had a lot less to offer than perfectly timed food and a stand-up guy complex.
Within five minutes, they were back in the house, Fia helping him gather condiments, napkins, and plates. Once everything was on the small dining table that separated the living room from the kitchen, he presented her with one medium-well-done portobello-mozzarella-onion burger on a perfectly grilled bun.
“This smells incredible. Why didn’t you go to culinary school?” she asked as she spread mustard and mayo, added lettuce and pickle, then took her first bite. She made the same kind of pleasure-filled moan that Mouse had made at her first-ever taste of hamburger. It was so much sexier coming from Fia.
“I don’t know. Time. Money. Differences of opinion. I have my way of doing things that I don’t want to change.” He took a bite of his own burger while considering it further. “I’m not interested in exotic ingredients or impressive plating or mastering overly complex techniques. I’d never make it as a chef in a five-star restaurant. I’d want to have my own place, cooking the sort of food I grew up with, serving it to the sort of people I grew up with, and for that, thousands of hours in the kitchen with Grandma count for a hell of a lot more than a culinary certificate.”
“So is that the kind of job you’re looking for here?”
Elliot shrugged with an easiness he didn’t feel inside. There weren’t many topics in his life that made him uncomfortable, but his lack of employment did. With all the skills that the Army had taught him, added to what he’d already known, finding a job should be easy. Instead, he’d found too many people who said, Oh, you were in the Army. Thank you for your service, but we don’t have anything for you. That was hard to accept for a guy who’d worked practically his whole life.
“I’m not picky. Cowboying, tending bar, construction, chief bottle washer…Something that will pay the rent.” Obviously, he’d been getting by the past two years, and more comfortably than a lot of veterans. He might sleep in his truck as often as not, but it was better than the ground. His only luxuries were the pickup and the cell phone, but he needed one to find the right place to live—and to get to any job he did get—and the other to keep in touch with his family.
“Hmm. My friend Jessy’s husband owns a ranch north of town. His brother works with him, but they hire seasonal help, or maybe he knows someone else who’s looking for someone. I’ll ask her.” Fia sliced into a piece of zucchini, her fork cutting through the charred marks, then tasted it. “This is really good.”
“Thank you, ma’am.”
“What was your MOS in the Army?”
Deliberately he took a large bite of his hamburger, more than his mouth should hold, because his specialty in the Army was one of the other topics that could make him uncomfortable sometimes. He had no regrets. He’d done his job and done it well, killing his share of the enemy, saving his share of his buddies.
Some people, though, didn’t care about the training, the discipline, or the people he’d saved. All they’d wanted to hear about was the ones he’d killed. Their questions were pushy a
nd rude: Did you know the guy in that movie? Could you shoot as well as him? Could you see their heads blow apart in the scope? What was it like? How did it feel to know you did that from a mile away?
“I was a sniper,” he said at last.
Fia wasn’t some people. Her eyes didn’t widen; her thoughts didn’t race to thrills and deadly skills or media hype. She nodded once and quietly said, “Tough job.” She didn’t pry. She didn’t look at him like he was some big bad killing machine. She just made her comment and continued eating.
Every time he learned something about her that he really liked, it gave him a warm feeling in his gut. It took a strong man to be a warrior, and an even stronger woman to be a warrior’s wife. Scott Thomas had met his match in Fia. That always-falling-in-love part of Elliot was wondering whether he might turn out to be as lucky.
* * *
Marti’s neat spacious house was quiet as usual Sunday morning. She’d gotten up at eight—it was the one day she allowed herself to sleep in—and made herself a cup of coffee, along with a bagel slathered with cream cheese. Her friends teased her about merely tasting foods rather than actually eating. Her rule was to eat as much as she wanted of most foods, which wasn’t a lot, but there were exceptions: a carton of salted caramel ice cream; a bag of vanilla cookies; a bagel almost as big as the dinner plate on which it sat. As much as she wanted then became an embarrassing amount of food. Like enough to sustain a family of three for a day.
With the local newspaper tucked under one arm, the plate in one hand, and the coffee in the other, she was on her way to the back door to enjoy the cool morning and the patio furniture delivered just last week when a sound down the hall stopped her. It came from the bathroom, and it wasn’t pretty. Cadence was puking. Again.
Marti hesitated. Should she knock on the door and ask if her niece was all right? Should she write it off as nerves, Cadence’s explanation when it had happened after lunch yesterday? Maybe she should pretend she hadn’t heard anything, go outside, and enjoy her breakfast while her coffee and bagel were hot, and let Cadence tell her whatever she wanted.
A Summer to Remember Page 5
