Fire and Glass

by Linda Seed

  Lacy went to the espresso machine to pull the coffee for Rose’s drink.

  “Honestly, Lacy, are you sure you even want to?” Rose asked. “Work things out with Brandon, I mean? It’s better to break it off now than to make a run for it at the church on your wedding day. Although, if you do that, I’ve totally got your back.”

  The other two nodded in agreement.

  “That’s just … Why the hell would I want to make a run for it?” Lacy was wiping the counter with a white towel, and she threw the towel down irritably. Ever since Lacy’s friends had learned about her engagement, they’d been dropping hints that Lacy might not want to go through with the wedding. At first, she’d just been puzzled, but now it was annoying the hell out of her. Marriage to Brandon meant a home, children, stability—all the things she wanted. Or, most of them, anyway. Why shouldn’t she have those things? Why shouldn’t she want them?

  “It’s just … the two of you don’t seem all that … compatible.” Gen was looking at Lacy earnestly, standing at the counter with her coffee cup in her hand.

  “We’re compatible!” Lacy threw her hands into the air in frustration. “We are! We’re compatible! He’s handsome, and smart, and he’s nice to me, and … and it’s easy for all of you to criticize, when you have what you want! You’ve all got these … these perfect men! What do you want from me? Do you want me to be alone? Is that it?”

  Lacy hadn’t planned the outburst, but now that it had happened, she could see that it had been brewing for some time.

  “Oh, sweetie.” Kate’s eyes were brimming with sympathy. “Can you take a little break and come sit down with us?”

  She was on the verge of saying no—of kicking all of them out, in fact—but she was due for a ten-minute break, and she didn’t feel that she could leave things like this. If she’d had doubts about Brandon—which she told herself she didn’t, regardless of what they thought—then she could live with that. But when things weren’t right between her and her friends, well, that was something that just couldn’t stand.

  “We don’t want you to be alone.” Kate was rubbing Lacy’s forearm as they all sat at a café table in a corner of the coffeehouse, with Connor peering over at them curiously from where he was manning the counter.

  “Well … it seems that way sometimes,” Lacy said, her voice sullen.

  “We just think … we’re not sure that Brandon is the guy who’s going to make you happy,” Rose said.

  “You don’t want me to be happy!” Lacy tossed her hands skyward again. “You don’t want me to have what you have! Why not? Why shouldn’t I have what you have?”

  “You should,” Gen said. “You should have exactly what we have. That’s why Brandon isn’t the right guy for you. Because he’s not going to give it to you. He’ll try, but he can’t. Lacy, he can’t.” Gen was looking at Lacy with the intense, serious gaze of someone staging an intervention. Which, now that Lacy thought about it, she was.

  It was easy for Kate, Gen, and Rose to judge Lacy’s relationship. After all, each one of them had found what appeared to be true love. Kate was living with Jackson, one of the top chefs in Cambria. Gen had married Ryan, a hot, ridiculously rich rancher. And Rose was having a baby with Will, a truly sweet guy who, Lacy had no doubt, would walk through fire if Rose asked him to.

  So what if Lacy’s relationship with Brandon lacked that kind of passion? It didn’t make Brandon any less of a good man. It didn’t make Lacy any less worthy of love.

  “Does this mean none of you are coming to my engagement party?” Lacy sat with her arms folded over her middle, her gaze firmly on the tabletop. “I wouldn’t, if I felt that way.”

  “Of course we’re coming. Don’t be stupid,” Kate said.

  “Honey.” Rose put a hand on Lacy’s arm. “We’re your best friends. If you killed somebody, we’d tell you that murder is wrong. But we’d still help you hide the body.”

  The Vegas job hadn’t been installed and unveiled yet, but after months of intense work, the glass was done. That meant Daniel had to get back to work on the bowls and vases, the plates and candleholders that usually made up so much of his income.

  Bowls and vases might not be as artistically satisfying as a big installation, but they were popular with the tourists who streamed through Cambria year-round. He regularly had pieces in a half dozen shops around town. He placed the lower-priced items—the kinds of things a middle-class shopper might buy on impulse during a weekend in town—in boutiques on Burton Drive and Main Street. The higher-ticket items—the larger pieces that would appeal to collectors—usually were shown at the Porter Gallery.

  The Vegas deal had already gotten him some press, and Gen Porter said some of her clients were inquiring about buying his pieces—even clients who’d never shown an interest in him before. The flip side of that was that he’d been so busy he had nothing new to show them.

  If he wanted to capitalize on the publicity from the Eden job, he had to get back to work, and he had to do it now.

  That was fine with him. The business of art—the schmoozing, the accounting, chasing publicity—was a necessary part of his work, and he knew that. But in his heart, he didn’t give a rat’s ass about that end of things. He wanted to work. He wanted to create things. He wanted to put his soul into the glass and see what that looked like.

  The rest of it only mattered because he had bills to pay.

  At the moment, he was working on a vase. A vase wasn’t flashy, it wasn’t high-profile. A vase wouldn’t get him a mention in Art in America. But there was a certain satisfaction in the shape, in the graceful lines. He started by gathering molten glass on the end of a blowpipe. Then he rolled the glass back and forth on the marver—a flat steel slab—to get a rough cylindrical shape. Into the furnace, then back to the marver for shaping. Back into the furnace, and then he rolled the hot glass over dark red powder and put that into the furnace again to melt it onto the piece. Now more shaping, this time with an inches-thick slab of wet newspaper that was rounded and blackened with use. The color streaked across the piece in fiery waves.

  He had to keep the glass hot—somewhere in the neighborhood of a thousand degrees Fahrenheit—and he had to keep it in constant motion to preserve the shape. One hand on the blowpipe, turning and turning, one hand on his tools, shaping the glass, forming it into the vision he had for his piece.

  Sometimes the vision changed in the middle of the work; the feel of the thing suggested to him what it wanted to be. Daniel believed in rolling with the intuition, in being as flexible and malleable as the molten glass itself. You had to listen to the glass. You had to hear the story it had to tell.

  Somewhere in the middle of the meditative process of heating and shaping, heating and shaping, Lacy Jordan popped into his mind. If he worked with Vince Jordan on the house thing, then maybe Daniel would get to spend some time with Lacy. He’d been around her a lot, mostly as part of the big group that included his friends and their significant others. He’d been intrigued by Lacy, and yeah, he could admit that at first, it was about how she looked. But there was more to it than that. He wanted to know how she thought. Images of Lacy worked their way through his mind as he carried the blowpipe back to the furnace and heated the glass until it glowed.

  What he did—it was all about the fire. The heat was everything.

  Daniel repeated the cycle of blowing and shaping and heating. He was starting to get somewhere with the piece. He’d been doing this long enough that he didn’t have to think about it much anymore—he felt it. The process relaxed him, soothed him, as he thought about everything from books he’d read to movies he’d seen to problems with family, with women.

  He looked at the glass form on the end of his pipe and admired the streaks of color. He wondered if Lacy would like it.

  Lacy. There she was again, in his thoughts, unbidden.

  Jesus, it was hot in here.

  Chapter Three

  Daniel probably would not have been invited to the engagement
party if it hadn’t been for Vince. Daniel considered Lacy a friend by virtue of the friends they had in common, but he wasn’t someone Lacy’s mother and sisters would have thought about when writing up the guest list.

  That oversight was corrected when Daniel called Vince to set up an initial appointment to talk about the renovations. After the usual chitchat about what Daniel was looking for and the basics of how Vince did business, the older man had asked whether Daniel could be expected at the party the following weekend.

  Not only hadn’t Daniel known about the party, but until that moment, he hadn’t even known that Lacy was engaged. Fortunately, Vince took the dumbstruck surprise in Daniel’s voice for affront over the fact that he hadn’t been invited, instead of what it was: dismay over the idea that the lovely and delightful Lacy Jordan, subject of many a happy daydream over the years, was going to marry that stiff she’d been seeing.

  Vince, in his misunderstanding of the situation, rushed to correct the faux pas he thought he had made.

  “Oh, jeez. I’m sure Nancy and the girls meant to invite you. I feel like an ass.”

  “No, no, don’t.” Daniel was pacing in his kitchen, his cell phone pressed to his ear. He didn’t correct Vince’s assumption, but he also didn’t want him feeling bad over something that wasn’t even a problem. The problem—the real one—was that Lacy was engaged in the first place. And if Vince wanted to feel bad about that, then he could sure as hell have at it.

  “If I’d known—” Vince began.

  “Nah, nah, it’s fine,” Daniel answered. “It’s just … are you sure she’s doing the right thing?” Daniel wasn’t sure whether to broach the subject with Vince, but the opportunity had presented itself, so what the hell?

  “Why?” Vince’s voice turned wary. “Do you know something I don’t?”

  “Not really. It’s just … I’ve met this Brandon guy a few times, and … are we sure he’s good enough?”

  The sound in Vince’s voice changed from suspicion to knowing amusement, and he chuckled. “You got someone in mind who’d be better?”

  “What?” Daniel’s eyebrows rose in innocence. “No. But a woman like Lacy is … she’s special. And that Brandon guy strikes me as … well … not.”

  Vince chuckled again, a low, throaty sound that made a man want to have a beer with him. “You go ahead and come to that party,” he said. “And if you’ve got a mind to make some sort of move, you’d better get on it, son.”

  “What, me?” Daniel was genuinely surprised at the suggestion. “I’m not gonna make a move. I’m just concerned.”

  Daniel didn’t want to pursue Lacy. At least, he’d never seriously considered it. And the woman was engaged. But if a guy was concerned about a sort-of friend’s life choices, well, that was just … friendly.

  “Listen, when’s that party going to be?” he asked Vince.

  The thing about living in an Airstream trailer was that there wasn’t space for anything. The fact that the trailer where Lacy lived—its tube of a body perched like some oversized metallic pill bug in her parents’ backyard—had just one miniscule closet meant that Lacy had very few clothes. And most of those clothes were the jeans and Tshirts appropriate to her job at Jitters.

  She did have one dress, but when she’d suggested that it would do well enough for the engagement party, her sisters had openly scoffed at her. That was how she ended up crammed into a Ford Fiesta on a Wednesday morning with her three sisters, traveling south on Highway 1 toward the Nordstrom in Santa Barbara.

  “For God’s sake, Lacy,” said Jessica, Lacy’s oldest sister, who was manning the wheel. “It’s your engagement party! How did you let it go this long without buying a dress?” Jessica, who was almost seven years older than Lacy, had the soft, comfortable look of a woman who’d long since settled into motherhood. She had the same glossy blond hair as Lacy, the same pale blue eyes, but the fifteen extra pounds and the smile lines around her eyes made women want to confide in her and children want to settle in for a long hug.

  “But I have a dress,” Lacy protested.

  “Pfft. That old thing?” Whitney, one of Lacy’s younger sisters, scoffed. “You wear it to every wedding, every funeral, every—”

  “It’s a nice dress,” Lacy insisted.

  “It’s okay, I guess, if you’re a hotel concierge,” quipped Cassie, the youngest of the Jordan siblings. “But you want to look sexy at your engagement party. You don’t want to look like you’re ready to book somebody’s tickets for Hamilton.”

  Cassie had a point, Lacy supposed, but Lacy shuddered at the thought of what her baby sister would choose for her. Cassie, with her messy pixie haircut, her bright red lipstick, and her dramatic, cat’s-eye eyeliner, tended more toward Timberland boots with cutoff shorts and band Tshirts than toward Lacy’s no-fuss style.

  Lacy would have to lean on Whitney in choosing a dress. While Jess was too conservative and Cassie was too grunge, Whitney hit a nice middle ground of sexy but not too sexy, classic but not fussy. Whitney, who ran a day spa in town, always looked appropriately polished without appearing to be trying too hard. Whatever extra gene Whitney had received at conception that told her what to wear, how to do her hair, and what accessories to choose for any given situation had obviously not been gifted to Lacy. Whitney bemoaned that fact from time to time, complaining that Lacy’s statuesque figure and elegant facial features were wasted on someone who didn’t give a crap about fashion, and who made even Levi’s and a plain white T-shirt look good.

  The drive to Santa Barbara was just over two hours, which was a long time when you were five foot ten and you were wedged into the back of a subcompact car that barely provided enough knee room for a five-year-old. Lacy was stuck with the back, though, because Jessica, as the oldest, had insisted on driving, and it was Cassie’s car. That left Lacy and Whitney with their knees shoved sideways in an effort to maintain circulation to their lower extremities.

  “I don’t know why it has to be Nordstrom,” Lacy complained. “I could have found something at one of the boutiques in town.”

  “It’s an engagement party. It has to be Nordstrom,” Whitney said, as though this fact were so obvious that no further explanation was necessary.

  “Anyway, it’ll be fun,” Jess said as they cruised through San Luis Obispo on their way toward Highway 101. “When was the last time we all went shopping together?”

  Cassie put a forefinger on her lips and gazed upward in thought. “Hmm. I think it was sometime around last … never.”

  “Never?” Lacy said. “That can’t be right.”

  “Well, I guess you could count the times Mom dragged us down to Santa Maria to buy school clothes,” Cassie said. “But I don’t think Jess was there for that, so … ”

  Lacy thought about whether it was true, and she decided it probably was. Jess hadn’t gone on those school shopping trips because she was so much older than the rest of them that by then, she’d preferred to do her shopping with her friends. And as adults, they all had such different fashion sense that it simply hadn’t occurred to any of them to hit the shops together.

  Until now.

  “We’ve really never done this,” Lacy said in wonder. “Not even once.”

  “Well, it’s about time, then,” Whitney asserted. “It’s my chance to smack some fashion sense into you people.”

  “I’ve got fashion sense,” Cassie said.

  Whitney rolled her eyes extravagantly.

  “What’s wrong with my clothes?” Jess demanded. Her mom jeans and poly-blend tops weren’t exactly frumpy, but they did broadcast her maternal status like a neon sign, especially when they were adorned with juice box drippings and a dusting of Goldfish cracker crumbs.

  “Nothing,” Whitney said, in an effort to keep peace with her older sister. “Nothing. I just think your style could use a little extra … oomph.”

  “Lacy’s idea of dressing up is to put on a clean apron at Jitters,” Cassie said, smirking.

  “My style i
s simple,” Lacy said, a little bit stung. “I like simple.”

  “It’s simple, all right,” Whitney said. “But an engagement party doesn’t call for simple. It calls for sexy.”

  “I gotta tell you, honey. She’s right,” Jess agreed.

  Lacy had to admit, she could get used to having Whitney choose her clothes.

  She was standing in a fitting room at Nordstrom, gazing at herself in a three-sided mirror with a surprising amount of satisfaction. The dress she was wearing was midnight blue, in a satiny fabric with ruching down the front that made the dress hug her hips and cling to every inch of her curves. The wrap-style neckline made a deep V that displayed a creamy expanse of Lacy’s cleavage. The three-quarter-length sleeves were midnight blue lace, offering a peek at the pale, smooth skin beneath.

  “Come on out. I want to see,” Whitney called over the top of the fitting room door.

  “Just a minute. I’m adjusting,” Lacy said. She tugged at the shoulders and hemline of the dress, but the truth was, it fit perfectly. Which was good, since she’d waited so long it would be impossible to have it altered before the party.

  “Stop stalling,” Cassie called. “Get out here and twirl!”

  Lacy took a deep breath, steeled herself for the comments she was certain to receive, and opened the fitting room door. All three of them were waiting on the other side, their faces displaying various states of impatience.

  When the door opened, those expressions fled and they all just stared.

  “What?” Lacy prompted them. “What’s wrong? Is the neckline too deep-cut? I knew it. God. I’ll just go back in and—”