White Picket Fences

by Tara Taylor Quinn

  “We’ve already done that, too.”

  “Maybe not enough.”

  “What’s the point?” she challenged him. “The intended goal?”

  He took the time to choose his words carefully. He’d told her about not making promises he couldn’t keep…

  “Things felt a little…awkward today. I’d like to see if we could change that.”

  “Pretend we haven’t seen each other naked, you mean?”

  Damn, the woman always managed to catch him off guard. “No.”

  “Then what?”

  “Maybe find a way to be friends.”

  He took her silence as a good thing.

  “We have to work together for at least the rest of this semester.”

  She nodded, still not speaking as she put one foot on the side runner of her Jeep.

  “The thing is, I’ve been thinking about you far more than I should have these past two weeks.” He heard himself telling her a lot more than he’d intended to. “Most mature people discuss certain issues, like what they’re looking for or not looking for in a relationship, before they have sex. We skipped that part, and I think it might help us understand each other better if we go back and try to fill in some of the gaps. I know it would make me feel better.”

  She nodded again, her arms still folded across her chest. “It might help us be friends, instead of lovers, you mean.”

  He supposed. “Yes, exactly.”

  “Okay, but let’s not go for dinner. I need to get some exercise after the day I just had. You got any Rollerblades?”

  “Yeah.” Not that he’d been on them a whole lot lately.

  “Then how about meeting me at my place in an hour? We’ll go for a spin. You can say whatever you have to say then.”

  Not quite what he’d envisioned, but then nothing with Randi Parsons turned out as he expected.

  “Great. One hour.” He looked at his watch. “I’ll be there.”

  The exercise sounded good.

  RANDI LOVED in-line skating. Flying along the road, her hair tousled by the breeze she created. She loved the freedom. Being on her skates, mile after mile, strengthened her. Not just physically, but mentally and emotionally. Sailing over curbs, through puddles, up hills, down hills, over gravel and debris, she felt as if she could do anything.

  Except be immune to Zack Foster. The man skating beside her.

  For the first half hour she went as fast as she could, knees bent, shoving off with every muscle she had. She skated hard. But no amount of effort was enough to leave Randi’s turmoil about Zack Foster behind. No amount of effort left him behind, either.

  He was good.

  She knew the neighborhoods, knew every hill, every pothole, every street crossing. She’d met every in-line skating challenge Shelter Valley had to offer. He conquered them all on his first go-round. No matter how many sharp turns she took, he was right there the whole way.

  She wasn’t going to get out of this conversation.

  “You’ve obviously skated a lot,” she said, slowing down enough to allow herself to speak. Like her, he was wearing knee and wrist pads, along with athletic shorts and a T-shirt.

  Somehow, the outfit that looked prosaic on her was nerve-racking on him.

  He came up beside her on the street that ran the entire perimeter of the university. It wasn’t quite dusk yet, but the streets were quiet. Only the occasional person out walking a dog or a student cycling by with a backpack. Nothing else to protect her from the conversation to come.

  Still, you couldn’t get too intimate rolling around on public streets. Even semideserted ones.

  “For years, I skated every morning before starting my day.”

  For years. It was the first time she’d thought of him in terms of life outside Shelter Valley. Adult life. The time between college and now. That was quite a few years unaccounted for.

  “By yourself?” she asked. Zack lived alone in Shelter Valley, but that didn’t mean he’d always lived alone.

  “With my wife.”

  She stumbled, her skate catching on a rock. She would have fallen if he hadn’t been there, grabbing her waist. Steadying her.

  The warm touch of his hands on her waist wasn’t steadying at all.

  “Your wife,” she said, instead of a thank-you for his help. She pushed off a little faster, needing the speed again. “I didn’t know you’d been married.”

  “It isn’t really common knowledge here,” he said, shrugging. “Ben Sanders knows. Cassie knows.”

  “I’m assuming it’s over.” It had better be or he was a dead man. Randi didn’t sleep with married men. She didn’t sleep with men, in the plural, period. And she was never sleeping with him again.

  “Of course,” he said, gliding beside her, keeping up with her easily.

  “How long were you married?”

  “Six years.”

  They were skating side by side down the middle of the street. “Let me guess,” she said. “Your move to Shelter Valley coincides with the breakup of your marriage.”

  “Just about, although the timing was pure coincidence. I’d been dabbling in pet therapy for a couple of years, though with the size of the clinic I was working in in Phoenix, I didn’t have a lot of time to spare for it.” They slowed gradually as he spoke, taking a pace more conducive to conversation.

  “When Cassie called,” he continued, “offering me half of her practice here—and a chance to be instrumental in helping her get a national pet-therapy program off of the ground—I jumped at the chance.”

  Randi rounded the corner, crossing one foot in front of the other. “Have any regrets?”

  “None.”

  “Shelter Valley can be a little hard to get used to after life in Phoenix.”

  He looked at her briefly as they headed down a long straight stretch of road. “I forget, even though you were born here, you spent a lot of time living in the fast lane, too. Was it hard for you to come back?”

  The automatic no almost passed her lips, but she couldn’t seem to say it. Couldn’t fool Zack the way she’d been fooling everyone else all these years. Everyone, including herself.

  Damn him for making her look at things she’d never seen before. She’d been pretending to be happy, determined to be happy, for so long that somewhere along the way she’d begun to believe the fantasy she’d created.

  Since Zack’s appearance in her life, she’d begun to sense things in her own personality that she hadn’t known were there. Dissatisfaction. Longings. A craving for great sex.

  “It wasn’t coming back that was hard,” she finally said after thinking about his question. “I love Shelter Valley, and even after all my travels, all the places I’ve seen, I know of no other place I’d want to call home.

  “There are certain things you can pretty much count on here, you know?” She glanced across at him. “A higher level of morality, for one, which seems to produce higher levels of individual self-worth, high standards. And there’s integrity between neighbors, the sense that as a general rule people look out for each other. And not just close friends, either, but the town as a whole.”

  “’Course, pretty much everyone in this town seems to be close friends.”

  Randi grinned. “I don’t know about that. There may not be all that many of us, but there are still personalities to deal with.

  “So what about you? Do you miss Phoenix?”

  They turned another corner and Randi slowed down to avoid an oncoming car. Zack, skating behind her, didn’t see the car in time to slow down and came up on Randi too fast. He skated into her, his hands on her waist keeping both of them steady and on their feet.

  At the touch of those warm masculine fingers spanning her sides, as the jolt of instant awareness shot through her, Randi tensed up again. Damn. For a couple of minutes there she’d actually forgotten she and Zack weren’t just friends enjoying each other’s company.

  “I don’t miss Phoenix,” Zack said when they were once again back on course. �
��In the first place, it’s close enough if you want to go there or you need something.”

  “Like a mall?” Randi asked with a chuckle.

  “I was thinking more along the lines of a car dealership.” He moved behind her as a car passed by.

  “My Explorer needs to be serviced. It’s under warranty, so it has to go to a Ford dealer.”

  “So that’s all you miss about Phoenix? Your Ford dealer?” Not your wife?

  “Pretty much.” He nodded. “Maybe a movie theater now and then. But overall, I much prefer the friendly atmosphere here in Shelter Valley to the anonymity of living in a city the size of Phoenix.”

  “Me, too.”

  They left the university behind, turning onto a road that would take them to the outskirts of town. But one that would be fully illuminated with streetlights when dusk finally drifted into night.

  “You said it wasn’t coming back that was hard, as though something else was hard. I’m assuming you weren’t referring to the obvious hardship of losing your career.”

  He’d assumed correctly. Fitting in was hard; being alone was harder. And why hadn’t anyone else ever compelled her to think about these things? Why hadn’t she forced herself to see them? Why was Zack insisting she study these truths, these questions, when she hadn’t even acknowledged that they existed?

  She was becoming afraid that there might be more wrong with her life than the lack of a white picket fence.

  “I think what was hardest was losing the motivation to reach for the stars,” she said now, thinking out loud more than speaking to Zack. “Like maybe I lost the ability to dream.”

  “Isn’t that all just part of growing up?” He skated away from her as he swerved to miss a piece of sagebrush in the road.

  “Maybe.” She thought about that. “But I’d sure hate to think so.” Why live and breathe if it was all going to be a drudgery of sameness?

  Yeah. Randi went all out, pushing on ahead, gaining speed as she tried to outdistance that last thought. Why live, if life was just a drudgery of sameness? But once the thought was there in front of her, she couldn’t escape it. Wasn’t that all her life was? A drudgery of sameness. Yet wasn’t that exactly what she’d wanted? Sameness? Predictability?

  Zack kept pace with her, gliding in silence for several minutes. The air was cool, welcome against her heated skin, evaporating the sweat from her back. She could smell the sweet scent of fabric softener. Someone must be doing laundry in one of the houses set back from the road. Lights shone in most of them.

  The streetlights came on.

  “You ready to tackle the stuff we came out here for?”

  Zack’s voice startled her, interrupting her focus on the rhythmic whirr of their skates against the black-top.

  “Not really.” It had been his idea in the first place, not hers.

  “Would you humor me on this and do it, anyway?”

  “I guess.”

  Turning onto a side street that would take them back toward town, they skated without speaking for a while. What was it he wanted to tell her? And why wasn’t he doing it? Had he changed his mind? Decided she wasn’t worth it?

  Her mind raced with possibilities as her feet sped along the road.

  “How do you feel about dating?”

  Randi’s stomach jumped. Her and him? “You mean in general?”

  “Generally, in terms of yourself, but not dating anyone in particular, necessarily.”

  Had that answer been as convoluted as it had sounded?

  “I don’t date much,” she said, then wished she hadn’t. Her dating habits were not any of his business. “Just friends” didn’t need to know about dating habits.

  “Because you don’t want to or because there’s no one to date?”

  She shrugged, skated around a car parked in the road. “When there was opportunity, I didn’t have time, and now that there’s time, there’s not much opportunity.”

  “Maybe you—”

  “Besides,” she interrupted before he could humiliate her by offering advice on finding other men.

  “I’ve been living alone for a long time, and believe it or not, I like it that way.”

  “You never have to wait to use the bathroom,” he agreed.

  “I can use two of them at once if I want to.”

  He chuckled. “Let me know when you figure out how to do that.”

  “I used to think I’d get married someday, have kids.” She watched the road, avoiding pitfalls. “But growing up in Shelter Valley, you’re kind of brainwashed into thinking that.”

  “You don’t think that way anymore?”

  “Nah.” Randi shook her head.

  “Why not?” he persisted, close beside her.

  “You’re certainly young enough….”

  “I just don’t see any reason to complicate things.” Don’t truthfully see much point in even thinking about marriage and children. At thirty, her chances were getting slimmer by the day, and they’d been pretty slim before that. “I’m happy. Why mess with that?”

  “Happy’s good.”

  “What about you? Have you been out much since your divorce?” Have you been out at all since then? Or was I a rebound? And obviously not a very good one, since it only lasted one night.

  Which was just fine with her. She’d felt relieved the next morning when they’d come to their mutual agreement. A single enjoyable encounter didn’t have to mean any more than that.

  “I’ve been with a few women, nothing serious,” he said.

  So, she was one of a few. Randi didn’t like that any better than being the only one. The first one. The rebound.

  She nodded, focusing once again on the rhythm of her skates skimming along the pavement.

  “I’m not looking for anything more than short and satisfying,” he continued eventually.

  What he was or wasn’t looking for had nothing to do with her.

  “You never want to marry again?”

  “No.”

  Well, that was succinct.

  “Maybe you just need some more time to—”

  “I don’t need any more time,” he interrupted her, his voice taking on a harder edge than she was used to. “I’ve been down that road once. I’m not going back.”

  “She was that bad to you?”

  He was quiet for so long she wasn’t sure he’d heard her. Or had she lost him to another time? Another woman?

  They came to a corner and had to wait for a car to go by before they could cross the street. He leaned against a lamppost, frowning as he looked at her.

  He made a pretty imposing figure standing there, his skates adding another couple of inches to his already impressive height.

  “Until the day Dawn asked for a divorce, I thought we had a perfect marriage. A partnership,” he said.

  The car passed, but Randi didn’t move. “What happened?” she asked in spite of herself.

  He looked so strong, so indomitable.

  “She wasn’t as happy as I was. Hadn’t been for almost a year. I never even knew.” He pushed off, heading across the street that led back to Randi’s neighborhood.

  “Sounds like you blame yourself for that,” she noted, catching up with him.

  “I obviously wasn’t paying enough attention to my wife if she was that…unhappy and I didn’t have a clue.”

  “Or maybe she was just really good at hiding things.”

  “She was good at that, all right.”

  He was skating so hard she had to really break it wide open to keep up with him.

  What things had she hidden? “Was there someone else, then?” She couldn’t imagine it, knowing him, having slept with him, but that was the most obvious reason for a breakup.

  “Yes.” The word was bitten out so painfully Randi decided to let it go.

  He’d not only been blindsided, he’d been betrayed, as well. That was rough.

  “I can see why it would be hard to trust again after something like that,” she offered, instead.

/>   The words weren’t merely a platitude. She could see. She wasn’t sure she’d have the courage to risk another relationship after making herself vulnerable to someone in the most intimate way only to have that person violate her trust.

  Hell, she wasn’t willing to risk a relationship anyway, and she didn’t have half as good a reason.

  CHAPTER TEN

  ZACK AND RANDI skated twice more that week. Sometimes they raced; he hadn’t lost to her yet, but his victories were so marginal he knew it was only a matter of time. They kept each other humble with good-natured ribbing. They talked. And laughed a lot.

  Randi had a unique way of looking at the world—a combination of realism and naiveté mixed with a healthy dose of humor—that intrigued him.

  But there was no touching. No sex. No dating.

  Things were just about perfect.

  They would be perfect just as soon as he’d had enough erotic dreams about their night together to get her out of his system.

  Or took a weekend to visit a woman friend of his in Phoenix.

  Whichever came first.

  “You’ve certainly been seeing a lot of Randi Parsons,” Cassie said the following Friday, a week and a day after that first pet-therapy visit.

  They were in the operating room at the clinic, finishing up after exploratory surgery on an overweight twelve-year-old cocker spaniel who’d turned out to have gallstones. She was Cassie’s patient, but Cassie had asked for Zack’s help. The dog was high-risk, and Zack had more surgical experience.

  “We’ve skated a couple of times, that’s all,” Zack said, making the last notes on the dog’s chart.

  Their assistants would be in to clean up as soon as Cassie and Zack vacated the surgery. Muffy, the cocker spaniel, was in recovery.

  Zack and Cassie moved together to the little room where Muffy lay, still unconscious.

  Cassie checked Muffy’s vitals, nodded with satisfaction. Zack, leaning against the counter, watched. His partner, with her masses of long red curls and creamy complexion, was beautiful. There was no denying that.

  He might even have been tempted to pursue an exploration of that beauty for himself if he hadn’t been afraid of messing up a perfect working arrangement. And if he’d ever had the feeling that there was “someone home” inside Cassie who might welcome his advances. His partner was a top-notch vet, a warm caring person, but she didn’t seem to have any passion in her heart. He’d wondered many times if she’d always been that way or if her ex-husband’s betrayal had destroyed whatever passion she’d had.