Confessions of a Small-Town Girl Read online

  Purpose in her step, she headed toward the mill’s wide-open door. Reaching it, she motioned Sam inside with her.

  “Do you think there’s enough room back there to store a living room set, an entertainment center and about twenty packing boxes? I’m going into St. Johnsbury tomorrow for paint so I can finish my bedroom,” she told him, moving into the dim light and the dust swirling in the sunbeams. “Then, I’ll move in my bedroom set and the kitchen table and chairs and live up there while we finish the rest.

  “I’ve decided I am adventurous,” she confided, thinking of what he’d said yesterday, thinking of all she’d done in the past couple of weeks. “So I’m moving in as soon as my things get here.”

  Adventurous and maybe even a little daring, she decided. Having only been daring in her dreams before, she loved that she’d actually moved beyond them—thanks to the man her mother insisted hadn’t a scrap of conscience in his body.

  She truly wished her mother would stay out of her head.

  She took a deep breath, banished the thoughts.

  Passing the huge grinding stone and its broken casing, Sam followed her to an area that had been swept as clean as the oil spots on the floor would allow. The windows down here were still in their original cracked or broken and rain-splattered condition, but she’d opened them all to let in as much light as she could.

  “You don’t want to wait until we get the kitchen in?” The uncomfortable and insistent protectiveness began to ease. She sounded fine to him, and not concerned about anything other than her mill. She hadn’t mentioned her mother at all.

  “How long will that take?”

  “From now?” Overlooking the fact that he could have pushed harder, or asked outright, he latched onto what he felt far more comfortable dealing with. “Cabinets, appliances, the tile backsplash you want. Ten days, give or take.”

  “I’ll buy a hot plate.”

  “You’re welcome to use mine.”

  “Your hot plate?”

  “My kitchen.”

  “Would that mean I’d have to cook for you, too?”

  He mirrored her teasing smile. “Absolutely.”

  A car door slammed.

  Precariously close to getting paint on her and dust all over himself, he made himself step back. “I think you have company.”

  She did. It was her friend from high school, who also happened to be his cousin, Cathy, coming to welcome her home with cookies and a request for a tour of the mill everyone was talking about. She didn’t seem at all surprised to see him there, which told him she must have heard either from her mom or through the grapevine that he was helping Kelsey. Since he wasn’t doing anything productive for her at the moment, and he had accomplished his original mission, he told them both he’d see them later, and headed back to tackle trim.

  Kelsey didn’t bring up anything about her mom when he checked on her the next day, either. Or the day after that. There had been people around each time he’d stopped by. Her friend Carrie who was helping her clear the driveway of weeds while her three small children picked wildflowers one day. His cousin and Carrie, the next. He wouldn’t have expected her to mention a problem with her girlfriends around, but even alone with her when they went inside the mill to store the ladder he brought and he asked how she was doing, she didn’t say a word about her mom.

  The fact that she didn’t mention having any particular trouble with her relieved him. At least until he realized she wasn’t talking about Dora at all.

  Had there not been a problem, she would have mentioned her mother somehow. The fact that she didn’t, gave him the certain and strangely uncomfortable feeling that she was protecting him by staying silent.

  In the five days since Kelsey had returned, she had spent nearly every waking hour at the mill. Because the only locals she saw were those who dropped by, she hadn’t realized until Charlie came to check on her progress that Sam hadn’t been eating breakfast at the diner. The older man mentioned it only in passing and then only because Sam’s absence was the reason he was there. Without Sam at breakfast, Charlie wasn’t getting his usual morning reports about how things were going at the mill and over at the old Baker place, as the house would probably forever be known, so he was checking on both himself.

  Had Kelsey thought about it, logic would have told her Sam would avoid the diner. She knew from Carrie and Cathy that word was out about her mom’s displeasure with him. What they didn’t know was that her mom was now blaming Sam for Claire and her husband, the mayor, being upset with her about not being supportive of the community. Her mom had insisted just last night that she most certainly did support the local economy and that she had no problem with the mill being put to work again. She even thought it was a fine idea. She’d apparently even told Claire that. She just thought it was a fine idea for someone other than her daughter.

  It seemed to Kelsey that the woman had gone totally deaf to her insistence that the mill was her dream. And she wasn’t being rational at all where Sam was concerned.

  Defending him had been a mistake, too.

  More concerned at the moment with what she’d just learned from Charlie, she watched him head to his truck to drive over to visit with Sam—who was putting the finishing touches on the house since his sister was moving in tomorrow.

  She didn’t believe for a moment that Sam was going hungry. Still, guilt hit like a brick.

  Between working to finish his sister’s place in the mornings and installing the new windows and water heater in the mill in the afternoons before going back to his sister’s, he was working even harder than she was. She knew he bought his lunch from the Burger Haven by the high school, which she’d been frequenting, too, and that Cathy occasionally dropped off dinners from his aunt. She’d just been so busy keeping a judicious mental distance from him that she hadn’t considered his care and feeding in the mornings.

  She knew that his uncle would be helping him that evening, so his aunt would have again sent food. Since he wasn’t going to starve in the next several hours, and she was desperately in need of a shower before she could go anywhere near a stove, anyway, she would make sure he got a decent breakfast first thing tomorrow.

  Her intention should have been simple enough to implement. Anywhere other than in Maple Mountain, it would have been. But there were no supermarkets open twenty-four hours a day for her to anonymously pop in to buy ingredients for what should have been an uncomplicated meal. The nearest supermarket was nearly an hour and a half away and the only place to buy food locally was the Waters’s general store. Even if the store hadn’t been closed by then that evening and wouldn’t be open before she returned in the morning, Kelsey would have hesitated to stop there. Agnes Waters, nosey as she was, would want to know if her purchases were for the diner and, if not, what she planned to do with them since everyone knew she didn’t have a kitchen yet. Agnes had already mentioned to Charlie how much cold cereal Sam had bought lately.

  Being closed, the store wasn’t an option, anyway. That left her mother’s pantry and refrigerator—those in the diner’s kitchen, since the tiny one upstairs was rarely used other than to make tea or heat leftover day’s special for a late supper.

  All she needed was bacon and eggs and ingredients for pancakes.

  She didn’t know which offended her mother more when she asked if she minded her borrowing them. That she was obviously cooking for Sam—though she never said so, nor did her mother ask—or that she told her she would replace or pay for them. Since Betsy had just arrived, her mother’s only response was that she didn’t need to be spending whatever money she had left on “that man.”

  “Does that mean I can take them, or not?” Kelsey quietly asked.

  “Suit yourself,” her mother replied, sounding as if her suddenly headstrong daughter was going to do as she pleased anyway. “You know how I feel about all of this.”

  Kelsey stifled a sigh. Though she doubted Betsy could hear over the splash of water running while the cook washed up at th
e sink, she lowered her voice even more. “I wouldn’t have to do this if he still felt welcome here.” Her mother wasn’t being fair at all. “He’s working with me. The least I can do is make sure he gets a decent breakfast.”

  Ignoring what she didn’t want to hear, her mom’s voice dropped as well. “Are you paying him?”

  “He doesn’t want money.”

  “Well, then.” Her lips momentarily thinned. “I think we both know what it is that he does want.”

  Kelsey opened her mouth, shook her head, closed it again. She had no intention of arguing with her mother over whether or not some man was after her body. Nor would she attempt to explain what motivated that particular man to stay as busy as he did. It wouldn’t get her anywhere, anyway.

  She shouldn’t have felt so incredibly guilty, Kelsey told herself. But as she quickly gathered what she needed and left with her mom muttering something to Betsy, she did. She would have felt just as bad leaving Sam to eat cold cereal when he was used to fueling his body in the morning with protein.

  Still feeling totally torn, she pulled up in front of Sam’s trailer a little after six o’clock fearing there was no respite in sight. Her mother’s attitude would only get worse as long as Sam was there. She knew that as well as she knew what a gamble she’d taken coming back.

  The sounds of the stream tumbling over the rocks in its bend behind the trailer filtered through her car’s open window. Telling herself to focus on the stillness and to just breathe in the fresh air, she tried to move past the agitation clinging to her like moss to stones. In no way had she romanticized how her life would be when she came back. She’d been brutally honest with the amount of work and risk involved and not for a moment had she expected things to progress with the almost eerie, straightforward ease of her move there. But she hadn’t thought the glow she’d awakened with that first morning would have dimmed so rapidly, either.

  “How long are you going sit out there?”

  Dropping her hands from the steering wheel, she glanced over to see Sam in the doorway of the single-wide trailer. With his arms crossed over a white T-shirt, his jeans missing their belt and in his bare feet, it appeared that he hadn’t been up for long.

  She reached for the bag on the seat beside her, scrambling as she did to focus only on why she was there.

  “I was just trying to decide if you’d be up or not,” she told him, climbing from the car with the bag in her arms. “I figured you would be, though.” He’d been hauling away the construction debris off and on all week. He’d told her yesterday that he’d wanted to be at the dump when it opened that morning to get rid of the last of it before his sister arrived. She was to be there at noon.

  “You said you wanted to leave by seven.” She nodded toward what was left of the pile at the end of the drive. “I can get started while you load that up.”

  Meeting her at the bottom step, he pulled back on one edge of the bag. “What’s this?”

  “Breakfast.”

  One dark eyebrow slowly arched. “You’re cooking?”

  “If your stove works.”

  Giving her a sleepy version of his killer smile, he took the bag from her. “It works just fine. Coffee’s already on.”

  A sleep crease slashed one cheek. A tuft of damp hair that had escaped his efforts when he’d splashed water on his un-shaven face and dragged his fingers through it stuck up on one side. Ignoring the tug she felt at that small vulnerability, she followed him to the long space divided into a living room at one end, a bedroom at the other and a little kitchen in between.

  She knew the modest trailer with its navy-blue furnishings and beige everything else was a rental. But she had the feeling the flat-screen television and the music system that practically overtook the sofa and single easy chair were his. The electronics and wires and yard high tower of CDs didn’t surprise her. What did as he set the bag down on the short, beige breakfast bar dividing the rooms and opened the curtains over the sink, was how tidy he kept everything.

  She didn’t know what she’d expected. A little careless bachelor clutter perhaps. Dishes in the sink, at least. A wadded up burger bag on the coffee table, perhaps. But other than two plates and some flatware that had been left to drip dry in a drainer and a haphazard stack of Rolling Stone, Newsweek and Motor Trend magazines on the floor by the sofa, the place was neat and ordered and everything was right where it should be.

  Which is just how he likes his life, she thought, a moment before she caught a glimpse of his bed through the open doorway.

  What appeared to be a wall-to-wall mattress was a tangle of sheets and blankets and a pillow that looked as if it had been beaten into submission.

  The restiveness she sensed in him sometimes during the day obviously followed him into his sleep.

  “Pretend I’m not here,” she told him. She didn’t like the thought that he didn’t rest well. As hard as he worked, he needed his sleep. “Just point me to your pans and go do whatever you were going to do.”

  “I was waiting for the coffee.”

  Reaching into the sack, Sam pulled out a smaller brown bag containing a half a dozen eggs. With a thoughtful frown, he also removed a clear plastic Baggie of what looked like flour, another holding strips of raw bacon, and syrup in a pitcher that looked very much like those on the counter and tables at the diner.

  Wondering what Dora thought of her daughter raiding her diner to feed him, he watched Kelsey pull out a Baggie containing a small amount of a white substance he didn’t recognize at all, a handful of foil-wrapped butter cubes, and a take-out soup container holding some sort of liquid. He heard it slosh when she set it down.

  “What’s this?” he asked, lifting up the Baggie.

  “Baking soda.”

  No wonder he didn’t know what it was. “Does your mother know you have all this?”

  Her glance dropped from his. “She knows,” she said, turning to the cupboards. “I figured you’d have salt and pepper, but I didn’t know about real butter,” she went on, indicating the foil cubes. “I hope plain buttermilk pancakes are okay. Do you have a bowl?”

  “Mind if I ask why you’re doing this?”

  Because I hate that you have to give up something I know you enjoy just because my mother thinks you’re ruining my life, she thought. “Because I know you’re not eating at the diner and you need more than cereal for breakfast,” was all she told him.

  “How do you know I eat cereal?”

  “Agnes told Mary.”

  “Mary?”

  “Charlie’s wife,” she reminded him, snatching open another cupboard when the first proved fruitless. “She said you’ve gone through two boxes of grain flakes in the last week.”

  “Agnes? At the general store?”

  “There are no secrets in this town.”

  The man’s kitchen equipment was abysmal. He was apparently a strictly heat-and-eat sort of cook. “Don’t you have a mixing bowl?”

  Hearing what sounded suspiciously like a hint of frustration in her voice, Sam moved behind her. Reaching past her shoulder, he took a salad bowl from the top shelf. He’d only brought the minimum of what he’d thought he’d need from his apartment. He’d become used to living spare.

  Handing the bowl to her, he watched her take it without so much as the questioning lift of an eyebrow and turn away to start cracking eggs. Beneath the clean faded pink T-shirt that now sported a rip on one sleeve, her slender shoulders rose and fell with the deep, deliberate breath she drew.

  She seemed different to him this morning. Working with her the past couple of days, he’d been aware of a deliberate sense of purpose about her as she’d painted and scrubbed, and hammered the trim around the windows he’d installed. He’d been drawn by her willingness to tackle every task she could handle, her quick grasp of things he’d had to explain and the hints of enthusiasm that had leaked through her grit. Now, all he sensed was a grim determination. Or, maybe, what he sensed was simply agitation.

  He didn’t know
if the faint strain in her features was new or if he simply hadn’t wanted to acknowledge it was there, but he couldn’t avoid noticing it now. It was as apparent as the impatience in her movements as she pulled a pan from beneath the stove and went back to beating the daylights out of the eggs.

  “Since there are no secrets, do you want to tell me what’s bothering you?”

  “Nothing’s bothering me.”

  The coffeemaker sputtered behind him, signaling that the coffee was finally ready. Instead of reaching for cups, he reached for her.

  Taking her by the shoulders, he turned her around, set the bowl she held on the counter and settled his hand back on her shoulder.

  “Try again.”

  She said nothing. While his glance moved over the baby fine strands of hair at the crown of her head, he thought about staying silent himself. He might have, too, had it not been for the protectiveness that had yet to disappear. If anything, it had grown—without his permission and in spite of his attempts to ignore it, but there was no denying that the feeling was there. So was the realization that, at that moment, he was far more interested in protecting her than he was himself.

  Too concerned about her to acknowledge that dangerous shift, he nudged up her chin with his finger. In his gut he knew what the problem was. It was the only thing they hadn’t talked about since her return.

  “What’s going on with you and your mom?”

  He could practically feel the tension shift through her muscles as she stepped away to open the bags of flour and baking soda. “I really don’t want to talk about my mother. Okay?”

  “Why not?”

  Kelsey picked up the baking soda, quickly opened the bag. She didn’t want him doing this. All she wanted was to fix his breakfast so she wouldn’t have to feel bad about what her mother was doing. She didn’t want him looking at her as if he already knew her secrets. She didn’t want him touching her as he had so casually over the past few days, either. Now as then, she’d had to pull away and make herself be busy because when he touched her the temptation to lean on him was too strong. Every time he would nudge up her chin and asked if she was okay, he reminded her of how badly she wanted to be in his arms, and of how she wanted his reassurance that everything would be all right. But she couldn’t let herself want him. And she couldn’t rely on him any more than she already did because soon he wouldn’t be there to rely on at all.