Confessions of a Small-Town Girl Read online

  Kelsey didn’t respond. Protected by six feet of wall, she was too busy closing her eyes, shaking her head and wishing her mom wasn’t so impossibly social. Dora Schaeffer had never met a stranger. Any tourist who came in more than once was remembered, along with where they were from and where they were going. She also knew every resident for a radius of fifty miles. If she didn’t know them personally, she knew of them, about them and who they were related to—along with most of their business. People tended to confide in her and what they didn’t confide, she overheard or pried out on her own. It was widely rumored that between her, Agnes Waters at the general store and Claire McGraw, the mayor’s wife, there was hardly a secret in town.

  The only person her mom didn’t know as well as she thought she did was her own daughter.

  There were advantages to that small failing. In a matter of seconds, it became apparent that she’d never had a clue about her daughter’s wild crush on the man watching her reluctantly step back into view. Her mom didn’t even seem to think she knew who Sam was.

  “Kelsey, this is Tom and Janelle Collier’s nephew, Sam. He’s taking time off to work on the old Baker place for his sister.” The arches of her pale eyebrows merged. “I told you the Bakers finally sold the place, didn’t I? After Jenny married Doctor Reid?

  “Anyway,” she hurried on, sounding as if she didn’t want to sidetrack herself as she turned back to the man quietly watching her strangely silent daughter, “Kelsey is helping out through the holiday, like I told you.” Holding her casted arm protectively at her waist, she set a napkin and utensils on the counter for him. “I don’t know what I’d have done if she hadn’t been able to make it. It’s just us locals and a few lowlanders on vacation out at the lakes right now, but give it two days and that road out there will be bumper-to-bumper with folk coming to celebrate the Fourth of July. They’re all going to be hungry, too.”

  He had big hands. Kelsey noticed that as he wrapped one around his mug. He had a nice smile, too. A little reserved. Kind of sexy.

  He was smiling at her. Feeling an odd jolt join her panic, she jerked her attention to the older man pouring more maple syrup over the melted butter on his pancakes.

  “Good thing you had her to call on, Dora,” Amos informed her mom. “You’d have been up a creek with Betsy being gone like she is. You thinkin’ to hire somebody to help her when she gets back?” He aimed his fork at her cast. “Leastwise until you get rid of that thing?”

  Not by a hair did her mom’s tight bun budge as she adamantly shook her head. “Betsy will take her shifts and I’ll take mine,” she insisted, speaking of her part-time cook, and new grandmother of twins. The birth of those babies had required Betsy Parker’s presence in Burlington to help her daughter and son-in-law—right through the busiest week of summer.

  “I just need to get used to this thing,” Dora muttered, frowning stubbornly at her encumbrance. “Once the crowds are gone this weekend I’ll be fine. In the meantime, I’ll have Kelsey freeze me up a bunch of pies and such in case Betsy needs more time with those babies.”

  The frown melted as she glanced back at Sam. “You used to come in here when Kelsey was in high school,” she reminded him, returning to what she’d rather talk about. “When she wasn’t in the kitchen, she waited tables for me. You might remember having seen her back then.”

  Kelsey knew her mom was just being her usual chatty self. As far as the older woman was concerned, her little diner was her home and her guests were treated with the same hospitality she would have offered had they been in her living room—which, technically, they were. The entire first floor of the old two-story house Kelsey had been raised in had been converted into the diner after her father passed away twenty years ago. She and her mom had lived in the rooms upstairs. Her mom still did.

  Since Dora was just being her gregarious self, Kelsey ordinarily wouldn’t have thought anything of her mom’s casual comments. But having her mom prod Sam’s memory was the last thing she wanted her to do—until she realized he seemed to have no memory of her at all.

  “Sure,” he said, in that vague way people did when they didn’t want to be rude and say they had little or no recollection of a person. “Your mom said that you live in Scottsdale now. You’re a chef?”

  “Pastry chef,” she explained, because it was all she could think to say.

  A hint of a smile tugged at his mouth again. “I’m an apple pie man myself. Will you make any of those while you’re here?”

  “Probably.”

  Watching her over the steam rising over the rim of his mug, he arched one dark eyebrow. “Are you any good at pancakes?”

  She was having trouble maintaining eye contact with him. She couldn’t remember specifics, but she was pretty certain that many of the entries in that diary had do with his beautifully muscled body. Those muscles looked as hard as the granite mined from the quarry outside of town and radiated a fine sort of tension that made him seem more restive than relaxed.

  The fact that he was making her feel the same way wasn’t lost on her, either. “I can manage.”

  “He always has a full stack, four eggs over medium, wheat toast and two sides of bacon,” her mom rattled off, moving from behind the counter to wait on a couple of tourists who’d wandered in with their two offspring. “Sit anywhere you’d like,” she told them, then glanced over her shoulder at Sam. “You want buttermilk or blueberry?”

  That reserved smile surfaced again. Looking at Kelsey, he said, “She can surprise me.”

  Realizing she was staring at his mouth, praying he hadn’t noticed, Kelsey spun away. She used to practice kissing that beautifully carved mouth on her bedroom mirror.

  With a mental groan at the memory, she snatched up a clean stainless steel bowl. With the last batch of pancake batter gone, she needed to mix another.

  She couldn’t believe how totally flustered she felt. She was twenty-nine years old. Not sixteen. In the eleven years since she’d left Maple Mountain for culinary school, she’d worked her way from a line chef in Boston to master pastry chef in four-star restaurants in San Diego and Scottsdale. She had managed to survive the artistic temperaments of male executive chefs who considered themselves God’s gift to man, woman and culinary creativity, and placed in the top three of every dessert competition she’d entered in the last five years. Until two minutes ago—three minutes were she to count from the moment she’d heard Sam’s name—her biggest concern had been the terrible timing of her mom’s need for her to come home.

  She had just been offered the position of executive pastry chef where she worked at the Regis-Carlton resort in Scottsdale. She had also been offered the same position with a high-end new restaurant by Doug Westland, one of the most respected and innovative restaurateurs on the West Coast, along with the opportunity to become his business—and bed—partner. She had huge issues with the latter part of that arrangement. But that wasn’t the problem at the moment. Or the point. The point was that she was highly organized, disciplined, creative in her own right and that she was not easily unsettled. Normally.

  Scooping a cup of the flour, baking powder and salt she’d premeasured earlier, she folded it into the eggs and buttermilk, gently so as not to make the batter heavy. She felt decidedly unsettled now.

  That circumstance no doubt explained why she didn’t feel at all slighted to know that Sam apparently hadn’t even noticed her existence the summer he’d occupied her nearly every waking thought. Realizing he barely remembered her was actually a relief. A huge one. So was the thought that nothing about his manner indicated that he’d discovered her daring and imaginative writings, much less read them. To the best of her knowledge, she was the only Kelsey in Maple Mountain. With her name on the diary’s cover, it seemed that had he found it, she would have at least rated a raised eyebrow when her mom mentioned her name.

  She spread two rashers of bacon on the griddle, cracked four eggs beside them. He probably needed the huge breakfast to fuel all that muscle, she sup
posed, only to deliberately change the direction of her thoughts. Thinking about the admittedly magnificent body that had inspired the current reason for her anxiety wasn’t getting her anywhere. Since it seemed he hadn’t found the diary, she needed to get to it before he did. She just needed to figure out how.

  She was praying for inspiration when she set the three plates of food that could have comfortably fed two in the window for her mom to serve. With a smile for Amos when he gave her a surreptitious wink to let her know she’d done well, she turned to make the omelets the tourists had ordered.

  Sam noticed that wink. Digging into his own meal, he might have mentioned how good his breakfast was, too, had she given him any hint that she was at all interested in anything he had to say. Instead he took another bite of heaven on a fork and frowned at himself while the two old guys next to him suggested he stop by for a game of checkers on the porch of the general store, providing he had time later that afternoon, of course.

  Sam liked the two old guys. There were times when he couldn’t get a word out of either of them other than a thoughtful and considered “Yup” or “Nope.” Then, there were days when they seemed more than willing to share whatever they knew, especially if they figured they could help a person out. It seemed, too, that once they got going, they could reminisce forever about what they considered the good old days—which was pretty much any year before 1955. According to both men, not much of anything was made the way it had been before then, and neither had much use for anything that hadn’t existed by the middle of the past century.

  He wasn’t much for games, except maybe the occasional hand of poker. Still, he told them he’d be glad to join them later, since he was looking for as many ways as possible to fill in his time there, and went back to his meal. He wasn’t doing anything but biding his time in Maple Mountain. Any diversion was welcome.

  He still didn’t think the time off the force was necessary. He had adamantly argued the need for the leave of absence his department psychologist had insisted he take three weeks ago. He would argue it now, if given the chance. Yet, as he frowned into his coffee, he would concede that the shrink may have had one small point.

  He’d suspected himself that he had lost the edge on his social skills in polite society. He just hadn’t been prepared to truly admit that loss until now. He hadn’t been able to get so much as a smile out of the attractive blonde he could see coming and going from the long window above the service counter, much less get any sort of conversation started with her.

  He only vaguely remembered the delicate-looking woman Dora had mentioned a couple of days ago. Since he’d eaten only occasionally at the diner all those years ago, he knew he hadn’t seen Kelsey often. But the more he thought about her now, the more he remembered that there had been a cute, long-legged blonde he’d looked for when he had come in. He also recalled that she’d been jail bait.

  She definitely hadn’t possessed the presence or style she’d acquired since then, either.

  She had her mother’s pale wheat-colored hair, only hers was woven with shades of champagne and platinum and caught in a low ponytail with a black clip at her nape. The rest was covered with a short, white pleated chef’s hat that ended below her brow line and revealed the white pearl studs in her ears. Her lovely eyes were as dark as the rich coffee in his mug, her features delicate, her skin flawless and she had a mouth that made his water just thinking about how soft it might be.

  Wearing the high-necked white chef’s jacket he figured she’d brought with her, since he’d never seen Dora wear anything more sophisticated than the hairnet and white bib apron she wore now, Kelsey Schaeffer looked polished, professional. She also seemed as familiar with the patrons she fed as she did the kitchen she moved through with such ease.

  He just couldn’t figure out why she would smile and talk with everyone else, but barely converse with him. Drawing out people was his strong suit. Among a certain, corrupt and incorrigible element, anyway. And cons and criminals were usually an even tougher sell.

  Deciding it wasn’t worth worrying about, he polished off his breakfast, had Dora bag two giant blueberry muffins from the case for later and headed for his truck and the trailer he was temporarily calling home. He had more on his mind than his apparently forgotten ability to flirt with a respectable woman. The department shrink had said he’d grown out of touch with normalcy, whatever that was supposed to mean, and that if he didn’t get back in touch with it, he could eventually lose his sense of perspective and his usefulness to the department.

  The department was his home, and as much his family as those he was related to by blood. Failing it would be like failing himself. He would do what he needed to do to keep that from happening. He wouldn’t like it, but he’d do it.

  It had been three weeks since he’d come off a case that had kept him undercover for over a year. The need to stay under had even caused him to miss his brother-in-law’s funeral after a road-rage incident left his sister a widow and his young nephews without a dad. He had been ordered to take three months to decompress by doing normal things. He was to reacquaint himself with his family, find creative outlets, wind down. Helping his sister by refurbishing the dilapidated old house so she could raise her sons in the country seemed as good a way as any to him to keep from going stir-crazy while he accomplished that goal. Then, after he put in his time, he could get back to the work that had become his way of life.

  There was just one problem. Having spent ten years working his way down the humanity scale from neighborhood beat cop to vice detective to spending the past fourteen months living in the underbelly of New York with crack heads, drug dealers, pimps and prostitutes to break a major drug ring, he wasn’t exactly sure he knew what constituted normal anymore.

  He felt fairly certain, however, that “normal” wasn’t having the pretty blonde who had all but ignored him at the diner show up that afternoon with the smile he hadn’t been able to get out of her before and a freshly baked apple pie.

  Chapter Two

  Kelsey figured she had two options. She could try to get upstairs alone and, depending on how much wall Sam had torn out, get the diary and sneak it out in her purse. Or, she could look around to see how far he was with his demolition and go back when he wasn’t there.

  The nerves in her stomach were jumping as she watched him walk toward her.

  With her oversize handbag dangling from one shoulder, and carrying a pink pastry box with both hands, she left the compact sedan she’d rented at the airport and moved past the construction debris to meet him. Old cupboards, carpeting and a rusted sink formed a pile at the end of the gravel driveway that cut into the deep and wooded lot. Stacks of new lumber nearly blocked the sagging front porch, waiting to be used inside.

  She’d heard that he was living in the long white trailer parked near the curve of the stream that meandered through the back of the property. According to her mom, the leveling of that trailer had been the local event of the day. Charlie and Amos said they’d helped supervise. Lorna Bagley, who took turns with her sister, Marian, waiting tables for her mom, told her she’d packed up a picnic and her kids and headed out to watch—though mostly, the single mother of two had confessed, she had watched Sam. They didn’t get many men as easy on the eyes as that one, she’d confided. Certainly, none as intriguing.

  Since news and gossip were shared freely among the locals, and since nothing pleased some of the them more than to bring someone who’d been away up to date, Kelsey had also learned that Sam had been a detective for years, and divorced for nearly as long. No one seemed to know what had caused the demise of his marriage. No one knew exactly what sort of “detecting” it was that he did, either. Some thought he solved murder cases like the detectives on television. But no one knew for sure. He apparently didn’t say much about his work.

  As unusual and fascinating as his occupation was to certain citizens of Maple Mountain, as far as most of them were concerned what he did in the city was no real concern of their
s. Sam was just Tom and Janelle Collier’s nephew and he’d come to help out a member of his family. Helping family and neighbors was something they were all familiar with. When there was a need, it was simply what people in Maple Mountain did.

  He stopped six feet in front of her, as tall and solid as an oak. Even as he spoke, she had the unsettling feeling she’d been appraised from neck to knee without his glance ever leaving her face.

  “I’d ask if you’re lost, but I figure you know your way around here a whole lot better than I do.”

  It was as clear as the gray of his eyes that he remembered their meeting that morning. Specifically, that she’d barely spoken to him—which obviously would make him wonder what she was doing there now.

  “I hope I’m not interrupting,” she replied, hoping she hadn’t offended him too badly.

  “I’m not doing anything that can’t wait.”

  Desperate not to appear as anxious as she felt, she held out the box containing one of the pies she’d baked between the breakfast and lunch that morning.

  “You said you like apple,” she reminded him.

  Curiosity slashed the carved lines of his face as he lifted the box from her hands. “What’s this for?”

  “A chance to look around?” Looking past the impressive shoulders and muscular arms she’d once fantasized about, she glanced toward the old two-story house behind him. “I heard you’re tearing out walls in there. If you don’t mind, I’d like to see the house before it changes too much.” She hesitated, trying to act only casually curious. “How far along are you? With tearing them out, I mean.”

  She thought he still looked skeptical of her presence. Or, maybe, it was interest in the contents of the box she saw in his expression as he pried up the front of the pink cardboard lid.

  “I still have half the upstairs to go.” Distracted, he lifted the box to his nose and sniffed. “You use cinnamon.”