Confessions of a Small-Town Girl Read online

  Then there was the realization that he had the power to cause Kelsey pain.

  The defensive sensation suddenly knotting his gut felt all too familiar. His jaw working, he headed past the row of metal garbage cans and out to the street.

  The only reasons he’d encouraged Kelsey about the mill were because her ideas clearly excited her, and what she was doing was something she’d always wanted—in one form or another. As he climbed into his truck and pulled onto the narrow main road, he insisted that to himself as forcefully as he had to everyone else.

  He just didn’t bother to wonder why what she wanted mattered to him. He was too busy refusing to accept responsibility for the decisions Kelsey had made. She was a big girl. She was bright, stronger than she thought she was and quite capable of making her own choices.

  He was, however, also beginning to feel an acute sense of accountability where she was concerned.

  Despite Dora’s claim, he did know Kelsey. And because he knew her, he had the uneasy feeling that what had happened between them that morning wasn’t just about fulfilling a sexual fantasy. Not for her. She’d gone too far out of her way in the beginning to make sure he knew she was more conservative than he might have suspected reading what he had of her diary. In the time he’d known her, he’d also come to realize there was a lot about her life and her dreams that she had shared only with him.

  Her mom’s claim that she had fallen in love with him tightened the knot in his gut. Whether things had gone that far, he didn’t honestly know. Kelsey certainly had never said anything to him about it herself. But he didn’t need to hear the words that would have sent him running, anyway. He knew she never would have slept with him had her feelings somehow not been involved. And that was a complication he’d never counted on.

  Complications were never a good thing. It had been his experience that one always led to another, and the last thing he wanted was for her to start believing there was anything more between them than what they already had. He didn’t want anyone else speculating about them, either. And people would if their relationship continued as it now was. He had never considered the effect an affair would have on her, or how it could affect her reputation in the small, conservative community.

  Considering it now, guilt hit him square in the chest. Though he didn’t want to admit that Dora was right about much of anything just then, he would concede that she did have reason to be slightly furious with him where her daughter’s reputation was concerned. In her mind, his intentions were definitely less than honorable and Kelsey would only suffer more talk after he’d gone. Especially since he wouldn’t be there to defend her.

  The responsibility he felt toward Kelsey jerked a little harder.

  He didn’t drive to the mill as he had planned to do. He didn’t go to his sister’s house, either. Partly because he didn’t want her and his aunt asking why he was there instead of helping Kelsey. Partly because it was always possible Kelsey could come looking for him there if she worried about him not showing up.

  He made a U-turn a mile from the mill road and drove out to his aunt and uncle’s farm instead. He had some arrangements he needed to make with his uncle Ted. He could use the phone there, too. He was due back on the force in a couple of weeks. Knowing it was always safest to put a quick end to an operation that had gone out of control, he would call his supervisor and ask if he could come back now.

  The disappointment Kelsey had felt when Sam’s sister had come over last night to tell her he’d needed to help his uncle had been replaced the next morning by anticipation as she listened for the sound of his truck. She’d also begun to feel a certain uneasiness. It was already noon and he still wasn’t there.

  Reminding herself that his sister might have needed his help moving something heavy, or that whatever project had taken him out to his uncle’s last night required more time than he’d thought, she continued rolling sealer over the new wallboard in her bathroom and tried to ignore that taunting sense of disquiet.

  Live in the moment, she reminded herself, only to find her thoughts promptly sliding straight back to the past. The man had probably always been her ideal, she’d come to realize, her hero and, subconsciously, the man by whom all others had been measured. It seemed monumentally unfair to her that she would only be allowed a couple of weeks with him when a lifetime was what she wanted, but she knew she couldn’t think that way. She’d promised herself that as long as he was there, she would live only in the moment. At least, as far as their relationship was concerned.

  Since her efforts didn’t seem to be working, she would also pray for a miracle.

  The breeze carried the warm August air through her open and sparkling new window. Yesterday, she’d scrubbed the soot from the hearth and the stones above the fireplace and shown up at her mother’s last night looking as if she’d spent the day working in a coal mine. Her mother had even commented on the soot, though, mercifully—and surprisingly—she’d said little else before Kelsey had showered and fallen into bed. She didn’t know if she could have taken her mother’s criticism of Sam now without somehow betraying how she truly felt about him. Knowing how her mother felt about Sam herself, Kelsey could only imagine what her mom would have to say if she realized she was in love with him. She also wouldn’t stand a snowball’s chance in Hades of convincing her that he wasn’t the reason she’d come back.

  With one of the dirtier jobs out of the way, the next task on her list was to seal the new wallboard in her small bathroom so she could paint now that her bedroom was finished. Sometime in the next couple of days, she and Sam needed to go into St. Johnsbury to pick up the fixtures that had been on back order when she’d picked up her paint.

  The list of tasks seemed endless. The moving van bringing her kitchen sink, new appliances and the rest of her possessions was to arrive tomorrow. Sometime between now and then, they needed to install the remnant of deep sage carpet she’d found for her bedroom on sale at the home improvement store where she’d ordered new unfinished fronts for her kitchen cabinets.

  Leaving the sealer to dry when she’d finished, she headed into the kitchen, still listening for some sound that would tell her Sam was there. Hearing nothing but Mrs. Farber’s geese, she picked up a screwdriver and sat down on the floor to remove the half-dozen old cabinet doors. With half of her attention on how messy it was going to be to strip off the old layers of paint and refinish the cabinets themselves, and half on the lengthening silence outside, she tried again to shake the unease that told her something wasn’t quite right.

  When Megan had come over last night, she’d said only that Sam had called and asked that she tell her he wouldn’t be able to make it out until morning, but that he would see her then. His sister, who was now her new neighbor, had then invited her back to her house with her and her boys, both of whom had devolved to the cranky stage, to share the tuna casserole her aunt had left for them. Since Sam wasn’t coming, and as much as Kelsey enjoyed the young widow’s company, Kelsey would have loved to join them. She told Megan that, too, but as dirty as she was and with more of the grimy task left to tackle before night fell, she’d needed to pass.

  Megan had understood completely. She’d also said nothing to indicate that Sam planned to be so late. Since it was Sunday and everyone else was either at the community church or with their families, no one had stopped by to mention whether or not they had seen him that morning, either.

  Noon came and went. Then, twelve-thirty. Then, one.

  By two, Kelsey was beginning to worry that something had happened to him and was about to head for Megan’s when the muffled growl of his truck’s engine had her bolting to the new window that overlooked her driveway.

  Looking down on the roughly cleared strip of overgrown meadow, she watched his truck stop directly below.

  It was no wonder he was late, she thought, anxiety fading to a grin as she headed for the door. The long bed of his pickup truck was loaded with boxes of bathroom fixtures. He’d driven to St. Johnsbury. Rou
nd trip alone took up three hours.

  By the time she made it to the bottom of the stairs, she had forced her grin to a smile. Sam was already out of the truck, muscles bunching and shifting beneath his chambray work shirt as he pulled off the ropes that held the load in place. Seeing him toss one end of the rope to the other side, she headed to that side herself to start untying the rope where it had been anchored there.

  “You didn’t have to pick these up,” she told him, wondering why he’d made the trip without her.

  Hidden behind boxes, she heard his easy, “Yeah, I did. Ernie is going to help me install them this afternoon.”

  Ernie Beauchamp was his uncle’s right-hand man at the farm. The grizzled, fortysomething-year-old Vermonter barely had two words to say to much of anybody, but the man did the work of ten. He was also one of the few men she’d ever encountered who tipped his hat to a woman. She’d met him and his wife at the Colliers’ barbecue.

  “I thought we were going to install the bedroom carpet today.”

  “We are,” he said over the chug of another vehicle pulling into her meadow. “Ernie’s bringing the tack strips with him now.”

  The faded red truck that parked not far from Sam’s looked as old as the hills surrounding them. Its engine still sounded healthy enough, though, and judging from the load of lumber in its bed, it could still carry its weight. But Kelsey’s attention was on Sam as he emerged by the rear fender and gave her a faint smile.

  Using her forearm to swipe back the hair that had come loose from her ponytail, she smiled, too. Only a little more hesitantly this time. He’d barely met her eyes before his glance cut away.

  She thought for certain that the telltale muscle in his jaw jumped.

  “I’ve only got Ernie for a few hours,” he said, lifting the latch to lower the tailgate, “but that’ll make a big dent in what we have to do.” Metal clanked as the gate locked into place. “Did you get the wallboard sealed?”

  “It might even be dry by now,” she told him, searching his guarded profile. “I just need to get the roller and paint tray out of there.”

  “That would be good,” was all he said as the chug behind them died.

  As distracted as he sounded, she wondered if he wasn’t just preoccupied with what he was doing. Now that his sister’s house was finished, it was entirely possible that he’d simply thrown himself headfirst into her project and wasn’t thinking of much else at the moment. She’d seen that intensity in him before when he’d worked, the concentration that made him seem almost…distant.

  That concentration seemed firmly etched in his face as his uncle’s slightly bow-legged handyman climbed from his truck. Ernie’s ruddy features were shadowed by the same Vermont Dairymen’s Association cap he’d worn when she’d met him. The white T-shirt and overalls he wore might have been the same, as well.

  Seeing her, he gripped his cap by its bill, lifted it off his flattened brown hair and muttered, “Ma’am.”

  “Hi, Ernie,” she replied, and told him it was nice to see him again, but he was finished socializing. His cap was already back on his head and he’d joined Sam at the tailgate to pull on a box the size of a refrigerator marked This Side Up.

  “We’ll need all the room we can get to maneuver,” she heard Sam say as Ernie gave a tug and a grunt. “We’ll put in the shower stall first. What do you think?”

  Ernie apparently thought the plan was fine. All Kelsey knew for certain was that he didn’t say otherwise before she hurried up the steps to clear away the can of sealer and the paint tray and roller she’d left to soak in a bucket.

  While the men cut away the cardboard container to wrestle the molded fiberglass up the stairs, Kelsey decided the best way she could help was to stay out of the way. Sam and Ernie clearly knew what they needed to do and how to do it. Since her experience with caulk and silicone was limited strictly to repairs, she returned to scraping layers of paint from the cabinets in the kitchen and soon found herself listening to male voices and various bumps from the other side of the wall.

  “You have a shower,” Sam announced over an hour later, only to disappear out the door with Ernie before she could do anything more than look up.

  Five minutes after that, she heard him thud back up the stairs. This time he carried a sink. Ernie came behind him, bearing variously shaped pieces of pipe and a large wrench that apparently hadn’t been in the green metal toolbox Sam had carried in before.

  She thought Sam might come back after he’d set down the heavy white porcelain, maybe crouch beside her and do what he’d always done when he was there and ask how things were going. She wouldn’t have expected him to touch her or kiss her with Ernie working so near, but after what they’d shared yesterday morning and the unsettling distance she’d begun to sense in him, she was beginning to feel a definite need for some reassurance on his part that yesterday morning hadn’t been a mistake.

  He didn’t come back, though. Thinking of how preoccupied he still looked, she wanted to believe he was just intent on taking advantage of Ernie’s help while the man was there. Knowing he only had use of the older man’s experience and brawn for a short while had to be why he didn’t seem to slow down at all, much less take a break. After the sink was in, they carted up the toilet tank and bowl, installed them, then went back down to get the roll of carpet from where she and Sam had stored it on a tarp near the grinding stone.

  By the time her carpet was in, she had two cabinets ready to sand and a new blister from scraping. It was while she was digging an adhesive bandage out of the box she’d learned to keep on hand, along with antibiotic ointment and tweezers for pulling out slivers, that she heard Ernie in the other room mention that he’d best get home to supper.

  She had one of the bandage strips in hand when, seconds later, he walked past where she stood by the slate counter.

  “Ernie,” she called, heading after him. “Thank you so much for your help.”

  “Glad to do it,” was his only reply before, tipping his hat, he walked out the open door.

  His footsteps on the stairs had barely started to fade when heavier ones had her turn back around.

  Sam had stopped behind her.

  Seeing what she held, he reached for the adhesive strip.

  “What’s this for?” he asked, his focus on peeling off its paper jacket.

  She held up her right hand. Even though she’d worn gloves, the pad below her fingers had been rubbed red. A spot in the middle sported the blister that had already broken.

  Seeing it, he frowned. “Where’s the ointment?”

  She’d left the tube on the countertop. Retrieving it, she removed the cap and deposited a small blob on the rectangle of gauze he had exposed.

  The same concentration that had carved his features before seemed fixed just as firmly as he positioned the bandage over the sore and pressed the ends into place with his thumbs. Held in his big, masculine hands, her own looked very small, and despite the nicks and scrapes she’d earned over the past week, almost as fragile as she suddenly felt.

  The movements of this thumbs were gentle. But it was the way those motions slowed and how his brow furrowed in the moments before he looked up that stalled the relief she’d started to feel at his touch.

  “I checked at the home improvement store,” he told her, letting her go to check out the work she’d done that afternoon. “Your cabinet doors won’t be in for another month, but they can install the carpet you ordered for the living room and the other bedroom the first of next week if you’re ready. I put you down for a week from Tuesday just to get you on their schedule, but you can change that if you don’t have the painting finished by then.”

  It seemed to her that he was getting way ahead of himself. “Do you think we’ll have the insulation and wallboard up by then?”

  “I asked Ernie if he can do that next weekend. He has a brother who can help him.”

  She hesitated. She’d never intended to impose on anyone else for the work they’d talked about
doing themselves. She knew she would have to hire help later, but Sam was talking as if enlisting more help had suddenly become essential right now. “I thought you said we could do that ourselves over the next couple of weeks.”

  It took a moment, but as his glance met hers and she caught the telltale tightening of his jaw once more, the reason for the unease she’d felt slowly began to register.

  He wasn’t going to be here that long.

  The breath Kelsey drew felt almost painful. When she let it out, she felt as if she wasn’t breathing at all. “You’re leaving.”

  Apparently he didn’t feel confirmation was necessary.

  “I think I have everything covered here,” he told her, glancing around as if he wanted to be sure he hadn’t overlooked some detail. “When your things arrive tomorrow, have the movers bring whatever you need up here. If you decide later that you want something brought from downstairs, call my uncle and he and Ernie or Ernie and his brother will move it for you. Uncle Ted will be in and out helping Megan, so you can coordinate with her.”

  He turned away, tension radiating in waves from his big body. Planting his hands on his hips, he nodded to the far corner of the kitchen.

  “I asked Charlie if he could recommend a carpenter. You’ll need one to build your pantry over there.”

  “Sam…”

  “If you like his work, you can use him to rebuild the casing around the grindstone and the chute. If you can’t find packing tables, he can probably build those…”

  “Sam…”

  “…for you, too.”

  “Sam, stop! Please,” she added, more quietly.

  She didn’t care about who would build what. She didn’t care about carpet or cabinets or the mill itself for that matter. Not just then. For the first time since she’d attempted to adopt his cynical philosophy, she honestly didn’t care beyond that particular moment. At that moment, all she wanted was to know why he couldn’t seem to get away from her fast enough.