Confessions of a Small-Town Girl Page 6

  He was feeling an uncomfortable dose of concern himself as he sat at his usual spot at the counter.

  “I didn’t know if we’d be seein’ you or not this mornin’.” Sounding as friendly as always, Dora automatically filled a mug with coffee and set it in front of him. “Charlie stopped by on the way back from your place and said you might be coming down with a cold. You should get extra vitamin C,” she insisted. “How about some orange juice?”

  “The juice would be great, but I’m feeling fine. Honest.” So much for preempting that little rumor. “I’m just late this morning,” he explained, sticking closer to the truth than he had earlier. “There’s nothing wrong with me that food won’t cure.”

  “In that case, I’ll go start your breakfast myself.” Holding her injured arm protectively at her waist, she glanced over her shoulder into the kitchen, then back at him. “Kelsey’s on an important call. She might be a while.”

  As usual, she asked if he wanted buttermilk pancakes or blueberry with his bacon and eggs, then disappeared through the swinging door before she reappeared again inside walking past the service window.

  His focus, however, was on Kelsey. He could see her at the back of the kitchen, pacing as far as the six-foot phone cord would allow.

  She’d been the last thing on his mind last night, and the first that morning.

  He couldn’t begin to deny how it intrigued him to know that she had once fantasized about him. With the memory of her scent and the feel of her long, taut body fused into his brain, he couldn’t deny the temptation to invent a few fantasies about her of his own, either. But entertaining such thoughts, interesting as they were, would have to wait. He had slammed her pretty hard against that stud.

  He had never in his career come as close as he had last night to harming an innocent person. And she was an innocent. Despite the way she’d been sneaking around, she was definitely not the hard-core type he’d grown so accustomed to dealing with.

  He picked up his coffee, watching her over its rim. He’d come to make sure she was all right, but his initial assessment was that she was not. She rubbed the back of her head as if it might be sore. From what he could see of her profile, she also seemed to be struggling over something, or someone, as she hung up the phone.

  She stood with her hand on the receiver, clearly lost in thought, in the moments before her mom noticed she was no longer occupied.

  “Grab the eggs for me, will you?” he heard Dora call to her.

  Without a word, Kelsey turned to the refrigerator beside her, yanked open the door and pulled out a large gray cardboard flat.

  “Sam’s here,” Dora continued, her tone utterly conversational. “He wants his usual. That means four. Best bring more bacon, too.”

  Kelsey’s preoccupation fled. Sam watched, fascinated, as she jerked her head toward where he observed her through the window. As she did, her eyes met his, her arm bumped into the door and the eggs hit the floor.

  “Oh, Kelsey, no.” Dora practically moaned the words. “That’s the last of the eggs till Edna delivers more tomorrow. Are there any that didn’t break?”

  Kelsey sank to her knees. “One,” she murmured, as fifteen others oozed from their shells.

  “Why didn’t you just take out what we needed?”

  She hadn’t taken out what they’d needed because the instant she’d heard Sam’s name her thoughts had scrambled. She was not, however, about to admit that to her mother. “I’ll run up to the store and get more.”

  “I’ll do it. You clean that up.” Already working her apron loose with one hand, her mom headed for the back door. “There’s nobody else out front except Claire and her cousin from Montpelier. I just refilled their coffee so they’ll be fine until I get back. Sam has a fresh cup.”

  Flustered, hating it because it made her feel so out of control, Kelsey grabbed a roll of paper towels and was back on her knees as the screen door banged shut. The sound coincided roughly with the ominous beat of rather large work boots coming through the swinging door.

  Sam’s knees creaked as he crouched in front of her and reached for the towels himself.

  Her glance made it from the denim stretched over his powerful thighs to the scar on the underside of his chin before it fell back to the mess on the beige linoleum. “You don’t need to help.”

  “I’m the reason you dropped part of my breakfast. The least I can do is help you clean it up.”

  Feeling flustered was bad enough. Knowing he knew he was the reason for that circumstance magnified her discomfort level by ten. She hadn’t behaved like her normally calm and collected self since yesterday when she’d first heard his name.

  With their heads nearly bumping, she picked up a paper towel full of the slippery mess, shells and all, and dumped it on the cardboard flat between them.

  Paper ripped as he separated a towel from the roll. “I wanted to talk to you anyway.”

  A hint of the raw tension she’d felt in him last night surrounded her once more. Even banked as it was, there was no mistaking that quiet intensity, that edge of complete and utter control. It surrounded him like a force field, invisible, invincible and emitting a kind of restive energy that taunted every nerve in her body.

  She now understood completely why that edge was there. She’d had no idea that a man his size could move so quietly or so fast. But she didn’t care to imagine what he’d dealt with that had honed his skills to such a degree, and instilled such lethal instincts. What she had encountered last night told her all she cared to know. The man did not do his work from behind a desk.

  That edge lurked beneath his quiet perusal even now.

  “I could have hurt you last night.” He hesitated, his deep voice dropping as he ducked his head to catch her eyes. “Are you okay?”

  There was no mistaking his concern, or the guilt that tightened his jaw. Caught off guard by both, she quietly murmured, “I’m fine.”

  “Then why were you rubbing the back of your head?”

  “It’s just a little bump,” she conceded, taking the towel he held to take another swipe at the floor. “It’s nothing.”

  “That’s what you said about the diary.”

  She didn’t get a chance to tell him she wished he’d never laid eyes on the blasted thing. With her head bent, she could only see his spread knees, but she caught the motion of his hands an instant before she felt them on the sides of her head.

  “Let me see,” he insisted, and skimmed his fingers toward the back of her hair.

  Sam was accustomed to relying on his own assessments, making his own judgments. Thinking she might be minimizing to get him to go away, he wanted to determine the size of the bump for himself.

  Crouched in front of her, remembering where he’d seen her rub, he slipped his fingers over the strands of shining wheat and flax. He didn’t doubt for a moment that she was still embarrassed. That was evident enough from the way she’d barely met his eyes. But he was more concerned with the harm he might have caused her than with her discomfort with him. With her hair restrained by the clip at her nape, he couldn’t get down to her skin, but he could feel the knot under the baby-fine strands. It was small, just as she’d said. Barely the size of a quarter. He’d already noticed that her dark pupils were equal and reactive. Tipping her head up to double check, he saw no visible sign of concussion. Other than for the wariness in their lovely brown depths, her eyes looked fine.

  His clinical assessment suddenly stopped there.

  He had her head cradled in his hands. With his palms cupping her cheeks, he became aware of the velvet softness of her skin, the delicate feel of her bones. Each breath he drew brought the clean scent of her into his lungs, the subtle vibrancy of it, the lightness. It was like breathing sunshine.

  He couldn’t remember the last time he’d experienced a woman’s softness. He knew only that it had been long before his last assignment. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had his hands on a woman he’d wanted to touch, either. One he’d wa
nted to taste. To explore. The majority of those he’d encountered in the past year had either been addicts, had charged for their services, or both. And of interest to him only because he’d needed to learn where they’d scored their drugs.

  Touching Kelsey was like touching something fragile. Something…fresh.

  His glance drifted to her mouth. Lush and inviting, her unadorned lips parted as she drew a deep, shuddery breath.

  Kelsey felt something squeeze at her heart as his thumb brushed the corner of her mouth. She wasn’t even sure what it was she saw in the carved lines of his face. Desolation maybe. Or need. Soul deep and weary. She knew only that no man had ever looked at her the way Sam did in the moments before he frowned at what he was doing and lowered his hands.

  Reaching for two broken shells by her foot, he picked them up and tossed them onto the tray.

  “How’s your neck?”

  He wasn’t at all comfortable with whatever it was he’d felt. She was dead certain of that. He also seemed fully prepared to ignore it.

  Feeling even more unsettled herself, she followed his lead and tried to ignore it, too. “My neck?”

  “Here.” Lifting his hand again, he touched above the hollow of her throat. “Do you feel bruised?”

  Beneath his fingers, she felt her pulse jump. “Only a little.”

  His dark eyebrows formed a single slash as he pulled back once more. “Maybe you should get over to the Doc’s and get yourself checked out.”

  “And tell him what?” Her voice lowered to nearly a whisper. “That I was going for a midnight stroll in the old Baker place and you attacked me?”

  His voice fairly dripped with patience. “We could explain what happened.”

  “We’re not explaining anything. I’m fine,” she insisted, because aside from a slight case of mortification, she really was. “But as long as we’re discussing last night, there’s something I need you to know.” Picking up eggshells herself, a quiet plea entered her tone. “Despite what you read, I wasn’t the town wild child. I’m not even a wild adult. No one but you knows what’s in that diary.”

  As involved as she tended to get with other people, few realized that she was a rather private person herself. She always had been. That was why she’d recorded her dreams in a diary rather than share them with anyone else. No one had known how drawn she’d been to the old mill, or that she’d once wanted to live there. And no one, not even her best friends, had known how she’d let her imagination run wild with Sam.

  She would really rather it stayed that way.

  “I’d appreciate it if you would just forget what you read.”

  “Even if I wanted to, I’m not sure I could.”

  His blunt admission made her go still.

  With her eyes trained on the toe of his boot, she quickly reached for the towels. “You could if you didn’t think about it.”

  “It’s not just that,” he told her, handing her the roll. “I can still see what you wrote.”

  Pure skepticism had her glancing up.

  “I have a photographic memory,” he explained with a shrug.

  “Right,” she muttered.

  “I’m serious. What I see tends to stay stuck. If you don’t believe me, I can tell you exactly what you wrote on the pages I saw. Do you want to hear July twelfth?”

  She had no idea of the specifics she’d written that particular day. She was quite certain from the glint in his eyes, however, that she did not want to hear him quote it to her.

  She was about to tell him that when the door to the dining room swung open.

  Claire McGraw poked her curly red head into the kitchen.

  In the time it took the mayor’s gregarious wife to smile, she had taken in their positions across from each other and what was left of the mess between them on the floor. It was as clear as the curiosity burning in her eyes that she wanted to know what Sam was doing in there.

  “I left money for my bill next to the coffeemaker, Kelsey.” Her curious glance bouncing between them, she stepped inside the door. There wasn’t a shade of pink she wouldn’t wear. Today’s ensemble reminded Kelsey of an antacid. “Tell your mom the chicken dinner committee meeting will run late tonight, so to stop by if she can after she closes.”

  Enormously grateful that the woman hadn’t walked in while Sam had been checking her head, Kelsey handed the roll of towels back to him. “I’ll do that, Claire,” she said, rising to dump the cardboard container in the trash. “Do you or your sister want more coffee? I’d be happy to get you some.”

  “Thank you, Kelsey, but we need to be going. I do have a question, though.” The woman’s smile never faltered as it shifted to Sam. It simply changed quality as she watched him rise, too.

  “You know Sam,” she began, checking out the breadth of his shoulders the way a farmer might check out the potential strength of a workhorse, “I was just telling my cousin we could use a little more muscle out at the lake in a few days. Setting up bleachers for the fireworks,” she explained, looking as if she might be mentally calculating just how much he could heft. “I know you’re working on your sister’s house, but you’ll be here until September. Surely you can spare a little time to help us out. The third at four in the afternoon? It won’t take long.”

  Sam eyed the matronly woman eyeing his chest.

  Anything to kill time, he thought. “Be glad to,” he told her.

  “I hoped you say that.” Curls bobbing, she gave him a nod, smiled again at Kelsey and seeing nothing of interest going on, backed out, leaving the door swinging behind her.

  Kelsey was already back on her knees. “You were wise to agree,” she murmured. “If you hadn’t, she’d have nagged you until you did.”

  He crouched again himself. “I have the time.”

  “It wouldn’t have mattered if you didn’t. Claire has headed every Fourth of July festival in Maple Mountain for twenty years. She prides herself on getting everyone involved. That’s one of the things I love about this place,” she confided. “It’s so predictable.”

  Conscious of him watching her mouth, remembering how he’d touched it, she returned her attention to what was left of the mess on the floor. “Is September when your sister is moving up from New Jersey?”

  “It’s when I’m due back on the force.”

  Mention of his work gave her pause. There was little she really knew about him anymore. So much she’d never known. Years ago, he’d been as much fantasy as reality to her. She had no idea what drove him, what passions had compelled him to choose his career or the choices he’d made that had affected its direction. Faced with choices of her own, she couldn’t help but wonder if he’d ever felt he’d chosen the wrong course, or regretted decisions he’d made along the way.

  Regret. Maybe that was what she’d seen in him when he’d touched her, she thought. There were scars hidden beneath those she had seen on his body. She didn’t doubt that for an instant. And the visible ones alone spoke volumes. Some of them had definitely looked older than others. He’d clearly been in more than one accident. Or incident.

  “Are you looking forward to going back?”

  He was counting the days, Sam thought. “I am,” he replied, picking up the last of the shells while she wiped up the rest. He didn’t fit in Maple Mountain any more than the woman looking at him so earnestly would fit tattooed, pierced and working a sting. The town wasn’t a bad place to be for a break, he supposed. It was just that what Kelsey seemed to like about the little community would have had him climbing walls if he’d had to stay any longer than he did.

  He thrived on change, on adrenaline and on the challenge of not quite knowing what to expect.

  Since his arrival there, Kelsey had been the only surprise he’d encountered.

  “I can’t imagine what I’d do if I didn’t go back,” he finally admitted as he rose to head for the sink. “It’s home. It’s where I work.”

  His response had Kelsey feeling a strange twinge of envy. He clearly suffered none of the
doubts plaguing her about where she belonged. Doubts she wanted to believe were nothing more than just professional cold feet now that everything she had worked toward was finally happening.

  “Do you ever have any misgivings about your career? About what you chose to do for a living?”

  He looked as certain as he sounded as he washed off his hands at the sink. “I never considered being anything other than a cop. Gramps was a cop. My dad still is. So is my Uncle Paul.”

  “Uncle Paul?”

  “My dad’s brother.” He shrugged. “It’s just what the MacInnes men are.”

  “So you chose it because it was expected of you.”

  Her conclusion threw him a little. So did her vaguely sympathetic tone. He did a lot of things because they were expected of him, but there was little time for him to consider that no one expected more or pushed him harder than he pushed himself. As he took the paper towel she handed him and dried off his hands, the back screen door opened with a squeak and closed with a bang.

  Her mom was back. Now that he knew Kelsey was all right, it was time for him to leave her alone anyway.

  Wadding the towel into a ball, aware of how consciously Kelsey stepped back from him, he tossed it past her into the trash. “I better get out of your way.”

  “I’ll get started on your breakfast.”

  “Thanks. Hey, Dora,” he said to her mom and walked out, wondering why the older woman was staring at her daughter with such a knowing look in her eyes.

  Chapter Four

  Kelsey would have bet her favorite French rolling pin that her mother was about to question what Sam had been doing in her kitchen. The efficient little space was her domain, after all, and customers seldom entered beyond the doorway. She also would have thought she’d look a little more puzzled about his presence. Or, at least, a little more curious than she did as she set her grocery sack on a stool by the work island and reached into it. Her mom, however, didn’t seem the least bit surprised to have seen him there.