Confessions of a Small-Town Girl Page 8

  Sam had come to her rescue.

  Kelsey didn’t know if anyone else noticed what he had so deliberately done. Since conversations in the diner tended to drift from one subject to another and interruptions were frequent anyway, she rather doubted that anyone had. She had no opportunity to thank him, though. The best she could do was offer him a small smile before her mom bustled in wanting to know what she needed seconds before Lorna clipped two more orders to the order wheel and a party of four came in to take the only vacant table.

  From that moment on, the diner had remained packed. As usual, many of the regulars stayed away for the weekend, as they tended to do when visitors overran their haunts. The town’s seasonal festivals were a major source of income for the little community, helping provide everything from the new roof on the community center to football uniforms for the Maple Mountain Maroons. Being a practical lot, those who lived there wanted to give everyone else space to spend their money and beef up the community coffers. Even Sam didn’t come into town over the weekend, though she didn’t know if that was because he knew his friends wouldn’t be there or if he wanted to avoid the crowds himself.

  Her mom always closed the diner on the Fourth. That was the morning everyone converged on the community center for the town-sponsored pancake breakfast. Outside the sprawling white building, the short road leading to it was lined with bunting-draped booths that would later sell hamburgers and homemade sausages. Other stands, decked out in that same patriotic red-white-and-blue, offered ears of buttered corn, watermelon, ice-cream cones and strawberry shortcakes. People came for miles for the dinners at the center where the church ladies served fried chicken, biscuits and slices of the blueberry and apple pies made with fruit from their own backyards.

  Kelsey usually adored everything about the festivals. She’d loved the preparations, the anticipation, the sense of belonging. When she’d lived in Maple Mountain, she’d been right in the heart of everything, working at the kid’s face-painting booth, serving at the dinner. In between, she’d wandered with her friends through the displays of hand-crafted quilts, locally made pottery, maple syrup, jams, jellies and wines from the vineyards lowlanders were only now discovering. When the high school band led the parade of decorated farm equipment and bicycles down Main Street, she’d been on the sidelines waving to the costumed participants with everyone else before heading for the old-fashioned fiddle competition at the school football field a few blocks away.

  That morning, she avoided it all.

  By eight o’clock her mom had already left for the community center. She hadn’t pressed Kelsey to come help, something that had surprised Kelsey a little, given that her mom could be as persuasive as Claire when it came to recruiting. Apparently feeling she’d worked her hard enough, she’d simply stuck her head into Kelsey’s bedroom, suggested she use the day to visit with her old friends and said she’d see her later.

  Though Kelsey had spent the majority of her waking hours working in the diner’s kitchen, she’d spent a lot of that time socializing through the window while she worked. Carrie Rogers, now Carrie Higgins, had stopped by with her three young children as soon as she’d heard Kelsey was back. So had Michelle’s sister, Jenny, and Sally McNeff, who’d sat behind her in English and History class and now ran her mom’s bookstore. She enjoyed seeing them all and had thought to catch up with those she’d missed. Yet, as she showered and dressed in her favorite old jeans and a cropped white, sleeveless blouse, she was feeling an old and familiar need for a little time and space to herself.

  She’d always felt that need when she had things to think about, to sort through. Or, for that matter, when there were things she didn’t want to think about and needed to escape. The problem just then was that she didn’t know whether she wanted to sit down and weigh her options, or simply forget for now, that she had a choice she needed to make.

  It wasn’t like her to be so indecisive. It wasn’t like her to avoid a decision, either. Those failings only compounded the odd sense of uncertainty that had plagued her for the past week.

  That was why, with Main Street clogged with more traffic than it had seen since the Maple Sugar Festival last March, she climbed into her rental car and headed toward the mill. She had one stop to make before she got there, though.

  Two miles out of town, her windows down and loose hair flying, she sailed past the lane to the mill and rounded the curve of the narrow road. Thick stands of lush birch and maple trees gave way to a meadowlike front yard as the Baker house came into view.

  She didn’t know if Sam would be there or not. It was entirely possible that he was spending the day with his aunt and uncle on their farm, or that he’d gone into town to meet them at the breakfast. But whether she saw him or not didn’t matter. She had something she needed to leave for him. A half dozen of the blueberry muffins she knew he liked and a note she’d taped to the top of the pink box that simply said, “Thanks for the rescue.”

  She wanted him to know she’d appreciated what he’d done. She also hoped the gesture would make him remember something about her other than what he’d read in her diary. From the way she’d noticed him watching her the other day, she had the distinct feeling he hadn’t forgotten a thing she’d written.

  The disquieting thought gave her pause. So did the realization that he was there. She could see his shiny black truck parked by the trailer as she turned onto the house’s long driveway. She could hear him, too. As she bounced over the ruts and pulled to a stop beside the house, the sharp beats of hammering pierced the reverberating base from a boom box. The instrument shattering the normal peace of the place couldn’t possibly have been a radio. Maple Mountain only received one radio station and its programming leaned heavily toward elevator music and farm reports.

  She knew for a fact it did not play rap.

  Picking up the box from the seat, she slid from her car. She’d thought to leave it on his trailer step if he hadn’t been there. Since he was, she would simply hand it to him.

  She found him near the house’s back porch, working beside a pair of saw horses. Across them lay a long piece of wood he was apparently trying to salvage by pounding out its old nails. A gray T-shirt stretched across his broad shoulders. Over his jeans, a chamois-colored carpenter’s apron was slung like a gun belt around his lean hips.

  Seeing her, he set his hammer aside and moved to the silver box vibrating on a back porch step.

  The sudden quiet seemed as loud as the music had been when he turned to where she stopped ten feet away. Beneath the dark hair falling over his forehead, his keen gray eyes skimmed her face.

  Conscious of his curiosity, more conscious of the quiet power in his bunched and sculpted muscles, she nodded toward the porch.

  “I didn’t figure you for the rap type.”

  “I got used to it on my last assignment. If I don’t know the lingo, I’m too easy to identify.”

  She hesitated. “To identify?”

  “As a cop,” he replied, tossing a bent nail toward the debris pile by the saw horses. “If someone figures it out while I’m working, it could be bad for my health.”

  He spoke easily, his manner and tone so offhand she might not have realized how serious he was had it not been for their encounter the other night.

  She had yet to shake the image of him towering over her. All that raw, vibrating strength. The hair-trigger tension. And the scars. The only ones she could see now were the inch long streak under his jaw and the tip of the one that crept above his collar. The World’s Best Uncle T-shirt he wore effectively hid the rest.

  Were she meeting him for the first time just then, her impression would be of a man who had nieces or nephews who thought him a pretty great guy, and who had a definite tendency to mess with a woman’s heart rate when he smiled.

  “So,” she murmured, pulling her glance from where the older-looking wound, the puckered disk of flesh on his shoulder, was hidden. She was as grateful as the next person for those who were willing to protect a
nd defend ordinary, law-abiding citizens. And she thought his calling terribly noble. She just couldn’t help but wonder if all those injuries had been inflicted in the line of duty, or imagine the danger he’d been in if they had. “Why aren’t you in town enjoying the holiday?”

  Beneath soft cotton, his broad shoulders lifted in a dismissive shrug. “I work through them.”

  “All of them?” The sudden and disturbing thought that he might well be attracted to that danger succumbed to hesitation. “Even Thanksgiving and Christmas?”

  “Even them.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the job usually requires it.”

  “But you’re not on your job now,” she pointed out, lost by his logic.

  He struck her as a man prepared for anything. Yet, she had the feeling her challenge had caught him completely off guard when a muscle in his jaw jumped.

  “My aunt and uncle invited me out for a barbecue. My sister and her boys are there for the weekend, so I might go out later,” he said, as if to end that particular line of questioning. “What about you?” The quick tension in his jaw gave way to his deceptively easy smile as his glance shifted to the box in her hands. “What are you doing out here?”

  Wondering at the invisible wall she’d just run into, she set the box on the top porch step. “I brought you some muffins. To thank you for cutting off my mom the other day,” she explained, wondering, too, if he didn’t find the whole sack-race and cakewalk thing a little quaint for his tastes. She’d always loved that simple, uncomplicated atmosphere. But he was undoubtedly accustomed to far more excitement than he was likely to find anywhere around there.

  Straightening, Kelsey snagged back her windblown hair. “I didn’t realize it was so obvious I was uncomfortable with what she was saying.”

  The caution in her fragile features had told Sam the moment he’d seen her that her uneasiness with him had yet to go away. At the moment, however, he was more aware of how the motion of her arm as she pushed back her hair drew her blouse taut across her breasts and lifted the hem of her shirt. The glimpse of bare skin above the low waist of her jeans was gone in the time it took her hand to fall, but there was no mistaking its effect on him.

  All he had to do was look at her and he could feel the tightening low in his gut. On the other hand, all he had to do was think of the plea in her eyes when she’d asked him to forget what he’d read about them to know her basic discomfort with him wasn’t going to go away easily.

  “It wasn’t.”

  “Then how did you know I didn’t really need her in the kitchen?”

  “By your eyes.”

  Her dark lashes flicked with an uncomprehending blink.

  “My eyes?”

  “Yours are a dead giveaway.” The lingering disquiet in her expression shifted to curiosity as she nudged her hair back once more. He liked that she’d left it down. Swept back behind her ears, the tousled strands of pale ash and wheat looked to him as if she might have left the window down on her car. He liked that, too, the thought of her driving along, the wind whipping her hair and the radio blasting.

  “When a person is under emotional stress, she blinks more. We see it all the time when we interrogate suspects. Or interview witnesses.” Or when you’re trying to mask how uptight you are around me, he thought. “You were pretty insistent about interrupting her, too.”

  “How did you know I didn’t have a problem with something else?”

  “Did you?”

  A row of small white buttons bisected the front of her blouse. Closing her fingers around the top one, she rubbed it like a talisman. “No,” she conceded, looking as if she found his ability to read her so easily a little unfair. “I just wanted her to be quiet. Everyone here knows everyone else, so everyone pretty much knows everyone else’s business. There’s actually a certain security in that,” she hurried to defend. “If someone needs help, someone else is there to offer it. But Mom just doesn’t get how intrusive talking like that can be sometimes.”

  “So ask her to be a little less generous with your personal life.”

  “Have you ever had a conversation with a brick wall?”

  “She can’t be that dense.”

  Kelsey eyed him evenly. “Asking my mother to keep anything to herself is pointless. Telling her it bothers me is useless, too,” she insisted, in case he was about to suggest it. “You can’t make a person understand how you feel when they simply don’t get why something bothers you in the first place. It’s like trying to make someone who doesn’t like chocolate understand why you crave fudge.”

  When she had finally found a minute the other day to talk to her mom, she had told her, politely, that she would truly appreciate it if she would keep what she’d confided in her to herself. In all innocence, her mother had replied that she’d always shared news about her with her friends and neighbors, so she saw no reason why she shouldn’t talk about how sought after she was now.

  The same frustration she’d felt then tugged at her once more. Trying to shake it off before her agitation could fully surface, she drew a deep breath, blew it out. She had more important things to think about than a minor annoyance with her mother. Her career for one thing. She was pretty sure, too, that Sam had better things to do than listen to her complain.

  “Sorry,” she murmured. “I came to thank you, not dump my little problems in your lap.” She didn’t doubt for a moment that they did seem insignificant to him, too, considering the situations he probably dealt with. “I should let you get back to what you were doing.”

  With a self-deprecating smile, she started to take a step back.

  “Just out of curiosity,” he said before she could, “I hear you’re leaning toward the restaurant. Is that the job you’re going to take?”

  Frustration with her mom prodded harder.

  “Where did you hear that?”

  “Over at the general store.”

  The town grapevine was obviously still alive and as tangled as ever. “I honestly don’t know which I’m taking,” she admitted, certain not knowing was part of the reason for her exasperation. “And just for the record, if you hear rumors about me being involved with the man Mom was talking about, they’re not true.”

  “So, you’re not almost engaged to the guy?” he asked mildly.

  “I’ve never even dated Doug,” she insisted, as exasperation surfaced anyway. “I’m not personally involved with him at all.”

  A hint of color had risen in her cheeks. It wasn’t embarrassment this time, though Sam had seen her color with that, too. This time it was pure annoyance.

  As he leaned against the porch railing and crossed his arms over his chest, what he noticed most was that her frustration with her mother and the rumor mill had overshadowed her discomfort with him.

  “Your mom seems to think he wants you to be.”

  “If he does,” she confided, crossing her arms herself, “it’s probably only to keep me from going to work for the competition.”

  “Nice guy.”

  “Actually he is. He’s very nice.”

  “So what makes you think he’s only manipulating you?”

  Her tone went as flat as her first soufflé. “He’s a forty-year-old bachelor who can have any woman he wants. He dates models. He’s friends with entertainers and politicians and people who know people. I can’t imagine he’s really interested in me beyond what I can do for his business.”

  She looked as matter of fact as she sounded, and utterly convinced of her conclusions. Sam just didn’t know if she realized what she had just admitted, or how surprising that admission was.

  As outwardly self-assured and outgoing as she seemed, and as polished as she looked even wearing jeans and a shirt that would take a man forever to get off her, he never would have suspected she doubted her appeal. The woman had the face of an angel, the body of a showgirl and a smile that radiated like the sun. That combination of innocence and seduction had snagged his attention in seconds. Having become privy to
her old fantasies, that hold had become merciless.

  “So how do you feel about working with him?”

  A thoughtful frown knitted the delicate arches of her eyebrows.

  “Being in on the ground floor of one of his restaurants would be an incredible opportunity.” Kelsey offered the admission quietly, considering her words even as she spoke. She wasn’t all that comfortable with the beautiful people and their groupies who frequented his establishments, but she could definitely hold her own in the back of the house. “Especially if I could eventually bring out a line of cakes and tortes that we could market outside the restaurant. The way Wolfgang did with his pizzas.”

  “Wolfgang?”

  “Puck. Spago?” she prodded, mentioning the famous chef’s most well-known restaurant. “In Los Angeles? Anyway,” she continued, when his only response was an uncomprehending shake of his head, “I wouldn’t be able to do that working for the hotel. Their corporate philosophy doesn’t allow for marketing outside their own properties. But the position at the hotel has a lot going for it, too.”

  She turned away, turned back. Frowning, pondering, she started to pace. “Some of the events we host are huge. We really go over the top with our desserts and wedding cakes and there’s always a major event to plan. As executive pastry chef, I’d be in charge of creativity, the budget, the staff. Everything.”

  She was one step from that responsibility now. She didn’t even blink at the thought of managing a line of sous-chefs to turn out five hundred mousse-filled chocolate tulips plated with sauces of raspberry and white chocolate for a charity gala while preparing tortes, tarts and brûlées for the regular menu. As executive, though, she’d have the creative control she lacked now.

  “So why don’t you see this decision as the opportunity your mom does?”