A Taste of Ice (48 page)

Then he entered her and she was lost.

An hour or so later they lay in a tangle of damp sheets on the floor between the bed and balcony door. She didn’t remember falling from the bed, but whatever. Tremors still pulsed through her body and her mind was floating somewhere over the ocean, somewhere between Earth and heaven.

Xavier was still kissing her, everywhere but on the mouth.

“Was Antoine lying when he said you’d e-mailed him about me?”

He grinned. “No.”

“You mean you’ve actually turned on a computer?”

“Yes. Just don’t time my typing speed.”

“If you say you have a cell phone I might have to name you an impostor.”

His mouth covered her bellybutton. “I don’t.”

She pushed at his shoulder, not wanting him to move away, but not wanting him to get in trouble either. “Don’t you have menus to plan or cooking to do or something?”

“I thought you knew.” He drew a wet line with his tongue between her hip bones. With a wicked, wicked look up at her from under his lashes, his eyes glowed pewter. “I’ve never tasted anything as good as you.”

Jen Haverhurst swerved onto the gravel shoulder of Route 6
and braked the rental car with a jolt. On the other side of a sturdy fence, Loughlin’s highland cattle swung their giant horns and hairy heads toward her. Those beasts had always made her uneasy. Beyond their field, across a cracked, weed-filled parking lot, rose the vacant Hemmertex headquarters. And directly ahead, tucked into the bend in the road, still sat the produce stand.

That’s where Leith had parked his dad’s boat of a Cadillac convertible that summer night ten years ago. The moon had been a sliver, each star its own atmosphere. And Leith had given her her first orgasm not from her own hand.

Jen turned up the weak air conditioner and whipped out her phone, pressing the single button to connect her to her office. She needed a dose of her real world. Fast.

Her assistant picked up. “Gretchen, it’s me.”

“You made it up there okay?”

“Yeah. I’m here.”

And here she was. Back in Gleann, New Hampshire, after all this time.

“What’d I miss today?” Jen stuck the Bluetooth earpiece in place and pulled back onto Route 6, following its curve down the hill and into town.

Gretchen started talking, but Jen drifted off, her mind following the roads she’d gotten to know so well by spending every summer here growing up. She still knew the way to the Thistle, the Tudor-style B&B once owned by Aunt Bev. She parked in front of it, but couldn’t yet bring herself to get out
and physically step foot in the town that had given her her only happy childhood memories.

Down the block, past the park, the Stone Pub remained, its faded sign still swinging out over the sidewalk. That’s where Leith had first brushed against her during their shift. That’s when they’d gone from being old friends to sneaky, desperate, teenaged lovers.

Gretchen let out a singsong whistle. “Yoo-hoo. Jen.”

Jen shook her head. “Sorry. What was that?”

“I asked if I should switch the setup for the Umberto Rollins cocktail party. The table pattern doesn’t quite work, I don’t think.”

Jen snapped back into focus. “No, no. Don’t change a thing. Everything is all taken care of. This is the same party they throw every year for their employees, and I had to make do with a drastically reduced budget. All you have to do is see it through.”

“All right. If you say so.” But Jen could hear the reluctance in her assistant’s voice.

“Gretchen, I’m serious. They’re very particular and traditional. They trust me, they trust the company. Just follow my directions for Umberto Rollins and then we’ll tackle the Fashion Week event when I’m back in the office in three weeks.”

“I thought it was four.”

“Nah.” She peered out the side window, at the ivy creeping up the side of the B&B she’d once considered home. “This should be a piece of cake. In and out.”

“The bosses were okay with you taking leave now?”

Jen pressed her lips together and forced confidence into her voice. “The bosses are okay with it.”

They had to be. She’d worked her ass off for them for six years, almost single-handedly tripled their client list, and snagged a prestigious fashion house account. She deserved this partnership. She
needed
this partnership.

And when she got back to New York after this leave was over, the promotion would be waiting for her. She could finally kill the heel-biting fear of mediocrity that had chased her all the way from Iowa.

“I still can’t believe you’re leaving Umberto Rollins to watch guys in skirts throw heavy shit around.”

Neither could Jen, but she’d make it work. She always did.

“They’re called the Highland Games, and Gleann needs them.” Gleann needed
Jen
. Someone moved behind the B&B’s upstairs curtain. “Listen,” Jen told Gretchen. “I gotta go, but call me if you need me. For anything. I’ll check in from time to time.”

“You’re on leave.”

“Oh, honey. In this business, you’re never really on leave. Nor do I ever want to be.”

She disconnected and stared out at the empty streets of Gleann. They hadn’t replaced the sign welcoming people to the downtown.
GLEANN, A WEE BIT OF SCOTLAND IN AMERICA. HOME TO HEMMERTEX CORPORATION.

The whole place was quiet and still. She reached into the passenger seat and lugged her giant purse across the center console. It hit the car horn hard, sending a loud and nasal blast echoing up and down the curving streets. In New York, a single horn meant nothing. Here it was a day’s excitement.

So much for a quiet arrival.

The front door to the Thistle flew open and Aimee bounded out, her light-brown hair streaming behind her. Jen hoisted her bag higher up her shoulder and went around the car, heading for the taller and older sister she hadn’t seen in three years.

Jen’s foot struck something, and she toppled forward, all balance and grace gone.

Aimee caught Jen and hauled her to her feet. “Whoa. You okay there?”

Jen righted herself and frowned at the slab of cracked concrete poking up from the sidewalk. “That wasn’t there before.”

Aimee gave a little laugh, but there was familiar strain behind it.

Jen eyed the tree in the bed and breakfast’s tiny, fenced front yard. “That thing’s enormous now.”

Aimee winced. “Did you expect the place to stay the same? Waiting for you to show up again after ten years?”

Maybe not to that extreme, but the distance between northern New Hampshire and New York City had stopped time in her mind.

Unexpectedly, Aimee pulled her into the tightest hug they’d ever exchanged. Or maybe that was just distance and time
again, pulling them together instead of pushing them apart as it had been doing for so long.

“I’m so glad you’re here,” Aimee said into her hair, in that serious, pleading way Jen remembered well. “Thank you. Thank you for helping us.”

Jen awkwardly patted her back and pulled away. “I said I’d
try
. Even I can’t guarantee how it’ll all turn out.”

Aimee nodded. “I know.” But there was hurt and worry behind her green eyes, the same shade as Jen’s.

If Jen didn’t succeed here, if she couldn’t fix the local Highland Games and keep the Scottish Society from moving it across state, Aimee could lose the B&B. The town could lose a lot more.

Jen glanced at the Thistle, which upon closer inspection looked a little threadbare and weedy. “Where’s Ainsly?”

Aimee rolled her eyes as she smiled. “At a friend’s. Who’s a boy. I don’t know how I feel about that.”

“She’s what? Ten?”

“Oh, God. Nine. Please don’t make her older than she already is.”

Her twenty-nine-year-old sister had a nine-year-old daughter. There went time again, churning up dust as it zoomed past.

“Come on.” Aimee took her arm with a small smile. “I’ll show you your room.”

It was same room Jen had slept in all those summers ago, from age eight to eighteen. The same room, different everything else. Frilly and soft and pale—not at all what she’d have chosen for herself. She dropped her bags outside the connected bathroom and went back downstairs to where she could hear Aimee clanking around in the kitchen.

“What are you doing?” she asked, stepping into the kitchen that hadn’t changed
at all
, shiny red refrigerator and everything.

“Cooking.”

“But I’m your only guest.”

“You’re still a guest, right?”

A guest. Right. A guest in the house that had once been the only place she’d considered home. Maybe she deserved that, since she’d been out of the country during Aunt Bev’s funeral. Bev had left the place to Aimee, after all.

Jen pushed a smile onto her face. “The next meal is lunch. Your sign says ‘breakfast.’”

“Please, Jen. Let me do this.”

Jen got it. She’d spent her life taking care of her older, crazier sister, and now Aimee had something to prove.

“Okay,” Jen said, levering herself up onto the familiar wood barstool at the kitchen island. “I, uh, saw that sign out on Route 6.”

Aimee slid a cutting board on the counter. One dark eyebrow twitched. “Which one was that?”

“You know.”

“Ohhhhhh. That one.” Aimee craned her neck to peek at the clock. “Wow, only twenty minutes.”

“For what?”

“For you to ask about him.”

Jen supposed it had to have taken coming back here to finally ask about Leith, considering neither of the sisters had mentioned his name in ten years. “They put up that huge sign? Just for him?”

Aimee took out a roast from the refrigerator and started to carve thin slices from it. It looked like she actually knew what she was doing. “It was a big deal then, a local winning the Games so many years in a row. And after that football season and that state track championship and all…It’s a small town. He’s a bit of a celebrity. He doesn’t compete anymore, but they still love him like he won the Olympics or something.”

“I’d say. That sign was like a shrine. An effigy shy of a temple.”

Aimee gave her a weird smile and started to assemble sandwiches.

Jen gazed out the window, to the backyard that sloped down to the creek. Old images of Leith struck her hard in the heart, and she felt more than a little dirty picturing his eighteen-year-old body, big even back then, moving on top of her in the back of that Cadillac. How cliché to have lost it to each other in the backseat of a car.

How wonderful to have lost it in the cloud of teenage obsession.

Aimee went to the pantry. “You should ask him to compete again.”

Jen felt like she’d tripped over something again, and she hadn’t moved an inch. “Wait. What?”

“You know. Get him to come out of retirement or something. I bet the town would love it.”

“You mean he’s still here?”

Aimee tipped down a bag of pretzels from the top shelf. “Sure. He owns a landscape business, though word is he’s hurting, like everyone else.”

But he was still here. Oh, God, Leith was still in Gleann. Jen didn’t feel guilty for leaving him ten years ago—it was what her life had demanded of her—but the possibility of seeing him again…“Why didn’t you tell me?”

Aimee shot her a hard look. “Because everyday news about Gleann hasn’t interested you in ten years. Until you learned it was dying.”

Jen swallowed, dropped her head in the face of the truth.

She’d chosen to keep her memories as just that: particles of the past drifting around in her mind. They weren’t allowed to affect her life in New York. She couldn’t afford to move backward.

Leith had once kissed her under the giant maple tree out back, up against its trunk that curved over the creek. How could something she hadn’t thought about in so long still feel so fresh? “Has he ever, um, said anything? To you? About me?”

“How old are you again?” Aimee shoved a plated sandwich in front of her. “No, he hasn’t. When we run into each other, it’s smiles and small talk. You remember how he was, like nothing could ever faze him.”

A little piece of her heart crumbled off and knocked around inside her chest. She’d managed to faze him, the night before she’d left Gleann for good and he’d begged her to stay. Told her he loved her. But what was she supposed to do? Sacrifice college and career and risk suffering the drunken, aimless, bitter lifestyle of her parents?

“So he doesn’t know I’m here?”

Aimee shook her head. “No one does except the mayor and me. What if you’d said no, Jen? We didn’t want to get everyone’s hopes up and then be denied. I’ve had enough disappointment.”

I
, not
we
. Jen knew Aimee wasn’t talking about today as
much as her and Ainsly’s visit to New York three years ago. The same week the fashion house had called and Jen had had to drop everything to secure the prestigious new client.

Aimee took a bite of sandwich and talked with her mouth full. “When’s your appointment with the mayor?”

Jen flicked on her phone to check the time. “About ten minutes.”

Which, if she remembered correctly, gave her about six minutes to eat, since it took four minutes to walk to city hall. They ate in silence, and then Jen fixed her hair and makeup, grabbed her purse, and headed for the front door.

A hard wave of memory slammed into her. This moment felt like all those other summers, leaving for job after job after job, her college fund bank account growing with every hour worked. It was as though ten years hadn’t passed at all. Even the feel of the front door’s oblong brass knob brought back memories. She’d drown in them if she wasn’t careful, and she’d only been in Gleann less than an hour.

She opened the front door, the scent of thyme and rosemary wafting in. The herb garden, surrounding little metal breakfast tables, was new.

“Jen.”

She turned around to find Aimee standing in the hallway, at the foot of the narrow, creaking staircase leading up to the guest rooms, her eyes filled with emotion. Jen’s eyes swept over the foyer. “Anything for this place,” she said. “Anything for you.”