Desired in December (Spring River Valley Book 12) (2 page)

“Hey, if you’re looking for something to do
, the rec needs more martial arts instructors,” Claudia continued, giving no indication she’d noticed his reaction to her question. “There are so many students, Aiden can’t keep up. You still practice karate, don’t you?”

James shrugged. “Yeah…I’ll give them a call. Actually I’m on my way to see Don Walkowski right now.”

“The contractor you used to work for over the summers in high school?” Owen asked.

“Yeah. He’s got a couple of jobs lined up to tide me over until I settle in and decide on something
full-time.”

“Are you going to stay with your parents for a while?” Claudia picked up the interrogation.

“Until I find a small place. It’s nice to be back in my old room, but I kind of feel like I’m seventeen again.” He made a face. “My mom offered to cut the crusts off my French toast this morning.”

Claudia groaned, giggling, and Owen cringed. “Dude, I’d invite you to stay with me, but…” He glanced sidelong at Claudia who blushed.

“He usually has a
girl
in his room,” she whispered coyly.

James held his hand up in surrender. “No way I’m intruding on that. I can deal with crustless French toast for a while.”

“There may be some apartments available in the complex by the movie theater,” Owen said. “I hear rents are going down.”

“I’ll check it out. I see there are a lot of empty shops…”

“Yeah. Business took a hit the last couple of years. A lot of people left and moved closer to the city.”

James nodded. He’d been in the
States a few times since his first deployment, short layovers down south and out west where things weren’t much better. He hated seeing his hometown suffering from financial hardship, but hopefully things would get better soon. “I hear Grant’s doing pretty good at Taverna Fiora.”

Owen gulped, and Claudia caught his suddenly guilty look.
She sighed in feminine frustration. “You
told
him? That’s who you told about what.
Owen
!”

“It slipped out. I’m sorry.”

“So the party’s at TF?” James hadn’t expected his friends to foot such a big expense. He’d have been happy with a couple of pizzas and a keg delivered to his parents’ basement rumpus room, just like the good old days…except for the keg of course, since he’d been too young to drink before he left for the army.

“You
have
to act surprised,” Claudia insisted. “Everyone is coming. Grant’s been planning this for months, and if you don’t act completely shocked, everyone will be
crushed
.”

“I think crushed is overstating it just a bit,” Owen muttered.

“No. Really. Promise me.” Claudia grabbed James’s collar. “Don’t let on that
Owen
ruined the surprise.”

“Okay, okay. I’ll practice my shocked face in the mirror. I promise
. So
everyone
is coming?”

“Of course everyone. No one would miss it
,” Claudia responded.

“Like the old gang?”

“Sure,” Owen said. “Quinn, Matt, Tanner and Taylor will be there, oh, and you’ll get to meet our newest band member, Dani Lennox. She works at—”

“He’s asking about Cassie.” Claudia’s steely gaze pinned James, and a jolt like he’d touched a live wire coursed through him.

Owen clamped his mouth shut, and James tried to look away. Damn. He’d wanted to be subtle. So far no one had picked up on his curiosity about Cassandra. Leave it to Claudia to zero in on the one subject he couldn’t bring up on his own.

“
Is she still in town?” It sounded like a casual question, asked with no subtext, but Claudia’s hypnotic blue gaze told him she knew differently.

She nodded. “She’s doing great…um…
She’s going to be catering the desserts for the party.”

“Oh. So she’s
coming?”

Now Claudia averted her eyes. “I…don’t…know.” The slow, deliberately vague way she answered told James she absolutely did know. So Cassie had agreed to work James’s surprise party
, but she wasn’t going to attend. Well, that was really no surprise, was it? And he couldn’t very well blame her for avoiding him, could he?

Change
, it turned out, wasn’t always a good thing.

“I’m cool with this. I’m totally cool with this.” Cassie had been reciting her mantra all morning while she bustled around her kitchen, preparing the desserts for James’s welcome home party. Every time she uttered the words, a voice in the back of her brain responded with a calm, decisive and matter-of-fact retort.

“No, you’re not.” This time
though, the response came from outside the deep recesses of Cassie’s mind.

She turned to face Audrey, who’d agreed to be her helper for the day. “Did I say that out loud?”

Max’s girlfriend set down the sifter she’d been using to dust chocolate Linzer torts with powdered sugar. “Sweetie, you’ve been saying it out loud all morning. I stopped believing it two hours ago.”

Cassie sighed and dropped her whisk into the bowl of blue icing she’d been mixing. “I
should
be cool with this. It should be fine.”

“But clearly, it’s not. Look, I don’t know the whole story between you and James, but I can guess it was a bad breakup. I give you credit for taking the catering job, but maybe you shouldn’t have.”

Cassie chuckled, but it sounded more like bitter scoffing to her ears. “As bad breakups go, it really wasn’t. We didn’t fight or scream or throw things. Well,
he
didn’t.”

“You threw things?” Audrey slipped onto a stool at the kitchen counter and rested her chin on her hands.

“Not
at
him. Later on, I threw some things, things he’d given me, but they were stuffed animals, so it wasn’t very satisfying.”

Audrey grinned indulgently. “I’ve
ripped heads
off stuffed animals. Take it from a nurse, it can be very therapeutic.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

“So you didn’t have a break-up fight?”

“No.” Cassie toyed with the whisk, making peaks of icing in the bowl. “It was quiet agony. We’d been dating for two years, and out of the blue he decided to join the army. Nobody was happy about it. His mother was a wreck. His father was upset. I was a basket case, but I told him I’d support anything he wanted to do, and I’d be here for him when he got back.”

“That’s sweet,” Audrey said. “Of course, what else could you say?”

Cassie shrugged. “Then he broke up with me.”

“Why?”

Cassie steeled herself to repeat his parting words.
She was an adult now, far more mature than the love-struck twenty-year-old whom James had cut loose for what he had decided was her own good. She was a successful businesswoman and completely independent. So why did the scars from the day James had broken her heart still ache so badly? “He said, ‘We’re too young to know for sure that we’re meant to be together forever. There’s too much out in the world for us to see and do to be tied together while we’re so far apart, so let’s not hold each other back.’” She didn’t add those were his exact words, memorized and repeated to herself at every low point she’d experienced during the intervening five years.

“Ouch. What did
you
say?”

“Nothing. I couldn’t. He was already at boot camp in Georgia for a week when the letter came.
It was postmarked the day after he got there.”

Audrey’s jaw dropped. “He broke up with you in a
letter
? Oh my God, that’s terrible.”

“He admitted he didn’t have the courage to do it in person. So he
obviously left knowing he was going to break up with me.” Cassie shrugged. Time had blunted the raw edges of the wound he’d inflicted, and she could look back now and see James had been a scared kid who’d just made his first adult decision—one that had turned everyone’s lives, including his own, completely upside down. Part of her, a very small part, understood his choice and the kernel of maturity it had taken to make it. Keeping their relationship going would have been torture for both of them. When she’d learned he’d decided to take his vacation-leave in other parts of the country rather than come home to Spring River Valley, she decided he must have found someone else and fulfilled his own prediction that there was something better waiting out there for both of them.

“Now I really don’t get why you took the job.” Audrey picked up the sifter and pointed it at the remaining naked Linzer torts.

Cassie went back to mixing the icing. “One, I need the money. With the lease for my shop coming through, I can’t pass up work for personal reasons. And two, he was right. We had to move on, so this is my way of showing him I did.”

“But you’re not actually going to see him or talk to him?”

“God, no. Would you?”

Audrey looked Cassie up and down. “Not in jeans and a pink apron, I wouldn’t. I’d buy the hottest, sexiest little black dress and the naughtiest pair of four-inch heels
I could find and show him what he missed out on.”

Cassie thought about it, but she knew one glimpse of James’s
denim-blue eyes, one flash of his sexy smile, and she’d be putty in his capable hands, begging him to take her back. “I don’t want to play games with him. He’s probably found someone else, and the last thing I want to do is look like the desperate ex who never got over him.”

“So then, you’re over him?” Audrey asked carefully, her gaze intent on wafting powdered sugar.

Cassie beat the icing with singular determination, her heart fluttering. “Not even close.”

* * * *

At half past noon on Friday, James found himself alone in his parents’ house for the first time in almost a week. His father had left an hour before on an errand, and his mother had been gone all morning. He assumed she was making preparations for the big secret bash taking place at Taverna Fiora this evening. He’d actually caught himself practicing a surprised look in the mirror this morning so he wouldn’t ruin anyone’s fun or crush anyone’s festive spirit as Claudia had warned him he might.

He wished he could enjoy the peace and quiet of a few hours with no one fussing over his every need. That would have been heaven, but unfortunately, his newspaper interview was due to begin any minute.

The
Herald
had called only hours after he’d returned home, eager to do a story on one of the few soldiers from Spring River Valley to recently serve overseas. They’d made his two tours in the Middle East seem far more glamorous than they were, and he hoped the story wouldn’t make him out to be some sort of action hero. He was far from it.

When the doorbell rang, he was pleasantly surprised to find another very pretty blue-eyed brunette on his doorstep. “You must be Miss Prentice,” he said, ushering her inside. He was about to close the door when a male form appeared on the step behind her.

“Hi, Mr. Galloway. Please call me Evie, and this is my photographer. I understand you may already know him.”

James met Max Shannon’s dark look
head-on. Cassie’s cousin looked taller, broader, and decidedly less friendly than James remembered him. They’d hung out a few times at family events during the two years James and Cassie had dated. He liked Max, but judging by the hard stare and ultrafirm handshake he received from the photographer, the feeling was no longer mutual.

“Hey,” he said, at a loss for how else to conclude their cursory introduction.

“James.” Max moved past him into the house, a camera bag dangling from his shoulder. “I just need a few casual shots, then I’ll be on my way.”

“How about over by the mantle, Max?” Evie directed. “The holiday decorations will make a nice background
.”

“Yeah, that’s fine.”

James followed the two into the living room and, on Evie’s instruction, struck an awkward pose by the fireplace. The reporter pulled out a notebook and pen and perched on one of the wingback chairs that flanked the sofa while Max busied himself testing the lighting and blocking shots.

James had spent many mornings in the army with a thirty-pound pack strapped to his back, jogging in sweltering southern heat
, and barking cadence until his voice gave out, and this interview was already more uncomfortable. He kept fidgeting and trying to find a place to put his arms. Good thing he’d never aspired to be a male model. This was torture.

“Just act normal,” Max muttered finally. “Look toward the windows, put one hand in your front pocket
, and smile.” A brilliant flash of light nearly blinded him before he could obey each of Max’s orders. Blinking away bright dots of color that had imprinted on his retinas, he tried to adopt a more natural stance before the next flash blinded him again.

“So, should I call you Corporal Galloway
?” Evie began.

“No, please. Call me James.”