Love in a Nutshell (17 page)

“So an extra set of hands would be good. I could help.”

Kate wanted this so much, and not just to see Royal Oak, either. Kate wanted to be with Matt.

“I’d like that,” Matt said, and their eyes held for a long moment.

“But really, guys. They’re not dating. Not even a little bit,” Lizzie said in a deadpan voice. “Can’t you tell?”

Maura made an odd sound. “Okay, and I’m about to be not pregnant. Not even a little bit.”

“What do you mean?” Lizzie asked.

Maura settled a hand on her belly. “I’ve been trying to be cool about it, but all of a sudden my contractions are getting pretty aggressive.”

Matt stood up. “Contractions, as in labor?”

“Bingo. I thought it was just Braxton Hicks lead-up stuff, or we would have stayed home. After all, who wants to disrupt a perfectly good Spaghetti Tuesday?” She closed her eyes for a moment and blew out a slow breath. “Guess I was wrong. If this is anything like last time, it’s going to be fast. Lizzie, could you go outside and round up Todd?”

“Sure,” Lizzie replied, then headed out through the kitchen doorway.

“You can still take the girls for the night as we’d planned, right, Anne? They’re upstairs playing in my old room.”

Anne pushed back in her chair. “No problem. Let me get Jack and we’ll go take care of things at your house.”

Lizzie reappeared with a tall, dark, and semi-worried-looking guy Kate knew had to be Maura’s husband.

He rounded the table and took Maura by the hand. “I told you those contractions were the real deal, babe. Your suitcase is in the trunk, right?”

“Todd, this is Kate. Kate, this is Todd,” Maura said.

Kate had to give Maura major props for having good manners during childbirth. She doubted she’d be able to show the same grace.

“Nice to meet you,” Todd said to Kate, but his eyes never left his wife.

Kate gazed at the empty doorway after Todd and Maura left the room, smiling at each other, holding hands, and Kate realized she’d wanted that love and connection when she’d fallen for her ex. She might not have gotten it quite right back then, but she recognized a solid relationship when she saw one.

When she glanced away, she caught Matt watching her, and the warmth in his eyes had her heart skipping beats.

Matt’s mom leaned her head out of the kitchen, ending the moment before Kate was quite ready to have it over. “Matt, could you and Kate take care of putting away dinner before you come over to the hospital?”

And then, suddenly the house was empty of Culhanes, except for Matt.

They moved into the kitchen, and Matt began putting plates away. “This is a new twist on Spaghetti Tuesday.”

Kate helped him with the plates. There was something intimate about the two of them being alone in the house, she thought. A little exciting, too.

“Silverware goes in the drawer second down from the end,” Matt said.

They worked in silence for a minute or so, then he asked, “So you’ve seen my crew. What’s yours like?”

“Smaller. Different.”

“Any sisters?” Matt asked while digging through the contents of a lower cupboard.

“One sister and one brother. Bunny and Chip.”

“Seriously, those are their names?”

“Well, actually Barb and Larry, just like my mom and dad. Everyone calls them Bunny and Chip to save confusion.” She pointed to a harvest gold–colored plastic bowl filled with salad greens. “Do you know where the top to this is?”

He rummaged through the bottom drawer, then paused to look up at her. “So among you summer people, when do adults become too old for names like that?”

“Never. The same holds true in the townie set. Witness Junior Greinwold.”

Matt laughed. “Point taken.”

He handed her the bowl’s lid. “So how’d you luck out and end up without a nickname?”

Kate returned the salad to the fridge. “It was a near miss. Since mom and dad had already used up their own names, they could have moved on to the family parakeet’s.”

“Which was?”

“Spike.”

Matt smiled. “I kind of like it. I think there might be some Spike in you. Remember, I saw you take down the fire chief,” Matt said. “That was definitely a Spike moment.”

Kate squelched a groan. “What should I do with the garlic bread?”

He handed her a box of aluminum foil. “How about if we take the bread and spaghetti to the hospital crew? I know Maura thinks this is going be fast, but I remember what it was like in that waiting room last time.” He smiled. “All the same, it’s totally worth the wait.”

Kate hesitated in her wrapping.

“What?” he asked. “Maybe just the spaghetti should go?”

“No, definitely the garlic bread. But how about if I just help you get things packaged up? I’d feel a little intrusive being there. I mean, Maura and I just met.”

Kate loved what she had seen of the Culhanes, but whatever she and Matt had going on between them didn’t make her family.

“Huh. I guess I wasn’t looking at it that way,” Matt said. “I was thinking more about how I’d like you to be there.”

“You would?”

He came closer and tipped up her chin so that their eyes met. “I like being with you. I like having you next to me. Haven’t you figured that out yet?” Matt lowered his mouth to hers and brushed a light kiss across her lips.

TWELVE

Kate had become a human battlefield. Ten days of excitement over heading home to Royal Oak warred with ten nights’ worth of nervous insomnia produced by the same trip. She’d been tempted to go with Matt to the hospital or his bedroom or wherever their kiss might lead, but in the end, she had him drop her off at her house before he went to find Maura and the rest of his family. The sun hadn’t completely risen when Matt pulled up The Nutshell’s drive. Kate, however, had been packed and ready for a good couple of hours. Preloaded with caffeine, she was waiting by the front door with her suitcase in hand. Matt exited the truck, took the suitcase, and stuck it in the backseat.

Matt opened the passenger door. “Do you want to lock up the house?”

“I can’t lock it. I don’t think we’ve had keys since my parents bought the place. All I can do is dead-bolt it from the inside. Let’s just go.”

“I don’t want to be an alarmist, but since I just changed the locks at the brewery and hired a night guard, I’m tuned in to security issues. Keene’s Harbor’s a great place, but we have our share of crazies, too.”

“All under control.
Avanti
.”

Matt glanced at Kate. She was really ready. Almost too ready. “Is everything okay?”

Kate fidgeted in her seat. “Everything is perfectly under control.”

The front door burst open and two or three workmen in hazmat jumpsuits ran out the door waving their arms frantically, screaming jibberish. Matt watched as they ran to the back of Kate’s house and jumped into the lake.

Matt got out of his car and walked up to Kate’s front door. There was a faint buzzing coming from inside her house.

He peeked inside the window. The entire living room was completely stripped of drywall, down to its studs. An angry swarm of bees filled a section of the exposed wall.

Matt walked back to the car and started up the engine. “Umm, Kate?”

“My house is completely filled with bees, isn’t it?”

Matt nodded. “Maybe not completely filled. Some of the space is taken up with honey. I’m sure it will all be gone by the time we get back. Do you know what all this is costing? Are you sure you don’t…”

“I know exactly what I’m doing. Just drive.”

As Matt started down the road, Kate ran a mental tabulation of the damage and its cost. Two thousand to fix the leaky plumbing. Two thousand to fix the bathroom tile. Three thousand for the mold cleanup and another five thousand to replace the drywall and damaged floor. She wasn’t sure how much bee removal cost. And she owed Matt at least $9,000 on the mortgage. If she didn’t get the house fixed by Christmas, her parents were turning it over to Matt, and if she didn’t get Matt paid by Thanksgiving, he was going to foreclose.

Matt sensed her thoughts and patted her leg with one hand. “Remember. Just one foot after the other.”

Good advice, she thought. Panic was counterproductive.

“Run me through what we need to get done once we’re in Royal Oak,” Kate said. “I’ve already double-checked the boxes of merchandise and found one of those old-fashioned thingies to run credit card slips through. You don’t want to lose the credit sales. And I really think we should have brought the hoodies along with the tees. It’s autumn, after all.”

Matt said nothing, but handed her a travel mug filled with coffee.

What’s next?” Kate asked.

“You tell me,” Matt said. “You’re my snoop. Anything new on that front?”

“Not a thing. Taproom work is harder than I thought. Servers are too busy to be good snoops. I did notice something about your menu, though. Who put it together?”

Matt lifted his mug from its holder. “I worked with a friend who used to be a regional manager for an upper-end chain.”

“A woman?”

He took a swallow of coffee. “Yes, why?”

“Did you date her and dump her?”

Matt’s eyebrows went up a fraction of an inch. “No.”

“You must have ticked her off, at least. You have no fresh vegetables anywhere on your menu, aside from your iceberg wedge smothered in blue cheese dressing. Oh, and the mango poppy seed coleslaw, but don’t get me started on that.”

“No one else has complained.”

“The customers who care the most are women—not your standard breed of beer lovers. And those women would eat fish bait if it gave them a chance at contact with you.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Your lunchtime fan club. They know your schedule better than you do. Haven’t you noticed the daily lineup?”

“I see them. They’re nice people, but I’m not interested. And it’s no big deal. Don’t you see the way men look at you?”

Kate laughed. “No. I’m pretty pragmatic about my looks.”

“And they are?”

“I don’t know.… Kind of cute, I guess.”

Matt glanced over at her.

“You’re beautiful. And if you’ve missed men checking you out, I’ll start letting you know when it happens. Like now. The more we’re together, the harder it is for me to keep my hands off you.”

Desire rushed through Kate’s belly and she admitted to herself that she didn’t want Matt to keep his hands off her. She took a beat to steady her voice. “Getting back to the vegetables. Do you have something against them?”

“No, in fact I like vegetables. Especially French fries.”

She let that sit for a couple of miles and moved on to another topic. “You can never go home again.… Any idea who said that?” Kate asked.

“Nope.”

“Well, I’m thinking it’s true. You can’t.”

“Maybe for that unnamed person,” Matt said. “But I do it every day. In fact, except for a short break long ago, I haven’t left.”

“Exactly. But I did, and now I’m returning. Today.”

“And?”

“The magazine I used to work for will be there,” she said. “The places I used to go will be there, and life will have rolled on without me. I’m going to be like a ghost.”

“You look real to me.”

Kate smiled. “But not to them.”

Matt shook his head. “Kate, you’ve been in Keene’s Harbor, not Brigadoon or whatever. You’ve made friends, found a job, even brewed up a little trouble, so it seems to me, you’re doing great.”

“The guy who took my job, he’s got my office. And then there’s Shayla the Homewrecker.”

“Who?”

Kate gave a dismissive wave of her hand. “The woman my ex ran off with. She has my old bed, my ex, and even my dog. They all have lives, and I’ve been in a holding pattern. I don’t have a clue what to do next.”

He cut his eyes to her. “I’d suggest switching to decaf.”

Kate realized she’d been jiggling her left foot at close to the speed of light.

“Kate, seriously, it’s all going to be fine.”

“But how can you say that? How do you know?”

“Experience, for one. And two, you’re not the kind of woman to let opportunity pass you by. But that doesn’t mean you need to dwell on things. How about you look at your time in Keene’s Harbor as a gift? How about you slow down and appreciate the present? The best I can figure, the future takes care of itself.”

“Nice philosophy, but I’ve seen how hard you work.”

“I’m not saying I don’t.”

“I need a plan,” she said.

He looked her way again. “Eventually you do, but not right now. There are no rules. There aren’t any Plan Police waiting to nab you. Give yourself a break.”

“Hmm,” Kate said, liking the thought. No plan. She could live with that. And truth was, she didn’t miss her old bed or her old job or her ex, but there was a hole in her heart for her dog. She desperately missed her dog.

*   *   *

MATT STEPPED
back and took a look at the Depot Brewing Company booth. It was, as it should be, perfect. He and the road crew had set it up enough times in the past. It had taken some adjusting—and another table—to create Kate’s merchandise area, but Matt considered it effort well spent. He should have started doing this sooner.

He also wished at least a couple of his sisters could be here, but understood why they weren’t. The choice between a new nephew to pamper and working a beer festival was a no-brainer. He’d put in his share of time admiring baby Todd, too.

Harley stood beside Matt, checking out the booth. “Thirty minutes before the doors open,” he said. “You’ve done good, son.”

Matt smiled at his friend, who had as big a heart as he did a skinny body. When Matt had been a kid, he’d always mixed up Harley with the Scarecrow from
The Wizard of Oz.

“I couldn’t do it without you. Any of it.” And Matt meant it. After Matt’s dad had booted him from the hardware store for an admittedly bad attitude, Harley had given him a job. He had also given Matt loans and advice when he’d opened the microbrewery. Matt had been mad at his dad at the time, but now he realized his dad had done it to help him spread his wings.