Talk of the Town (6 page)

It so happened to be convenient at that moment. The off-season lunch rush at Lulu's was hardly a tidal wave, and the trickle was nearly over anyway.

"You know," she said mildly, keeping her voice low as she poured his coffee. "It's a darn good thing I'm so good-natured."

"I agree. It is a good thing," he said, matching her tone of voice.

"Otherwise, I'd think you were a pain in the neck and I'd have to be sorry we ever met."

"That's true too," he said, smiling, his hazel eyes warm and bright. "But you're not, are you? Sorry that we met?"

"Not yet." Then she added pointedly, "But I have a feeling I will be."

"You can get rid of that feeling," he said. "Because once you get to know me, you're going to wonder how you ever got along without me."

"I doubt that." But she
was
beginning to suspect that he wasn't going to go away any time in the near future. “I’ve been muddling along on my own for a long time. And I like it that way."

"Do you like to dance?" he asked abruptly. "I forgot to ask last night. That's one of the reasons I came back today."

"You could have called to ask me that."

The animation drained from his face as he stared at her, then he grimaced, shook his head, and laughed out loud.

"It never crossed my mind," he said, self-amused. "I was too busy thinking that I wanted to see you again, I guess."

It was her turn to shake her head. He was hopeless, brain damaged from all those garbage fumes. She turned and pushed open the door to the kitchen. She went to the oven and took out the meatloaf—accidentally cutting his piece a little bigger than she'd cut the others that afternoon.

"So, what about dancing?" he called out when she stepped in front of the window between the kitchen and the lunch counter. "Do you like to dance?"

"I don't dance."
Hadn't danced
was more the case, in thirteen . . . no, almost fifteen years. She was sure she'd forgotten how. She poured gravy into the pool of mashed potatoes on his plate.

"Well, I was trying to decide where I'd take you tonight, and there's a little jazz bar in Eureka that's nice. . . . But then I thought, if I took you dancing, I could hold you in my arms. Are you sure you don't dance?"

Her head jerked up. Danny O'Brian and the ladies at the table were eagerly awaiting her answer.

"Yes," she snapped, blushing to the tips of her ears. "Will you come back here, please," she said, setting his plate down so she could cross her arms defensively across her chest. "I want to talk to you in private."

He turned on his stool and rose to his great height, walking slowly to the end of the bar. He hadn't been behind a counter like that since college when he'd worked a part-time job at Woolworth's. Things hadn't changed much, he noticed, eager to face the encounter that awaited him in the kitchen, but feeling odd behind the lunch counter, doing nothing.

"Can I get you anything while I'm back here?" he asked, addressing the avid audience of five. "More coffee, anyone?"

They waved their hands over their cups and shook their heads and muttered polite refusals, grinning and giggling. He shrugged and walked into the kitchen. Rose was waiting, but not patiently.

"Will you please stop acting like this," she shouted at him, though her voice was only a stern, strained whisper. "I have to live in this town, and its embarrassing to have you acting this way."

"Which way is that?" he whispered back at her. There was so much intimacy in a soft, hushed voice. And they had to stand so close to hear each other.

"Like you're in love with me. Like you can't keep your hands off me—like we've even touched in the first place. Those people out there will have us sleeping together before the night is over."

"Great"

"What?"

"I'll take all the help I can get."

"This isn't funny," she hissed. "I've already had to live down more than one scandal in this town, and I don't want to have to deal with another. I have Harley to think about, too. It's bad enough for him already. Stop this."

"If those people want to think that I'm in love with you and want to touch you, let 'em. There's nothing wrong with that. People do it all the time."

"I don't. And besides, it isn't true."

"What if it is true? What if I fell in love with you the first time I saw you? What if I want to touch you so bad, I ache?" he asked, reaching out to content himself with a light touch to her arm.

"Oh, stop." She flailed her arms, waving away his hand, and took a step back. "You don't even know me.
Yon
don't know anything about me."

"I know me. And I know enough about you to feel the power of the possibilities between us."

"The what? Power of the possibilities? What is that? What does it mean? That you've got hot pants and I look available?"

"Not entirely," he said, undaunted. After all, where was the sense in wasting the time to deny the truth. He did want her. And in a very big way. "Possibilities come in a lot of different shapes and sizes. Bigger than sex, smaller than fear; as ordinary as common gossip, more peculiar than love. Possibilities are limitless, Rosemary. Really bad and really good, but you never know which until you try one."

"Chances," she said, redefining his possibilities. She glanced out the window again to be sure they weren't being overheard. "I have too much at risk to take chances. I won't do that to Harley."

"Or to yourself."

Okay. He had her pegged. He'd thumbed her like a magazine and found her out. She was scared. So what?

"That's right. Or to myself," she said, wanting to smash all his possibilities to smithereens; wishing he'd go away and leave her alone; hoping she could seal up the crack in the dam before it split apart and let loose all her emotions. "I took most of my chances a long time ago, and I lost. I have two left and I'm not going to screw them up." She hesitated for the briefest moment. "I've changed my mind about tonight. I appreciate the offer for dinner, but I don't think it's a good idea."

"Okay. Fine. That's it," he said, stomping out of the kitchen.

Her heart was racing and her chest was tight. She didn't like to fight and she hated hurting people . . . and she really had liked Gary. In a way. Mildly. He was a nice man. Personable. Funny, in his way. Her life wasn't his fault. He was a little overenergized, a little too intense, too full of life—sort of pushy and vigorously laboring under the false impression that she had something left in her heart to offer a man—but he wasn't a bad person.

She listened for the door of the diner to slam closed behind him as he left, but what she heard was Gary— talking to the customers.

"I'm going to take Rosemary Wickum out to dinner tonight, but before I do, I think everyone should know that despite what I want, she has no intentions of sleeping with me. Ever. And while I think that's a big mistake, it is her choice. Now, I know that you don't know who I am or where I come from, but just for the record, I would never force myself on a woman." He bowed his head humbly. "I'm a good looking, sensitive type of guy, and to tell you the truth, I don't have any trouble getting women into the sack, if that's all I want." He glanced over his shoulder, knowing that Rose was listening. Her goggle-eyed expression was priceless.

"The thing is," he said, turning back to the stunned luncheoneers, "getting Rosemary into bed isn't all I want. Now, I do want to make love with her, I'm not denying that," he said, holding up one hand.

"Will you stop?"

"But I've always found sex a much more enjoyable experience if both parties are cooperating. Haven't you found this to be true?" he asked the four ladies, who ranged in age from thirty to fifty-six. They nodded, then glanced at one another self-consciously before agreeing with him again. "So, if Rosemary has no plans to cooperate with me, and if I'm too much of a gentleman to force myself on her, wouldn't you think she'd feel safe in going out with me tonight?"

"He seems okay to me, Rosie," Danny O'Brian said. He did, after all, own the hardware store, where these types of small-town judgments were decided.

"Thank you," Gary said, very man-to-man. He turned to her. "What do you say, Rosie? Won't you give me a chance to show you that I'm not such a bad guy?"

A bad guy? She was far more concerned with the fact that the man clearly didn't have both oars in the water.

However, that's not how he appeared to her neighbors. To those five apostles, who would go forth among the limited masses of Redgrove' and preach the gospel truth according to Gary Albright, he looked refreshingly forthright, lovable, and sincere.

It did cross her mind to stand fast and heed her better judgment, but Lu chose that moment to return from the bank. Lu—who took to anything in pants like jelly to peanut butter, like ketchup to french fries, like syrup to waffles, like . . . well, you get the picture – was the straw that would break her back. Rose might have been able to disregard five favorable opinions, but with Lu to make the sixth, it was a lost cause.

"All right," she said finally, noting her employer's keen interest in Gary. "Dinner. Six-thirty."

"And dancing," he said, smiling. To her infuriated gasp, he shrugged and said, "You give me happy feet."

She disappeared from the window for a split second, coming out of the kitchen to meet him face-to-face behind the counter. She opened her mouth to give him fifty lashes with her sharp tongue, but nothing happened. He grinned at her.

He was the most exasperating man, yet his eyes were wondrous and full of awe when he murmured, "God, you're pretty."

What could she say?

"Oh, for pity's sake. Fine. Dinner
and
dancing. Now, will you please go?" she asked, pushing lightly on his chest. Under her breath she muttered, "I can't believe you just did that—and don't ever do it again."

"What?"

"Embarrass me like this."

"Then don't provoke me," he said simply.

"Provoke you?"

"I want to go out with you. I was desperate."

She sighed heavily, despairingly. "Will you please leave?"

"Aren't you forgetting something?"

"What?" she asked, her hands out as if imploring him.

He leaned forward and her heart stopped cold. Judas priest! He was going to kiss her! Right there in front of everybody! She braced herself—resisting would only make the scene worse. Her eyes grew wide and dark—in dread, of course.

Gary couldn't believe what he was seeing. He moved his face closer to hers and her lips parted in anticipation, her breath coming warm, sweet, and rapid against his. Deliberately he tilted his head to one side, looking into stormy seas of emerald green, murky with longing and need. His heart was beating hard and wild in his chest. He could
. .
. He
would
calm the stormy seas, feed the need, and grant her every wish. Later. In private. Fully. And most thoroughly.

"Rose," he murmured, their lips barely brushing. "You forgot my lunch."

FOUR

Redgrove was one of several small, New England-flavored lumber and fishing villages scattered along the rugged Pacific coastline between San Francisco and the Oregon border. Eureka being the most populated because of a choice natural harbor, and because it was the site of the world's largest redwood mills.

Redgrove was a blink and a half long. Population: six hundred and two, in the early sixties before the Redwood National Park was established. No one had bothered to change the number on the sign since then. It was one of those tiresome and irritating little bus stops that motorists had to slow down from sixty-five to thirty-five miles per hour for fifteen minutes before they hit the main drag —along which most of the town's residents lived.

Once upon a time, Rose had done some traveling. She called it traveling, though her intent at the time had been to run away, to escape her past, present, and future in Redgrove. But when the skyscrapers of Chicago made her lonely for the mountains and the tall redwoods, when the Arizona desert didn't smell like the ocean and the waving fields of grain on the plains of Kansas and Montana were conspicuously lacking the sound of the breakers smashing against high bluffs, she came back to Redgrove declaring "travel" to be the only valid method of learning to appreciate what you have at home.

Everyone but Earl had admired her freedom and independence, and her wisdom in "globe-trotting" while she was still young and unfettered enough to enjoy it. She'd scoffed at their definition of globe-trotting, knowing she'd seen only a small fraction of the world before she'd come crawling home. But Earl knew. Earl had answered the phone the night she'd called home crying, miserably homesick and pleading for the money to pay for a six-state bus ticket home.

To this day she couldn't regret either decision. She couldn't see the ocean from her bedroom window, but she could smell it and feel it in the moist rolling fog, and if she was very quiet—didn't even breathe—she could hear the waves pounding the rocks on the beach less than a mile away. She could stand there and feel the notion she had of being safe among the ancient redwoods, protected from behind by the snow-capped mountains, secure in the regularity of the tides. They were just the little things, of course, things she took for granted—unless she was feeling uneasy or isolated inside.

She stood there feeling exactly that, waiting for Gary. Uneasy and isolated. The sun was preparing to kiss the horizon, turning the sky mauve and magenta, as romantic as it was miraculous, as it was mysterious. She found no comfort in it.

She hadn't been out to dinner with anyone but Earl and Harley in years. She'd "done" lunch with Justin several times—in broad daylight, without dancing, without the frightened squirrels in her stomach, and without the hope that she wasn't making another huge mistake.

"Mom?" Harley's voice had been cracking like cheap china all day. It made her smile.

"What?"

"Are you ready? It's almost six-thirty."

She rolled her eyes heavenward. What a nag! Harley had been pestering her about this "big date" since she'd come home from work at four-thirty.
"Aren't you going to take a bath? Use a little extra of that stinky rose stuff. It smells nice." "You're not wearing jeans, are you? He's gonna think there's something wrong with your legs. Don't you have
anything
with a skirt on it?" "Would it kill you to use some lipstick or something?"