Willowleaf Lane (6 page)

Nobody except her brothers had ever lifted her up, and even they hadn’t done it in years.

“How long have you lived here?” he asked in a conversational tone, as if they were sitting on counter stools at the café passing the time.

She really, really hoped none of her neighbors were awake and gazing out their window at the morning view. This wouldn’t exactly be easy to explain, how she found herself in the arms of the town’s most notorious former denizen.

On the other hand, she would look even more foolish if she put up a fuss and tried to wriggle out of his arms, onto legs she wasn’t entirely certain would support her.

Only two more houses to go and then she would be home.

“Three years,” she finally answered.

She ought to leave it at that—her life was none of his concern, thank you very much—but with nerves bubbling through her like fine champagne, she couldn’t seem to keep from jabbering.

Maybe it was the way the sunlight glinted gold in his hair or the play of those muscles against her, but her voice sounded husky and strained.

“After I graduated from Colorado State, I came back to town with a degree in business and a master plan of taking over the café from my dad eventually. I tried working as his manager but he wasn’t in a big rush to retire, and I discovered I wanted to build something of my own.”

“You have,” he answered. “I had a piece of your peanut butter fudge last night. It was just about the best thing that’s ever crossed my lips.”

She knew perfectly well she shouldn’t have this little burst of pride at his words. What did she care what Spence thought of her store and her product?

Oh, why did her house feel like it was so far away, like they were swimming through miles and miles of melted chocolate to get there?

“Pop always told me that, when you find something you’re good at, you should throw your whole heart into it.”

A corner of his mouth lifted. “Good man, your dad.”

She had a vivid memory of sitting at a corner booth at the café with Spencer doing homework. She had probably been twelve, he had been sixteen, and his mom had showed up drunk for the dinner shift, as usual. This time, she started talking smack to one of the customers who complained she got his order wrong and then had turned on Dermot when he stepped in to help.

Instead of firing her, like he probably should have done years earlier, Dermot had, in his quiet, effortless way, calmed the situation with the customer, directed Billie to his office and brought her a big pot of coffee and a grilled cheese sandwich.

Meanwhile, Spence had sat at their booth, his head almost buried in the book he was supposed to be writing a report about, but she hadn’t missed his red ears and the tension in his shoulders.

Her father had adored Spence like one of his own boys. Just a few months after his mother had died of acute liver poisoning, Spence had signed with the Pioneers, and Dermot had been as proud and excited as if Spence
were
his son.

And when Spence had been embroiled in scandal and controversy, Dermot had followed the news with a baffled, hurt sort of disbelief that had broken her heart, though he had clung to baseless faith.

If she hadn’t already despised Spence by that time, she would have hated him for that alone.

The reminder helped her rein in her wayward hormones. “Okay,” she said abruptly, the moment he crossed from the sidewalk in front of her neighbor’s property to her own. “We’re here. You can put me down anytime now.”

He gave a short laugh, enough to make his chest move against her shoulder, but kept walking up the path to her porch. “Is your house locked? I can help you inside.”

She could hear a car approaching at the other end of the street, and she just wanted this to be over before someone saw. “I’m fine. Please put me down now.”

It must have been the
please
that finally did the trick. He carried her up the steps then lowered her gingerly to her feet. She braced one hand on the wall and with the other pulled the key out of its zippered pocket of her capris.

“Thank you,” she said shortly. She should say something more but for the life of her she couldn’t come up with anything that didn’t sound ridiculous.

“You’re welcome. Consider it my neighborly duty. Are you sure you don’t need me to help you inside, maybe tape it up for you?”

Oh, she could just imagine him kneeling at her feet, his big hands warm on her bare skin as he wrapped it. “I should be fine.”

He looked big, muscular. Gorgeous.

“Give me a call if you need a ride to the doctor. I guess you know where I live.”

“I’ll do that,” she lied as if she didn’t have a dozen friends and family members she could call, people she would be far more likely to turn to in times of trouble than Smoke Gregory.

He stood and watched as she fumbled through unlocking the door. Already, the acute pain of her ankle injury had begun to fade to a dull, insistent throb. She figured that was a good thing but it still made it a challenge to enter her house with any degree of dignity.

When she made it through the doorway, she turned around and gave him a little one-finger wave then closed the door firmly.

When she knew she was out of sight, she sank onto the conveniently placed bench in her entry and pressed a hand to her foolish heart.

Of all the rental properties in Hope’s Crossing, why on earth did he have to pick the one just a few hundred feet from hers? She would be aware of him all the time now. Every time she drove down the street and passed his house, she would wonder if he was home, what he was doing, how he smelled....

If she wasn’t careful, she was afraid she would turn into that fifteen-year-old again, a crazy stalker girl with a crush on the sexiest boy in town.

No problem. She would just have to make sure she was very, very careful.

CHAPTER FIVE

S
PENCE
WALKED
BACK
down the steps of Charlotte Caine’s house, off balance by the tangle of emotions.

Charlotte Caine.

He still couldn’t get over it. Whoever would have guessed she could have such a lithe, curvy body now? He was still having a hard time reconciling the girl he had known to the sexy armful he had carried to her house.

She had always had pretty-colored hair, he remembered, blond shot through with gold and red streaks. When she was a girl, though, she had worn it long, her bangs hanging in her eyes and around those big thick-framed glasses.

He supposed he had changed, too. What did she see when she looked at him now? He was no longer that cocky kid blessed with uncommon ability who thought the world was his to conquer.

Life had a funny way of knocking guys who needed it back down to size.

How had the years treated Charlotte, beyond the physical changes? Her store seemed to be doing well. Did she have someone special in her life? Had she been married? Engaged? He hadn’t noticed a ring on her finger but he had certainly learned a little piece of jewelry didn’t always mean anything.

So far, he knew she had come home to Hope’s Crossing with a business degree but their few moments of conversation while she had been in his arms hadn’t exactly unlocked her life story for him.

He pulled out his key and let himself into the rental.

After one night here, he hadn’t made up his mind yet whether he liked the place or not. The house was meticulously and expensively decorated, but compared to the glimpse into Charlotte’s charming little cottage he’d caught when she had opened the door—plump pillows, bright textiles, bookshelves overflowing—the furnishings here seemed cold, almost sterile.

He wasn’t sure if he would be here long enough to redecorate. He and Pey had only packed a few suitcases between them for the drive. The rest of their belongings still filled their Portland house. He hadn’t decided yet how much to haul down here.

He would have to see how things went first with the job before he made a decision about that.

He heard noises coming from the kitchen and headed in that direction. When he walked in, he found Pey seated at the breakfast bar, a huge bowl of cereal in front of her, looking at something on her phone.

“Good morning. Did you sleep well?” he asked, then cursed the stiff politeness in his tone. This was his daughter. He shouldn’t sound like he was on a business trip, bumping into an associate in the hotel’s free buffet line.

She shrugged, a spoonful of cereal almost to her mouth. “Okay, I guess. I need a fan or something. It was too quiet.”

“We can probably find you something. Was the bed comfortable?”

“I don’t know. I guess. It was a bed. I slept.”

She took another bite of cereal and he opened the refrigerator and pulled out a water bottle and a yogurt, grateful he had taken a moment to order groceries the night before. It took him a few tries to find the silverware drawer for a spoon before he leaned back against the counter adjacent to her.

“We can change anything you don’t like in your room.”

“Can you transport it back to Portland?”

He bit down his frustration at her continual refrain.
This
was why he walked on eggshells around her, because she was prickly and moody all the damn time.

“Nope. Can’t do that. How’s your cereal?”

“Fine.” She poured a little Cinnamon Toast Crunch into her milk. Where did she put all the food she ate sometimes? he had to wonder. She was skinny as can be, like her mother had been.

Once he had found that attractive. He must have. Hadn’t he been enamored with Jade at first and thought her the most perfect creature on earth?

Of course, he had been only nineteen and in his rookie year with the Pioneers, starry-eyed and heady with the success that had come far more quickly than a dirt-poor kid who had spent his life watching over a drunk of a mother could either comprehend or cope with.

When a gorgeous supermodel like Jade Howell, three years older and infinitely exciting, wanted to date him, what teenage boy would have refused?

Not him, even though he was pretty sure now she had been more drawn to all those new zeros in his portfolio from his record-breaking contract than she had been to a naive nineteen-year-old kid.

At the time he had been too caught up in the high life of instant fame—fast cars, magazine covers, avid fans—to see that she was a troubled, damaged soul constantly in need of reassurance. Or maybe subconsciously, he
had
seen it and had in some twisted way thought that, if he could make things work with Jade, in some way he might be able to scab over all those open sores from his childhood.

A therapist would probably tell him he had a pretty severe case of knight-in-shining-armor complex from all those years he had tried to look out for his mother. Even so, after six months, he had grown tired of Jade’s moods and her petty piques and probably would have ended things if she hadn’t gotten pregnant with Peyton.

He didn’t like thinking about Jade or the way their hasty marriage had disintegrated before Peyton was even in preschool. Though his wife had certainly loved the creature comforts his income provided, she had hated everything about his career—the traveling, the fame, the fans—and had constantly accused him of cheating.

He took a spoonful of yogurt. It had been a miserable marriage. If not for his daughter, he would have walked away but Jade had threatened to tie him up in court so he would never see Peyton again. He had known she wouldn’t have been able to win but the energy in fighting her would only have hurt their daughter.

As poor a father as he had been, he had been raised the only child of a bitter, lost, addicted soul, and he couldn’t condemn his child to that same fate.

Eventually, he and Jade had worked out an arrangement of sorts. They lived virtually separate lives in the same house, joined only by their shared love for their daughter. Jade did her thing, he did his and they tried to stay out of each other’s way—until she made that impossible by dragging him into the complicated mess her life had become.

Jade had been all sharp edges and angles. Charlotte Caine, on the other hand, had those soft curves that a man wanted to spend days, weeks, months exploring....

“So why were you carrying the fudge lady?” Peyton asked.

He flushed, remembering that surge of unexpected heat when she was in his arms. “You saw that, did you?”

She pointed to the window over the sink, which he realized provided a fine view out into the street.

“I guess I startled her this morning when I said hello as she was jogging past. She lost her balance and ended up twisting her ankle.”

“Oh, way to go, Dad.”

At her caustic tone, he jumped immediately to the defensive. “Yeah. It was totally on purpose. I like to lie in wait, then jump out of the bushes when unsuspecting joggers appear. Makes a fun ending to my own workout.”

She rolled her eyes. “Whatever.”

He would like to wring the neck of
whatever
idiot invented that word that was wielded so freely by his daughter.

“It was totally accidental, I promise. I was just being friendly when I saw her go past. I figured she would have seen me. Turns out, she lives up the street in that little white cottage with the blue shutters and the ivy.”

“And you had to carry her home.”

“Didn’t have to, no. But I didn’t want her putting weight on her ankle.”

Peyton raised a skeptical eyebrow, always looking for the worst in him, and he waited for the dreaded
w-
word. To his surprise, she must have decided to demur.

“You knew her when you lived here before, didn’t you?” she asked instead, in almost a civil tone. Charlotte must have made quite an impression with her kindness. Peyton had seemed genuinely touched at her welcome gift.

“Yes,” he answered, weighing how much to tell her. He had been fairly closemouthed about his life here in Hope’s Crossing, figuring his childhood wasn’t exactly much to brag about. She hadn’t showed much interest but when she did ask, he evaded and dissembled.

He had spent most of his adult life trying to forget his beginnings here. Off the top of his head, he couldn’t remember ever having a conversation with Pey about those hardscrabble times, the weekends when he would eat ramen noodles for three meals each day because that’s all they had in the house and about all he knew how to fix.

Another reason he had loved the café, because Dermot would always make sure he went home with something in his stomach and usually a doggie bag of food he could heat the next day.

That was one of his worries about being home, actually. Peyton already thought the worst of him. What would she think once she discovered how much everybody likely hated him here?

On the other hand, he wouldn’t exactly win any popularity contests in Portland, especially since the Pioneers had struggled the past few years without him. He knew things had been rough for Peyton at school, enduring taunts and ridicule about her drug-dealing asshole of a father, but at least she also had a core of loyal friends there.

He wondered again if he was doing the right thing, dragging her away from what little she had left. He had to cling to the idea that, if he could make things work here in Hope’s Crossing, he might be able to open other options for them both in the future.

“Charlotte’s family was always kind to me,” he finally said, which was a bit of an understatement. “I was good friends with her older brothers. My mom was a waitress and I washed dishes at her dad’s diner in town. The Center of Hope Café.”

“You washed dishes? Seriously?”

“Yeah. And I swept the floor at the hardware store after school. And delivered papers at 5:00 a.m. every day from the time I was twelve.”

He had figured out early that if he and his mother were going to be able to afford to keep the utilities turned on in the house she had inherited from her mother, one of them was going to have to work to make it happen.

“Newspaper delivery boy. Really?”

He had no regrets, at least about the paper delivery job. As miserable as it might have been riding his secondhand bike around the hilly streets of Hope’s Crossing, especially on bitter January mornings, he gave that job a lot of the credit for his throwing arm that
Sports Illustrated
once called supersonic.

“Yeah. Really. It taught me a lot, that job. Maybe you ought to think about picking up a route.”

She snorted. “Right.”

Her phone bleeped with a text and that apparently was the end of their conversation. She turned her attention to the device and started thumbing a message, probably about her idiot of a father.

“After I shower, I need you to get dressed and grab your laptop or whatever other gadgetry you want to take.” He tried for a firm paternal tone. “I’m heading into the recreation center today. Until I can hire a housekeeper, I guess you’ll have to come with me.”

She stared at him. “You can’t be serious.”

“Why can’t I be serious?”

Her eyebrows nearly reached her fringe of bangs. “I’m almost thirteen. I don’t need a babysitter! I’m old enough to
be
a babysitter, for heaven’s sake.”

Yeah, how many nights had he spent on his own? After his grandma had died when he was nine, Billie sometimes wouldn’t come home for a couple days at a time. Of course, she didn’t spare a thought for the child she only remembered half the time.

A vivid memory flitted through his mind, the first time she had decided to stay at the bar all night until closing and then go home with somebody who bought her a few drinks. He remembered locking the front door and huddling in his bed, missing his grandmother like crazy. He hadn’t slept at all that night and had been so bleary-eyed, he had ended up in detention for dozing off in class, where he was warm and safe.

He hadn’t thought about these things much in years. He wasn’t sure he liked the way the memories had started to bubble up to the surface since his return, like some geothermal hot spot reinvigorated by volcanic activity deep beneath the crust of the earth.

Peyton probably was old enough to stay by herself but the idea didn’t sit well with him, for reasons he couldn’t fully explain.

“I have no problem with you being on your own for a few hours. Even three or four,” he said. “But this is all day long. I just don’t feel good about leaving you in a strange house by yourself when you don’t know anybody in town yet that you could call in case of an emergency.”

“I don’t want to sit around a stupid, boring recreation center all day!”

He licked the last bit of yogurt from his spoon and tossed it in the sink and the empty container into the trash. “It’s a recreation center,” he reminded her. “By its very definition, you should find plenty to do. Swimming, racquetball, mountain biking. You won’t be bored unless you want to be, trust me on that, ladybug.”

“Would you stop calling me that? I’m not five years old anymore, and I’m so tired of you treating me that way. I don’t want to spend all day at your stupid job!”

He should have known she would dig her heels in about this, as she did about every other damn thing in their lives.

“This isn’t negotiable,” he said, trying not to grind his teeth. “Get dressed. I can give you half an hour.”

She stared at him for a long moment and apparently seemed to know he had drawn a line he wouldn’t let her cross.

“I hate you and I hate this stupid town!” she exploded. “Why couldn’t I have stayed in Portland with one of my friends or with Mrs. Sanchez?”

“You think Mrs. Sanchez would have extended the retirement she had been planning for a year in order to stay with you?”

“If you paid her enough, she would have! You just didn’t want to.”

A bleak sense of futility seemed to settle in his gut. His daughter would have preferred staying with their housekeeper to moving here and having a new adventure with him. She said she hated him. For all he knew, she meant the words.

Like the rest of the world, she blamed him for her mother’s death. He wanted to believe she didn’t think he was literally responsible for Jade’s drowning, that he had held her head underwater or something, but Peyton seemed to think he should have done more to help Jade when her addictions spiraled out of control.