Bliss and the Art of Forever (A Hope Springs Novel Book 4)

by Alison Kent

  “Nope.”

  “No sex in six years.”

  “With another person?” He shook his head.

  Her cheeks bloomed with color, but he didn’t think her embarrassment had much to do with his admission.

  “Six years is a long time,” she said.

  “So’s two.”

  “Yeah, but I’m a—”

  “A woman? And that makes a difference?”

  “I don’t know—”

  “I think you do know,” he said. There was no need to remind her that only moments ago she’d been the one begging.

  “You’re right. Celibacy’s for the birds.”

  “Oh, I think the birds get theirs. Them and the bees.”

  “You’re a funny man, Callum Drake. You’re a nice man.”

  “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

  “It’s a compliment,” she said, circling to the other side of the center workstation. “My girlfriends tell tales of men who aren’t.”

  “Kindness and respect, doing unto others”—he stopped, shook his head. “It’s really not that hard.”

  “Funny, nice . . . all the things that make for a good father.”

  He reached up a hand, dragged it down his jaw. “Is bringing my daughter into the conversation your way of throwing a bucket of cold water?”

  “Did it work?”

  “To remind me she’s at a sleepover and I’ll be going home alone? I could’ve done without it, but yeah.”

  She pushed one of the filled trays toward him. “You are the one who put on the brakes.”

  “Maybe before I take them off, we could finish getting this cleaned up?”

  “It’s not the best offer I’ve had all day, but it’s probably a good idea. I’ve heard the boss here doesn’t like leaving the place in anything but tip-top shape.”

  “Sounds like a real jerk,” he said.

  “He’s not. Trust me.”

  “You know him that well, do you?”

  “Not yet. But I’m getting there.”

  “Too bad you’re not sticking around,” he said, because the two of them in this small room needed the reminder. “You could get to know him a lot better.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Sitting at her kitchen table with her Sunday morning latte, still wearing her yoga pants and the Austin Fire Department T-shirt she’d slept in, her feet in cozy socks, her legs crossed, Brooklyn thought of only one thing: that kiss.

  Oh, that kiss. She brought her mug to her mouth, held it there, swearing she could still feel the press of Callum’s lips beneath the steam from the espresso and very hot milk. The skin around her lips was slightly chapped from his beard, and she touched the most sensitive spot with the tip of one finger, closing her eyes and remembering the heat of his breath on her face.

  What in the world had she been thinking, falling into him the way she had, his mouth, his hands, his body? Falling into the moment and wanting more of him? Falling into the fantasy of being able to have him when there were so many reasons she couldn’t: her trip, his mother, Artie’s ashes, his daughter, Bianca’s need for a teacher, his focus on good choices.

  The kiss was a bad one. A very bad one. Even so, she spent much of Sunday morning reliving Saturday night. Wanting to go back and finish what they’d started. Wanting to go back and not kiss him at all. Wanting more.

  Kissing him had been . . . amazing wasn’t a strong enough word. She was a teacher. She had an advanced degree in education, yet she couldn’t come up with a description for what they’d done together, to each other, there in Bliss’s kitchen. That was Sunday. All. Day. Long.

  Monday’s spelling lesson was a hit. Bees and beavers and bugs and bulls. Kelly Webber came up with begonias; she and her mother had looked at flowers over the weekend, now that the home improvement stores were stocking starter plants for spring. Luke Bean, grandson of Alva, offered the Beatles, explaining to the class how his grandfather played music on vinyl LPs.

  Adrianne added butterflies and berries. While at Kelly’s during the weekend, she, too, had gone plant shopping, where she’d seen the first, and then to the Gardens on Three Wishes Road with her father, where Callum, Brooklyn learned from his daughter, had bought the second.

  The strawberries from Indiana Gatlin’s greenhouse would be dipped in chocolate for a party at the home of local sculptor Orville Gatlin and his wife, Merrilee, who had judged the dessert competition at the Second Baptist Church carnival. Brooklyn knew about the soiree from gossip shared by Jean Dial. What she hadn’t known until Jean had mentioned it was that Callum did that sort of catering.

  Tuesday brought a quick call from Bianca. Artie’s cousin had remembered another family heirloom Grandmother Zola had given him, an olive-wood mortar and pestle that Brooklyn recalled sitting on top of his bureau for years. She promised to find it and send it along with the vase.

  Thursday saw two more fathers visit Brooklyn’s class to read stories for her Dads Love Books, Too! reading program, and while the kids were as captivated by Dan Roth and Stephen Howard as they’d been by Callum Drake, Brooklyn was not. Both men were handsome, Stephen Howard divorced from his son Stevie’s mom and available. But she felt none of the attraction that had drawn her immediately to Callum.

  She didn’t necessarily believe in love at first sight, and she knew calling what she felt for Callum love was a stretch, but neither did she think such a thing was impossible. She and Artie had been inseparable from the day they’d met. And even if she and Callum weren’t, she’d been thinking about him as much as, if not more than, she’d thought about Artie in those early days—a realization with which she was as confused as she was uncomfortable.

  Was she falling for Callum? Was she falling in love with Callum? Was this a physical need her very hungry body had decided she couldn’t live without? Or was this just her infatuation with—and her lust for—a very attractive man? After that kiss, his hands in her hair, her hands on the skin of his back, the taut muscles there, the sweat . . . his leg pressed between hers, the hardest part of him so evident against her belly.

  She wanted to sleep with him. There. She admitted it. She wanted to get him out of his clothes and touch him in places she blushed to think about. She wanted to see his tattoos. All of them, not just the ones he’d shown her. To ask him about them: what they symbolized, where he’d had them done, why he’d chosen the colors. If he regretted any of them, or valued the quotes as much today as he did at the time he’d marked himself with them.

  The last five days had passed like five months. It had been a long week of not seeing Callum. Not talking to Callum. Not hearing from Callum in person or by voice. The only contact he’d made with her had come on Wednesday through Adrianne, and the tiny Bliss box she’d carried so carefully in both hands to Brooklyn’s desk that morning.

  That time at least Brooklyn hadn’t been blindsided, though she had still been surprised. After the butterflies settled, she could hardly wait for the end of the day to arrive so she could open it with no one around and see what he’d sent her, what he’d made for her, what about her he’d put into another one of his candies the way he had the coffee she loved.

  The candy was shaped like a leaf, the veins a dark green while the rest of the surface was lighter, and shiny, as if catching the rays of the sun. It made her think of their day at the park, the sun and the breeze and the trees. That was what she’d expected to taste when the candy hit her tongue, a delectable representation of the day she’d spent with father and daughter, but the flavors that melted in her mouth with the chocolate surprised her.

  The combination had tasted of citrus, lemon, maybe, and ginger, and what she thought was green tea. A spice she didn’t know hung just beneath the rest; she’d have to ask him what it was, and what had inspired him. But when she reached for the lid to tuck the box into her drawer with the other he’d sent, her hair fell forward, and she knew exactly his inspiration.

  She was slow t
o tuck her hair back behind her ear, first bringing a lock to her nose, smelling it, then lifting her shoulder and breathing in the scent of her morning’s shower that lingered. Green tea and lemongrass and ginger. And the spice, the saffron, with which her soap was infused that remained on her skin.

  He’d put what he’d smelled on her into the chocolate. He’d breathed her in and he’d remembered. He’d been close enough only one time to pick out the individual scents that made up the whole. Which meant he’d put their kiss into the candy. What the kiss had been for him.

  Could she have done the same? Identified anything about him in that moment and latched on to it to remember? There’d been the chocolate, of course, but that was embarrassingly easy. The rest of him . . . she’d been so caught up in what he’d made her feel that she’d been barely aware of the rest of the sensory details. His sensory details.

  Closing her eyes, she pictured his hair, the dark auburn that made her think of autumn leaves, of burnt sienna. How could she ever put that into a chocolate? She didn’t think in the same way that Callum did. She thought like a . . . well, like the schoolteacher she was.

  A schoolteacher who’d hung cutouts of leaves in October, who could name almost every Crayola crayon color in the ninety-six-count box. Who’d traveled to Ireland and read all of Nora Roberts’s trilogies set there. Those were the bits and pieces of who she was. These were the words she would use to describe him, because she was practical, not creative. An educator, not an artist.

  Finally, on Friday, once she was home and curled up in the corner of her sofa with a glass of wine and a book, she picked up the phone. She’d had meetings two nights this week, and spent the rest of her free hours packing.

  She’d wanted to call sooner, to thank him for the gift, but the kiss made things so awkward. It shouldn’t have; she was thirty-seven years old. He was thirty-four. She was a widow. He was a father. They were both adults, both professionals. Not high schoolers, experimenting, learning, curious.

  Yet she was so out of practice, after Artie, because of Artie, that it felt exactly like that, leaving her to her silence. And to wonder why Callum hadn’t called her . . .

  “Bliss. What’s your pleasure?” came Lena’s voice on the line.

  “Hi, Lena? This is Brooklyn Harvey. Is Callum available? Don’t bother him if he’s busy—”

  “Yo. Boss. Phone,” Lena said before Brooklyn could finish.

  “Thank you—”

  “Bliss,” Callum said so quickly Brooklyn decided he was in the showroom instead of the kitchen.

  “Hi. It’s me. Brooklyn.”

  “Yeah. I know who me is. What’s up?”

  O . . . kay. “Thank you.”

  “For?”

  “I think you know,” she said, and waited one heartbeat, then another for him to respond.

  He finally did. Saying nothing more than, “You’re welcome,” before adding, “My pleasure,” then asking, “Was that all?”

  What’s your pleasure? It was how they answered the phone at Bliss. And that left her wondering if his response was rote, or if he’d truly found pleasure in making the candy for her, in their kiss . . .

  “This is going to come out of the blue, but if the offer’s still open, would you mind if I took a few things to your place tomorrow? I thought if I got them out of my way, for now at least, I’d have a better idea of what I have left to do.” She couldn’t imagine he was buying this. She sounded lame to herself.

  “Sure. I can meet you out there. What time?”

  “You don’t have to. If you’re working. Or busy with Addy. I could just stop by Bliss and get the key to the storage barn from you,” she said, cringing when she realized how presumptuous she was being. What was wrong with her that she couldn’t come right out and tell him she wanted to see him?

  Hearing what she thought might be the door from the showroom into the hallway closing, and realizing he hadn’t responded, she prompted, “Callum?”

  “You called her Addy,” he finally said, the echo of his voice confirming her hunch that he’d moved to a more private location.

  “What?”

  “My daughter.”

  “Isn’t that her name?” she asked, confused.

  “It’s her nickname,” he said, his tone softening. “No one uses it but me. You always call her Adrianne.”

  “Oh,” she said, pressing her fingers to the flutter in her throat. “I guess it just slipped out.”

  “I like that it did.”

  Please don’t read anything into it. “As much as you talk about her, it’s no wonder I picked it up.”

  “Are you saying we’ve been hanging out too much?”

  She was pretty sure they had, though his question had her smiling. “Hanging out. Is that what we’ve been doing?”

  “Well, we’re not dating, so hanging out seems to cover it.”

  Oh, boy. “I can’t date my students’ parents.”

  “I hope not. That would make for a hell of a schedule to keep track of.”

  She found herself wanting to laugh. “You know what I meant.”

  “Sure. Okay. But we can still be friends?”

  “Of course we can still be friends.” The thought of his disappearing from her life . . . she couldn’t even imagine it.

  And then he asked, “What about kissing?”

  She closed her eyes, blew out a slow breath. “That’s probably not a good idea.”

  “Doing it again? Or doing it the first time?”

  “Both.”

  “You disappoint me, Brooklyn Harvey. I thought you were more adventurous than that.”

  If she were adventurous, wouldn’t she have continued to travel on her own? Wouldn’t she have done more the last two years than watch movies and read books? Wouldn’t she have figured out how to have fun without Artie?

  “Listen,” Callum said before she could push away the thoughts and find a response she could live with. “I need to go check on Addy. She’s been coughing and sneezing all afternoon.”

  “Really?” No wonder he’d sounded distracted earlier. “She seemed fine today at school. Does she have a fever?”

  “I took her temperature when we got here, and she was fine. Had to get Lena to run to the pharmacy for a thermometer.”

  Brooklyn thought a moment, then asked, “Does she have allergies?”

  “Nothing serious like peanuts or ragweed. Could be she just got into something in the storeroom, dust or whatever. I need to get my child laborers back in there to clean it up.”

  “It didn’t look dirty the other night.” The night she’d kissed him. The night she’d tried to get beneath his clothes and find him. Find why she wanted him. Why she needed him. Find herself.

  If his mind had made the same leap, he thankfully kept it to himself. “I haven’t had it scoured since the Valentine’s Day shipping rush. Who knows what she picked up back there. Look, I’ll talk to you later, okay? If Addy’s all right, my mom’s picking her up in the morning at nine, so I could meet you at nine thirty, unless that’s too early for you.”

  “It’s fine, but we can do this another time. And really,” she said, realizing it would’ve been so much easier to be honest and admit she wanted to see him, “we don’t have to do it at all.”

  “Tomorrow’s fine. My work schedule’s pretty light. Lena can handle things till I get in.”

  Then he hung up, leaving her to wonder if friends was what she wanted to be with this man, or if she wanted to break the rules that were nudging her shoulder, pushing her out of the bubble she’d been living in all these years.

  Pushing her toward him.

  ADDY

  FRIDAY NIGHT

  If I had a mommy, I would want her to be just like Ms. Harvey. I don’t ever tell Daddy, but sometimes I pretend that’s who Ms. Harvey is. Daddy says there are some little girls who don’t have a daddy, and some little girls who don’t have a mommy, and some little girls have both of them
and LOTS of them.

  And sometimes I think it would be nice to have a kitty, too. Because a kitty and a little girl and a daddy and Ms. Harvey for a mommy would be the best family EVER. I want a big gray and white kitty. And I want to name her Pikachu. I promised Daddy that if we got a kitty I would never EVER sneeze.

  Achoo!

  “I heard that.”

  I pull my covers down away from my itchy face and see Daddy looking at me from the door. I don’t want to be sick. If I’m sick, I can’t go to school and I HAVE to go to school. That’s where Ms. Harvey is. “It was just a tickle in my nose. It’s not there anymore.”

  “That’s because it’s all over your sheets now.”

  “Daddy! Tickles can’t get on sheets.”

  He walks close to the bed and sits down. Then he puts his hand on my forehead to see if I feel like a fireplace.

  “I’m not hot.”

  “You’re warm.”

  “Warm isn’t hot. Warm is like cool.”

  He shakes his head. “Warm is not like cool.”

  “Ms. Harvey says it is.”

  “Does she now?”

  “Uh-huh. Warm hasn’t made it all the way to hot yet. Like cool hasn’t made it all the way to cold yet.”

  “I see,” he says, and he rubs his beard like it tickles. “Is that how Ms. Harvey tells it?”

  I can’t remember Ms. Harvey’s real words, but I nod anyway. “If you don’t like it you can take it up with her.”

  That makes Daddy laugh.

  He’s so funny when he laughs. But then I want to laugh and it makes my throat hurt, and then my tummy hurts because my throat gets all tight but I am NOT SICK.

  “Sit up a second. You need a spoon of the purple medicine,” he says.

  The purple medicine is yummy, but it’s not candy so I pretend I don’t like it too much. And it is hard to swallow. My throat wants to close up and feels all sticky.

  Daddy puts the top back on the bottle. “You didn’t eat much dinner. Sometimes when you don’t have an appetite that means you’re getting sick.”

  “I do too have an appetite.”