by Katy Paige
“Jenny?”
The table was set simply with two plates, two coffee cups, and two napkins. Just what they needed. No fuss. He could smell the coffee, and his mouth watered, so he poured himself some joe before sitting down at the table with Casey on his lap.
In the middle of the table was a spice wheel like his mother used to have. He put Casey in the nook of one elbow and used his other hand to spin the plate slowly: hot sauce, mustard, black pepper, white pepper, red pepper, salt, red pepper flakes, a wooden pepper mill, a clear plastic pepper mill, cayenne pepper, chili pepper, maple syrup, and some honey.
Wow, he thought. Someone likes her food spicy!
He scratched under Casey’s neck. “Where’s Jenny? Where’s your mama?”
“Jenny?” he called toward the living room.
“I’ll be out in a minute,” she called. “Help yourself to coffee…and anything else you see.”
He glanced at his half-finished cup and winked at Casey. “Good thing she didn’t mind!”
Casey bucked up and licked his chin from where she was lying in his elbow. He looked around the kitchen for breakfast, but he didn’t see anything else to help himself to, just the spice wheel on the table. He assumed breakfast was warming in the oven and figured he should wait for Jenny before he got started.
Jenny came into the kitchen dressed in jeans and a white, long-sleeved, button-down shirt. Her jeans were belted with some sort of Indian-style beaded belt, and she wore them slung low on her hips, like Sam imagined a cowgirl would wear them. She had on leather boots too—the real deal, not from Bloomingdale’s or Saks—and they were well worn and scuffed from years of use.
She smiled at him, but he couldn’t read her face and sensed something standoffish in her manner. Maybe she was still upset about him kissing her hand last night. He waited to see what would happen. He was starting to learn that with Jenny, you never knew.
“Morning,” she said, not meeting his eyes.
“Morning.”
“Hungry?” she asked pleasantly. He caught it again: that smile that didn’t reach her eyes.
“Sure.”
“What’re you in the mood for?”
You. On the table. Shirt optional. “Ummm. I don’t know. What’re you offering?”
“I made omelets and bacon.”
“Sounds great.”
She opened the oven and took out a warm platter of omelets and placed it gingerly on the table between the two place settings: four small omelets sat prettily on the platter, with a bunch of bacon on the side. She took Casey from him and sat down across from him, smiling that unpleasant, pleasant smile. It was starting to unsettle him in the same way a man gets unsettled when a woman says she’s “fine” but is clearly perturbed about some unknown thing.
“Wow. Four. Is anyone else coming?”
“Nope,” she replied. “All for you. The first one is green pepper, the second one is red pepper, and the third one is yellow pepper. Want to know what the fourth one is?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s an all-weather omelet. Has one vegetable in it from every season…spring peas, summer corn, autumn yams, and winter squash.” She got up and placed Casey back in her pen, then turned to face Sam, hands on her hips, her eyes boring into his. “Peppers and weather. And a little bit of cheap pig on the side. I wanted you to feel at home.”
***
He stared at her, speechless, and Jenny stared right back, daring him to confess everything.
So she wasn’t totally sure what to do when his face suddenly contorted with a loud guffaw and he started laughing so hard, his face turned red. In between sob-like chuckles, he grabbed his napkin off the table to dab at his eyes.
Her indignant confidence took a hit from his unexpected reaction. This couldn’t be the standard response when a man was caught trying to cheat on his perfect girlfriend!
She crossed her arms over her chest and pursed her lips, watching as he, at long last, collected himself.
“Jenny,” he finally said when he could actually speak again, wiping at his eyes.
“Sam,” she replied tartly, every bit the aggravated schoolmarm.
He gestured to her laptop and crossed the kitchen to stand beside it. Grazing the space bar with one finger, a picture of Sam and Pepper suddenly sprang to life on Jenny’s kitchen counter. “Someone doing a little Googling this morning?”
Conferring her most contemptuous look, she knew she should declare, Yes, that’s exactly what I did, bucko, and you’ve got another thing coming if you think you’re going to cheat on Pepper Pettway with me!
However…a little seed of doubt was taking root in her gut based on his reaction, and she started to worry that she may have jumped to conclusions from looking at a few glamorous pictures on the internet.
“Jenny.” An errant chuckle escaped his lips, and it took him a second to straighten his expression to declare, “Pepper and I aren’t together anymore. We broke up.”
She swallowed and covered her mouth with her hand. Her cheeks were burning, no doubt turning thirty shades of scarlet. She wondered for the second time in twelve hours why the forces of the universe couldn’t see fit to open large craters in the floor of one’s apartment when a situation clearly called for it. When she looked up at him, he was smiling, and to her relief, he didn’t seem angry or upset, just sort of amused, eyebrows raised in quizzical merriment, waiting for her next misguided assumption about him and his life.
“I thought…I mean, last night you…kissed my…hand and…” She let her voice trail off because she could hear how weak and ridiculous she sounded.
Oh, Lord. When you’re wrong, Jenny, you’re good and wrong.
Ashamed of herself for getting so carried away with her quest for information on Sam and for believing the worst of him, she couldn’t meet his eyes. He’d done nothing to deserve her distrust. Though her eyes burned, crying wasn’t the prerogative of the transgressor in her family growing up, so she bit her tongue and held her tears. She looked down at her boots instead.
“Jenny, look at me,” he said, his rumbly voice gentle and kind. “Please look at me.”
She looked up, meeting his eyes sheepishly.
“Listen, I know you don’t know me very well, but I need you to know this: when I’m with someone, I’m really with them. I wouldn’t have touched you yesterday if I wasn’t free to do so. We may live in different worlds, Jen, but that’s just not the kind of man I am, or would be, in either world.”
He was waiting for an indication that she understood and accepted what he was saying, so she gulped over the lump in her throat and nodded at him.
“Okay!” he said, rubbing his hands together as he sat back down at the table and turned his attention to the omelets. Using a spatula, he slid the all-weather omelet onto his plate with several pieces of bacon. “I’m not actually a big fan of peppers.”
“Noted.”
“Hey! You didn’t do anything to these omelets, did you?” His eyes sparkled with laughter. “I’m not going to die from too much cayenne, am I?”
She closed her eyes, breathing in, then opened them, breathing out. It didn’t help. She had done it again after she had promised herself she wouldn’t: jumped to conclusions. Misjudged him. How in the world could she offer a sufficient apology? Lord help me to swallow my terrible pride and show him how sorry I am.
“No, Sam. They’re fine. I promise.”
“Then come sit with me and have some breakfast.” He gestured to the empty seat across from him. “And if you want, I’ll tell you all about Pepper.”
Burning cheeks. Wounded pride. Repentant heart.
She sat. There was nothing else to do.
***
Jenny, Jenny. He glanced over at her as they shared breakfast, sipping coffee in the silence of her kitchen. She looked young and miserable, occasionally taking a small bite of egg or bacon. He couldn’t deny it—he admired both her panache and her chagrin.
“So,” he beg
an after polishing off half the omelet and several pieces of crispy ba—cheap pig, “do you want to know about Pepper or not?”
“Sure,” she muttered.
She picked at her bacon distractedly, Sam noticed, and she didn’t meet his eyes. He wasn’t a fan of mopey Jenny. He was eager to dispense with Pepper’s story and get on with their day.
“You may already know that I work at an investment firm, and schmoozing is pretty important to my boss.”
“Schmoozing?” she asked. “What’s that?”
“Uh. You know…taking clients out to over-the-top dinners…going to galas to rub elbows with millionaires…that sort of thing.” She nodded and he continued. “So my boss had two tickets to a fundraiser at the Chicago Cultural Center. He couldn’t go at the last minute and asked me to go. I didn’t have a date, and he suggested that his niece, Pepper, who was supposed to be going with him, could just as well go with me. I didn’t put two and two together until she met me there and I realized the girl from ‘What’s the Weather? with Pepper’ and my boss’s niece were one and the same. After that, we started dating.”
“She’s perfect, Sam. Beautiful. And the burned children…” Jenny looked at him so earnestly, so miserably, with such vulnerability etched on her face, his heart clenched with tenderness.
“Jenny.” He sipped his coffee, pushing his plate away. “Those are just pictures. Pepper Pettway is really beautiful. You’re right. She is. But her beauty is skin deep and goes no deeper, I can assure you. Those burned children? She read three sentences of a story while the camera was flashing, then marched out of there to get her nails done a minute after the reporter left. I doubt those poor kids will ever find out what happened to the grumpy puppy.”
Jenny seemed unconvinced. “She seems so selfless, helping with so many fundraisers and good causes.”
“She was an ‘honorary member’ on most of those committees.” She cocked her head to the side, and he realized she didn’t understand. “Someone whose name goes on the invitation because they’re a public figure but who does nothing to contribute to the event aside from showing up and having her picture taken for publicity.”
“With you.”
Ah, Jen. You’re killing me with these searching blue eyes. I want to hold you and kiss all that uncertainty away.
“Sure. Sometimes. When we were together. Next week, it’ll be someone else.”
“Did you love her?” Jenny asked.
“For a while, I thought I did,” he said, wishing they could finish this conversation sooner than later. Pepper wasn’t one of his favorite conversation topics. “But I’m pretty sure it was something different.”
“What?”
Pride. Lust. Stupidity. Take your pick.
“Listen…almost two months ago, a week after that picture was taken, I was in a car accident. A hit-and-run.”
“What? No!” Jenny gasped and reached across the table for his hand.
He was surprised by her impulsive gesture and sensed she was too, but she didn’t release his hand immediately. Yes, her cheeks flushed a little, per usual, but instead of drawing back, she allowed him to curl his fingers around her hand and hold it. He stared at their joined hands for a beat before lifting his gaze back to her face.
“Jenny…”
“Go on. Hit-and-run.”
“Ummm…so, I was in a hit-and-run, and when the other car left, I was bleeding from my forehead, and it hurt to breathe. The ambulance came, and the EMTs couldn’t be sure whether or not I had a concussion, but they were pretty sure I had cracked or bruised a rib, so they took me to the hospital.” He cleared his throat. “Anyway, I called Pepper from the ambulance to tell her what had happened. We had plans that night to go to a charity dinner, and I knew she’d be upset to miss it, but I was sure she’d come to me. I mean, we’d been dating for more than a year.”
Jenny squeezed his hand gently. “So…did she?”
“Not for a while. The hours ticked by, and she didn’t show up. I didn’t call my folks or my sisters. I didn’t want to worry them. I had a concussion and a couple of broken ribs that would heal on their own.” He decided not to add that things had been strained with his mother and sisters with Pepper in the picture. They’d never liked her, which should have had more of an impact on him. “I was asleep when she finally got there.”
He would never forget her sweeping onto his hospital floor after visiting hours, dressed to the nines, soused from champagne. She had woken him up from a deep sleep as she made a drunken scene with the nurses about how her future husband was wounded and needed her.
“Screw visiting hours!” she shrieked. “Don’t you know who I am?”
Security had finally made her leave. Truth be told, less of a knockout might have been arrested for such behavior, but Pepper had her charms. He had cringed listening to her from his hospital bed, and his stomach curdled, horrified by the words “future husband.”
“I’m so sorry,” Jenny murmured.
“She had gone to the benefit with a friend of mine, an associate at work, and came by the hospital when it was over. She explained later that she had a new dress and didn’t want it to go to waste. And you know? I just decided then and there: she wasn’t the girl for me. So we broke up. It was a few months ago.”
He remembered the morning he’d broken up with Pepper.
“You think you’re going to find someone better than me?” she’d spat at him with furious green eyes, her perfectly manicured fingernails digging into her slim, taut hips.
He’d stared back her, thinking, Just because I know what I don’t want doesn’t mean I know what I do. It’s not like he’d had someone else lined up. All he’d known was that Pepper wasn’t right for him.
Now it occurred to Sam…he’d wanted something more, something good, something real in his life. Something more like what his parents had, like the marriages his sisters had.
He rubbed his thumb back and forth lightly across the soft pad of skin at the base of Jenny’s thumb, thinking about how much he’d like to pull her into his arms and kiss her. He’d like to watch her eyes close as his lips moved closer to hers, pressing softly on them, running his hands through her silky blonde hair as he held her more intimately against his body.
His eyes flicked to the spice wheel covered with different peppers and the pepper omelets still sitting on a platter. Something sort of amazing occurred to him, and he decided to take a chance, whispering, “You had nothing to be jealous about.”
When he looked up, she nodded and smiled at him. To his delight, she didn’t turn scarlet or purple or rush to contradict him, and once again he was captivated by the honesty of her reaction. “I see that now.”
After a moment, she withdrew her hand gently, squeezing his before she pulled hers away. “How did you stay so calm yesterday? When I spun out? I mean, I would think seeing someone else in an accident so soon after yours would—”
“I was worried about you. I was focused on you.”
She smiled at him with such tenderness, his heart leapt in his chest.
“How’re your ribs?” she asked.
“Right this minute?” My heart’s hammering the hell out of ’em, Jen. “Just fine. All healed up.”
“I’m glad you’re not with her anymore. I’m so sorry she wasn’t there for you when you needed her. I’m so sorry you were hurt and alone.”
How does she keep doing this? Cradling my heart in her hands?
He knew how much courage it had taken for her to reach out and hold his hand, but she had done it, in spite of her reservations. Comforting him was more important to her than feeling comfortable herself. Once again, he was humbled by her selflessness.
“Sam.” She cleared her throat and lifted her chin. “I owe you an apology.”
“Nah, I’m flattered. Anyway, you make a mean omelet, Jenny. It’s okay.”
“No. It’s not okay.” She held his eyes uncompromisingly. “I owe you an apology, and I’d like to offer it, if that’s ok
ay. I thought you were attempting to dally with me while you were away from your girlfriend, but you’ve done nothing in the short time I’ve known you to lead me to believe you are the sort of man who would do something like that. And yet I jumped to that conclusion after looking at a few pictures on Google. I do that sometimes, rush to judgment. It’s a bad habit of mine, and I am just so sorry and so embarrassed.”
“Really,” he said, “it’s fi—”
“And I—I also just want to say…I’ve been pretty difficult since you met me. I sure would understand if you’d like to be left alone for the rest of the weekend…to, um, just explore Gardiner on your own. You don’t have to help me today. I can get Nils to come help me. He already offered. I don’t deserve your help.”
She said her piece, then released his eyes with a single nod. Standing up, she gathered the dishes and put them in the sink, giving Casey the solitary piece of leftover bacon.
Man, she is brave.
Most of the men he knew֫—hell, most of the people he knew—wouldn’t have offered up an apology that thorough and sincere. She took it on the chin, that’s for sure. He suddenly thought of Jenny as a little girl, being raised alongside three older brothers. No doubt she sat in on all the life lessons they would have had about courage and integrity and standing up for themselves throughout childhood. She’s strong like that. She’s tough.
Then again, he thought as he watched her at the sink washing the breakfast dishes, she’s all woman too.
She had her white shirt rolled up to her elbows, and he could see the skin on her forearms was still holding onto a summer tan against the white of the shirt. He moved his eyes lower to her waist and hips, then lower still, and—hallelujah!—her backside was cupped to perfection by the soft, molded denim of her jeans, highlighting every pert curve.
No way she’s putting up that booth with Nils today, whoever the hell he is. Screw Nils. No way.
“Hey, Jen.”
She turned to face him from the sink where her arms were elbow-deep in suds. “Mmm?”
“I know you may think an urban Chicago playboy isn’t fit for hard work, but you’re not getting rid of me that easy—”