by Stella Quinn
He smiled. “So thorough.”
How had he managed to turn that into a comment which did a slow burn through her nerve endings? She took a breath. Focus, Katie, focus. She sighed. It had been a crazy idea coming down here, and now she was getting distracted by warm brown eyes and a fine set of shoulders. She took a swig of coffee from the giant mug and winced. “Eesh.”
“Lukewarm?” He raised his eyebrows at her in sympathy.
“Like my heart—”
Oh, shoot. She’d nearly said that out loud! She slammed the mug back down on the desk and stood, tugging on Rose’s lead as she did so. “I’ve taken up enough of your time. Thank you.”
He stood, too. “No problem. I’m sorry I couldn’t be more help. Hey, let me know if you find your sister, will you? Tuna Yango will want to know. I can…er, pass on the message.”
“Sure, fine, yes,” she stammered, and took off back to the street, only stopping to breathe when the timber-and-glass door had thunked to a close behind her.
She pressed a hand to her chest, alarmed and thrilled in equal measure that her heart, for the first time in a long time, didn’t feel lukewarm at all.
Too bad she didn’t have time to wonder what that meant. She had a sister to find, and it seemed Tuna Yango was going to be too big of a distraction to be any help.
Chapter 10
Anton spent a thoughtful week.
He jogged—alone like always—and wondered what it would be like to have someone jogging beside him. He worked his way through the R section of his secondhand cookbook—rice pilaf, risotto con fungi, rolled chicken stuffed with brie and pancetta—and imagined a woman standing beside him, helping herself to a sip from his glass of wine, sampling the bubbling pot of risotto to test if the rice was al dente.
It had been a long, long time since he’d pictured living a life with someone else in it...and now that someone had a face. He frowned at himself in the gilt mirror above his hall table. “For a guy who doesn’t believe in love at first sight, you’re acting like a total sap, Price.”
Still. Would it hurt to get a haircut? Spend more than thirty seconds picking out which shirt to wear in the morning?
Not that it mattered what shirt he was wearing, today or any day; his Monday afternoon visitor had probably returned home to find her sister on her doorstep or had received a dozen text messages, like sorry, my phone died, all is well, etcetera etcetera. Tuna Yango was just a distant memory to her by now.
He pushed his wandering thoughts aside. Even a semi-employed newspaper columnist like him had to work sometimes, and this was one of those times. He hauled his laptop out of its case and set off for the flagged patio that spilled out from his kitchen onto the rocky cliffside. Time to pick this week’s selection for Happy Snaps. He logged into Reel Life and scrolled through the submissions. Lovely photos, many of them, but some a little blurred or bleached out. He stopped on one showing the sun rising over water. That wasn’t a common sight here on the west coast of the States. Sunsets, sure...each night more spectacular than the one before. But sunrises?
He enlarged the photo to see if he could recognize any details. Of course—Lake Eloise. A picnic area and campground in the foothills of the Santa Lucia Mountains. He’d been there many a time, back when he was doing research for The Garden of Evil. He’d needed a lost hiker, a psychopath with an orienteering obsession, remote wilderness trails…
He shuddered. There was nothing to be gained in rehashing the macabre plots in his past. Whoever had taken this lovely photo of Lake Eloise had not had psycho killers in her mind. The photo was burnished with golden light. A bird—some sort of downy woodpecker—perched on a fallen tree limb, its wings a blur of movement. He should go out there one day, and replace all his research memories with this lovely one.
His phone bleeped as he dragged the photo over to a folder on his laptop for his next article, and he picked it up before he’d quite computed that the words on the screen said unknown number calling.
Hmm. He hoped his editor hadn’t switched phones in an effort to trick him into answering, because if he had, it had just worked. He was wilier than a darn coyote.
“Oh, er, hi. Anton?”
His editor had a voice like a train derailing into a gravel quarry…this was so not his editor on the line. This voice was hummingbirds drunk on honey, faeries plucking strings on golden harps, ange—
“Hello? It’s Katie. We met last week in your office.”
He cleared his throat. “Katie?”
“Yeah. I hope you don’t mind me calling you so late.”
Was it late? His adrenalin had just jumped him into a never-ending wakeful dawn. “Not at all. Did you find your sister?”
Her sigh dampened his thrill at hearing her voice. “No. That’s kind of why I’m calling.”
“Oh.” He scrambled for something to say. “Er…you need my help again?”
“I just keep circling back to that letter she sent me. Her crush on a suitable guy at work here at SantaCal Bank, her meeting someone…and then thank heaven for Tuna Yango.”
“It’s a conundrum.”
She had a smile in her voice when she answered. “Not a word I’d ever think to use, but yeah. It’s definitely a conundrum. Maybe we gave up too easily the other day with the crossword clues.”
“You want to go back a little further?”
“If you don’t mind.”
Mind? His hormones had just started singing the Hallelujah Chorus.
“And I think I’m going to have to go to Veronica’s old workplace.”
“Where? The bank?”
“Yes. I’ve been thinking about Vee’s note. I just fastened on to the Tuna Yango thing because it stood out. What if something else in there was a clue?”
“You’re sounding like a detective.”
She chuckled in his ear, and the sound warmed him. “That is so unlikely, Anton. A lateral thinker I am not. There’s a reason I became a traffic controller, not a...a...FBI agent. I’m a one-plus-one-equals-two kinda gal.”
He tore his mind away from how much he liked hearing that deep chuckle of hers and how much more he’d like to hear it in person. “So what else does the letter have in it that you can work with?”
“Two things. First, is the guy she had a crush on here? Maybe I could find out who that person is and ask him if she’s been in touch.”
“Could be awkward.”
“Yeah. I’m dreading it, to be honest. Since, um—well, let’s just say making chitchat with people I don’t know isn’t one of my strengths. After that, I need to head on back to Maple Ridge and somehow ask her coworkers there if they know who this new guy is.”
He waited a beat. “When are you thinking of following up these leads?”
“I’m on the dawn shift tomorrow at the airport, so I’m off duty at noon. I thought I’d swing into town on my way home and visit Vee’s old branch on Main Street.”
He instantly cleared his plans for the next afternoon—which wasn’t, admittedly, difficult: he had no plans, not for tomorrow or any day. “Want to meet up first? I can print up the answer grids to all the Saturday crosswords we didn’t get to, so you have the answers on hand.”
“Oh.”
She fell silent, and he tried to interpret the inflection in that softly spoken oh. Was it Oh, shoot, I’ve called a stalker, and he’s probably a total crackpot? Or was it more of an oh, heavens, that hot dude with the murky past and the apathetic future just asked me out, and I’m a teeny-weeny bit thrilled?
“I’d like that.”
Wait, had she said that, or was his fertile brain filling in all the answers again? No, she’d definitely spoken, and now it was his turn. “You would?” He cleared his throat and brought his voice back down an octave. “How about the park above the beach? There’s a cafe across the road that makes incredible donuts.”
“Sweet and Treats? I love those donuts.”
“I love that you love those donuts.” Jiminy cricket, he needed to t
hink about his conversational skills. He was losing it. L.O.S.I.N.G I.T.
“See you tomorrow, then?”
“Yeah,” he said, and slid the phone back down onto the table. He lifted his gaze to where the setting sun was sending streaks of color through the sky in the direction of tomorrow, and smiled. For the first time in a long, long, time, he had something to look forward to.
Chapter 11
I love that you love those donuts, Katie mused to herself as she found a parking lot near the town square and clipped Rose to her leash. “Do you think—?”
Rose trotted along the footpath beside her, looking up, waiting for her to finish the thought.
“Never mind. Enjoy your walk, my fluff. An hour or two in town, then we’re heading out to the refuge for another session with Prince. How does that sound?"
Rose’s nose had been distracted by a drooping fern which apparently needed to be disciplined, so Katie slowed while her dog batted at it with her front paws until it lay inanimate.
“You done? Because if you’re finished, we have a man to meet.”
Rose woofed.
“Correct, I did say a man.”
Rose woofed again.
“Also correct; I did, not so long ago, say we would never get involved with a man ever again, but this is different.” How different, she didn’t yet know. She just knew that she had a spring in her step, the flowers were blooming pinker and brighter than they ought to be, and the sun felt like spun gold on her skin. Despite the fact that she was on a mission here—her sister could be missing, for Pete’s sake—the prospect of meeting up with Anton for a donut had made her buoyantly happy.
The park running along this part of the coast was one of Katie’s favorite places to laze away a few hours. Flowering allamanda grew over wrought-iron arbors. Low hedges of ixora lined the flagged pathways, and the wide, palm-fringed esplanade was home to a steady stream of joggers and stroller-pushing parents.
She couldn’t see Anton, so she settled at a picnic table near the monument to health workers. Service above self, the deeply chiseled inscription read.
She stroked Rose’s head. “Those wonderful people,” she murmured. “And you are wonderful too, my sweet, every time you help one of those fear-filled pups escape Heartbreak Row.”
“I should have bought three donuts.”
She looked up, and there was Anton, smiling down at her and Rose. He’d lost the dark shadow that had clung to his jawline when they’d first met, and his hair had been shorn of its tousled, fairy-tale-prince-astride-a-noble-stallion look.
He set two coffee cups down on the wooden table, along with a shiny paper bag with the Sweet and Treats logo printed on the exterior.
“Hi,” she said, in a regrettably breathless way.
“Hi.”
His brown eyes had a way of looking that really looked. No wonder she’d been bowled over on her first meeting.
“Any news from Vee?” he said.
Despite her worry, she couldn’t stop herself from grinning. Veronica used all four syllables of her name, and insisted everyone else did, too. Katie only got away with saying Vee because she was family. “No. Nothing. No phone messages, no posts on Reel Life, zip.”
Anton settled into the bench seat beside her, so they were both looking out over the view. Rose shifted under the table so she could lie across their feet.
“Just nudge her away if you don’t like dogs so close. She won’t be offended.”
He smiled. “I love dogs. I’d have one in a heartbeat if I didn’t travel so mu—”
He came to a halt mid-word, and she slanted a glance up at him. “If you didn’t travel so much?”
He gave her a sheepish grin. “Past tense. I guess I haven’t been doing much of anything lately. I’ve been…giving myself a time-out.”
“From travel?”
“From writing, mostly.”
“For real? But people line up for your books.”
“Yeah. So my agent keeps reminding me,” he said, tearing the paper bag in half so a puff of warm, cinnamon-sugar goodness billowed up and her taste buds went into high alert.
“Oh my,” she groaned. “I made a pact with myself: only one a month. This will be my third in a week.”
“You’ve been stressed. Donuts are medicinal; it’s a proven thing.”
She took a bite from the warm, doughy chunk he handed to her. “If only that were true.”
Rose gave a soft whiffle beneath the table.
“Is it okay if I give her some?” said Anton.
“Sure, but just a bit so she doesn’t feel left out. And it’ll have to be our little secret. If Carol, the breeder who gave me Rose, ever found out, she’d stage an intervention.”
“Ouch. Sounds a bit like Jules at the newspaper. Since she found out I’d given up writing, she’s been sending me books about curing writer’s block and leaving little embroidered scraps of cloth on my desk with self-help sayings. Take your mind out and dance on it, Mark Twain, that kind of thing.
Katie took a sip of her coffee. “That is so adorable. Hand-sewn? Who even knows how to do that anymore? She must care for you a lot; I hope your wife doesn’t get jealous.”
Oh, wow. She’d wondered at his single-or-not status, and somehow her mouth had thought it would be okay to just ask away, without checking with her brain first.
Was she imagining the little twinkle in his eye as he looked at her? “There’s no wife or girlfriend to care about who’s stitching me little notes.”
“Huh,” she said.
“How about you? Anyone in your life who’s going to worry about who you’re, um…sharing donuts with?”
“Besides Rose? No. There was someone, a few months ago, but I don’t think I was reading the signals very well.”
“How do you mean?”
“You know how I said I was a literal thinker? A one-plus-one-equals-two girl? Well, I thought our dates were going somewhere, but Jetson thought I was too…” Too what? He’d accused her of being too inward-looking, too unwilling to take chances and be impulsive. She’d been trying, and he’d just mocked her and then taken off.
She sighed. “Whatever he thought, he didn’t stick around to see if it was true. He found a job in a bigger city and took off for a more glamorous future.”
“Wow. Jetson. Please tell me he was embarrassed by that name.”
She giggled. All those months of feeling bad about the way she and Jetson had ended things evaporated in the face of Anton’s ridiculous comment. “He thought it was captivating. Bond…Jetson Bond, that sort of thing.”
“I have never wished so badly to be a rom-com writer. That man deserves to be immortalized as the dopey moron who let the best girl he’d ever meet get away.”
Katie buried her nose in the lid of her coffee cup. Was that a compliment? Or just a bit of fun? She glanced up, and Anton’s eyes met hers. Warmly. So warmly, in fact, that she felt a little tremor of longing that she hadn’t felt in…well…ever.
She cleared her throat. This was no time to be losing her focus just because kind brown eyes were giving her the come-hithers. “So, er, I think you were going to give me the answer grids to all the crosswords you—well, Tuna Yango—published in the Cove to Coast Herald.”
“I’ve got them here. I had another idea, too. Say no if you don’t like it, okay? It’s just…I might have a bit of clout at the local SantaCal Bank branch. If you want me to come with you so we can work out who your sister might have been in contact with, I’m happy to help.”
“You are?” He was? Oh heck, she could spin her brain cells into a lather wondering, or she could just ask. “Why do you want to help me, Anton?”
He spent a long time looking over the waves breaking on the point before he answered, and when the words started, they weren’t quite what she expected.
“You know I said I’d given up writing?”
“Mmhmm.”
“It wasn’t the whole story. Truth is, for a while there, I gave up on pretty
much everything. Getting up. Buying groceries. Answering my phone.”
She rested her hand on his arm. “I’m sorry, Anton. Did you lose someone?”
He placed his hand over hers, and she tried to remember she was comforting someone; these little trills of reaction were so not appropriate.
“No. It wasn’t what I lost. It’s what I had done.”
She frowned. “What did you do? Sneeze over strangers at the drugstore? Hoard rice?”
He squeezed her hand. “Huh. I’m beginning to see why Veronica may have wanted to give you the slip.”
She grinned. “Seriously, Anton. What on earth would you have to feel guilty about?”
“My last book.”
She sorted through titles in her head, trying to think which might have been the most recent. She was a fan, sure, but not a rabid one. She didn’t have his book titles tattooed across her breast. “Er…Delta Echo Nine? Nevada Storm?”
“Strain X”.
“I haven’t read it.”
“Well, you must be the only person in the Northern Hemisphere. Sold more copies than all my other books put together, which was great, and my ego grew into something about the size of Alaska. But then—”
He broke off, and she could see what it cost him to choke down what he was feeling. “But then it all became real?”
He nodded. “Yeah. The world went crazy, and I couldn’t get over the fact that I’d been fictionalizing pain and fear and worry on a global scale…and profiting off it. I started having panic attacks, so I stepped away.”
She mulled over his words. “I’m not getting the link between your book and helping me.”
He snuck another piece of donut under the table to Rose, who would be ecstatic to find she now had an undisciplined treat-giver in her life. “I’ve been using the newspaper page I’m in charge of as a means of sticking to a routine, keeping involved in a minor way…but it’s not enough. It’s time I stopped sulking”—he turned to her and raised his eyebrows—“which is what my sisters tell me I’m doing, and reconnect with the world. Helping you find your sister feels like the nudge out the door I’ve been needing.”