Along Came a Husband

by Helen Brenna

  “I’ve disturbed the feng shui of your life enough. The least I can do is make it up to you by helping feng shui your shop.” Besides, he had nothing better to do while he sat tight waiting for Reynolds to get his files and work some magic with the Bureau. He might as well make himself useful.

  She studied him for a moment as if deciding whether or not he was being honest, and then on a heavy sigh, reached up and put her hand in his. She was so light he easily pulled her to her feet.

  “Okay, boss lady. Tell me what to do.”

  For the next hour, Missy told him where she wanted things moved and he moved them. Some things she’d gotten right the first time and other things had to be shifted around once or twice. When she’d settled on the placement of the main shelves and racks, they spent the next hour or so restocking.

  Jonas did his best to stay in any aisle except for the one she was in. Being near Missy, smelling her, listening to her soft, calm voice was doing a number on him. At one point, she sent him into the back room for something. He took one look around at the mayhem in her storage area and knew exactly what he’d be doing the next day.

  Even so, it was hard to fault Missy. What she lacked in organizational skills she more than made up for with heart. He hadn’t been able to keep from noticing the origins of her inventory. Missy was helping a damn lot of people.

  By the time he’d placed the last item, a set of earth-friendly stationery, on a display case his bullet wound, which had previously been healing quite nicely, was aching. Even so, Jonas stepped back, admired his handiwork and grinned. “I’m done. You have anything else that needs to be shelved?”

  “Nope. We’re finished.” Missy popped up from another aisle, stood toward the back of the shop and a big smile spread across her face. “I like it. What do you think?”

  What he liked was looking at her, the way her hair bounced, her smile widened, her eyes twinkled. He’d promised to not touch her, but touching her seemed the only thing on his mind. He went back to where she stood to get the same view. “It looks clean to me. Like I could easily move through the aisles without bumping into things.”

  “Exactly.” She walked through the store grinning. “This is perfect. Perfect.” She was perfect. She glanced at him, a ray of warm sunshine on a cold, bitter day. “Thanks for your help. I couldn’t have done this without you.”

  “Yes, you could’ve. You would’ve.”

  “It definitely would’ve taken me all night.”

  “Probably.”

  “Let’s go home,” she said with a soft smile.

  Home. What a damn loaded word.

  “H UNGRY ?” M ISSY ASKED as they walked through her front door.

  “Now that you mentioned it, I’m starving.”

  “Salad? Pasta?”

  He hesitated. “I’m pretty hungry. Maybe I’ll go back to town—”

  “I have the makings for a homemade potpie.”

  He looked at her. “Vegetarian?”

  She nodded. “But it’s hearty. I promise you’ll feel satisfied.” At least your stomach will, she almost added and then thought better of it.

  “What can I do to help?”

  “Open that bottle of merlot and then help me chop some onions.” She flipped on the oven and then gathered the ingredients. Onions and garlic. Peas, carrots and corn. Vegetable broth, bay leaves. Potatoes, barley, pie crusts.

  He glanced skeptically at the bottle of merlot.

  “You used to like wine.” She started peeling a potato.

  “Haven’t had the occasion for it these last several years. The lot I’ve been forced to hang with are more of a tequila shot kind of group.”

  “If you’d prefer—”

  “No, I wouldn’t.” He took out a corkscrew and opened the bottle. “I’m quite sure I’ll never drink tequila again.”

  They stood next to each other at the counter, and Missy felt herself relaxing with Jonas for the first time since he’d reappeared in her life. It hadn’t happened often, but years ago when Jonas had come home early from work they’d have invariably found themselves in the kitchen making a meal together. After all they’d been through it was nice to recapture a hint of the good times.

  “Where did you live while you were undercover?” she asked.

  “Apartment in Chicago. Wasn’t in too bad a part of town, but it was nothing more than four walls, really. Sterile.” He poured two glasses of wine and then downed the better part of one. “I couldn’t have anything personal around that might give me away.”

  Missy couldn’t imagine it. She almost reached out to pat his back. But if he couldn’t touch her, she couldn’t touch him. She sautéed the onions and garlic. “Wasn’t there any part of the life that your were living that resembled your own?”

  “No.” He refilled his wineglass.

  “Never dated? Went to movies? Checked out restaurants?”

  “No. No. And no.” He grabbed a knife and chopped vegetables. “I worked. Put together evidence. Filed reports. Listened to wiretap recordings. Deciphered e-mails.”

  She watched his face and remembered that look. “Bad men, huh?”

  “Very.” He sliced quickly, hitting the chopping block harder and harder with each thrust.

  “Can you tell me about it?”

  “I’m not sure you’d want to hear.”

  “I’d like to—”

  “It was as bad as it gets, Miss.” Pausing, he glanced at her. “We were holding out to nail Delgado. The top man. At least I thought that was the holdup. Anything you can imagine, I saw. Beatings. Murders. Teenage drug dealers and prostitutes. And much worse.” He glanced out the window as if remembering. “No respect for life. Few lives worth respecting.”

  Through it all, one thing she’d never lost for Jonas was respect. What she did to help the unfortunate was nothing compared to what Jonas had accomplished as an FBI agent.

  She shouldn’t ask, she knew, but a part of her cared deeply about his work. “What’s going to happen to this assignment?”

  “I’ve worked too long and hard to let these last four years amount to nothing. I’ll nail them all to the wall, if I can.”

  She took a gulp of wine, summoning the courage for a question that had been popping into her mind lately. “What if you couldn’t…nail them? What if you could no longer be an FBI agent?”

  “It’s who I am, Missy,” he whispered, going back to chopping vegetables. “I don’t see that changing any time soon.”

  T HE NEXT MORNING , M ISSY WAS answering a customer’s questions about fair trade products when sounds coming from the back room distracted her. She finished the sale of the coffee beans from South America and spun around expecting to find Ron had come into her store from the alley. No doubt he’d had enough of the disarray in her storage room.

  “Hey!” she said, smiling, and then stopped at the sight of a large, muscled body bent over clearing a space on the floor. “Jonas?”

  “Morning.”

  Wanting to get to her shop early to make sure she was satisfied with the rearrangements, she’d left her house before he was awake. “What are you doing here?”

  He grinned. “Feng shui-ing your back room.”

  “Awesome.” Gaia showed up beside Missy. “This the guy who helped last night?”

  “Jonas, this is Gaia. Gaia, this is…my husband, Jonas.” On one level it felt so entirely strange to introduce him as her husband, and yet so normal on another.

  “Legit.” Gaia raised her eyebrows and nodded with approval.

  “He won’t be around for much longer,” Missy added, trying to distance herself. “So there’s no point in getting to know him.”

  “If you say so.” Gaia spun around and went back into the store.

  “You don’t need to do this,” Missy said as he pulled out one of the shelving units Ron had purchased months ago and began assembling it.

  “I want to.” Sidestepping boxes stacked every which way, Jonas came toward her. “If it makes you feel any better
I’m bored out of my mind. I need to do something to pass the time.”

  Missy backed up as the overwhelming urge to walk toward him engulfed her. No man had ever made her feel quite this real, this free to be herself. His stable, no-nonsense way of going through life had always calmed her thoughts, her energy. As long as he wasn’t touching her, as long as they didn’t make love, being near Jonas somehow grounded her.

  The problem was all she wanted was to touch him.

  “Thanks.” She backed up even more. “I’ll be out front if you need anything.” Then she quickly escaped.

  Unfortunately, nearly the entire day while Missy occupied herself with customers, her thoughts were actually focused on Jonas. She’d hear the sound of a drill and wonder how many shelves he’d assembled. A box would slide across the cement floor and she couldn’t help but imagine how he may have arranged the shelving. Long moments of complete and total silence made her wonder what he was organizing.

  By lunchtime she couldn’t stand it. Needing to get away, she ran to the Bayside, brought back several sandwiches and asked Gaia to deliver a couple to Jonas. The afternoon was no different from the morning. It was early evening when he hesitantly came out front.

  “Missy?”

  She turned from rearranging the window display. “Need some help?”

  “Actually, it’s finished. Do you want to see? You might like to make some changes.”

  Missy followed him into the back room with Gaia hot on her trail.

  “Owned!” Gaia said, walking around looking at the shelving. “This totally smokes.”

  Missy was speechless. She barely recognized the area. All the clothing was shelved on one unit, the home and garden merchandise on two others, and books, calendars, cards and all type of paper products on another. Apparently she had enough jewelry for one entire storage unit. Purses and wallets took up most of another.

  “I can’t believe this,” she murmured. “I can actually walk around back here.” There was even enough room for a small table and a couple of chairs for short breaks.

  “Ron is going to be so happy,” Gaia added. Then a customer came to the front counter with a purchase. “I’ll get it.”

  “What do you think?” Jonas grinned at Missy. “Six weeks before you’re going to need someone to get back in here and organize things?”

  Her heart felt as if it stopped. “What if you were still here? Would that be so bad?”

  Jonas’s smile disappeared. “That’s not going to happen, Missy.”

  Of course not. Missy took a deep breath and did her best to smile. “You know what? Gaia’s closing the shop tonight, so let’s go. I owe you dinner.” She headed toward the front door. “How does Duffy’s sound?”

  “All right. You’re on.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  MISSY WALKED INTO DUFFY’S PUB and glanced through the windows in the main dining area that looked out over Lake Superior. Only a sliver of the sun clung to the horizon, shedding its pale light on the sailboats docked in the harbor and creating a quiet, romantic atmosphere. Not what she was after. Besides, Missy had always preferred the dark and somewhat raucous pub side. After nodding to a few of her fellow islanders, she took a seat in the first available booth not far from the bar.

  Jonas sat directly across the table from her. Their waiter, a college kid, handed them a couple of menus. Missy didn’t bother with hers. “Eggplant parmesan,” she said, after ordering a glass of merlot.

  Jonas flipped back and forth through the menu.

  “Erica makes the most amazing pasta,” she offered.

  “Why don’t you order for me?” Jonas handed the menu back to the kid.

  “He’ll take the rigatoni.”

  “And a beer.”

  The waiter walked away, quickly came back with their drinks and they sat looking at each other. This was getting dangerous. Spending the last night with him rearranging her gift shop and listening to him work his magic this morning in her back room had reminded her of the many reasons she’d fallen in love with the man.

  “Why Mirabelle?” he asked, out of the blue. “I would’ve thought you’d go to L.A. or Seattle. New Mexico. The Midwest seems a little staid for you. How’d you end up here?”

  It seemed too personal to share that she’d been looking for the right kind of place to raise a few kids. “I’m not really sure,” she finally said. “I guess I hit the road right after you died. Had no idea where I was going. First stop was Sandusky, Ohio, along the shores of Lake Erie. Then Gary, Ludington and Traverse City along Lake Michigan. Then I took a long road trip through Montana, Wyoming, Oregon.” At least that was the truth. She took a sip of wine, glanced at him over the rim of the glass, then set it down. “But you already know that, don’t you?”

  Silently, he nodded.

  “Turned out I liked the Great Lakes best. So I headed back to the Midwest. Not sure why. Big water, I guess. Without the saltiness of the northeast coast.”

  “Wisconsin’s a bit off the beaten path.”

  “I just drove, Jonas, letting my instincts lead me, until I hit water. This time the water in my way was Lake Superior. When I got to Bayfield, there was a ferry heading to Mirabelle. I got on it and never looked back.” She smiled. “Besides, except for Manhattan, where else can you live and not own a gas-guzzling, global-warming-causing car?”

  Jonas smiled. It was unusual to see him so relaxed she found herself staring. “What kept you here?” he asked. “On an island? You never stayed any other place longer than a few months.”

  “The people, I suppose.” She sipped her wine. “They’re straightforward. If they like you, you’re in like Flynn. If they don’t, they let you know. I can deal with that.”

  “Some of them didn’t like you? Impossible.”

  “Mary Miller—she owns the candy shop—still looks the other way when I walk down the street. Shirley Gilbert, the owner of the cotton-candy-pink B and B, can be rude. Outright. Even Jan Setterberg wasn’t the most hospitable of neighbors until I got to know her sister, Lynn Duffy, a little better.”

  “Doesn’t make sense. How can anyone resist you?”

  “You did.”

  “Is that what you think? That I was unaffected by you? That I ignored you?”

  “It’s not what I thought as much as what I felt.”

  He looked away, seemed angry. When he glanced back at her, he’d recovered, just barely. He glanced at her arm. “Tell me what those mean. Your tattoos.”

  She hesitated, unsure she cared to share something so intimate. Then again, what could be the harm? Jonas would be gone in a week, two at most. The thought made her feel fairly miserable.

  “Missy? You okay?”

  “They’re the Sanskrit symbols for the chakras,” she finally whispered. “The first one is the crown. Our spirituality. The next one, our third eye, represents intuition or wisdom. Then there’s the throat.”

  “Let me guess.” He smiled. “Communication.”

  She nodded. “Our self-expression.”

  He reached out to touch the fourth symbol and then, as if he remembered his promise to not touch her, quickly pulled back. “Next is the heart, isn’t it?”

  “Which needs no explanation,” she said, almost wishing she hadn’t held him to his promise. “Then the solar plexus. Which holds our personal power. The sacral chakra embodies our emotional balance and sexuality.”

  “That’s odd,” he whispered. “Those two going together.”

  “Is it?”

  He gaze faltered for a moment. “Maybe not.”

  “And last is the root. Represents our survival. Our physical needs.”

  “So why those symbols and why there?”

  She hesitated. “They remind me what’s important to me. Help me remember who I am.”

  “I noticed you aren’t wearing your crystals anymore.”

  “I need to protect myself without help,” she said.

  “And I have no doubt you can.”

  His eyes held her
mesmerized. For a moment, she fought the connection growing between them, fearing the weakness she’d experienced all those years ago around Jonas. Fearing she might slip back in time and lose the ground she’d gained. But there was nothing weak or needy about what she felt toward Jonas. She felt strong, alive and whole. Though utterly confused.

  The waiter came to their table, delivering food, and the moment evaporated as quickly as it had come. They were finishing eating when Sean came into the bar. Nodding at Missy, he came to their booth after picking up a beer at the bar. “Hey.”

  “Sit,” Missy said, glad for the diversion. “Have a beer with us.”

  “Nah, I don’t want to disturb your meal.” He glanced at her, studied her face, and then, reconsidering, suddenly plopped down next to her. “On second thought maybe I will,” he said, looking directly at Jonas. “Got a haircut, I see.”

  Jonas nodded, almost imperceptibly before taking his last bite of pasta. Tension charged between the two men like boxers squaring off in opposite corners.

  “How’s your side healing?” Sean asked, although there was no compassion in his voice.

  “Fine.”

  “Great.” Sean put his arm on the back of the booth behind Missy in a subtly possessive way. “So when are you leaving?”

  Under the booth, Missy briefly put her hand on Sean’s leg. Don’t. It’s okay.

  “Actually, I’m kind of liking Mirabelle.” Jonas took a long pull on his beer. “Maybe I’ll stay awhile.”

  She could almost hear the vibrations coming off Jonas. My wife, asshole. Hands off.

  “Won’t the FBI be wanting their agent back?”

  “I’m not sure I’ll be staying with the Bureau.” He held Sean’s gaze for a moment and then briefly glanced at Missy.

  What? That threw her. Jonas without the FBI was like tofu straight up. “What would you do?” she asked.

  “I’ve heard Newman’s grocery store is looking for a security guard,” Sean said, sipping his beer.

  Jonas glared at Sean and then ran a hand over his face and chuckled. “Or I suppose I could bounce here at Duffy’s. Get rid of all the riffraff.”

  Missy glanced between the two men. “Okay, that’s it. Far much too testosterone. I’m out of here.” She pushed Sean out of the booth and then slid out behind him.