by Stacey Keith
“Yeah?”
“Halloween candy. Gotta bunch of it this year. So instead of eating the candy myself, I sell it. Two dollars for Reese’s Pieces. Three dollars for Skittles. Fifty cents for candy corn.”
Mason pictured Terrence working the lunch tables at school, pockets bulging. “Why only fifty cents?”
“Nobody likes candy corn, man. You know that. Hey, this one girl offered me five dollars for a full-sized Snicker’s. I’m saving up to buy me a house, just like this one.”
They sat looking at the other kids. When the pool lights switched on, everyone cheered. “So Ms. Mankie told you about me, right?” Terrence knuckled water out of one eye. His fingers were pruned. Droplets clung to his hair.
Mason made an effort to remember who Ms. Mankie was. It felt like his brain was made of sawdust. Ms. Mankie was the one with the lipstick and the glasses, right?
“I had to take swim class twice,” Terrence told him.
“What do you mean, twice?”
“First time around, no way I was getting in that pool. Water’s scary. My friend Dwight said sharks can come up through the drain hole at the bottom.”
“I wouldn’t worry too much. Sharks don’t like chlorine.”
“See, that’s what’s cool about your pool. It kind of goes all around and there’s no deep end except that part under the slide.”
Mason leaned back in his deck chair. He unscrewed the top of his soda, took a slug, and then capped it again. “They call it a lazy river.”
“I don’t know about lazy, on account of me having to work real hard to get my swim license.”
Swim license. How cute was this kid? “You should think about becoming a sports agent, Terrence. They make tons of money.”
Yet for some reason, Mason couldn’t get it out of his head, the idea of little Terrence with his round face and solemn brown eyes overcoming a fear of water. Mason knew he wasn’t an expert on child psychology, but to a kid, real and imaginary were pretty much the same thing, weren’t they? If Terrence thought there were sharks, there were sharks.
But if Terrence could conquer his fear of water, why couldn’t a girl like Lexie learn to manage a pack of loser paparazzi?
Mason rubbed the dull ache in his chest where his heart used to be. Of course, there was no way to find out now that Cassidy had just said to hell with it, fuck you, Mason, and run home.
By the time five o’clock rolled around, the kids were finally tapped out. Bodies were everywhere. The entire backyard looked like a Civil War reenactment.
Before Terrence got on the bus going home, he shook Mason’s hand. “I’m going to have my birthday party here. You’re invited,” he said.
Mason couldn’t hold back a grin. “Thanks. I accept your invitation.”
“We’re cool then.” Terrence climbed the bus stairs that looked half as tall as he was, followed by a trail of soggy kids. Their chaperone, whose name Mason still couldn’t remember, shook his hand, then Ruth’s, and then his again. “We just can’t thank you enough,” she said.
Mason stood beside Ruth and waved goodbye as the bus drove away. The place seemed depressingly quiet again. Whatever ground he’d gained during Terrence’s visit suddenly evaporated, and now he was left with all his hurt, angry feelings.
Ruth turned to him with her usual brisk efficiency. “Ready to tackle the kitchen?”
“No, you go on. I’ll do it.”
He started toward the house, but she blocked him, her pink cardigan drawn tightly around her shoulders like a shield. “Stop,” she said. “Just stop.”
Annoyed, Mason said, “What are you doing?”
“I don’t know you anymore.”
He marched around her and then into the kitchen. “Goddammit, Ruth. I’m in no mood for games.”
“Then why are you playing them?” She stalked after him. “You’ve been sulking all day, feeling sorry for yourself. This isn’t the Mason I know.”
Mason found a trash can under the sink and started chucking shards of ceramic plate into it. “Is that right? Well, there’s a lot you don’t know.”
“Cassidy left you, didn’t she?”
He paused long enough to glare at her.
Ruth sighed. She grabbed a broom, jabbed it in a glass-filled corner, and then swept the glass into a pile. “It’s none of my business, of course, but may I ask why you’re not going after her?”
“She left me, remember? I dunno—are you supposed to go after someone who leaves you?”
Ruth stopped sweeping. “Of course you are. Why wouldn’t you fight for the woman you love?”
Mason stood looking at her, and for the first time since Cassidy had left, he thought maybe he wasn’t completely in the right on this.
“That little girl is her world, Mason. You know that. Cassidy did what she had to do. She did what was best for her daughter. She didn’t leave you. She protected her child.”
Mason crossed his arms. Ruth was making a lot of sense, but he wasn’t sure he was ready to hear it yet. “How do you know?”
“About what? Her feelings for you?” Ruth rolled her eyes and started sweeping again. “A blind man could see what you two have. Most people would kill for it.”
“I don’t even know if I can trust her anymore,” he muttered darkly.
“Trust her? Okay, now I know you’ve lost your damn mind. Look how many times that woman had to swallow her pride and trust you, you big galoot!” Scowling, Ruth herded half a plate in his direction with the broom. “Men. I swear. You should hear yourselves talk sometimes. You’re like a bunch of lunatics on day pass.”
Mason seized the broken plate and threw it in the trash. “I don’t know what you expect me to do about it. I can’t make Cassidy change her mind about bringing her daughter here.”
“Why not?” Ruth said fiercely. “The Mason I know would never have given up in the first quarter of the game. He would have fought for what he wanted. He would have fought until the whole field was covered in blood.”
Mason winced. His heart felt like someone had shot it full of lead. “Yeah, well, that Mason is a dumbass.”
If looks could kill, the one Ruth launched at him from across the kitchen would melt the skin off his bones. “I gotta tell you,” she said, “I liked that Mason a whole lot better than the pathetic whiner right in front of me.”
He lifted the trash bag out of the can, spun it and then knotted it closed. I need time, he thought resentfully. With enough time and distance, maybe someday I can see this clearly.
Chapter Eighteen
It was dark by the time Mason made it to Cuervo. He could see the old water tower in the distance, lit from below so the crop dusters could spot it when they circled the fields. A full moon hung in the star-filled sky. He took a deep breath. The air was so much cleaner out here. It smelled of hay and horses and the familiarity of home.
In the six weeks he’d been away, nothing had changed. Nothing probably ever would. When he was young, that sameness had driven him wild with impatience. Now, he recognized it as one of the things he loved most about Cuervo.
The last month and a half had been a blur of brutal on-the-road football games, eked out victories, a deep-season injury list and long nights spent in lonely hotel rooms pretending he didn’t miss her. No one had told him that yearning could damn near kill you. No one told him that once you’d found the woman you were looking for and she left, you felt like you were acting out the words to a country western song.
Other women didn’t even exist for him at this point. All he wanted was her.
Driving here had been the same kind of adrenaline rush he felt when the football sailed between the goal posts—a lightness in his chest, the fast pulse. He spied the Artie’s Burger Express sign lit up yellow and red against the night sky and remembered the first time he saw her there after all those years. How strange t
hat even then, he’d had a hunch that she was the one. Maybe the human heart just knew things.
He took a deep breath, ready to do whatever it took to make her understand they needed to be together. That as long as they were a team, all things were possible. Lexie would go to a good school. There would no longer be any need to sling burgers and fries. And every day of the off-season they would spend right here in Cuervo with friends and family. He knew a ranch for sale next to Buckingham Farms that would be perfect for them. There was even a fishing pond for him and his dad to fish in while they continued patching up old wounds.
First, he had to get Cassidy to see that he loved Lexie, too, and would teach her everything she needed to know in order to handle life in the limelight.
But he wasn’t sure what his reception would be once he got there. He let the car idle for a minute across the street, heart pumping, hands a sweaty mess. After all the soul-searching he’d done, all the long talks he’d had with himself, it all came down to this moment, fourth down in the fourth quarter of the game.
He spotted her skating toward a red Ford pickup, tray in hand, hair in a sporty ponytail, and everything inside him suddenly came to life again. He could do this. They could do this.
Nerves jangling, he drove into Artie’s parking lot and found a stall. He turned the car off, got out, and then started toward Cassidy. She had her back to him and was delivering milkshakes to a family sitting on the patio.
The other two waitresses inside the restaurant saw him first and started jumping and waving to Cassidy, trying to get her attention. A man in a cook’s hat and white apron peered out at him. Everything seemed like it was happening in a movie, and Mason had trouble catching his breath.
Cassidy turned around and saw him.
Only on the football field had Mason seen color drain from a face before. It made her eyes look intensely blue. She uttered something he couldn’t hear because his heart was blasting apart. Then she dropped her empty tray.
“Mason,” she cried. “Oh, Mason!”
She made it into his arms in one glide and he could feel her body trembling with emotion. By some miracle, they were kissing, and his shy, sweet Cassidy didn’t even notice that everyone was watching them. She stood on the tips of her skates and clung to him, saying his name over and over, until it felt like he would explode from happiness.
“I can’t believe you’re here,” she said. “Oh, Mason, I was so stupid. When I finally figured it out, I thought it was too late.”
“You aren’t stupid,” he said. “I just didn’t understand. Cassidy, I don’t want to lose you again. Tell me you’ll stay this time, you and Lexie.”
“Yes, of course. We’ll find a way to make it work.” She gazed into his eyes. Her own were shiny with tears. “Oh, Mason, I never thought I’d ever see you again.”
“I should probably do this more formally, but I want to marry you,” he said, feeling the sureness of it. “I want us to be together—the right way.”
He could tell it was yes by the way her whole face lit up. No hesitation. No running for cover. She was ready—ready to face whatever hardships came their way. When she kissed him, her entire heart was in that kiss, her woman’s heart that had bound him to her forever.
Suddenly, the whole restaurant erupted in car horns, flashing headlights, and people pounding on tables. The guy in the cook’s hat and the two waitresses came out, fists pumping, leading the cheer. For probably two minutes the wild, joyful noise continued. Cassidy seemed to welcome it. Her face was wet with tears, but she kept smiling and laughing. Mason watched her with a rush of love and awe and a sense that at last his destiny and hers had come together.
Finally he’d come home.
About the Author
Award-winning author Stacey Keith doesn’t own a television, but reads compulsively—and would, in fact, go stark raving bonkers without books, most of which are crammed into every corner of the house. She lives with her jazz musician boyfriend in Civita Castellana, a medieval village in Italy that sits atop a cliff, and she spends her days writing in a nearby abandoned 13th century church. But the two things she is most proud of are her ability to cook pasta alla matriciana without burning down the kitchen and swearing volubly in Italian with all the appropriate hand gestures.
Read on for a look inside the next Dreams Come True novel, Sweet Dreams.
CHAPTER ONE
“Celebrity weddings should come with a warning label,” Coralee said as she peered outside. “I’ve never seen such a madhouse.”
Maggie Roby glanced up from the wedding cake she was frosting. Her new employee, Coralee, hadn’t moved from that window all morning. She had a stainless steel mixing bowl full of butter cream frosting tucked under one arm. The more agitated she got, the faster Coralee whisked.
“I don’t think my sister knew it was going to be this bad,” Maggie said. She used the back of her hand to push aside a curl that had tumbled into her face. “Cuervo’s never had this many people in it before. So of course everyone’s going crazy.”
“Sara Merriweather told me that folks here are renting out rooms in their own houses. Renting! To strangers! What’s next—putting up tents in the municipal park?”
Out of loyalty to her sister, Maggie wouldn’t admit it in a thousand years, but Coralee was probably right: their two-stoplight Texas town was absolutely in over its head. Now all Maggie could hope for was that her sister Cassidy wasn’t in over her head, too. What would happen when Cassidy figured out that love was not only a lie, but that all weddings should come with a warning label?
“Oh, great, here comes another pack of reporters,” Coralee groused, trudging behind the counter. “And they look just as hungry as the last bunch.”
Maggie knew better than to wish away customers, but her sister’s wedding cake needed everything she could give it right now. You never could tell what kind of disaster might be awaiting you with these things. Even an experienced baker like her could spend hours piping icing onto a multi-tiered, sandwich-layer cake such as this one, only to end up with a hideous bulging monstrosity.
Sometimes cakes sank. Sometimes they were undercooked no matter how many toothpicks you poked into them. And sometimes, after toiling away on some elaborate creation, you got wildly nervous toward the end because you knew if you messed it up now, it was ruined forever. Her sister’s cake was the most important one she’d ever made. Even if she hated weddings herself, everything had to be perfect for Cassidy’s—and the fact that her sister was marrying Mason Hannigan, the most famous quarterback in the country, only added to the pressure.
Maggie reminded herself it wasn’t weddings she hated. What she hated was watching people make the biggest mistake of their lives. One cheating asshole of a husband followed by a heart-wrenching, finance-busting divorce and she felt like a cake that had cratered. There was a hollow ache where her heart used to be.
If Mason hurt her sister, Maggie told herself with grim determination, she was fully prepared to choke him.
The bell above the door jingled. Just as men toting cameras and video equipment crowded into the bakery, one of her many egg timers went off.
Maggie set aside the pastry bag and pulled on the homemade pink oven mitts her darling niece, Lexie, had sewed for her last Christmas. The mitts had pugs on them done in cross-stich. She slid the cupcakes out of the oven and set them on a cooling rack. Then the phone rang. It always rang when something was about to burn or there were customers out front.
People were pouring in—more people than she’d seen since Mr. Flannigan’s barn caught fire. After the fire was put out, the firemen and the half of Cuervo that had been avidly watching packed her bakery for coffee and doughnuts. But this was even crazier. She undid the top button of her polo and fluttered it, trying to pump air across her chest. These were out-of-towners. You never knew what to expect.
She answered the phone, flipping open
her order pad while keeping an eye on the front. Poor Coralee was dashing between the coffee machine, the cash register and the pastry trays.
Maggie found a pen and test-scribbled it to see if it worked. “You know I can’t accept cake orders two days before an event, Mrs. Connors,” she said on the phone. “We need a week, minimum.”
Alice Connors kept arguing. That woman would argue with a sack of wet hair.
“I have a pre-made carrot cake in the refrigerator,” Maggie said, knowing if she didn’t find a solution, she would never get Alice off the phone. “Why don’t we write ‘Happy Birthday, Schnoodles’ on that one? By the way, you do know sugar isn’t good for dogs, right?”
Maggie had to hold the phone away from her ear, Alice blasted her so hard. It made her think she would almost rather be at the wedding. Out front, one of the reporters emptied a pocketful of change on the counter and sorted through it, one coin at a time. Behind him, the line of reporters loudly groaned.
“I’ll make sure it’s beautiful, Mrs. Connors. Yes, of course. See you then.”
Coralee sent her a look of frazzled relief when Maggie appeared beside her. She gave Coralee a reassuring wink. This was nothing they couldn’t handle. Sure, the bakery was jam-packed, but there were few things in life Maggie loved more than a challenge.
“Would you like a sandwich to go with your coffee?” she asked the disheveled reporter across from her. His press pass, dangling from a lanyard around his neck, read Harold Lipsky. “The egg salad is fresh. Family recipe.”
Harold blinked. “Wait. You’re the sister of the bride, aren’t you? Care to comment—for the record, of course—on what it’s like seeing your sister marry America’s favorite quarterback?”
Maggie maintained her brisk, professional smile. “Not even a little. But if you’d like a sandwich or a pastry to go with your coffee, I’d be happy to get that for you.”
“Not one single comment?” Harold pushed a few crumpled dollars across the counter. “Maybe something about how you’re hoping to marry a famous athlete, too?”