His Valentine Surprise

by Tanya Michaels

  When he spoke, his voice was still thick with medically administered narcotics, but his eyes seemed clearer. “Almost kissed you earlier tonight.”

  Her breath froze in her lungs and she had to force herself to exhale. Almost let you. “I know.”

  “Probably shouldn’t?”

  Shay couldn’t tell whether it was a statement or a question. But she answered it as much for her own good as his. “Probably not.”

  AFTER GETTING MARK’S EXACT address from his license, Shay thought she had a pretty good idea of where he lived. Apparently, she’d been wrong.

  Since Mark had drifted to sleep before she’d even cleared the ticket booth in the hospital’s parking deck, he hadn’t been much help. She’d opted not to wake him—as much from self-preservation as out of kindness. On a feminine, instinctive level, she’d been aware of the chemistry between them, those moments that were a little too charged to be fully platonic, the glances that lasted a smidge too long to be casual. But she hadn’t expected him to bring it into conversation so candidly. Now that he had, it was more difficult to act as if those sparks weren’t there.

  Almost kissed you. She shivered. What would that have been like, kissing Mark Hathaway?

  “Pull yourself together,” she muttered in the dark car. Good grief, no wonder she’d gotten herself lost on Braeden’s back roads. It was difficult to fantasize and pay attention to where you were driving at the same time. Time to enlist help. “Mark?”

  Nothing. He was out—not snoring, not fidgeting in his sleep, but finally, completely untroubled. His face was expressionless and unlined, his eyelashes dark crescents against his cheeks. Although she’d seen him laughing before, picking on Cade or grinning at his daughter, she realized now that even when Mark was having fun, there was a subtle tension in the way he held himself. This was the first time she’d seen him at peace.

  In Vicki’s Valentine solicitation, she’d said that her dad was lonely. Shay wondered if he felt that way. Though he obviously had friends and family who cared a great deal for him, at the end of the day, he still had to shoulder his responsibilities alone.

  Like you. Shay was comfortably independent and a proud feminist. She didn’t “need” a man, and her parents’ insinuations that she did had rubbed her nerves raw. But she had to admit, there were days that just sucked out loud, when school boards voted in bad policies that principals then had to implement whether they agreed with them or not, days where you went home knowing that despite your efforts you hadn’t gotten through to a child with the message you wanted them to hear—and on those days, a friendly hug or back rub or even a heartfelt “you did the best you could” would count for a lot. And in the running of his store and raising of his daughter, Mark didn’t have that, either.

  She might have experienced a twinge of pity for him, except that would have equaled feeling sorry for herself, too, which she refused to do.

  “Mark!” Her voice was louder, more demanding this time.

  He inhaled deeply, blinking as he slowly came awake. “Shay?” He seemed confused by his surroundings.

  Her name sounded far different in Mark’s sleepy drawl. “Y-yeah. I’m taking you home from the E.R., remember? Only I think we took a wrong turn.”

  Straightening in his seat, he looked out the window. “Where the hell are we?”

  “Not entirely sure. That’s what I meant by wrong turn.” In her defense, she’d only lived in town a month—most of which had been spent at the school, her house, or Geneva’s—it was dark, and it was going on midnight. Her mental acuity for the day had peaked hours ago.

  “Okay, give me a sec. Can you pull over, let me get my bearings?”

  They had the road completely to themselves. It was no trouble to steer her car over to the shoulder. She tried to talk him through the roads she’d taken.

  “Got it, you should have gone left on Gideon instead of a right. And you must have taken Pine Street.”

  “Isn’t that what I wanted?”

  “Nope. Our subdivision is off Pine Court.”

  She scowled. “The town ain’t that big. How many pines do they really need?”

  “Well, it is the state tree,” he teased gently. “As long as there’s no one coming, let’s make a U-turn. I’ll let you know when to turn.”

  Glancing in her side mirrors, she spun the wheel. “You’re obviously feeling more…alert. How’s the hand?”

  “Throbbing. I don’t know if I remembered to say so earlier, but thanks for taking me to the hospital. I really didn’t want to go, but it was the right call.”

  He’d brought up his wife before he’d fallen asleep. Would it help him to talk about it? Keeping her voice matter-of-fact, the way she did with parents or students who had been through something traumatic, she asked, “Did you guys have to spend lots of time in the hospital when Jessica got sick?”

  “Not enough.” He sounded calm, not as maudlin as he had in his pharmaceutical haze. “She had such non-specific symptoms that she didn’t go to the doctor for a long time. Even when she did, it took them too long to identify a cancer that had already spread from its original site. So we didn’t spend months and years in and out of the hospital the way some people do, which is probably a mercy. But since her diagnosis was so grim from the beginning, the trips we did make were all… It was awful to be in a place that’s supposed to be about healing and recovery and not have any hope.”

  She wanted to tell him she was sorry, but they were just words. Inadequate and redundant—she was sure he’d heard it a hundred times.

  “Losing her was even more difficult than when my parents died,” he said. “My folks died a couple of years apart, obviously not as young as Jess was, and she’s the person who helped me cope with their deaths. When she died— It’s melodramatic to say I felt utterly alone. After all, Dee had just lost her sister, which had to hurt like hell, yet she still found the strength to take care of me and Vicki.”

  “Is Vicki a lot like her mom?” Shay asked, helping him focus on the bright spot in his life. “No offense, but I couldn’t help noticing she looks nothing like you.”

  “She’s definitely her mother’s daughter, but Jess was…sweet. Soft. That makes her sound weak, doesn’t it? She wasn’t. She just didn’t have my ornery streak. Vicki does. My daughter has a big heart—I’ve never seen her do anything intentionally malicious—but she can be seriously stubborn.”

  Shay chuckled, recalling the little girl’s determined face as she’d announced that “people should never give up.” “There are worse things to be in life. A sense of persistence might serve her well.”

  “Let’s hope I can redirect that ‘persistence’ to earning Campside Girls badges instead of marrying me off!”

  “Do you think you’ll ever get married again?” The question escaped of its own volition, hanging over them like one of those cartoon dialogue bubbles. It was none of Shay’s business and it would be easy to mistake her curiosity for personal interest. Yet since she’d already put it out there, she held her breath, waiting to see if he would answer.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe? It’s not that I’ve decided to be alone forever. Or even that I’m waiting to be ‘over’ her. I loved Jessica. She gave me Vicki. She’ll always be part of who I am. But she wouldn’t want me to spend my life as some untouchable shrine to what we had. I just… I don’t think much about it.”

  “You have plenty of other things on your mind,” Shay said. She knew what that was like. Her mother had seemed to believe for a couple of years that Shay was deliberately avoiding relationships in rebellion against her parents. But Shay had friends and a job and commitments in the community—unconsciously rebelling was only a tiny fraction of her motivation.

  “If I ever did stop to imagine it,” Mark continued, “well, it’s tough to see anyone else as my wife. Hell, it’s hard to picture anyone else as a girlfriend. She was the only one I ever had.”

  Shay almost swerved off the road. “You’re kidding.”


  “We were high school sweethearts. I went out on a few dates before we met, held hands with a girl in middle school and called it ‘going together,’ but my only real relationship was Jess.”

  Wow.

  “I sound wildly inexperienced, don’t I?”

  It was a loaded question. Judging from his heated gaze as he’d looked into her eyes at the skating rink, Shay would have said he was a man who knew exactly what he was doing and what he wanted. “N-not exactly.”

  Just because he’d been committed to one woman and didn’t take relationships lightly…well, that was kind of sexy, actually. Geneva had admitted on the phone that Cade’s local reputation was as a charming, free-spirited ladies’ man. The two of them had been out and enjoyed each other’s company, but Geneva wasn’t picking out china patterns. But someone like Mark? If he—

  “Here!” His sharp declaration startled her. “We need to turn here. Sorry, should have mentioned that sooner.”

  She made an abrupt turn, glad there was no one on the road behind them.

  “Then you’ll make a left at the second stop sign,” Mark directed.

  “Got it, thanks.”

  “So what about you?” he asked as she drove. “Leave a string of brokenhearted ex-boyfriends behind you?”

  “Just one. I mean, there’ve been other boyfriends, but only one ever got serious enough that he might have been truly brokenhearted.” At least, she liked to imagine him that way. “We were together three and a half years, even got engaged, but I broke it off a few months before we reached the altar.”

  Mark remained silent, wordlessly encouraging her to tell the story. It was only fair, she thought. He’d certainly opened up to her.

  “I was twenty-two when we met. We were both student teaching, used to have these long discussions about the school system, ways it could be more effective, personal contributions we hoped to make, ideas for improving it. Eventually, he adopted more of a ‘why rock the boat?’ philosophy, and I was brainstorming my grand ideas alone.”

  “So you broke up with him because you were an idealist and he was lazy?”

  “No. I know I can get…carried away. I grew up doing my homework at the back of my mom’s classroom, listening to her and her teacher friends talk. I’ve always had big plans that get reined in by more conservative boards and, you know, reality. It probably made sense for me to be with someone a little less zealous. What bothered me was the day when I was ranting and raving about a standardized testing policy I thought could hurt more kids than it ended up helping and Bryan joked, ‘Well, if it bothers you so much, you can just homeschool our kids.’ Plenty of families choose homeschooling as a valid alternative, but that’s not where I belong. Or what I ever wanted. When we got to talking more about it, I realized he actually could picture me at home with our kids, setting aside my career even though I was more passionate and ambitious about mine than he was about his. Does that make me sound selfish?” she asked, ashamed that she was seeking the validation. Her mother had thrown a fit when Shay broke the engagement.

  “Selfish because you didn’t want to marry someone who clearly didn’t understand you? Or share your life goals?” Mark shook his head. “You’re a bright, beautiful woman who deserves to be loved for who she is. Why settle for someone who’s a poor fit when you would have made each other miserable?”

  Her lips parted in surprise at his eloquent flattery. “Th-thank you. I would love for you to meet my mother someday. Maybe you could get her to come around to your way of thinking.”

  They’d made it back to an area of town Shay recognized, and finding the rest of the way was easy.

  Even with the streetlight, she couldn’t tell much about the outside of his house in the dark. It was slightly bigger than hers, some toy horses sat up on the porch, and the lawn definitely needed to be cut.

  “This is it,” Mark said, awkwardly removing his seat belt with one hand.

  “Could you use some help unlocking the front door? Or assistance with anything inside?”

  His eyes met hers, inscrutable. Then he shook his head. “I’ll manage, but thanks. You’ve done more than enough for me tonight. Have dinner with me on Valentine’s Day,” he blurted.

  “What?” She couldn’t tell from the way he’d said it if it was a completely impulsive invitation or if it was something he’d simply been too nervous to say until now.

  “As…as a thank-you for everything.”

  She tried to wave away the gratitude. “It was an emergency situation. I would have done the same for any of my parents.” Probably.

  “I already know you don’t have plans,” he cajoled. “You told me you didn’t. We don’t have to go out—I understand that people might get the wrong idea. Why not come here? You, me and Vicki. We’ll cook out. I know Vicki says I’m a lousy chef, but I can grill with the best of them.”

  A laugh burbled out of her. “In the middle of February, one of the coldest months of the year?”

  “Come on, Principal Morgan.” He flashed a grin. It wasn’t his legendary stubbornness that was going to get her; it was the undeniable pull in those gray eyes. “Live a little.”

  Chapter Nine

  “No, Ed, to the left!”

  “Your left, or my left?” the young man on the ladder asked.

  “We’re facing the same way! We don’t have different lefts!” Mark didn’t mean to snap at his employee. He was frustrated that he only had mobility in one hand, which made decorating the store for the upcoming Valentine’s Day sale difficult. So he’d been relegated to supervising a guy who could calculate sales tax in his head better than anyone else in the county but was color-blind, lacked depth perception and apparently couldn’t hang anything level to save his life.

  This morning, Ed had been out distributing fliers about the big weeklong sale until a rainstorm drove him back to the store. The pounding rain was supposed to trail off and turn to sleet once the sun began setting this afternoon. Mark crossed his fingers that the roads would be clear tomorrow. He had that drive to make to Hawk Summit. The operations manager had agreed to donate one night’s stay for a couple, to be raffled off at Mark’s store.

  “It’s pretty romantic up here,” the man had told him on the phone, “if I do say so myself. The exterior rooms have some spectacular views, and the luxury suites feature deluxe, Whirlpool bathtubs and his-and-her robes.”

  A deal like that could certainly help make someone’s Valentine’s Day special.

  Mark thought again of Shay’s parting words when she’d left him the night before last. I’ll think about it. Was she truly considering joining him for Valentine’s Day, or had that simply been her polite way of dodging the question? He’d shocked her with the invitation.

  Of course, he’d also shocked himself.

  Perhaps he’d been spurred to action by the conversation they’d had earlier, when he’d told her he didn’t really want to be alone—yet wasn’t he? Or maybe his judgment had been clouded by achiness, exhaustion and medicine, resulting in uncharacteristic behavior. But most likely his question came from really, really wanting to see her again.

  Mark wasn’t to the point of actually hoping Vicki would get in trouble just so he would get called to Shay’s office, but that wasn’t outside the realm of future possibility. Mark groaned. How had he become so far gone?

  “What, it’s still not in the right place?” Ed demanded, scowling at the large sign he was attempting to hang. Obviously, he’d misinterpreted the disgruntled noise his boss had made.

  “No, the banner’s fine now. Sorry, I was just— I’d better get that,” Mark interrupted himself when the phone rang. “Up A Creek. Mark Hathaway speaking.”

  “Mark, it’s Shay Morgan.” Suddenly, his hand hurt less and his day shone brighter, even through the thunderclouds dipping over the store.

  “I was just thinking about you,” he said. Was that too blunt, too needy?

  “Oh?” Her voice went breathless. “What about?”

  Maybe t
he admission hadn’t been needy after all. He swore he could hear her pleased blush—he’d noticed more than once that her delicate skin flushed easily. She had such fair coloring, almost disarmingly fragile for a woman so strong.

  “Valentine’s Day,” he said, stifling mental images of Whirlpool bathtubs. “Let me guess, you’re calling to accept my offer. Valentine’s Day is on a Monday. How late do you usually stay at the school? We’ll plan dinnertime around your schedule.”

  “That’s not actually why I called.” But she sounded as if she were smiling.

  “Well, then you can kill two birds with one stone. Solidify our plans and discuss whatever you called about.”

  “You’re very—”

  “Persistent,” he supplied unrepentantly. “I’m told there are worse things to be in life.”

  “Fine, I’ll be there at six-thirty. Will that work?”

  Mark wasn’t fooled by her mock-grudging tone. Nobody pushed around Shay Morgan. If she said yes, it was because she wanted to be with him. Eagerness suffused him. It felt as if he hadn’t looked forward to a Valentine’s Day in a lifetime, yet he couldn’t wait for this one.

  “So, what else can I do for you, Principal Morgan?”

  “Check your email, please. I drafted a letter for the parents of prospective Campside Girls and just sent it to you. It gives the details of how to sign up and also asks for willing volunteers. I just wanted to get your input before I ask Roberta to print copies and put them in the teachers’ boxes.”

  “Will do.” He shot a glance toward Ed, who was easily within earshot, and lowered his voice. Mark liked to maintain some degree of competence in front of employees. “Shay, you’re not…I don’t know, worried about me being troop leader, are you?”

  “What do you mean? I told you all the necessary people were on board with it. Hasn’t the regional leader been in touch?”

  “Yeah, I know everything’s in order, officially. But to recap, I volunteered to read to first graders and you ended up with parental complaints. I volunteered to help with the skate night and I ended up in the E.R.”