Which, Kate figured as she walked out of the M &S and into the bright afternoon sun, was way more info than she needed to know about the Fernwoods' son-in-law. She moved down the sidewalk toward her Honda CRV and looked across the parking lot. Rob was out front of Sutter Sports, still wearing the same green sweatshirt and jeans he'd had on earlier. The only difference was that he'd put on a pair of black sunglasses with blue lenses.
Before she thought better of it, she stepped off the curb and moved across the asphalt lot. Yeah, he was the president of the "bad relationship bet" club, but he'd also been the only man in the Buckhorn bar who'd stepped up to help her out. She wasn't sure he knew how truly grateful she was.
As she got closer, she watched him stick an ax under one arm and pull on a pair of brown leather work gloves. Then before her eyes, he turned and swung the ax at one of the four-foot evergreens growing in twin planters next to the front doors. Two swings and the tree lay on the ground at his feet.
"Hello," she called out to him as she stepped up onto the curb.
He glanced back over his shoulder at her and straightened.
"What? Are you in desperate need of firewood?" she asked as she stopped in front of the dead tree.
"Stand back a little bit," he said and swung at the other tree. It fell on the ground next to its twin.
"I've always hated those things," he said as he turned toward her. He held up the ax, and the wooden handle slid through his gloved hand and stopped at the heavy steal head. "They look like they belong at the Four Seasons, not a sporting goods store in the Idaho Sawtooths."
"Are you going to replace them?"
"I was thinking about maybe getting some of those tall weeds." He bit one fingertip of his gloves and pulled it off.
"You mean like pampas grass or maidenhair?"
He shoved the glove in the front pocket of his sweatshirt. "Yeah, probably. I have some of that stuff growing in my yard, and I like it." He took off his sunglasses and shoved them in the pocket, too. The sun shone bright, and lines appeared in the corners of his green eyes looking back at her. He kicked one of the trees with the toe of his boot. "Those had to die."
"It's probably a good thing you don't sell guns."
He smiled and, for some appalling reason, a little tingle settled in her stomach. She glanced away from his mouth to the destruction at her feet.
"No," he said. "No guns."
She certainly understood why he didn't sell guns. "Wow, I'm surprised they let you live around here."
"I'm not anti-gun. I just don't have a need for them."
She glanced up at the striped awning overhead. "When are you opening?"
"April first. A week from tomorrow." He didn't elaborate, and an awkward silence stretched between them. She couldn't help but wonder if he was recalling the night she'd made a fool out of herself. Or the night he'd had to rescue her from the Buckhorn. She folded her arms across her chest, and Ada's bag of cold remedies swung and bumped her thigh.
"How's your jaw?" she asked as she glanced at the side of his face. "Does it hurt?"
"No."
"Good. If you hadn't stepped in when you did, I'm certain I'd still be at the Buckhorn playing pool."
"The Worsleys are idiots."
"I think you called them numb nuts."
He chuckled. "They're that too."
"Well, thanks again for helping me out."
"Don't mention it." He tapped the ax handle against his leg as if he were impatient to get rid of her.
She took a step back. "See ya around."
He bent and picked up the trunk of one evergreen. "Yeah."
While she felt little tingles, he clearly felt nothing. It was embarrassing. She turned and started for her car. But his lack of interest wasn't exactly a news update-which was just as well. She wasn't in town to date-especially men like Rob. She was here to help her grandfather.
The following Friday she helped him out in a way that changed his life.
She'd inadvertently given her grandfather her cold, and he was forced to stay home in bed. Before Kate left for work, she spoke to Grace Sutter about bringing him into the clinic. Grace didn't believe it was necessary, but she promised to look in on him on her lunch break and after she closed up for the day.
The first thing Kate did when she got to the M &S that morning was to pull Tom Jones out of the CD player and plug in Alicia Keys. She followed Alica up with Sarah McLachlan and Dido. It was definitely kick-butt girl day.
At one o'clock that afternoon, she called a gourmet food wholesaler down in Boise and ordered olives, jalapeno jelly, and wafer thin crackers. She thought it best to start out small, and if those items sold, her grandfather would have to agree with some of her other ideas.
At five, the Aberdeen twins came to work, and Kate changed out the tills. She counted the money, recorded the amounts in her grandfather's ledgers, and put the money in the safe until the next morning. The telephone rang just as she was about to leave the office at six. It was her grandfather, and he wanted her to do two things for him. "Grab the books," which she'd already done, and make one delivery on her way home.
"Rob's special order came in yesterday," he said between coughing fits. "Take it out to his place."
Kate glanced down at her beige wraparound blouse that closed with three leather buckles at one side, and she brushed dust from her left breast. "I'll call him, and he can come get it tomorrow." She didn't want to see Rob. It had been a long, exhausting day and she just wanted to go home, get out of her black twill pants and leather boots. "I'm sure he doesn't need whatever it is tonight."
"Katie," her grandfather sighed. "The M &S has stayed in business all these years because our customers depend on us."
She'd heard it a hundred times before, so she grabbed a pen. "Give me the address."
Five minutes later she was driving around the left end of Fish Hook Lake. The sun was about to set behind the sharp granite peaks, throwing jagged shadows across the landscape and into the cold bluish-green lake. Kate glanced at the directions propped up behind her gearshift and took a left up a long drive with a split-pole fence. She could barely see the roof of a house, but motion sensor lights turned on like a runway, so she figured she was headed the right way. Then the house seemed to rise up in front of her, huge and imposing within the gray darkness of the setting sun.
The house was made of lake rock and logs, and the huge windows reflected towering pine and clumps of shaded snow. "Pa rum pum pum pum," she whispered. It looked more like a hotel than a private home. She pulled her Honda to a stop in front of the four-car garage and grabbed Rob's grocery bag off the passenger seat. She'd never given any thought to where he might live, but even if she had, this wouldn't have been it.
She checked the address her grandfather had given her against the numbers on the house. Professional hockey must have been very good to Rob.
She got out of her car and hung her leather backpack over one shoulder. The heels of her boots echoed across the concrete and stone as she moved up the wide porch to the double front doors.
With the grocery bag hanging off one arm, she raised her hand and knocked. The light above her head wasn't on, and there didn't appear to be any lights on in the house. After several moments, Kate set the bag by the front door and opened her purse. She dug around for a piece of paper and found an old grocery list, a bank deposit receipt, and a paper gum wrapper that smelled like mint. She pulled the wrapper out along with a pen and used the door to write against.
About halfway through the note, the light above her head flipped on and one side of the doors flew open. Kate stumbled and almost did a header into Rob's chest.
"What are you doing?" he asked.
She grabbed hold of the other door to keep from falling. "I'm delivering your groceries." She looked up past his bare feet and jeans to an old, worn T-shirt. Blue, she believed, and stretched out of shape.
"You didn't have to do that."
He had a white towel around his neck,
and he lifted one end to dry his wet hair. The loose sleeve of his shirt slipped down the hard mounds of his muscles to the dark hair nestled in his armpit. His snake tattoo circled his thick biceps, and something warm and delicious slid into her stomach. "My grandfather said…" She frowned and shoved the bag toward him. "Never mind."
He turned and walked into the house without taking the bag. A chandelier made of elk horns shone overhead and slid crystal prisms down his wide shoulders and back to the behind of his jeans. He looked at her over his shoulder. "Come in and shut the door."
Nine
"You live here alone?"
Rob tossed the towel on the back of his leather couch and finger-combed his hair. "Yeah." She'd caught him just out of the shower. He wouldn't have even seen her standing by the door if he hadn't walked by and noticed her through the windows at the top of the stairs.
Kate set the bag of groceries on a coffee table as she moved past him across the great room. "Wow, I've never really seen the lake from this side," she said as she looked out the floor-to-ceiling windows.
Rob glanced out at the patches of snow around the clear lake. In the summer, the water reflected the dense pine and took on an emerald green color. Tonight the quarter moon was just starting to rise over the jagged teeth of the Sawtooths, casting the mountains and lake in a light gray.
"Do you like it?" he asked as he ran his gaze down the back of Kate's coat and pants to the heels of those dominatrix boots of hers. No female, other than his mother, had ever been in his home. That Kate was even here felt a bit disconcerting-like watching the star from your favorite porn film step from the screen and into your living room. He'd been thinking about her so much it was embarrassing. Almost as if he were sixteen instead of thirty-six.
"It's gorgeous." She pushed one side of her hair behind her ear. "When I visited Gospel when I was young, my grandmother used to take me to the public beach." She pointed to her right, toward town. She leaned forward and placed her palm against the glass, her long ringers spread out and pressed flat. Her short, shiny nails pointed toward the ceiling. "I can see the marina over there." She dropped her hand and looked over at him. "Oops. Sorry." She frowned and turned toward him. "I got my handprint on your clean window."
"That's okay. It'll give Mabel something to do when she cleans next week." He folded his arms across his chest and rested his weight on one foot. His gaze took in her smooth, red hair resting against the thin column of her throat. He knew that the skin where her shoulder met her neck was as soft as it looked.
"Your house is beautiful, Rob," she said, and it was the first time he could recall her using his name.
Of course, he'd imagined her using it. But in a context that would probably get his face slapped. Inviting her in had been a bad idea. Very bad. He should show her the door. Instead he heard himself say, "Do you want to see the rest of it?"
"Sure."
Too late now. "You can leave your coat down here, if you'd like." He didn't offer to help her. He'd pretty much learned his lesson about that the last time.
She shrugged out of her coat and laid it by the grocery sack. She walked toward him, and his gaze took in her sweater, which wrapped across her breast and closed with buckles on one side. Black leather buckles. The kind that wouldn't be that hard to open. Don't think about the buckles.
He turned, and she followed him upstairs. The first room they entered was filled with free weights and exercise equipment. In front of a wall of mirrors sat his treadmill and Nordic Track.
"Do you really use this stuff?" She pushed up her sleeves, exposing the delicate blue veins on the insides of her wrists.
"Most every day." First he'd noticed her neck and now her wrists. He felt like a vampire.
"I joined a gym once." She walked in the room and ran her hand over his weights. "The Golds on Flamingo Road. I paid a year's membership and went three months. I'm afraid I'm not dedicated to fitness."
"Maybe you need someone to motivate you." He watched her long fingers and hands slip across a row of chrome dumbbells. In his former life, he would have offered to motivate her.
"No, that's not my problem. I went with my friend Marilyn, and she's a Stair Master fiend. She tried to motivate me." She shook her head. "But once my thighs start to burn, I just have to lie down. I'm kind of a wimp when it comes to pain."
He laughed even though he wished she hadn't mentioned burning thighs. "Come on." He led her back out to the open hallway that looked down at the entrance and great room. "That's my daughter's room," he said and pointed to a closed door.
"How often does she visit?"
"Amelia's never visited me here. She lives in Seattle with her mother, but when the house was built, I had her room done for her."
"How old is she?"
"Two."
He pointed to another closed door. "That's a bathroom, but I don't think it's ever been used." They moved past some sort of alcove with a couch he never sat on and a big plant he never watered. "You ever married?"
"No."
"Ever get close?"
"A few times." She laughed without humor. "Or at least I thought so. They didn't, though."
"That's a problem." They moved to the open door of his bedroom. The place where he'd pictured her naked. Tied to his bed or on her knees in the moonlight. He wondered if he should feel like a pig for thinking about her naked so much. He wondered if it counted since she didn't know, and he never planned to do anything about it. He leaned a shoulder into the door frame and shoved his hands into the front pockets of his Levi's. As he watched her move silently through his room, he wondered if he'd ever be able to separate the Kate looking out his bedroom window from the Kate who'd wanted to have sex with him the first night they met. He doubted it. The two were so interwoven in his brain that when he looked at her, it was always there.
"Is this your little girl?" she asked as she stopped in front of his entertainment center, cluttered with pictures of his daughter.
"Yeah. That's Amelia."
She leaned in for a closer look. "She's cute. She looks like you."
"My mother thinks so."
Kate took a step back, and her gaze moved to his big-screen television. "Hockey must pay well."
So, she did know a thing or two about him. It was no secret. Everyone in town knew. "It did, yes."
"What team?"
"Ottawa Senators. New York Rangers. Florida Panthers. Detroit Red Wings. L.A. Kings, and the Seattle Chinooks."
She looked across at him. "Sounds like you moved around a lot."
"Yeah." He didn't really like to talk about the past. It brought up too many questions he didn't want to answer. Too many memories he didn't like to think about.
The carpet muffled the sound of her boots as she walked toward him and stopped about a foot away. "Were you good?"
His gaze slid to her mouth. "What do you think?"
She tilted her head to one side as if she were studying him. "I think you were probably scary."
"Do you watch hockey?"
"Just enough to know that if you were skating toward me, I'd get out of your way." She bit her lip, and it slid through her teeth. "And I saw you take out the Worsleys."
He chuckled. "Let's go downstairs," he said before he gave in to the urge to bite her lip, too.
He pointed to two more closed doors. One bedroom was filled with his fly-tying gear. The other had boxes of his hockey stuff in it. They walked downstairs and through the house, past the dining room to the kitchen. On the granite countertops and steel gas range sat his sheets of cooling granola. He was addicted to the stuff, and he'd been making his own for several years. He'd just about perfected his honey almond crunch. When he'd played hockey, the guys had all given him a raft of shit about his granola, but they all secretly hit him up for some when no one else was around.
She stood next to the work island in the middle of the room and gazed up at the pots and pans hanging on the rack above her head. The recessed lighting cast her in a warm glow and sh
one in her red hair. "Who uses all these pots and pans?"
"Me." He lived alone and had learned a long time ago how to cook for himself. Life on the road and eating in restaurants could get real old. "When I'm here." He scooped up some granola and moved toward her. "Open up," he said as he held his fingers in front of her mouth.
She looked skeptical, as if she might argue. "What's in it?"
"Oats, flaxseed, honey." Or maybe she was just nervous. He liked to think he made her nervous.
"Did you know that a bee only produces one and a half teaspoons of honey during its lifetime?"
"That's fascinating. Now open up."
Her gaze stared into his as she tilted her head back and opened her mouth. The tips of his fingers touched her lips. He dropped the granola into her mouth as if she were a bird, then he stepped back.
She chewed, then licked the corner of her mouth. "That's pretty good stuff."
"I'm addicted to it." He grabbed one of the cooking sheets and sat it on the island next to her. "Help yourself."
"Are you sure you made it?"
"Of course. Who else?"
"I don't know, but you don't strike me as the type of guy who makes his own granola."
It was on the tip of his tongue to ask her what she did think of him, but he supposed he already knew. She thought he drove a HUMMER to compensate for a small dick and impotence. "That's because you don't know me."
"That's true." She cocked her head to one side and studied him. "Can I ask you something?"
"Yeah, but I don't have to answer."
"That's fair," she said and crossed her arms beneath her breasts. "Why do you live in such a huge house when you're not even here that much?"
"I'm here from March to September. Well, when I'm not at the store, anyway." Which didn't answer her question. Why had he built a big house? He shoved his hip into the counter next to her. "I guess because I've lived in big houses with pools and Jacuzzis and game rooms for most of my adult life. So, when it came time to build this one, I just went with what I was used to."
The Trouble With Valentine's Day Page 11