by Mindy Klasky
It was after nine when Anne finally said, “Well, tomorrow’s bread won’t bake itself.”
Everyone else took their cues, gathering their belongings, pulling on coats, exchanging hugs and good wishes for the coming week. Anne didn’t say anything to Lexi until they were halfway to Adams Street. Then she said, “Don’t do it.”
“Do what?” Lexi asked with pretended innocence. Anne just stared at her. Lexi finally said, “What? You think I’m going to drive to every hotel in Winchester?”
“I think you’re going to call him. Then drive to wherever he says he is.”
“I promise you. I won’t do that.”
Anne shook her head, but she didn’t press the point. Instead, she said, “I’ll be home. Call me if you need me.”
“I’m fine.”
“Call me if you need me,” she repeated.
Lexi gave her a quick hug, because that’s what best friends did. And then she marched to her own home and slipped behind the wheel of her Corolla.
She didn’t have to call Finn. Because she already knew where he was.
~~~
Finn jerked awake, his fingers automatically clutching the grip of his sidearm, ready to defend himself against attackers.
Except he didn’t have a sidearm. He had a half-empty bottle of whiskey.
And there weren’t any attackers. Just a dark shadow outside the driver’s-side window of his truck. He squinted in the dim moonlight. Shit. Who told Lexi he was here?
The motel loomed behind her, its darkened row of rooms staring out with empty, curtained eyes. The sign over the parking lot was dark, but if he squinted he could make out its message in the moonlight. “Closed for Season,” it said, the “C” already tilted to a crazy angle, victim of some gust of wind. Dry leaves swirled against the door of the room he’d called home for three weeks.
Fuck. He swiveled his legs to the floorboard and shoved his extra clothes into the passenger seat. So much for his improvised blanket. He pushed open the truck door, and the cold air slapped him hard. Almost as hard as Lexi’s voice: “What the hell are you doing, Finn?”
He scratched his chin. “Sleeping.” She obviously didn’t like that answer, so he tried explaining. “The Hyland’s closed till spring.”
“So you didn’t say anything? You didn’t ask friends for help?”
“Don’t wanna be friends,” he muttered. And he didn’t. Lexi wasn’t friends material. She was something different. Something more. Or she had been, until he washed up homeless. A homeless vet with a ghost problem—pure catnip for a girl like Lexi. He started to reach for his one true friend—his bottle of Jack—but he stopped himself just in time.
“You could have told me, Finn. Or the Dawsons. They would have taken you in.”
Sure they would. What parents wouldn’t adopt the guy who’d watched their son die? Besides, he’d never actually met the Dawsons, hadn’t made it over to their house for the inevitable sobfest he’d promised J-Dawg he’d lead. Finn said precisely, “I’m fine, Lexi.”
“You’re drunk.”
He clambered from the truck and pulled himself up to his full height. “I don’t tell you how to spend your nights.”
She didn’t have an answer for that. Or maybe she did; she was just too smart to say it out loud.
He said, “Don’t worry. I’ll get to work on time tomorrow.”
“I don’t care about—” She cut herself off. Instead of finishing, she sighed and shook her head. “Let’s go.”
“Go where?”
“To my house. You can’t stay like this.”
Finn’s huff of disagreement fogged the air. But the armrest had already gouged out part of his spine, and his neck ached from leaning against the door.
A bed? And heat? Not to mention running water? And waking up next to Lexi? “Okay,” he said. “I’ll follow you over there.” He pulled out his keys.
Lexi shook her head. “You aren’t driving anywhere tonight.”
Who the hell did she think she was, telling him what to do? Finn whirled back to his truck.
But he misjudged the distance. Or the door swung out as it caught the full weight of his body. Or he was a hell of a lot drunker than he thought he was. He ended up sitting on his ass in the gravel parking lot of the Hyland Motel.
“Oh, Finn,” Lexi said. And there was something in his voice he hadn’t heard before: Tears. He’d made Lexi cry.
He was such an asshole.
So, he pushed himself up to his hands and knees. He used the truck’s running board to climb to his feet. He leaned in and scraped up the clothes he’d been using as a blanket, his extra sweater, his leather jacket. He started to reach for the bottle of Jack, but something—some remnant of pride, some whisper of looming disaster—told him to shove it under the seat instead.
He squinted into the darkness, half expecting to find J-Dawg staring back at him. But no. The bastard was nowhere in sight.
Silently, Lexi waved him over to her car. She waited for him to settle in the passenger seat and she made a show out of fastening her seatbelt, waiting for him to do the same. He almost laughed out loud—after Parwan, he didn’t think a lot about the danger of riding in a civilian car on a civilian road in the middle of a quiet December night.
All the same, he watched the shadows as Lexi drove. Even drunk, his brain ticked off a constant running commentary. That was a dog running out the length of its lead, not a child rushing the car. That was a trashcan set out early for morning collection, not a lurking insurgent. The bridge arched over the slow water of Harmony Creek was free of trip wires glinting in the moonlight.
His hands were knotted into fists by the time Lexi pulled up in front of her house.
She led the way to the front door. He leaned against the storm-door frame, convincing himself he was being helpful as she worked the lock. He caught his foot on the half step into the house but managed to keep from falling, even when her three-legged dog did its best to trip him, whining and barking like it had never seen Finn before.
“Lucky!” Lexi ordered, pointing toward the plaid dog bed in the corner of the living room. The dog wasn’t stupid. It knew she meant business.
“Come on,” Lexi said to Finn. “Let’s get you to bed.”
“Bed…” He said, trying to make the word take the place of an hour of foreplay.
She rolled her eyes and stomped away. So much for that plan. But he knew how to kiss that frown from Lexi’s face. He could turn it into something else, something hot, something raw.
By the time he got to the bed, she was coming out of the bathroom. “Here,” she said, and he half-stood to face her, to get his arms around her, to find that soft spot above the pulse in her neck.
She held a plastic cup in one hand and a bottle in the other. Pills. Aspirin.
She worked the cap and shook four into his palm. “Go ahead,” she said. “You’ll thank me in the morning.”
“I’ll thank you right now.” He tried to growl the words, to make her step closer to him, to excite her. Instead, she arched her eyebrows, watching with skepticism as he swallowed the aspirin, chasing them with the full glass of water.
While she carried the bottle and the empty glass back to the bathroom, he got ready for her. As she returned, he shifted his legs to keep his balance. He folded one hand around her waist as she passed by him. He tightened his forearm and pulled her close.
“Finn,” she said, putting her left hand on his chest. Of course it was her left hand. She did everything she could to keep her right arm hidden away.
He bent to kiss her.
“Finn,” she said again, using the same tone she had with the dog. She caught his wrist with her good hand and backed him up till he felt the mattress behind his calves. She pushed lightly on his shoulders, and he obliged by sitting on the edge. She knelt in front of him.
Her head bobbed as she worked, loosening the knots, pulling the leather tongue free, first on his right shoe, then on his left. He glanced toward the f
ar corner of the room. J-Dawg would have a field day if he saw this. Give him a thumbs-up at least. Mouth the punchline from a dirty joke.
But the Dawg wasn’t there. And as Lexi pulled off Finn’s left shoe, he realized this wasn’t the set up for a dirty joke. This was something sweeter. Something softer. Something a hell of a lot more sad.
He reached out and pulled Lexi up to sit beside him, pretending he didn’t notice how she twisted to the side, how she angled her body so he couldn’t see the way her right arm didn’t quite straighten all the way. Her tongue darted out, and she licked her lips. He waited for his blood to rush south, for the familiar pulse to take over and shove his thoughts out of the way.
But he didn’t get hard.
“Lie down,” Lexi said, pointing toward the pillows at the head of the bed. That could have been sexy, like a nurse ordering him around. But his dick sure didn’t know what to do with the scene spun out in his head.
So he lay down on the bed, humiliated. He closed his eyes, but he felt her move his legs, swinging his feet to a more comfortable angle on the mattress. Her fingers were cool as she raised his head, as she shifted the pillow beneath his neck. She picked up a blanket from the foot of the bed and shook it out, letting it fall soft and warm over his body.
She was so kind. She was kind and quiet and gentle, and he was broken. He wasn’t good for her, wasn’t good for anyone.
His breath rasped, and his throat swelled around salt. Disgusted with himself, he tried to hold his breath, to measure out a slow count of twenty, to make her think he’d fallen asleep or at least passed out.
But Lexi wouldn’t have that either, wouldn’t let him hide. Instead, she climbed onto the bed beside him. With the blanket between them, she pressed against his back. She draped her good arm over his side. That little weight, that soft pressure reminded him to breathe again, normally, like a man whose world wasn’t falling apart.
She didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to. His fingers fumbled for hers, but he was out cold before he found them.
CHAPTER 9
Lexi juggled her coffee and keys as she let herself into the shop. Her fingers were clumsy from lack of sleep. She should have taken the time to down her caffeine at the diner.
But staying at the Orchard Diner would have meant subjecting herself to more questions from Anne. And Lexi was still pretending she hadn’t gone after Finn last night, that she hadn’t brought home another lost puppy.
Anne wasn’t buying it anyway, not from her skeptical look as she took in Lexi’s all-black attire. But Anne didn’t understand how hard it was to get dressed in the dark, fumbling in a closet because Lexi didn’t want to wake the man sleeping in her bed. She’d fed Pirate and Lucky in the mud room so their excited yowls and yips wouldn’t force her to face the debacle from the night before.
It wasn’t the sex—or rather, the lack thereof. She could live without sex. Had done, for plenty of long stretches before Finn came to town.
It was the drinking. The drinking, and the lying—by omission, at least. What the hell had he been thinking, sleeping in his truck? Why didn’t he trust her? Why couldn’t he act like a normal man in a normal relationship?
Relationship.
Right. Like they had a relationship. He’d barged into The Christmas Cat like a bull into a china shop. She’d accepted his labor because she didn’t have any other way to recoup her loss. They were both counting down the days until New Year’s, until he could hit the road for Boston, for the rest of his life.
Who was lying now?
Lexi went through the motions of opening up the shop. She flipped on the lights and powered up the register. She pulled out her laptop and checked on inventory. It was Tuesday, so she took a feather duster to the trees, leaving the ornaments gleaming in her wake.
She felt restless when she’d finished, like she’d left something undone. No wonder—there was a trail of muddy footprints down the main aisle of the store. She’d only had half a dozen customers all of yesterday; most people had been scared off by the rain. But someone had managed to track in half the mud of Harmony Springs.
Sighing, she headed toward the storage closet in the back room to fetch the bucket and mop. She never got to the closet, though.
The floor was covered with water.
Stunned, Lexi looked at the back wall. Her old nemesis, the window sill, was dripping. But that wasn’t the real problem. The real problem was that an entire sheet of drywall had collapsed onto the floor. The soggy gypsum board had fallen in chunks, clearly overwhelmed by a lifetime of trying to hold back flood waters.
The feet of the armchair stood in a puddle. Pine boards were soaked where they lay on the floor, waiting to be converted into shelves, into the protective platform Chris had envisioned weeks ago.
Chris! Boxes of his books were surrounded by water, with tell-tale dark stains creeping up the cardboard sides. Lexi’s belly churned as she thought of all that wonderful stock ruined, of all the potential sales destroyed.
What the hell had Finn done? Or, more to the point, what hadn’t he done?
He had promised to fix the window. He’d had weeks to get that basic job done before he’d started in on his battle scenes. On the battle scenes that even now were perfectly safe and secure, high on their tables above the flooded floor.
Lexi whirled back to the front of the store, already grabbing her cell phone. She’d call her home number until Finn answered. She didn’t give a damn if he woke up with a hangover. She only wished the phone rang louder beside her bed.
She’d just punched in the number when the jaunty chimes jangled over the shop’s front door. Furious with the interruption, she started to snarl, “I’ll be with you in a moment.”
But common sense jumped in before she could make a complete fool out of herself.
“Mrs. Dawson,” she said instead. “Good morning.” She stabbed at her phone with her thumb, cutting off the call home. It took her one more moment to lapse back into her professional role, and then she was sighing about yesterday’s storm, about Harmony Creek breaching its banks, speculating about whether the Fire Department had kept the wood covered for the Christmas Fête bonfire. That last thought—of the bonfire—made her stomach churn, but it wasn’t any worse than the anger she already felt toward Finn.
“I won’t keep you,” Mrs. Dawson finally said. “I just wanted to pick up those candles you ordered for me.”
Of course. The candles. What sort of businesswoman was Lexi, that she didn’t even remember special orders for her clients?
Nevertheless, she pasted a smile on her face. “I’ve got them in the back room.”
At least she wasn’t wearing a long skirt. She didn’t have to worry about ruining her clothes as she crossed the flooded storeroom to retrieve the brown box for Mrs. Dawson. The candles themselves were safely perched on one of Chris’s boxes.
How the hell was she going to air out the shop? And what was she going to say to Finn when he got his sorry ass down here?
The door chimes rang again as Lexi cradled the box of candles against her chest. She hurried back to the front room.
Speak of the devil. Finn slipped into the store like a beaten dog, his Red Sox cap jammed low on his forehead, his shoulders slumped forward. He barely glanced at Mrs. Dawson. Instead, he became fascinated by a display of old tin toys.
Just as well, Lexi thought sourly. He can’t break those.
She braced herself for Mrs. Dawson to chat politely with Finn. The last thing she wanted to hear was the woman saying nice things to the man who’d served with her son. Lexi didn’t want to be reminded that Finn was a hero.
But Mrs. Dawson wasn’t chatting with Finn. Mrs. Dawson looked like she’d never seen Finn before in her life.
“Here you go,” Lexi said. “One dozen eight-inch column candles. Scarlet, Forest Green, and Gold.” She used a box cutter to slice the packing tape, pulling out one for Mrs. Dawson to review. She pushed down the slightest shudder as her fingertip brushed
against the wick.
“Excellent,” Mrs. Dawson said. “Could you pass me one of the green ones? I want to get napkin holders that match.” She nodded toward the bins at the side of the store, toward the kaleidoscope of festive tableware. “Why don’t you help this young man while I make up my mind?”
This young man.
Mrs. Dawson’s eyes passed politely over Finn, and she smiled vacantly. Finn only glanced toward the back room, obviously eager to make his escape. Lexi saw the exact moment he registered the water on the floor. Or maybe that was just his green complexion from his overindulgence the night before.
He obviously didn’t want an audience for the fight they were about to have. Instead, he mumbled something about looking for a present for his sister. He shuffled toward the nearest decorated tree.
He was a lousy liar.
Lexi was willing to bet his sister didn’t give a damn about Matchbox cars. But that was fine. Lexi didn’t give a damn about his sister.
She wanted to know why Finn was ignoring Mrs. Dawson. She wanted to know why the two people in her shop were acting like they’d never seen each other before in their lives. She wanted to know why Finn had let her believe he’d made his peace with the Dawsons, that he’d visited their house, eaten at their table. Told them about the sacrifice their son had made.
Lexi’s ears were buzzing as Mrs. Dawson returned to the front of the shop, eight napkin rings in hand. The roof of her mouth had gone numb, as if she’d drunk too many chocotinis. She went through the mechanics of the sale without a single conscious thought—keying numbers into the register, swiping a credit card, wrapping each individual napkin ring in bright red tissue paper, putting them and the candles into doubled-up shopping bags.
“Thank you so much,” Mrs. Dawson said as she headed for the door. “I’ll see you at the Fête!”
“Absolutely,” Lexi said, even though she hadn’t gone to the Fête since she was twelve years old.