by Claire Adams
"Just a few new comments, but nothing I have to do this weekend." I waved the short story pages.
Ford frowned at all the red marks. "I thought he liked it."
I smiled. "Professor Rumsfeld gives great feedback. And my story was very well received in class."
"So? Is it the one?" Ford asked.
It felt like sunlight spreading across my chest. Everything felt right. "Yes, I think it's the one."
Ford kissed me again. "I'm so proud of you, Clarity. You're going to do it, right?"
"Yes, I'm entering the contest. There's no predicting if the judges will like it but—"
"But if you win, you'll be on your way to getting published at the same time as you graduate from Landsman College." Ford grinned and squeezed both my hands. "That's a reason to celebrate if I ever heard one."
"I've heard one better," I said.
Ford pulled my hands to his lips. "Tell me again."
"I love you, and you love me. That's the only reason I want to celebrate."
An alarm clock sounded on the floor and all the newspaper staff members jumped up from their desk. A big monitor on the far wall flickered to life and the IT staff fluttered around getting the last minute codes in place.
Ford looked from the newspaper floor, poised to publish, and then back to me.
"Go on; I don't mind waiting," I said.
"Put that in the top drawer of my desk. It locks and it will still be here when we get back."
"Get back?" I asked.
"Sorry, I have to go take care of this," Ford slipped onto the floor and took care of the final details before he could publish the new online edition of The Mirror.
I took a seat at his desk and unlocked the drawer he suggested. Once my short story was inside, I sat back and took a moment to breathe. It was impossible to not want everything all at once. Then I thought about how far we'd come. From strangers at my father's party, to a student and professor, to journalists fighting against a well-funded enemy.
"What's that look?" Ford asked when he returned.
"Life just keeps getting better and better with you," I said.
Ford sat on the corner of the desk and tapped the locked drawer. "Listen, Clarity, I understand if you want to spend the weekend working on your short story. It's a huge deal. When you win the contest, you'll have the chance to find an agent or a publisher."
I shook my head. "I'm not in it for the money or the accolades," I said.
"Those things are important," Ford said.
I leaned back in his office chair and fixed him with a sharp look. "This coming from the man that is currently missing his own awards reception at Landsman College."
"It's only for being a good example. They don't expect me to actually show up to receive it," Ford joked.
I crossed my arms. "I thought we had fun the last time we were dressed up and on campus."
He smiled at the memory of me in my formal, black dress. "Well, we could go and do that, but I really had something else in mind."
"Do I have to remind you again that these walls are glass?" I joked.
Ford grinned and stood up. He held out both hands and pulled me to my feet. "Nah, I don't have to hide this from my staff because they covered for me while I went home and got everything packed."
His intern lugged two suitcases to the office door and dropped them off with a jaunty salute.
I looked from the suitcases to Ford in surprise. "What's this?"
"This," Ford said, taking my arm and gathering up the suitcases in his other hand. "Is me taking you away on a road trip."
We went out the office doors and found his car waiting at the curb.
"A road trip?" I asked with tears of joy. "I hope it has plenty of detours."
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Epilogue
"It's okay to admit if you're lost," I said.
Ford scowled and tightened his grip on the steering wheel. I'd never seen him so tense on a road trip. He pushed the accelerator down and seemed determined to beat the clouds to the horizon.
"I'm not lost, I'm just trying to find something special," Ford said between clenched teeth.
"Hey," I joked, "I thought I was your something special."
Ford's jaw relaxed a little. "You're something else, that's for sure. I was just hoping to catch a good sunset before we have to get back to town. Hang on!" He pulled hard on the wheel and we skidded into the gravel parking lot of a scenic overlook.
I laughed. "This is the same exact overlook you brought me to two years ago. Remember? We finally left on our first road trip and we stopped here to enjoy the sunset."
Ford leaned back in the driver's seat and shrugged. "Really? I can't quite remember. That was two years and two dozen adventures ago."
"Come on, was the book tour really that bad?" I asked.
"Twelve cities in ten days? No." He reached over and squeezed my knee. "I loved every minute of it."
"You're just anxious to get back to The Mirror and dive back into work," I concluded. "I get it. When you find the work you love, it's hard to be away from it."
"I think people say that about people more often than work," Ford chuckled.
"So, I'm ambitious. I thought you loved that about me. Besides, I'm not the one under deadline at the moment. Don't you have the first fall publication due out at the end of the week?" I asked.
Ford shifted in his car seat and smiled softly at me. "That's right. It's almost Thanksgiving. It's almost exactly the day that I first met you."
I grinned. "Remember what we talked about?"
"I remember you telling me about the headline game you liked to play. How about this one: Couple Misses Stunning Sunset, Stuck in Car."
I laughed and reached for my door handle. Ford jumped out and ran around to open the car door for me. "Here's one for you: Exhausted Editor Fills Empty Spaces with Headlines."
Ford laughed and pulled me out to the scenic overlook. The sun was still warm as it nudged against the horizon. Still, there was chill sent to the air that meant autumn was on its way. It was my favorite season, especially when Thanksgiving was only a few weeks away.
"Did I tell you that my father and Polly will be home from Cuba in time for Thanksgiving?" I asked.
"I know, your father mentioned it when I talked to him the other day." Ford popped his mouth shut and admired the sunset with a sudden keen interest.
"Oh, no, what are you and my father planning now?" I asked. "I can just imagine the headline: Men Plan Elaborate Feast, Use Every Dish in the Kitchen."
I laughed at my own joke and turned, but Ford was gone.
He was down on one knee. The sky streaked with reds and golds as he reached for my hand. "I have one last headline for you: Will you marry me?"
I dropped to my knees and kissed Ford a dozen times over before I took a breath and said, "Yes. And you can quote me on that."
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SECRETS
By Claire Adams
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are products of the writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2015 Claire Adams
Chapter 1
“I’m fine Rebecca, the taxi just turned down my street.”
“I’ll just stay on until you get inside the house.”
“Seriously Rebecca, I’m not going to get murdered in two blocks. It’s Bain, Missouri for gosh sake!”
My ability to humor Rebecca and her mothering significantly decreased the more exhausted I was. We had been friends for most of our lives, but she still didn’t think I was capable of taking care of myself.
“Are you at the house yet? Did you get inside?”
“I’m paying my taxi driver now,” I sighed as I walked up to the door to my house and looked for my keys. Unfortunately, I had forgotten them inside the house. Nothing to worry about though; I had a spare key, somewhere.
“Walking up to the door…unlocking the door… going inside,” I lied to her.
“Alright. Remember to take some Tylenol and drink some water. Do you have orange juice for the morning?”
Since losing my parents, Rebecca had tried to fill in the emptiness. Her heart was always in the right spot, but she never understood what it was like to be without any family. Moving into my grandparent’s house and remodeling it was the best way I could cope, at least for now.
“Yes, I will drink orange juice, take two pills and call you in the morning.”
“Great, yes. Call me when you get up,” Rebecca said.
“Ok mother Rebecca. Talk to you tomorrow.”
With Rebecca off the phone, I went to work looking for the spare key. I remembered putting it somewhere around when I had visited my parents and my mother was too sick to get up to the door. But after she died I had moved the key again.
Really it shouldn’t be all that hard to find a key, but when you forget things as fast as I do, you would understand. This key was going to be near impossible to find.
After searching the mat, flowers, and all the rocks around my grandparents old Victorian home, it finally dawned on me that I had put the key over in the neighbors’ rocks. The fake rock that held the spare key fit perfectly with their rocks and since the home had been empty for at least five years, it seemed like a good place to hide the house key. Now if only I could remember which rock I was looking for…at two o’clock in the morning, it was amazing how every single rock looked exactly the same.
Well this was just perfect. On my hands and knees in the grass was not how I wanted to be spending my Saturday night. I was crawling around in the wet grass and looking for the key to my dead parent’s home. Well, the house was actually my grandparent’s home, and then they passed it to my parents and finally on to me.
Why couldn’t I just have a normal life? Like those girls at the bar tonight. They had the kind of busy lives with friends and parties all the time. But no, I had by far the most boring life in the history of Bain. Fixing up my grandparents’ house was the only thing interesting on my calendar for the next three weeks. Oh, how I longed for some excitement, but instead I was here digging through rocks and grass in the middle of the night.
The rock that held my house key eluded me. I screamed out in frustration and threw a rock from the neighbor’s yard to my own.
“Can I help you?”
My breath caught as I looked up to see a strongly built man standing at the corner of the house. He looked to have been just woken up and stood there with sweatpants and no shirt.
The no shirt part is what had me so distracted. Even in the moonlight I could see more muscles on his stomach than I probably had in my entire body.
“Um. Well, I uh…I’m looking for my house key.”
“And you keep it in my flower bed?”
The way he stood there looking at me, it was like I amused him. He watched as I struggled to stand up and then fidgeted with my dress. As much as I tried to hide the level of my intoxication, I’m pretty sure there was no hiding it. The look on his face showed enough pity toward me that I knew he could tell I was drunk.
“I’m uh, yes I did hide it here. It’s a rock. Well, it looks like a rock. It’s a fake rock with a key in it. But I can’t find it because they all look the same.”
I watched as the mystery man walked closer to me and looked at the rocks surrounding the house.
“What’s your name?” he asked me.
“I’m Katelyn. Katelyn Peterson.”
I waited for him to respond with his name, but he did not. Instead, he reached down and grabbed a rock from the back of the pile of rocks. He handed it to me and I instantly knew that it was the rock I had been looking for. It was light and I could hear the jingle of the key as I moved the rock in my hand.
“There you go Katelyn.”
His voice was smooth, seductive and sexy, which was hard to pair up with the body that stood in front of me. The man in front of me looked more like a killer than a seducer. The muscles in his arms bulged with definition. Not bulk, but a refined sense of power. Even the way he clenched his jaw made me think of someone who was hiding something and wasn’t going to let you find out.
“Wow, thank you. That was pretty amazing. How did you know which one it was?”
“Just luck I guess,” he said as he looked me over.
I dropped the rock as I tried to get the key out and he quickly retrieved the key from the grass. I’m not sure if he was so helpful because I was annoying him by waking him up in the middle of the night or if he was just a nice person.
He took the key and walked over to my front door. I tried to keep up, but my short legs and high-heels were no match.
By the time I got to my door, he had it opened and stood there with the key in his hand.
“Goodnight Katelyn.”
His hand touched mine as he passed me the key and instantly my body reacted with a surge of energy. I didn’t know who he was, or why he was living in the old abandoned neighbor’s house, but he could touch me with those hands any time he wanted.
Chapter 2
“So how long have you lived here? I didn’t know anyone had moved in,” I asked the gorgeous mystery man.
“I just moved in.”
“Ahh, so you’re new to town? How’s that going for you? Wait, why did you come to Bain? It’s not like we are a happening town.”
As I kept talking I tried to force myself to be quiet but I just couldn’t stop. The more I looked at him, the worse my tongue-tied condition got. The light of my porch intensified his muscles and I’m pretty sure my brain actually stopped working.
I tried not to make a fool of myself, but his body was just too much for my brain to comprehend. He had muscles so defined he looked like he could be one of those Navy Seals or something. I fixated on his naked chest with the desire to feel it against my body. Every impulse jetting through me said not to touch his chest. Yet my hand had a mind of its own.
Sure enough, without warning, and likely fueled by the large alcohol courage I had…
…I touched his chest.
Right there on my front porch in the middle of the night and without warning. My drunken hand reached out and touched his chest! It would have been bad enough if that’s all that happened, but I couldn’t stop myself. My verbal garbage kept coming out.
“Oh my god, you work out. Yeah, you definitely work out. Is that all you do all day long is workout?”
He stood there with the same calm and cool look as when he first saw me on my knees in his flower bed. Hmmm…he seemed to be the quintessential strong silent type. His face was serious and observed me with just the slightest bit of a smirk forming at the corners of his mouth.
“To answer your first question, I’m here to relax and get away for a little while,” he said, and looked down at my drunken hand still sitting on his chest. “Yes, I work out.”
Maybe it was the alcohol wearing off, but I suddenly realized my hand was on his chest and I removed it. My eyes looked at his and then down at his chest again. What had come over me? This was not my usual behavior. Then again, a sexy guy like this on my front porch was not my usual evening either.
I could feel the flush of embarrassment start filling up my face. I stopped looking at his chest and made eye contact with him, but that was worse than looking at his chest.
“Oh, alright. Yeah, I kind of thought that you were a workout kind of guy. I like to run. But I don’t get out as much as I would like and I certainly don’t run for long distances. Maybe down a few blocks and back. Like one mile tops. I take pictures. That’s what I like to do. You know…photography and that kind of stuff?”
I wanted to stop talking. I just couldn’t send the impulse
from my brain to my mouth to make it happen.
“Well, you have a nice night Katelyn.”
He turned to walk away and I stood on my porch and watched him. I waited for him to look back at me, ready with one last wave goodnight. But he didn’t turn around.
“Goodnight!” I yelled as he disappeared around the corner of the neighbor’s house toward the back door.
I closed my front door and stood inside pondering who this man was and what he was doing in tiny little Bain, Missouri. He had this quiet calmness about him that was fascinating. I had never met a man who seemed to have so much self-control, like a vigilant soldier with his senses finely tuned.
I turned the lights off in my house and tried to look out at the neighbor’s house. I just wanted to see if there was any movement inside of his house. Perhaps I secretly wanted to get one last peek at that chiseled chest of his? But I was disappointed and there wasn’t a single sign of movement throughout his house.
As I drifted off to sleep, I couldn’t help but fantasize about being with the gorgeous neighbor. I had not even considered another man since Michael’s death, so it surprised me how easily this man was filling my thoughts. Normally the memory of Michael and our six years together caused me too much pain to even think about it for long. He had been my first love, my high school sweetheart. After losing Michael a year before, I never thought I could ever move on. Maybe my interest in the gorgeous stranger was a signal that I might be ready now.
As I drifted off to sleep, I saw the stranger’s face in my mind: his chiseled serious face, with just the right touch of softness. His demeanor was so relaxed and calm for such a late hour. It struck me as odd that he was so readily awakened in the middle of the night, but I was happy he did wake up. Getting to meet him was just what I needed to give me hope that someday I could move on from my grief about Michael’s death.
Chapter 3
“Are you alright?” Rebecca said loudly into the phone.