“Thanks, pal.” She shot him a look from dark-circled eyes. “Like you’re a regular Pierce Brosnan yourself.”
“I didn’t sleep.” He tossed in some more blue cheese for good measure. “What’s your excuse?”
“More blue cheese,” she said, eyeballing the vat of dip. “Don’t skimp. It’s bad for business.”
He flung in some more crumbled cheese and stirred the whole mess with a stainless steel spoon longer than his arm. “We have an office party coming in at eleven-thirty. Billing department from Mo’s Sporting Apparel.”
“That’s today?” Claire frowned. “I thought Winnie made it for next week.”
“Looks like you got your signals crossed. They’ll be here in an hour, and we still need to—”
She waved away his words. “Same old, same old. I know what we need to do.”
There was a sharp edge to her words, sharper even than usual.
“You got a problem helping Tommy set the tables?”
She made a sound that might pass for a laugh in another galaxy. “I could set tables in my sleep, Aidan.”
She was going to leave. He knew it in the time it took her to draw her next breath. It was there in her eyes, her posture, every goddamn thing, and it had probably been there for months now. Maybe years. And he never saw it coming until now.
Anger burned through his gut, running alongside bitter disappointment. And yeah, some resentment, too. You didn’t walk out on family.
“Hand me the hot sauce, would you?” he asked. He wasn’t going to make it easy for her to walk out that door.
She swiveled around, grabbed the bottle, then placed it next to the pile of chicken wings waiting to be lowered into the deep fryer.
“You really do make the best wings in the state,” she said.
“Sucking up,” he said. “Not a good sign.”
She leaned against the worktable and crossed her arms over her chest in the stance he had come to recognize as her take-one-step-closer-and-you’re-dead pose.
“You know, don’t you?”
He pushed the vat of dip to one side and began feeding chicken wings one by one into the fryer. “I do now.”
She sounded almost nervous as she began parroting facts and figures about the damn tea shop, outlining her responsibilities, her hours, every goddamn thing Olivia and Rose had told her regurgitated for his approval.
“Hostess and baker?” He met her eyes across the deep fryer. “Sounds like they got themselves a good deal. No wonder they pitched it to you.”
“And what the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“You’ll be working twice as hard there as you do here, and for what? A paycheck instead of a partnership.”
“But I’ll be doing it because I want to, not because I—” She stopped, and an ugly red stain moved its way up from the base of her throat. “Sorry. You deserve better than that.”
“Won’t get an argument from me.”
“I’m not leaving you in the lurch, if that’s what you’re worried about. I spoke to Peggy Randall. She said she’d be glad to pick up my hours here and more.”
“You plan on selling your half of O’Malley’s to Peggy, too?”
“Do you want me to?” Her voice shook with emotion.
“No,” he said, refusing to be moved by her distress, “but since when does my opinion count for shit in this discussion.”
“I’m not quitting the family, Aidan, We’ll still be partners. I just need to try something new.”
“Sorry,” he said, “but I don’t see the big difference between pulling drafts and pouring tea.”
“I do,” she said. “For one thing, I won’t see Billy every time I walk through the door.”
“No, but you’ll still see him every time you walk through your own front door.”
Her smile faded. “Would it kill you to make this easy on me?”
“Yeah, it fucking well might.” He slammed a few more chicken wings into the hot oil, narrowly escaping a vicious splash. “I think this is going to be O’Malley’s best summer ever. It wouldn’t kill you to stick it out.”
“Oh yeah?” she said, mimicking his tone of voice. “It fucking well might.”
“They let you use that kind of language in a tea shop?”
“I’ll let you know when I get there.”
He lifted the basket of fried chicken wings from the deep fryer and set them to drain. “Is there anything I can say to change your mind?”
“I need to leave, Aidan. I need—” She stopped and shook her head. “Sometimes I think I’m drowning here.” Her voice broke on the last word. “I might fall on my face and come crawling back next month, begging to pull some drafts, but at least I’ll know I tried.” She blinked back tears. “I have to know I tried.”
“You fight dirty,” he said, lowering another batch of wings into the fryer, but he was lying. She didn’t fight dirty. She fought the way she did everything else, with a balls-out, in-your-face passion he admired more than he would ever be able to tell her. Right now, however, that passion was about to screw up his life.
“It’s my only talent.” She pushed her mop of auburn curls off her face. “I’ll still be involved with things around here. We’ll still be partners.”
Yeah, they were partners, but it struck him that a good partner didn’t walk out the door and leave the other partner juggling the workload. His emotions ran the gamut from pissed off to hurt to deeply sympathetic, and damn it, sympathetic was winning out.
He had been where she was. He knew the toll it took on her to walk through those doors every day and immerse herself in Billy’s old domain. Whatever Billy’s faults, Claire had been there beside him every step of the way. Aidan had walked through that door with her on a daily basis since the accident, seen the same ghosts, ducked the same memories. He couldn’t imagine the bar without Claire’s laugh, her running commentary, her frequent flashes of temper, and he was afraid their many regulars wouldn’t be able to either.
For the last seventeen years she had been the one person on earth he could count on. She had opened her heart and her home to Kelly and him without reservation when they needed it, and she had never asked for anything in return.
Until now.
“Give me Peggy’s number. I’ll call her and see what she has to say.” Not particularly gracious, but it was the best he could manage.
She rounded the work counter and kissed him on the left cheek. “Thanks,” she said. “You know I’ll come in if you get in a pinch some night.”
“So what are you standing here for?” he said gruffly. “Don’t you have a new job to go to?”
She grabbed for a fresh apron on top of the stack near the sink. “O’Malleys don’t walk out without giving notice. You’re stuck with me for at least another few weeks.”
He was so filled with conflicting emotions that he turned away and pretended avid interest in a bag of onions on the counter. “Put the blue cheese dip in the fridge and start setting up the tables. Tommy thinks all you need is a cocktail napkin and a bowl of nuts, and you’re good to go.”
“Watch it, O’Malley. I was here a long time before you started pulling drafts. I’m still an equal partner. If you push, I’m gonna push back even harder.”
“If we’re equal, why am I always doing the grunt work? Let’s get moving. We have a crowd of hungry sporting goods accountants to feed.”
They fell back into their normal brother/sister banter, but everything was different between them, and they both knew it. The moment she made her decision, everything changed. She was the bar’s connection to Billy and the old days, more so even than Aidan. Aidan’s working connection with O’Malley’s was only a few years old, while Claire’s went back almost twenty years.
She was the one who greeted the old-timers by name when they walked through the door, the one who sent flowers when somebody died, bought Mass cards, visited hospital rooms, remembered who liked his burgers rare and whose life was in the toilet, and she did it w
ith a smart-ass laugh, a sly wink, the sense that they were all in it together, always had been, always would be.
You could renovate the bar, add outdoor dining, spruce up the menu until it looked like something Emeril or Wolfgang would whip up, but you couldn’t manufacture a soul. A place either had one or it didn’t, and you knew it the second you walked through the door.
Claire was the soul of O’Malley’s Bar and Grill, and when she left to start her new job, she would take the hearts of every regular with her. Aidan’s included. She was the sister he never had. The O’Malley family connection he had always wanted. They didn’t share DNA, but she was blood just the same.
He could’ve fought her on this. For one long moment he had considered calling in lawyers he couldn’t afford and trying to block her from leaving, but when push came to shove, he couldn’t do it. He wouldn’t do it to her. He was making a new life for himself, and Claire deserved the same chance, even if it meant O’Malley’s future hung in the balance. She’d earned it.
She was feisty, opinionated, a little rough around the edges, not always diplomatic, a survivor like everyone else who had ever walked through that door, and one damned tough act to follow.
Chapter Fourteen
SETH LOOKED UP from the computer screen when Kelly entered the room later that morning. They had both earned a free period to work on school projects as one of the many bonuses of scholarship and were alone in the newspaper office with a pair of file cabinets, a computer monitor, and their growing fears. “Anything?”
She shook her head. “Nothing.”
“How do you feel?” he asked as she sat down at the worktable next to his.
“Pretty good.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really. Definitely better than I felt the last few days.”
“Maybe that’s a good sign.”
She wasn’t sure if it was a sign of anything but wishful thinking, but she kept that thought to herself. One of them might as well hang on to hope. “I think I’m going to buy one of those home pregnancy tests this weekend. My dad and Maddy are going to Spring Lake on Saturday. I figure I’ll drive over to the mall near Bay Bridge where nobody knows me and pick one up after the graduating class’s interview.”
He reached for her hand and held it tight. “I’ll call in sick and go with you.”
“You promised Mrs. DiFalco you’d finish the carport this weekend.”
“So I’ll finish it Sunday.”
“I’ll be there and back in a half hour. Besides, I’ll be working at the inn on Saturday, too.”
She laced her fingers with his and let his warmth flow into her. Quiet came easily for them. It always had. They flowed from conversation to silence and back again as easily as breathing. She tried to imagine what this would be like with a boy who didn’t care about her, who didn’t love her the way Seth loved her, and the thought filled her with sadness.
“Did you know this is what happened to Maddy?”
He looked over at her. “I thought she was married to that gray-haired guy, and they split up.”
“They never married. She got pregnant, and he didn’t want to start over again with a family when he already had grandchildren, so they broke up.”
“Bastard.”
It wasn’t that simple. She had seen the way Maddy spoke about him, with friendship and affection. “Remember how he was when he came to the hospital to see Hannah? He might not have wanted her, but he loves her.”
“Then he should’ve stayed with them. You don’t walk out on your kid.”
“Maybe sometimes it’s the only thing you can do.” People wanted different things from life, at different times. You could love someone with your entire heart and soul and still not be able to make it all turn out all right in the end.
“Your father didn’t walk out on you.”
The statement brought her up short. “That was different. My mother died.”
“Some men might’ve walked just the same.”
A chill spiraled up her spine. “You wouldn’t.” Would you?
“No,” he said, “and you wouldn’t either.”
She nodded, but she wasn’t so sure. Lately she had found herself wishing she could just disappear. She wanted to leap behind the wheel of her car and drive until she ran out of money or gas or highway, drive to someplace where they didn’t know her as the good girl, the perfect daughter, the model student, the one who never made mistakes, never said the wrong thing, never disappointed anyone, not even herself.
It was all coming at her so fast that she found it hard to arrange her thoughts into some kind of order. She had always known exactly where her life was headed, as if she had been born with a schedule hardwired into her brain that kept her on time and on track. Just a few more months, and she and Seth would be leaving for college, heading up to New York and Columbia and a whole wide world of experiences she could never enjoy in Paradise Point. Sometimes she looked at her old friends, at Aunt Claire, at her father, and felt like she was watching them from across a divide that grew wider every day.
They were happy with their lives. They liked it right there in the town where they’d been born, tending bar, raising families, having their hair styled at Upsweep or buying stationery at Le Papier or watching the tourists watching them from the front porch of The Candelight. Only Maddy had ever wanted something different. She had broken away from the pack when she was Kelly’s age and headed to Seattle, where she made a life for herself. A life she might still be living if Hannah hadn’t come along.
The thought made her uncomfortable. Hannah was an adorable little girl, funny and bright and dangerously perceptive, and in a few months she would be Kelly’s sister. Someone who would look up to her for advice and friendship. Strange to think that little Hannah had been the catalyst for such big changes in her mother’s life which, in turn, changed Kelly’s and Aidan’s lives as well.
But that was the way it happened, wasn’t it? Babies changed everything. Sit one down in the heart of a family, and the aftershocks could be felt for years.
As bad as things had been after the warehouse accident, that was how good they were now. Her father was happy, really happy, for the first time in Kelly’s life. The kind of happy that made people smile when he walked into the room. The kind of happy that would make it possible for Kelly to fling herself into her new life in September without feeling guilty and torn between her home and her future.
It was as if all the stars had finally slid into alignment just for her, and they were pointing her toward the path she had been working toward her whole life. She was so close she could reach out and touch it, grasp the stars and hold them in the palm of her hand.
As long as she wasn’t pregnant.
CLAIRE SPENT MOST of the day trying not to think about the fact that one morning she was going to wake up and discover that Corin Flynn was in town. He hadn’t been specific in his note to Olivia. All he had said was that he was en route. She told herself that it didn’t matter, that he had asked his sister to pass along the information as a courtesy, a social heads-up if you will, but that was a lie, and she knew it. There had never been anything casual between them. Right from the start they had both recognized the import of what was happening between them and where it might lead.
God, she didn’t want to think about him. She had trained herself not to think about him, to consign those memories to a dark corner of her heart, the place where old dreams were buried.
When push came to shove, she had chosen her flawed husband. Their imperfect marriage. Their wounded family, and the home they had built together. She had known exactly what she was doing and why, and if she had any regrets, she would take them to her grave.
She was wiping down the bar after the lunch rush when she saw Peter Lassiter and his crew walk in. A second later, Gina Barone came racing in, all laughter and smiles, and joined them. What the hell was that all about?
“I’ll do the bank run for you,” she said to Aidan, who was counting
out the main register.
“No problem,” he said, not looking up from the count. “I’ll drop it off on my way to deliver the signed building permits to town hall.”
“I’ll do it,” she repeated as Lassiter acknowledged her stare with a pleasant nod of his head. He turned back to Gina and said something that made her sway toward him and toss her overprocessed hair. “Just give me the pouch, will you.”
“For Christ’s sake, Claire!” He pushed the stack away from him and reached for a bottle of water. “You made me lose count. Now I’ve got to start over.”
“I’ll do it.”
“What the hell’s the matter with you? You hate doing the bank.”
“I’ve gotta get out of here,” she said, aware of the rising note of hysteria in her voice.
“So go. Nobody’s stopping you.”
She liked a good brawl as much as the next person but not now. All she wanted was to escape.
“I owe you one,” she said as she grabbed her purse from the rack beneath the register. “I’ll be back after I pick up Billy.”
“Whatever.” He waved her off and resumed counting the half-day receipts.
She escaped into the kitchen and out the back door, almost knocking into poor Tommy, who was sitting on the top step.
“Sorry,” she said, rubbing his shoulder where the door banged into him. “I should’ve looked first.”
“Goddamn dangerous out here,” Tommy muttered. “Safer sitting inside a smoke-filled bar.”
Normally she would have offered up a wisecrack, some sarcastically funny comment meant as a combination apology and disclaimer, but all she could think about was putting as much distance between herself and O’Malley’s as possible. If she had needed further proof that it was time to move on, this was it. Her entire body vibrated with the need for change, for new possibilities, new challenges, not the navel-gazing into the past that Lassiter and his crew were looking for.
And what was Gina doing with them, she wondered as she climbed behind the wheel of her car and started the engine. The woman looked all buddy-buddy with Lassiter, who didn’t seem her type at all. Gina usually went for flashier men, guys with muscles and—
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