Kiss Me Hello (Sweetest Kisses)

by Grace Burrowes

  No doubt by the time church services were over tomorrow morning, Mac’s friends and neighbors would have him married to Sid Lindstrom, living at the farm, and picking out names for their firstborn.

  Then his brothers would start in on him, and his misery would be complete.

  These thoughts preserved Mac from blushing, but only just.

  “Shall we go?” he suggested, shrugging into his own jacket. “Do you know how to get home from here?”

  “We’ll manage,” the Kissing Fiend assured him, “but I’ll meet you fellows in the parking lot. I need to make a pit stop before we head back to the Ponderosa.”

  She sashayed off toward the ladies’ room, leaving Mac to walk—not run—for the door, with Luis matching him step for step.

  “Is everything around here so white-bread?” Luis asked as they gained the chilly night air.

  “White-bread and then some. We have a liberal smattering of Mennonite, and even some Amish.”

  “Like Witness and all that?”

  “Daisy and Buttercup are genuine Amish plow stock,” Mac said, realizing too late he probably shouldn’t admit he knew their bloodlines. “But you’ll see some diversity at the high school, though it’s all recently acquired.”

  “It’s bad enough being dark-skinned and red-haired in the city. I’m going to be the freak of the universe out here.”

  “You’ll be different, but then, being six-foot-four before the end of my sophomore year made me different, and in my experience, that can be a good thing. Does Sid always kiss strange men in public?”

  “Sid’s Sid.” Luis’s teeth gleamed in the darkness. “But, yeah, she’s a kisser. Took me a while to get used to it, but it’s kind of nice too. I figure it’s her way of telling the whole world I’m partly hers.”

  Mac considered that. Sure as shit, he was not anybody’s, except perhaps his brothers’. “I’ll hurt her feelings if I ask her not to do it again?”

  Luis’s smile disappeared. “I dunno, but it was just a kiss. Big guy like you can’t take a little smoocheroo?”

  Mac let the conversation lapse because Sid was churning across the parking lot in her fake cowgirl boots, hugging her decorative denim jacket close against the night breeze.

  “Spring, my fat aunt Fanny,” she said as she approached them. “Luis, don’t spare the horses, as it were. Mr. Knightley, good night.”

  Mac found himself holding the car door open for her. On the other side of the car, Luis stopped before climbing in. “You said you could find us some real halters, didn’t you?” he asked.

  What was it with these people, that they memorized a man’s every blessed word?

  “I did say that. I’ll make some calls when I get home tonight.”

  Luis wasn’t buying that, the little twerp. “How do we call you if we have questions about the horses?”

  “Luis,” Sid broke in, “get in the car before I freeze to death.”

  Mac drew out one of his farrier’s cards and tossed it onto the roof of the car. “Evenings and weekends are the best time to reach me. My thanks again for dinner.” He closed the car door and turned his back on them both.

  The kissing female, the smirking, brooding boy, the pair of them.

  He climbed into his truck, cranked up the heat, slipped in a disc of Vera Winston playing late Brahms piano solos, and turned on the seat heater for good measure. Shoeing horses was hard on a man’s back, and some days Mac was already half convinced he should put away his tools.

  He’d always do his brother’s horses, of course. James was the family mechanic—when he wasn’t mooning after his piano teacher—and Mac was the family horseshoer. Trent’s position was more subtle.

  He was the family dad, the middle brother, the glue, the guy who checked on the fraternal chickens, making sure Mac wasn’t too isolated, and James wasn’t socially exhausting himself.

  Though their roles had started to change with Trent’s marriage to Hannah earlier in the year. Now James was showing signs of getting Vera Winston into double harness, and that would mean James had at least a stepdaughter to go with Trent and Hannah’s pair of seven-year-olds.

  Eight-year-olds, soon.

  Mac stabbed at the CD controls, and swapped out Brahms for early Brubeck. Children had been abundantly in evidence at the restaurant—babies, toddlers, tweens, and teens. Children and doting parents, and even grandparents.

  He switched the music to Mel Tormé, soothing, bluesy crooning that suited Mac’s out-of-sorts frame of mind. His mood did not improve when he saw lights on at his house, and recalled James was bringing the everyday truck back from its visit to James’s garage.

  “Made yourself at home, I see,” Mac observed as he walked into his own kitchen. James was at the table, doing the crossword puzzle in the local newspaper, while one of Mac’s cats supervised as it sprawled over half the funnies. The kitchen light haloed James’s blond hair. A loaf of homemade bread sat on the classifieds, amid a few crumbs, and a tub of homemade butter at James’s elbow.

  “The kettle should still be hot,” James said, not looking up. “What’s a three-letter word for difficulty or trouble?”

  Sid. “Dunno. My truck’s done?”

  “Rub,” James said, his pencil making neat strokes. “You’re the Shakespeare nut. You should have known that one. Your truck’s done, but I didn’t check your spare.”

  “Why should you need to?”

  “Because that model has been recalled. Road salt corrodes the spare brace assembly. Take it to the dealer and get it checked, lest your spare go thumping down onto the tarmac without warning. I need four letters for a word that means—” James looked up, his gaze going to the clock. “Where have you been, Mac? I’m almost done with this puzzle, and it’s the Saturday special.”

  Prevaricating was pointless. James had a social network that made the online utilities pale by comparison. By this time tomorrow, word of Mac’s dinner out, and the way it had concluded, would be all over the valley.

  “I had pizza with my last stop of the day,” Mac said, hanging up his jacket. “Spent the first part of the day with the therapeutic riding ponies. Adelia sends her regards.”

  James stuck his pencil behind his ear. “She doing OK?”

  “She and Neils are doing OK.” Mac added water to the teakettle. James had never been the possessive sort, nor did he tolerate possessiveness in his female acquaintances.

  “She deserves to be happy, and Neils is good people. I wasn’t aware you were shoeing horses for anyone but the therapeutic riding program.”

  “And our brother, Mr. Many Ponies. These people were connected with the riding program.” Mac put the kettle on the stove, turned on the burner, and wondered why James had hung out here on a Saturday night when he had his own place not two miles away.

  “You ever talk to Hannah much about foster care?” Mac asked.

  “Some.”

  “What does she say?”

  He heard James’s chair scraping back, and then his brother was standing beside him at the stove. “She says it was lonely, but not all of it was bad. Why?”

  “No reason. You want some tea?”

  “Sure.”

  James’s tone was casual—James did a virtuosic job with casual—but Mac wasn’t fooled. His youngest brother was studying him, and the guy was brilliant at most anything he turned his hand to, including needling his elders or chasing women.

  Except until recently, the women had done the chasing, which was beyond brilliant. Now James was smitten with his Vera, though the course of true love had apparently hit bad footing.

  “Cream is in the fridge,” Mac reminded him.

  “Why do you use cream? Clogging your arteries can’t be good for an old man like you.”

  “You are six years my junior,” Mac said, taking the boiling kettle off. “This means I can still whu
p your ass on my worst days. Get the agave nectar.”

  James rummaged in the cupboard for a squeeze bottle. “Did Trent turn you on to this stuff?”

  “Other way around.” Mac took the bottle from him. “I use cream because I enjoy its richness, most flavor compounds being fat soluble, and because dairy fat is good for you. I also use it because you don’t need as much to get the same dairy impact as you would with milk, so you can have your tea hotter than if you’d dosed it with milk. Let’s take this to the study.”

  “Why is everything an appellate argument with you?” James asked, trailing after Mac with his own tea.

  “You asked me why I used cream. I answered. Did you know the home place has been flipped again?”

  James closed the study door. “I knew it was for sale.”

  “That was my last call of the day.” James would hear about this too, of course. Luis would go to school, he’d say something about the draft horses being on the property, and the whole story would eventually reach James’s ears.

  “That could not have been easy.” James sprawled on one end of the couch. “The place doesn’t look like anybody has kept it up in recent years.”

  “The property is still salvageable with hard work and hard cash.” Mac took the rocking chair he’d built to suit his personal dimensions. James was also several inches over six feet, Trent about the same, but they both seemed to wear their height more easily than Mac did.

  More gracefully.

  “So who bought it?” James asked after a thoughtful sip of Earl Grey. “What kind of horses do they have?”

  “A lady with a foster kid bought it, or came by it somehow, and they aren’t horse people, James, but they have Daisy and Buttercup.”

  James, the true horseman in the family, came immediately alert. “Our Daisy and our Buttercup?”

  “They aren’t ours anymore, James, and haven’t been for a long, long time.”

  * * *

  “I’m telling you, Sid, he knew exactly where everything was.” Luis sat on the kitchen counter, looking like a giant, adolescent, cookie-ingesting vulture.

  When had he grown taller than Sid’s own five foot seven inches, and where was he going to stop? And why didn’t anybody warn a woman that old Formica never really came clean?

  “So Knightley knows his way around a barn. He’s a farm boy who shoes horses. Why wouldn’t he?” A mighty big farm boy.

  “You never believe me,” Luis said, brushing crumbs from his lap onto the floor. “I’m telling you, Sid, he reached up into the rafters and found a hoof pick, like he’d hung it up on his personal nail just yesterday.”

  She scrubbed at a brown stain on the counter, knowing she’d get nowhere with it. “What’s a hoof pick?”

  “Like the thing in the nail file you use to clean under your fingernails, but for horses.”

  “Maybe you always hang those things from the rafters, and as tall as he is, he spotted it up there.”

  Which meant he’d probably seen the top of the fridge, which likely hadn’t been scrubbed since the Flood.

  “You couldn’t see jack in that barn because the windows were all filthy,” Luis insisted. “Knightley knows this place, and I’m thinking he knew the horses were here.”

  “So you’ve convicted him of abandoning and neglecting those equine asteroids, all without benefit of judge or jury?”

  When had Sid appointed herself the guy’s public defender? She gave up on the stain and wrung the hell out of the tired rag she’d been using.

  “I’m raising questions.” Luis’s tone was maddeningly patient, but then, the defining joy of adolescence was to condescend to slow-witted adults. “Questions you ought to be raising.”

  To throw the rag or to be an adult? Sid ran the rag under the tap and wrung it out again.

  “Weese, I am grateful that you’re so protective of me, but I’m the mama. It’s my job to protect you. What I know about Knightley is he showed up here when we needed him, dealt with the horses, spent more time acquainting us with their preferred pony chow, and even joined us for a surprisingly good dinner at the local watering hole. His actions suggest he’s a decent man, if a little low on charm.”

  Charm challenged, in fact.

  “I didn’t think you liked him,” Luis said, taking still more cookies from the package.

  Fortunately, Sid didn’t particularly like peanut butter cookies, for that bunch was doomed to annihilation by morning.

  “I don’t know Mr. Knightley well enough to like him or dislike him,” Sid said. “I was grateful he came when needed, and equally grateful that he rode off into the sunset. I’m about to do likewise, and you shouldn’t be up too late either.”

  She wrung the rag out again, as hard as she could, and draped it over the spigot.

  “I still have to set up my computer,” Luis said around a mouthful of cookie. “How long before we have high speed out here?”

  “Yeah. About the high speed.”

  Luis rolled up the package of cookies and slipped a rubber band around it.

  “I’ll get a job,” he said. “I can pay for the horse food, and help out with the bills, and high speed really only makes a difference for graphics. You don’t need it for email and social stuff.”

  Sid would rather he scolded her, even if she was the mama. Dial-up not two hours from the nation’s capital was proof positive of parental incompetence.

  “Weese, I am sorry. First thing Monday, I’ll call the estate lawyers and harass the hell out of them. They said it could take a year, but it’s been six months. Something has to break loose sometime soon.”

  Though every time Sid called them, they probably billed the estate for it.

  “I’ll get a job, Sid.”

  Six months was a long time to a teenager, particularly a disillusioned teenager who’d been let down enough for a long lifetime. Six months was a long time when bills were coming due too.

  “So you get a job.” Sid swiped the cookies and stashed them in a cupboard. “We only have one car between us, and you don’t have your license yet. How will you get to and from this job? We’ve been over this and over this: your job now is to rack up as many advanced placement courses as you can, Weese. That’s money in the bank; that’s entrée; that’s laps ahead of the pack.”

  Also time spent in the company of people his own age, something Luis didn’t appear to care for.

  “I can do both.” He hopped down from the counter, lithe as a dancer. “You did.”

  “I do not recommend it,” Sid shot back. “By the time Tony took me in, I was a wreck, and I had no friends, and you don’t want to end up like that.”

  Luis gave her a long, sad perusal, then balled up the paper towel he’d been using as a napkin and, with the faultless grace of the natural athlete, lobbed it into the contractor bag pressed into service until they found their wastebaskets.

  “I’ve got Mac’s card,” Luis said, leaping topics in a display of teenaged tact. “He said he’d find us some halters for our horses.”

  “Ours for now,” Sid said tiredly. “They’re only our horses for now.”

  Chapter 4

  Until a few years ago, when somebody local referred to “the Knightley boys,” they meant Trent and Mac. Only within the past five years, with joint ownership of a law practice, had the duo become a trio.

  And James, like most youngest siblings, figured he was more aware of this distinction than his brothers were. Underdogs watched overdogs much more closely than the converse, simply as a matter of survival.

  “How are the mares?” James asked. “They have to be, what, seventeen years old?”

  “Closer to twenty,” Mac said, cradling his mug of tea in both hands. “They were the last pair Dad broke before he died.”

  The study became silent while each brother pushed back memories of a long-ago spring that
had put an end to both of their childhoods.

  “The mares are a little underweight, their feet are long, their teeth probably need some attention, but overall, they seemed hale.” Mac had chosen a green-and-purple-paisley-patterned mug, probably locally made craftware he’d picked up at Boonesboro Days, or some festival over in Frederick.

  “Will the new owners look after them?” James posed the question sincerely, but he was struck by Mac’s preoccupied expression.

  “They’ll tend to the mares to the best of their ability, but they aren’t horse people, and the lady of the house does not enjoy comfortable finances.”

  MacKenzie Knightley could use language delicately, for all he was frowning mightily. His surgical gift with language was part of what made him so effective before juries.

  “You went to dinner with the people who have Daisy and Buttercup?”

  Mac simply nodded, and James’s curiosity spiked upward, while his own tea grew cold in its plain white mug. “When’s the last time you went out to dinner with an adult female, Mac?”

  “Be ten years this July third.” He hadn’t glanced at a clock or a calendar, hadn’t hesitated.

  “You know the exact date, like a drunk knows his sobriety date?”

  Mac took a sip of tea in a manner another lawyer—say, James—would have called dilatory. “This wasn’t a date. The foster kid was with us. We merely went out for pizza.”

  “You don’t look like you merely went out for pizza, MacKenzie.” He looked, to James’s expert eye, like a guy who’d been coldcocked with the celestial two-by-four of love—or lust, or fascination, or whatever passed for attraction in the labyrinthine depths of Mac’s brain.

  “She kissed me, James.”

  What did a baby brother say to such a disclosure from an elder, and such a bewildered disclosure?

  “You break your streak after ten years without a date, and all you can say is she kissed you?”

  “Nothing will come of it.” Mac set his teacup aside—on a coaster, of course. “Nothing can come of it, and I don’t think she meant anything anyway.”