by Robin Wells
Oh, wait—he could. He’d been seventeen years old and crazy about a brown-eyed girl in the most colorful town in Louisiana.
Katie spotted him in the mirror. Her honey-colored eyes widened, and two pink spots formed on her cheeks. “Zack—hello!”
Good. It was only fair that his presence affected her, because God only knew hers affected him.
Her behavior didn’t indicate she was glad to see him, though. Her gaze went right back to her client, and she continued putting rollers into the older woman’s hair. “When did you get back in town?”
“Just now. I went by the salon and Bev said you were here.”
Avoiding his gaze, she looked down at her client. “Dorothy, this is Zack Ferguson.”
“Oh, you must be the warmie everyone is talking about!” the white-haired woman exclaimed.
“I think you mean hottie,” Katie said softly to the lady.
“Yes, yes, yes. Hottie. And aren’t you just! Why, you’re a flat-out sheet-scorcher.” The woman beamed at him. “I understand you made a fortune playing poke.”
“Poke-er,” Katie prompted. “You know—the card game.”
“Yes, indeed.”
Katie grinned. “Zack, this is Dorothy.”
Zack dipped his head in a nod. “Nice to meet you.”
“Likewise,” Dorothy said. “So you’re Gracie’s father?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, she’s a darling girl! So sweet. We all just love her.”
Zack’s eyebrows rose. “Darling” and “sweet” were not descriptions he would have ascribed to the sullen teenager. Perhaps Dorothy had confused Gracie with another girl working at the retirement home.
“She’s teaching us how to use Tubeface,” Dorothy added.
Zack grinned at the malapropism. “No one does Tubeface better than Gracie.”
“She showed us the funniest videos. And she’s teaching us to swim the wet.”
“I think you mean surf the Web,” Katie prompted.
“Yes, that’s it. And she turned shuffleboard into a drinking game.”
Katie’s brows pulled together.
“Oh, don’t worry.” Dorothy flapped her hand dismissively. “It was harmless fun, and she’s not drinking herself. She’s too young—and besides, she’s got that baby to think about. The only person who had a problem was Iris Huckabee, and that was only because she was drinking prune juice.”
Zack laughed.
“The stuff Gracie’s teaching us about the computer is amazing. Why, I had no idea Oprah has a wetsite!”
Katie looked at Zack as she picked up a roller. “Gracie told me you’ve been calling and texting her.”
Zack nodded. They’d communicated every day. It was actually easier to get information out of Gracie over her phone than it was in person. “I just saw her in the rec room, and she was calling bingo.”
“Oh, she’s great at that,” Dorothy said. “And she’s good at getting the folks on the rehab wing involved in activities, too.”
That was surprising. Wonderful, but surprising all the same.
“She and my mother-in-law are bonding,” Katie said, affixing the last roller at the bottom of the neat row down the center of the woman’s head. “They like some of the same books.” Katie pumped the metal bar on the chair, lowering it, and looked at Dorothy. “Ready to get under the dryer?”
“You bet.” The woman took Katie’s hand, rose from the chair, and bustled to the lone hair dryer. “I won’t be able to hear a thing once I get under that contraption, so I might as well say good-bye now.” She waggled her fingers at Zack. “Nice meeting you!”
Katie adjusted the helmet over the old lady’s head, turned the blower on high, and handed her an Oprah magazine.
“So your trip went well?” she asked, moving toward the back of the small salon.
“Yes.” The client had signed a huge contract, which would keep Zack’s staff busy for the next few months. Usually he would have stayed longer to kick things off, but he’d left his vice president in charge. He’d been eager to get back to Chartreuse. “How are things between you and Gracie?”
“We’re getting along better, as long as we stay away from sensitive topics.”
He grinned. “Does that leave you anything to talk about?”
“Sure. Books and movies and music. Baby clothes and birthing classes.” Katie opened a door in the back of the salon, stepped in, and came out with a broom. “And school. We visited the high school counselor and got Gracie enrolled. She’ll attend most of the first semester and try to bring her grade point average up, then take her midterms online. After she has the baby, she can decide whether she wants to go back to school for her last semester, finish online, or test for the GED. She’ll have some options.”
“Options are good.” Why didn’t he seem to have any where Katie was concerned? Only one option came to mind—the same option that had led him to throw caution to the wind that night on the sailboat and to kiss her in the kitchen. He watched Katie set the dustpan at the styling station, beside a picture of Paul—Christ, she even had his picture here!—and start sweeping the perfectly clean floor. “What else is going on?”
“I made Gracie an appointment with a therapist yesterday, but she wouldn’t go.”
“Can’t say that I’m surprised.”
“I went instead.” She swept up a few locks of white hair. “We talked about a lot of things.”
“Such as?”
“The identity of the father.” She stopped sweeping and looked at him. “The therapist said we shouldn’t push Gracie. When she trusts us more, hopefully she’ll tell us about him.”
“I’m more concerned about Gracie telling the boy.”
“We’ve been over this.” Katie blew out a little sigh of exasperation and leaned on the broom. “Please don’t start in on that again.”
He didn’t want to argue with her. He didn’t know what the deal was with Gracie and the baby’s father—it confounded him that despite all his snooping, he couldn’t find out who he was—but there was nothing to be gained by alienating Gracie. And hell—for all he knew, it might be for the best if the guy just stayed out of the picture. Gracie wouldn’t need child support; in addition to her inheritance from her parents’ estate, Zack had more than enough money to care for her and her child.
“Okay,” he said.
Katie eyed him suspiciously. “Okay, what?”
“Okay, I won’t push Gracie about the baby’s father.”
“Oh.” The capitulation seemed to leave her off balance. Her eyes softened. “Oh, good.”
He stepped closer. “I’m glad you told me about your father. Now I understand why you feel the way you do about it.” He didn’t agree—he still thought Gracie should at least give the guy a chance to step up to the plate—but he understood, and he was willing to step back and let things unfold at Gracie’s pace. “I’m glad you confided in me.”
“Yeah.” Her lips curved up in an embarrassed half smile. “Me, too.”
“Why didn’t you tell me that summer?”
She lifted her shoulders. “I was ashamed.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I guess I felt like there must have been something about me that was basically unlovable, and that’s why my father always left.”
His chest squeezed around his heart. He’d felt the same way about his parents—that it was his fault they fought, his fault they ignored him. He’d grown up thinking he was fundamentally flawed, and he’d spent his entire life trying to prove otherwise. Not to his parents—at some point, he’d quit caring what they thought—but to himself. He’d thought that success and money would do the trick.
He’d been wrong.
But he and Katie were different. They might have the same wound, but they’d recovered in different ways. He held himself away from others; she reached toward them.
“You know better now, right?”
She lifted her shoulders.
“Kate, you’re t
he most lovable person I’ve ever known.”
She looked at him, her brown eyes surprised, and time fell away. Suddenly they weren’t just two people talking; they were two people connected to each other, deeply and intimately.
It had always been that way with Katie. From the very beginning, there had been some intangible bond, something that drew him to her. It was as if her heart were transparent and he could see right into it and it was a safe place. She made him feel things he’d never felt with anyone else—understood and accepted and whole.
She looked like she was going to say something more, but instead she picked up the dustpan, bent and swept up whatever nearly invisible stuff she’d corralled with the broom, then dumped it into the trash can by her station. She briskly carried the dustpan and broom to the back room. She was running away from him, damn it. Without thinking, Zack followed her.
It was a tiny room, really little more than a walk-in closet with cabinets and a small counter, lit by a dim overhead bulb. Zack stood in the doorway, holding the door open as Katie busily hung the broom and dustpan on the wall at the back. She turned to the shelves on the right and reached for a fresh stack of towels, standing on her tiptoes.
“I’ll get those for you,” Zack said, stepping forward and reaching over her head. The door closed behind him. Katie stepped back, bumping into him. His hands went out to steady her, and landed on her waist.
A hot shock ricocheted through him; his groin was against her bottom, his nose in her hair. She smelled like herbal shampoo and Katie—a scent that reminded him of summer and desire and a nameless longing—a scent that made him so hard, so fast that he could have been seventeen again.
Neither one of them moved for long seconds. And then his fingers tightened around her waist as if they had a will of their own. His mouth moved against her hair.
She inhaled sharply, then gave a little moan. He dipped his head and kissed her neck, right where her pulse beat, right on the little brown birthmark. He felt her pulse flutter under his lips.
“Turn around, Kate,” he whispered. “Turn around and kiss me.”
He kept his hands on her waist, feeling her silky shirt slide under his fingers as she turned. Her eyes were dark, almost all pupil in the dim light.
“God, I’ve missed you,” he told her. He felt like he’d missed her before he’d ever met her, like he’d missed her for a couple of lifetimes, like she was a missing part of his very soul.
He heard her quick intake of breath. He pulled her flush against him, then lowered his head and kissed her.
The kiss was slow and tender, but the effect on Katie was like a bolt of lightning—instantaneous, jolting, electric. It was as if someone had put a defibrillator on her heart, shocking it back to life, and all of a sudden her blood was pumping furiously through her veins and feelings, long lost, were flooding her body.
Something had happened in the other room. Zack had given her that look—the one that was tender and open and frank, the one that said, “I get you, I know you, and I think you’re amazing,” a look that said, “Your secret is safe with me,” and “I’m on your side, no matter what.” It was the look that had told her, “I’ll defend you and watch out for you and make sure you get home safe”—the look that had made her fall for Zack all those years ago. God help her, he’d tripped the switch all over again.
His mouth moved over hers. Zack’s hands slid from her waist to her back. Her arms somehow wound around his broad shoulders.
She could feel the hard length of him, and it set her on fire. She moved against him, fitting her torso to his, her blood hot and fevered. She stood on her toes and wrapped her right leg around both of his, arching her spine, needing to get closer.
She couldn’t get close enough. She wanted to touch his skin, to be naked underneath him, to feel him plunging into the part of her that ached to be filled. Desire, ravenous and mindless as wildfire, scorched through her. She needed… she wanted…
“Katie!”
Oh, dear lord. It was Iris Huckabee, her next appointment. Alarm shot through her.
“I—I’ve got to go.”
“Okay.” He didn’t turn her loose.
“Katie?” Iris screeched again, her voice like metal rubbing against metal.
“Seriously,” she whispered to Zack. “I’ve got to go. The longer it takes for us to come out of this closet, the worse this will look.”
“Why do you care?”
“Because…” She felt like she was cheating on Paul. A sense of shame snaked through her.
“Dorothy, do you know where Katie is?” Iris shrilled.
Oh, God. Dorothy would know they were still in the closet together.
“Be right with you, Iris,” Katie called, breaking away from Zack. “I’m getting some towels.” She burst through the door, then realized she didn’t have any towels in her hand.
Thankfully, Zack followed her, carrying a stack of towels.
Iris’s painted-on eyebrows rose above her cat-eye glasses. “Who’s this?”
“I’m Zack Ferguson.” He smiled at the woman, then turned to Katie and held out the towels. “You really should put the towels on a lower shelf.”
She followed his lead, grateful for the excuse. “Thanks for getting them down for me.”
“No problem.” As she reached for the towels, he whispered, “See you tonight.”
“No.” She couldn’t. Her emotions felt like a scraped knee.
She was aware that Iris was watching them avidly. Dorothy had pushed the hair-dryer helmet up and was following the exchange as well.
She turned and carried the towels to her stylist station. “It’s my book-club night,” she said as casually as she could. And if it hadn’t been, she would have found some other excuse. “Can Gracie stay with you tonight?”
“Sure.”
“Good. Thanks for stopping by.” As soon as he left, she’d explain to the two women that Zack had dropped in to discuss arrangements for Gracie.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Zack said pointedly.
Not if she could help it. She needed some time to gather her wits and work through her tangle of emotions.
He mercifully moved toward the door. She turned to Iris and motioned to her chair. “Have a seat.”
She heard the door open, and although she didn’t turn around, she knew the exact moment Zack left the salon. She felt the air change, felt it lose its charge and fizz, felt it flatten like a left-out soda, returning to the way it had been before he’d walked in.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“Good job, Mrs. Charmaine. Now turn around and go back the other direction.”
Annette squinted against the late-afternoon sun shining through the window of the physical therapy room, then tightened her grip on the wooden bars on either side of her. It was hard to believe that the boy who’d been such a lackadaisical student as a teenager had turned into such a drill sergeant of a physical therapist. “I’m tired, Blake. I’ve been walking this cattle chute for half an hour.”
“And you’re doing great. Let’s see you do it again. And this time, put more of your weight on that leg.”
Annette scowled. “You’re an unconscionable slave driver.”
“Unconscionable.” Blake shook his head and laughed. “Only an ex–English teacher would use a word like that.”
“Humph.” Annette rested her weight on her good leg and slowly turned around. “If you’d studied your vocabulary words half as much as you studied your football playbook, you might even know what it meant.”
“Ow!” Blake clutched his chest. “You got me with that one.”
She took a step forward on her new knee and winced. She was amazed at how much an artificial joint could hurt. “I think you’re getting back at me for giving you a C on your book report on that Lindbergh biography.”
Blake’s eyes widened. “You remember that?”
“I most certainly do.” It was funny that she could remember the topics of most of her students’ biograp
hical book reports. She’d always learned a lot more about the students than the subjects they’d reported on. “You spelled his name with a u instead of an e.”
Blake laughed. “Spelling never was my strong suit.”
“I’ll say.” She grimaced as she took a step.
He folded his arms across his chest and watched her. “As it turns out, it’s a good thing I spent more time on football than English. If it weren’t for football, I wouldn’t be here with you today.”
“And wouldn’t that be a tragedy,” Annette muttered, taking another painful step.
Blake laughed. “It would be, actually. You’ve got to work through the pain to get better, and you need someone to make you do it.”
Annette was sure there was a lot of wisdom in the statement, but she hurt too much to contemplate it right now. “I fail to see the connection between torturing me and football.”
“Well, if it weren’t for football, I wouldn’t have gone to college. And if I hadn’t played, I wouldn’t have gotten injured, and then I never would have gotten interested in physical therapy. And since I know what it feels like to be hurt, I can relate to my patients.”
“Humph!” She took a pain-racked step and winced. “You relate about as well as you spell.”
“Is she giving you a hard time again?”
Annette’s head jerked toward the sound of Dave’s voice. He was leaning in the doorway, his lanky frame filling it. The sight of him turned her heart into a pattering fool.
“Again? She never lets up,” Blake complained.
“Don’t I know it.” Something in Dave’s lazy grin made her stomach flip-flop. “How’s she doing?”
“Well, she needs to put more weight on that leg, but overall, she’s doing great.”
“Glad to hear it.”
“You two are talking about me as if I’m not even here,” Annette complained.
“That’s because I want actual information,” Dave said. “If I ask you, all I’ll hear is how Blake is trying to kill you.”
Blake laughed. “You’ve got her number, all right.”
“I should. I was married to her for thirty-two years.”