Back in Service

by Isabel Sharpe

  “I’m an asshole and you’re blameless?”

  If the shoe fits. She blew out a breath. “Chris, this was years ago. Years. There is no point bringing it up again. Too much pain, too many accusations, it was all so ugly.”

  “It doesn’t have to be.” He took a step closer, voice dropping, a touch of vulnerability in his eyes, not something Chris Hamilton showed often. It could still get to her. Crap. “I promised myself I would never look for you, Matty. But also that if I ever saw you again, I would take it as a sign to—”

  “G’night, Matty!” Dominique, gossip girl of the cast, peered curiously at Chris, giving him the up-and-down once-over, no doubt absorbing details she could then exaggerate and spread around. A few steps past his sightline, she gave Matty an enthusiastic thumbs-up.

  Matty couldn’t respond, either to her or to Chris. Why was he doing this? It was so much easier to deal with him when he was being Mr. Smooth. This genuine humility and regret—who could turn her back on that?

  Worst of all, Matty wanted to talk to him. She wanted the closure she’d never gotten. She wanted to understand why, when things had been crazy, yes, impossible, yes, but so, so good between them in a way she’d never found again, he had wanted to dip his dick into someone as obvious and twisted as Clarisse.

  After that, after his thing with Clarisse had fallen through and Matty was long gone, what had he done then? Had he gone through one student after another, trading the old one in when the new one showed up? Or had Matty truly been special and Clarisse some bizarre aberration?

  Matty needed to know, even if it hurt. In spite of their age difference, in spite of the improbability of their circumstances, she’d been sure Chris was The One. His betrayal had deeply hurt not only her heart but her faith in herself and in her judgment.

  She was relenting, she could tell, and it scared her. Yes, it had been six years, but he could still get to her, and she couldn’t afford to lose this battle or herself to him again.

  Wait. What the hell was she saying? Matty would only lose herself if she allowed that to happen. She was not a twenty-one-year-old kid anymore, and he was not the man the sun rose and set around. He was the Creepy Professor, as Jameson called him, a man into girls way too young for him.

  “Can we go somewhere we can talk?”

  “Yes,” she answered impulsively, held his gaze, searching for smug triumph—if there was even the tiniest flicker of it, she’d change her mind so fast he’d only feel the breeze of her leaving.

  There was none. Only surprise, then relief.

  “Thank you.” His gratitude, too, was real. “Where do you— I don’t know this neighborhood...”

  “Green Street Restaurant isn’t far. About a ten-minute walk. We can get a drink there.”

  “Or dinner?”

  She narrowed her eyes. “Don’t push it.”

  “I’ll try.” Chris grinned and reached to straighten the collar of her favorite blue jacket. “It’s really good to see you again, Matty.”

  Matty stepped away from his touch, not sure what to say to that. Because aside from all the lingering anger and hurt he’d managed to unearth, it was really good to see him again, too.

  Okay. Now that she’d admitted that thought to herself, she’d suppress it for the rest of time.

  Talking rather stiltedly, they headed down El Molino Avenue and turned east on Green Street, heading for Shopper’s Way, where Green Street Restaurant, a Pasadena institution, had stood since the late 1970s.

  Inside, they found two comfortable chairs at the long wooden bar opposite the low curving wall that cleverly separated tables in one area of the dining room. Behind the bar, windows let in evening light that made bottles and glasses glow in rich shades of green and gold.

  Chris pulled out her chair, waited until she was seated before he sat and pulled his chair up next to her. She’d always liked Chris’s flair for playing the gentleman—grace and respect, not a hint of condescension. He pulled out her chair because he wanted her to be settled and comfortable, not because he thought she was a dainty flower who couldn’t manage the task herself.

  “What would you like?”

  “Oh.” She frowned, mind spinning through possibilities. She hadn’t thought past the conversation they were supposed to have. “I guess wine?”

  “You’re right.”

  Matty laughed. They’d shared a distaste for women who spoke in questions, something Matty didn’t usually do. Clearly she was not in her element. “I would like a glass of wine. Stop. Red, full bodied. Stop.”

  He put on a pair of narrow-lensed reading glasses, which made him look sexy in the intellectual way she was a complete sucker for, and peered at the wine list. “Looks like mostly California. Here’s a gigondas from France, how about that?”

  “How can I say no to a gigondas?”

  “I have no idea, how can you?” He closed the menu and signaled the bartender, who came right over. Chris had that weird power over bartenders. He was also the kind of guy who could find a parking place in front of a train station at rush hour. Or call a sellout concert and score just-returned tickets. Life seemed to arrange itself to suit him. Kind of sickening, to be honest.

  They chatted about the show for a few minutes, an obvious delay tactic that made Matty even more nervous. She was about to break in and demand they get it over with when—thank you, Lord—their wine showed up.

  “Cheers.” He raised his glass to hers. She nodded, inhaled the rich, complex bouquet and took a polite, experimental sip, wanting to gulp a good quarter of it straight down because in these circumstances she damn well needed it.

  “Delicious, Chris.”

  His mouth broke into a smile of pleasure that took her back six years. The way they’d enjoyed food and wine together had been really special. “Yup. Very good.”

  “So...”

  “You want me to get on with it.”

  “I do.” She put her wine down, determined to drink slowly, keep her wits about her.

  “Ah, Mattingly.” He sighed heavily. “Okay. Where should I start?”

  “How about that night I walked into your place and found Clarisse naked?”

  “I already explained...” He held up a hand to stop himself. “Sorry. You want me to do it again.”

  “Yes.” Her throat was already thickening. Damn it, why couldn’t she have let this go? Let him go? “I’m better able to listen now.”

  “Okay.” He took another sip of wine, cleared his throat. “Let’s see. Clarisse came over—I was just back from the gym—and she came over to my apartment all desperate, saying she needed to talk to me. I’d already heard some about her capacity for melodrama, so I wasn’t really worried. I figured she was having trouble in class or something. I let her in, made her some tea, and she suggested that since I was still in workout clothes she could wait while I took a shower.”

  “Then...”

  “Then when I came out of the shower, she screamed. I grabbed a towel, ran into the living room and found her lying naked on the couch, completely fine.”

  “Mmm-hmm.” Matty forced her teeth to unclench. “That part I remember.”

  “Because you walked in right when I was trying to get her to stand up and put her clothes back on. So it looked like I was...” He gave a short, mirthless laugh. “You know what it looked like.”

  She bloody well did. The image of him kneeling over Clarisse’s naked body, her arms wrapped around his bare shoulders, legs spread wide—that lovely picture hadn’t left Matty’s brain for...

  Okay, it still hadn’t left.

  Chris’s story hadn’t changed. And one aspect of it still didn’t make sense.

  “If nothing happened, why did you let me go?” All pretense at not caring was exposed by her husky whisper.

  “Matty.” His voice wa
s equally raspy, pain evident in his eyes. “I had nothing to offer you. You were miserable and frustrated. We both were. It seemed the decent thing to do, to cut you loose to find someone else. I was hurt that you didn’t trust me, but bottom line, we were in an impossible situation.”

  “You are right about that.”

  “I thought you’d come back. Sometime.” He stared moodily into his wine. “Then I stopped hoping.”

  No, she hadn’t come back. Even after finding out the extent of Clarisse’s issues, which meant his story could have been true. Even after Matty graduated and was no longer his student.

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “Because you weren’t what I wanted.” Matty spoke quietly, but firmly. She hadn’t wanted a man eleven years older than she was. She hadn’t wanted someone whose class and learning and experience outshone hers by so much. She didn’t want a man surrounded daily by young beautiful women who threw themselves at him, whether or not he stayed faithful. And mostly... “I wanted time to discover who I was, apart from the woman my parents wanted me to be. Apart from the woman you wanted me to be.”

  “When did I want you to be anything but yourself?”

  She laughed. “I was twenty-one, Chris. I didn’t know who myself was.”

  He nodded, swirling the rich liquid in his glass. “And now?”

  “Now I know.”

  He raised an eyebrow, devilish and confident again. “You know what that means, Matty?”

  “No.” She eyed him warily. “But you’re going to tell me, aren’t you.”

  “Yup.” Grinning now, he reached out and took her hand, drew her fingers between his palms. “It means now is the perfect time for us to try again.”

  6

  KENDRA PULLED HER Lexus into the parking lot north of the Point Vicente Interpretive Center and chose a spot overlooking the ocean. Red-earth cliffs lined this part of the coast, dropping dramatically to a series of coves and beaches for about a dozen miles between Rat Beach to the north and the Port of Los Angeles to the south, where the landscape flattened again.

  Jameson sat in the passenger seat; she’d brought him out here for a walk to the whale-watching station. A familiar area, familiar experience, but one that got him out of the house, in ocean air, back with nature. So simple and therapeutic to sit and watch the sea’s restless motion, smell the salty fresh air, watch pelicans and seagulls go about the business of living. Most of her clients responded immediately, some with joy, some with hitherto-suppressed tears, some with a release of crippling tension, but very few came away unchanged. She wouldn’t risk climbing down to the beach with Jameson today—too many opportunities for knee twisting on the steep, uneven paths—but he’d get plenty from the experience.

  “Ready?”

  “Sure.” He flicked her a glance. Something was different about him today. She hadn’t yet figured out what, only that the change made her uneasy.

  “Okay.” She climbed down from the car—really, she needed to buy something smaller—and waited for him to come around before they headed toward the path that wound along the sea to the Interpretive Center, which she’d always called “the whale watch place.” The Center consisted of a building with a small museum, friendly, helpful staff and a whale-watching station on the outside terrace. December through mid-May during daylight hours, seven days a week, volunteers with binoculars scanned the sea and recorded numbers and types of migrating whales. Farther south, white and proud at the tip of the point, rose the Point Vicente lighthouse.

  “So beautiful.” Kendra spread her hands to encompass the view and gave a long, blissful sigh. “I couldn’t live anywhere else. How about you?”

  “For the next twenty years, where I live won’t be up to me.”

  “Twenty.” She started walking toward the path that led to the Center, feeling oddly dismayed. “You’re staying in that long?”

  “That’s what Cartwrights have always done.”

  “After that?”

  “Yeah, I’ll probably come back here.”

  She hung back to let a jogger pass, and nearly bumped into Jameson, who’d done the same thing. “What do think you’ll want to do then?”

  “Oh, probably...circus clown.”

  “Ah, really.”

  “Or linebacker for the Packers.”

  Kendra rolled her eyes. “Uh-huh.”

  “Then astronaut, most likely.”

  She snorted. “Okay, smartass.”

  “All true.” Jameson put his hand to his heart. “At least I wanted to be all those things when I was seven.”

  She glanced at him in surprise. “You weren’t born wanting to be a soldier?”

  “Airman. Army has soldiers. And no, not me.”

  “When did that start?”

  “Can’t really say. Middle school, maybe. When I started clueing into the family history.”

  Kendra let the silence hang for a few steps, seemingly enjoying the breeze, while she wondered how to phrase her next question. “I guess it would be hard to break a tradition that long.”

  “Mattingly took care of that.”

  “Oh, right. She— Mattingly?” She wrinkled her nose. “That’s her full name?”

  “Uh-huh.” He shot her a sideways glance. “We were all named for whiskey. Jameson’s Irish, Maker’s Mark, Basil Hayden’s and Mattingly and Moore.”

  Kendra laughed, surprised at how comfortable she felt around him today. Sure made a difference when he wasn’t snarking at her. “That’s hilarious. I never put it together.”

  “Some do, some don’t.” He shrugged. “It’s Dad’s idea of a joke. Where does Kendra come from?”

  “Dad’s name was Ken. Mom’s name was Sandra. They saw Kendra in a baby name book and went ‘ooh, perfect!’” She tossed hair from her face, blown there by the stiff breeze, and dug in her pocket for an elastic to control it. “It means knowledgeable.”

  “Ah, know-it-all, that figures.”

  “Not what I said.” Her hands went through their practiced motions, taming her hair into a ponytail. “What does Jameson mean?”

  “Supplanter. When I was little I thought it was something you grew flowers in. I refused to tell anyone.”

  Kendra giggled, feeling slightly giddy. “What would supplanter mean? Taking someone’s place?”

  “Yup.” He quirked an eyebrow and made quotation marks with his fingers. “Wrongfully or by force.”

  “Bet you cut in line a lot.”

  “Nah.” His shoulder bumped hers before she could step away. “I think bigger. Maybe a government coup someday.”

  “Live large, General Cartwright.”

  “I’m aiming for Colonel by the time I retire.”

  “Colonel Cartwright has an excellent sound to it.”

  “Yeah?” He turned his head slowly toward her, grin mischievous, blue eyes warm and alive, utterly transformed from the shut-down guy she’d seen so far into someone boyish and irrepressible. “You grew up fun.”

  Kendra sucked in a breath. They needed to go on talking. Now. Because she was gazing at him, taking him in, smiling. She hoped she wasn’t drooling.

  Talk, Kendra.

  “My parents used to bring me here a lot when I was a kid.” She gestured toward the still-distant lighthouse, aware her voice was too high and silly-chattery. “I used to pretend I knew the names of the whales and their personalities and would tell everyone in earshot all about them, their families, favorite toys, etc. I’m sure the volunteers trying to count them thought it was adorable. And really annoying.”

  Jameson’s smile faded. He put a hand briefly on her shoulder. “I’m so sorry about your parents, Kendra.”

  Kendra’s heart gave an irregular jab. “Thanks.”

  “I didn’t know, when you were talking about
your mom, that you lost both of them so suddenly.” His voice was deep, sympathetic and absolutely genuine. “Matty told me.”

  “Ah.” Her throat was tight; she stubbed her toe on a rock and nearly stumbled. “Well, thanks.”

  “It must have been hell.”

  She could only nod. From the height of giddiness she’d crashed back into grief. Incredible how fast it could happen.

  “You have a brother?”

  “Mmm.” Kendra cleared her throat. “Duncan. He’s ten years older. Lives in Wales and herds sheep. We’re...different, to put it mildly.”

  “Did he help out at all?”

  She let out a brittle laugh. “Aren’t we supposed to be talking about you?”

  “Did I sign something saying that?”

  “No, but—”

  “Did he come home to help you?” There was an odd note in his voice. She struggled to identify it. Not anger, not quite, but almost.

  “He came for the service.” And left almost immediately after. “He had to get back.”

  “To his sheep.” The disdain was clear enough now.

  “No, you don’t understand.” She tipped her head, eyebrows raised. “He re-e-eally likes those sheep.”

  Jameson cracked up. Kendra’s chest loosened. She pointed out toward the spectacular view of Catalina Island. “Look how clear it is today.”

  He stopped with her, hands on his hips. “How did you manage? Who helped you through all that?”

  “Jameson.” She laughed awkwardly. “I’m not here to talk about—”

  “Did you have uncles? Aunts? Cousins?”

  “No. Look, can we—”

  “Neighbors?” He swung around to face her, eyes deep with sympathy and something else. “Friends of your parents?”

  Kendra turned to keep walking. She could not stand still and stare into those eyes or she’d come apart. “Yes, I had lots of help. Lots of support.”

  “Uh-huh.” He clearly didn’t believe her. “Lots. And it was all a piece of cake.”

  “Chocolate with chocolate frosting.”