The Coldwater Warm Hearts Club

by Lexi Eddings

  “I’ve seen plenty of dogs chase rabbits in their sleep, but never one that wagged his tail,” Lacy said. “He must be a happy little guy.”

  “They say dogs take on the attitudes of their owners.”

  “Are you trying to tell me you wag in your sleep, too?” Lacy said with an ornery grin.

  He couldn’t tell if she was making fun of him or flirting, but either way, Jake didn’t care. Just being close to her made him happier than he’d been since he’d returned from Helmand province.

  Lacy’s picnic was a feast. In addition to the fried chicken, the picnic basket held half a dozen deviled eggs, carrot and celery sticks, and a crisp apple apiece along with chips and salsa. For dessert, there were a dozen peanut butter chocolate chip cookies that looked soft and chewy, just the way he liked them.

  Before Jake popped one of the deviled eggs in his mouth, he sent a silent prayer skyward.

  Lord, please don’t let me mess up this date, too.

  His iffy relationship with Lacy had survived a botched attempt at bringing her dinner when she was moving in, a disastrous day at the lake house, and a dog bath that ended with a kiss that made him grateful to be a man. For some inexplicable reason, the same kiss had sent her running. He didn’t think he’d get another chance with her if today also went south.

  Then the flavors of the egg burst on his tongue and he forgot all about how the date was going.

  “Oh my gosh, what’s in this?”

  “Those are my mom’s three-cheese deviled eggs.”

  “A plate of these on a bed of watercress would make a great summer special for the grill. I gotta have the recipe.”

  “No can do.” Lacy shook her head. “It’s a family secret.”

  “So you know it?”

  “Of course. All the Evans women do. A girl isn’t considered fully grown till she’s learned to make three-cheese deviled eggs. It’s a family tradition.”

  “Right up there with not cleaning fish?”

  “Exactly.” She nibbled a heavenly egg, too. “The secret recipe is held in as high regard as the family motto.”

  “OK, I’ll bite. What’s the Evans’ family motto?”

  “‘If a little is good, a lot is a whole bunch better,’” she said in an exaggerated English accent pronouncing the last word as if it was “bet-tah.” “My mom believes too much is never enough.” Then her face scrunched into a frown. “Since I’m a minimalist, I’m not doing so well with that, am I?”

  “Whatever you’re doing, keep it up. I think you’re really something special, Lacy,” he said in all seriousness. “Everything you do. Everything you are.”

  “Careful, sir,” she said, as if determined not to take his compliment seriously. “If you hope flattery will get you a deviled egg recipe, you are destined for disappointment.”

  “It’s not flattery if it’s true.”

  She chuckled. “Most guys use sweet talk to get a girl into bed. I’ve never had to defend the virtue of a deviled egg before.”

  Jake leaned toward her. “Is that your way of saying you’d like to sleep with me? If that’s where this is headed, I’ll give up on the recipe in a heartbeat.”

  “No, no, I didn’t mean that.” Her lips said no, but judging from the way her cheeks flushed and her pupils widened, she was thinking about tumbling into bed with him. Lord knew as soon as she mentioned it, it was all he could think about. “I was just trying to impress upon you how seriously my family takes its secrets.”

  “OK, so we’ll take going to bed together off the table for now.” Jake was disappointed by her sigh of relief, but they were still talking, still spending time together. He’d live to fight that battle another day. At the moment, it was time to focus on those eggs. Jake rubbed his chin. “But tell me, is there anything that would convince you to teach me how to make your family’s soon-to-be famous eggs?”

  “Hmm . . . I don’t know. What did you have in mind?”

  He fought the urge to admit the idea of taking her to bed still occupied most of his brain. And all of a certain part of his body. “How about if I name the dish after you on the Green Apple menu?”

  Lacy frowned. “If anyone’s name is on it, it should be my mom’s.”

  “Done.”

  “Now, wait a minute. I didn’t mean for you to think the Evans family eggs can be had for a nod in the Green Apple’s menu.” She cocked her head and gave him a searching look. “We’re not that cheap.”

  “Never thought you were.” Jake helped himself to another egg, willing his body to settle. “But it seems to me you’ve already agreed to share the secret with me. All we’re dickering on now is your price.”

  “What price can you set on the best deviled egg recipe on the planet?” Lacy’s blue eyes teased. “In addition to naming the dish after my mom . . . maybe I’d trade a secret for a secret. Back at my folks’ house, I told you everybody had one—a secret that would break your heart if only you knew it.” She cocked her head at him. “What’s yours?”

  Jake crossed his arms over his chest. “I don’t have any secrets.”

  “Oh, that’s right. You’re a regular item on the Methodist prayer chain, so your life is an open book.”

  Jake laughed. “It was when I first came home from Afghanistan. I’ve been lifted up by the prayer chain in the past, that’s for sure. And I needed it every time, but I don’t think Marjorie and her gang are as worried about me as they used to be.” He gave his prosthetic calf a slap. “I’m doing pretty good with my ‘bionic’ leg now.”

  Of course, he still hadn’t been in a relationship with a woman since he’d returned from Afghanistan. His confidence had taken a beating, but he was working on it. That had to count for something.

  Lacy’s expression went suddenly serious. “Does the prayer chain know about your flashbacks?”

  Jake shook his head. “You’re the only one who knows about them.”

  “Me and that other vet you talked to, you mean.”

  He nodded. He hadn’t exactly unburdened himself to Lester that day. Jake had done more listening than talking, but Lester was the only other person besides Lacy who’d ever caught him having a flashback, so at least the old man knew about them.

  “Maybe you should try that new clinic at Bates College, too,” she suggested. “They might be able to help. Why don’t you see what they can do for you?”

  “Is that your tactful way of telling me I’m nuts?”

  “No, just pointing out an option for you that wasn’t there before. But setting that aside, you can forget about getting my deviled egg recipe with a secret I already know.” Lacy met his gaze steadily. “The day I first came home, you told me you’d been married once. What happened with that?”

  Jake flinched. It had been months since Kim had even crossed his mind, but now the whole screwed-up mess flooded back into him.

  “There’s not all that much to tell.”

  “Let me be the judge of that.” Lacy shifted onto her knees. “Who was she? Where did you meet? And most importantly, why did it end?”

  “You don’t want much, do you?”

  “Neither do you.” She popped the last bite of egg into her mouth and then licked her fingers slowly. “Talk or I’ll take the secret of three-cheese deviled eggs with me to the grave.”

  Jake shrugged. “Okay. Why not?”

  Contrary to Lacy’s cynical suspicion that the point of a date was for a guy to work his way into a girl’s bed, Jake wanted to use this time for them to get to know each other better. Of course, he’d rather she got to know him through his successes instead of his failures, but Lacy wasn’t giving him much choice.

  “I don’t want you to have to shout, so you might want to tell me before the band starts playing.” Then because he didn’t answer immediately, she added, “while we’re still young, please.”

  “Young, huh? That was part of the problem, I guess. We were too young. I met Kim in college when I was playing football. She was a cheerleader for the team, so w
e did some traveling together for games. Toward the end of my freshman season, we played UNLV in Vegas.”

  “So I’m guessing what happened in Vegas didn’t stay in Vegas.” Lacy popped the top on her Coke and took a long drink.

  “Are you telling this story or am I?”

  “Proceed, Mr. Tyler,” she said in an imitation of Judge Preston’s gravelly voice.

  “Anyway, we whupped UNLV big time on the gridiron that year,” Jake said. “After the game, Kimberly and I celebrated the win by hitting one of those cheesy wedding chapels on the Strip.”

  “So you got married, but you didn’t really mean it?”

  “Turns out, I did. Even if a wedding starts out as a joke, by the time you say ‘I do,’ well, the weight of the whole thing hits you pretty hard. All that bit about leaving and cleaving and ‘till death do us part’—it’s got to mean something.” Jacob tried a bite of the chicken, which was juicy and crispy and perfectly spiced. Here was another Evans family recipe he’d need to finesse from Lacy sometime. “The vows meant something to me anyway.”

  “Not to her?”

  “Oh, yeah. I think they did. At first. She had plans for us. Big plans,” Jake said. “Kim expected me to go pro after we graduated. I’d racked up record-setting yardage in my freshman season and it wasn’t over yet. I already had a few agents putting out feelers. But then I took some hard helmet-to-helmet hits and had a couple of pretty bad concussions back-to-back.”

  “Ouch.”

  “What can I say? A three-hundred-pound nose tackle can really ring your bell. It made me pretty fuzzy-headed for a while.” Jake took a drink of his Coke. “I could have kept playing once the team doctor gave me the green light. Guys do. But with all the talk of how multiple concussions in the NFL lead to dementia and other bad stuff, I felt like I was at a crossroads. I had two choices.”

  “And they were?”

  “Look stupid by walking away from a full-ride four-year scholarship, or be stupid from recurring head trauma for the rest of my life,” Jake said. “Like I told you, I need to keep all the gray matter I got.”

  “I’m glad you made that choice. I like the way your brain works in its present configuration,” Lacy said. “But I take it Kim wasn’t in agreement.”

  “Heck, no. She was furious. And she was even more upset when I joined up with the Marines. I tried to convince her it would be great for us. Depending on where I got assigned, we’d be able to travel the world together.”

  It had all seemed so exciting at the recruiter’s office. Once the guy found out Jake was married, he hammered away at all the benefits offered to military families—from housing to shopping at the PX to the adventure of a possible assignment to Italy or Denmark or Japan with his hot young wife at his side.

  “But Kim wasn’t willing to leave the university.” He’d known in his gut that was the beginning of the end, but he’d hoped they could work through it.

  “She wanted to finish her degree?”

  Jake shook his head. “She still had three years of partying left in her.”

  “So did she ever graduate?”

  “Oh, yeah, she racked up enough credits to get a BA in something while I was in Afghanistan, but she was never what you might call a scholar.” Kim’s mind certainly wasn’t the first thing Jake had noticed about her. He was choosier about women now. “A string of Ds can still add up to a degree, you know.”

  He went silent for a moment, reliving his last wrenching day with Kim. Lacy put a hand on his thigh.

  “Jake, don’t tell me she . . . she didn’t leave you because . . . you were wounded, did she?”

  “No. Kim had sent me a Dear John a couple of weeks before the incident. Turns out that old saw is right,” Jake said. “Absence does make the heart grow fonder . . . for somebody nearby.”

  It was hard to make a long-distance marriage work. Harder still when one partner was in a combat zone, but having Kim cheat on him was a wound even the Taliban couldn’t inflict on him.

  “I know what it feels like to be two-timed.” Lacy’s brows tented together in distress and Jake remembered she’d been almost engaged to the lout who stole from their company and ran off with someone else. “I’m so sorry that happened to you.”

  “Don’t be.” He tried to brush aside her sympathy. He couldn’t bear it. “Like I said, we were too young.”

  “Why do I get the feeling there’s more to this story?”

  There was, but he hated to talk about it. Still, when Lacy waited in silence, he felt duty-bound to fill the void. “When I woke up in the hospital in Germany, Kim was there.”

  “She wanted to come back to you?”

  “No, not really.” Kim told him she’d left the other guy. But Jake knew she was only at his side out of pity and that was harder to take than his injury. “The divorce wasn’t final, so she said she wanted to give our marriage a second chance.”

  “But you didn’t want to forgive her.”

  “No, it wasn’t that. At least, not only that.” He looked away from Lacy, feigning intense interest in the motorboat chugging across Lake Jewel. Even though his body was still in Coldwater Cove, his mind wandered back to the hospital ward in Germany.

  It had been the sound of water that had made him open his eyes and realize for the first time that he wasn’t in Afghanistan any longer. The overbright sun that bleached out all colors but dun and poppy red was in hiding. Falling in slashing torrents on the hospital windows, rain washed the whole world in gray.

  Kim was there, sitting in a chair at his bedside in the bleach-scented ward. Her head drooped forward, her long dark hair obscuring her face. When she looked up and saw that he was awake, her eyes were red with weeping. At first, he was happy to see her, but then he remembered the letter. She’d cheated on him. The pain was still like a mortar to his gut.

  She didn’t love him anymore, so why was she there?

  Then while she fussed over him and cranked up the head of his bed so he could sit up, he realized dimly that something else was wrong, too. The blankets draped over his body weren’t lying right. They were flat where his left foot should have been.

  He’d been wounded, Kim explained. Unconscious for several days because he’d suffered a head trauma in addition to . . . well, she wasn’t able to finish the sentence. But she was there now. She’d come to take him home and, once they were back stateside, to take care of him.

  It was pretty clear Jake was no longer the man she’d married. Heck, she hadn’t even wanted him when he still was. The Dear John proved that. He wasn’t about to let pity be the only thing that tied them to each other.

  “I didn’t want anything from her,” Jake said softly, almost forgetting that Lacy was there. Kim hadn’t seen him as a man any longer. He was a pathetic cripple and she’d cast herself in the role of the saint who’d stuck by him.

  Not in this lifetime.

  Then he met the gaze of the woman who didn’t see him as an invalid. The one who still saw him as a man. And realized he needed to tell Lacy the whole truth.

  “Kim didn’t leave me because of my leg. I let her go because of it.”

  “I see.” Lacy tugged absently at a loose thread on the hem of her shorts. “And do you still need to let the people who want to be with you go because of your leg?”

  “No.”

  “Good.” Lacy smiled at him. “Let’s ditch the concert, go back to your place, and make some deviled eggs.”

  Chapter 24

  Want to buy: a used camper trailer, the cheaper the better.

  Don’t have to be fancy or nothing. A title would be nice.

  Call the Bugtussles at 555-0169. Ask for Junior.

  —the Coldwater Gazette classifieds

  Daniel was no judge of music, but he could have sworn the piccolo solo in “The Stars and Stripes Forever” wasn’t supposed to sound like a gang of mice having their tails stomped off. Of course, it didn’t matter much what sort of noise was coming from the gazebo because on the edge of the crowd,
a group of teenagers was singing “Be Kind to Your Web-Footed Friends” at the top of their lungs, drowning out most of the band’s mistakes.

  Toward the end, all pretense of matching the right pitch was abandoned as the boys switched into screeching falsettos.

  Daniel hid a grin as he walked by them. Once again, he was thankful to be in law enforcement in Coldwater Cove, where the worst youthful offenses seemed to be skateboarding in unauthorized areas, cruising around the Square too fast, and singing out of tune.

  Loudly.

  Coldwater Cove was a great little town. It was the best place in the world for his son to grow up.

  If only Anne would allow him to be part of Carson’s growing up again. He didn’t blame her for limiting his time with the boy. Until he got himself together, it was the right thing for her to do. But knowing that it was right didn’t make it hurt any less.

  He’d been assigned to patrol the band concert on the off chance that there might be some drugs changing hands. The sheriff had heard that meth had found its way to Colton Springs, a town some fifty miles away. He wanted to make sure the drug didn’t migrate up the highway and get a toehold in Coldwater, too. Daniel hadn’t seen anything suspicious, but he did spot Anne and Carson on a blanket under one of the big live oaks that sprawled over the green.

  Dan had been praying. He’d been working on his problem. He even swallowed his pride and drove all the way to Muskogee for a Gamblers Anonymous meeting on his day off. The hardest part was getting up in front of that roomful of strangers and admitting what he was. After that, he received nothing but support and a sponsor who was so committed to Daniel’s recovery, he promised to be available to counsel him by phone anytime, day or night.

  Maybe once Anne saw how serious he was about kicking his addiction—he could admit that was what it was now—she’d give him the benefit of the doubt. He screwed up his courage and headed her way.