by Holly Rayner
“Paige, are you all right?”
She didn’t answer the hallucination, even though she really, really wanted to. His accent was just a little bit softer and a little bit stranger than she had remembered, but it still had an unshakeable control over her body and her heart.
“Who’s going to take care of Dylan?” she mumbled under her breath, hoping no one would hear.
A look of concern crossed the hallucination’s face.
“You will. You just fainted, that’s all. This is no big deal. From what Dale tells me, you’ve been putting yourself through a lot lately, and that can cause this sort of thing. I can take you to the hospital if you want to get checked out by another doctor.”
Above her, Dale, the waiter, looked at where the hallucination was. For a second, Paige could swear he saw it too. And then, he spoke to it.
“I can take care of her; don’t worry, sir. You just enjoy your trip and let us locals worry about our own.”
Wait, what?
“You can see…?” Paige trailed off, not wanting to fully voice the question. But she couldn’t stop herself from addressing Kehlan. “You’re really here?”
A smile replaced the concern, and Kehlan’s strong, steady arm offered her a hand up.
“I’m really here. Let’s get you some air, shall we?”
Outside, in the still-chilly spring air, Paige found that she was more certain of her surroundings, but no less confused.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, before he had a chance to utter a word.
Her tone was defensive, but he barely responded to that aspect of it. Instead, he leaned forward.
“I guess I just couldn’t keep away from the fresh air…the ski slopes…”
Paige felt his hand on hers, his fingers and hers intertwining.
“…the sudden rain…the lakes…”
He used her hand to pull her in close to him, so that her whole body was so close to his that she could feel the warmth coming off of him. His mouth was so close to her ear that his next words were perfectly clear, even though they were barely spoken in a whisper.
“…the waffles.”
And, all in a moment, the dam broke, and she heard herself laugh and let herself fall fully into his arms, burying her head in his chest and feeling his fingers run through her hair just the way she had remembered.
They stood entwined together for a while—how long, Paige couldn’t say. All she knew was the feel of him, and the warmth of him. This was all she needed. Nothing else mattered.
Eventually, he pulled back, leaned down, and pressed his lips to hers. She felt a thrill run from the tips of her toes up through her body.
How could she have thought she was willing to give this up? How had she thought she was able to give this up, whatever the cost? She’d had so little time to be able to kiss him before, and yet now that he had come back, it felt as though holding him and kissing him had been a central foundation of her life that had been ripped away for the last two weeks.
“I missed you,” she said when they stood back at last, one hand still clasped, pulled apart just enough to look at one another.
He grinned, and rubbed her chin with his thumb.
“I can tell. I missed you, too.”
They were simple words, but they were full of meaning. She looked back towards the diner.
“If you give me a minute, I’ll just go tell Dale…”
She stopped herself. Her immediate reaction was to tell Dale that he was on his own for the rest of the afternoon, and bring Kehlan back to her house and keep him there. But that wasn’t right. That wasn’t possible. Everything was different now than it had been before, when Dylan was gone and they were in their own little bubble with no responsibilities or complications.
“Dylan?” Kehlan asked, seeming to follow her train of thought, even without her having said much of any of it out loud.
“He’s back from his field trip,” she said, trying to work out in her head how this man she’d been yearning for fit into her life as it was.
How to you bring a distraction into the life he was a distraction from?
“I would hope so,” he said.
He was looking at her expectantly. Not forcing the issue, but leaving it open. Waiting.
Her heart raced. Her initial reaction had been to keep her life with Dylan separate from her time with Kehlan. But that was just a way of keeping Kehlan distant, and trying to protect her heart. Wasn’t that exactly the sort of thing that she’d just spent the last two weeks wishing she hadn’t done?
She swallowed hard, summoning the courage.
“Would you like to meet him?” she asked.
He gave her a wide smile.
“I would love to.”
A mixture of relief and nerves flooded her body. She leaned up, kissing him on the mouth, still amazed by what a luxury it felt like to be able to do that.
“Then come by tonight for dinner. If you come at seven that should give me time to pick him up from my parents and prepare him for someone coming over.”
The same smile seemed permanently affixed to Kehlan’s face.
“That sounds perfect to me. And what would be an effective bribe to ensure he likes me? Pizza?”
Paige laughed, partially from the nerves, and partially from the novelty of ordering takeout through a prince.
“If you pick up a pepperoni from Pizarro’s on Fourth Street, I’m pretty sure you’ll have a friend for life.”
He nodded mock seriously.
“Pepperoni. Pizarro’s. Seven o’clock. Mission accepted.”
Then, her brought her hand up to his lips and kissed it.
“Until then. I don’t want to keep you from everything in there. I’m pretty sure there aren’t enough pizzas in the world to bribe Dale if I steal you away from the crowd you’re dealing with today.”
He’ll get over it, Paige wanted to say. She wanted to leave work and run away with him. But she also knew that if this was going to be anything more than last time, anything real, it needed to fit into her life, not entirely disrupt it. She needed to go back into work, and finish out her shift, and stick to the plans they’d just made.
Though, as she watched Kehlan walk back to his car—constantly turning backwards for a few steps at a time so that he could run his eyes over her body, as though he’d been dying of thirst for two weeks, and she was a tall glass of water—she suspected it was going to be hard to focus on anything at all that didn’t involve him.
As the afternoon wore on, her suspicion was proved right. On the brief occasions she was able to focus on her work and put Kehlan out of her mind, there was something that always brought her right back to him. At least she was used to it, she thought, distracted with memories and daydreams of him as she had been the past two weeks. Still, the nearer the end of her shift drew, the more nervous Paige became.
She was a mess of nerves as she went to pick her son up from her parents’ house. It was all she could do to stop her mother’s interrogation as to who the mysterious man was that she’d heard someone say they saw her with earlier, in front of the Coffee Cup. As much as she loved living in a small town, Paige thought ruefully, it had its disadvantages.
But she was able to roll her eyes, extricate herself, and tell her mother than she’d tell her all about it later. On autopilot, she drove Dylan home, and talked about his afternoon with his grandparents. Their chatter was all pleasant and normal, but even the nine-year-old was able to sense that something was up.
As they walked in the front door, Dylan asked, “Mom, are you okay? You seem weird.”
That’s the thing about kids, isn’t it? They pay attention, and they tell the truth about what they see.
She knelt down so that she could talk to her son at eye level.
“Mom’s just excited. We have a special guest coming over tonight for dinner, and he’s very excited to meet you. He’s a good friend of mine.”
Dylan seemed a little bit confused. One day, he’d p
robably look back on this conversation and understand perfectly what was happening. But right now, it must have seemed a little weird to him.
But that’s the other thing about kids—they’re good at finding the upside, even when they don’t understand what’s going on.
“Do you think he’ll want to meet Milo?”
Paige laughed. Milo was the name they’d given to the kitten, who was growing into more and more of an energetic little furball every day.
“I think he would love to meet Milo. But do you know what?”
“What?”
“He already met him! Kehlan was the one who saved Milo. He heard him crying in the rain and he rescued him.”
That look of absolute amazement at something so simple—she’d miss that look when Dylan was older.
“No way!”
She neatened his wrinkled shirt sleeve. For a second, her nerves about introducing Kehlan and Dylan almost made her worry that Kehlan would judge him for it. But she knew better than that. She knew Kehlan better than that, even though they’d only known each other for such a short time.
“Yes, way! Now, go pick up your stuff in the living room. He’s going to be here soon.”
The little boy sighed and huffed away, obedient but under protest. Paige tried to keep her attention on him, if only to stop herself from obsessively checking the time on her phone. Would Kehlan be here right at seven, she wondered? Or would he underestimate just how much the people of Stockton loved their marginally authentic pizza, and keep her waiting?
After what seemed like an eternity, but was really only until exactly 6:59 p.m., the doorbell rang, startling Paige even though she was expecting it.
“He’s here!” she heard Dylan say. He ran to the door, opening it before she could stop him.
There, as expected, was Kehlan. He had a pizza box in one hand and a grocery bag in the other, but Dylan zeroed in on the former.
“Pizza!” he exclaimed, before Kehlan could even open his mouth.
Paige grinned. Not exactly the orderly introduction she’d been expecting.
She stepped forward to try to get things back on track. But, before she could, a little ball of energetic fur came out of nowhere, running into Kehlan’s leg and almost startling him into dropping the pizza box.
“Oh, hello there!” Kehlan said, his pleasure at the surprise evident.
“That’s Milo,” Dylan said, in a voice that Paige recognized among his most excited. “Mom says you saved him.”
His eyes still on the kitten, Kehlan shook his head.
“What, me? No. Your mom saved him. I just found him.”
“He likes pizza.”
“He has good taste.”
Time to pull a little order from the chaos.
“Okay boys, hand over the box before our dinner gets stolen. Dylan, this is Kehlan.”
She deftly took the pizza box and grocery bag from Kehlan’s hands. When she did, Kehlan closed the door behind him and slowly shepherded the little boy towards the table.
“Hello, Dylan. It’s very good to meet you.”
“You have a weird name.”
“Dylan!”
Kehlan shrugged it off.
“No, it’s all right. I kind of do. I was named after my great-grandfather.”
Dylan made his exaggerated thinking face.
“I guess it sounds kinda cool.”
“Dylan, come set the table, please.”
It was almost surreal how easy and natural everything felt. This situation—Kehlan here with Dylan, interacting like this was all normal—had felt so impossible two weeks ago. But now that it was happening, it seemed inevitable. Like he always should have been here.
She enjoyed listening to the two of them talk, mostly about nature. Dylan was excited to tell Kehlan everything he could think of about animals, and to his credit, Kehlan displayed the patience of a saint, listening to every word as though it were indispensable information.
Watching the two of them, it felt to Paige like her whole life for the last nine years had been a machine. It worked, sure. It functioned well enough to keep moving. But it was clunky, and prone to breakdowns, and there were loose ends and non-moving gears that only ever seemed to get in the way. But here was the missing gear, and it slotted in perfectly. And for the first time in her adult life, Paige felt as though everything could be not only survivable, but really functional.
All this time, there had just been something missing. And now, he was here.
Chapter 16
Kehlan
One Week Later
The last week had been a blur, but a happy one. Kehlan had rented a room at the Haases’ bed and breakfast, although he was barely ever there except at night. He spent the majority of his waking hours with Paige and Dylan, and he found himself increasingly feeling as though this were a default setting, and any time he spent out of the presence of one or the other of them was a strange and unwelcome occurrence.
Paige still insisted on going into the Coffee Cup for her work shifts, but she had cut them far back. It would have been disappointing to Kehlan, missing out on time with her, if it hadn’t given him a chance to spend time with Dylan and get to know him. A few times, they even went out with Paige’s father, making the most of the Washington spring and the birdwatching opportunities it provided.
It had been years since Kehlan’s father died. Even when he’d been alive, their relationship had been strained in many ways. He loved the man, but there had always been a distance there. There were expectations which they’d just never quite gotten around. But with Dylan and Paige’s father, it wasn’t like that. It was simple.
He could get used to this. He was already used to this. It had happened so quickly, the routine of it. The way Kehlan had slipped so easily into their family life. It surprised him. He’d known that he’d hoped to eventually get to this point. But to have it happen so quickly and so naturally was one of the best surprises of his life.
He still treasured every moment of alone time he got with Paige, after Dylan went to bed, or when he joined her for lunch in the middle of a shift at the Coffee Cup. She became so central to his life so quickly that it was easy to forget how new their connection was, right up until the moment when he was with her, and then he learned new things about her with practically every phrase she spoke. It was like she was a blurry photograph that he knew he already loved, but which he just kept falling deeper for as it grew clearer and clearer.
So, when Paige’s parents took Dylan for the evening as per Paige’s regularly scheduled “me night,” Kehlan was delighted to join her in making it a date night instead.
He considered driving her into Seattle and finding something impressive or expensive to wow her with. His friends at college had always been a fountain of ideas about the best way to impress a woman on a date, or to make sure that she got the “right” impressions of you right away. But that wasn’t them. That wasn’t what they wanted, or what they did. Looking back, he realized now that his whole concept of dating had been flawed. This is what it always should have been: time focusing on one another. There would be time for trips, and exciting ventures out to the city. Kehlan especially intended, when everything was settled, to be sure that Paige got to go out regularly to see her sister.
But that wasn’t a date. This was.
Tonight, the two wanted nothing more but to walk around downtown Stockton in the crisp, clear spring evening air, peering into the windows of each shop they passed. He held her hand in his, and reveled in the way it felt to be there with her. It felt like home.
“What are you thinking about?”
The question caught him off guard. He lifted her hand to his mouth and gave it a quick kiss.
“You,” he said. “And how happy I’ve been this week.”
She smiled.
“It feels so different now than it did the last time we walked down this street.”
Kehlan nodded.
“In a good way, I hope.”
Sh
e rolled her eyes.
“Of course in a good way.”
“So, you don’t deeply resent me stealing away your ‘me night’?”
She nudged him playfully.
“Oh, you know. Only very much.”
He laughed.
“What do you usually do on these nights, anyway? I feel I hardly know what you’d do, left to your own devices. You’ve always got something to do.”
She sighed.
“Oh, I don’t know. Usually just watch a show or something. Do some cleaning or pay some bills that I haven’t gotten around to paying. Then rest, mostly. I go pick up Dylan when I know he’s asleep enough that he won’t wake up from the trip, so that the morning routine stays consistent. Though, that was a lot easier when he was younger and easier to carry.”
“Oh, so you go get him in the evening,” Kehlan said, surprised. He tried not to let his disappointment show through in his voice. But then, he felt her squeeze his hand.
“I usually do. But I don’t have to. I wasn’t planning on picking him up tonight.”
The disappointment was gone, and Kehlan again felt like he was walking on air.
Paige seemed to know everyone, and they all seemed to know her. They didn’t seem interested in hiding their reactions in seeing her walking hand in hand with Kehlan, either. There was a variety, but most of them seemed positive. Not that that seemed surprising—Paige was the kind of woman who would develop good relationships with every person in the town she loved so much.
After every encounter, when they’d had a few seconds to walk down the road so that they wouldn’t be overheard, Paige gave him a brief synopsis of who the people were they’d just talked to, and a few basic things about them. Kehlan found that many of them were familiar names, either from the story of the town that Paige had given them the first day they’d met, or from things that he’d heard from Dylan and Paige’s father.
Putting faces to the names just made him feel more as though he were settling in. More like he was becoming a permanent fixture in Stockton.
But then, he saw a face that made him feel as though he were already a part of the town.