“On that note, I’m going to my room to rest up for the next shift,” Savannah said. She looked at Maisy and the others. “You should do the same. I put some spare toothbrushes out in the bathroom, and I have some extra pajamas you can sleep in, Perry.” She glanced at Ryder. “Sorry, nothing in your size.”
“I’ll try to contain my disappointment,” he said. He turned to Perry. “She’s right, ladybug, it’s going to be a long night. You should sleep while you can.”
“But what if the kitten needs me?” she said.
“It’ll cry. Trust me. You’ll hear it. It’ll be perfectly safe in its box until it’s time to feed him again,” he said. “I promise. I’ll stay up a bit and keep an eye.” Perry looked like she would argue, but he shook his head and with a frown she nodded in agreement. She leaned into the box to kiss the kitten’s head and then trudged to the bathroom.
“She looks exhausted,” Maisy said. “I hope she can sleep. I hope you can, too. I’m not sure how comfortable that couch is.”
“I used to sleep on the backseat of my car, which was a beat-up old Honda Civic, when I was working and going to school,” he said. “Nothing can be worse than that and I slept like a baby.”
Ryder grimaced when he remembered the catnaps he used to take in the back of the small sedan. It had been like trying to jam a whale into a tuna can. It was a wonder he wasn’t permanently shaped like a question mark. Those had been relentlessly arduous days, one bleeding into another until he lost track of himself and his life.
“Was it worth it?” she asked. “Working that hard?”
Ryder had never really paused to think about it. It was just what he needed to do to provide for his family.
“Yes,” he said. “It was worth it.” He pointed at the bathroom door. “She was worth it.”
“You’re a good father, Ryder,” Maisy said.
A shadow passed over his face and when he glanced up at her, his gaze was fierce. “I have to be. I won’t fail her the way my father failed my younger brother, Sawyer, and me.”
Maisy wanted to hear more but she didn’t press, knowing that if he wanted to talk he would and if he didn’t at least she’d gotten a glimpse into his personal pain, a random piece of the puzzle that was Ryder Copeland.
She tipped her head in what she hoped was an inquisitive way, encouraging his confidence but not badgering. Ryder ran a hand over his face and gave her a rueful glance. “Sorry, you don’t want to hear this.”
“Of course I do,” she insisted. “I’ll listen to anything you have to tell me.”
Ryder gave her a small smile and she almost jumped with triumph when he began to speak.
“My mother passed away when I was seven and losing her broke my father,” he said. “He crawled into a bottle and never came back out. We moved often because he couldn’t hold a job. We were frequently homeless, occasionally on public assistance, and I learned very young that if Sawyer and I were going to eat, it was on me to provide. When I found out I was going to be a father, I vowed that my child would never ever know what it was like to be hungry or scared. Not ever.”
“Oh, Ryder,” Maisy said. “Perry is an amazing young woman. You’ve clearly done a great job raising her.”
“Maybe,” he said. “I wasn’t around as much as I wanted to be when she was little because of work and school, but we’ve been on our own for a while and I feel like I might be doing okay. At least, the school principal doesn’t have me on speed dial or anything.”
“You’re doing better than okay,” Maisy said. “Look how she talks to you about everything and trusts you. There is real affection between you and she listens to you. I’ve worked with kids not much older than her and a lot of them do not have that with either parent and usually not with their dad. Trust me, you’re doing good work here.”
“Thanks,” he said. He had tried so hard to be everything for Perry when her mother went to pursue her own dreams. It had been a rough adjustment, but he felt as if they’d hit their stride. He might have screwed it up somewhere along the way and maybe a big fail was looming, but it wasn’t for lack of effort.
When Perry reappeared, Ryder had to resist the urge to tuck her in like she was five. It was one of the many things he’d had to let go of as she became a teenager. There were still days when he came home expecting to find his toddler daughter tottering around in her mother’s heels and instead found a slender young woman painting her nails with a hoodie all but covering her face. Sometimes she was gregarious and chatty and other times she was sullen and withdrawn. He tried not to take it personally.
Perry climbed into her comforter on the floor. She pulled the covers up and glanced at him and Maisy with a look that was older than her fourteen years. “Wake me up if the kitten so much as hiccups,” she said. “I will be distraught if I wake up in the morning and it’s de . . . no longer with us.”
“I promise,” he said. He glanced at Maisy. “We promise.”
Maisy nodded and Ryder felt a connection he hadn’t felt since Whitney left. The feeling that he wasn’t alone in raising this young woman. It was ridiculous, he knew that, but still, for a fleeting moment, it felt good to share the parenting worry.
“Well, good night,” Maisy said. She gave them a small wave and disappeared into her room.
Ryder watched her go, wondering how it was that she was single. She was such a breath of fresh air; she was smart, lively, funny, and adorable. How had no man snapped her up by now?
Like a sucker punch to the jaw, it hit him then that he was assuming she was single. She’d said she had no marriage or fiancé in her past. But she could have a boyfriend. He shook his head. He hated the thought. Detested it. Despised it. In fact, his heretofore unknown inner caveman wanted to hammer the idea of her with another guy into the ground with his fist.
“Dad,” Perry whispered.
“Yeah,” he said. Who would know if Maisy was single? Wait, what was he thinking? If she accepted his bid, he was going to work for her. He couldn’t think of her that way. It was one of his long-standing rules. Do not get involved with clients. But she wasn’t a client yet. He shook his head. Obviously, kissing her had rattled something loose and he wasn’t thinking clearly.
“Dad.” Perry said his name, this time with a note of exasperation, sort of like when he made spaghetti and she wanted tacos.
“What?” he asked.
“Your pacing is making it very hard to sleep,” she said.
“Pacing?” He glanced around and realized he was across the room and had been going back and forth the entire time he was thinking about Maisy’s status. This was just more proof that he getting in way over his head. He glanced at his daughter. “Sorry, I was just thinking about . . . work.”
“Well, do it from a stationary position, please,” Perry said. Then she rolled over, tugged the covers up around her ears, and fell asleep.
Ryder made a face behind his daughter’s back. He couldn’t wait until some boy came along and dinged her radar, then she’d know how he felt. Whoa, hold on, there. Yes, he could wait. He could wait until she was thirty-five, at the earliest. Maybe then he’d be willing to let go a little bit. He sighed as he stretched out on the fold-out couch and stared up at the old plaster ceiling.
He could handle this, he told himself. Maisy Kelly was just one woman in a sea of women. There was absolutely no reason for him to get all tripped up over her Ideas! with capital I’s and exclamation points. In fact, judging by the turret she had her heart set on, she was probably going to be trouble with a capital T. His best line of defense would be to steer clear of the cute little bookseller.
Settled on his course of action, Ryder closed his eyes and tried to sleep. He couldn’t help it if his carpenter’s brain estimated that it was exactly twenty steps to her room from his spot on the couch. He wasn’t going to do anything about it. Really, he wasn’t.
But
that didn’t stop their kiss from replaying in his mind in a continuous loop that made a complete and utter mockery of any thought he had about staying away from her.
Chapter Fifteen
THE alarm on her phone flashed and beeped a high-pitched repetitive chime that was impossible to ignore. Maisy looked at it and blinked. That had to be wrong. Was she flying somewhere? Had she taken leave of her senses and decided to go for a run in the middle of the night with Savy? Was there a hot sale from some company on the other side of the world that she needed to catch online? No, no, no. Why the hell was her alarm ringing at two in the morning?
Oh, yeah, the kitten. She shut off the alarm and climbed out of bed. Her room was only half-unpacked so she switched on the light to avoid tripping on her boxes of stuff. She grabbed her robe as she slid out of her wrought iron bed. Her sheets were hydrangea blue with a matching comforter that was white with embroidered bunches of blue and violet hydrangea all over it. She loved this bedding. It always made her feel as if she were outside on a beautiful spring day and she was oh-so reluctant to leave it.
She stepped lightly as she opened her door, not wanting to wake Perry or Ryder if she could help it. It had been a long night already and if Ryder was taking the four o’clock feeding, he was going to need his sleep.
She stepped around Perry and peered into the cardboard box, hoping with everything she had that the little one was all right. She dreaded the thought of having to be the one to tell the others, especially Perry, that it hadn’t made it.
In the dim glow coming from the night-light across the room, she could see that the fuzzy nugget had moved so its back was against the side of the box. Its feet looked tiny and thin as if they couldn’t support the weight of its fluffy black fur never mind any milk weight it might gain. Maisy put the backs of her fingers on its chest to make sure it was breathing. It was. It was warm and its little chest was rising and falling. She sagged a bit in relief.
She tiptoed around the fold-out bed where Ryder was fast asleep. She took a moment to study the man and then his daughter. They both slept on their backs with their mouths slightly open and one arm was flung over their heads while the other was down at their side. With the softness of sleep, the similarity of their features was even more obvious. They each had a wide brow and a square jaw, high cheekbones and long dark eyelashes, hiding what Maisy already knew they shared, their bright-blue eyes.
She knew that Perry was in her awkward stage right now, but there was no doubt that she was going to grow up to be a heartbreaker. Ryder was going to have his hands full, no question.
She supposed he was lucky they lived in a community like Fairdale. It was a college town, but it was a small campus and despite the new crops of students that came and went every year, Fairdale was the sort of place where everyone knew everyone else and they kept an eye on one another. Raising a teen girl could be tricky, but he’d have a lot of help here.
She prepped the kitten’s milk and then crept back to the box and scooped it up, taking it into the bathroom so as not to wake everyone. The kitten let out a soft meow, but settled into her hand as if trusting her. Maisy felt her heart go smoosh.
She sat on the tile floor of the bathroom with her back propped up against the tub. She grabbed a towel from the rack and put the kitten in the middle of it. She remembered to get some formula on the bottle’s nipple and sure enough the kitten latched on, sucking with gusto and making its ears wiggle while it did so.
“You are wrecking me, kitten,” she said. “Who knew a half pound of fuzz could crawl inside my heart in a matter of hours?”
The kitten spread its front paws and started to knead the blanket while it drank. Its little feet were so tiny as it extended its itty-bitty claws while padding the terry cloth. Maisy wanted to hug it close to her and promise nothing bad would ever happen to it again, but of course that would be a lie. She had no idea if it would survive the night, never mind the next week. She felt her anxiety spike.
As if risking everything she had by opening the bookstore wasn’t stressful enough, now she had this little life looking to her, to all of them, to save it. The thrum of panic surged through Maisy. What if she failed? What if she lost everything? What if the kitten died? She’d already quit her job and lost Auntie El; she didn’t think she could handle another crushing blow.
A sob bubbled up in her throat before she could stop it. Tears dropped onto the kitten’s fur and she was sure she was going to make it wet and cold and it would croak, shivering from the dampness of her tears. She held her hand over its back, shielding it from the tears she could not seem to stop.
“You have to live,” she said. She sniffed. She turned her head so she could wipe her face on her shoulder, first one side and then the other. “I don’t want to pressure you or anything, but I will be overwrought if something happens to you.”
The kitten finished the bottle and stretched. Maisy took it as a good sign. She sniffed again, relieved that her tears seemed to have stopped. She put the bottle down and lifted the kitten up so she could pat its back. When it burped, she held it so that they were face-to-face. Much to her surprise, the kitten licked her nose with its tiny pink tongue. Maisy sighed.
“You are a charmer. Just so you know, there is a little girl out there who will be devastated if you don’t make it, and so will I,” Maisy said. “So, even though I know you don’t like this, you really need to make with the business. Deal?”
The kitten closed its eyes as if ignoring her. Maisy grabbed a cotton ball and wet it with warm water. As she expected, the kitten didn’t like having its potty makers rubbed any more than Maisy like rubbing them. The kitten’s eyes popped open and it wiggled and yowled but Maisy persevered until the cotton ball was flooded with warm wet. At least it seemed to have the peeing thing down. Still no sign of number two. Maisy wrapped the kitten in a towel while she cleaned up. Then she crept back into the living room, hoping that the kitty’s caterwauling hadn’t woken anyone.
She tucked it back into its box, checking that the heating pad was warm but not hot. The towels were fluffed and the box was safely up against the wall and out of any lines of traffic so it wouldn’t get kicked.
She glanced down at Perry. She had rolled onto her side and was still asleep. She glanced at Ryder on the fold-out couch, expecting him to be asleep as well. He was still on his back, as he’d been before, but his eyes were open and he was watching her with a look of concern.
“How did the kitten do?” he whispered. He pushed the covers aside and rolled up to a sitting position and then got to his feet. Maisy felt her heart thump hard as she took in his bare chest. Thank goodness he’d opted to sleep in his jeans, otherwise she might have fainted. She watched as he pulled his T-shirt over his head. Even in the dim light, she could see the man was pure muscle. Lord-a-mercy!
She glanced away, trying to regroup. She shook her head. She cleared her throat. She studied the floor. Floors were good. Floors were boring. Floors didn’t have muscles or big callused hands that she wanted to feel . . . ahem.
“The kitten ate like a champ,” she whispered to the floor. Her voice sounded breathy and she cleared her throat. “Still working on number two.”
She felt the heat of his body next to hers when he stepped close to peer into the box. She saw his slash of white teeth in the dark. His voice was soft in her ear when he said, “I’m up next. I’ll see what I can do.”
“Good luck,” she said. It felt like a lame thing to say, and she was glad it was dark and he couldn’t see her blush. She edged away from him, thinking it wasn’t safe to be standing this close to temptation. The urge to lick him or bite him like he was a piece of chocolate cake found on a late-night refrigerator raid was too much. Complete and utter torture, in fact.
“I think we need to talk,” Ryder said. His voice was so soft she had to lean in to hear him.
“About what?” she asked.
He
didn’t answer. Instead, he took her hand and led her into her room and shut the door. Before Maisy could gather her wits, he leaned against the door and crossed his arms over his chest.
“Why were you crying?” he asked. His eyes were worried. “And, no, I’m not leaving until you tell me.”
“Does that strong-arm stuff work with Perry?” she asked. She needed to divert him. She didn’t want to admit how scared and weak she felt about the bookstore or the kitten.
“Never,” he admitted. “But she’s a teen. Stubbornness is like their superpower.”
Maisy laughed. He smiled but he didn’t move. He stood leaning against the door, not crowding her, not pushing her, just a steady presence, sort of like a rock, patiently waiting for her to share.
“I’m fine,” she said. She met his gaze with a steady one of her own so he wouldn’t doubt her.
“Aha!” he said. “My friend Zach says that when a woman says she’s ‘fine’ she is anything but.”
“What does this Zach know about being a woman?” Maisy asked.
“Zachary Caine grew up in a house full of women and then married a woman with two daughters. He might be the most woke man I know,” Ryder said. “Besides, he runs a brewery in Maine that I helped restore from an old factory, so I got to watch him up close and personal when he met his wife. The man knows what he is talking about. Fine is never fine.”
“Be that as it may, I really am fine,” she said.
He didn’t move. In fact, if anything he relaxed into the door as if he was willing to wait all night for her to spill her guts. Talk about stubborn!
“All right,” she said. “I got a little terrified about our kitten’s mortality—it’s just too tiny and frail—which then rolled into a freak-out about the house—what if we can’t remodel it to be functional as a bookstore?—then I had a spike of anxiety about the bookstore—what if it fails and I’m left with nothing or even worse I have to crawl back to the university and beg for a job from the dingleberry, who has repeatedly told me I’m going to fail? Good grief, I’d rather sell insurance or cars or my soul. All of which twisted into a nice punch of ambush grief, as you so aptly named it, for my aunt just to top off the emotional cocktail. So, I leaked out my eyeballs a little bit and now I’m fine.”
The Good Ones Page 13