Sugarplum Way

by Debbie Mason

  Instead of offering her his hand this time, because she’d no doubt ignore it, Aidan grabbed hold of her puffy black jacket and pulled her upright. Her left boot slid across the frozen puddle and out from under her. She grabbed him at the same time he yanked her toward him, ensuring she ended up plastered against his chest. The feel of her small, curvy body against his reminded him of another time he’d been this close to her.

  Only then it had been a hot summer day and he’d been sprawled on top of her naked body while she lay facedown in the sand. The memory was so clear and so real that he jerked back as if he’d been burned. She must have been having a flashback of her own because she sucked in a breath, scrambled backward, and held up both hands.

  They stood staring at each other, panting as if they’d been in a race, their breath glistening in the frosted air. The porch light went on, dissipating the heat that had been simmering between them.

  The front door opened to reveal Maggie. The fifty-something woman wore a bright, floral-print housecoat, her shoulder-length red hair showing signs she’d just woken up. “Julia, Aidan, what’s—” She didn’t get a chance to finish. Miller bounded up the stairs to shower the love of his life with doggy kisses.

  “Oh, I miss you too, my handsome boy,” she murmured, and gave Miller a rubdown.

  Maggie’s voice and smile wavered, and Aidan realized he’d been wrong earlier. His father hadn’t broken up with Maggie soon enough. The typically vivacious artist was heartbroken. Still, it was better now than later. If she and Miller were this bad off after only a week…

  “You’re welcome to take him anytime, Maggie,” Aidan offered. Just because he had a reputation as a hardass didn’t mean he couldn’t feel sorry for both the dog and the woman.

  After gathering her hat, scarf, and bag from the ground, Julia straightened and smiled at him. She had one of those infectious grins that made people smile in return. Most people. Not him. And it wasn’t only because he didn’t smile a lot or have a lot to smile about these days. It was because the smile she gave him was the kind you offered someone with a shared interest. And other than books, this particular woman’s interest was his family’s love life.

  He crossed his arms and narrowed his eyes at her, hoping that was not what she was up to here.

  She lifted a shoulder as though his lack of a smile and suspicious look were par for the course and stuck a Books and Beans bag between her knees. Using both hands, she wrapped the furry red scarf around her neck and then jammed a green knitted tree hat decorated with red glitter balls on her head.

  He gave his own a slight shake at her getup and then turned back to Maggie.

  His dad’s ex looked from him to Julia. “Is something wrong?”

  “Miller and I saw Julia skulking about your place and thought she was trying to break in.” He jerked his thumb at the two streetlamps that had burned out before the sun came up. “I’ll put in a call to have them fixed.”

  “I wasn’t skulking, Maggie. I wanted to drop off a Thanksgiving invite to Hazel’s and, um…” She glanced at Aidan as though waiting for him to leave.

  He raised an eyebrow and cocked his head. No way was he going anywhere until he learned what she was up to.

  She looked like she intended to wait him out, but when Maggie wrapped her arms around herself, Julia dug in her bag and hurried up the stairs. Miller scooted past Maggie and into the blue Victorian.

  Julia pulled out a book, cast a furtive look Aidan’s way, and then lowered her voice. “I found this by the window. It looks like you have a secret admirer, Maggie. I must have scared him off. I saw a man”—she shot another glance at Aidan as he came up the stairs and finished quickly—“a tall man with silver hair fast-walking in that direction.”

  She shoved the book, A Thousand Mornings by Mary Oliver, in Maggie’s hands when Aidan joined them on the porch.

  “Brr, it’s freezing,” Julia said, giving what Aidan suspected was a fake shiver. “Get inside before you catch cold, Maggie. I hope you can make it to Hazel’s for Thanksgiving dinner. I’ll talk to you later.” She reached for the doorknob.

  Aidan leaned his shoulder against the doorjamb and looked down at Julia while saying to Maggie, “I should probably take a look at that. You can’t be too careful with these secret admirer types. Could be a stalker.”

  “A stalker? Don’t be silly.” Julia tried to nudge him out of the way to pull the door closed. “Poor Maggie’s freezing. Let her get inside.”

  Maggie nervously handed him the book. “Have you had a problem with this kind of thing in town?”

  “Now and again.” He flipped through the poetry book. A piece of paper fluttered to the ground. Julia lunged for it, but he was faster. “What do we have here? I can probably get some prints off this.”

  “And waste taxpayer dollars? Don’t be silly,” Julia said, trying to take the paper from his hand.

  He held it out of her reach and scanned the overwrought lines comparing Maggie’s hair to a burning bush in autumn and her eyes to newly budded leaves in spring. Aidan worked to keep a straight face. “I’ll bring it to the station and let the boys have a look, but my guess is your secret admirer’s a woman, Maggie.”

  Noting the disappointment on the older woman’s face, Aidan felt bad for being the one to burst her bubble. Which might have been why he let Julia take the poem from him.

  “Let me see that.” She tugged the paper from his hand. With an intent look on her face, as though giving careful consideration to the lines, she said, “Don’t listen to him, Maggie. This was definitely written by a man. Someone who obviously knows you well.” She took the book from Aidan, holding it up as evidence before giving it back to Maggie. “You were telling me just a few weeks ago how much you enjoyed Mary Oliver’s book Upstream, remember?”

  Maggie nodded and clutched the book to her chest, a hopeful light shining in her eyes. “I remember. It was the day Colin and I stopped in to try your pumpkin spice lattes.”

  Pressing a hand dramatically to her chest and making her big eyes even bigger, Julia gasped. “Oh my goodness, I forgot Mr. Gallagher was with you. I wonder if… That line about your hair and the burning bush—”

  Aidan took Julia by the arm and leaned in to close the door. “You can talk to Maggie later. She’s freezing.” He looked at the older woman, who now appeared to be glowing with hopefulness thanks to Julia. “Do you want to keep Miller for a while or—”

  “Of course she does. Your dad can pick him up when he gets off work. Dinner’s at four, but don’t worry if you’re a little late, Maggie. We’ll wait. Unless you and Mr. Gallagher—”

  Aidan tightened his grip on Julia’s arm and propelled her toward the stairs. “I’ll pick up Miller in a couple of hours, Maggie.”

  Julia waved goodbye to his father’s ex. “I can manage on my own, thank you very much,” she said, tugging her arm free.

  “My dad can take care of himself, too, so butt out of his love life. You’re wasting your time, and it’s not fair to get Maggie’s hopes up.”

  Julia stopped in the middle of the driveway to stare at him. “You. You’re the reason he broke up with Maggie, aren’t you?”

  “What? No.” But her accusation made him wonder if he might have said or done something that his old man misconstrued as disapproval.

  “I knew it,” she muttered, and began walking down the road talking to herself. He thought he heard her say something about five weeks. Her shoulders rose on what sounded like a heavy sigh, and she turned to walk back to him. “Okay, so if you aren’t the reason your dad broke up with Maggie, maybe you can help me get them back together?”

  He hadn’t gotten anywhere with Julia when he interrogated her at the station last summer, so he decided to try a new tactic. “Maybe. But before I decide whether I’ll help you or not, you have to tell me why you’re obsessed with my family.”

  “An obsession is a persistent, disturbing preoccupation with an idea or feeling.” Her head tilted as if she was thinking tha
t over.

  He crossed his arms. “Yeah…”

  She sighed and then closed her eyes, taking a long moment before answering. “It’s not as if I spend every waking minute of every day thinking about your family. I think about a lot of people in town. I like people, and if I can do something to make someone happy, I will. Maggie’s my friend, and she deserves to be happy. So does your dad.” She lifted her hand to play with her earring.

  It was pretty much the same spiel she’d given him at the station. And while he could tell by the way she’d closed her eyes, the length of her pause, and the way she twisted her earring that she was lying, he’d been back in town long enough to see her in action. There was a reason everyone in Harmony Harbor loved the woman.

  Every day she went out of her way to put a smile on someone’s face. Whether it was the kids she entertained at her bookstore or the transients she left blankets and food for at the park or the stray cats she fed at the waterfront, it was obvious she truly enjoyed making others happy. It came naturally to her. But there was nothing natural about her need to make the Gallagher family happy. He could almost feel the desperation coming off her.

  “You’re not going to help me, are you?”

  “Look, if I thought being with Maggie would make my dad happy, I’d talk to him about it. But it won’t. So no more secret admirer crap. You’re just setting Maggie up for more disappointment.”

  Slowly moving her head from side to side, Julia said, “Okay, fine. Have a happy Thanksgiving.”

  She’d just lied to him again. And for some reason that made him want to laugh. Probably because it was hard to take a woman wearing a Christmas-tree hat seriously. Besides, he had more important things to worry about. Like how to explain to his family that his daughter didn’t want to spend Thanksgiving with him. At least that’s what his ex had told him when she refused to abide by their visitation schedule for the holiday.

  Standing in the middle of the street, he watched as Julia fake-skated her way to the red car parked at the end of Breakwater Way. The woman had a way of making even something as simple as walking look like fun. He probably should have asked her how to make his daughter’s visits with him more fun. Maybe then Ella Rose would want to come. He turned to walk back to the brick two-story. If he was thinking about asking the Gallagher family’s stalker for advice, he needed more sleep.

  Chapter Three

  He stood over me like a marauding pirate with his heavy, dark beard and thick, overlong hair curling below the collar of his brown leather jacket. “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t arrest you.”

  There was a rough edge to his deep voice that made me shiver. Or maybe it was the way his eyes moved over me that caused the tiny ripple up my spine. Trapped by the heat in his cobalt gaze, I didn’t notice him pick anything up. At the clink of metal, I drew my eyes from his to see a pair of handcuffs dangling from his forefinger. With more gentleness than I imagined him capable of, he lifted my hand and placed it against the wooden spindle of the headboard. His thumb stroked the fluttering pulse on my wrist, and lips that rarely smiled curved as he expertly snapped the…

  “Careful, dear, you’ll burn the gravy.”

  Hazel’s voice jerked Julia out of her captor’s bed. Before she came fully back into her body, which was standing by the stove in the mayor’s stark, white kitchen, a cry of frustration bubbled up Julia’s throat and out of her mouth.

  She grimaced, racking her lust-fogged brain for a way to cover up what she now realized sounded more like a genuine sob of utter despair than simple frustration. It wasn’t like she could tell Hazel that she’d made the noise because she’d yanked Julia out of her daydream just before sexy times with Aidan got under way.

  Tell Hazel? Julia didn’t even want to think about it herself. But she did, and was more than a little relieved when she came to the conclusion that her anguish had nothing at all to do with missing out on Aidan having his big, experienced hands or his firm, beautiful mouth on her. Her sob of utter despair was because he’d hijacked her internal plotting session.

  Her stories played out in her mind like a movie, and while she’d been stirring the gravy, she’d taken the opportunity to rethink the first half of Warrior’s Touch in order to ward off any comparisons of her hero to Aidan. She’d come up with the idea that Adrian Greystone was simply a persona her hero had taken on to outwit his enemies in book one. He’d no longer be a member of the Garda—Irish police force—but a modern-day pirate loosely based on Robin Hood.

  However, thanks to her early-morning run-in with the marauding pirate himself, Aidan had messed with her head just like he’d messed with her plan this morning to get Maggie and Colin back together.

  Giving Maggie the book of poetry with a note from her secret admirer had been an inspired idea. Or so Julia had thought until Aidan cast both a scary and creepy light on the gesture. There was a word for what he was doing. It wasn’t one Julia would use, even in her head. She’d replace it with something like roosterblock.

  With the help from a bar of soap, her mother had broken Julia of the cursing habit she’d acquired from her three older brothers. Emmeline had washed Julia’s mouth out so often she swore she’d blown bubbles in her sleep for a year. Now, if her temper got the best of her, she fake-cursed.

  But fake-cursing Aidan in her head wasn’t a good idea. She had to get him out of there once and for all. Which admittedly wasn’t easy, given that she’d yet to shake off the fantasy that involved him, her, and a pair of handcuffs.

  “Julia, dear, are you all right?” asked the woman who’d taken on the role of Julia’s mother-in-law despite her son’s death six months prior to the wedding. A concerned frown was visible beneath Hazel’s teased cinnamon-brown bangs.

  Afraid that the heat thrumming through her body would show on her face, Julia leaned over the pot of bubbling, golden gravy and sniffed its nutty fragrance. Once she’d spent enough time with her face stuck in the steam to cover what she imagined had been her flushed cheeks, she straightened and smiled at Hazel. “I’m wonderful, and I think the gravy is too. It smells as delicious as always. The whole kitchen does.” The aroma of turkey, stuffing, green beans, and potatoes permeated the warm air, reminding Julia how much she loved the holiday.

  Her smile fell at the sight of three black dots rolling around in the gravy. She attempted to mash them with the wooden spoon while sliding the pot to the back burner.

  “Don’t try and hide it from me, dear.”

  Beneath the wrap dress made of purple merino wool, Julia’s shoulders rose on a sigh. It seemed she couldn’t do anything right today. She should have known Hazel would notice the burnt specks. There wasn’t much that got past the older woman, which had made for a stressful eight months leading up to and after Josh’s death. But it was just a little over two years now and Hazel rarely brought up his… how he died. Julia ignored the mental hiccup, about to confess that she’d burned the gravy and apologize.

  Before she got a chance, Hazel continued. “I know how hard the past week has been on you. It’s been difficult for me too, of course. But we should be celebrating. Do you know it’s five years today that Josh brought you home to meet me?”

  “I was just thinking about that this morning. It’s crazy how fast time goes.”

  Sometimes it didn’t go fast enough. They should be celebrating though. Julia felt lucky to have met and kept Hazel in her life. But she’d be less than honest if she didn’t admit there were times over the past few years when she’d envisioned what life would have been like if she’d stayed in Texas instead of moving to the East Coast after graduation. She’d grown up listening to her mother’s stories about New York City and thought of it as a place where dreams come true. Sometimes she wondered if she’d mixed up her mother’s dream with her own.

  Julia had met Josh while performing in a play that was so far off Broadway she didn’t think there were enough offs to qualify just how far off it had been. She hadn’t cared. It wasn’t like she’d thought
she was destined to be a star or even wanted to be. She’d been lonely when she’d first moved to New York and accepted a job in advertising. She’d quickly discovered she wasn’t as passionate as her colleagues about branding or writing copy for the next big thing.

  As low man on the totem pole, she spent her days inputting product survey results, and she needed a creative outlet that had the added benefit of getting her out of her closet-sized apartment. She found that and more in a hole-in-the-wall theater in Midtown Manhattan.

  Josh was the playwright and director. Of average height with curly auburn hair, he had the soul of a poet and the face of an angel. They hit it off almost immediately. He helped her get into character for her very minor role, and she liked to think that she helped him sharpen the play’s dialogue and plot.

  “I have just the thing to help us celebrate. We had it for our first Thanksgiving toast,” Hazel said, and walked to the refrigerator. She wore her regular uniform of a jacket over a sleeveless black dress. Today’s jacket was decorated with colorful fall leaves. The intricately tied silk scarf at her neck was the same shade of fire-engine red as her lipstick and shoes. Her chin-length hair was teased and sprayed to resemble what Julia thought of as Texas hair—kind of big and kind of square.

  Hazel was a short, solid woman with a pleasant face who gave an inordinate amount of time and attention to what she looked like and what people thought of her. Julia had wondered if it was because of her job. Hazel had been mayor of Harmony Harbor for more than a decade. She was up for reelection again next year.

  But Josh had thought his mother’s preoccupation with her looks and popularity had more to do with his father having an affair than Hazel’s position as mayor. Julia often wondered if things would have turned out differently had Hazel not been in the public eye. So much of what had happened could be traced back to Hazel running for reelection that fall. So many lives devastated by one phone call. If only…

  Julia pushed the thought aside. Playing the “if only” and “what if” game was fine when she was writing a book. It wasn’t the same in real life. Right or wrong, she’d made her decision two years ago. There was nothing she could do about it now. She blanked her mind to the horrors of that bitterly cold November night.