It was a surreal picture: Adrian and the fallen cyclist were mirror images of each other, one upright and one prone, both covered in blood. They were dressed alike and had similar blue bikes. It freaked me out, big time. I couldn’t keep their images from returning to me over and over.
Adrian continued. “This guy had been riding maybe a quarter mile behind the leaders—he passed us when I hit the cow—and then this car just came out of nowhere off a little dirt road and smashed into him.”
“You saw it happen?” Connor leaned in, his voice a mix of dread and morbid curiosity.
I started to speak but realized both of my hands were over my mouth. I pressed my palms together and lowered them. “We heard it.”
“Oh my God,” Connor breathed.
It was a sound I would know anywhere. Adrian had hit a car head-on two years ago. I still don’t understand how he walked away from the wreck—his bike didn’t—and I will never, ever forget the sound. A thud, a wrenching of metal, a thump, then a crack as rider and bike hit the road separately. Groans. And in Adrian’s case, the squealing of brakes as the driver came to a stop. Not that time, though. Not that time. That time there was silence, except for Adrian screaming “Rider down, rider down” at the top of his lungs.
I forced myself to keep talking, to expunge the rest of the memory. “We saw the car driving away. White, a small sedan, like a Taurus or a Camry or something.” I shook my head. “We couldn’t get the license plate number, though, and we didn’t see the driver, so we were practically no help at all to the police.”
Just then, our publicist put a manicured brown hand on the table in front of Adrian. It startled me. I had forgotten we were in a bookstore, that there were other people around—worse, in line watching us, listening to us, waiting for us. Scarlett—that was both her name and her nail color—said, “Only thirty minutes to go, and you’ve still got a line out the door. I hate to break in, but we need to keep it moving.” She’d coached us on this earlier. The line must move no matter what. A moving line means book sales.
We nodded, and she backed away with her smile pointed toward the queue, a “Nothing wrong here, folks, nothing to see” smile.
To Connor, Adrian said, “Sorry, man.”
Connor pulled at his collar. “Absolutely. I understand. Um, I’m going to hang around and do some shopping. Could you spare five minutes when you’re done? I have something I need to talk to you about. It’s the reason I came, actually.”
There. That was what I’d heard in his voice. A purpose for his presence, and a threat to our plans for the evening. A post-signing tête-à-tête wasn’t on the schedule. My throat tightened. “Wound so tight, she springs when I touch her,” my ex-husband Robert had said about me. Well, not tonight. I breathed in and held it. I would not be rigid. I would roll with it and everything would be okay. I exhaled.
“Sure. I’ll meet you in the café when we’re done.”
Bam. I saw spots in front of my eyes. My internal tension meter was only about a 6 out of 10. Really, it’s no big deal, I told myself. Just five or ten minutes. We probably wouldn’t even be late for the eight thirty reservation at Oxheart I’d made two months before. My fingernail ended up in my mouth, but I snatched it away before I could bite it. This wasn’t exactly unprecedented. Adrian was a constant challenge to my need for order on his best days, just as I was to his need for flexibility. I called these opposing traits our growth opportunities when I was feeling Zen.
“Perfect. Michele, a pleasure.” Connor extended his hand to me.
I shook it, and his touch jarred my nerves. We posed for the obligatory picture and he walked off toward the biographies. Nice guy, even if he was a plan-buster and a bringer of bad memories, but something else was wrong with him. I could feel it. “Do you know what he wants to talk to you about?”
“No idea.” Adrian pursed his lips for just a moment. Then his expression shifted. Big smile, maybe a little less big than before, but big enough. He greeted the next person. “Sorry about the wait. I hope you’re having a good time.”
***
Half an hour later, we bid goodbye to our last customer and stood up.
“Congratulations. You did it.” Scarlett beamed so wide the store lights reflected off her perfect white teeth. “This was a very, very successful event. The manager is thrilled. I’ll have you guys on the TV interview circuit within a week.” She rubbed her cherry-tipped hands together. “You’re so perfect for this, it hurts.”
“Thanks, Scarlett.” I nestled into the crook of Adrian’s arm as he slipped it around me.
“I’ll say goodnight now and go close out with the manager. You kids have a fun anniversary.”
“We will. Thanks again.”
As she walked away, I heard her muttering, “Gorgeous, just gorgeous,” to herself.
I lifted my face toward my husband. “I’m so glad to get the first one over with. Now we can relax and have some fun. You’re meeting that stalker fan guy in the café first, though, right?”
“Yes, but Connor’s a friend. I’ve corresponded with him more than a year. He’s all right.”
I felt a little better about it, maybe three percent. “Five minutes?”
“Five minutes.”
“I’ll hit the ladies’ room and meet you at the café, then, okay?”
“Sounds like a plan, and I love me a good plan.”
I rolled my eyes at him in response.
He swooped me over backwards. A flashbulb lit up my peripheral vision. Scarlett’s hired shooter was still at it. “Hurry back.”
I put the back of my hand to my forehead and said, “Be still, my heart.”
He laughed and set me back on my feet, and we walked in opposite directions.
It felt strange and wonderful to have finished our book launch together, hell, to have written the book at all, instead of just enforcing the Chicago Manual of Style upon it. As an editor, most of my writers treat me like the punctuation police. Adrian doesn’t. Words matter to him, like they do to me. Even more, my words matter to him. Mine. I hadn’t even known I had my own words. Sure, I’d known I was prone to what my mother called an overactive imagination since the day I ran home from school, gasping for air, and told her I’d seen an elephant walk through my schoolyard and reach into my classroom window. That I’d felt the wiry hairs on his trunk as he lifted me from my seat, through the air, and out the window. Yet somehow—“It was like magic, Mom!”—I’d still been in my seat five minutes later to take the terrifying state assessment test. I’d kept that imagination under wraps until Adrian started unfastening all my buttons. And now my name was on a book jacket, too, and more words threatened to come out of me, this time forming themselves into an idea for a fantasy novel, for goodness’ sake, something I hadn’t told even Adrian yet because it was so crazy.
I made my way across the store toward the ladies’ room. Many of the browsing shoppers were people I recognized from our signing. I tried not to race-walk in front of them.
When I finished sprucing up—and answering questions from women in the bathroom who were more interested in my marriage than in triathlon—I broke toward the sounds of beans grinding and milk steaming. Adrian and Connor were talking with their heads together like longtime confidants—and Miss Boob Job was lurking behind them, more Mata Hari than Barbie now. When she saw me, she whirled around so fast her bag flew out from her body like a stripper from her pole. My eyes followed her retreat.
When the door closed behind her, I looked back at my husband and his new old friend. Connor was punctuating his speech with sharp nods of his head and smacking his closed fist into his open hand. Adrian snuck a glance back over his shoulder and saw me, then turned back to Connor and held up a palm. Connor looked in my direction, then back at Adrian, and nodded. They shook hands and Connor left through the same door Rhonda had, all before I could reach them.
I tilted my head. “That was some conversation.”
Adrian planted a firm kiss on my lips.
“I love you.”
“I love you, too.” I started to roll my eyes, but stopped when I caught a flash of white through the window. A small sedan was driving past the bookstore, sending me into another blood-soaked flashback of Adrian on the side of the road with the dead cyclist. I shook my head to clear the image and gripped my husband’s bicep. Warm. Solid.
He picked up a cellophane-wrapped bouquet of orange and yellow tulips from the table beside him and I took them from his hands. “But it’s Thursday!”
Adrian brought me tulips every Friday since one hour after our first not-a-date. It was still hard to believe that a man who looked that good would work so hard to make me feel special. Tan, muscular but lean, and blond with short curls at the nape of his neck, Adrian was delectable. Like double-fudge-brownie-sundae-with-a-cherry-on-top yummy, although he would rather be compared to a gluten-free brownie sweetened with coconut nectar, hold the fudge and double the organic fresh cherries, please. He made me forget that I’m on the wrong side of forty and haven’t changed my hairstyle since my fifteen-year-old started kindergarten. Sure, I have a good face and can render a pretty paragraph, but Adrian was the looker in our twosome.
He kissed the tip of my nose. “Pretend it’s Friday, then, since it’s our anniversary and book launch. Thank Scarlett, though. I ran out of time today, and she saved my ass.”
I laughed. “Well, I have a surprise for you, too, but I’m saving it for dinner.”
“Oh, that isn’t all I’ve got, but you’ll have to wait till tomorrow for your real surprise. Tomorrow night.”
“Then I’ll save mine until then, too.”
“Copycat.” He winked.
We started walking to the parking lot, my arm through his. Adrian’s strides were normally twice the length of mine, but somehow we made them match.
“So, what did Connor want to talk to you about?”
“We debated Coeur d’Alene versus Lake Placid.” Those were two famous Ironman triathlons.
“That’s caca.”
“He heard Lake Placid was the better race for a first-timer. I set him straight.”
My thoughts began to tumble like Keds in a drier. The scene replayed in my mind: Little Miss Boob Job skulking around in the café within earshot of the two men. I couldn’t make sense of what I’d seen, nor could I figure out the source of the dread that was seeping through me. But it was our anniversary. I had two options. I could act the paranoid fool or I could be a grown-up. I chose option B.
“Okay.”
***
My stomach bulged against my waistband, but I was not about to stop now. Why had I suffered through a sixty-five-minute swim and a two-hour run that day if not to overindulge on a special occasion? I’d eat like an Ironman contender tomorrow. Meanwhile I’d savor each bite, made even more dear because my Oxheart meal cost what I’d normally spend to eat for a week.
Tex, our Vietnamese waiter, arranged my dessert in front of me and backed away with a theatrical flourish. His voice was pure epicurean hip. “Your tapioca pudding caressed by Buddha’s Hand citron, ginger-galangal ice cream, and apple mint.”
Oxheart was definitely on the cool side: local ingredients and hip, rustic-leaning décor, light years away from our elderly Jewish neighborhood.
Tex lifted a bowl from his tray and held it high and away from his body like he was serving up a dead rat. “Your berries, sir.” He thunked the bowl down on the table. Plain ole fruit hadn’t been on the menu.
“Great, thanks.” Adrian was oblivious to the waiter’s pique.
Tex nodded at me, gave his head a barely perceptible shake at Adrian, and left.
I dug into my pudding. “Oh my.” I held a bite in my mouth and moaned, letting the flavors seep into my tongue. Heaven. Heaven in a spoon.
Adrian stabbed a strawberry with his fork, then held it suspended in the air in front of him, forgotten. He looked at me instead, looked into me, in a serious way unlike his usual self. “Lately I’ve noticed more strangers recognize me. I don’t like it as much as I thought I would. You’ve got to promise me you’ll be careful. Watch out for the crazies, don’t take chances, tell me if anyone does anything weird around you. You’re my world, Michele.”
I couldn’t recall a single time my free-spirited husband had scared me, but he scared me so much right then that I pushed my tapioca away. “Nothing’s going to happen to me.” He shifted upwards like he was going to interrupt, so I hurried on. “I promise, though, I’ll be careful. Will you promise me the same?”
“Yes. I promise.”
His definition of careful and mine don’t even belong in the same dictionary, but I accepted his answer. “Is something going on?”
“No.” He drew out the word. “I’m just sentimental because it’s our anniversary.”
I narrowed my eyes.
He held up three fingers. “Scout’s honor.”
A lump rose in my throat. “I wouldn’t last a day without you.”
“Sure you would. You’re the strongest person I know. You’re my little Itzpa, my Butterfly.” He held up his hands bent into claw shapes. I couldn’t help but laugh. “Seriously, you know it’s me who’d crumble.” He leaned toward me and extended his hands palms up across the table. I put mine on his, our hands and fingers barely touching. “Please, honey, whatever you do, don’t leave me alone in the house with those two teenagers.”
The tension slipped off of me like a silk robe to the floor. Annabelle, his seventeen-year-old daughter, and my Sam were good kids, but they were your normal handful of hormones. I tickled his palms with my fingertips. “I think Belle and Sam would love it. Party every night and sleep all day.”
He snorted. “Your nose is growing, Pinocchio.”
I smiled and pulled my tapioca bowl back into place. I couldn’t help but think, though, that if anyone’s nose had grown that night, it hadn’t been mine.
To continue reading Going for Kona, click here.
Excerpt from Heaven to Betsy (Emily Mystery Series #1)
Chapter One
I wedged myself up to the bar between an urban cowboy and a sequined octogenarian with a cigarette dangling from her lips. Is that a gun in your holster or are you just glad to see me? I shied away from Little Joe Cartwright or Brett Maverick or whoever the heck he thought he was while also trying to avoid the business end of Grandma’s cancer stick. I looked up at myself in the mirror behind the premium liquor bottles, a head shorter than the cowboy and a head taller than the little old lady—and a damn sight more harried looking than either of them.
Why did everything have to be so hard? All I wanted was one teensy-tiny little drink. Well, that wasn’t completely true. I also wanted as far away from my mother as I could get. Siberia-far, or maybe even Pluto-far. Oklahoma City-far would do in a pinch. Across the lobby from her in a hotel—which now called itself a Wyndham but which everyone in Amarillo would forever know as the Ambassador—wasn’t nearly far enough. Especially since we were there for the wedding reception of my high school boyfriend, Scott, to his third wife—who was nineteen and pregnant.
I raised a finger and leaned across the wooden bar, trying to catch the attention of the bartender. Too late, I felt the wetness. I looked down. I’d plopped my breasts into someone else’s spilled drink. Great. Just then, the bartender’s blue-shadowed eyes swept over me.
“Virgin mojito, please,” I said.
All I got was the back of her orange hair, teased so high it looked like cotton candy, Halloween-style. I grabbed a fistful of napkins from a dispenser and mopped up Lake Titicaca—the bar top and the underside of my rack. At least I’d worn a simple black dress tonight, so it wouldn’t show. Much.
“Need some help, Blondie?” Little Joe asked. His voice had a rumbly drawl to it—not quite Texan but close—which I might have found pleasant if he hadn’t called me by my hair color.
I studied him. He was tall, well over six feet—at least with his boots on—and a good ten years older than me, judging by his crow’s f
eet. Age, or was it weathering? My eyes slipped down to his boots. The leather was worn, but cared-for, with a few dark lines of oil tracking scratch marks and scuffs. I flicked my eyes quickly back up, but not so fast that they didn’t take in his narrow hips circled by a brown leather belt and his flat stomach behind the silver and turquoise buckle, the deep chest, and the wide set of his shoulders. His upper lip looked lighter than the rest of his face, like he normally wore a mustache and had just recently shaved it off, and whatever had weathered his face didn’t hide his great cheekbones or the lone dimple to the left of his half-smiling mouth. Maybe Little Joe wasn’t a city slicker after all.
Willie Nelson crooned in the background. He was a regular artist on the soundtrack to my life—my heroes have always been cowboys. Yeah, Willie, mine too, until they weren’t. Back in another life, I’d had a weakness for Little Joe’s type. I couldn’t help it, really. I was the daughter of a steer-wrestling father. And now it wasn’t just cowboys that had let me down, but the male species in general. So, did I need some help, from this cowboy?
“I don’t think—”
“What’re ya drinkin’, sir?” the bartender asked.
Steam whistled from my ears like I was some fancy-schmancy espresso machine. Oh sure, ignore the woman and bring the guy another round. I wheeled toward the cowboy, ready to let fly a string of invectives about him and the barmaid and my whole miserable life in general, but I saw no drinks in front of him. Maybe it wasn’t another round. I clamped down on my ire.
He looked me in the eye for a split second—long enough for an unwelcome frisson of pure animal response to unleash itself in my lady parts—then turned back to her.
“Bourbon neat. And a virgin mojito.”
Spit in a well bucket, as my father used to say, before he left us for the circuit rodeos one year and never came back. Hell, maybe he was still saying it, somewhere else, wherever it was he’d gotten off to.
Leaving Annalise (Katie & Annalise Book 2) Page 31