He eyed her skeptically. “The people running this shindig wouldn’t accept a straight donation? No charity I know operates that way.”
Kristin released a sigh. She’d never been good at lying. That was his talent. “All right. I felt sorry for you, too.”
A nerve leapt in his jaw. “You felt sorry for me?”
“Yes.” She knew how he felt about pity, but the truth wouldn’t have been necessary if he’d been gentleman enough to accept her first answer. “I saw how uncomfortable you were, and for a second, I remembered that we were friends once. I wanted you off the runway.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.” She wouldn’t let him think all was forgiven when nothing was further from the truth. “It was just a knee-jerk reaction. If I had it to do over again, I probably wouldn’t have.”
His gray gaze went flat. “I’ll send you a check in the morning to cover your bid.”
“There’s no need to do that.”
“Yes, there is. If you remember anything about me, you know I don’t like owing people. I had enough of that when I was putting off bill collectors for my old man.”
“This isn’t a debt, Zach.”
“It feels like one. After all, you did get me off the runway—and you didn’t get the man you wanted. I’ll mail the check to your shop.”
“I’ll send it right back,” she said, and started away.
Zach grabbed her hand. He released it quickly when a shock jolted them both.
Kristin’s heart raced as they stared at each other. It’s just static, she told herself. Just static electricity from the carpet.
The moment stretched out on tenterhooks. Then Zach’s voice softened, reminding her that they hadn’t always been distant with each other. “It never changes between us, does it, Kris? Even after all these years, sparks still fly the second we—”
She couldn’t listen to this. “I have to go. Goodbye, Zach.”
Then she strode back toward the table groupings, her stomach quaking, and every nerve ending in her body wound like a steel spring. It was illogical, irrational and unbelievable, but as much as she despised what he’d done, the chemistry they’d surrendered to the summer of their senior year was still strong, still fierce, still dangerously tempting.
And she resented it.
Zach watched her wave and smile to friends as she hurried toward the opposite end of the room, then stopped to talk to three women who’d risen to corral her. He was finally free to take a good long look. His gaze slid appreciatively over her narrow back, over the flare of her hips in the sleeveless black dress she wore, then slipped down her long, shapely legs. He took in her hair again. It was short now—not much longer than his—but silky bangs still fell below her brows, framing her wide, beautiful brown eyes. They were the confident eyes of a woman now, he decided. Clear, intelligent…and unforgiving.
He jammed his hands into his trouser pockets. He’d thought his mood couldn’t get any blacker when Etta met him at the door with the damn tux. He’d been wrong.
“Well,” Etta said wistfully, magically appearing as though he’d conjured her up. “That certainly didn’t go as well as I’d planned.”
With difficulty, Zach pulled his gaze from Kristin and glanced down at his great-aunt’s rueful expression. “What didn’t go well? The auction?”
She slipped an arm through his. “No, dear, your meeting with Kristin. I’d hoped it would be a little friendlier, but I suppose with all that’s between you, it was too much to hope for. Maybe you should stop by her shop tomorrow and try again.”
Everything in Zach stilled as he stared down at his elfin aunt, and his mind took him on a slow, sure path to trickery and deceit. “Aunt Etta, what did you do?”
“Come dear,” she said, patting his arm. “Let’s have some dessert.”
Zach stood his ground. “I don’t want dessert, I want an explanation. What did you do?”
But she was already walking toward a table where blueberry cheesecake and coffee sat untouched in front of six empty chairs. Swearing beneath his breath, Zach followed, seated her, then took the chair next to her. “You set me up! There was no sick bachelor. That’s why you wanted me here a day early.”
Without a trace of apology, Etta placed a white linen napkin on her lap. “Honestly, Zachary, we should all be grateful you decided to go into the construction business. You’d have made a dreadful detective. Didn’t you wonder why your tuxedo fit so well? The jacket, the trousers—the size fourteen shoes?”
No, he hadn’t, but then, he’d never expected Etta to bamboozle him, either. “Could we forget my deductive powers for the moment? Why in hell would you feel the need to drag me down here and put me through this?”
“Because I’ve waited years for you to marry a nice girl and bring some children into this world before I’m gone, and I’m running out of patience. When you offered to come home and get the farmhouse ready to sell, I decided that a bit of meddling was justified if it got you and Kristin talking again. It’s time.”
Zach narrowed his eyes, trying his best to follow Etta’s reasoning. “You expect me to marry Kris?” He’d have to be certifiable to want a woman who’d put his heart through a Cuisinart not once, but twice.
“Good heavens, no! She’s still mad, and I don’t blame her.” Etta shook her fork at him. “You need closure, young man. That’s what they say on the talk shows. Kristin does, too, if that three-hundred-dollar bid is any indication. The two of you need to resolve this unfinished business between you so you can get on with your lives.”
“Aunt Etta, I don’t need closure, I need ten more hours in the day. And I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I don’t have the time or the inclination to marry and start a family right now. I’ve got a construction business to run. As a matter of fact,” he added, glancing toward the exit, “I—”
He stopped abruptly as a couple separated from the small crowd that had gathered at the front of the room. Then, as he watched, Chad Hollister escorted Kristin though the wide archway and out of sight.
The words she’d said not ten minutes ago came back to him. This time he gave them more credence. Actually, I’d planned to bid on someone else, but I was in the ladies’ room when he was auctioned off.
Chad Hollister was “someone else?” Chad Hollister?
“As a matter of fact, you what?” Etta prompted.
Zach sent her a grim look and pushed to his feet. “As a matter of fact, I do have unfinished business. I was tearing off the front porch when you phoned with this trumped up emergency of yours. I need to get back to it.”
“Zachary, it’s dark, and the power and water won’t be turned on until Monday. What are you planning to use for light? Fireflies?”
He smiled. “No, Aunt Smarty-pants, I brought a generator with me. You’re catching a ride back to the high-rise with your friends, right?”
“Yes, and I wish you’d reconsider staying there with me. At least until the utilities are reconnected.”
“Again, thank you for the offer, but I’m fine where I am. With my work habits, you don’t need me stomping through your apartment in the middle of the night disrupting your sleep.”
He bent to kiss her cheek. “I’ll see you tomorrow evening for dinner. We’ll drive into Lancaster—maybe go to that Amish farmhouse restaurant with the great chicken.”
“Go see Kristin,” Etta said ignoring his invitation. “She bought the souvenir shop on Main Street where she worked in high school and turned it into a lovely place—Forget Me Not Antiques.”
“Aunt Etta—”
“It’s not often a person gets a chance to right the wrongs from their past.”
Zach met her eyes candidly. “If I had any wrongs to right, I’d do it. I don’t. See you tomorrow for dinner.”
Ten minutes later, he’d left the tux behind and was striding across the parking lot beneath a starry summer sky, and feeling damn good to be in jeans again.
He wasn’t a tux man. He was a sweat and calluses, hamm
er and nails man. Now, Hollister—he was a tux man. Hollister with his fake smile, military bearing and swaggering attitude. Good God, what did Kris see in that jerk? Position? Education? It sure as hell couldn’t be personality. Hollister had been mean-spirited and cocky from the day they’d met in the same tenth grade homeroom—a kid with money who’d enjoyed lording it over the kids without. Not that Zach gave a fat fig who she dated. He’d just always thought she’d be more selective when she hooked up with someone else.
Climbing inside his truck and firing the engine, he drove toward Etta’s old farmhouse on the outskirts of town.
Though he tried to ignore it, his past swung hard at him from every bend in the road. He approached the tiny stone church Kristin had coaxed him into attending, back when he’d decided to change his bad boy image and do whatever it took to keep her. He’d taken some serious heat from his friends for that, but he hadn’t cared. The sign out front evoked a near-smile. Come In. We’re Prayer Conditioned.
Traffic got heavier when he reached the brightly lit shopping plaza that hadn’t been there in his youth, then tapered off again when he turned down a secondary road toward the “poor end” of town. He passed four houses that needed work, then slowed the truck when he got to the empty lot where the hovel he’d once lived in had stood.
There’d been no flowers on the table in that place, no clean sheets on the beds, no mother with hot meals after school. She’d cut and run when he was seven and they were living somewhere in New Mexico. A long string of different states and different flophouses had come after that, and somewhere along the line, he’d missed two whole years of school.
By the time they’d finally made their way back here—back home, his father had called it, though no brass band had shown up to meet them—Zach was fifteen and understood clearly why his mother took off. But by then, he’d built up a dandy kiss-my-ass attitude. He’d been way too cool to let anyone know how it shamed him to be Hap Davis’s son, and fifteen—not thirteen—in the eighth grade.
He saw his father again, sitting in the recliner in their pan-gray living room, empty beer bottles lined up on the floor beside him. He was glad someone had torn down the old shack. Otherwise, he might’ve been tempted to buy it and rip it down himself.
Zach clicked on a country music station and rolled down the window to let in the night air.
His usual expectations upon returning home had been met. He’d only been back a few hours, and he was already primed to leave.
Chapter 2
K ristin stepped out of the shower, wrapped herself in a white terry robe, then with a vengeance, rubbed a towel over her short hair. She was so churned up, she didn’t know what to do with herself. Flinging the towel over the shower curtain rod, she strode barefoot into her pretty oak kitchen where her teakettle was screaming its spout off. She turned off the gas.
How could she have let him get to her like that?
What had possessed her to bid three hundred dollars on a man who’d crushed her spirit, and for months, had her gobbling chocolate like a child on Halloween?
She fixed her tea, grabbed the cookie jar from the countertop and carried it to the sofa in her living room. After a moment, she picked up the phone to call Rachel in Flagstaff. She hung up before she’d finished dialing the area code.
The second she told Rachel that she’d seen Zach again, her psychologist-sister would either counsel Kristin to death over the phone or catch the next plane home and do it in person.
Kristin couldn’t handle any more preaching tonight. Not after Chad’s well-meaning diatribe when he walked her to her car. He’d pretended concern, but his underlying feelings were easy to read. He was hurt, and he couldn’t understand how she could have bid on a man she supposedly despised. He hadn’t been in the best of moods when she’d sent him back to Mary Alice.
Kristin reached inside the cookie jar and grabbed a handful of Oreos. She needed to forget that Zach Davis ever existed. She needed to drink tea and eat cookies and watch mindless TV and forget.
It was simply mind over matter. She’d done it before, and she could do it again.
The next morning as she said goodbye to Mildred Arnett and hung up the phone in her shop, Kristin was teeming with energy. This mind over matter thing was easy. All she’d needed to do was focus directly on the work she loved, and she’d been doing that nonstop for an hour—ever since she came in at seven-thirty.
Pushing to her feet, Kristin grabbed the shipping manifest from her clipboard and strode into the small stockroom off her sales floor to finish checking in the previous day’s delivery. Two dozen cartons were stacked beside the metal door leading to the alley.
Pulling a stool close, she opened the boxes, checking each one to see that the description and number of items agreed with the manifest, then noting it on the sheet and boxing the items back up to be shelved later.
The very last carton was a case of jelly-jar candles she’d received from a new vendor. Kristin took more time with them, removing the lids to check the quality and strength of the fragrances. The second she opened the strawberry candle with the pretty red-speckled label, she knew it was a mistake.
One whiff had tears filling her eyes and that cruel videotape in her mind clicking on again.
Suddenly she was driving up the bumpy dirt driveway to Etta Gardner’s farmhouse again…guiding her mother’s car to the end, then back behind the big, white clapboard house where the strawberry fields opened and a small campfire blazed orange in the darkness.
The scent of strawberries filled her mind and lungs, and Kristin’s chest began to ache. Because there was Zach in the car’s headlights again, shattering her heart in a million pieces.
The bell over the entry door jerked Kristin out of her thoughts, and blinking rapidly, she blessed the interruption. She didn’t need this anymore, didn’t want it.
Smoothing her pearl-gray jacket over her white camisole and gray skirt, she summoned a smile and returned to her sales floor where antiques and pretty collectibles shared space with Amish baked goods, silk flowers and more candles.
Her face froze when she saw who’d entered. Then she reminded herself that she was a professional, drew a steadying breath and walked out to greet Zach, just as she would greet any other customer who walked through her door.
“Good morning, Kris.”
“Good morning.” She would not get upset again. She would not run trembling to the cookie jar ever again because of him. She stepped behind the glass showcase that served as a sales counter to stand beside the hulking old-fashioned silver cash register. “What can I do for you?”
“Nothing. I’m here to do something for you.” He was dressed in snug, faded jeans and a white knit polo shirt with an open collar that showcased his broad shoulders and tanned arms. His steady gaze held hers as he reached for his wallet, withdrew a check, and laid it on the counter.
She knew without looking that it was made out to her in the amount of three hundred dollars. “I told you last night that I didn’t want it.”
“And I told you that I don’t like owing people. Take it.”
“No.”
He shoved it under the cash register. “All right, then add it to your donation or use it for a bookmark.”
She paused for a moment, then nodded, knowing that if she kept refusing, they’d be at this all day. “Thank you. I’ll see that the hospital auxiliary gets it. Now, if there’s nothing else, I need to get back to work.”
“There is something else.”
Kristin waited.
“Before we spoke last night, Maybelle Parker collared me.”
“Yes, I know. I saw her.”
“She said we were expected to join the other bachelors and their dates for a dinner cruise on Lake Edward in two weeks. Are you planning to go?”
She was stunned that he would even ask. “With you?”
“You did buy me.”
Kristin kept her tone even. “I did not buy you, I made a donation to the Children’s Chr
istmas Fund. I thought you understood that.”
“So you said. But it was a pretty hefty donation. Are you sure you didn’t expect something more?”
This time she couldn’t keep the edge out of her voice. “I have no expectations where you’re concerned. I’m not going on the cruise. But if you’re interested, by all means, feel free to ask someone else.”
“I’m not interested.” Zach returned his wallet to his back pocket. “I’ll only be here for a few weeks, and I’ll need most of that time to get my aunt’s house in shape for a Realtor. I don’t have time for cruises.”
“Really?” she asked, irked again. “Would you have answered the same way if I’d said I wanted to attend?”
“Looking for a fight, Kris?” he asked curiously. “We used to be pretty good at it.”
The arrival of another customer stopped her reply, and for the second time in minutes, Kristin was glad for the interruption. She was even happier to see Chad, but probably for all the wrong reasons.
“Hi,” she called, smiling.
“Hi,” Chad called back cheerfully. “You look pretty this morning. How’s my best girl?”
“Full of energy,” she answered, letting the “best girl” thing slide.
Zach watched Hollister amble toward them, happy to return the jerk’s frigid nod as he carried a take-out bag to the sales counter. He eased as close to Kristin as the counter allowed, an intimate smile on his lips as he unloaded coffee in foam cups, stir sticks and creamers.
This morning, the chief was all decked out in his uniform—dark gray shirt with black epaulets and pocket flaps, black pants, and lots of shiny silver buttons. There was more crime-fighting paraphernalia hanging from his utility belt than Batman’s.
Zach found himself disliking Hollister more with every passing second. Maybe because he’d figuratively elbowed Zach out of the way. Or maybe because Chad was fixing Kristin’s coffee from memory.
Hollister spoke cordially to Zach as he stirred cream into Kristin’s cup, though there was no mistaking the “get lost” message in his green eyes. “Sorry, but I didn’t bring enough for company. If I’d known you were here, I’d have ordered another cup.”
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