“He just needs a nudge.”
“I’ve known him my whole life. The only thing that nudges Josh Kowalski is a softball bat upside the head.”
“And yet your soft, nurturing nature hasn’t drawn him in yet. I’m shocked.” Max dumped the entire bag of chips into a cheap plastic bowl.
“Bite me, Max.” She took the bowl and the dip and walked into the huge living room. When he’d moved to town and bought the place, Max had removed some walls and let the space absorb what had been a formal dining room.
She glanced toward the sectional and found that, as Max had predicted, the corner was still empty. And Josh smiled at her when she walked over to claim it, setting the chips and dip on the coffee table. That damn smile had always made her feel like a giddy teenage girl, but she had years of practice hiding that giddy girl from the world.
“Thought maybe that junk of yours finally shit the bed,” he said when she’d dropped into the corner.
“Leave my Jeep alone, Kowalski. She’s outlasted three of your pickups.”
“Because I know when to put a vehicle out to pasture.” He leaned forward to grab a slice of what looked like her mother’s banana bread off the table and turned his attention to the big screen, where the pregame chatter was wrapping up.
“Hi, guys,” she said to the room at large, and she got some hellos and a “Hey, Katie” back. Gavin Crenshaw, who cooked at the Trailside Diner, was there with his dad, Mike. Butch Benoit, whose wife, Fran, had made her late, was sitting in the recliner. He was the oldest guy, so he got the prime leather real estate. It was a light crowd this week. Usually there were a few more guys, but it was the first weekend of December and she knew the town well enough to know there were a lot of Christmas lights being hung in lieu of watching football.
Since her spot in the corner put Katie just slightly behind Josh, she was able to watch him through the corner of her eye. She was pretty sure Max was wrong about Josh putting out any kind of vibe where she was concerned, but even the possibility was enough to make her heart beat a little faster.
He looked better, she decided. Some of the tension had left his expression over the past several months, and more of his usual charm shone in his blue eyes. Even though her mother never said much, Katie knew Josh well enough to see the strain the past few years had put on him. He’d been unhappy and had started drinking enough that she’d half-jokingly given him a hard time once in a while. But then he’d broken his leg, his brothers had come home to Whitford to help and they’d all devoted themselves to getting the Northern Star back on its feet.
Katie had mixed feelings about that. She’d practically grown up at the lodge, so she didn’t want to see it go under. And it had been her mother’s home since Katie went off to college and it didn’t make sense for Rose to have her own place anymore. They were turning things around, which was good. Whether they hired a manager or sold the place, she knew her mom would be taken care of.
But, in either scenario, the endgame was Josh leaving Whitford. As the youngest, he’d seen his older brothers and sister all go off to live their own lives and, by the time it was his turn, he’d been unable to leave his dad to run the place alone. Then Frank had passed away and everybody had just assumed Josh would go on taking care of business. He wanted out and the day was coming when he’d get his wish. Katie didn’t want to think about that.
Josh pulled off his Patriots ball cap and pushed his dark hair back before settling the hat back on his head. He’d need a trim soon, she thought, and she had mixed feelings about that, too. On one hand, she knew what it felt like to run her fingers through his hair. On the other…she knew what it felt like to run her fingers through his hair. It could be excruciating, touching him like that—especially when he made that little moaning sound if she washed his hair before cutting it—but she couldn’t deny herself the pleasure. Plus, there was nowhere else to go but the beauty parlor, and sending Josh there would be too cruel a thing to do to her best friend.
“What the hell are you doing?” Josh yelled, sitting forward on the couch as if he could physically intimidate the television into taking back whatever had set him off. His voice was almost drowned out by the other guys shouting, and Katie realized she’d been so busy mooning over the side of Josh’s head, she’d missed the kickoff. Damn.
She grabbed a handful of chips and forced herself to focus on the replay. If she got caught making googly-eyes at Josh in this crowd, she’d never hear the end of it.
* * *
After almost fumbling the ball during the first kickoff return, the Patriots got their act together and Josh relaxed against the superior cushions of Max’s couch, wishing he could afford furniture like this for the lodge. Someday he was going to get a straight answer from the guy about what he did for a living. It wasn’t easy to keep a secret in Whitford, but Max Crawford managed.
But if anybody would know, it would be Fran. And if Fran knew, Rosie would know, which would mean Katie might know.
When Max went into the kitchen at the start of halftime, Josh slapped Katie’s leg. “Hey, does Rose know what Max does to earn couch and television money?”
He’d kept his voice low, so she had to lean closer to him to answer him in the same tone. “Nobody knows. It’s no secret he doesn’t go anywhere on a regular basis, so I guess he works in his basement.”
“It’s quite a lock he’s got on the door.” Had a security keypad and everything.
“So nobody can find the bodies.”
Josh snorted and shook his head. “It’s weird that he’s lived here, what…five years? And nobody knows what he does?”
“Has anybody actually asked him outright? I haven’t.”
She usually got her information the normal way—from Fran, her mom or from keeping her ears open and her mouth closed while the old bucks chatted in the barbershop. But Josh didn’t get out quite as much, and Fran didn’t share gossip with him as much as she did with other women.
“I did once,” he said. “He changed the subject and didn’t even try to make it smooth.”
“I bet I can find out before you do.”
That perked him up and he turned his body so he was fully facing her. “Whaddya got, Davis?”
“If I find out how he makes his money before you do, I’ll cut your hair free for six months.”
He snorted. “Lame. Winner washes the other’s vehicle once a month for a year.”
She hesitated, but he’d expected that. It was a half-hour drive to the car wash and twelve bucks down the drain, but Katie never backed down from a bet. “Car wash when it’s cold, but hand wash and wax from May through August?”
“Done.” He stuck out his hand, then pulled it back before she could shake it. “Wait. I have a condition.”
“Admitting it’s the first step.”
“Funny, smart-ass. The condition is no using feminine wiles.”
She laughed, which made everybody in the room stop talking for a few seconds. Katie had a great laugh. “Feminine wiles? What are you, eighty?”
“Call it whatever you want, but no flirting or making kissy faces or letting him look down your shirt to get information out of him.”
“How do you see that going, exactly? ‘Hey, Max, if you tell me what your job is, I’ll let you see my boobs’? You’re a moron.”
“That’s the deal.”
“Fine.” She shook on it.
Josh loved a good challenge. Gathering up their empties and a couple of used paper plates off the table, he headed for the kitchen to restock.
Max was leaning against the counter, cell phone to his ear, and Josh shoved the stuff into the garbage can as quietly as he could. Then he opened the fridge, looking for a couple bottles of water.
“I promised you it would be there before Christmas, and it will be,” Max was telling whoever was on the other e
nd of the line. “I’ll shoot you an email when I ship it out, okay?”
Josh didn’t try to pretend he wasn’t eavesdropping as Max ended his call. He really had no choice but to overhear, since they were the only two people in the kitchen. “Christmas present?”
“Yup.” Max snapped his phone back into its holster.
“Family?”
“Nope.”
“Something for work?” It was a natural segue into the conversation he wanted to have.
“When are you and Katie finally going to hook up?”
Josh’s head whipped around. That wasn’t the conversation he wanted to have. “What the hell are you talking about? Why would I hook up with Katie? She’s…Katie.”
Max shrugged. “Just seems as if you two would be good together.”
“We are good together. That’s why she’s my best friend. Hell, we practically grew up together, so that would be weird, man.”
Max shrugged again, then grabbed a soda off the counter. “Shame. You guys are a great couple.”
He brushed by and was out of the kitchen before Josh could think of a response. What was he supposed to say to that? Katie was like one of the guys and they’d known each other their whole lives. If they were going to be a great couple, it probably would have come up before.
Halfway back to the couch, he realized Max had managed to evade answering the question about whether his phone call was work related. And he’d done it by deliberately blowing Josh’s mind with the concept of hooking up with Katie. It was a slick move on Crawford’s part, Josh had to admit.
During a lull in the third-quarter action, Josh pulled out his phone to make sure he hadn’t missed any calls. Butch and Mike had disagreed on a referee’s iffy call and the volume level had been pretty intense for a few minutes. There was nothing, so he had to assume Rosie was still watching television. It was tempting to call and check on her, but she wouldn’t take kindly to that. Or to being woken up if she’d nodded off.
“Waiting for the 1-800-Loser hotline to call you back?” Katie asked, sticking her toe out from under Max’s blanket to poke at Josh.
“Yeah. I told them I was worried about you.” He shoved the phone back into his pocket. “Have you talked to your mom lately?”
She frowned. “A couple of days ago. Why? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, probably. Did anybody ever say how long her cough might linger after the pneumonia?”
“A little while, I guess, but it should be getting a lot better by now. Is it bad?”
He tilted his head and shrugged a shoulder. “I don’t know. She seems to be coughing a lot, but she says she’s fine.”
“She said she was fine last time, too, right up until she passed out. I think she was even saying it as she hit the floor.”
“If it gets any worse, or doesn’t get any better, you should talk her into a follow-up appointment.” He felt bad when he saw how the concern scrunched up her face. Rosie said she was fine, and he was certainly no doctor. “I’ll keep an eye on her. It’s probably just left over from having pneumonia.”
“You’ll call me if you think there’s anything wrong with her, right?”
“Of course. Unless I’m on the phone with the 1-800-Loser hotline. You getting help is really important.”
She laughed and shoved at his hip with her foot before pulling it back under the blanket.
The other guys cheered and Josh turned back to the game, but Max caught his eye. Crawford jerked his head toward Katie and then made some goofy motion with his eyebrows. Josh gave him a what-the-hell look and then focused on the television.
Dude was losing his mind. He’d run with Katie for as long as he could remember, through good times and bad. He wasn’t screwing up a lifelong friendship to get in her pants, even if she was into him. And she’d never given any sign she wanted him in her pants.
Yeah, Max Crawford was totally barking up the wrong tree.
Chapter Two
At work the next morning, Katie snipped at what little remained of Dozer Dozynski’s hair while pondering how best to get Max Crawford to tell her what the hell his job was. Assuming he wasn’t a serial killer, what did he do in the basement that kept him busy, earned him money and required a security system? CIA? Computer hacker?
“How did you manage to sneak away from the hardware store on a Monday morning?” she asked when she realized her silence might come off as awkward, since there was nobody else Dozer could talk to.
“Lauren and my wife came in to drive me crazy looking at a million paint samples, so I told them to watch the store and ran as fast as I could.”
Katie laughed. Lauren was his daughter and she was also recently engaged to Ryan Kowalski. Lauren and her teenage son, Nick, were in the process of preparing to move to Ryan’s home in Brookline, Mass, and there had been a lot of talk about paint samples. The house was beautiful as far as form, function and resale value, but it was very bland. Lauren had declared her first act as the future Mrs. Kowalski would be to “unbeige the place.”
“I stopped by Lauren’s a few days ago,” Katie said. “Looks like they’re almost ready to make the move.”
He nodded, but fortunately she saw that coming from experience and paused the snipping until he stopped moving his head. “Very soon. Nick will finish school here in a couple of weeks. They want to have a week to move in, and maybe he can familiarize himself with the neighborhood. Then they’ll come spend Christmas week here so Nick can be with his father and the little ones while Ryan and Lauren finish getting her house ready to sell.”
Katie moved to the other side of the chair, halfway done with the cut. “So Nick can start his new school with the new year, instead of starting and then having time off. Makes sense. How’s Mrs. Dozynski taking it?”
“She’s happy for our daughter, of course, but it will be hard for her. She doesn’t drive and Lauren helped her a lot. Now she’ll be nagging me even more to retire.”
Katie hoped not, though she didn’t say out loud. The hardware store ran on such a thin thread, Dozer didn’t even have hired help anymore. The only way he could retire was to close it, which would be heartbreaking and inconvenient, or sell it. There wasn’t much of a market for small-town hardware stores anymore. Not with the big-box stores springing up around them.
Before she could respond, the big black phone on the wall rang with a loud jangle. The thing was practically a relic, but she’d answered it when she was a little girl hanging around with her dad, and she couldn’t bring herself to replace it with something less alarming. “Just a second, Dozer. Don’t move.”
The phone rarely rang. The shop’s hours hadn’t changed in at least thirty years, so the only time anybody bothered to call was during the winter, when somebody might check to see if she was there during a snowstorm. Since she lived upstairs, she usually was.
“Barbershop.” She didn’t bother identifying herself. There had only ever been one barber at a time in Whitford. First her dad, then the idiot who’d “run” the business for her mom after her dad died, and then Katie as soon as she met the licensing requirements.
“Hey, it’s Josh.”
The little zing she’d been feeling at the sound of his voice since her body had reached zinging age was chased by a pang of anxiety. He never called her at the shop. “What’s up?”
“It’s not a wicked emergency or anything, but I’m taking your mom to the hospital.”
The pang of anxiety solidified into a knot of fear in her gut. “What’s wrong?”
“Same as last time, more or less. The cough’s gotten worse since yesterday and she’s got a fever. She won’t let me take her temperature, but it’s pretty obvious.”
“Is it bad enough for an ambulance?”
“No. She’s arguing with me, actually. Says she just needs to have some te
a and lie down for a while, but I can tell from looking at her she feels like she did when we took her in before.”
Katie’s fingers tightened around the old-fashioned phone receiver. “So you think she has pneumonia again?”
“I’m not a doctor but, like I said, seems to be the same symptoms that got her that diagnosis last month.”
“Can you wait for me? I need maybe five minutes to finish this cut and then I’ll hang the sign and lock up.”
“Yeah. She’s still trying to convince me she doesn’t want to go, so we’ll be here debating the point for a while yet.”
“I’ll be there as quick as I can.”
She hung up and walked back to Dozer, but took a few seconds to calm herself before taking the scissors to his hair. The first bout with pneumonia had been scary enough, but her mom was a pretty healthy woman. Now if she had it again, it could be so much worse. Her immune system was still building itself back up and she hadn’t fully regained her strength.
“Is Rose sick again?”
Katie shook off her dread and made sure her hands weren’t shaking before lifting the scissors. “Maybe. Josh doesn’t like the sound of her cough and he says she has a fever, so we’re going to take her to the hospital to get checked.”
“I can have Pat finish this if you want to go.”
“I appreciate that, but I’m almost done.” And she’d seen what Pat Dozynski had done to his hair when the hardware store was busy and he hadn’t had a chance to get away while the barbershop was open.
Ten minutes later, Katie locked the door behind Dozer and used a dry-erase marker to write Gone Fishing on the bottom of the Closed sign before turning it around. She’d probably take less flack if she wrote Closed for Family Emergency, but that news would spread through Whitford like wildfire and concerned neighbors would descend upon them like torch-bearing villagers.
When she got to the lodge, she found her mom in the front room, still arguing with Josh.
“I’m fine,” she said to Katie when she saw her come in, but then she broke into a coughing fit that took her breath away.
All He Ever Dreamed (The Kowalskis) Page 2