Sam wasn’t sure what it was, but something seemed to squeeze at his heart at the feel of her lips on his skin. Some of the women he’d known over the years had been fascinated by his scars. One had even seemed a little afraid of them. But none had kissed them the way Kelsey did. And not one had made him want to simply lay with her while his body, so recently sated, began to stir again.
He glanced at the clock on his nightstand, tucked her a little closer. It was barely eight o’clock. They had nearly four hours to slake the hunger that was building already.
Or so he thought a moment before he heard the slam of car doors and his sister’s voice yelling for the boys to slow down.
Chapter Ten
“Trevor! Don’t you dare jump off that porch rail! Tyler, don’t run with that stick!”
Kelsey could hear Megan hollering at her offspring as she scrambled to dress at the edge of Sam’s bed. He had already handed her her jeans and underwear and was pulling on his own on his way into the kitchen to retrieve their shirts.
Standing with the sheet in front of her as she snapped her own pants, she saw him swipe up pink cotton and white, then bend to look through the slats of the blinds over the tiny kitchen table.
“She’s chasing the kids right now,” was all he said before heading back to hand her the rest of her clothes. “I think we have a minute.”
Her bra dangled by one strap from his finger. Snatching it, she turned away to put it on, only to have him turn her right back around.
“I’ve kissed every inch of you,” he reminded her, lifting his hands to cradle her face. “You don’t have to turn away to dress.”
He wanted her to be comfortable with him, and to know she had no reason to ever feel self-conscious where he was concerned. Desperately relieved to know that, she whispered a shaky, “Okay.” The tension in his body had been almost palpable when he’d bolted from bed. It was clear now that it wasn’t there because of any regrets he had about her.
He looked very much as if he were about to kiss her when the muscle in his jaw jerked and his hands fell.
“She was supposed to be here at noon,” he groused, stuffing his shirt tail into his jeans. “Not at half past the crack of dawn.”
“I’m sure she’s anxious to get into her house.” Quickly fastening her bra, she reached for her shirt and stuck her head through its neck. “I would be if I were her,” she confided as her head popped through.
This time he did kiss her. With his hands in the mess of her hair, he pulled her to him, kissed her hard, then turned to grab clean socks from the built-in dresser drawer. “I’m sure she is. But her timing sucks.”
“Sam? You in there?”
“Yeah, Sis. Hang on.”
Kelsey reached for her own socks, pulled one on. “I need a comb.”
“In the bathroom. Through there,” he said, pointing to the door just outside the bedroom. And Kelsey,” he said, catching her by the arm before she disappeared. His glance moved from her mouth to her eyes, promise heavy in his rugged face. “We’ll take longer next time.”
The thrill that shot through her coincided roughly with the sharp knock on the door.
“Sam? I’ve got to get back to the kids. Do you have any coffee in there?”
“I’ll bring you a cup.”
“And some aspirin if you have any.”
“Got it.”
With his hand still on Kelsey’s arm, he gave a little squeeze. “Can I have a rain check on breakfast?”
Kelsey told him of course he could and slipped into the bathroom, leaving him to pull on his boots. By the time she had made herself presentable, he was already outside and she was left to make as graceful an exit as possible with his sister standing twenty feet from the door.
The boys were running around like wind-up toys beside the orange trailer his sister had pulled behind her SUV when Sam heard the door of his temporary residence open. Megan stood beside him, cradling her coffee mug as if it contained the elements of life itself. She had just started to take another sip when she noticed the door open, too.
“’Morning,” Kelsey said, appearing as if she were trying not to be self-conscious as she descended the stairs. She looked as neat to him as she had when she’d first shown up. Except that her hair was down now instead of in a ponytail. Apparently she hadn’t been able to find the little fabric thing he’d pulled out and tossed somewhere.
“Well,” his sister murmured. A smile joined the fatigue in her eyes. She’d said she and the boys had been too excited to sleep. That was why they’d left so early. “I see now why you weren’t so happy to see me.”
“She came by to fix breakfast.”
“Looks like you didn’t get very far. With breakfast, I mean.” Her voice dropped at his puzzled frown. “The ingredients are still on your counter.”
“How do you know that?”
“The curtain wasn’t pulled all the way on the door window. There’s also a car parked right there,” she pointed out, motioning to the little sedan beside his truck. “It’s obvious someone’s here. I was looking to see who it was.
“’Morning, Kelsey,” she called. Her knowing smile turning friendly as she glanced to the woman walking toward them. “Sorry about the interruption. Oh, jeez,” she muttered, shoving her mug at her brother before she turned. “That kid is going to kill himself.
“Trevor! I told you not to walk on the railings! Get down before I buckle you back into the car and make you stay there forever!”
“Lookit what I got, Uncle Sam!” Oblivious to his older brother’s impending fate, little Tyler walked toward him with his hands cupped together. “It’s fuzzy!”
Kelsey touched his arm, quickly eased back her hand. She didn’t know if she should offer to help or just get out of the way. “I’m going to go,” she decided, as the little boy drew closer, his expression rapt. “Unless it would help if I stayed to help your sister.”
Sam’s attention, clearly divided, cut to her.
“Thanks,” he murmured, “but we’ll call my aunt and cousin. They’re coming, anyway. And my uncle’s going to help unload the heavy stuff, so I should be finished by midafternoon. I’ll be over to help you then.”
“Uncle Sam?”
At his nephew’s plea for attention, Kelsey smiled at the child, then looked back to the big man beside him. “Don’t worry about me.”
She offered the assurance as she backed toward her car. She was in trouble here. Deep trouble, she realized. She didn’t regret for a moment what her appalling lack of restraint where he was concerned had led. She knew she should. She could practically feel the void he would leave once he was gone waiting to open. But she wasn’t going to think about that now. She had always planned ahead, always considered consequences, but for now, she was going to adopt the philosophy he apparently lived by and stay focused only on the moment.
At that particular moment, he was smiling at her in that deceptively easy way he had as his nephew held up his treasure for his perusal.
“Just take care of Megan,” she said, taking another step away. At the moment, too, she had soot to scrub from a fireplace and he had a sister who definitely needed his assistance. “She has her hands full.”
Sam would have agreed with her had Tyler not been elbowing his knee to get him to look at what he held so gently.
“That’s a great caterpillar,” he told him, only to look back to see that Kelsey had already turned and was headed for her car.
He’d just watched her head down the drive for the road when he heard his sister behind him. She had Trevor, in full pout, by the hand. He knew the kid was just wound up. But he really didn’t want him breaking an extremity, either.
“I like her.”
“Yeah,” he muttered, making himself focus on the people surrounding him. “She’s…”
“Special? That’s okay,” she told him when his only response was protective silence, “you don’t have to answer that. I can see it. And it’s nice to see you with her.”
Sam blinked at the top of her dark head. “You know me better than that.”
He couldn’t believe she’d asked such a question. Apparently, she couldn’t quite believe his response. Puzzlement crossed her face as she looked up.
“Then why would you talk her into moving back here if you aren’t staying yourself?”
Disbelief shot into his voice. “Where did you hear that?”
“That you talked her into staying? I heard it from Aunt Jan, and from Cathy,” she explained speaking of their cousin. “They said everyone around here is talking about it.”
For a moment, Sam said nothing. He knew from experience that the first words to come to a person’s mind weren’t necessarily the best to verbalize. Since those that immediately came to his involved several with four letters, he had the foresight to shield them from tender ears.
The annoyance Sam had first felt toward Dora did not diminish, however, as he chose what he said with a little more care.
“What you heard is her mother’s interpretation,” he explained, when explaining anything about his personal affairs wasn’t something he tended to do with his family. “I didn’t talk Kelsey into anything. Buying the mill is something she’s wanted since she was kid,” he maintained, telling her exactly what he’d told Joe—who apparently hadn’t done a very good job of spreading that part of the story.
“But you’re helping her with it, aren’t you?”
He all but gritted his teeth. “Because I need something to do while I’m stuck here now that your house is done.” His exasperation was with Dora. Not with his sister. For that reason, along with the fact that his already beleaguered sibling didn’t need to bear the brunt of his frustration, he did his best to keep that exasperation from his voice. “All I’m doing is working on the place while I’m here.”
He didn’t know if Megan believed him or not. In the moments before Tyler asked if he could keep his find as a pet and Trevor said he had to go to the bathroom and wanted to know if Uncle Sam could show him where it was, he was more concerned with putting an end to the rumor that, by now, people were apparently accepting as truth.
Like stemming the flow of a broken dam, the best place to stop a rumor was at its origin. Dora had started it. With Dora was where it would end.
By five o’clock that afternoon, all of his sister’s boxes and furniture had been unloaded and moved into their respective rooms and his aunt was helping her unpack her kitchen. Since Sam knew Kelsey would be at the mill until the sun set and she could no longer see to work, he figured the time was as good as any to talk to her mother about her glaringly erroneous assumption.
He didn’t bother to wonder why he was deliberately walking into the sort of family clash that normally would have had him diving for cover. All he did as he parked in front of the diner and walked down the graveled side driveway to its back entrance was consider his approach. An operation was only as good as its planning. Dora possessed a basically warmhearted nature, which she had passed on to her daughter. She also had an obsessively practical side which Kelsey had likewise inherited in spades, but had softened with a huge dose of imagination. Considering those qualities, he’d decided that Dora would best respond to the direct approach.
He was wrong.
“I’m not sure you want to talk to her right now,” said the white-haired woman in the hairnet who answered his knock on the back screen door. The inner door had already been open. She’d simply appeared on the other side of the screen. “Claire just left.”
Claire would be the mayor’s wife—the woman who thought Dora wasn’t being civic-minded because she disapproved of her daughter’s plans to rejuvenate the mill. That meant Dora’s mood would not be good.
“When do you suggest I come back?”
“The turn of the next century comes to mind,” came Dora’s response.
Appearing at her cook’s elbow, Kelsey’s mom crossed her arms over the bib of her white apron by resting her still-casted arm atop the other. Her actually rather pretty features looked as tight as the braided, figure-eight bun at the back of her head. “It’s all right, Betsy. I’ll take care of this.”
Sam had met Betsy through the serving window. The woman had cooked his breakfast all the time Kelsey had been gone, and while they’d never had a conversation, he’d thought her rather pleasant. That was obviously before her employer had gotten to her. The look she gave him before she turned away was nearly as thin-lipped as Dora’s.
“Unless you’re here to tell me you’re stayin’ to see Kelsey through the start up of that mill, I have nothin’ to say to you.”
She hadn’t bothered to open the screen door. With the clank of pans drifting from the kitchen into the storage room behind her, she just stood there, staring at him through the metal mesh, waiting for him to vindicate himself.
“I never planned to stay,” he told her, his tone as reasonable as he could make it. “Kelsey knows that.”
“Then why did you talk her into moving back here?”
A muscle in his jaw bunched. “That’s what I want talk to you about,” he advised her, masking his surge of annoyance with practiced calm. “I never talked your daughter into anything. All I did was encourage her to follow a dream she’s had since—”
“That’s not what you did at all,” she cut in, cutting him off. “What you’ve done is set her up for a whole lot of discouragement. You had no business encouraging her to do anything, much less buying that mill.
“No one knows better than I do how hard it is to run a business alone,” she informed him, apparently finding plenty to say after all. “It takes all your time and every bit of your energy. I don’t think Kelsey realizes what she’s sacrificed buying that place. Doing what I do here, I have a social life. But she’s going to be stuck out there alone. Day in, and day out. She won’t see anyone who doesn’t make a point of stopping by. Heaven knows she won’t have time to get out and do the things a single girl ought to do.
“Not that there’s anything for her to do here,” she continued, clearly upset by that circumstance, too. “We don’t have the opportunities here that she had in the city. On top of that,” she persisted, squeezing her arms as if to hold herself back from going through the screen at him, “she’ll be out there working off her backside trying not to lose her money. This would all be different if she had a partner. Life’s just plain easier that way all the way around. But she doesn’t, and she isn’t likely to have one given the pickin’s in this county. I hate to think of all she’s thrown away. She had a wonderful future ahead of her. Now all she has is that…that…mill.”
Kelsey was right, he decided. Talking to her mother was like talking to a brick wall. Only there was no conversation involved. She’d barely let him say a word.
The last thing Sam wanted to do was cause more problems between Kelsey and her mom. That was the only reason he didn’t tell the woman she should back off and let her daughter live her own life. Or, at the very least, that she should give her a little credit for having a brain of her own and not bending to her mother’s expectations just to keep the peace. Had she been anyone else, he would have said just that. But he wouldn’t have talked that way to his own mother, and having Dora more upset with him would only make her more unhappy with her daughter.
“You’re underestimating her,” he said instead. “Her plans for the mill are solid. I don’t think you realize how committed she is.”
Offense joined indignation. “I know my daughter, Sam MacInnes. You’re the one who doesn’t. I don’t doubt that she’ll work herself to the bone making a go of that place. That girl’s never shied from hard work. But there’s more going on here than whether or not I think what she’s done is right.”
As if to make sure her coo
k or waitresses weren’t lurking behind her, she tossed a quick glance over her shoulder. When she turned back, she lowered her voice a terse notch.
“I can tell from the way Kelsey defends you that she cares about you far more than you care about her. I know you’re after her,” she snapped. “After Joe saw the two of you, there’s not much of anybody in this town who doesn’t, and I don’t think much of you for messin’ with her heart the way you’re doin’ when you know you’re just going to walk away. That girl is fallin’ in love with you. If you don’t care about anything else, you might at least consider her feelings and her reputation and behave yourself while you are here.”
Standing at the back of the old, converted house, Sam couldn’t see the street. But he could hear the sounds of a car driving by and another pulling up to the diner in Dora’s sudden, condemning silence.
Of all she had said, what she’d unloaded last clearly angered her the most. He held the potential to hurt her daughter. Watching her glare at him, there was no doubt in his mind that she resented his lack of respect for that above and beyond everything else.
Sam often didn’t say what he thought. That didn’t mean he didn’t have an opinion or a defense. It just meant he didn’t choose to waste his breath offering it. At that moment, though, he had no defense. He was also at a total loss for words.
Dora seemed to know that, too. Looking as if she dared him to deny her conclusions, she held his eyes long enough to do what no man had done in longer than he could remember. She made his glance fall. That accomplished, she turned away to take care of her customers.
He’d gone down in flames as far as accomplishing his initial goal was concerned. He did, however, now understand the root of her protective fury.
Sucking in a breath that smelled faintly of meatloaf, he stepped back himself and plowed his fingers through his hair. At that moment, he wasn’t honestly certain which disturbed him more: the question both Dora and his sister had asked about why he’d encouraged Kelsey, Dora’s announcement of how Kelsey felt about him, or her insinuation that he could be ruining Kelsey’s reputation.
Confessions of a Small-Town Girl Page 20