Читать книгу Hot Date - Amy Garvey - Страница 10

On Tuesday morning, Nick was slouched behind the wheel of the patrol car, making his usual circuit through town. Up River Road, a left onto Bridge, another left on Broad, straight through the village and past the quiet green square with its bandstand and handful of benches. Left on Schoolhouse Road and then again on Canal Street, past the bakery and the Café and the cramped, dusty little bookstore Walter Greenmarsh had run since Nick was a kid.

So far, the most exciting thing he’d seen was a fat gold tabby cat taking a swipe at a blue jay, and Joy Goldberg, who was supposed to be doing the Atkins diet, walking out of the bakery with a cinnamon-sugar cake donut in her mouth. It was a warm, bright blue morning, and unless Nick wanted to set up a speed trap over on Bryant Farm Road, there was nothing much to do.

As usual. Which was just the way he liked it. It meant he didn’t have to feel bad about leaving Wrightsville behind.

He pulled into the lot behind the Methodist church near the square and radioed in to Miriam.

“Nothing going on here, Nick.” He could hear her chewing gum, which she’d taken up when she quit smoking. “Are you surprised?”

“Shocked,” he said with a smile. He signed off and pulled out, watching as Mr. Terrill pushed his walker across the street, his dachshund Frank waddling along beside him. He’d never asked if the dog’s name was short for frankfurter. He didn’t actually want to know.

Without thinking, he turned the car toward Tulip and drove down the wide, quiet street only half aware that he was heading to his mother’s house. It was Tuesday; without anything more pressing to do, he could at least put the trash out for her, even if it was a little early in the day.

But when he pulled up to the house, he had to park beneath the elm that would shade the whole front yard in midsummer. Another car sat in his mother’s driveway, a clean, compact little Toyota about half the size of the Ford his mother had driven since just a few years after his father took off.

He started across the neatly trimmed yard, cocking his head when he heard voices, his mother’s and…Mason Lamb’s. Which was when he nearly tripped over his own feet.

Mason Lamb was up on a stepladder on his mother’s front porch, replacing a lightbulb in the ceiling fixture, while Nick’s mother leaned against the screen door with a cup of coffee in her hands.

She had a ribbon in her hair. A pink ribbon. Which matched her sweater. And she was wearing earrings. Earrings. At home, on a Tuesday morning in March.

Not only that, but she was laughing at something Mason had said. Dressed in his usual uniform of wrinkled khakis and a white Oxford under a loose gray cardigan, he twisted to reach for something, and Georgia handed him the old glass cover for the light fixture.

Smiling all the while. The woman was practically batting her eyelashes.

She looked up then and smiled at him across the lawn. “Nick. What are you doing here, honey?”

“Well…” What was he supposed to say? That he was bored and figured taking out her trash would be more interesting than cruising around Wrightsville for the sixth time that morning, even though that was his job? His mother never asked him why he stopped over, or at least she never had before.

Of course, there had never been anyone else at the house before except one of his sisters.

Mason finished with the light fixture’s glass dome and backed off the ladder before he turned to Nick with a hearty wave. “Hey there, Nick! Good to see you again.”

Nick nodded slowly. He hadn’t seen Grace and Tommy’s dad in six months before he and Georgia ran into him at the Canal Street Café on Friday night, and now he was over here fixing Georgia’s porch light?

He realized Georgia was frowning at him. Boy, that was a look he knew and hated, that faint, rare hint of disapproval that pinched her nose and made her eyebrows beetle up. He cleared his throat and said, “Good to see you, too, Mr. Lamb. How are you this morning?”

Meaning, of course, what the hell are you doing on my mother’s porch?

He was being stupid, and he knew it even as Mason began to ramble about a free day from the high school, since the whole tenth grade was on a field trip, and the juniors and seniors were taking some kind of standardized test. He’d been a high school history teacher at Franklin High School ever since Nick could remember.

He was also his best friend’s father, and a man who had been like a dad to him for years. But there was something weird about finding him hanging out with Georgia as if they were old buddies who drank coffee and chatted every morning.

Of course, they were old friends—they’d known each other since Nick and Tommy were kids, before Nick’s dad had disappeared and Tommy and Grace’s mom had died. But they weren’t really friends, not in Nick’s book. Mason had never gotten over Kay’s death, for one thing. He taught his classes, and he went to Tommy’s football games and Grace’s…well, whatever it was that Grace did that required an audience, but once they were out of the house, Mason spent his time puttering in his basement or watching the History Channel when he wasn’t teaching, according to Tommy.

And Georgia, well, Georgia had her female friends. Women she’d known forever, right there on the block or down at church, and later at the elementary school where she’d finally gotten a job in the front office.

As Mason rambled—and his mother looked on fondly, smiling in all the right places—it struck Nick that his mother had never once dated another man since his dad left. He did the math, right there in the sunny front yard of his childhood house, and swallowed hard.

Twenty-three years ago. And he’d never even thought about it.

But he was willing to bet, all of a sudden, watching Georgia’s face soften at something Mason was saying, that his mother had.

“Nick, you’re not paying attention,” she scolded him, and he looked up to find her frowning at him all of a sudden. “Mason asked if you’d seen Grace since the other night.”

“Um, no sir, I haven’t.” He ran a hand over his forehead. Grace. This was all her fault, as usual. If Grace hadn’t come back, everything would be just the way it had always been, and that had worked pretty well so far, if you asked him. Hell, his sisters were both married, and Georgia’s house was nice and snug, and she was set up doing storytimes at the library, now that she’d retired, and volunteering down at the church.

Everything was finally all set up. He now had the chance to broaden his horizons a little bit. Sow a few oats, or whatever they called it, work on a police force that dealt with more than the occasional cat up a tree or kids on Mischief Night, damn it.

He realized Mason was staring at him and found his voice. “Is she doing all right over there at Toby’s?”

“I suppose so,” Mason said, and lowered himself onto the top porch step. Georgia joined him, not even bothering to brush it off before she sat down. Nick closed his mouth when he felt his jaw hanging open. Their hips were practically touching, for God’s sake.

“She came over last night because she found some old photos in the shop she thought I might like.” Mason chuckled, and slanted a look sideways at Georgia. “Had a whole story in her head about the family in the pictures and their life at the turn of the century.” He paused, his brow wrinkling as he smiled and shook his head. “She got most of it right, too. I guess she listened to me more often than I thought.”

Georgia laid a hand on his arm. “Of course she did, Mason. Has she made any headway deciding what she’s going to do?”

Mason snorted at that. “Not much so far. She did pull out some dead shrubs before she left.”

Figures, Nick thought. Impulsive, that was Grace. The shrubs were probably fine.

“Did you need something, dear?” Georgia asked now. Her eyes were wide, all innocent interest, but Nick knew what she was thinking. He’d seen that look often enough as a kid, when she needed a break or wanted a minute by herself. That look meant, “Unless you’re bleeding from the eyes or the house is about to explode, please go away.”

“Not really, Mom.” Hands in his pockets, he backed toward the patrol car. “Nice to see you again, Mr. Lamb.”

“Oh, Nick, we’re all adults,” the older man said with an easy laugh. “Call me Mason.”

“Yes, sir,” Nick said, and practically blushed at the way Mason and Georgia laughed together.

Adults, huh? He restlessly ran a hand over his head as he turned around and got into the car. He didn’t feel like one at the moment.

Especially since what he planned to do next was drive over to the antique store and tell Grace that their parents were canoodling on his mother’s front porch.

Grace was perched on a ladder in the front room of the shop, a giant strip of faded wallpaper in her hands, when the bell over the door jingled. She looked over her shoulder to find Nick planted in the hall, shaking his head.

“What is it with your family and ladders?” he said.

She climbed down, tossing the discarded wallpaper onto the pile on the floor. “What are you talking about?”

“What are you doing?” he said instead of answering her.

“You’re never going to make detective at this rate, Nick,” she said archly, and bit her bottom lip when he glowered at her. “I’m taking down this awful wallpaper,” she explained. “Can’t you tell?”

“Of course I can tell,” he grunted. “But the question is why? Especially when”—he counted off on his fingers—“it’s not your store, you shouldn’t be up on a ladder all by yourself, and the front yard looks like a battlefield!”

“Oh, that.” She sighed, and walked over to the big bay window. She’d dug out either side of the slate walk so she could plant pansies, which she didn’t have yet, and then ripped up half of the pachysandra that was choking the front edge of the lawn. The dead branches of a sickly hot pink azalea were scattered on the grass like crime scene evidence. “I forgot about that.”

“How do you forget that you ripped up the yard?” he demanded.

If he wasn’t careful, that throbbing vein in his neck was going to pop, she thought, and shrugged at him. “I was working on ideas for a new career last night, and I wanted to do something this morning. But halfway through, I ran out of potting soil, and then the phone rang, and I was looking at the wallpaper while I was talking to Toby, and it was so awful and dark and dingy that I decided to peel back a piece when I hung up with him, and then…” She trailed off, watching his throat. The vein was pulsing like a strobe light now. She bent down and retrieved a strip of the wallpaper. “See? It’s horrible. No one has flocked wallpaper anymore. And shepherdesses? Honestly.”

He lifted one dark eyebrow. “Shepherdesses.”

He was probably an excellent cop, Grace thought as her face heated. His stare was like a bare bulb. If he started interrogating her, she would crumble like a stale cookie.

He was so much bigger than she remembered, too. So…solid in his khaki uniform. He was all man now. Big, strong man.

She blinked at him in confusion, painfully aware of the hot blush on her cheeks. He was Nick, for heaven’s sake. And of course he was a man; he was thirty-five years old. What did she expect, the gangly thirteen-year-old who used to yell at her for climbing trees?

“Grace?”

She cleared her throat, hoping it would clear her head at the same time. What was wrong with her? Maybe she was spending too much time alone, trying to figure out how she could make the little bit of money she still had pay for everything she needed to go into business for herself. And no one but Nick had come into the shop since last Friday, which was trouble, because that made it all too easy to find herself avoiding the disaster that was her bank account and her life and throwing herself into the disaster that was the store.

He was still staring at her, waiting for an answer. “What?” she said, hoping the irritation in her tone would scare him away. “So I took down the wallpaper. I’m not breaking any laws, as far as I know.”

He sighed and shook his head, running a hand over his closely cropped hair. “Not yet,” he said darkly, and pushed past to shake the ladder. “This thing could qualify as an antique, though. Isn’t there a decent ladder downstairs?”

“I’m not going to fall off it, Nick.” Rolling her eyes, she bent down to gather the shredded wallpaper into a plastic garbage bag. “What are you doing here, anyway? Aside from spreading doom, I mean.”

He leaned against the wall and folded his arms over his chest. Buttery sunlight through the window fell on his bare forearm, turning the fine hairs there to dark gold.

Dark gold. Please. It was just hair. Man hair. Nick’s man hair. She wasn’t tempted to touch it. Not at all. She had some sense left, after all. The last thing she needed was a complication shaped like a…big, strong, sexy man. She restrained the urge to groan in frustration and looked away to stuff more discarded wallpaper into the bag.

“Guess who I found at my mother’s house this morning,” he said.

“Jimmy Hoffa?”

He ignored that. “Your father, Grace.”

She twirled the garbage bag before affixing a twist tie. “My father what?”

“Was at my mother’s house. This morning.” He stared at her, waiting for a response.

She was waiting for the rest of the story. When it didn’t come, she laughed. “Am I missing the punch line? What’s wrong with that?”

“They were flirting,” he said incredulously. “Laughing. Touching.”

She stopped to picture that, her serious, shy dad and Nick’s mom, with her gentle smile and matching sweater sets. “Touching? Really?”

“Well, no, they weren’t…touching,” Nick retorted. “Not like that. But still, Grace, think about it.”

“Think about what?” she said, and carried the trash bag back to the kitchen. Nick followed, his handcuffs rattling on his belt. “They’re adults, Nick. Adults who have been alone too long, if you ask me. To tell you the truth, now that I think about it, I’m surprised this didn’t happen earlier.”

She set the bag down in the mud room just off the kitchen and turned around to find Nick gaping at her.

“Well, it’s true,” she said, waving him into an empty chair at the table, which was still cluttered with the remains of her morning coffee. “Just because you’re not interested in a relationship doesn’t mean your mother isn’t.”

“What?”

There went that vein again. He really needed to have his blood pressure checked, Grace thought, dragging her gaze away from it to stare at the tabletop. Why on earth had she said that? Nick’s love life was none of her business.

But then, their parents’ love lives weren’t exactly his business either.

“I think it’s sweet,” she said quickly, before he exploded at her. “My dad and your mom, I mean. Think of the possibilities! I like that. It’s spring, Nick. It’s time for new things to grow.”

He snorted, and she looked up to see him shaking his head. “Speaking of growing, how exactly are you planning to support yourself? You can’t live with Toby forever, you know.”

As if she needed another reminder. She got up from the table irritably. “I’m working on it,” she told him, and grabbed up the raspberry jam she’d used, to her disappointment, on a corn muffin that morning. “I’m just trying to figure out how to cover expenses.”

Nick shook his head. “You’ve got some bare earth to cover out front or Toby is going to have your head.”

“It’ll get done,” she said. “Why are you so interested, anyway? I can take care of myself.”

“Yeah, well, you’re doing a bang-up job so far,” he muttered, and stood up to lean against the back of the chair. “Are you really sure you want to do this, Grace? Start over from scratch?”

Not again. Why did everyone insist on believing that they knew what she should be doing with her life better than she did? She put away the jam and shut the refrigerator door with more force than necessary.

“I am absolutely sure, Nick,” she snapped. “Are you sure you want to be a cop? Are you sure you want to live in Wrightsville? Are you sure you should be cutting your hair like that?”

He narrowed those big hazel eyes at her. “What’s wrong with my hair?”

“That’s not the point!”

“That’s for sure!”

They glared at each other for a minute across the wide pine table, with the fridge humming in the background and the old mantel clock on the counter ticking like a heart.

Standoff, Grace thought, stiffening her spine as she glowered at him. They’d done this so many times before. When she stole the boys’ G.I. Joes and married them to her Barbies. When Nick found her carrying an abandoned baby bunny into the house. When she’d decided to find out what a bottle of Michelob tasted like just hours before the eighth grade dance.

He was good, she had to admit—his gaze never faltered, and the cocky tilt to one of his eyebrows made her itch to reach up and smack it back into place.

“What do you want me to say?” she finally demanded, hands on her hips. “Why do you even care what I do?”

He looked as though she’d slapped him. “That’s low, Grace. I’ve known you forever. And I don’t want to see you get hurt.”

She rolled her eyes. “Well, it’s too late for that.” She softened when he lowered his gaze. The rigid set of his jaw was a rebuke. “You can’t protect everyone, Nick. Not all the time, not from everything. This is a chance for me to do something right, for once. I just need a little time. I need…”

She couldn’t finish the sentence. Not with Nick looking at her again, dubious and immovable as always. I need someone to believe in me, she thought instead, and was surprised at how much it mattered.

And at how much, she suddenly realized, she wanted Nick, her childhood nemesis, to be that someone. Or at least one of them.

The crackle of Nick’s radio startled her. He took the thing off his belt and turned around to answer it. Everything about him changed in that moment—suddenly he was completely alert, focused, and ready to go.

Like a lion, she thought, with a gazelle on the horizon. All brain, muscle, and instinct. She wouldn’t have been surprised if he growled at her.

What was absolutely shocking was how much she suddenly wanted to hear him do just that.

“Traffic assistance needed at Bryant Farm and Hilltop Roads,” said a female voice. “Vehicle accident reported.”

“Officer responding,” he said into the radio, and turned back to Grace. “I have to go.”

She nodded at him without a word.

And then tried to convince herself she wasn’t appreciating the way his uniform pants fit so gorgeously over his ass as he walked away.

Charlie Costello, it turned out, had a really nice ass.

Not that Toby was staring or anything. Just…appreciating. Surreptitiously. Whenever Charlie moved a stride or two ahead of him as they navigated the pedestrians on the sidewalk. They were on their way to dinner, despite the fact that they’d spent most of the afternoon together, and Toby was practically floating.

Which made the view of Charlie from behind even better, honestly.

He was going to kiss Grace when he got back. Kiss her, and write a real old-fashioned thank-you note, and take her out to dinner, and maybe build a shrine to her, too. Because Charlie had been thrilled to hear Toby was coming up to Boston—his return e-mail had said simply, “Dude! When can we see each other?!”—he’d taken the afternoon off to show Toby the city and was just as funny and sexy and charming as his e-mails.

And cute. So very cute. Abercrombie & Fitch classy, lean and fit, with blue eyes and short gold-brown hair spiked casually in front.

The freckles were really what got Toby, though. He was already imagining a day when he could sit and count them, one by one, and watch Charlie grin.

“You still with me, man?” Charlie said, tilting his head to one side in amusement and waiting for Toby to catch up.

“Right here,” Toby said, and flushed hot when Charlie took his hand. His long, graceful fingers were cool and firm, and when he turned to face Toby, his blue eyes were…grateful. Eager. Hopeful.

It was an incredible feeling.

“This is the place,” Charlie said a half block later, their hands still linked loosely as they stopped in front of a tiny café under a red awning. “It’s the best Thai in the city, and they don’t take reservations, so there might be a wait. If that’s okay, I mean.”

“I’m sure we can find some way to pass the time,” Toby said, and heard the husk of anticipation in his voice. His cheeks burned, but Charlie just smiled and went inside to give his name to the hostess.

Waiting was okay with him, yes sir. Toby had been waiting forever for, well, for this. This strange tingle, this warm, comfortable weight of knowing that this was it, Mr. Right, or that he could be. Understanding finally that love was more than possible, it was right here, waiting.

He turned his face into the breeze, letting it cool his cheeks as he bit back a ridiculous smile. He and Charlie had only just met, after all, no matter how many e-mails they’d shared on-line. He couldn’t go overboard, couldn’t get carried away. Even if nothing more came of this than a pleasant meal, he’d have this memory, and the knowledge that he had taken a risk, reached out for what he wanted.

When he felt a hand on his elbow, he turned to find Charlie smiling at him, eyes full of light in the gold glow of a street lamp.

“I hope you’re hungry,” he said simply, leaving his hand right there on Toby’s elbow.

“You better believe it,” Toby answered, and took a breath before he closed the distance between them by another inch. Charlie smelled good, like sandalwood and spice and man, and Toby could feel the heat of his body shimmering under his jacket.

“Good.” And then Charlie leaned forward, right there in front of everyone milling on the sidewalk and waiting for a table, and kissed him.

“Thank you, Grace,” Toby whispered when Charlie pulled away, the taste of him still on his lips, his tongue.

“Who?” Charlie laughed, sliding an arm around his shoulders.

“I’ll tell you later,” Toby said, and laughed back. “I’ll tell you everything.”