Читать книгу Hot Date - Amy Garvey - Страница 8

Two days later, Nick pulled up outside Priest Antiques. The rambling old house looked like it always had, faded, harmless, a grand old lady who had never given up her old-fashioned clothes, but he knew better. Grace was in there—and most likely doing something impulsive and ill considered.

Grace, who was just as infuriating and unpredictable as ever, but who was somehow all grown up now, in all kinds of ways he had never imagined. And in ways that made him think about her like a…well, like a woman, not the annoying honorary kid sister she had always been before Wednesday.

Grace, who had kissed him without thinking twice about it. On the cheek, in perfect innocence, but that hadn’t seemed to matter to his brain when her lips brushed his skin. No, his brain had skipped right over that and focused on how good she smelled, and how soft and full her lips were, and the faint heat coming off her body as she got close.

His brain had decided, without any help from any other part of him, that kissing her, really kissing her, on the mouth, would be even better. And touching her? Even better than that. Actually, maybe a few other body parts had voted yes to that, too.

And that was bad. So, so bad. It would be a mistake for the history books. Grace Lamb was his best friend’s sister, a woman who had just left her husband and whose life was, to be blunt, a mess. He had no business thinking about kissing Grace, and he knew it.

So he’d told his brain to cut it out, to think about someone else. Josie Reese, the bartender at Newtown Brew, who had a cute ass and bright blue eyes. Maggie DeFiore, who had just bought the café down on Canal Street, and made an awesome cheese steak on garlic bread.

But his brain didn’t take orders very well, it turned out. It kept reminding him that Josie always smelled like rum and whiskey, and smoked too much. And Maggie kept hinting about sleeping over, about keeping a toothbrush at his place, and liked to look at his gun, which was frankly a little disturbing.

Nope, his brain just kept pulling out the memory of Grace stretching up on her tiptoes to kiss him. All wild hair and soft lips and dark eyes, and Christ, that was the last thing he needed.

Grace was the last thing he needed. Grace back in Wrightsville, wreaking havoc, was even farther down the list of things he needed.

If the world was turning the way it was supposed to, she’d make him crazy the minute he walked in Priest Antiques, and he could forget all about the new, sexy Grace and focus on the old, irritating one. He needed to remind himself that he was this close to taking a job in Doylestown and getting out of Wrightsville himself.

Just as he opened the door and got out of his Jeep, a broken chair sailed out of a second-story window and hit the ground beneath it with a splintering crash.

It was reassuring to know that some things never changed.

“Grace!” he bellowed, and shook his head at the haphazard pile of furniture and assorted junk that apparently couldn’t fly either. Some of it had landed over the property line in Frank Garrity’s yard, and Nick could just imagine the angry phone call that was sure to come.

“Grace!” he shouted again.

When she didn’t appear, he decided not to wait and pounded up the porch steps and into the store.

“Hey, Nick,” Toby said from the hallway, a cup of coffee in his hand. “Can I get you—?”

“Not now,” Nick growled, and took the stairs to the second floor two at a time.

Grace was in the spare bedroom, which was at least passable at this point. A meandering path cut through the accumulated junk, although the piles to either side of it looked taller than they had the other day. He had only one foot over the threshold when Grace peeked briefly into a cardboard box and then heaved it out the open window.

“Grace!”

She whirled around, hand to her chest, and smiled as she unplugged a pair of iPod ear buds. Outside, he could hear the box land with a thud. “Hey, Nick. What’s up?”

He glared. “What’s up? I think the question is what’s down, Grace. What the hell are you doing?”

She blinked at him in surprise. Her hair was scooped on top of her head in a messy knot, curls springing out every which way like an exploded Slinky. “I’m…cleaning. It’s sort of obvious, Nick.”

“You’re throwing things out the window,” he bellowed, and didn’t even care when she flinched.

“Well, yeah. It’s a lot easier than carrying everything downstairs,” she said, and took a step backward when he growled.

“Grace, will you stop and think for a minute? Please?” He rubbed a hand over his eyes. “Half of it’s ending up in the Garritys’ side yard. And you can’t just leave it there. Someone is going to have to pick it all up and set it by the curb, or put it in a dumpster. Which would be on the other side of the house, in the driveway.”

“A bonfire would be quicker,” she said thoughtfully, and threw up her hands in defeat when he glared at her. “Okay, okay, no more tossing it out the window. You’re a total buzz kill, you know that?”

He ignored her last remark with effort and slouched against the door frame. “I have news about the VW, if you’re interested.”

“Good or bad?” she said idly, squinting at a faded water-color of a landscape she’d taken off the top of the nearest pile.

“Not great.”

She set down the painting and frowned. “Uh oh.”

“It’s not going to be cheap. It’s drivable, but if you want to return the car in the shape you found it, it’s going to cost you. With a car that old, just finding the parts costs money.”

Her face fell. “Oh. That’s bad.”

He shrugged, but his heart squeezed in pity, just for a second. She looked so appalled, so confused—and strangely adorable with her hair corkscrewing all over the place, and her cheeks warm with the hard, dirty work of cleaning out the spare room.

There went his brain again, whispering, Kiss her. Kiss her!

He shoved the thought aside and straightened up just as she sagged into the one empty chair in the room. “Does your friend need the car back right away?”

“No. But I can’t return it all banged up,” she said disconsolately. “It’s Regina’s baby.”

He folded his arms over his chest. Maybe that would cure the urge to reach out and stroke her head.

He still couldn’t believe that he wasn’t tempted to shake her instead. You couldn’t just run off and start a new life without a plan, without money, without reliable transportation, but would Grace admit that? Never. It was just like her to charge into making life-altering changes without thinking about it, but for the first time ever he couldn’t muster up enough indignation to yell at her.

Maybe because this time, she actually looked a little bit worried about what she’d gotten herself into.

But he couldn’t be the one to pick her up and dust her off, not now. Not when he kept seeing this new Grace, instead of the old one he was so comfortable with.

Not when all the pieces of his life were finally in place, and he was about to get out of Wrightsville himself. He couldn’t fix this for her, not this time.

So he said, in his most casual tone, “Could you ask Robert to help out?” He leaned one elbow on a stack of cartons, and jumped back when it wobbled.

She raised her face to his and blinked incredulously. “Robert? Why on earth would I do that?”

Right. Why? He shrugged. “Well, he is your husband.”

“And I left him,” she pointed out, looking at him as if he were a particularly stupid kid. “I can’t ask him to finance it.”

Time to plunge in. Throw the proverbial piece of spaghetti against the wall and see if it stuck. Even so, he found himself looking at his shoes as he said, “Maybe it’s not really over. Maybe you just needed some time to cool off. Maybe, just maybe, you miss him. Maybe you should—”

He looked up just in time to see her stand up, wielding an empty plastic water bottle which she obviously intended to introduce to his head. He ducked toward the door. “Okay, maybe not. Sorry.”

She was sputtering, he realized, actually sputtering as she followed him into the hall, the water bottle still clutched in one hand and her cheeks bright pink with outrage now.

“It’s over,” she finally managed. There went her eyes, blazing like a freshly set fire. “And I do not need you or anybody else to suggest different!”

“Got it,” he said, and backed down the stairs, hands up in surrender. “Sorry. Leaving now.”

“Good!” she yelled, and turned on her heel, disappearing into the spare room with a slam of the door.

“Don’t ask,” he said to Toby, who was waiting at the bottom of the steps with his hands on his hips.

It just proved how dangerous being impulsive could be, he thought as he strode out to his truck. It never paid to do something without thinking it over first, and that was a lesson he didn’t need to learn twice.

No, Grace’s problems were her own now. And he had his own life to live.

He flinched as another piece of furniture shot out of the window and hit the ground with a crash.

The sooner he remembered that, the better.

Two hours later, Grace was reheating a cup of coffee downstairs in the kitchen. The morning sun had given way to a gray drizzle, and Mr. Garrity had already called twice to complain about the “refuse” on his lawn, which was now wet and was a lot heavier to carry around the house to the driveway than it had been going out the window.

Damn Nick, anyway. He was always right. She hated that in a person.

And she hated how guilty she felt. Toby would never say no to her, and she knew he loved her, but showing up on his doorstep unexpectedly was something she had done on Saturdays in the ninth grade. When you were supposed to be a grown-up, it probably left something to be desired.

Toby pushed open the swinging door just as she was getting up to retrieve her coffee from the microwave. “I have a surprise for you,” he said with a sly grin.

She arched an eyebrow. “A cleaning woman?”

“Nope, it’s me,” came a female voice, and then Casey Peyton pushed past him and into the kitchen. “When Mohammed doesn’t come to the mountain…”

“Casey!” Grace squealed, and scared the baby in Casey’s arms, who immediately wrinkled up his face and began to cry.

“Jack, it’s okay,” Casey murmured, and brushed her lips across his peach fuzz head. “It’s Aunt Grace. Loud Aunt Grace.”

“Hey, Jack,” Grace said softly, and inched forward to drop a kiss on his mother’s cheek. “I haven’t seen you since you were, well, even smaller than you are now. How are you, buddy?”

The baby sniffled and hid his face in Casey’s shoulder.

“He’ll come around,” Casey promised, and dropped into the nearest chair, patting the baby’s back all the while. “For a one-year-old, a cookie is a surefire bribe.”

“I’ll have to remember that,” Grace said, and sat down beside her. “Where’s Jilli?”

“Jilli is hiding behind Uncle Toby’s leg,” Toby said, glancing over his shoulder. A small red head and a bright purple jacket were just visible behind him. “Forget everything your mother’s told you,” he whispered to the child. “Grace doesn’t bite.”

“Toby!”

He waggled his eyebrows. “Just kidding. Come on, Jilli, let’s show Grace where we hide the cookies.”

“I can’t believe how big they’ve both gotten.” Grace stood in the doorway to the upstairs living room. Both kids were parked in front of the TV, watching Sesame Street with a plate of apple slices and cookies between them.

“I can’t believe you’ve been here for two days and you haven’t called me, you rotten friend,” Casey said, shaking her head. She slung an arm around Grace’s shoulders. “Thank goodness I have Toby to deliver news.”

“I’ve been a little distracted.” Grace turned around and hugged Casey for the third time in fifteen minutes. “It’s so good to see you. Really. I was going to call today, I swear.”

“After you finished pitching stuff out the window, I presume,” Casey said with a wry tilt of her head. She’d cut her hair a little bit shorter since Grace had seen her last, but she still looked like the same Casey who had been Grace’s other half since sixth grade. She sat down on the floor in the hall and patted the space beside her. “Join me. If we even tiptoe in there, the spell will be broken.”

Grace slid down next to her and nudged Casey’s shoulder. “Something you’re not telling me?”

“I could ask you the same thing,” Casey said with a laugh. “You’re full of surprises, huh?”

“What else is new?”

Casey’s laugh was gentle, but she was all business as usual. “So what are you going to do now?” she asked. “Do you have a plan? Where are you going to work? Live?”

“I slept on the couch last night, you know,” Grace told her archly. “I’m still trying to clear a path into my bedroom. I haven’t thought too much beyond that yet.”

“Okay, well, what about your bank account? Did you go down to First National yet? Have you forwarded your mail? Did you call a lawyer?”

Grace’s shoulders sagged. “I didn’t think about that.”

Casey’s smile was sympathetic. “Which?”

Grace winced. “All of it?”

“Grace.”

She sighed and let her head fall back. “I know.”

“Have you even called your dad yet?”

“I’m having dinner with him tonight,” she said with a grin. “I get points for that, right?”

“You do.” Casey reached for her hand and squeezed it. “I’m sorry, honey. About all of this.”

“I’m not.” She trained her grin directly on Casey this time. “It’s going to be good, Casey. Really. I need to do this. And this time I’m going to make it work.”

At four o’clock, Toby stood in the side yard, surveying Grace’s handiwork, a bottle of water in one hand and something that was half frown and half smile on his face.

Leave it to Grace, he thought. That room upstairs had been collecting junk and dust and cobwebs for years, and within days of her arrival half of it was, well, littering up his side yard and part of the driveway, but still. The room was almost clean now.

Grace didn’t think twice. Okay, sometimes she didn’t think ever, but at least she got things done. Did things, took chances, even if they sometimes—okay, most of the time—backfired.

It was a hell of a lot more than he could say for himself.

He glanced up at the sound of shuffling footsteps and found Quinn Barnett, his next-door neighbor, ambling up the driveway.

“Hey, kiddo,” he said, and wound an arm around the girl’s bony shoulders. She was fifteen going on forty, as serious a kid as he had ever met. He adored her.

“I hate it when you call me that,” she said, eyebrows drawn together in a precise frown.

“I know,” he said easily. “What’s up?”

“I should ask you.” She waved a hand at the junk on the grass. The glass face of a broken clock glittered up at them in the late afternoon light. “What happened?”

“A friend of mine is here,” he said with a fond smile. “She’s going to stay for a while.”

“And trash the place?” Quinn said dubiously. She wriggled out from under his arm and poked at one pile of debris with her booted toe, unearthing an ancient camera. “Hey, can I have this?”

“You can have it all, as far as I’m concerned.” He let her poke through the piles and leaned against the hood of his old Celica. “And she’s not trashing the place.” Yet, he added silently, trying not to smile.

“So what is she doing here?” Quinn asked. She was squatting on the pavement, idly flipping through the pages of a water-damaged book on botanicals.

“Starting over.” He shrugged when she looked up at him, eyes sharp under the dark fringe of her bangs. “Seriously. She left her husband and she’s…I don’t actually know what she’s going to do yet, but the thing of it is, she’s not scared, you know?”

Quinn nodded slowly, something like envy in her eyes, the book still clutched in one hand.

“I can’t imagine doing that,” Toby said, and heard the awe in his voice as if from far away. “I mean, I think about it for a good long while before I decide to order mushrooms instead of sausage on my pizza, you know?”

Quinn smiled sadly, and it took Toby a minute to remember she was only fifteen, just a kid, really. Not that she’d ever seemed like much of a kid, even when she was seven, curled up on her front porch with a book, a tattered stuffed snake draped over her shoulders. Snakes don’t get enough love, she’d told him then.

“Yeah. I do know,” she said now, and turned her gaze back to the book in her hand, something very close to a blush heating her pale cheeks.

“She’s trouble, no doubt,” Toby told her, walking over to join her beside the clutter, pawing through it idly. “But sometimes I think trouble is underrated.”

At seven o’clock, armed with her best positive attitude and a big appetite, Grace walked into the Canal Street Café for dinner with her dad.

She loved him, she even liked him, but spending time with him had always been a test of her patience. If she was the hare, her father was the tortoise—on sedatives, and with one broken leg. Ordering a meal usually took a good fifteen minutes, and that only after weighing the pros and cons of each entrée, sometimes wandering down a few lanes of trivia concerning the origins of certain pasta dishes or the historical uses for chickens.

The Café was one of Wrightsville’s institutions, a little converted cottage overlooking the water, as famous for its mismatched china and tablecloths as it was for its food. There were only a dozen tables aside from the counter in the back, which was half lunch spot and half bar, and Grace could smell cheeseburgers frying when she walked in the door.

She could also see her father, the man who usually preferred books, if not the History Channel, to other human beings, chattering happily with Georgia Griffin and her son, Nick.

Good God, the man was everywhere she looked.

Georgia spotted her hovering near the door and waved. “Grace, dear! Come join us!”

Her father glanced up and beamed from behind his glasses. “There’s my girl. Come on over, honey!”

He stood up to hug her, and she let the familiar scent of him wash through her—Old Spice, old books, and leather. Georgia stretched up to kiss her cheek, and Grace hugged her, too. No one made cake like Georgia, and no one except Georgia had ever bothered to ask if Grace needed a woman to talk to once in a while. Her son could be a pain in Grace’s ass—when he wasn’t being surprisingly, intensely sexy all of a sudden—but Georgia definitely wasn’t.

“Hey, Grace,” Nick said. He was slouched in his chair, a scowl already settled on his face, and he didn’t look happy to see her. She didn’t blame him. She wasn’t exactly thrilled to see him, either. She had splinters in both hands and sore shoulders from carrying junk down to the basement.

Then again, it was easier to deal with him when they were squared off like they always had been. It pushed the idea of kissing more than his cheek to the back of her imagination. Almost.

She nodded coolly. “Nick.”

“Sit down, sweetie.” Mason pulled out the chair beside him and patted it. “You don’t mind if we eat with Georgia and Nick, do you? Nick brought Georgia here for her birthday. Isn’t that nice?”

Nick scowled harder, and Grace bit back a grin. That was Nick, the reluctant hero, the Good Son through and through.

She’d known it even way back when his dad had taken off. Nick was just twelve. Left with his mom and his sisters, Katie and Meg, Nick had turned into the man of the house overnight. He took over mowing the lawn and putting out the trash; he shoveled the snow and killed spiders. He didn’t always like it, and it wasn’t as if he never complained, but he’d stepped right up, all business. Katie and Meg used to complain that Nick was stricter than their dad had ever been, and way more of a worrywart. They weren’t wrong, either.

She smiled as Mason handed her a menu and wound his arm around her shoulders. “I’m proud of you, Gracie. I think you did the right thing, coming home. We can keep an eye on you here, help you through this.”

Oh, perfect. She narrowed her eyes at Nick, but he just shrugged. What exactly had he told them before she arrived? She was almost thirty years old. She didn’t need anyone “keeping an eye” on her. That was the point here. She was going to make a success of her life this time, figure out what she wanted, what mattered to her. Just because she’d taken a few admittedly ill-advised shortcuts so far didn’t mean she was being reckless or stupid.

She’d just bet he’d embellished the whole fender-bender story and had her heaving whole pieces of furniture out the window like some freak.

“I agree, Grace,” Georgia offered. Beneath her cloud of faded brown hair, her expression was soft. “It’s bound to be a bit confusing, starting over this way. We’ll all be here to help.”

“I don’t think I need it, but thank you,” Grace said pointedly, and relished a glow of pleasure when Nick glowered and looked away. “I’m an adult, and I’m perfectly capable of making my own decisions. This is a second chance for me, guys! I’m actually very excited about it. Getting a divorce isn’t the end of the world.”

“Of course not,” Mason said hastily, and smiled up at the waitress who had appeared beside their table.

“What can I get everybody?” she said cheerfully, and Grace glanced at her menu.

“I’ll have a cheeseburger, medium rare, with fries and an iced tea,” she said, and sat back.

If only the girl could bring her a skewer to use on Nick, it would have been a perfect meal.