Читать книгу The Home Is Where The Heart Is Collection - Maisey Yates - Страница 25

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

IN HIS ENTIRE LIFE, Aidan had never been the recipient of so many charged glances.

It seemed as if every time he looked up from the cleared path ahead of them, he would meet the gaze of someone who would quickly look away again. Sometimes they appeared simply curious and a few were even friendly but others wore expressions of anxiousness and even outright anger.

When he made the deal to assume ownership of the land and property from Ben, he hadn’t even considered how that decision would ripple through the small town as if a meteorite had plummeted into Lake Haven.

This was their town. He was an outsider. No wonder they were concerned about what his plans might be. Eliza was right. He needed to do something with the property he owned. The town meeting should probably take place sooner, rather than later.

He wasn’t used to being accountable to anyone except his board of directors and stockholders. Even then, he owned the outright majority of stock in his own company and could usually make his own decisions about most things.

This was different. These people were invested in Haven Point and its surrounding communities. They had a stake in whatever he decided to do.

A tired-looking young woman with a bundled-up baby in her arms gave him a tentative smile as the man walking beside her picked up a boy who looked to be about three and hefted him onto his shoulders before he took the hand of a girl about Maddie’s age.

The father wore a John Deere cap and his ranch coat had a grease stain on the arm. The little boy’s coat was too big and his boots were bright yellow, probably passed down from his older sister.

As the fourth boy in a family of seven, Aidan had known his share of hand-me-downs. He hadn’t had a brand-new, never-been-worn coat until he bought his own as a teenager, with money from working at Pop’s café. His family hadn’t been poor but they hadn’t been wealthy, either, not with all those mouths to feed—and a father known for his openhanded generosity.

Aidan wasn’t Dermot’s son for nothing. His father had taught all of his children that each had an obligation to leave the world a little better than he—or she, in Charlotte’s case—had found it.

He had the ability to make a huge difference in Haven Point, for good or for ill. It was a humbling realization.

Ben Kilpatrick was a good friend and someone Aidan respected and liked, but his inaction here had hurt the community’s economy and morale.

If Aidan could help this little family somehow, along with all the others who were watching him so carefully, he had to try. It wasn’t right for him to do nothing with the resources he now owned. Aidan had taken over Ben’s properties and therefore also his responsibility. Like it or not.

“Oh, look.” Eliza burst into his mental discussion. “There’s the Serrano’s chili booth.”

This, at least, was something he could make a decision about. “Let’s eat first and then we can spend a little time shopping, if you want.”

“Sounds good.”

He settled her and Maddie near one of the propane heaters then headed over to grab some food for them. He stood in line for only a few moments before he reached the counter, just as Barbara arrived to help take orders.

“Well? What did you think of our little celebration?” she asked.

“Very festive. Maddie and Eliza had a great time.”

“She’s a cute one, that girl.”

“She is.” With more courage than most adults, he thought.

“Too bad the two of them can’t stick around town a little longer. Eliza seems like a woman who could use a friend or two.”

Whenever he thought about Eliza and Maddie moving on and out of his life, he felt a weird little tug in his chest.

Before he could answer, he was jostled from behind. He turned around to find one of the men who had given him a less-than-welcoming look earlier.

“Sorry,” the man said, with no trace of apology in his eyes. A strong whiff of alcohol wafted from him. “Didn’t notice you there.”

Tension rippled through Aidan. Thanks to his brothers, he had plenty of experience with barroom brawlers. Though they weren’t anywhere close to a barroom, he sensed the man was half drunk and just stupid enough to think he could piss Aidan off enough to take a swing at him.

“No worries,” he answered. He could certainly take care of himself—again, thanks to his brothers—but he didn’t want to cause trouble with Eliza and Maddie a few yards away.

“What do you want, Jimmy?” Barbara asked, with enough wary impatience in her voice to make Aidan quite sure this was the town rabble-rouser

“What the hell you think I want? Chili! I want chili and some of that fry bread. Otherwise I’d a gone to another booth, right? Put some hustle in it, would you? I’m starving and I’ve got to get back to work.”

“You’ll have to wait your turn. It will be a few minutes before we have a new batch of fry bread.”

“What about that one?” He pointed to the fluffy pieces of golden bread draining on a rack.

“Those are for Mr. Caine and his party.”

“The rich bastard can wait. Some of us who actually have to work for a living ought to have first dibs.”

Barbara glared at him. “Two more minutes. That’s all, then the new batch will be done.”

“I don’t want to wait. I want one of them that are already finished. Let him wait.”

“He was here first. Don’t be a jerk, Jimmy. You want me to tell your ma you were harassing Mr. Caine here?”

“Go ahead. She won’t care. She hates his guts, too, thinking he owns the whole town just because he has a fancy house and a big old airplane.”

Aidan managed to rein in his temper. “Don’t forget the ninja security force that follows me around specifically to deal with assholes.”

The guy looked around as if he didn’t know whether to believe him or not. “I’m just kidding.” Aidan forced a smile. He had figured out early in the game that confusing and disarming opponents was a far more effective strategy than outright warfare. “Here. Your lunch is on me. Barbara, give the working man here one of those pieces of fry bread over there. We only need two.”

Jimmy looked like he didn’t know how to respond as Barbara quickly complied and served up a bowl for him and then three more for Aidan, obviously anxious to defuse the tension.

“What was that about?” Eliza asked when he carried over their tray.

“Just meeting a few of the locals,” he answered.

“It’s a nice town, don’t you think? Everybody is so friendly.”

Not quite everybody. “Yes. And the food looks good, too.”

They finished eating and then walked through the booths for a little while. He bought several things he didn’t need or want, especially from booths whose proprietors were friendly to Eliza or Maddie.

A short distance from the gift show, the town council had set up a little Christmas village filled with animatronic elf figures hammering, sawing or nailing Christmas toys.

Aidan paid the dollar admission for each of them and then they wandered through. It was worth the dollar and more, the way Maddie’s eyes lit up with excitement at each new animatronic figure. They spent a good twenty minutes inside the little village but as they passed the last elf, he saw Maddie yawn for the second time in as many minutes.

“It’s getting late. We should probably head back to Snow Angel Cove.”

“No! We haven’t seen the petting zoo yet.”

“We might have to catch that another night, honey,” Eliza said gently.

Her patience and love for her daughter warmed him. He was coming to admire so many things about Ms. Eliza Hayward. Her resilience in the face of adversity, the wry sense of humor she tried to hide, but especially the loving care she took of her child.

“I don’t want to go back.” Maddie’s lower lip trembled enough to turn even the hardest heart into dough.

“I know.” Eliza smiled sympathetically. “That must be so disappointing for you.”

She was a genius of a mother, with a real knack for showing compassion for her daughter’s perspective without giving an inch.

“It is!” Maddie declared.

“It’s been a big day and I’m pretty tired. I’m a little cold, too. Some hot cocoa by the fire and the Christmas tree back at Snow Angel Cove sure sounds nice,” Aidan said. The second part, at least, was the truth.

“I am a little cold, too, I guess.” She yawned again, a huge, wide, ear-popping stretch of her mouth, and he had to smile. At this rate, she wasn’t going to make it home, forget about hot cocoa.

“Let’s go find our warm car.”

As he expected, Maddie fell asleep in her booster seat before they even hit the outskirts of Haven Point. One minute, she was chattering away about the parade and about seeing Santa Claus and the cute doll with the curly hair like hers she had seen at one of the booths—which he had sneaked back and purchased, though neither she nor her mother knew. In the middle of a sentence once again extolling her favorite boat in the parade, her eyelids drooped and her words trailed off.

He glanced in the rearview mirror at the sudden silence. Her head lolled to the side and her mouth was slightly open. She was completely adorable and he would have to possess a heart of tungsten carbide not to be crazy about her.

“Looks like she’s out,” he murmured.

Eliza shifted around to look behind the seat. He loved the way her eyes turned soft at the sight of her child.

“She runs hard all day, then usually collapses. She’s always been that way.”

“Her medical condition doesn’t seem to get in the way of her energy level.”

“She’s usually pretty good at pacing herself. I think it must be some natural-born instinct. She knows when something is too much for her to handle—a talent I sometimes wish I shared.”

She added the last slightly cryptic comment in a bit of an undertone and he had to wonder what she meant.

“I wonder where Sue and Jim ended up,” she said after a moment. “We never did run into them.”

“There was quite a crowd tonight. I guess we missed them somehow.”

“I’m glad we came,” she admitted. “Thank you for the invitation. Maddie enjoyed herself immensely.”

He shifted his gaze from the road briefly, just long enough to wish he could pull over and kiss her.

How had this woman and her child become so important to him after only a week in his life, especially when he had been gone for half of that?

“What about you? Did you enjoy yourself?” he asked.

“Yes.” When she finally answered, her voice was small, as if she didn’t want to admit it.

“You’re allowed to have fun, you know.”

“I have plenty of fun,” she said, bristling a little.

“How?” he asked, genuinely curious. He wanted to follow and tug and unravel all the tangled little pieces of her. “What brings you joy, besides Maddie?”

She made a small sound of amusement. “That’s like asking someone how he breathes without air. She’s everything to me.”

“But you’re a woman first, before you’re a mother. What does the non-maternal side of you enjoy?”

“You don’t ask the easy questions, do you?”

He shrugged and waited for her to think through her answer.

“I love to run, when the weather is good,” she finally said. “It’s tough to do that with Maddie. It was easier with a regular jogger when she was smaller. Last summer I bought an oversize one and we still go, though I don’t know how much longer she’ll fit.”

She was right, her world was inexorably tied to her daughter’s. He wasn’t really surprised. He had seen it in his siblings with their children. His three older brothers were all excellent fathers, patient and loving—which surprised the hell out of him, considering how they had all tormented each other growing up.

“What else?” he asked.

She was silent, gazing out through the windshield, her face in lovely profile. “On cold winter nights like this one, after Maddie’s asleep and the house is still, I love to read curled up on my sofa with a warm throw and a cup of tea. It’s a total indulgence. I love finding treasures at garage sales for next to nothing and repurposing them into something wonderful for our apartment. I love fresh-cut Christmas trees—who doesn’t, really?—and summer evenings that stretch out forever and crunching through dry leaves on a mountain trail that smells earthy and musty with autumn.”

He smiled, enchanted with her. “I do believe that is the most you’ve ever said about yourself since we met.”

She shifted, clearly uncomfortable. “Because I’m basically a boring person.”

He would firmly disagree. She was one of the most fascinating people he had ever met, made up of textures and layers and subtleties.

“What about you?” she asked. “What brings you joy? And since you wouldn’t let me say Maddie, I’m making the same rule for you. You can’t answer the obvious, your family.”

Since that was exactly how he intended to answer, he had to regroup. “Fair enough. If you want the truth, I’ve had a little more time to think about this very question these last few months, especially in those few weeks before the doctors knew the tumor was benign. The possibility of everything ending long before you expect it to tends to distill everything in your life to the essentials.”

She made a tiny sound, just an exhalation, really, and reached a hand out to squeeze his arm, a spontaneous comforting gesture that just about slayed him.

Too quickly, she returned her hand to her lap. He suspected if he could see her in the dark, she would be blushing.

He cleared his throat. “Okay. To answer your question. What brings me joy. I also love running—something we have in common. During the initial weeks after my recovery when I wanted absolute privacy, I leased a place on the coast between Carmel and Big Sur. After I worked up to it for a few weeks, I discovered I love to run on the beach there just as the sun is coming up behind the mountains.”

“That sounds lovely. What else?”

This was tough for him. He was an inherently private person. Not shy, exactly, just...self-contained. His brother Jamie would spill his life story to any girl he met in a bar but Aidan would guess that even Louise and his other close associates didn’t really know the heart of him.

“The horses, naturally. I guess that’s obvious. I bought an entire ranch and half of a town, apparently, so I can have a place for them. I don’t know what it is, but just being around them calms me. It takes me back to my childhood and summers I would spend with my grandparents.”

His mother had loved horses, too. She had always stabled a horse at one of the ranches outside of Hope’s Crossing and had gone riding in the mountains around town. Her mental vacation, she used to tell them. Of all the Caine children, he was really the only one who shared that love with her.

“I love a good basketball game, playing it or watching it.”

“Are you any good?”

“Not really. Doesn’t stop me from enjoying it. I’m the unathletic one of my brothers.”

“Somehow I doubt that,” she murmured.

Heat swirled between them, not all of it coming from the vehicle’s ventilation system.

“What else brings you joy?” she asked, rather quickly.

“Hmm. I love sleeping on good sheets and that first sip of coffee in the morning and fine-aged Scotch. I love going to the opera, but if you tell my brothers, I’ll deny it with all the breath left in my body.”

She laughed softly. “Secrets and more secrets. I’m not going to be able to open my mouth when your family is here.”

He smiled and realized he was quickly becoming crazy about her, too. He had a sudden disorienting, unsettling urge to reach for her hand, to drive through the quiet, peaceful dark with her fingers tucked in his.

Did she sense the connection between them? The fragile threads that seemed to curl and twine around them?

He pushed away the impulse, curled his own fingers against his thigh and forced himself to continue the conversational thread.

“That’s about it. Though—and this is probably going to sound arrogant as hell—I have to admit that I love what I have created with Caine Tech. It’s not really the material things that success has afforded me. I never sought that, though you won’t hear me complain about having them now. You were right earlier, I have been incredibly lucky in my life in some areas. Beyond all the perks of that success, I love knowing that a device or an app I created is making someone’s life easier—many people’s lives, more than I ever imagined. It’s an incredible rush. Indescribable, really. Sometimes I still can’t quite believe it’s real.”

He also couldn’t believe he had spilled something so intimate with her. “I don’t think I’ve articulated that to another person before.”

“Thank you for being willing to share it with me,” she murmured.

“You’re probably sorry you asked.”

She shook her head. “Not at all. How could I be? You’re a fascinating man, Aidan. More so now that I see a little of the man behind the Geek God legend.”

To his embarrassment, he could feel himself flush at the mortifying nickname from an in-depth article one of the newsmagazines had done on him. Brendan and Dylan still called him that when they wanted to rile him, usually when they were head to head on the basketball court.

Fortunately, he was saved from having to respond when they pulled up to the house. He glanced in the mirror and saw Maddie hadn’t stirred.

“Will I wake her up if I carry her in?”

“I doubt it. She can sleep through just about anything.”

He scooped up the little girl. She made a tiny sound, snuggling against him, and he felt an odd little catch in his throat.

All this time, he had told himself he didn’t want the chaos or stress of kids. Let other people with more patience, time and inclination deal with propagating the species, he had always figured.

Just went to show how stupid he could be about some things. What the hell was he thinking? This was just about the sweetest thing he could imagine, to have a little creature turn to you in full trust for warmth and security in a crazy, messed-up world.

Eliza opened the door to the cook’s quarters. The room smelled like her, like vanilla bean and citrus and summer flowers all mixed together. She had made the space their own over the past week, he was happy to see. Toys were piled in a big wicker basket next to the comfortable easy chair and a little Christmas tree stood on a table in the corner with presents underneath. She had piled throw pillows on the sofa and even hung a picture of a lovely cottage by the sea with a mother and daughter walking along the shore, hand in hand.

She was so good at making a space warm and inviting. He had walked through the guest rooms the other night and loved all the welcoming little touches she had created for his family.

“Where would you like me to put her?” he whispered.

She pointed to the bedroom and he followed her. Here, too, the space was theirs, with a pink comforter on one bed and another bright blue comforter splashed with purple-and-yellow flowers on the other.

“Give me a minute to get the bed ready,” she murmured.

She pulled back the comforter and then gestured to him. The girl didn’t stir as he carried her in and set her down. Eliza quickly pulled her boots and coat off in silence and handed them to Aidan, pointing to the other room.

He carried them into the little sitting room and waited while Eliza presumably changed Maddie into pajamas and tucked her in.

He should probably go but he found himself deeply reluctant for the evening to end.

When she walked out of the bedroom and closed the door behind her, she looked a little surprised to see him still there.

“I didn’t know where you keep these.” He held out the coat and boots in his hands.

“The mudroom. Sorry. I should have told you.”

“Oh. Right.” He felt stupid for not figuring it out.

“I can take them.”

She walked out into the kitchen and then to the mudroom, where she hung her coat and Maddie’s while he did the same with his own.

“Thank you again,” she said. “We both had a wonderful time.”

He didn’t want the evening to end. Not yet. “It’s still early. We were supposed to end the evening with hot cocoa by the fire, remember? You haven’t had anything until you’ve tried my pop’s famous real chocolate cocoa.”

“That was a bribe for Maddie’s sake and she’s sound asleep,” she pointed out.

“What would I have to offer to bribe you to stay?”

“Oh, I’m fairly impervious to bribes or blackmail,” she said, with rather adorable primness.

“Fine. I’ll just ask you, then. I’m not ready for the evening to end yet. Will you have some of my pop’s hot cocoa with me?”