Читать книгу Abby, Get Your Groom! - Victoria Pade - Страница 8
ОглавлениеDylan paid the bill for his haircut at Beauty By Design’s reception desk then leaned around the partition behind it to call back to Abby Crane. “The park on Thirty-Second and Bryant, tonight at six-thirty, at the picnic tables—I’ll find you,” he said, repeating the time and location of the meeting she’d agreed to.
From her station she nodded that so-full head of shiny hair. He’d noted that it was the color of the Belgian bittersweet chocolate that he’d gorged on for the past three months.
“You’d better be on the up-and-up,” muttered the receptionist.
“I am, don’t worry,” he assured her before leaving the salon.
It was only a little after four and Dylan knew he should go back to his office for a while. But as he got into his black Jaguar the thought of that just didn’t sit well.
He wasn’t far away—he was on the very outskirts of the city, and it wouldn’t take him more than fifteen minutes to be sitting behind his desk again.
But since returning from three months of working on the security in the European stores—which he’d done to escape Lara and let the situation here cool off—everything seemed to require so much extra effort. It was taking its toll on him.
Sure, it was effort he was willing to put in. Effort he knew that he owed his entire family. And he definitely wanted to make things right again because he couldn’t even put into words how much he hated the way things were between himself and the family now.
But it wasn’t easy keeping up that eager-to-please attitude nonstop, day in and day out. It wasn’t easy doing things like today’s mea-culpa lunch with Cade and Nati—one of many he’d done during the three weeks since he’d been back. And sometimes he just needed to crawl to the back of his cave like a bear and take a few minutes before he could do more of it.
Like right now.
So rather than heading for the offices of Camden Incorporated where he would be around any number of siblings and cousins who were never particularly happy with him these days, he drove to his lower downtown penthouse loft instead.
There, he parked in his spot in the underground garage, rode the private elevator to the top floor and sighed in relief as he passed through the elevator’s doors when they opened directly into his loft.
His cave wasn’t very cave-like, admittedly.
The living room, dining room and kitchen were all one expansive open space decorated in glass, leather and chrome with mere hints of serene sky blue accents. The lines were smooth and there was no clutter. It was quiet, clean, and everything was in its place.
Lara had hated it.
And maybe that, and the fact that her own condo was decorated in what he’d considered “clutter chic,” should have been an indicator that she thrived on chaos.
But like all the rest of the clues, he’d missed that one, too.
As nice as it was to be home, and as tempting as it was to just chill out until he needed to leave again to meet Abby, he realized that he still had to let his sister and grandmother know what was going on. It was part of being on his best behavior, after all.
He took his phone out of his pocket and walked to the wall of windows that allowed him a view of most of Denver. Lindie was first on the list, to tell her that he’d arranged for her and her bridesmaids to have the hair and makeup trial by the special occasions team of Beauty By Design.
Abby had said that she ordinarily took Wednesdays off, but after some persuasion—and a conference with China who was apparently the head of the makeup-artist portion of it all, and the manicurist in charge of the nail division—they’d all agreed to do the trial next Wednesday.
And, yes, due to a cancellation of a wedding on the same Saturday that Lindie’s was scheduled, Abby Crane and the Beauty By Design group would be available for the race to the altar that Lindie had opted for, if Lindie and her bridesmaids were happy with the results of the test run.
Dylan concluded by relaying Abby’s email address so his sister could send pictures and information about what she had in mind.
Then Dylan called his grandmother to tell her the same things, as well as that he was meeting with Abby tonight to open the door on her past.
Both Lindie and GiGi appreciated what he’d accomplished but there was still an edge of reserve, a chilliness, from both of them—the same thing he met from the rest of the family at the office every day. So he was glad when the calls were complete and he could do what he’d come home to do—relax and let down his guard.
But the way things were still weighed on him.
Everybody had been pretty ticked off by the time he’d ended things with Lara, when he’d left for Europe. And even now, after admitting he’d been wrong and apologizing until he was blue in the face, feelings were still hurt, tempers were still tweaked and things were still stilted.
He just had to keep chipping away at it and eventually maybe the whole thing would get to be history.
The way he and Lara were.
“Crazy-ass woman,” he grumbled, reminding himself of his appointment on Monday to take the Jag into the shop to have the dents she’d made in it repaired.
If his siblings and cousins hadn’t been so mad at him when he’d left for Europe one of them probably would have had it done while he was gone. But as it was, his car had been left sitting in the parking garage for three months, the way he’d left it, and now he had to get it taken care of.
Luckily he’d had the windshield replaced before he’d left so he could drive it now. But there was plenty of bodywork that needed to be done on the expensive sports car.
Just one more thing that was all messed up...
Now, in retrospect, he could see how it had gotten that way. Subtly. Insidiously. Quietly. He could see where he hadn’t listened to what his family was saying and should have. He could see what he’d been blinded to by his feelings for Lara. He could see where he’d crossed the line himself on her behalf. And he sure as hell wished that he’d never given in to that urge in him to be her damn white knight.
But regrets and merely seeing things in retrospect weren’t enough. There was a price to pay for what had happened.
He knew that. And he was willing to pay that price. But, unfortunately, payment was coming late. In the end, he’d had to escape to Europe for a while just to get out of Lara’s sights himself—and that time lapse with his family had widened the gulf and made things all the more awkward to put back together again now.
He just had to keep at it, regardless of how rough it might be or how much he wished he could turn back the clock and stop it all from ever happening.
On the up side, he told himself, it had only taken Lara three months to get engaged to some other poor sucker. When he’d heard about the engagement he’d figured the coast was clear to come home, finally address things with his family and hopefully get them all back on track. It would have been worse if he’d been gone longer.
He hadn’t seen or heard from Lara since he’d come home. Thank God! He had no desire to ever set eyes on her again as long as he lived.
And exhausting as it was to put back together everything she’d broken, at least he’d had a couple of wins today. Hopefully he’d gotten a few steps closer to being forgiven by arranging for one of the most highly reputed stylists around to work on his sister’s wedding with very short notice—a coup if Lindie liked Abby Crane’s work.
Plus he’d set the wheels into motion to relay to Abby all his grandmother had told him so she could know where she’d come from. And he was on the path to find a way to compensate her somehow for what she’d suffered because of the actions of his family.
Assuming that Abby Crane had suffered.
But he did assume that, especially coming from his own current situation.
He’d felt lousy the past several months being on the outs with his family and a continent away from them. He’d been at loose ends the whole time. Adrift. He’d felt so damn cut off and alone in the world. It had been a rotten way to feel and he still didn’t like the sense that he was being kept at arm’s length, that he wasn’t embraced by them all the way he was used to.
So what must it have been like for Abby Crane to grow up in foster care, moved from home to home, with no family of her own ever?
He couldn’t imagine that it had been good for her.
And yet, she wasn’t what he’d expected of someone who had been shuffled through the system.
He’d expected her to be hard-edged. He wouldn’t have been surprised by spiked hair or tight leather or all-black clothes. By tattoos and piercings. By an I-dare-you-to-cross-me attitude.
But that wasn’t Abby Crane.
Instead she was a fresh-faced beauty who looked as if she could have grown up in the country, on a farm.
A spectacular beauty, certainly without any obvious too-hard edges.
No, she was all soft curly hair—wild, thick hair that he’d kind of wanted to get his hands into. She was all smooth peaches-and-cream skin that didn’t show signs of ever having had so much as a blemish.
She was all fine, delicate bones in a nose that not even the most expensive plastic surgeon could have done as well. She had a slightly pointed, defined chin and high cheekbones dusted naturally pink and pretty.
And there definitely wasn’t anything hard about her soft-looking lips or those big brown doe eyes that somehow sparkled even from that deep, dark color.
Why he hadn’t expected someone quite that attractive to come out of the life she’d had he didn’t know, but he hadn’t. And he could honestly say that even if she had been on a rocky road in the past, it wasn’t reflected in the way she looked now.
About the only possible indication of a difficult youth had been in the way she carried herself.
She was relatively small—not more than five feet four inches—and trim under that black smock. He’d seen that when she finished his haircut and took it off, revealing a body with tight curves in all the right places. But she stood straight and tall, shoulders back, head high, as if intent on making herself seem bigger than she was and strong enough to take on the world.
And there was nothing effusive about her—that probably came from the way she’d grown up. She was friendly enough but not overly so. Self-contained. And while she seemed warm toward that China person, he certainly hadn’t felt an over-abundance of warmth directed at him.
She was slightly outspoken, too, he recalled, remembering her unabashed demand to know what he was up to. And she was no good at hiding the suspicion she’d felt. But that attempt to sound intimidating had just been adorable. Thinking about it made him smile the way he would have at the time if he hadn’t suppressed it.
So if foster care had left scars they weren’t readily visible. But it was something to watch out for anyway, he told himself. Like Lara’s true nature hiding just under the surface, Abby could have plenty of baggage that wasn’t easy to see but that could end up being hell to deal with.
Purely on a business level, of course. It wasn’t as if he was considering anything else. Anything personal. There wasn’t going to be anything personal between him and any woman for a long time. Not when he had so much damage control still to do with his family.
And even if he was ready for another relationship, even if all his fences with his family were mended, he’d be cautious of someone who came from Abby’s kind of background. Stable, steady, grounded—that’s what he’d be looking for when he started looking for someone again.
Someone who had been raised moving around from home to home? He didn’t see how that could breed stable or steady or grounded.
Maybe that wild hair of Abby Crane’s was the kind of clue that the clutter of Lara’s condo should have been.
And this time around he was reading it, noting it, and taking it very seriously.
Not that there was anything to what he was about to do with Abby Crane that was at all relationship-driven to make that matter.
There wasn’t.
His only job was to reveal to her who she was, where she’d come from, and then see how he could—in some way—make things up to her.
At the same time he was making things up to his family.
And, with any luck, maybe he could take care of everything at once and then really breathe a sigh of relief.
But no matter how long either chore took, it was all going to be far behind him before he even considered getting involved with another woman.
Fresh-faced spectacular beauty or not.
* * *
The park on Bryant Street was only a block from Abby’s apartment. She wanted to walk there but it was after six o’clock when she got home so she had to hurry in order to change clothes first.
Not that she really needed to change clothes—there was nothing wrong with what she’d been wearing all day. And she convinced herself that it wasn’t for the sake of Dylan Camden. She just felt like putting on something fresh.
So she replaced her work jeans with a better pair that were low-slung and fitted her rear end just the way she liked. On top she opted for a slimmer-cut black T-shirt that hugged her not overly well-endowed chest. She wore that over a white-and-black polka dot tank top that rose about two inches higher than the T-shirt’s square-cut neckline.
She drew a large hair pick through her curls and re-scrunched them, and refreshed her eye makeup, blush and lip gloss. Although she probably shouldn’t have used the time, she searched out and put on a pair of hoop earrings before rushing back to her closet for shoes.
Despite telling herself that she should wear sturdy shoes in case this guy was some kind of creep she might need to kick before making a run for it, she still went with a pair of ballet flats that wouldn’t be able to do any damage.
But they were comfortable and she’d been on her feet all day. Plus they had cute little white-and-black polka dot bows that coordinated with her tank top.
It was six-twenty-five by then, so she grabbed her keys, put them in the pocket of her jeans and headed for the park.
Dylan was already there—Abby spotted him when she reached the corner across the street from the park. He was sitting at one of the picnic tables. And looking as good as he had at the shop that afternoon.
She’d been hoping that maybe he wouldn’t. That the flattering lighting of the salon had just really worked for him. But that wasn’t the case. The guy was sooo hot!
But that wasn’t going to get to her. He was still a stranger and her guard was up on that account alone. But there were two other things that factored in, too—she’d just ended the only long-term relationship she’d ever been in, and what had come out of it had shaken her. That wasn’t anything she wanted to try again anytime soon.
And if she hadn’t been good enough for Mark The Systems Analyst, she certainly wouldn’t be able to live up to the standards of a Camden. Someone like that would surely believe he was legions out of her league.
So, Adonis or not, Dylan Camden wasn’t going to get to her.
He saw her coming just then and perked up as if he was happier to see her than she thought he should be. Or maybe he’d just thought she wouldn’t show and was glad she had. But she was still leery.
“Hi,” she said as she drew near the table.
“Hey there,” he responded.
He was sitting on the table itself, his big loafered feet on the bench below, long jeans-encased legs V’d out wide, leaning on forearms atop thick thighs—nicely developed forearms exposed below the rolled-up-to-his-elbows sleeves of a crisp, clean, pinstriped shirt.
He’d changed clothes, too. And he’d shaved so his face was clear of stubble, as if he wanted to be ready for kissing.
Dumb thought. Surely he hadn’t shaved so he’d be ready for kissing her.
“Shall we walk or sit here?” he asked when she joined him.
“Let’s just sit,” she said, preferring to stay near to the busy street and her apartment.
“Oh, right, you work on your feet all day—taking a walk is probably not high on the list of things you want to do,” he reasoned.
Sure, let him think that.
He stood then, and Abby was struck once more by how tall he was and what a great body he had—lean and toned, muscular, and wow, those shoulders and the way they tapered down to that narrow waist were impressive!
He motioned for her to sit on the now-free bench but she rounded the table and sat on the other side instead.
Something about that distance she put between them made him smile as he slung a long leg over the seat he’d just offered her and took it himself. And when he smiled small lines fanned out from the corners of his astonishingly blue eyes and drew the most appealing little parentheses around that supple mouth.
She tried not to notice, let alone appreciate the sight, but it was almost impossible not to appreciate someone who looked as good as he did.
“How’s the hair?” she asked, letting herself look at him even more closely for a moment to assess the work she’d done on him earlier.
“Best haircut I’ve ever had,” he said without equivocation. “I washed it in the shower, ran a towel over it when I got out and barely had to touch it from there.”
She fought the mental picture of him in the shower—and out of it. Naked. Big and strong and tight. Hard muscles glistening wet. Reaching those impressive arms up to rake a towel over that dark, thick hair and making those massive shoulders stretch while the sinews of his back flexed all the way down to those great glutes she’d caught a peek of when he’d left her station today...
Whew! That was not something she should be thinking about, either! And she wasn’t quite sure where all those details had come from.
She chased the image out of her mind, forced herself to sound cool, detached and objective—which was not how she was feeling—and said, “It isn’t too short...your hair?” she added, reminding herself that that was all she was supposed to be considering.
“Yeah, shorter than I wanted it but you were right to do it. It looks better than it ever has.”
She didn’t know about ever but she did know he looked fantastic there in the late-day, early-autumn sunshine. She restrained herself to say nothing more than an aloof, “Good, I’m glad you like it.”
“My sister is thrilled that you can fit her and her bridesmaids in for the test run Wednesday,” he said then. “And that if that goes well, that you’re free to do the wedding the Saturday after that. Her hopes are high and I told her I didn’t think you’d disappoint.”
“We’ll do our best,” Abby assured, effectively ending the catching-up part of things.
Which, she thought, left them with the reason he’d wanted this meeting. So she waited for him to get to it.
He must have realized it was time for that because he reached into one of his front pockets and produced a key that he held out to her.
She didn’t take it. Instead she narrowed her eyes at him and said, “If that’s the key to your place and this is all some kind of come-on—”
“It isn’t,” he said quickly, setting the key on the picnic table closer to her than to him.
But rather than explaining what the key was for, he said, “Is there anything you know about where you came from? Your family or history or anything?”
“I know the same things you said this afternoon—I was left sleeping on a chair in the hospital waiting room with a blanket and a note saying my name was Abby. Someone along the line added Crane as my last name because there were pictures of cranes on the blanket that I guess I wouldn’t let go of.”
“I’d wondered where that came from.”
“I know that local newspapers did articles and news stations did broadcast stories asking anyone who might be able to identify me to come forward,” she went on, “and no one did. I know that there wasn’t any information other than my first name so I’ve never had a real birth date. The pediatrician who checked me out at the hospital decided I was barely two so they picked a day the month before I was found and that’s what I use when I have to give my date of birth. And that’s it. That’s all I know.”
“I hadn’t even thought about a birth date,” Dylan muttered more to himself than to her.
“Apparently neither did whoever left me.”
“And you don’t remember anything?” he asked.
“I was, as far as anyone could tell, barely two years old. Do you remember anything from when you were two?” Abby countered.
He shook his head. “No, I don’t think so.”
“When I think about it, sometimes I get a vague sort-of sense of being somewhere with too many bright lights and being scared. But it’s really just like a kind of faint dream. I’ve always figured that might be from waking up in the hospital with no one around that I recognized, but I’m not even sure if it’s really a memory or if it’s just how I imagine it was.”
Dylan’s handsome face had sobered considerably as she’d talked and his well-shaped eyebrows were drawn together in a troubled expression before he said, “It was your father who left you at the hospital.”
“And you know this how? Because he was connected in some way to your father?”
“Yes, my family did play a part in you being abandoned...”
He sounded loath to admit that.
Then he said, “Your father is—was—a man named Gus Glassman. Ring any bells?”
“None,” she answered honestly. Why had he corrected himself to say her father was Gus Glassman instead of is? Had he changed his name, or was he...no, she shouldn’t get ahead of herself. She needed to pay attention to what Dylan was saying.
“Well, that key came from him.” Dylan nodded at it. “Gus gave it to a prison chaplain just before he died—”
“Gus Glassman—my father—is dead?”
“I’m afraid so. I’m sorry,” Dylan said with more sympathy, pausing a moment as if out of respect. Or maybe to let it sink in—which was what Abby was trying to let it do.
But it wasn’t easy. These were just words to her. There were no instant emotions the way she’d thought there would be.
“According to the chaplain,” Dylan went on, “he was the first person Gus ever told about abandoning you. He asked the chaplain to find you, to find the lockbox that this key opens and to give the contents to you.”
“So where’s the chaplain?” Abby asked.
“He came looking for Camdens because there’s a connection. And talking to the Camdens means going to GiGi, first and foremost... GiGi is what we call my grandmother. She’s the head of the family.”
“A prison chaplain just showed up on the doorstep of the foremost Camden with this story and a key to a lockbox? Why? What does your family have to do with it?”
“We actually just found that out ourselves. Recently, we learned that twenty-eight years back your father worked for Camden Superstores. He was on the payroll as store security, but he did more than that...” Dylan said quietly, as if it was something else he didn’t want to admit.
“What more did he do?” Abby asked, feeling removed from what he was telling her, still just trying to absorb it.
“It looks as if, when there was something brewing somewhere that could turn into a headache for some part of the business, my great-grandfather—H.J. Camden—had a few chosen men he sent in to...well, to do whatever it took to contain things before they got out of hand.”
Dylan didn’t seem proud of that because he was again talking quietly. “I guess you could say they were his...enforcers.” That word came out more under his breath than out loud. “We have a lot of production factories. A supervisor in one of those factories was trying to unionize.”
“And you didn’t want it,” Abby guessed.
“I was five, going on six—what I wanted was probably cookies and candy and to play outside. But no, H.J.—along with my grandfather and my dad and my uncle, who all ran the Superstores together—didn’t want unions in the factories.” Dylan’s eyebrows arched toward his hairline in reluctance to say what he was going to say. “They wanted the labor leaders discouraged—”
“And Gus Glassman—my father—was the discourager?”
“Yeah. But that discouragement got pretty heated. It turned into an all-out fight between Gus and the supervisor, and in the course of that fight the supervisor fell back, hit his head and died.”
“So my father was a thug? He was your family’s bully or henchman or something, and he killed someone?” The fantasy of learning about her family had never included that and Abby was beginning to feel slightly knocked for a loop by the reality.
“I don’t know that your father was a thug or a bully or a henchman,” he said as if those terms were too harsh. “But he was involved in a bad situation, following orders that he probably shouldn’t have been given. We—my grandmother, my siblings, my cousins and I—read about it in my great-grandfather’s journal. We checked to see if the supervisor had left family or someone we should compensate—he hadn’t. But when it came to Gus Glassman—”
“He was nothing but the guy who did your family’s dirty work?”
It wasn’t as if Abby felt any kind of affection for the man Dylan Camden kept calling her father, but she had too much experience being in positions where she’d been looked at as a nothing herself and he’d touched a nerve.
“No. What I was going to say was that when it came to Gus, we could contact him directly. So that was what we did—GiGi wrote to him, asking if there was anything we could do for him and if he’d left anyone behind who he might like us to reach out to.”
“And he didn’t say me,” Abby said quietly.
“He didn’t answer the letter at all. So GiGi found his attorney, who said that Gus had been a widower with no kids so we shouldn’t worry about it. I guess not even the attorney knew about you.”
Because she’d been a nothing even to her own father?
That thought didn’t boost her spirits.
More and more feelings were coming at her but they were all jumbled and indecipherable as Dylan continued. “Like I said, telling the chaplain was the first time he’d so much as spoken of you since the supervisor’s death. He told the chaplain that that was because he wanted to spare you having to grow up with the disgrace of a dad who had taken another person’s life, who was convicted of manslaughter and sent to prison. He didn’t want that following you around. The chaplain said your father was ashamed of what he’d done, that he’d never forgiven himself and that he didn’t want to pass that shame on to you. He thought that you’d be better off just left somewhere—somewhere safe, because he knew you’d be taken care of in a hospital—without a last name or any information that could link you back to him.”
So he had cared about her? He had thought about her welfare in whatever skewed fashion?
More feelings came, bringing with them more confusion.
It must have shown on her face because out of nowhere Dylan said, “I know it’s kind of hard to reconcile things that don’t seem to go together. I loved my great-grandfather, my grandfather, my dad and my uncle. They were unfailingly good to me. But I can’t say I’m proud of all the things they did outside of the family. It’s something we’re all having to come to grips with. For us, we never forget that those same men who didn’t always behave honorably were still people we loved, who loved us, so we have to separate things. And it seems like—in spite of what your dad went to jail for doing—he really did care about you. Maybe that’s something to hang on to.”
“Maybe...” she parroted, struggling with it all. Struggling, too, with the fact that this was so completely different than any of the romanticized thoughts she’d always entertained about where and who she’d come from, about why she’d been left.
But here she was, with Dylan Camden at the moment and she wasn’t sure where this was supposed to go.
So she asked. “I guess, then, you’ll tell me where to find the lockbox and that’s it?”
“Well, if you’ll let me, I’d like to help you piece together what we can of your background,” Dylan said. “Figure out more about where you came from and the kind of man Gus Glassman was—because I have hope that he might have been a loving dad to you, despite what he did. Maybe we can figure out who your mom was, what happened to her and any family she might have had. It just seems like you should know as much as you can from here.”
Should she? Abby wondered.
She wasn’t sure.
In some ways she wanted to deny that this could actually be her background and step away from it as if it wasn’t really hers.
It had been difficult enough growing up a foster kid. She’d been vigilant about being a good girl in order to live down preconceived notions about what that might mean.
And now to learn that she really was what some people had assumed—if not bad herself, then at least the child of a criminal? The daughter of someone who had killed someone else? Someone who had died in prison?
A part of her did not want to embrace it.
But it didn’t seem as though that was possible.
“How would we do those things you said?” she asked, buying herself more time to think while her head was swimming.
Dylan nodded toward the key on the table again. “Gus told the chaplain that the lockbox that that key opens is hidden in the store—meaning one of our Superstores. We’re trying to figure out which one he might have worked out of and locate the box. Hopefully that will give us more to go on. Plus, I run the security department for the Camden Superstores, and part of my job is to do background checks on people we hire. I have full access to our employee files, even the ones from before my time. If Gus was married to your mother I can find record of it and get your mother’s maiden name—that would give us a starting point to looking into that side of your family.”
“What about the chaplain? Where did he go in all of this?” Abby asked.
“He’s from the prison in Canon City so he went back there. When GiGi heard what he had to say, she swore to him that we would take care of this.”
“By hiring me to fix your sister’s hair for her wedding?” Abby asked because she was trying to fit the pieces together.
“No. This and the wedding are not connected. Your reputation for your work preceded you. Or, at least, the work of the special occasions team from Beauty By Design preceded you. Then it just happened that the same name GiGi finally put to Gus Glassman’s daughter was one of the names included on that team.”
“So it’s only a coincidence?”
“It honestly is. My haircut today was my chance to meet you, but even if you had turned down the wedding, you and I would still be here right now and I’d still be asking you to let me help you find out about your family. The fact that you agreed to do what you’re doing for Lindie—on such short notice—is a whole separate thing.” Under his breath, he muttered, “One that I’m hoping will get me some much-needed brownie points.”
She didn’t know what that meant so she didn’t comment.
Then he said, “So, what do you think? I’m sorry I haven’t brought you a happier story, but will you let me help you, anyway?”
Abby merely sat there looking at him, trying hard to absorb all he’d told her, trying to deal with it, considering what he was asking.
Did she want to know more if it was as sordid as what she’d just learned? Because this was not the fairy tale she’d always envisioned. And what if what went with it was worse?
But there was that key on the table between them and the knowledge she already had. And after a lifetime of not knowing anything, she knew she couldn’t just ignore the chance to find out whatever more she could, good or bad.
“I’ll be right by your side every step of the way,” Dylan said then, as if he was reading her mind.
And Abby found that assurance that she wouldn’t be alone in the process of uncovering her history somehow comforting.
Which was all the more confusing because she prided herself on standing on her own two feet to face whatever she had to face. The most support she’d ever had had been from China and this wasn’t China. This was a stranger she’d just met today.
But here was this guy offering to help her and stick by her, and it made the whole delving-into-her-history thing more palatable.
It had been a really strange day...
“Okay, I guess,” she heard herself say without any conviction whatsoever.
“Great!” he decreed. “I already have people looking for the lockbox, so that—and my digging through old marriage records—is where we’ll start.”
Abby nodded, feeling slightly shell-shocked.
“And in the meantime, Lindie’s wedding is pulling a lot of attention from newshounds and I also have to keep a handle on that. Is there any chance that you and I can take an after-hours look through your salon so I can get a feel for how I can make sure the test run can be kept private?”
He’d moved on. It took Abby a moment to realize that and switch gears, too.
But she did.
“We don’t do the special occasions work at the salon,” she informed him. “The owner—Sheila—has two salons and there’s a third location midway between the two where we only do the special occasions work. It makes it so our brides and their wedding parties—or whoever else we’re working with for a special event—can spread out and get a little pampered without regular clients around.”
“Then can you give me a tour of that place so I can check it out? The sooner the better.”
He was really expecting a lot of her in her befuddled state. But she tried to think about work and scheduling and finally came up with an answer. “I guess I could meet you there tomorrow night—I know it’s Saturday night but I’m booked from early tomorrow morning until closing at the shop so that would be the soonest... I know it’s probably a date night for you with your girlfriend or wife or whatever, but—”
“There’s no girlfriend or wife or date night or whatever. Would meeting with me be messing with any of that for you?”
“Me?” she said as if that was unthinkable. “No. There’s none of that for me right now, either.”
“Then we can do it tomorrow night?”
“I’ll text you the address and directions. I can probably be there by seven.”
“Seven it is, then,” he agreed. “Now, how about that burger place over there? Can I buy you dinner?” He pointed his sculpted chin in the direction of a small redbrick building that housed two restaurants just in front of the old Victorian house where Abby rented a studio apartment.
Clearly he had no idea how overwhelmed she was if he thought there was any way she could be good company right now. She declined the invitation with the polite excuse that she’d promised to eat with China tonight.
“I’ll see you tomorrow night, then,” Dylan said without seeming to take any offense from the rejection.
They both stood and as he did, he picked up the key from the picnic table. “I think you should hang on to this.”
This time Abby took it from him, her fingers brushing his as she did and making her oddly aware of some kind of heat passing between them.
“Are you okay?” he asked then, as if he’d just noticed that she was a little dazed.
“I’m fine. There’s just been a lot that came at me all of a sudden...”
“Why don’t you at least let me drive you home.”
Abby took a deep breath of the evening air to clear her mind and shook her head. “I’m only a block away. The walk will do me good.”
“Are you sure?” he asked skeptically.
“I am,” she said, wondering if she should thank him or something.
But she didn’t feel altogether grateful for what she’d learned tonight, so instead she just said goodbye and headed back the way she’d come.
It was only as she walked home that she recalled feeling somehow strengthened by the thought of picking through her past with him by her side.
Why would that have happened? she asked herself when it struck her as weird all over again.
It certainly couldn’t have anything to do with the fact that he was fabulous looking—even though she suddenly found herself happy to think that she’d be seeing him again tomorrow night.
Maybe it was just because he was a big, strong guy who gave the impression that he could handle himself and anything thrown at him.
Except that whatever got thrown would be thrown at her...and so far, he’d been the one doing all the throwing.
But still, that must be it, she decided.
Because after all, what else could it be?
Certainly not that she was attracted to him.
They were worlds apart and she knew better than to try crossing over from her world to anyone else’s.
