Trouble With Valentine's Day

Eleven

Riding alone in Rob's HUMMER. was worse. The vehicle was huge, and yet he seemed to take up so much space—and not physically, although he was a big guy. It was the deep texture of his voice filling the shadows as he answered her questions about his vehicle. It was the smell of his skin and the starch in his shirt mixed with the scent of leather seats. The lights from the dash lit up the dark interior with so many digital displays that she couldn't even guess what half of them were for. According to Rob, the HUMMER had heated seats, a Bose stereo, and a navigation system. If that wasn't enough, it also had OnStar. span

"Do you know how to use that thing?" she asked and pointed to the blue navigation screen.

"Sure." He took one hand from the wheel, pushed a few buttons, and the city display of Gospel popped up. As if a person could get lost in Gospel.

"Do you need it to find your way home?"

He chuckled and glanced across the vehicle at her, one side of his face washed in blue light. "No, but it comes in handy when I travel to places I've never been before. I used it a lot this past February when I went skiing with my buddies." He turned his gaze back to the road. "I've been meaning to ask you something."

"What?"

"Do you really have a tattoo on your butt?"

Her fingers on the hors d'oeuvre plate in her lap tightened. "You need to forget that night ever happened."

His quiet laughter filled the space between them. "Right."

"I know you probably won't believe this, and it's a waste of breath, but that was the one and only time I've ever propositioned a man. I always wanted to pick up a boy toy in a bar, but I'm too inhibited. I'm sexually repressed."

"You weren't inhibited or repressed that night."

"I was drunk."

He made a scoffing sound that made Kate want to hit him. "You weren't that drunk. You had a nice buzz going, but you knew exactly what you were doing."

True, but there was no way she was going to admit it. "I just wanted to live out a fantasy for one night. One night, that's it. Is that so horrible?" The collar of her peacoat brushed her chin as she looked out the passenger's window at the dark silhouette of pine trees. "All I wanted was to pick up a man and use him bad. Twist him into a sexual pretzel, then kick him out the door when I was through and never see him again. But look what happened." She'd been turned down flat, then given a moral lecture a few weeks later. "Why are women considered promiscuous when we take charge of our own sexuality? Why is society threatened by strong women who go after what they want? Men proposition women in bars all the time, and they're just being men when they do it."

She turned her gaze to the front. The head beams lit up the road, and she paused a moment to think about the injustice of it all. "Why is it different for women? We have control over our own fertility, but we still must conform to some archaic moral code. Even in the twenty-first century, women can't be as sexually aggressive as men. If we are, we're sluts. Why is it so wrong for women to admit that we think about sex like men do?"

Rant over, Kate sighed and leaned her head back against the seat. Silence filled the vehicle for several long moments, and she began to think he hadn't been listening.

He had. "You planned to twist me into a sexual pretzel?"

"Yeah," she said through a sigh. "But we both know how it turned out. You ran away as fast as you could."

"I didn't run."

"Practically."

He reached for the navigation system again, pushed a few buttons, fiddled with the stereo, then shut it off. He glanced over at her, and his brows were drawn together as if he were hard at work thinking about something important. He returned his attention to the road, and when he spoke, his voice was a little lower than before. "How were you going to twist me into a sexual pretzel?"

"Forget it."

"Will you tell me if I beg?"

"No."

"I'll pay you."

"No. You already think I'm a slut."

He glanced at her then back at the road. "I don't think you're a slut."

"Yes, you do. You grabbed my hand and shoved it on your crotch. That pretty much says to me that you think I'm a slut."

The lights from the dash accented the outline of his mustache and the scowl turning down the corners of his mouth. "I shouldn't have grabbed your hand."

"No," she said. "You shouldn't have."

"I was provoked."

Maybe.

Again he was silent for a few seconds. "Do you really believe women can think like men when it comes to sex?"

"Yes," she answered, although she'd never had the opportunity to try. The guy across the HUMMER had killed her only chance.

"You think women can just have a good time and that's enough?"

"Yes." At least in theory. "Don't you?"

"I used to, but I'm not so sure anymore."

They entered town and drove past the big red Texaco sign. "Why not?" she asked, although she figured she knew the answer.

"Sex can make women psycho," he said.

"That's ridiculous." Yep, that was pretty much the answer she'd thought he'd give. "Sex doesn't make a person psycho. They're psychotic before the sex."

"Yeah, but you can't tell by looking. A woman can look perfectly normal until she shows up at your house with crazy eyes and a.22 Beretta."

"Psycho men can look perfectly normal, too," she said, thinking of how normal Randy Meyers had looked the day he'd walked into her office.

"Yeah, but a man is less likely to freak after a one-nighter when he doesn't get hearts and flowers and a marriage proposal." They drove past the courthouse and Hansen's Emporium. "But you give a woman some good sex, and she's more likely to go postal."

Which was patently absurd. "Are you saying that if the sex is bad, a woman won't go all postal?"

He glanced at her as if she'd asked the obvious. "Why would anyone stalk a lousy lay?" He turned onto her grandfather's street. "Do you like to fly-fish?"

"What?" How had the conversation turned from psycho women to fishing?

"Fly-fishing. Do you like it?"

"Ah… I don't know. I've never been fly-fishing."

He pulled the HUMMER into Stanley's driveway and parked behind Kate's Honda. "I'll take you sometime. It'll be good for your nerves."

"My nerves are fine," she said and grabbed the door handle. "Thanks for the ride."

He reached across and grasped her arm. "Hang on." When she looked at him, he added, "I'll get your door."

"I can get it myself."

"I know you can," he said and was halfway out of the HUMMER. The grill lights were as big and obnoxious as the rest of the vehicle, and for a few brief moments they lit him up like he was on stage. He opened her door and took the hors d'oeuvre plate from her. His hand once again grasped her arm as he helped her out, which was ridiculous, because she was perfectly capable of getting out of a car by herself.

"We should start over." His palm slid to her elbow then dropped to his side.

But, she did have to admit, there was a part of her that liked the old-fashioned male attention. "Start over? You mean forget the night we met?"

"That's not going to happen." He followed close behind as she moved up the dark sidewalk, the soles of his loafers drowned out by the sound of her boot heels. "Maybe we can be friends." Wow, that's a first, she thought as she stopped beneath the porch light and took the plate from him. She usually heard those words right before she was dumped, and Rob wasn't even her boyfriend. "Have you ever had a friend who was a girl?" she asked and hunched her shoulders as the cold night air seeped down the front of her coat.

"No. Have you ever had a guy for a friend?"

"No." Porch light made the white of his shirt almost fluorescent, while the edges of night outlined him in black. He towered over her and managed to make her, a woman of five eleven with size ten feet, feel small. "Do you honestly think we can be friends?"

"I have my doubts, but if my mother and your grandfather are going to be friends, we're probably going to be seeing more of each other."

She was freezing her behind off, while the cold didn't seem to affect him. "Probably." Maybe the cold didn't affect him because he ate so much. She'd never seen anyone eat as much as Rob had tonight. The man should be fat, but he wasn't. The night he'd kissed her she'd felt his chest muscles and hard, flat stomach. He had to do a couple hundred sit-ups a day.

"It would be nice if you weren't always pissed off at me," he said.

She reached into her pocket with one hand in search of her keys. "I'm not always pissed off at you." Her pocket was empty and she remembered that no one in Gospel locked the doors to their cars or houses. "But you keep bringing up that night in Sun Valley. Obviously it doesn't hold the same pleasant memories for me that it seems to hold for you."

He rocked back on his heels and looked down at her. "How about I don't mention that night, and you don't walk around mad."

She opened the door behind her. She had her doubts whether he could control himself. "We can both try."

"Should we shake on it?"

She held onto the plate with one hand and stuck out the other. His palm pressed into hers, calloused and so warm that her wrist tingled. She tried to pull her hand from his, but his grasp tightened.

"I guess this means I never get to hear about the sexual pretzel."

She tried not to smile. "No."

"Damn." His thumb brushed across the heel of her hand, back and forth, scattering the hot tingles in her wrist.

"Good night." This time when she pulled her hand away, he let her go.

"Good night, Kate."

She moved into the house and shut the door behind her. She felt a little flushed as she set the tray on the counter and hung up her coat. A frown pulled her brows even as the hot tingles settled in her stomach.

She didn't really believe she and Rob could be anything that even closely resembled friends. For some reason that defied logic but probably had a lot to do with anthropology and absolutely nothing to do with common sense, her body reacted to his. It was natural. In her DNA. Programed into females since prehistoric times, and Rob Sutter happened to be the biggest, baddest Neanderthal in the cave.

Kate set the hors d'oeuvre plate on the counter, then hung her coat by the back door. She didn't want to get a club to the head. She'd been there and done that with other men who couldn't make a commitment to one woman. There was no doubt in her mind that if she was foolish enough to get involved with Rob, he'd leave her battered like a baby seal.

She removed the plastic wrap from the tray and threw it in the garbage beneath the sink. Not only was he a bad bet, he believed sex could "make women psycho," which was ridiculous on so many different levels. One of which was the fact that men were much more likely to kill their coworkers, sniper cars on freeways, and wipe out their entire families. The only thing she did agree with Rob on was that you couldn't tell a psycho by looking.

Reaching into a cabinet, she pulled out a few plastic containers with snap-on lids. Almost a year later, she could still recall the absolute average-Joe looks of Randy Meyers the day he'd walked into her office at Intel Inc. She remembered the family portrait he'd brought in with him. The light blue muted background, contrasting with matching red sweaters. Doreen sat frozen in time with a pleasant smile on her lips. Her children on each side of her—Brandon with his short blonde crew cut and Emily with her blonde ponytail and missing front tooth. Randy stood behind his family, his hands on his wife's shoulders while a normal smile curved his mouth.

On the surface, the perfect family. But if Kate had bothered digging, she would have found out that normalness was a carefully constructed facade. She would have discovered that Randy had exerted a systematic control over every facet in the lives of his family.

He hadn't physically abused his wife, but he'd ruled her life just the same. He hadn't isolated her from her friends and family, but he'd alienated her from them. He'd made sure he was invited and included in every aspect of Doreen's life. He hadn't allowed her to work outside the home, but he had allowed her to attend college classes. The catch was that he took them with her. He'd been his daughter's soccer coach. His son's Cub Scout leader. He was always there. Always directing. Always watching.

When Doreen left, he couldn't accept the fact that he was no longer the center of their lives. He'd driven for two days straight to find them. Then he'd perpetrated his last act of control. He'd made sure they were all together. Under the same headstone in a Tennessee graveyard.

No matter how many times Kate told herself that she wasn't responsible for what an insane freak had done to his family, she could not separate herself from her part in it. She felt the weight of their deaths in her soul, and she could not completely wash the blood from her hands.

She didn't know if she would ever get over what had happened in that small house in Tennessee, but she was going to try. She was going to get on with her life. She was going to help her grandfather get on with his, too.

She placed the olives in a container and snapped on the lid. For her grandfather's sake, she would try to be friends with Rob. If he really did have feelings for Grace, Kate didn't want to cause friction. Because despite what her grandfather thought, she was a "people person."

Damn it.

Kate went into work early the next morning and shifted through bread recipes her grandmother had kept in a recipe box at the M&S. Kate would have loved to bake focaccia bread, but the store didn't carry fresh cake yeast. She settled on cracked wheat bread and got busy. When her grandfather arrived to open the store at six-thirty, she was just taking the loaves out of the big ovens.

"That smells wonderful, Katie," He hung his coat and knit cap next to the back door. He rubbed a hand over his bald head.

"You got home late last night," she said as she sliced off a hunk for him and spread it with butter.

"Grace read me a few of her poems and then was kind enough to give me some pointers." He took the bread from her and bit into it. She didn't know if it was the chill clinging to his cheeks, but they were definitely pink.

She moved to a cabinet and reached for bread bags on the top shelf. "You're writing poetry now?"

"Poetry feeds the soul of mankind."

She dropped on her heels and slowly turned toward him. The man in front of her looked like Stanley Caldwell. He stood there eating his bread, getting butter on his mustache, and he had the same white pants and shirt her grandfather always wore. Same apron he tied in place before he left the house every morning. But he didn't sound like her grandfather. "Did Grace say that?"

He nodded and took his bread out into the store. A few moments later, she heard him starting the coffee machines. He has it bad, she thought as she shoved the bread in clear bags and closed them with twist ties. He was moving on. Starting to live again. She was glad. Really.

She got out the sticker gun and marked each loaf. Yeah, she was happy for him, but at the same time, a tiny part of her wondered when she was going to get her life together enough to move on. He was seventy-one. If he could do it, she certainly could too.

She dragged out a card table and set it at the corner of the bread aisle. She draped it with a green-and-white-striped cloth and set her ten loaves of bread on it.

Eden Hansen, owner of Hansen's Emporium, was the first to bite.

"A dollar seventy-five is a lot to pay for a loaf of bread," she complained. "Melba used to sell her loaves for a dollar."

"That was several years ago," Kate explained, purposely keeping her gaze locked with Eden's so she wouldn't get distracted by her pile of lavender hair. "With inflation, the cost of utilities, and my labor, you're getting a bargain, Mrs. Hansen."

She pursed her purple lips. "How do I know it tastes as good as Melba's?"

"I used my grandmother's recipe," she said, determined to be pleasant even if it killed her.

"I don't know."

"Wait one minute." Kate held up a finger, then went into the back room and carved off a slice from the loaf she'd cut into earlier. She quartered it, then brought it out on a small paper plate for Eden. "Try it."

Eden chewed. "Will you take a dollar fifty?"

"Sure, but only if I get to come into your store and haggle over the price of Tshirts and Cow Pie candy."

Eden tipped back her head and laughed, or what might have been a laugh if it hadn't turned into smoker's hack. See, she told herself and smiled. I'm a people person.

"Everyone says you're stiff as a dead dog in January," she said when she quit coughing. "But I think you're all right. I'll take your bread for a dollar seventy-five, and I'll tell my sister to get down here too." Stiff as a dead dog in January? That wasn't very flattering, but Kate was too happy over her first sale to let it bother her. After Eden left, she went into the back room and cut up the extra loaf of bread into bite-sized chunks. She set them on the card table, and by the end of the day, she'd sold every loaf of bread and had requests for more.

Later that night she found some wholesalers who sold the prefect ingredients for focaccia. She tracked them down on the Internet, and by the time she was through, she'd also ordered pickled asparagus and smoked cheddar.

She searched the house for her grandfather to tell him about her orders, and she found him sitting at the kitchen table working on a poem. His hand held a pencil stub over a sheet of notebook paper, and his gaze was fixed somewhere near the ceiling.

"What rhymes with change?" he asked. "Strange?" He looked at her, then wrote on his paper. "Thank you. That's the perfect word."

It certainly was the perfect word to describe his behavior lately. "I ordered some things for the store," she told him and expected him to raise a fuss.

"That's nice." He was so absorbed in his poem that he didn't care.

The next morning, she made fifteen loaves of wheat bread and sold ten of them by noon. Also at noon, a delivery call came in from Sutter Sports. As always, her grandfather handed her the grocery bag he'd already filled. Kate hadn't spoken to Rob since the night they'd decided to be friends, or at least decided to give it a try.

"Why can't he walk over here and get it himself? We're just across the dang parking lot."

"Katie, we don't complain about business."

"We should if the business is just across the parking lot," she grumbled as she left the M&S.