Chapter 12 #3
Reno took a small, sharp breath. "Be there as your brother or be there as something else?" he asked reluctantly.
"You know which one I'm asking."
Reno squeezed his eyes tightly shut and reached up to pinch the bridge of his nose.
With a glance at Boone’s feet sticking out from under the pickup, he said low and urgent, "I'm not asking you to file paperwork or review the case. I'm asking you to sit at the table next to my lawyer and help protect Madi when she’s questioned.”
Not that. Not family. How was he supposed to say no to protecting his own flesh-and-blood niece? But how could he possibly say yes? That part of his life, that part of himself, was over. Gone.
Hank added, “Lorraine's lawyer is going to come at Madison hard about running away. He’ll try to make her seem wild and irresponsible and incapable of making a smart choice about which parent she wants to live with. My lawyer’s good at knowing family law and negotiating amicable arrangements out of court.
But he’s no great litigator. Going toe-to-toe with a barracuda like Lorraine’s lawyer is not his strength.
I need someone up front, with the power to speak up, who can stop Lorraine’s lawyer from badgering Madison or making her out to be a rotten, angry teen who’s just mad that her mom is being a responsible parent. "
Reno didn’t say anything. He couldn’t say no. But he couldn’t say yes, either.
"I know what I'm asking, Reno. And I’m sorry. But will you do it."
Reno looked around the shop. Looked across the street at Grace’s shop.
The front room still had a line of customers snaking away from the counter.
He thought about Lily and how bad he would feel if someone put her on the witness stand and assassinated her character when she was fourteen, all for the sake of a narcissistic, substance abusing parent getting custody of a child she couldn’t properly care for and didn’t particularly want other than to keep up appearances with her circle of vapid friends.
"Yes,” Reno said heavily. “I’ll do it.”
Hank looked at him with naked relief and gratitude. "Thank you, Reno."
Hank pushed away from the fender and took a step forward to grip Reno’s shoulder tightly for several seconds. Then he let go and walked outside to his truck without looking back. It struck Reno all at once that Hank must not want his little brother to see how emotional he was feeling.
Reno sat on the crate, wrestling with his own emotions. He’d done the right thing. The only thing he could do. He had to help his brother and his niece. The most fundamental rule the Steele family lived by was that they took care of their own.
But he hadn’t stood in front of a judge in three years.
He hadn’t held a person’s entire future in the palm of his hand and molded it into what he thought it should be.
The last time he’d played God like that, it had ended disastrously for more than just the defendant in the case.
Innocent people, including children, had been devastated by his actions.
He’d vowed then never to play God with other people’s lives again.
But Hank had just put him right back in that position. And this time it was his own family that would be irrevocably changed for better or for very, very much worse.
Breathing hard, he dragged himself to his feet, winced at the pain that sliced through his leg, and went to work reinstalling the Mustang’s water pump while he watched Grace’s store.
He walked across the street to the bakery at two forty-five PM.
The CLOSED sign was already in the window and the front door locked.
Business had been especially slow after lunch today, and Grace must have decided to close early.
He went around to the back and texted her that he was at the kitchen door.
He told her to check her phone’s security app to verify before she unlocked the door and let him in.
He watched on his own phone as she looked at him on hers, and then the door in front of him opened.
She smiled at him. "Hi. You're here early."
"I finished what I was doing at Boone's and saw you close up. Thought I'd come by."
"Business was slow, and Mary said the espresso machine was making a noise. Figured I’d have a go at seeing if I can find what’s wrong with it."
"I can look at it if you’d like. I’m no espresso machine repair guru, but I’m decent with engines and mechanical things.”
"I'd appreciate that."
Once he unscrewed the stainless steel side panel, he noise was easy to hear: a combination rattling and metal-grinding-on-metal sound.
It was even easier to locate where it was coming from.
He pointed his phone flash light to the back section of the interior and spotted the coffee bean that had somehow jumped out of the bean hoper and gotten wedge in among the gears that connected the motor to the grinding mechanism.
Using the tip of a kitchen knife, he pried the bean free.
He tried running the machine again, and it sounded like any other espresso machine he’d ever heard.
He replaced the side panel and washed his hands in the kitchen’s prep sink.
He wandered over to where Grace was cutting star-shaped sugar cookies from dough she’d rolled out on the counter.
"Can you use a second pair of hands?" he asked.
"Sure. I’ll roll and cut. You lay them on the cookie sheets, three across, four down."
The marble was cool as he lifted each star, the dough coming up in soft pieces. He matched her rhythm, and the only sound for a while was the rolling pin thudding softly on dough and the hum of the big refrigerator in the corner.
"You're awful quiet today, Reno," Grace commented without looking up from rapidly cutting stars out of the next batch of dough.
He lifted stars out of the layer of dough and carefully laid them on the next cookie sheet. "Hank came by Boone's shop this morning."
"How's he doing?"
"He asked me to go to the Bozeman custody hearing for Madison."
She set down the cookie cutter and looked at him. "You're going, aren’t you?"
"I am. I’ll do whatever I can to help him get his daughter."
She nodded and dumped out the next bowl of cookie dough.
“Why did you make the cookie dough in a half-dozen small bowls? Why not mix it all at once in your big stand mixer?” he asked curiously.
“It’s my great grandmother’s recipe and I’ve never figured out how to make it taste the same and have the same lightness as when I make one batch at a time according to her recipe.
I worked on it for over a year and finally gave up.
It only works with the ingredients mixed in the exact amounts she wrote down. ”
She rolled out the last bowl of dough, working it gently into a flat disk. "Reno, is there something I should know about you?"
He stopped in the act of putting the last cookie down on the counter in front of him.
She didn’t look at him as she started cutting stars.
He thought, for a beat, about lying. He thought, for the next beat, about telling her everything. He thought, for the beat after that, about how she’d worded the question—something I should know—without specifying how he should interpret that. She’d given him room, the way she gave everybody room.
"There is."
"And?"
"And I’m going to tell you. Just not today."
"All right."
He stared at her, shocked. "You’re not going to ask when I’m telling you, or if it’s something terrible, or if you shouldn’t be letting me be under the same roof as you and your daughter?"
"No. I asked what I needed to know for now."
She kept working.
He went back to picking up stars and spacing them out evenly on the cookie sheet.
He helped her cover the sheets of cookies with plastic wrap and carry them over to the refrigerator. He washed his hands again at the sink while she arranged the trays in the frig to her liking.
He dried his hands and stood by the marble counter, watching her as she walked back toward him. The light from one of the small, high windows in the back wall backlit her, turning her golden hair into a nimbus of pale fire around her shadowed face.
Hand-to-heart truth, she looked just like an angel who’d come down from Heaven to fetch him home.
Never mind that she wore a plain, pale blue blouse with her sleeves rolled up and flour dusting the fine hairs on her forearms. She was so beautiful in that moment his breath caught in the back of his throat and he could only stare at her in awe.
She stopped in front of him and stared back at him.
He had no words. But fortunately, she didn’t seem to need any from him.
The moment grew around them, the air pulsing like a living thing against his skin, coiling around him like a rope slowly but surely pulling him toward her and her toward him.
She was the first one to give in to it and take a slow, deliberate step forward.
She laid her right hand flat on his chest and then reached up with her left hand and laid it lightly on the side of his jaw.
He held his breath, not even daring to blink lest this magical being made of golden light disappear in that instant. He waited in wonder as she rose up on her toes because he was a head taller than she was, and she slowly, very slowly, came closer to him.
Their gazes remained locked, then her mouth touched his and their eyes closed in unison.
Her lips were warm and soft and entirely real as she kissed him. He stood perfectly still and let her control the moment in its entirety. He kissed her back lightly, tasting flour on her lips along with hints of sugar and lemon.
Her mouth moved experimentally against his, and he moved his mouth to meet hers, not increasing the pressure but also not pulling away. His entire being focused down to the sensation of her impossibly soft, yet resilient mouth, moving lightly and gently against his.
And in those endless, sweet seconds, the whole architecture of his life, who he thought he was, and why he was here on Earth, rearranged itself in his chest. He was changed all the way down to the very roots of his being.
And when she stepped back, he was a new person. Completely, and irrevocably changed.
"I’ve been wanting to do that," she said softly, "since the day you fixed my dock."
It took him a few more seconds to find his voice. "Grace," he half-whispered.
"I know."
"I . . ." Wow. He was still having a hard time stringing words and thoughts together.
"You don't have to say anything, Reno. I wanted to do it and I did it. That's the whole transaction."
"The whole transaction?" he echoed, feeling as if his thoughts were flowing about as fast as molasses in a deep freeze.
"You don’t owe me anything in return. Thank you for letting me do that.”
He blinked down at her, still searching for words to express what had just happened to him when she kissed him.
She said easily, “I have to make the biscuit dough for tomorrow so it can rest overnight. I need to go get the sourdough starter out of the walk-in cooler.” She added lightly, “I’ll be back in two minutes. You can think about whatever you need to think about while I do that."
She went into the cooler.
He stood there in the middle of the bakery with the heat of her hand still burning a spot on his chest and her faint palm print in flour on his shirt, and his thoughts ran in a fast bright line.
The stricken face of the woman who haunted his nightmares most nights.
Walking away from everyone and everything that meant anything to him.
His brothers coaxing him to come join the rodeo and have at least some contact with his family.
Dillon telling him to walk through the door when it appeared one day.
Lily at the breakfast table asking him to teach her mommy how to dance.
Boone telling him he would know when the parenting switch flipped.
The picture on Grace’s bedroom dresser of her husband and her on a beach laughing and in love.
The same woman kissing him beside a marble counter.
He breathed out very slowly and very carefully.
She came out of the cooler carrying a big jar of gray-white goop
"You think about everything you needed to?" she asked him.
"Most of it."
"Good. Help me make the biscuits, and then take me home."
"Yes, Ma'am."
They mixed, rolled, and cut the biscuits side by side. He didn’t say anything about the kiss because she’d told him the transaction was complete. He understood now, in a way he hadn’t understood before, that this woman was nowhere near as fragile as everyone else believed she was.
She kissed him because she wanted to. She stepped back from him because she meant it. And she’d told him to think about it.
The next move, when it came, was going to have to be his.