Two
There were a great many things I was good at.
Picking out screws at the hardware store the following Sunday night was not one of them.
On the phone with Chris, I told him for the millionth time why I should have stayed home with Dylan and he should have been the one looking in bins marked with fractions. They all looked the same to me.
“Don’t be such a whiny child,” he snapped at me.
“C’mon, boy, use that Y chromosome for something,” Chris teased me.
“I hate you,” I assured him. “What are you doing, anyway?”
“I’m watching TV and making your dinner.”
I chuckled. “Very domestic.”
“Just hurry up. If I don’t get the damn crib put together today, my life is gonna be hell.”
“Fine, I’m coming.”
“Don’t forget the half gallon of paint and the staple gun and staples.”
“I won’t.”
“And that blue tape you use when you’re painting.”
“You mean painter’s tape?”
“Screw you, smartass,” he grumbled before he hung up. I was smiling as I turned and stepped into someone.
“Sorry.”
“Jory.”
My head snapped up, and there I was—without fanfare, not even a trumpet—face-to-face with Sam Kage. He reached instantly to steady me, but I was faster and stepped back before he could put even a finger on me.
His hands went instantly deep into the pockets of his jeans.
“Hey.” I stared up into his eyes.
He took a quick breath. “How are you?”
“Good. You?”
“Good.” He nodded. The way he was looking at me, uncertain and curious at the same time was…funny. “What’s it been? Three years?”
“Somewhere around there,” I agreed with him.
We were silent several seconds before he squinted at me. “You know, this might sound weird, but you don’t seem that surprised to see me.”
I smiled at him. “No. I saw you, like, a year ago at a street fair downtown.”
“You did?”
I nodded. “Yeah, and right after that I did some work for your brother’s firm, and he caught me up on the events in your life.” I spoke fast. “Not that I asked—he was just making conversation.”
“Was he?”
“Yeah.”
“Huh. So then you know I’ve been back for a while?”
“Yeah.”
“But you never…”
I shrugged. “No, but you didn’t either.”
His eyes narrowed. “No…I didn’t.”
“Okay, so, I’ll see ya.” I smiled again, stepping around him.
Hand on my arm, he stopped me, shifting back into my path. “What is it you do now?”
“Oh,” I said, not minding the safe topic. “Well, I don’t know if you remember my partner, Dylan Greer, but—”
“I remember her,” he assured me.
“Yeah, well, she and I have our own business now. It’s called Harvest Design, and we do logos, branding, company concept, identity, that sort of stuff.”
“Sounds good. You like it?”
“I do. I mean, it’s not, like, a million-dollar business or anything, but we do okay.”
“Dane set you up?”
I was irritated instantly. He thought maybe I had borrowed the money from my brother to start my business because I was such a charity case?
“Actually, no,” I said curtly, realizing he was still holding on to my arm.
“Dyl and I took out a business loan together and had it paid off within three months of being open.”
“That’s great.”
Like he cared. I rolled my shoulder, and his hand dropped away.
“Sorry,” he said under his breath.
I held up the tape and the plastic bag full of screws. “Well, I gotta go. I’m in the middle of a project, but it was—”
“What’re you doing?”
“I’m helping Chris build a crib.”
“Chris?”
“Dylan’s husband.”
“Oh.” He nodded. “Is this their first child?”
“Yeah.” I smiled. “We’re finishing up the nursery today, so I gotta get there.”
“Sure.”
“I’ll see ya.” I sighed before turning and jogging away.
I didn’t care if it looked like I was running.
I wanted to put distance between us. I had closed and locked the door on Sam Kage and the mess my life had been when he was in it a long time ago.
I wanted it to stay that way. Obviously, he did as well.
If he had wanted it any other way, the first time I saw him—after the time I had seen him in the hospital—would not have been as he strolled, laughing, with friends and a woman I didn’t know.
His life, I was sure, was exactly as he wanted it.
“Jory.”
I turned, and there was a stranger.
“Hi.” He smiled sheepishly. “Brandon Rossi. Do you remember me?”
I shook my head. “No, sorry.”
He cleared his throat. “I was at Bigelow and Stein when you and your partner did the logo for their new community outreach program a few months ago.”
“Oh, that’s right. They ended up with the big scary clown on their logo. Bigelow and Stein, the home of the killer clowns.”
“You don’t like clowns, huh?”
“They’re creepy as hell.”
His smile made his eyes twinkle behind the wire-rimmed glasses. “Well, I, for one, didn’t understand what you guys were saying about the tree until I saw it in print.”
I nodded.
“C’mon.” He chuckled, reaching out, giving me a pat on the shoulder. “I just didn’t get it. I couldn’t see it in my head like you could. I’m not an artist.”
“Neither am I,” I said adamantly, laughing at him. “But like I said, clowns creep me out.”
He scowled at me, but the smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. “Don’t make fun of me. I’m not at all creative. That’s why I became a lawyer.”
“Oh, I think the interpretation of the law is plenty creative.”
“Snark.” He nodded. “Super.”
He had warm eyes and a great smile that I didn’t remember seeing before. “So what brings you to the hardware store on a Sunday night?”
He cleared his throat. “This confession will hopefully not scare you.”
“Uh-oh. What?”
“I was across the street, and I thought I saw you run in here. You’re driving a really ugly green Jeep and—”
“The Jeep is not ugly,” I defended Chris’s pride and joy. “And it’s not green. It’s gunmetal. You just can’t tell at night.”
He snorted. “It’s green. It’s, like, greenish brown and—”
“You know nothing about color.”
“I do too.”
“Oh yeah? What’s your favorite color?”
“Black.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Yeah, but not black as in the absence of all other color, but black as in lots of paint colors mixed up together to make black.”
“I see.” I said it like he was nuts.
“You’re not freaked out that I saw you and followed you in here?”
I shrugged. “You just wanted to say hi and give me a little crap about my ride. That’s all very understandable and kinda nice.”
He nodded, and I watched his eyes slide over me. “You think maybe you’d like to grab some dinner with me?”
“I can’t tonight,” I said quickly. “I’m putting a crib together, but I will take a rain check if that’d be okay?”
“Yeah, that’s okay.” He smiled, pushing the glasses up on his nose. “Is dinner tomorrow all right, ’cause if it’s not, we can—”
“Tomorrow night’s great. Why don’t you call me at work and we’ll figure out where we wanna go.”
His smile was huge. “That’s perfect.”
I nodded. “Okay, so I’ll expect to hear from ya.”
“You will. Thanks.”
I squinted at him. “Thanks for what?”
He shrugged. “Saying yes.”
I grinned at him, and I heard his breath catch. It was very flattering, his reaction to me.
“I’ll see ya soon.”
“Yes, you will,” he said from behind me as I walked away.
As I was pulling out of the parking lot, I saw Sam getting into an SUV with blacked-out windows that was even bigger than his old one, close to the size of the Ford Excursion Dylan’s father drove. I stopped and called over to him. When he turned, I smiled wide. I just couldn’t resist.
“Is it big enough, Detective?” I teased him.
The smile I got in return was the same crooked one I remembered. “No.”
I nodded as I flipped on my radio and Fontella Bass came screaming out. “Did your mom tell you about her job?” I yelled over the music at him.
“Her what?”
I waved at him before I pulled out into the street and drove away.
Hours later, I told Dylan all about seeing Sam and my date the following night with Brandon Rossi. She pretended to go into labor, which scared the hell out of both her husband and me. It was just plain evil. I was still harping on her about it as we walked into work together the next morning.
“I could do it again.” She waggled her finger at me. “So don’t push me, J.”
“Do what again?” Sadie Jackson asked me as she strolled into our office with two coffee cups.
I loved our perky little receptionist from Kenosha, Wisconsin. She was funny and smart and had a scathing sense of humor that matched Dylan’s perfectly.
“She pretended to go into labor again,” I told her.
“Why?” She looked at Dylan. “Did the bakery only have one chocolate chip muffin?”
“Oh, for crissakes,” she snapped at us. “Fake your water breaking one time and you’re branded for life.”
We both laughed at her.
“Oh no,” Sadie moaned suddenly, walking over to me. “What did you do to your beautiful hair?” she asked me as her fingers slid through it.
“I got—” I stopped and looked at Dylan. “What color is it again? Baby’s Breath Blue?”
“Yeah.”
I looked back at Sadie. “I got Baby’s Breath Blue in it. I had to do the ceiling of the nursery. Chris screwed up the corners.”
“I see.” She smiled at me, and there was something different about the way she did it, almost loving. Dylan’s sigh brought me back to her.
“What?” I asked her.
“Nothing.” She smiled before she sighed deeply again, looking at me. They were both being so weird.
“What?”
“I said nothing,” Dylan snapped at me. “Let’s look at the proofs we did for Trotter.”
We spent most of the morning going over current accounts, and then our work ethic dissolved into office-chair races by ten. We took a cab to meet a new client for lunch, and on the way back Brandon called me. I told him I had been getting worried that he was blowing me off.
“No, Jory,” he murmured into the phone. “That will never happen.”
“You are very good for my ego, Mr. Rossi.”
“I’m going to be good for you, period,” he said flatly. “How about Brava at seven?”
“That sounds great. I’ll meet ya there.”
“Okay.” Long exhale. “See ya there.”
When I hung up, Dylan was scowling at me. “What?”
“Who is this guy?”
“I think we did the logo work for his old law firm. I got the idea that he moved.”
“From where? You didn’t say where he was in the first place.”
“He was at Bigelow and Stein.”