Chapter 19
Chapter Nineteen
B y the time they’d stopped in front of a restaurant with a blinking neon sign that said Vito’s, Katie had gotten used to holding Frank’s hand. Well, getting used to it was probably the wrong phrase. More like. she didn’t want to let go. Which was worse—totally worse.
There was no way tonight would end well if she forgot the truth about Frank Hartigan. He went through women like men who walked out of the desert went through gallons of water—one after the other, none more special than the last.
The only reason he had even called her house after Marinos was that, once she’d stopped floating in orgasmic bliss and landed back into reality, she’d gotten the hell out of that supply closet and hadn’t looked back. That must have been a shock for Frank, since every other woman in Waterbury couldn’t get enough of him. So he’d called. He’d shown up at poker night. Then, he’d gone all knight-not-in-a-DeLorean at the movie theater. It would be so easy just to go with it, to let herself believe it was because he wanted more than another supply-closet quickie.
But she refused to lie to herself. He wasn’t actually interested in her, Katherine Allison Madigan. He probably just saw not being the one being pursued as a novel experience. Once that changed, she’d be just another one of many to him—just like she was just one of the many Madigan kids who were all but indistinguishable from each other, according to almost everyone in Waterbury.
She knew all of that. Yet, here she was, holding his hand, with butterflies doing The Electric Slide in her stomach, about to walk into a diner and share a chocolate shake with him like it was the 1950s instead of 1982.
Katie, you are in so much trouble.
She was going to be the one playing Skidmarks On My Heart on repeat if she didn’t get her head right. The smartest thing she could do right now was tell Frank she’d changed her mind about the shake and that she just wanted to go home.
So that’s what she’d do.
Any second now.
As soon as her pulse stopped going a million miles a minute.
“I know the place is pretty dingy,” Frank said, obviously misreading her reason for hesitating outside of the diner, “but I promise this place has the best shakes in Harbor City.”
Her head and her heart (fine, her clit) still duking it out, she tried to come up with something to say. That’s when a waitress in her early thirties, with bright red hair sprayed high with enough AquaNet she had to be God’s next-door neighbor, came rushing out of the diner’s glass double doors. The harried look on her face fit right in with the splash of mustard on her pink shirt, the pencil in her hair that looked like it had been chewed on by a pack of beavers, and the smudged mascara drawing attention to the frantic look in her eyes. Whoever she was, her day had gone very, very wrong.
She jerked to a stop in front of them. “Please, for the love of chili cheese dogs, tell me you’re Katie.”
While anyone who’d grown up around Harbor City knew the logical thing was to lie about her name and quickly walk in the opposite direction, something about the desperation in the woman’s voice stopped Katie from doing just that. “I am.”
The woman breathed a sigh of relief so big that it seemed to come all the way from her toes. “When Jolene walked out right before the lunch rush, and Destiny was a no-show, and then Clive said he’d dropped his last basket of chicken tenders after his already-approved vacation got revoked, I was ready to drown my tears in extra salty fries because I can’t quit this job and if the diner can’t serve food, Hansen said he’d close it for the night and I need tonight’s tips to pay my rent, and Brandi promised you’d be here, but I was beginning to give up hope,” she said in all one breath. She shoved a half apron at Katie. “Here, put this on. You are a lifesaver. I swear to God, someday I’m going to own this place and run it the right way—either that or I’m going to murder my uncle for running it into the ground. Right now, either option sounds good.” The woman turned her attention to Frank. “So you’re the boyfriend, huh? How are you on a grill?”
He shot a wide-eyed, what-the-fuck look at Katie. Okay, now she should explain that this was a case of mistaken identity, and that while she was a Katie, she was not the Katie this woman was looking for. Then she and Frank could finish whatever this night was, and she could go home to her tiny apartment and pretend she’d never think of him again.
Her stomach clenched at the thought, because the hard truth was, she didn’t want to—and she wasn’t sure she could, even if she did. The fact was, she’d fallen for Frank Hartigan when she’d looked out the front window of her apartment and saw him fixing her brake light. Everything since that moment had just been her trying to avoid the inevitability of becoming just one more broken heart left in Frank’s wake.
So what was the big deal in postponing that moment for the dinner shift?
“Can you make a cheeseburger without killing people?” the waitress asked, a ribbon of hope threaded through each word.
“You bet he can,” Katie said, already deciding to pick up more Rocky Road on the way home. “He’s an ace in the kitchen.”
“Thank God,” the waitress said, her shoulders inching down from her earlobes. “I know we’ve got some more hairnets in the back somewhere.”
She hurried back inside, grumbling under her breath about how the worst people were always put in charge.
Studiously avoiding looking at the brick wall of a man standing next to her, Katie started to tie the black half-apron around her waist. It would have worked, too, if he hadn’t moved to stand in front of her. Unable to stop herself from taking him in, her gaze went from the tips of his sneakers, up his acid-washed jeans (the thigh seams of which were doing the Lord’s work), up the Springsteen T-shirt that stretched across his broad shoulders, to the suspicious look on his rugged face. Her pulse sped up, and her fingers stopped cooperating.
He crossed his arms, the move making his biceps look even bigger. “What are you doing?”
“Helping someone out. You can cook, can’t you?” she asked, forcing enough sweet cheerfulness in her voice to send anyone hearing her into diabetic shock as she fumbled with the strings. “I thought all firefighters could cook.”
He brushed her hands away and finished the double bow. “Well, yeah, of course, but?—”
“She obviously needs the help,” Katie said, breaking in before she did something awful like lean in closer to get a whiff of his cologne, or kiss him, or ask him if he liked her or if he like liked her. “Are you saying we should just leave her to drown or commit homicide?”
“No.” He held onto the ends of her apron strings, but he was looking right at her mouth. “But this is crazy.”
Tourists and Harbor City residents flowed around them like they were the big boulder in the middle of the river, but Katie barely noticed. All she could concentrate on was the chicken pox scar on Frank’s cheek, the squareness of his jaw, and the way he looked at her as if she wasn’t just one of them but the one. Yeah, it was her imagination, but at that moment, it sure looked real.
Her chest was tight with want on so many levels. She took a deep breath and clawed her way back from the edge of disaster the only way she knew how. Her smart mouth.
“Maybe,” she said, taking a step back and purposefully not watching her apron strings slip from his fingers, “the best night of my life involves you in a hair net.”
One side of his mouth curled up in a sly smile. “You have strange turn-ons.”
Yeah, like crushing on guys named Frank Hartigan.
She was saved from having to come up with a response that wasn’t the full embarrassing truth by the waitress, who stuck her head out of the door and hollered, “Get your toasted buns in here, you two. The dinner rush is going to be here any minute.”
Knowing to take an escape when it was offered, Katie started toward the door. She made it two whole steps before Frank fell in beside her, the back of his hand brushing against hers. It seemed like the most natural thing in the world for her to intertwine her fingers with his as they walked through the door and into absolute chaos.