How to Knit a Heart Back Home (16 page)

Tomorrow, then.

She’d talk to Owen tomorrow and see if he had any more papers, then she’d get him to take the boxes to Abigail, and that would be that. They weren’t theirs. They had to give them back. It broke her heart.

Toots held up her hand and said, “In light of that wonderful news, I have some of my own. I have an announcement. Daddy already knows, but you should all know that I’ve started a new venture. I’m opening another chapter in my life.”

Lucy exchanged worried glances with her brothers.

“Going into business sticking people with tiny needles in my bar?” Jonas guessed.

“Don’t be silly. That’s just for fun, not for profit. No, I’m going into pleasure parties.”

Oh, no. Lucy felt herself pale. Jonas, apparently, didn’t see Silas frantically drawing his finger across his neck, and asked the fateful question of doom. “What’s a pleasure party?”

“It’s a sex-toy party, darling.”

Jonas blanched. Lucy put her head down on the table and rocked it back and forth.

Bart nodded proudly. “She’s designated me the research and development department.”

There was a long, awful pause. Jonas and Molly stared at their plates. Silas whispered something inaudible.

Then Toots said, “Does anyone want to see my new vibrators?”

Chapter Twelve

Sometimes a knitter will need rescuing, and we must be ready to come to her aid, just as we would want her to do for us, were we in her handknit socks.

—
E. C.

O
wen wasn’t sure if there was anything worse than dealing with your mother’s accumulated shit, piled into a ten foot by ten foot space, seven feet high, with only the narrowest walkway through it. It felt like something out of
Hoarders
, only he didn’t have the promise of a job well done at the end of it glimmering like a beacon.

Standing in the middle of the storage unit, he stood up slowly from where he’d been bending over boxes of old photographs and rubbed his hip. These were the tricky things. What the hell did he do with them? Enough photos to choke a hippo, but he had no idea whose they were—had they been of his father’s family? His mother’s? He could take a few to his mom and hope for some kind of response, but he wasn’t sure if he’d trust anything she said anyway. Photos were only memories as long as they were attached to a memory that could be trusted.

What he really wanted to do was throw all of it out. But family photos? Wasn’t there some kind of son law prohibiting that? He moved it to the side.

Just like he’d been doing all day.

Damn, his body hurt.

Was this all he had left? In the whole world? This is what he had left to look forward to? Going through a crazy woman’s belongings? She sure had more than he did. . . . Owen bet Lucy’s house didn’t look like this. Someone who owned a bookstore, a person as careful as she was, probably organized the spices alphabetically and her clothes by color. Of course, she had bolted out into the storm to watch the lightning, even though he’d seen that it had scared the shit out of her.

So that meant she was probably sensible, with a dose of the unpredictable. You throw in a good amount of gorgeous, in that understated way she was, as if she didn’t even know it, and Owen knew that came pretty close to kryptonite.

He opened another box next to the stack of photos, and found thirty cans of alphabet soup. Good. At least this was something he could chuck out. He might regret it when the Apocalypse came, but until then, he’d have five cubic feet more space in here.

As he tossed it in the storage yard’s Dumpster, Owen thought he caught a glimpse of someone outside the fence, a girl, a block away. She reminded him of Lucy. That curve of the hip, that loose brown hair, that careful way of walking, as if not wanting to disturb anyone . . . Dammit. He
had
to get his mind off of her. Lucy wasn’t good for him. Obviously. This morning when he’d been shaving, he’d noticed bruised-looking places under his eyes from not sleeping, and he hadn’t had those since the shooting, since the investigation.

At night, when he closed his eyes, he saw Lucy. And it pissed him off. The way he’d practically chased her out of the parsonage the other night . . . He didn’t deserve to see her again, to think about her. It would just cement in her mind what everyone in town already thought about him, and Owen just didn’t have the time or the heart to watch that happen to her.

Back inside the storage unit, he kicked a recalcitrant door on an old sideboard to get it to open. It didn’t help, but it made him feel better.

“This is insane,” said a voice from behind him.

Owen flinched, stilled his reflexes, didn’t reach for his gun.

“Yeah,” he said, turning around.

“Hi,” said Lucy. She held up one hand in greeting and rocked backward on her heels, her toes lifting. “How are you?”

“Been better.” He hated his rough tone, but he’d been alone for days, and this was a horrible job. And here she was, showing up, fresh as a flower with that open face of hers, and he was astonished to realize he wanted to rush her like a linebacker—in less than the space of a second, he could cross the few steps between them and take her by the upper arms, pulling her against him, crushing her mouth with his, pressing his body against his own, showing her exactly how badly he wanted her.

To hide his eyes and his thoughts that had no place around her, Owen turned and stared at the countertop of the sideboard he’d been wrestling with. He pulled on a drawer. It, too, was stuck.

“This is even worse than I imagined,” Lucy said.

“Yep,” said Owen. She was more right than she knew. He cleared his throat.

“How do you know where to start?”

Owen jerked his thumb in the direction of the piles of crap behind him. “I come here every day and I push things around until I can’t stand it. When I get to the point where I’m considering arson, I leave.”

“You mind if I help you? And look for more of those papers?” she asked.

“Your tetanus shot current?”

Lucy nodded.

“Good luck.”

And then, very simply, she helped.

Stepping in next to him, Lucy moved boxes with him. She carried light pieces of trash to the Dumpster, and moved heavier things than he thought she’d ever be able to move, just by using her legs and pushing. She made short work of a file cabinet that Owen had opened more than once and closed again in despair. He watched in amazement as she pulled everything out, rifled through the pages, decided what to keep or recycle. When she passed him a stack of paper an inch thick and took out a Hefty bag for paper recycling, he was overcome again with the urge to kiss her.

Who
wouldn’t
want to kiss this woman?

“How did you do that?” he asked, when she entered the storage unit again, bringing with her the scent of sun and flowers.

“What?” she asked, as she pulled down another box. “Oooh! Yarn!”

“How do you just dive in and get this done?”

“Not my stuff. It’s easier.” Lucy held up the ugliest-color yarn he’d ever seen, bruised yellow and acid green. She made a face. “I thought your mother was a
knitter
. This is acrylic. I’m horrified. This whole box has to go. At least there are no moths. Guaranteed.”

“I don’t know what to tell you.”

Still moving, still emptying boxes at the speed of light compared to the way Owen moved through them, Lucy kept talking. “So Eliza Carpenter, the woman who wrote these papers I’m looking for, the ones we need to give back to Cade and Abigail, she was my friend as a child. She was the one who really taught me to knit, and more than that, she told the best stories in the whole wide world. Instead of laughing at a little kid, or ignoring me, she listened. She always had time for me.”

Owen, in the same amount of time, had done half what Lucy had. He shuffled a box of old, chipped mugs. How could he just throw these out? His mother had loved this one with the cow on it. “So that’s why you want these patterns.”

“Yep. But what I still don’t know is why your mom had them in her storage unit. Why wouldn’t Cade have them? When Eliza died, she’d left Abigail’s cottage full of things that Abigail would need to run the yarn shop, and she had everything else with her in San Diego. Were Eliza and your mother that close?”

Running his finger along the sharp edge of ceramic mug, Owen thought. “She was the one with the long hair and those eyes . . .”

Lucy grinned. “They sparkled when she laughed. You couldn’t forget her.”

Funny, Owen actually remembered that sparkling. As a kid, he’d been drawn to that woman who knitted in the kitchen with his mother. It was one of the few times his mother would relax and really laugh. Once, when the woman who must have been Eliza was visiting, Owen had passed through the kitchen, and his mother had put her knitting on the table and reached out, pulling him to her, giving him a spontaneous hug as the other woman looked on, smiling.

He remembered that hug. They were few and far between.

Then Eliza had left for the day and his father had come home. The screaming had started again, and everything had gone back to ugly. Busted.

Normal.

Hell, it’s probably how most of these mugs got broken. Owen took the box outside and threw the whole thing into the Dumpster, listening as the ceramic shattered inside.

Three hours later, they’d settled into a rhythm. Owen wouldn’t call it comfortable—how could anything be comfortable when he was so close to a woman who set his nerve endings on fire like she did?—but it felt good, this shifting of bodies in such a small space. She was good at it, so damn fast, and when he was stuck, she saw it and made the decisions for him. “No, not that, yes, keep that, no, are you crazy? Throw that out.”

When she laughed, he did, too. She was infectious. It felt as if she was getting into his bloodstream.

And then, in the early afternoon, he looked around and suddenly realized that he could see around the whole space. They’d done most of the work. He’d been dicking around by himself for a week and getting almost nothing done, and she’d been here for mere hours, and they were almost finished.

Owen looked at her. She had smudges of dirt across her nose and cobwebs in her hair. “You’re amazing,” he said. The words were out before he thought.

Then Lucy looked into a box and made a small squeak, which turned into a full-blown scream as something small and fast moving jumped out of the packaging and ran across the storage-unit floor. Her scream grew in volume and intensity as she stood, putting her hands to her mouth.

“No, no, it’s only a mouse, Lucy, it’s okay,” Owen yelled, moving as quickly as he could toward her. He wrapped his arms around her, and her body was rigid against his. Her screams tapered off, but she still shook.

“It’s okay, you’re all right.” All this for a mouse?

Then something like a choked laugh broke through and she finally said, “I’m sorry, it’s a phobia. It doesn’t make any sense. Right up there with heights. I hate rats and heights. And probably tall rats. Rats on ladders.” She gasped. “Oh, hell.”

“It was a mouse, I think.”

She shuddered. “Only slightly less loathsome.
Stupid
. Hate being scared.”

Owen drew her closer and used his thumb to stroke the side of her face. “You’re doing good, heart.”

He didn’t know where that last damn word had come from. He wanted to take it back, to swallow it and hide it, put it away forever. And he wanted to hang it on a golden chain around her neck.

“Oh!” She didn’t even seem to have heard him, thank God. She was peering down into a box at their feet, where the mouse had come from.

“What?” Owen asked.

“More! More papers. Eliza’s papers.” There was wonder in her voice.

God, if she ever spoke to him like that, with that tone—what he wouldn’t do . . .

Owen had to get a damn hold of himself. This storage space was just too small, that was all.

She knelt. “This was the last box I had to open. And here they are.” Lucy looked up at him and smiled. Stars danced in her eyes.

He wouldn’t kiss her.

No.

He would
not
kiss her.

“Thank you,” Lucy said, reaching up to brush his hand with hers. “Thank you so much. Do you want to come . . .”

And for just a moment, Owen stopped breathing as she looked up at him. He could feel her thinking about it, too, watched her eyes move to his lips and then back to his eyes. Her cheeks colored.

She went on, her words hurried, “I mean, what I meant to say, is do you want to drive over to Cade and Abigail’s with me? To tell them about all this? I haven’t yet. I’ve been waiting until Abigail was out of the hospital. And now she’s home . . .”

“I’d love to.” Owen grinned.

“You would?”

“Yep.” He wanted to go anywhere she was going. Owen didn’t care. He just wanted to be near her for a while longer. She could end up being more dangerous than any gun he’d ever held, but God help him, he’d always liked risk.

Chapter Thirteen

Humble pie is a dish not unfamiliar to the new knitter. Sadly, it isn’t that unfamiliar to the veteran knitter, either. Miscrossed cables and dropped stitches lurk, waiting for a moment of vanity to showcase themselves in their full and obvious glory.

—
E. C.

A
n hour later, Lucy led Owen up the dirt driveway to Eliza’s, the yarn shop Abigail had named for her mentor and her husband’s great-aunt. She looked in her rearview mirror, still almost unable to believe that the same blue Mustang that could set her heart to racing as a teenager was rumbling behind her, hitting the same potholes that her trusty little compact car was barreling through.

Lucy’s heart sank when she saw the small parking lot—it was full of cars, and heaven help them, there was a tour bus parked next to the alpaca shed.