Isabella Moon (8 page)

“Whoa, Kate,” he said, putting his hands in the air.

“Oh, my God, Caleb!” she said, lowering the gun. A nervous laugh escaped her before she could stop it.

“Hey, that’s not really funny,” he said. “You scared the shit out of me.”

“Of course it’s not funny,” she said, composing herself.

Caleb watched her as she carefully slipped the gun into the nightstand. “I knew you had that thing,” he said. “But I never expected to be on the receiving end.”

Still shaking, Kate went to him and put her arms around his waist. Resting her head on his chest, she heard his heart pounding against the inside of his shirt. “I thought you were going to be gone until the middle of next week,” she said. “You should have told me you were coming back today.”

He kissed the top of her head and she lifted her face to his. He seemed to be searching her face for an answer to a question that he couldn’t bring himself to ask. She wanted him to trust her, but knew there was nothing she could say to make him understand that she had to protect herself from ghosts of the past, transparent or not.

“You know I get nervous sometimes,” she said. “It just goes with the territory, living alone. I’m really sorry.”

He finally smiled. “Here I was thinking I’d climb into bed and wake you up with kisses and maybe one or two other things,” he said.

“And what makes you think you won’t get me right back into bed?” she said.

“I didn’t say I couldn’t do that,” he said. He leaned down to kiss her then, working his mouth hungrily against hers. But he suddenly pulled away. “Thing is, I was up at the crack of dawn so I could come and get a gun pointed at me, and I haven’t even had breakfast.”

Kate gave an exaggerated sigh. “Well, I guess I at least owe you breakfast,” she said.

“Oh, that ain’t all you owe me, girl,” he said, squeezing her backside through her pajamas. “But if you’ve got all the stuff, I’ll cook.”

“Oh, you’re funny,” Kate said. The sparse contents of her refrigerator were a running joke between them. She wasn’t a bad cook, as she’d proved to him more than once, but when she knew he wouldn’t be hanging around her house, she seldom went to the store. He teased her that she was some kind of witch or fairy, that she didn’t actually need food at all.

“Just let me clean up some,” Kate said.

“I’m really hungry,” Caleb said.

She could tell he was serious, but also that he would probably indulge her. “I’ll be fast,” she said, running for the bathroom. As she hurried through her ablutions, she felt a small rush of excitement at the prospect of some relaxed time with Caleb. Even though she wasn’t sure she could trust him to understand what was happening to her, she did know that he cared deeply about her.

True to her word and relatively clean, she led him out of the house ten minutes later.

“What exactly is a
latte
?”

It had been a little more than a year since Caleb had first settled himself in the armchair beside Kate’s in Craddock’s on Main Street, Carystown’s only coffeehouse. She hadn’t even known his name, but had laughed aloud at his lame opening line. Up to a couple of weeks before that, he’d always come into Craddock’s with a tall, energetic blonde in sheepskin boots whose minimally made-up face always looked freshly scrubbed. The blonde was striking in her own way, but it was Caleb who drew her attention.

Taller even than the blonde (she later learned that he was six-two in his socks and didn’t fit into her bed very well), Caleb walked with an appealing confidence. He wore his wavy brown hair cut close and was bulky about the arms and chest, but not in a way that spoke of vain hours spent at the gym. She had the impression that he worked with his hands.

“What’s so funny?” he’d said, looking a little worried.

“You are,” she said. “You aren’t trying to pick me up at nine in the morning, are you?”

When he’d smiled, she knew she would have a hard time resisting him, even if she wanted to. She’d never seen him smiling with the blonde. It was a good sign.

“I could wait until about nine-thirty,” he said, looking at his watch. “But that’s about my limit. Then I’ll have to move on to someone else.”

She’d made a show of looking around the coffeehouse. Two teenage boys sat drinking sodas and poring over a trail map. Mrs. Kraus, the diminutive woman who ran the used bookshop next door, was ordering at the counter. The young woman behind the counter was very sweet, but Kate guessed that her chemically pink hair and dramatic black and white makeup wouldn’t appeal to the rather earthy man beside her.

“Hmm. I don’t know how Mr. Kraus, that lady’s husband, would feel about that,” she said, indicating the older woman. “Then, there
is
Jessica behind the counter. Though she might be a little young for you.”

“Why do women want to pierce their noses?” he had said, suddenly serious.

“I don’t know,” she said. “But I’ve seen Indian women with lovely jewelry on their nostrils.”

“Sure,” he said. He lowered his voice. “But I think your friend Jessica up there got hold of a nine-penny nail and a watch battery.”

Kate had laughed so hard, she almost bathed them both in latte.

Maybe it was the brightness of the morning, or Caleb’s unaffected manner, but much of her hesitation to become involved with another man seemed to evaporate when he spoke. Her attraction to him had been so immediate that she was afraid to trust it. But she’d been alone then for well over a year. Friendships with other women were one thing, but a small part of her cried out for intimacy, communication on a more elemental level. It wasn’t just that she hadn’t had sex in all that time. Even before that, what had sex been to her? Physically pleasing, but Miles, the man with whom she’d spent so many years, so many intimate days and nights, had made it shameful in the end. And that relationship?
Poison.
She was a different person now. Reinvented. She knew it suited her, just as Caleb suited her.

When they got to Gatchel’s diner, Kate found that she was hungry, particularly after her dinner of popcorn the previous night. She ordered a scrambled egg, toast, sausage, and juice. Caleb’s meal was a marvel to her: a stack of pancakes, two eggs, sausage, biscuits, and grits with gravy.

“Are you sure you’re not still hungry?” she teased. “They might have to go to the grocery, but I’m sure they can get you something else.”

“You wait,” he said. “I’m going to need all that energy later.”

“Promises, promises,” Kate said.

As it turned out, when they finally made it back to her cottage later that afternoon, he fell sound asleep on the couch minutes after he took his boots off. But before they left the diner, she convinced him to drive out to Janet’s house to see if anyone was working and what the progress was.

It was only ten-thirty in the morning, and the temperature on the bank sign already read an unseasonable 65 degrees. When they got into the car, Kate asked Caleb to help her get the top down on her small blue convertible.

“Pushing it a bit, aren’t we?” he said. “It’s not even April yet, hotshot.”

“Oh, come on,” she said. “Live a little.”

They headed west out of town into the lush part of the valley, where several of the old families had their farms. Miles of white fence wound up and down the rolling hills alongside the road. A few early foals ran alongside their mothers or chased one another gamely across the pastures, playing hide-and-seek behind the mares and small hillocks.

Driving out to the new house one afternoon in Janet’s Range Rover, Janet had hinted that Kate would be welcome to keep a horse in the stables she was building—paying its board, of course—but Kate laughed and told Janet that she couldn’t imagine what would’ve given her the idea that she’d want to do such a thing.

Janet had shrugged it off. “I don’t know,” she said. “You just seem like the horsey type.”

It seemed unlikely to Kate that Janet would have noticed how her eyes moistened a bit as she looked out the passenger window of the Range Rover. She put it down to coincidence and Janet’s tendency to stereotype everyone she met. Funny, though, how often she seemed to be right, Kate thought. She’d loved to go horseback riding as a girl. Janet had a strange talent for knowing what people wanted, and it had helped her make a lot of money in insurance and real estate.

“I wouldn’t mind living out here if it weren’t for snooty types,” Caleb said now. “What a pain.” He turned in his seat to follow the oncoming car that approached and zipped past them in the southbound lane. “That, honey, was how fast I was driving at dawn to get back to you this morning.”

Kate smiled. “Paxton,” she said, “I understand that he pretty much always drives like that.”

“If the guy weren’t such a snake, I’d admire his car,” Caleb said.

“I like your truck just fine,” Kate said. She reached over and squeezed Caleb’s hand, then slid her hand playfully onto his jean-clad inner thigh. He leaned over and kissed her on her neck, which the wind passing through the convertible had exposed by blowing her hair out behind her. Caleb’s kiss and the fast-moving wind cleansed her thoughts of the funk that had settled over her in the past week. She wanted the way she felt this morning to last forever.

Janet’s house was set far back from the road atop a small hill so that it seemed to tower over the green pastures around it. Kate drove slowly up the gravel road leading to what would soon be a circular drive; the paving crew wasn’t scheduled for another few weeks, when all the heavy equipment and trucks were supposed to be gone. It was Kate’s opinion that the house’s stucco walls and terra-cotta red tiles on the complicated roof were better suited to the shores of the Mediterranean than central Kentucky, but it was still going to be a beautiful place to live.

“Great,” she said. “Janet’s here.”

She hadn’t seen the Range Rover at first, parked as it was between an electrician’s truck and a pickup.

“I’ve got zero need to talk to that woman,” Caleb said.

“Just tell me if she tries to put her tongue in your ear,” Kate said.

Caleb stretched his arms above his head and yawned. Then he said, “You know, for a good-looking woman, you can be pretty nasty, Kate Russell.”

“Kate, come on up here!” Janet had opened one of the front windows to shout down to them. “They’ve messed up the chandeliers.”

“She’s seen us now,” Kate said.

“I’m going in covered,” Caleb said, putting his hands over both ears.

“You want me to have a job, don’t you? Those giant breakfasts you eat don’t come cheap.” She pulled him into the house through one of the open doors of the six-bay garage.

“Hey,” he said, sounding hurt. “I offered to pay, but you were all about apologizing for almost blowing my head off.”

“Oh, yeah,” Kate said. She grinned back at him. “I guess I forgot about that.”

“Watch out.” Caleb grabbed her arm to keep her from stumbling over a rolled-up Oriental rug. “You’re a danger to yourself and others, you know that?”

They found Janet in the master suite berating a man in work blues who stood a good six feet up a ladder in the center of the room. Kate recognized the look on his face—he was just about fed up with Janet and her demands.

“The media cabinet looks great, Janet,” Kate said, trying to deflect her attention from the man.

“I wanted it to start six inches off the floor,” Janet said. “Seems someone forgot all about that.” Her tone and the hard look at Kate made it clear that Kate was the someone of whom she spoke, but Kate ignored it. She’d explained to Janet more than once that the weight of the solid walnut entertainment cabinet precluded it from being free-hanging.

Janet Rourke was a woman who used clothing, jewelry, and, Kate suspected, plastic surgery to play up her best physical features: a voluptuous, perfectly balanced pair of breasts; large, deep blue eyes; a waist that Scarlett O’Hara would envy; and a backside that seemed to laugh at gravity. Even in the tight peach velour jacket and track pants she was wearing, she gave the impression that she had dressed with considerable care. Her jet black hair was intricately styled, curled, and sprayed, and her makeup, down to her generously applied mascara and deep burgundy lipstick, was almost theatrical in its precision.

For all her professional poise, Janet had an aggressively sexual aura about her that puzzled Kate. She wasn’t sure if it was natural or simply cultivated from long years of practice. But even though Janet was a frequent subject of town gossip, there was very little that wasn’t business-related. The men called her a “ball breaker,” but they usually gave her her own way because she had a knack for making herself and her associates money.

“Plus, the place wasn’t even locked up when I got here,” Janet said. “That damned contractor’s not doing his job.”

“Ma’am,” the man on the ladder said. “You want me to switch out this chandelier with the other one or not?”

Ignoring him, Janet told Kate to deal with it.

When Kate followed the electrician out of the room, Janet’s irritated mood suddenly changed. She smiled sweetly at Caleb.

“Our Kate’s such a treasure,” she said. “I don’t know what I’d do without her.” She hurried over to the bank of windows at the front of the room, the kitten heels of her sandals clapping brightly against the newly laid wood floors. “What do you think of my view? Isn’t it fabulous? You can see almost the whole county from here. You can see almost all the way out to the Quair.”