Love Inspired December 2014 - Box Set 2 of 2: Her Holiday Family\Sugar Plum Season\Her Cowboy Hero\Small-Town Fireman (67 page)

Chapter Twelve

K
arla sat at Max Jones's wedding reception the following Saturday night feeling sad, awkward and out of place. Why had she ever thought coming would be a good idea? She wasn't really part of this community; she'd only been invited as a courtesy to Grandpa. And right now, Karl was sulking.

The party should have proved a welcome distraction, but it wasn't. The love story between Max Jones and Heather Browning was a fabulous tale that should have made anyone happy—a young man in a wheelchair finding love with the local high school guidance counselor—yet she still felt a heavy weight pressing down on her.

The back deck of the Black Swan, one of Gordon Falls' nicer restaurants, had been transformed for the joyous couple. Max was a Karl's Koffee regular, despite all the accommodations it took for him to enter the shop using his wheelchair. Max was one of Grandpa's favorite “personal policies”; if Grandpa had to move you to another seat so that Max could use the only table that would accommodate his wheelchair, your coffee was on the house. Grandpa had scores of “personal policies”—they were part of what made Karl's the homey place it was. Could Perk achieve that kind of personal service? She'd want to find a way at Rooster's, that was sure.

Even though he hadn't looked her in the eye all night, Grandpa was trying to make the best of his first true social outing, shaking hands and shouting hello. Karla tried to cheer herself by watching everyone be so happy for two people who looked happier still. She finally managed to shed most of her doldrums by the time Max and Heather had their first dance. A pretty impressive feat since Max used a wheelchair. The tender moment left barely a dry eye in the house, Karla included.

The night's biggest surprise, however, was the sight of Dylan in full dress uniform. Max wasn't a fireman, but his sister JJ was, and evidently Max had “borrowed” the knees of the entire department to propose to Heather since he couldn't get down on one knee himself. To honor their role in the engagement, all the invited firemen—which was practically the entire department—wore their dress uniforms to the ceremony.

Karla didn't need anyone to point out how well the uniform suited Dylan—even though Violet, Tina, Marge and several other of the other knitting circle women went out of their way to do so. Karla's inclination had been correct: Dylan MacDonald was handsome in casual clothes, but he was downright stunning in formal attire. The navy of the uniform doubled the intensity of his eyes, and while she preferred his hair messy and just shaken out of a baseball cap, it gave him a whole other kind of appeal tamed and combed.

She did her best to stay on the other side of the gathering, but it was a lost cause. Karla wondered if Dylan could sense the unease in her expression—after all, she had told him on the fishing expedition that her departure would be soon. She could certainly see the tension in his broad shoulders. A wedding must be a hard thing to watch for a man who'd had his own near engagement go so painfully awry. They kept catching each other's eye from opposite sides of the happy crowd until, finally, just as Max and Heather were feeding each other slices of wedding cake, Dylan walked over to stand next to her.

“They look so happy.” His voice was stretched tight with regret as he stared at the couple.

“Is it hard to watch?” She was sorry for the question, but there was no mistaking an edge of pain in Dylan's eyes. He said he'd been about to propose to Yvonne—surely he'd imagined what their wedding would have been like.

Dylan didn't speak, but simply nodded. Karla watched him clench his jaw, keenly aware of the wound Dylan still carried.

“Want to get some air?”

“Yeah.” He snickered, realizing at the same moment she did that the comment was ludicrous on an outdoor patio. He tilted his head toward the riverbank. “Or water.”

They walked in silence down toward the riverbank, hearing the boisterous party noises fade behind them to be absorbed in the quiet sounds of the river on a summer evening.

Dylan stuffed his hands in his uniform pockets. “Sorry about that.”

She didn't think he had anything for which to apologize. “You're far from over her, huh?” Some things didn't go by practical timetables.

“Oh, no,” came his quick reply, “I'm over Yvonne. The only feelings left for her are—” he shook his head “—well, not terribly honorable, let's just leave it at that.” The night was warm, and he undid the gold buttons that closed the dark double-breasted uniform jacket. “I don't quite know why that was so hard. I wasn't expecting that.” He sat down on the low stone wall that faced the river, undoing the top button on his shirt and loosening his tie.

“Makes sense to me.” She sat down close beside him, drawn in by his soft tone and somber mood. “Woulda, shoulda, coulda, you know?”

He cracked a forlorn smile. “I
shoulda
seen her for what she was, then I
coulda
left her alone and I
woulda
avoided all this hurt.”

“Hey, we can't always see what's coming down the road.”

He turned to her, moonlight casting his face into stark features. “Yeah, well look at you. You know just where you're going, are honest about it, and you're just about off on your way to get there.” He pushed out a breath. “I just hope it lives up to your expectations.” It wasn't sour grapes, more of a gentle warning.

“I've really liked being here,” Karla felt compelled to say. “It's not where I belong, but I can see why Grandpa loves this place so much. Why you love it so much. I can see how it could become hard to leave.”

He gave a low laugh. “You didn't think much like that when I first met you.”

“Yeah, well, I wasn't cochair of the big anniversary bash and catcher of the town's prize fish back then.” Karla kicked her feet out to cross her ankles in front of her, a bit surprised at the wave of affection that flooded over her as she remembered the fuss over that fish. “Serious résumé booster, the lot of it.”

“Glad to know we enhanced your credentials.” There was just the slightest edge to his words.

“It was more than that. You know it was.”

He turned to look at her. “Was it?”

She owed him honesty, the knowledge that a woman could be straight with him. “This isn't the place for me. Everyone's wonderful, and I know what people are thinking. Goodness knows it's crystal clear what Grandpa was thinking, but it's not...” She couldn't find the words for what she wanted to say that didn't sound dismissive, or worse yet, city-snobbish.

“It's not Chicago,” he finished for her. “Funny,” he said sourly, “that's precisely why I love it.” He straightened up, pulling his tie from his collar. “If I'd stayed, if we were sitting on a high-rise balcony in Chicago instead of on a stone wall in Gordon Falls, would we even know each other?”

That was easy to answer. “I hope so.”

“That'd fit the Karla Kennedy master plan, wouldn't it?” He stood up off the wall and took a few steps away from her. “That wasn't fair. That was out of line.” He turned back to stare at her. “Sore spot for me, you know?”

What wasn't fair was how emotionally raw, how honest and charming he looked washed in moonlight with that wounded grin on his face. He didn't belong on a high-rise balcony in Chicago and never would. He belonged right here. Was it so awful to admit that now just a small part of her did, too? “I'm glad I came.”

“You did the right thing. You helped your family out in a tight spot.”

“I'm glad I came for other reasons, too. I'm not sorry we met.”

“You're just sorry we met
here
.” He said it with a tone of regretful acceptance.

It was true. “Yes.” The moment was tumbling toward something that wasn't smart for either of them. A closeness that would only make everything more difficult instead of easier. Half out of distraction, half out of curiosity, and because she knew she'd probably never get another chance to find out, Karla stood up and asked, “Hey, Captain McDonald, can you really tango, or was that just a fish tale?”

He laughed. “I most certainly can. In fact, I am the best Scottish tango dancer you will ever know.”

Karla laid her sweater on the stone wall. “Prove it.”

* * *

Karla looked at him with such a daring playfulness in her eyes. Dylan knew right then and there that he didn't want to play the victim anymore. Why not take that beautiful woman in his arms and slay all the bad memories Yvonne had dumped on him? How many times had Jesse told him to “snap out of it”? Right here, right now, was the first safe chance to do that. Things were destined not to work out between him and Karla—she wanted everything he'd left behind, and the timing couldn't be further off. This was one night, one chance to take back a piece of himself that Yvonne seemed to have stolen.

Dylan took off his uniform jacket and laid it on the stone wall. “You'd better mean that.”

She put her hands on her hips, a feisty ball of challenge. “I most certainly do.”

He looked around. “We don't have any music.”

She wasn't going to let him get away that easily. “I have a smartphone.”

He crossed his arms over his chest. “Oh, got a tango tune all cued up, do you?”

She held up her fingers in the universal “5 seconds” gesture, then rifled through her handbag for her phone and began tapping furiously. As she worked, her tongue stuck out just the tiniest bit, and his pulse kicked up a notch at the endearingly unconscious quirk. It seemed as if every time he was with her some little detail would add itself to the pile of things he liked about her. A smarter man would have stopped that pile from getting any more chances to grow, but it had been so long since he'd met any woman that made him even consider taking chances with his heart. Even stupid, doomed chances.

“Ha!” she proclaimed, setting the phone on the wall and punching a final button. “Technology for the win.” The first strains of “La Cumparsita,” that one song everyone thought of for tangos but only tango fans could name, wafted out into the night.

“Predictable, but it works.” Dylan undid his cuff buttons and rolled up his sleeves.

She pulled back. “Too obvious?” Then, she got an idea. Honestly, the sight of that woman getting an idea was like a shot of espresso. Holding up a finger again, she darted back to the phone, tapped some more and began a low, playful laugh as the Proclaimers' “I'm Gonna Be” started up.

“A Scottish band, Mr. Scottish tango man.”

A pop song?
That
pop song? “How on earth did you come up with that?”

She grinned. “I just typed ‘Scottish tango songs' into the search engine.”

“There are no Scottish tango songs.”

She pointed to her phone. “Are you going to stand here and argue with the internet or are you going to deliver?”

The steady beat of the song filled the night air. He knew the song, knew the band, but hadn't
ever
thought of it in terms of a tango. Only as he stood there and counted out the rhythm, it worked. It actually fit in a weird, crazy way. Somehow, with that one offbeat suggestion, Karla Kennedy yanked all the hurt right out from underneath him. She was there, in a circle of lamplight, ready to hand an enormous chunk of his heart back to him with her outstretched hand.

He took her hand, feeling something zing through him as he did. “Do you even know how?”

She cocked her head to one side. “Can't be that hard.”

“Oh, it's harder than it looks.”

Her chin tipped up in defiance. He put his hand to her waist and counted out the beat, made easy by the pop song's powerful drumbeat. “Slow, slow, quick-quick slow.”

Karla tripped twice, but he caught her, saving her from falling. By the end of the first verse she was following his lead, laughing when she goofed instead of getting frustrated the way Yvonne always would. For the first time in ages, the comparison didn't pinch; it freed him.

By the chorus, she was having fun. The combination of the rowdy Scottish pub song with a summer night tango somehow made it all new again. Karla had given him lots of gifts over these few weeks, but even if this was the last one, he'd walk away a happy man.

When the bridge came, a rousing burst of “da-da-da” nonsense syllables, Karla pulled away from him and began joyfully dancing around the makeshift dance floor, a ridiculous jig of waving arms that sent him doubled over laughing.

Laughing. How long had it been since he'd laughed like that? It swept the stale air from his lungs. When the verse returned, he pulled her back into the tango, indulgently staring into her eyes and holding her the tiniest bit closer. It would be okay, just for tonight. This felt like such a restoration. “Get ready,” he said, sure his grin filled every part of his face.

“For what?”

“For this.” With that he dipped her, enjoying the way her arms tightened around him as he pulled her off balance. It wasn't anything close to elegant, but it was spectacular in its own crazy way. He relished the way her hair swept around her face when he pulled her back up and spun her into a turn. When she missed a step and ended up with one foot tangled around his leg, he felt her laugh ripple over him until he laughed himself.

When the chorus came back around, he didn't let her leave him, but promptly picked her right up off the ground to spin her around until she threw her head back and shouted the lyrics right along with him.

He hadn't planned to kiss her. He shouldn't have, given the circumstances. But when he dipped her again and she stared up at him with those incredible ink-blue eyes, he couldn't have helped himself for all the world. She had all this joy and determination and energy and he just needed to taste it, to breathe it in and wake back up to a world where love didn't leave so many scars. To kiss a woman in a tango dip was the most romantic thing in the whole world, and tonight he wanted to give that to her.