Loving Jessie (2 page)

They’d had some good times together, he thought, some really good times. It had never seemed to matter that Jessie was so much younger than he and Matt, or that she was a girl. She’d just…fit in, somehow. Part little sister, part friend. And Matt. Matt had been his best friend from fifth grade through college and beyond. Still was, Reilly guessed, even though they hadn’t seen each other in…how long had it been? Still holding the picture, he let his head fall back against the soft leather of the sofa while he tried to recall the last time Matt had been home. Three years? Four? Hell, the last time he’d seen Matt was when he flew in from way the hell and gone to be best man at the wedding. Five years. It was hard to believe it
had been that long. A couple of phone calls, half-a-dozen postcards sent from parts of the world no sane tourist would willingly visit—they’d kept in touch in that out-of-touch way men favored.

Apart from spending a few years in some fancy cooking school in Paris, Jessie had stayed in Millers Crossing, and he still saw her fairly often. Well, now and again, anyway. Frowning, Reilly tried to remember the last time he’d seen her. Fourth of July, maybe? The whole town had turned out for the annual barbecue, and he and Dana had run into Jessie waiting in line for a churro—a sweet fried twist of dough that was a specialty in the Hispanic community. He remembered he’d teased her about checking out the competition, and she’d laughed. That was a month ago and, before that…before that, the last time he’d seen her was at her grandfather’s funeral in February. Funny, how you could lose track of the people you cared about, even when they were right under your nose.

God, he was tired. It was late. Dana was upstairs, asleep in the bed they still shared. He could go up and join her, but what was the point? It wasn’t as if she cared one way or another. She hadn’t said as much, hadn’t suggested by so much as a word or a glance that she would rather he moved into another room, but he doubted she would offer any argument if he made the suggestion.

Reilly let his eyes close, let tiredness wash over him. What he wouldn’t give to be that twenty-three-year-old kid in the photo again—his whole life ahead of him, a second chance. Wouldn’t it be great to have nothing more important to worry about than how many bottles were remaining on that mythical wall?

Matt Latimer shuddered faintly as he splashed the last few ounces of twenty-one-year-old Chivas into a plastic
tumbler. Should have kept out a glass when he was packing stuff up to give to Goodwill, he thought, contemplating the warm amber liquor through the clear plastic. He didn’t mind eating pizza straight out of the box, but when you started drinking good scotch out of plastic, could the end of civilization be far behind? Shrugging, he lifted the glass. What the hell, civilization hadn’t really lived up to its promise, anyway.

With the first swallow of scotch warming him from the inside, he looked around the apartment he’d called home for the last eight years. No, actually, he couldn’t remember ever calling it home. It was just the place where he lived in those brief, restless intervals between assignments. Up until recently, he didn’t think he’d ever spent more than two consecutive weeks here, and the past few months of more or less enforced residence hadn’t exactly inspired him with warm and fuzzy feelings for the place. Still, it seemed as if, after eight years, there should be some evidence left of his occupation, even if his belongings were already packed, waiting to be loaded into his Jeep in the morning.

But there was nothing—no holes in the walls from the certificates and awards he’d never bothered to hang, no worn spots on the carpet in front of a favorite chair that he was rarely around to sit in, no scuff marks on the plaster where he’d carelessly let the door bang back against the wall—nothing at all to suggest that someone had lived here for the better part of a decade. He hadn’t left yet, but the rooms already had the hollow echo of abandonment, as if they’d been empty a long time.

He moved restlessly across the living room to stand in front of a window. One of the apartment’s selling points had been the promise of a “spectacular view of Elliot Bay.” It was more or less true. If he stood on the far left
side of the window and tilted his head slightly, he could see the bay. For the most part, he preferred to avoid getting a crick in his neck and settled for a reasonably pleasant view of Seattle. Tonight, in the chill hours after midnight, the city lights created a ghostly glow in the mist.

Cradling the scotch against his chest, he looked out at the lights and wondered how many other people were out there like him, standing at their darkened windows, staring out into the darkness, putting off sleep for fear of what it might bring with it.

Taking another swallow of Chivas, Matt held it in his mouth for a moment before letting it trickle slowly down his throat. It was ironic, really. He hadn’t been afraid of the dark when he was a child. He’d never imagined goblins in his closet or monsters under his bed, never been afraid of things that went bump in the night, maybe because his family had come complete with a real live monster in the form of his father’s drunken rages. It was only now, a couple of years short of his fortieth birthday, that he’d learned to fear the things that lurked in the dark.

The nightmares had started three months ago, shortly after he got home from the hospital. They’d come occasionally at first—once or twice a week, jerking him from sleep into sweating, shaking wakefulness, half-remembered images floating in the darkness before his eyes like red-tinged bits of film cut from a horror movie, memory and imagination so tangled together that it was difficult to separate the two.

He’d tried to ignore them, the same way he ignored the ache in his shoulder, shoving both into a sort of mental closet and slamming the door tightly closed. It worked. Some of the time. Whole days went by when he could almost convince himself that he was just taking a little time off before going back to work. He could half forget
the nightmares and the bullet hole in his shoulder and pretend not to see the dust settling on his camera case. But there was something about the black, after-midnight hours that stripped away the lies and exposed the cold, white bones of truth.

He wasn’t taking time off. He was burned out, drained, empty, wrung dry—you could take your pick of clichés. It all boiled down to the same thing. The life he’d spent the last fifteen years building was crumbling around his ears. The camera that had been his almost constant companion felt clumsy and alien in his hands. The city, this apartment, everything that should have been safe and familiar, was suddenly strange and hostile.

Matt swirled the tumbler, watching the amber liquid slosh against the plastic. It didn’t take a medical degree to make a diagnosis. These days, any moderately intelligent fifth-grader could probably have told him what was wrong. Post-traumatic stress disorder was the term currently in favor. It had been called other things—shell shock, battle fatigue, delayed stress. He could have talked to his doctor, asked her to prescribe some nice little pills to make him feel better. That would have been the smart thing to do, he admitted. He hadn’t tried to dig the bullet out of his own shoulder. So why did he feel compelled to deal with this on his own?

“Macho idiot,” he muttered, lifting the tumbler to his lips. No pills for him, by God. He was going to do the manly thing and just abandon his entire life in hopes of hiding from the shadows. “When the going gets tough, the tough run like hell.”

At least it was an organized flight, he thought, looking at the neat stack of boxes. And he actually did have somewhere to go. Two weeks ago, when he’d talked to his older brother, Gabe had casually mentioned that he could
use some help with the house he’d bought and was rebuilding from the ground up. Matt had made noises about needing to get back to work, pick up assignments that had been put on hold when he found himself being airlifted out of Kosovo.
Places to see, pictures to take
, he’d said.

Gabe had accepted his excuses at face value, but, the truth was, there were no assignments and he didn’t much care if he ever went back to work. Let someone else risk his neck to document the world’s increasingly rapid descent into madness. He’d been there, done that. It was time to move on to something else.

“That’s a good one, Latimer.” His mouth twisted in a sharply mocking half smile. “Pulitzer prize–winning photographer trades in cameras for hammer. A perfectly reasonable career choice. No one will suspect you’re falling apart at the seams if you do that.”

Maybe he could talk Reilly McKinnon into giving him a job on one of his construction crews. Twenty-five years of friendship ought to be enough to get him a job. He could spend his days building houses and whistling at passing females, maybe develop a beer belly and a permanent sunburn. Maybe, if he pounded a few thousand nails into submission, he would start sleeping nights again, stop jumping every time a car backfired and be able to look at himself in the mirror without wondering if he could have changed things, if he…

“No.” He said it aloud, using the sound of his own voice to cut off that line of thought. “If only” was a fool’s game. What was done was done. Life didn’t offer any do-overs. Tipping his head back, Matt downed the last of the scotch, barely tasting it. The past was past. The only thing he could do was move on.

If he could.

M
att took his time getting home, stretching a two-day drive into more than a week. He tried to tell himself that he was savoring the journey, enjoying the scenery, taking time to smell the roses, but he’d never been very good at lying to himself. The truth was, the moment the decision was made to come home, he’d begun questioning it. And the closer he got, the more he was caught between the hope that this was the one place that would offer him the peace he needed and the conviction that this was the last place on earth where he could find anything resembling peace.

So he dawdled his way down the coast to California like a five-year-old dragging his feet about getting ready for church. He stopped to see scenic views that barely registered, ate fast food that gave him heartburn, drank coffee that didn’t deserve the name and veered off his route to visit tourist attractions that gave new meaning to the word
tacky
. But, despite his best efforts, he eventually found himself on the outskirts of the town he’d called home for the first twenty-three years of his life.

Millers Crossing had started out life as a wide spot in the road that provided services for local farmers in California’s Salinas Valley. A feed store, a small general store with gas pumps out front and a café. Located just off Highway 101 on a reasonably scenic route to the Pacific, the town had grown at a steady pace, reaching its peak in the fifties, when cars were big, gas was cheap, and the whole country seemed to be spending vacations on the road. A movie house, motels and more shopping had been added to accommodate both tourists and residents.

In the mid-sixties, an entrepreneur from Los Angeles decided that Millers Crossing was just the spot for a hotel specializing in luxury and romance. Built on a hill overlooking a golf course and an easily ignored stretch of highway, the Willow Inn was a Spanish Mission fantasy, complete with pale pink stucco, red-tiled roof and arched doorways. Courtyards, tinkling fountains, wrought iron and palms added to the atmosphere. Locals sneered and predicted bankruptcy within a year, but the Willow Inn built a reputation for sugarcoated romanticism that, combined with the location, brought in honeymoon couples from as far away as Chicago. Heart-shaped tubs and mirrored ceilings achieved a nice balance between the romantic and the erotic, the nice and the naughty.

It didn’t take long for local business owners to discover that, if a fool and his money were soon parted, it was nothing compared to the eagerness with which newlyweds divested themselves of cash. Fueled in part by the success of the Willow Inn, other businesses took root—gift shops and restaurants, boutiques and beauty parlors. During the seventies and eighties, when many Valley towns were suffering the effects of a depressed farm economy, Millers Crossing managed to hold its own.

Matt had grown up there, had skinny-dipped in the man-made lake that marked one edge of the golf course; learned to drive on the long, empty dirt roads that stretched out north and south of town; had gotten his first glimpse of a girl’s breasts underneath the bleachers at the high school when Marcy Woodbridge let him remove her cheerleader’s sweater. A few weeks later, she’d let him remove considerably more and the two of them had discovered sex in the back of his ancient Corvair. He’d been half convinced it was love, but Marcy had been under no such illusion and had dumped him for Billy Macy, who planned on going to Harvard Law School. Matt had consoled himself with the knowledge that she was going to hate going through life with a name like Marcy Macy.

The high school looked just the way he remembered it, as did the library where he’d spent as much time ogling girls as he had studying. There was the city pool where he’d worked as a lifeguard, and Dickerson’s Feed and Grain, where he’d spent the summer after he graduated lugging bags of grain and dodging the advances of Buddy Dickerson’s wife. It had been as much a healthy respect for her husband’s large size and uncertain temper as respect for her wedding vows that had kept Matt from taking her up on her invitations to find passion among the hay bales.

There were changes. There was a supermarket where the bowling alley had been, and the old Woolworth store had been turned into a collection of antique shops. But there was more that was familiar than not. So much so that it was almost like stepping back in time, and Matt had the whimsical thought that, if he turned the right corner, he might see his younger self.

God, there was Ernie’s Café. His foot eased off the gas, his mouth curving in a quick, delighted smile. He’d
spent countless hours there, eating burgers and fries and guzzling milk shakes. It looked exactly as he remembered it, and parked in front of it was—hell, he knew that car. He’d spent most of his last summer in Millers Crossing with his head buried under the hood, rebuilding the engine and damned near everything else in it.

No, it couldn’t be the same car. Classic Mustangs might not be commonplace, but they weren’t a rarity, either. But how many cherry-red Mustangs could there be in Millers Crossing? Still, even if it was the same car, there was no way Jessie still owned it. She must have sold it years ago. She couldn’t possibly have kept the car for thirteen years.

But he was already braking, turning the Jeep into a parking place a few spaces down. What the heck, he hadn’t eaten since San Jose. Gabe wasn’t expecting him. He hadn’t told his older brother he was coming, leaving himself at least the illusion of being able to change his mind. There was no one to object if he stopped off at Ernie’s.

“Jessica Sinclair, you are an evil woman, and if there is any justice in this world, you will surely pay for your sins.” Lurene Washington sighed as she slid her empty plate back from her with the air of someone pushing away temptation.

“Hellfire and damnation for a cheesecake?” Jessie asked with a lift of her eyebrow.

“I was thinking more of being forced to spend eternity on a fat farm.” When Jessie laughed, Lurene gave her a stern look. “You laugh now, but you won’t think it’s so funny after a few thousand years spent eating lettuce and white rice.”

“I didn’t force you to take a second slice of cheese
cake,” Jessie pointed out, not visibly terrified by this vision of her future.

“No, but you put the temptation before me and, according to my great-aunt Bessie Mae Cupperman, those who offer temptation are as guilty of sin as the sinners themselves.”

“I thought your great-aunt Bessie Mae was a stripper.”

“She was a fan dancer,” Lurene corrected. “But she had high moral standards, and she knew sin when she saw it.” Using the tip of her finger, she picked up a few crumbs at the edge of her plate, sighing as she put them in her mouth. “And this cheesecake is pure sin.”

“That’s what you can put on the menu—Caramel Sin Cheesecake. If you want to add it to the menu.”

“
If
I want to add it to the menu?” Lurene’s dark eyes widened in disbelief. “Do you think I’m crazy, girl? Of course I’m going to add it to the menu. When you own a restaurant, leading people astray isn’t a sin, it’s just good business.”

Jessie laughed and gave in to the temptation to cut herself a tiny sliver of cake. It really was one of her better efforts, she decided as the rich, creamy filling melted on her tongue. Maybe even worth the extra time she was going to have to put in on the treadmill to make up for all the taste testing she’d done while refining the recipe.

When she thought about it, the real sin wasn’t the approximately five million calories in the cheesecake but the fact that someone was actually paying her to play in the kitchen. As a graduate of Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, she could have made a lot more money, but it would have meant working in Los Angeles or New York or some other foodie Mecca in between. And then she would have had to prove herself to some restaurateur who might or might not know the difference between crème fraîche and
crème brûlée, and she would have had to put in long hours and worry about the competition. Just thinking about it made her tired.

Maybe things would have been different if she’d sought out a position as soon as she returned from Paris. But her grandfather’s health had been declining and, though he would never have said as much, he’d needed her, and she’d welcomed the chance to be there for him the way he’d been there for her since her parents’ death when she was eight years old. She had no regrets about the decision. Leland Sinclair had been more than just her grandfather; he’d been her friend, and she was grateful for the time they’d spent together over the last few years.

After his death six months ago, she’d thought about pursuing a career, but the idea held little appeal. She liked living in the town where she’d grown up. Millers Crossing was neither too large nor too small. Like Goldilocks and her porridge, it was just right. It was small enough to be cozy and big enough to offer decent shopping. If she got a sudden urge for culture with a capital “C,” she could always spend the weekend in San Francisco or make the longer drive to L.A.

Her arrangement with Lurene was satisfying if not wildly lucrative. Four days a week, Jessie provided specialty desserts for the café and she also provided desserts for Lurene’s fledgling catering business. It wasn’t exactly a living wage, but, thanks to her grandfather, that didn’t have to be her primary concern. It was a mutually beneficial arrangement. Jessie got to play in the kitchen, and the café saw a tidy little increase in business.

Her friendship with Lurene had been an unexpected bonus. Aside from a weakness for rich desserts and old Bogart movies, the two women had little in common. Lurene was a tall, busty blonde on the far side of forty
who viewed the world with good-natured cynicism. She’d been married twice, once in her early twenties to a rock guitarist who’d chosen his profession with visions of beautiful groupies throwing themselves at him. When they did, he’d been more than happy to catch them. In her thirties, she married an accountant, the epitome of a solid, upright citizen. If her second marriage lacked the wild passion of the first, at least she didn’t have to worry about whose bed her husband might be warming, which was true enough, since there wasn’t a mattress in sight when he managed to knock up his firm’s receptionist on the desktop in his office.

Deciding that two strikes was more than enough, Lurene took her half of the money they’d been saving to buy a house and moved to Millers Crossing. She hadn’t planned on buying a restaurant, wasn’t even sure she planned to stay in California. But five years later, here she was, restaurateur, part-time caterer and one of Jessie’s best friends.

Really, Jessie thought, she had a very good life—friends, a nice little house, a job she loved. It was greedy to want more, but she did, she admitted with a soft sigh. She wanted so much more. But she wasn’t sure how to go about getting it. It was one thing to make up her mind to have a baby, something else altogether to figure out how to do it when there wasn’t a man in the picture.

“Now
there’s
a man who could make a woman rethink the joys of being single.”

Lurene’s soft murmur fit so perfectly with her own thoughts that Jessie looked up, startled, wondering if the older woman had read her mind. But Lurene was looking past her, her dark eyes bright with a cheerfully impersonal lust that made Jessie smile. Curiosity had her nudging her toe against the counter, giving the red vinyl and chrome
stool a half turn so that she could take a casual look at the man who’d just entered the café.

He was an inch or two over six feet and had the sort of long, rangy body that made clothes look good and women sigh. He wore jeans faded to almost white with time and wear, and a gray T-shirt that looked as if it had seen better days. Thick, nearly black hair fell into a careless wave on his forehead and brushed his collar in the back. Jessie couldn’t see the color of his eyes from where she was sitting, but she knew they were a clear, crystalline blue.

“Tall, dark and handsome. The man’s a walking cliché.” Lurene sighed happily. “I suspect there are states where it’s illegal for a pair of jeans to fit that well. And I know those shoulders are—”

“Matt.” Jessie’s soft exclamation cut across her appreciative monologue. She slid off the stool. “Matt!”

At the sound of his name, Matt froze for an instant, his shoulders tensing in a quick defensive reaction that was as uncontrollable as it was infuriating. Once, in a small African nation whose name changed with monotonous regularity, he’d been photographing an inauguration when a bloody coup occurred. Backing into the shadows, the camera steady in his hands, he’d continued to snap photographs, so intent on what was happening in front of the lens that it wasn’t until hours later, when he found the bullet hole in the camera bag that had been slung over his shoulder, that he realized how close he’d been to becoming a piece of history himself. Now he was jumping like a frightened rabbit just because someone had called his name unexpectedly.

“Matt.”

He shook off his annoyance and focused on the woman hurrying toward him, and his eyes widened. Even though
he’d told himself that the odds were against Jessie still owning the old Mustang out front, there had been a part of him that half expected to see her, but he’d been picturing a different Jessie—toffee-colored hair and big brown eyes, long, coltish legs and a warm smile. All the ingredients were still there, but the packaging had changed considerably. There were curves he didn’t remember—some very distracting curves. And the legs…She was wearing a flirty little pink skirt that stopped at midthigh, exposing miles of long, tanned legs. Looking at them, Matt felt a punch of something that might have been—but couldn’t possibly be—pure male appreciation.

“It’s so good to see you.” Oblivious to his stunned reaction, Jessie slid her arms around his waist, and Matt found his arms full of warm, female curves.
Jessie
, he reminded himself sharply. Little Jessie Sinclair, who’d tagged along after him and Reilly. Even if she had curves, he had no business noticing them. But they were a little hard to ignore when they were snuggled against his chest.

“When did you get home?” she asked, easing back far enough to look up into his face.