Never Too Hot (5 page)

He wanted her.

The moment he walked into the diner and saw Ginger standing behind the counter, desire had hit Connor square in the groin. And all the while they were talking, while he’d been hammering on her about getting into Poplar Cove, sex had been running a constant current between them.

She’d changed out of the skimpy tank and shorts combo she’d had on earlier, but the fitted white shirt and black pants weren’t too bad either, managing to nicely highlight her ample breasts. The half-mirrored walls gave him a good opportunity to appreciate the curve of her hips, the slight bounce of her breasts as she sparred with him.

Not only was Ginger his perfect type, lush and soft and sure to be wild in bed, but she was clearly smart too. Tough. He couldn’t stop himself from appreciating—despite his irritation at having to work for it—how quick she was to cut his attempt at charm off at the pass, when any other woman would have folded at his initial apology.

And then there was the way she’d responded to his scars, the fact that she experienced some of the hell he’d lived through personally.

No one knew how much his hands still bothered him. No one had the guts to ask him outright if they hurt. He’d been surprised enough by her question to answer.

And afterward, he’d actually been disappointed when their conversation had ended and she’d gone back into the kitchen.

Since puberty he’d had plenty of experience with lust, but rarely had any of his attractions gone beyond the superficial, beyond the bedroom.

Fuck. He couldn’t afford any distractions from his ultimate goals for the summer: continuing his intense training regimen so that he would be in peak physical condition for his upcoming Forest Service reinstatement, first, and fixing up Poplar Cove for the wedding, second.

There was no room for third.

He took a twenty out of his wallet and threw it down on the counter, then got the hell out of the diner.

ALL NIGHT, Isabel had thought there was something not quite right with Ginger. She hadn’t been able to put her finger on it exactly. Just that she looked different. Brighter, somehow. But also, unsettled.

Eight months ago, when Isabel first met Ginger, she’d had the same impression—that Ginger was a woman in dire need of calm. Living on Blue Mountain Lake had clearly done wonders for Ginger’s nerves, just as it did for most people who settled in long enough to slow down to the pace of local life. So, then, what on earth could have happened to Ginger to send her back to that unsettled place?

Telling Scott, her fry cook, to man the stove for a minute, Isabel headed out after Ginger.

“What’s wrong?”

Ginger shoved the curly hair that had escaped her ponytail back from her face. “I had an unexpected visitor this afternoon.”

Unexpected visitors were rather common in a place as beautiful as Blue Mountain Lake. Friends from the city who’d decided to drop by for a couple of days and relatives looking for a private beach to park their kids while they raided the liquor cabinet were par for the course. But Ginger wouldn’t be looking so worried if a gaggle of girlfriends had descended on her.

“Who? Don’t tell me your ex came all the way out here?”

Ginger had told her all about her marriage to Jeremy, that her relationship had fizzled out pretty much right after her new husband slid the wedding ring onto her left hand. And even though Ginger said they were both to blame for it not working out, Isabel had painted a fairly vivid picture in her head of the ex-husband as a self-obsessed bully who had once masqueraded—very briefly—as Mr. Right. She didn’t have a much better image of Ginger’s parents.

Ginger made a face. “No. Jeremy wouldn’t come all the way out here to see me. From what I’ve heard he’s already moved on to a tiny little brunette with a button nose and hollow cheekbones. And my mother would absolutely lose it out here with all the bugs, so no chance of that.”

And yet, Isabel noted, Ginger’s cheeks were growing more flushed in the empty space between sentences.

“His name is Connor. Connor MacKenzie. His grandparents own Poplar Cove. He thought he was going to be moving in today. Until he found me on the porch. He’s here now, in the diner. Sitting at the counter.”

Isabel heard her own sudden intake of breath and had to ask herself why it felt like her world had just been rocked, why she was reaching for the hood of the nearest car with a death grip.

So one of the grandkids next door was in town for a visit. So what?

“Do you know why Connor came back to the lake?”

“He wants to fix up the cabin for his brother’s wedding.”

Isabel felt the rock sink deeper into her gut. Weddings meant family. Mothers.

And fathers.

“When’s the wedding?”

“July thirty-first.”

Four weeks away. Long enough, Isabel reckoned, to get a new haircut. No, a complete makeover. To make sure she blew Andrew away when she saw him.

If she saw him.

God, what was wrong with her? She hadn’t seen Connor’s father in thirty years. Ancient history. She had a full, wonderful life; a thriving business, lots of friends, and a great son.

“Connor told me the house is unsafe. That it’s a fire hazard and he needs to work on it. But even though he’s probably right, I’m freaking out about having a guy all up in my space. Especially him.”

“Why?” Isabel asked, feeling very protective of her friend. “What did he do? Did he try something?”

Ginger blushed. “Oh God, no. Of course not. It’s just that …”

“What? You can tell me.” And then Isabel would head back into the restaurant and kill him.

The last thing she was prepared for was Ginger saying, “Oh Isabel, there’s just something about him. Not just that he’s big and strong and gorgeous, but it’s like there’s this weird connection between us. Like we’re supposed to be …”

Isabel tried to think how she would have normally responded if she didn’t know the MacKenzies. Probably would have encouraged Ginger to break her year of celibacy with the guy.

Fortunately, Ginger was already laughing at herself. “Listen to me. You’d think I was fifteen again with a crush on the quarterback. Talking about how the stars are aligning to bring us together. Could we both forget I said any of that?”

But the thing was, Isabel remembered what good-looking kids the MacKenzie boys were. There was a reason for Ginger’s bright eyes and flushed skin. MacKenzie men were a force to be reckoned with. As a teenager, Isabel had half wondered if their father did indeed hold the strings to the stars.

“Hey, your family has lived next door to the MacKenzies for a long time. Is there something I should know about them? Some sort of warning you should be giving me about him?”

Isabel shook her head no, but she put too much force in it and ended up feeling dizzy. “Well, Helen and George are great. But you already know that from dealing with them over the phone.”

She should stop there, shut her mouth. But somehow, she couldn’t.

“I knew Connor’s father, Andrew. We dated for a while. A very long time ago.”

Seeing the interest on Ginger’s face, Isabel moved to quickly stamp it out. “We were just kids. Like Josh and the girl he went to the movies with. I haven’t thought about him in years. I probably wouldn’t even recognize him if he walked into the diner.”

Too late she realized it sounded like she was trying way too hard to convince Ginger about just how no-big-deal it was. A clear case of “she who doth protest too much.”

Fortunately, Ginger was too wrapped up in her own problems to pay much attention. “Guess I’d better get back out there before the customers start a mutiny.”

Isabel said “Sure” in an easy voice. But when she went back into the kitchen and picked up her knife, her hands were shaking.

This was usually the time of day she liked best, when the dinner crush had erupted in organized chaos; but it was hard to focus on her job, impossible to stop her brain from rewinding, from retracing the steps that had brought her here. To this diner on the lake.

Ten years had passed since the day she’d bought the run-down building on Blue Mountain Lake’s small main street. At that time, the town had barely been more than a grocery store, a post office, a liquor store, and a gas station. Lately, though, she’d step outside to mail a letter and surprise would catch her at just how far the small town had come.

A bustling café that often housed live music occupied an old white post-and-beam house on the corner. Anderson’s Market, a grocery store that had been around since her grandparents had built their cabin on the lake, had done major upgrades in the past couple of years, going so far as to stock organic fruits and vegetables all year long, rather than just July and August to appease the summer folks. And the Inn now had huge plantings of bright flowers all along the fence that bordered the street.

Only the knitting store was showing signs of wear and tear. Isabel remembered learning to knit on the comfortable couches in the middle of the store one summer when Josh was still an infant—mostly for the help of extra hands to take her baby, less because she had any affinity whatsoever for yarn.

After her divorce, the only thing that had made sense was to leave the city and settle in Blue Mountain Lake permanently. Her heart had always been there, waiting September through May for June fifteenth to roll around again. By the time she and Brian split, she’d been a full-time mom for five years, but everything changed once she took off her wedding ring. It wasn’t okay to let her ex support them anymore.

Josh had made it through his childhood and early teens relatively unscathed, in large part, she believed, because Blue Mountain Lake was a world apart from the fast-moving city she’d grown up in. It helped a great deal that cell phones hadn’t made their way into town until recently. Because of the thick forests throughout the Adirondacks—and a blanket unwillingness to rent out land for cell towers on the part of the locals—cell reception had been little to none in most parts of town.

Over the years, as cell phones had become increasingly popular, Isabel often had to swallow a laugh at summer visitors standing in the middle of a canoe on the lake waving their cell phones in the air trying desperately to stay connected to their fast-paced lives back home.

Wasn’t that the whole point of coming to Blue Mountain Lake? To get away from everything they needed to get away from?

It was what she’d done.

Her first day back in town she’d seen the FOR SALE sign on the old diner and the lightbulb had gone on. Cooking had always been her passion, the best way to settle her nerves at the end of a long, irritating day.

Fortunately, living full-time in the lakefront cabin had given her the freedom to use her savings to lease and fix up the old diner. And in the end, having to figure out how to cook, day in and day out, for paying customers, learning how to hire other cooks and waitstaff and be a good boss to them, was the perfect way to get over her divorce. To get past it.

Long hours behind the stove or hunched over her computer in the office going over payroll helped her turn down the volume on the things she and Brian had said to each other at the end, the horrible accusations he’d made.

“Did you ever really love me, Isabel?” he’d asked. “Was there ever enough room in your heart for both me and him?”

Dampness crept between her breasts, across her forehead. The Big M was creeping up on her. More and more often she found herself tangled up in sweaty sheets in the middle of the night. She didn’t mind at all the thought of not having a period anymore. That had never been her best week of the month.

What got to her was the sense that she wasn’t going to be a real woman anymore. That forty-eight would turn to fifty in the blink of an eye and she’d be nothing more than a dried-up old woman. That her best years would be far behind her.

As she moved through the kitchen and into the blissfully cool walk-in refrigerator to check the stock, she knew it wasn’t fair to paint the past as bad. As a kid, she’d spent many happy rainy afternoons at the original diner’s counter, sipping milkshakes and malts, giggling with her friends over the cute boys. Thirty-five years later, the picture hadn’t changed much. Every summer, girls on the verge of becoming full-blown women came in through her doors in cutoff shorts and flip-flops and giggled with their friends over the boys they’d seen that day on the beach.

Sometimes in her dreams she still felt like one of those girls. Unlike Ginger, fifteen hadn’t been bad for Isabel. Just the opposite, in fact.

Fifteen was when she’d met … well, there was no point in going back there.

Caitlyn, a lovely twenty-two-year-old who had a way with greens, poked her head in. “Oh, Isabel, you’re in here. Just making sure the door hadn’t been left open.”

Isabel knew she must look like a crazy lady standing in the refrigerator staring at nothing. Grabbing a couple of eggplants and a fistful of carrots from a metal shelf, she took them over to the sink and washed them. She was drying her hands on a brightly printed dish towel when Ginger came back into the kitchen carrying a special.

“Is there something wrong with the food?” Isabel asked.

“No. It was Connor’s. But he’s gone.”

Just then, Isabel heard a loud crack from behind her. She turned around just in time to see the upper hinge on the back kitchen door finally pull free from the wall, leaving a rusty hole on the white door.

As they stood there watching the door swing back and forth haphazardly on its remaining hinge, Isabel couldn’t help but feel that it was a bad omen.

The horror movie had sucked. Big-time. But Josh Wilcox didn’t care. He couldn’t have concentrated on it anyway. Not with Hannah sitting right next to him. She’d grabbed his arm during one scene where the doll’s head spun off and blood spurted everywhere. It had been awesome.

Everyone else had to get home after the movie, but Josh knew his mother would be at the diner until eleven at least. He had plenty of time before he needed to get home.

“It’s pretty dark out,” Hannah said when their friends dropped them off on Main Street.

He wasn’t sure if she was hinting, but he dared a, “Want me to walk you home?” anyway.

She smiled at him and they headed down to the beach. Hannah’s house wasn’t far from Main, unlike his, which was halfway around the lake. He could bike the route into town in his sleep.

There were several campfires going and Hannah said, “Can you believe that I’ve never had a s’more?”

He turned around and tried not to stare at her like a total dork. “Seriously?”

“Weird, huh?” she said, looking a little embarrassed. “Maybe you could show me how to make one sometime?”

His heartbeat kicked up as he nodded in a way that he already knew was a little too enthusiastic. But he couldn’t help himself. Not when this was his chance to shine. Because everyone knew that he was a master s’more maker.

“Sure.” They were nearly at her house now. “How about tonight?” Then it occurred to him. “You probably don’t have the stuff for it, though.”

But she nodded, and said, “Actually, I do.” He sat on her dock as she ran up to her house and came back with graham crackers and marshmallows and chocolate and matches.