Take the Long Way Home (6 page)

Now that she’d somehow succeeded in floating
back up to the surface, she would have to enter that house.
Eventually. Not now. Not yet.

“When?” she asked. Maybe next week she would
be ready. After Cookie’s had opened. After things had settled down.
After she was able to wrap her mind around the notion that this
town was once again her home.

“Tonight? My shifts end around five-thirty,
as long as no one gets murdered in the next few hours. Gus can get
Manny to cover for her at the bar for a few hours. Tonight’s a slow
night there—”

“I can’t,” Maeve said. She wasn’t ready, she
was too scared. But she couldn’t tell her father, a brave police
detective, that she was afraid to enter his house. “I’m timing the
ovens today, working out the logistics. I’ll be here late.” That
wasn’t a lie.

“Tomorrow, then. Or the day after. Pick a
day.”

She hated the pleading undertone in his
voice. It made her feel guilty. But still… “Maybe after the shop
opens and I’ve got a better handle on things,” she said, cringing
at how lame her excuse sounded.

Her father didn’t say anything for a minute.
Then: “Maeve. I want to see you. I want us to talk. We have…some
stuff to work out, you know?”

Of course she knew. Harry hadn’t just left
her this shop in his will because he loved her cookies, or because
he had faith in her entrepreneurial skills. He’d done it because he
thought she needed to heal the wounds between her father and
herself.

He was right. She did.

So she’d come back to Brogan’s Point. She’d
quit her job at the Stonehouse Café, uprooted herself from Seattle,
bought a not-bad used car, packed it with her belongings, locked a
protesting Cookie in a crate on the front passenger seat with some
catnip toys to keep her occupied, and driven three thousand miles.
Surely she was allowed to take her time traveling the last few
steps.

“Store or no store, you still have to eat,”
he said, sounding ridiculously paternal.

“We’ll figure something out,” she told him.
“I promise. Just let me get through…” The next few days. The next
few minutes. “I’m beta-testing the ovens,” she said in as cheerful
a voice as she could muster. “Stop by later today. I’ll let you
beta-test the cookies.”

“I’ll do that.” He sounded
more cheerful, too. She wasn’t rejecting
him
, after all. She was just
rejecting the idea of entering the house where she’d lost so much,
the house she’d had to flee to save her sanity.

The oven timer dinged. “I’ve got to go, Dad.
If I don’t, the batch in the oven will char. I’ll see you this
afternoon, okay?”

“I’ll be there. Save me a cookie that isn’t
burned.”

She hung up, grabbed her mitts and slid the
tray out of the oven. The cookies looked perfect.

Two hours later, she’d baked several
successful batches and eaten most of her apple. One of the
mix-masters was a little sluggish, but it got the job done. Harry
had bought the mixers, along with pretty much all the other
appliances, pans, trays, and utensils, from Sal Torelli when he’d
purchased the building. She might have chosen newer equipment,
maybe different makes and models, but this shop was the proverbial
gift horse, and she couldn’t complain about the condition of its
teeth.

She’d brought her scoops from Seattle,
though. Once Lenny had expanded her waitressing job to include
baking cookies for the café, she’d purchased different sized batter
scoops to insure that the cookies would have uniformity of size.
The bar pans had removable dividers which would guarantee that all
her brownies and blondies were the same size, too. She’d learned a
lot about quality control while working at the Stonehouse Café.

Joyce arrived at noon, as promised. A
cheerful, robust woman in her late thirties, with short,
peroxide-platinum hair, a buxom figure, and a tiny nose ring, she
was exactly the colleague Maeve needed. She knew the facility, knew
the town, knew the clientele who used to buy pastries at Torelli’s.
Hopefully, some of that clientele would return to the location to
buy cookies from Maeve.

“It smells fabulous in here. You’ve been
baking, huh. Ooh, nice cappuccino machine,” Joyce said as she
admired Maeve’s recent acquisition. “And I see you got a new cash
register, too. I pleaded with Sal to update his machine so we could
accept debit cards, but he was a cash-and-credit kind of guy. How
are the ovens working for you?”

Maeve handed her one of the molasses-almond
cookies. “Try this.”

Joyce bit into the cookie, closed her eyes
and groaned. “Oh, my God. That’s amazing!”

“Then I guess the ovens are working.”

The phone rang. After tossing Joyce an apron
identical to her own, embossed with the Cookie’s logo—the O’s
replaced by chocolate chip cookies—Maeve answered the phone. “When
is your store opening?” the caller asked.

Unlike Joyce’s groan, Maeve’s was not the
result of having bitten into a scrumptious cookie. For the tenth
time that day, she told her caller Cookie’s would be open for
business Saturday at ten. “Next time the phone rings,” she told
Joyce, “you’re answering it.”

As it happened, Joyce did answer it the next
time it rang. She was in the front, arranging decorative paper
doilies on the shelves inside the glass showcases while Maeve was
in the kitchen, sliding a small batch of butterscotch blondies into
the oven. Through the open door connecting the two work spaces, she
heard Joyce say, “Good afternoon, you’ve reached Torelli’s—oops, I
mean Cookie’s! My bad!”

All right, so she wasn’t perfect. She was
close enough.

“Sure, let me see if she’s available,” Maeve
heard Joyce say.

She cringed. Was it her father again,
nagging her about dinner? Or maybe his girlfriend, Gus, hoping
could succeed where Maeve’s father had failed?

Maeve set the oven timer, then took the
handset Joyce handed her through the open door. “Hello?” she said,
not bothering to filter her annoyance from her tone.

“Maeve,” a familiar voice, deep and
supremely male, said. “Hi. It’s Quinn Connor.”

Quinn.
She pictured him the way he’d looked yesterday in the shop,
sipping coffee, telling her he’d like to hear about her long way
home. Quinn, with his black hair and pale eyes, his tall, athletic
physique. His sheer beauty.

Yesterday, and now today.
Why was he interested in her? What did he
really
want?

Probably what he
really
wanted was to find
out when Cookie’s was going to open. But he wasn’t asking.
Belatedly, she realized he was waiting for her to speak. “Hi,” she
said, then felt like an idiot.

“I’m working right now, but… This is kind of
crazy, but I thought maybe we could get together later tonight and
grab a bite to eat.”

“I’m working, too,” she said, then heard
herself echo her father. “I guess I do have to eat, though.”

“It would be late,” he added. “I’m on until
eight tonight. I could get to Brogan’s Point by nine.”

He was “on” doing what? Where would he be
coming from? She knew nothing about him, other than who he’d been
ten years ago.

Yet…his blue, blue eyes. His easy smile. All
that charisma emanating from him, as enticing as the aromas
emanating from the ovens… “I’ll still be at the shop then, if you
want to stop by,” she said. Just as well that she’d be working late
into the evening. She didn’t want him viewing her barely furnished
apartment with its alley view. Cookie might not welcome him,
either. She tended to be skittish around men, especially tall men.
Quinn was tall.

“Great. I’ll head up once my shift is done,
and we’ll—whoa. Gotta run. I’ll see you later.” A click, and the
line went dead.

We’ll what? What will we do?

Had Quinn
Connor—
the
Quinn
Connor, golden boy, gridiron star, king of Brogan’s Point High
School—just asked Maeve out for dinner? What about Ashley, his
golden-girl queen? And…what about Maeve? She was no golden girl, no
star. Not an ounce of royalty in her entire body. She was just part
of the scenery.

Just part of the scenery?
Where did
that
thought come from? A song lyric, she realized. From the song
at the Faulk Street Tavern.

Pressing the “off” button
on the handset, she shook her head. The oven timer dinged, but all
she heard was that song.
Take the long way
home. Take the long way home.

The shop’s front door was locked, but lights
glowed inside. Quinn rapped the door gently with his knuckles. At
one time, he would have been able to make more noise tapping the
glass with his bulky high school ring. He’d worn it religiously
from the day he’d received it, two months into his senior year at
Brogan’s Point High, until the disaster a year later that had sent
him to the hospital, dizzy with the understanding that the life
he’d been living up to that moment, the life he’d expected to keep
living for the next couple of decades, was over.

Now that he was performing surgery, a ring
would only get in his way. He needed to be nimble, his surgical
gloves as snug as skin on his hands.

High school was a decade behind him. And he
had to admit that the ring, with its clunky engraving flanking a
garish chunk of faceted blue glass, had been pretty ugly. But the
most important reason he no longer wore the ring was that Ashley
had given it to him. He couldn’t afford the hundred-fifty-buck
price tag, but she’d insisted that, as a star athlete and class
leader, he had to have a ring. She’d bought one for herself and one
for him.

They’d almost seemed like pre-engagement
rings. Back then, he and Ashley had been a capital-C Couple,
destined for ’til-death-do-us-part.

The decade between when Ashley had given him
his class ring and today felt more like a century. Everything that
had occurred ten years ago had been a part of some other life,
happening to some other Quinn.

Peering through the front window, he saw a
shadow flicker across the glass pane, and then Maeve loomed into
view, entering the store from a back room, circling the counter and
crossing to the door. She wore a white apron over a long-sleeved
tee and a pair of jeans. Smiling hesitantly, she tugged a clip out
of her hair, letting it spill loose past her shoulders as she
reached for the door, twisted a bolt, and pulled it open. “I didn’t
want to leave it unlocked at this hour,” she explained before he
could say hello. “I’m here all alone.”

Oh, God. The aroma.

He stepped inside and inhaled so deeply, his
lungs felt as if they’d burst. The shop smelled like heaven. It
smelled like…home.

At one time in his life,
locker rooms were his home. He’d enter one and his nose would
welcome the heavy, sour smell of sweat and mud and testosterone.
When he was in a locker room, he knew not just where he was
but
who
he was.
Ashley used to bathe herself in flowery scents, perfume or bath oil
or whatever, and he used to want to say, “Don’t bother. I like the
smell of dirty socks.”

His being a jock wasn’t the only reason he’d
always appreciated smells others might find offensive. His father
was a fisherman. Quinn’s earliest memories were of his father
coming home from a day, or sometimes several days, out at sea on a
trawler. He’d smell of cod and the Atlantic, of rubber boots and
grease. Some might consider it a bad smell, or at least a strong
one, but it had been the smell of his father, the smell of a safe
homecoming.

Then, of course, Quinn’s athletic talent had
taken over, and the small, shingled ranch house where the Connors
family had lived filled with competing fragrances: his father’s
work clothes and boots, and Quinn’s cleats, pads, and jerseys.
Healthy smells, he’d always thought. Both he and his father bathed
frequently, washed their hair, made use of deodorants and
aftershave. But underlying those clean smells were the riper,
muskier scents of manhood, of hard work and pride.

Lately, hospital smells were his life:
alcohol, iodine, pine-scented antiseptic cleaning agents. Also
blood and bile, the stink of illness—although as an orthopedist, he
dealt more often with injuries than with disease. But he liked the
hospital smells, too. They were smells of healing, recovering,
journeying back to wholeness.

Now this: the smell of cookies baking. Not
just cookies—Maeve Nolan’s cookies.

He’d smelled baking before. His mother threw
together an occasional cake or pie on birthdays and at
Thanksgiving, and Ashley had made cookies for him all through high
school—it was a cheerleader tradition to bake for the football
players, although she’d confessed to him that her cookies were made
using mixes. He’d eaten the treats she’d baked for him, though.
They’d tasted fine. In those days, he’d always been trying to gain
weight. Eating whatever Ashley fed him had been a good way to do
that.

The smell in Maeve Nolan’s cookie store was
different. He smelled spices he couldn’t name. He smelled a rich,
buttery fragrance and the dark perfume of molasses. Chocolate.
Vanilla. Honey.

Maeve’s store should not
smell like home to him. But he couldn’t shake idea that it
was
home. This smell—the
complex of sweet and bitter aromas, the warmth of it, the
mouth-watering glory of it—
this
was home.

Damn. Just breathing here turned him on.

It had to be the smell that was making him
hard. It couldn’t be Maeve. Today, like yesterday, she had a blotch
of flour on her chin. She was taller than average, kind of thin,
her shoulders slumped and her freshly liberated hair limp around a
face that exuded weariness more than delight at seeing him. Then
again, why should she be delighted to see him? He wasn’t sure why
he was here, either.