Take the Long Way Home (8 page)

He’d been relieved to discover he actually
was pretty smart—not a scholar, not a genius, but he knew how to
learn. Years of football training had taught him discipline. Hard
work wasn’t exactly a new concept to him. But Ashley hadn’t wanted
him working hard at anything except whatever would lead to a career
in professional sports. She’d resented him for telling her he
couldn’t phone her every night because he had to study. She’d been
pissed off that he no longer had money to spend on her. When he’d
traveled from his parents’ new home in Maine to Brogan’s Point to
visit Ashley during the Christmas holiday that first year of
college, she’d broken up with him. Clearly, she’d wanted nothing to
do with some ordinary college student sweating bullets to make good
grades. She’d wanted a star.

She’d found one, a nose guard from her own
school. They’d gotten married a week after graduation. They’d
gotten divorced less than a year later.

Apparently, she’d come around to thinking
that a doctor was almost as prestigious as a professional football
player. Somehow, she’d found out that he was now a graduate of
U-Michigan’s medical school, doing his residency at Mass General,
and he was once again good enough for her.

He’d loved Ashley once. Maybe he could love
her again. After she’d ended things with him and he’d immersed
himself in pre-med studies, he hadn’t had much time to socialize.
He’d lacked the time and energy for love. He’d had a few drive-by
relationships, but nothing significant, no one who came close to
replacing her in his heart.

When Ashley had contacted him a month ago,
he’d been surprised. What they’d once had was now ancient history.
He’d had no illusions that they would pick up where they’d left
off, but he’d been curious.

Just as he was curious about Maeve Nolan.
She might have been a freak back in high school, but they weren’t
in high school anymore. She intrigued him. She was courageous
enough to open her own shop, and enough of a magician to fill that
shop with an aroma that could be bottled and sold as an
aphrodisiac. And unlike Ashley, she’d never broken his heart.

He chewed his sandwich, watching her as she
watched him. It occurred to him that she expected him to say
something more than that abandoning the within-reach dream of a
professional football career for the far greater challenge—for him,
at least—of pursuing a medical career had been crazy.

In fact, sometimes he thought that choice
had been the sanest move he’d ever made.

“I’m no genius,” he admitted, smiling
sheepishly. He was just stating the obvious, but maybe she didn’t
know that. Maybe she really thought he was brilliant. “A lot of
medical training is just memorization. You don’t have to be
Michelangelo with a scalpel to be a good orthopedist. Bones are
bones. Joints are joints. Connective tissue is connective tissue.
Orthopedics is one of the more mechanical specialties. It’s
engineering.”

“But you really enjoy it,” she said.

His enthusiasm must have leaked through his
bland description of his work. Funny, but Ashley had never even
asked if he enjoyed what he was doing, let alone sensed how much he
did.

Stop comparing Maeve to
Ashley
. He popped a few fries into his
mouth, savoring their unhealthy coating of salt. One thing he’d
learned as a medical resident was that knowing what was healthy
didn’t always lead doctors to make healthy choices. He’d been
stunned that several residents who’d started with him at Mass
General smoked. Less stunned but bemused by the dangerously heavy
drinking some of his colleagues indulged in, and their abuse of
sleep aids and amphetamines, helping them get through their
ridiculously long shifts. Scarfing down greasy, salty fries seemed
pretty benign in comparison to some of his colleagues’ bad
habits.

“Yeah,” he said, responding as much to the
sinful but delicious flavor of the fries as to Maeve’s comment. “I
really enjoy it.”

“It isn’t always easy to know what you’re
meant to do,” she said, her eyes steady on him. They reminded him
of sunlight on the ocean—green and gray, with those golden glints
of light in their depths. “But if you’re lucky enough to figure it
out, you have to do it. It sounds like you’ve figured out what
you’re meant to do.”

She made the process seem so simple, as if
he might have found his way to medicine even if that Ohio State
tackle hadn’t sacked him, as if the years of doubt, the financial
crises, the all-nighters and stress and the loss of the girl he’d
once imagined marrying hadn’t tied his life in knots.

Maybe, to Maeve Nolan,
it
was
that
simple. She’d clearly figured out what she was meant to do. Not
that he had any idea of her business plan or whether her shop would
survive, let alone flourish. Not that he had a clue whether her
cookies were good enough to justify the prices she’d written on
that whiteboard behind the counter in Cookie’s.

Screw that. He
knew
they would be that
good. He’d smelled them, and that smell had taken him
home.

Perhaps it was because she’d grown up in a
seaside town that Maeve often felt she was on a boat—a small
dinghy, or maybe a life raft. When her mother had died, she’d felt
as if that tiny boat was caught in an ocean storm. She’d been far
from shore, buffeted by violent waves, without oars or a sail. All
she could do was cling to the gunwales and pray that the boat
wouldn’t capsize or a rogue wave wouldn’t crash over the side and
sweep her away.

During the past few years, the storm had
abated. Preparing for the opening of Cookie’s, she sometimes
actually felt as if she were standing on dry land. Her footsteps
were sure, her legs no longer wobbly, her vision no longer
swaying.

Listening to Quinn tonight,
she was out at sea again. Nothing was quite steady. Her
surroundings seemed unfamiliar. Yet the waves were gentle, and the
boat beneath her soothed her with its rocking.
You may not be home
, she told
herself,
but wherever you are, this is
really nice.

So he wasn’t the hot-shot jock she’d
believed him to be. He wasn’t the self-assured alpha dog he’d
seemed in high school. He was a doctor, eager to work miracles like
the doctors who’d fixed his broken leg. He was attentive and
soft-spoken and…

Nice. She hadn’t expected
him to be nice—in her experience, no guy as handsome as Quinn ever
turned out to be nice. But he was. Really, truly
nice.

Her lobster roll tasted delicious. She
hadn’t realized how hungry she was until she’d taken the first bite
and her body had hummed with gratitude. She’d been working the
entire day, and other than the fruit and cheese she’d packed for
herself that morning, all she’d eaten had been a peanut-butter
cookie that had fallen off the spatula and broken while she’d been
transferring it from the cooking tray to a container, and a
date-nut bar that gotten burnt around the edges. She drank her
coffee black, so no nourishment there. For most of the day, she’d
been on her feet, fueled only by caffeine and those few small
snacks.

Now, at last, she was sitting, relaxing, and
eating something substantial. The mayo in the lobster salad had
been spiced with a touch of curry that added zing to it, and the
roll had a deliciously crunchy crust. Honestly, though, she would
have been happy to sit here eating dry saltines and drinking clam
juice. Everything tasted delicious when you were in good
company.

To her amazement, Quinn Connor was good
company. In high school, she had never even said hello to him.
She’d assumed they were alien species, unable to cross the gulf
that separated his tribe from hers—if, all by herself, she could
qualify as a tribe. He’d spoken the language of success; she’d
spoken the language of despair.

She’d also assumed she’d been more or less
invisible back then. At least she’d tried to be. She hadn’t wanted
anyone to notice her, since any attention she received had usually
brought pity with it. She’d hated being pitied.

“All we’ve done is talk about me,” he said
after polishing off the last of his sandwich. “Tell me about you.
How did you wind up becoming a champion cookie maker?”

“I don’t know if I’m a champion,” she said
with a modest laugh. “I used to bake with my mother, though. It was
a special thing we did together. After she died, I found a
loose-leaf notebook of hers, filled with cookie recipes. She would
take traditional recipes and add her own twists. Butter-nut cookies
flavored with coffee, or lemon cookies sweetened with honey. Some
of her experiments worked better than others, but she took notes on
everything and put them in her book.”

“Kind of like a lab notebook,” he said, then
reached across the table and gave her hand a squeeze. “I’m sorry
about your mother. I didn’t know.”

His touch surprised her, yet it also felt
right. His hand enveloped hers, large and warm. She supposed
football players needed large hands in order to hold and throw that
strange-shaped ball. But the warmth—that was unexpected. And
welcome.

After a moment, he withdrew his hand, as if
he’d suddenly had second thoughts about touching her. He smiled
hesitantly. “So your store is like a tribute to her. You’re keeping
her alive by baking her cookies.”

“I hadn’t thought about it
that way,” Maeve admitted. It was a lovely notion, though. “The
store…” Should she tell him? Would he think she was nuts? If he
did, so what? She’d long ago stopped caring what people thought of
her. “The store came about because I was selling my cookies through
a café where I was working in Seattle, and this man—Harry—loved
them. He thought I should have my own store, so…” What Harry had
done for her
did
sound nuts. But here she was, because of him. “He bought the
shop on Seaview Avenue from the Torellis and gave it to
me.”

“Wow! I wish I had friends like that.” Quinn
laughed.

“Harry was special. He was always telling me
I should come back to Brogan’s Point, I really didn’t belong in
Seattle, my father was here. And he was—well, I didn’t realize how
rich he was until he died. He left me the shop and some start-up
money in his will.”

“Wow.” No longer laughing, Quinn sounded
thoughtful. “This guy must have been really significant in your
life.”

She recalled her father’s suspicion when
she’d mentioned Harry to him. Of course her father would be
suspicious. He was a police detective. Skepticism was bred in his
bones.

Quinn seemed much more respectful of the
elderly gentleman who’d befriended her in Seattle. His tone didn’t
imply that he thought Harry might have had ulterior motives, or
Maeve might have been in some sort of sleazy relationship with him
to justify his generous bequest.

“I didn’t realize how significant he was
until he died,” she admitted. “We were friends. He’d come to
Seattle on business, stop in at the café where I worked, eat my
cookies and visit with me. He was such a sweet man. I could talk to
him. I was…kind of alone while I was living out there.” Just as
she’d been alone in Brogan’s Point, once her mother had died and
her father had basically gone AWOL. “Harry was someone I could talk
to.”

It struck her that she
could talk to Quinn, too. She
was
talking to him. She found it easier to understand
her friendship with an elderly businessman who’d stop by to see her
when he was in Seattle than this unexpected rapport with a boy
who’d awed and intimidated her all through high school. Quinn
wasn’t a boy now, and as with Harry, she found confiding in him
surprisingly easy. Just as his having reached across the table to
touch her hand had seemed easy.

Quinn continued to regard her thoughtfully.
When the waitress approached their table and asked if they wanted
dessert, Quinn eyed Maeve, who shook her head. He asked for the
check, but his gaze never left Maeve. “Some people would think you
were lucky to have a rich guy buy you a store and give you enough
money to get your business off the ground,” he said. “But it wasn’t
luck. You worked damned hard for this.”

She shook her head and grinned. “How would
you know how hard I work?”

“You’re putting in more hours than most
medical residents.”

“I’m hoping things will lighten up once we
open.”

The waitress returned with the check. Quinn
stood and pulled a few bills from his wallet. Then he offered Maeve
his hand and helped her to her feet.

Outside on the wharf where
the Lobster Shack stood, the sky was dark and the air was nippy.
Maeve wished she’d brought a jacket, but when she’d bid Cookie
farewell that morning, she’d expected to be driving directly back
to her apartment when she was done working—and she’d expected to be
done working a bit earlier. Maybe she
had
put in a medical resident’s hours
today, but she was sure that once she worked out her routines and
rhythms, her work load would ease.

And if it didn’t, she’d work long hours. She
was determined to make Cookie’s a success. She owed it to Harry,
after what he’d done for her. Maybe she owed it to her mother, too,
if Quinn was right and the shop was a way to keep her mother’s
memory alive.

A cold gust of wind off the water caused her
to shiver. Quinn wrapped an arm around her shoulders and drew her
closer to him. His torso was as warm as his hand had been, as if he
had an internal oven heating him. Cuddling up to him didn’t seem
appropriate, but she was cold and he was willing to share his
warmth.

She ought to thank him, and clarify that his
casual embrace meant nothing, but although she moved her lips, no
sound emerged. Walking along the wharf with him this way felt too
good.