The Coldwater Warm Hearts Club (28 page)

She arched a skeptical brow at him. “How would you do that?”

“I worked construction in Brownsville from time to time,” he said. “Long enough to learn how to pound nails into shingles. I could do it. Will you let me?”

“We'll see. It's time you were going now.” She turned to Lacy and Jake. “Thank you for coming with him, kids.” Then she glanced at Lester, stepped inside, and hooked the screen between them. “If you're serious about this amends business, I expect you to mow the yard on Sunday afternoon.”

“I'll be here, Glenda. Count on it.” Lester started down the steps, but then stopped himself and turned back to face her. “I can't thank you enough, babe.”

“Don't ‘babe' me. Just mow my yard,” she said and shut the storm door with a hard click. Then through the door, Lacy heard, “And don't be thinking I'll invite you in when you're done.”

 

—from the Sports section of the
Coldwater Gazette

 

 

 

“W
ell, that was intense,” Jake said after they dropped Lester at Mr. Bunn's house and watched him climb the exterior stairs to his studio apartment over the garage. Lacy slid across the bench seat to take advantage of the breeze coming through the open window.

“I didn't think Mrs. Scott was going to let Lester do anything for her at first,” Jake said.

“I wouldn't have blamed her,” Lacy said. “It's a wonder she even allowed him on the porch.”

“The way she pulled herself up after he left is pretty impressive. You have to admire her for getting some training and making something of her life.”

“Guess it was easier without that deadweight.”

Jake glanced at her sharply. Sometimes, he didn't find the things rolling around in Lacy's head nearly as attractive as she was. Of course, sometimes there were things in his head that ought to send her running away screaming, too. He'd had another flashback last night, triggered by nothing more sinister than a thunderstorm rolling through the area. He didn't want to admit it, even to himself, but the episodes were becoming more frequent. And more intensely real.

“Why would you call Lester deadweight?” Concentrating on Lester helped Jake shove aside his own issue. He knew it wasn't doing much good trying to run from this one, but he wasn't ready to bare his soul to some stranger at the new Bates College clinic. Even if it was free for veterans.

“I know Lester is no prize,” Jake said. “But he's still a person.”

“A person who treated his family like dirt,” Lacy countered. “Daniel didn't ever tell me much about what went on, but just from the things he didn't say, I know his father put him through a trial by fire when he was growing up.”

Jake knew even better than Lacy how bad it had been for Daniel. It was a good thing Danny had told Jake about his plan to waylay his father that night just weeks before their graduation. If Jake hadn't been there to stop him once the beating began, Daniel had been out of control enough to have killed Lester then and there. And would've ruined his own life in the process.

But even though Jake was sorry about Dan's rough upbringing, he really didn't need an old boyfriend invading his time with Lacy.

“Are you still hung up on Daniel?”

“No, of course I'm not still hung up on Daniel.” Lacy rolled her baby blues at him. “He's married, remember, and besides, I heard he got back together with his wife.”

“Must have overlooked that bit of gossip.”

“Aw, did you miss a call from the Methodist prayer chain again?”

“Cute.” Jake grimaced at her. He wasn't on the chain's phone tree, but if he listened to his customers at the grill, he usually heard everything happening around town that was worth knowing.

“I do pray for people, you know.” And whether he was on the prayer chain or not, he
had
prayed for Dan to reconcile with Annie. It was the best way to make sure Lacy didn't end up with her old flame.

“People besides me?”

“Besides you. You should try it sometime,” Jake said. “You never know if it will help them, but I guarantee it'll help you. It's hard to dislike somebody when you're praying for them. Like Lester, for instance.”

“You want me to pray for Lester? He's a pretty horrible person,” Lacy pointed out. “At least, he was.”

“You're right. He was a total loser, but ‘was' is the operative word. Besides, if we only pray for people who deserve it, we won't pray at all,” Jake said. “Lester is trying to make some changes now. That's hard for anybody and he has farther to go than most. How about cutting him a little slack?”

“All right. And if it'll make you happy, I'll pray for him, too,” Lacy said. “I'm sorry to be so cranky. It's just, well, I've had a hard day.”

“Want to tell me about it? I've got a good shoulder to cry on. It's yours for the taking.” He lifted his arm to invite her to snuggle closer. She slipped off her seat belt and slid across the truck's bench seat.

Lacy sighed as she leaned into him. “I did something today that I should be feeling good about, something the Warm Hearts Club would approve, I'm sure. I know it was the right thing to do. Heather claims it makes her happy when she does something good for someone else, but to be honest, I'm kind of depressed about it. Does that make me a bad person?”

“Never. Whatever it was you did must have been hard for you. In my book that makes you an even better person. If we only do something good because it's easy, we might as well be bad.”

“No worries on that score,” she said with a chuckle. “I'm pretty sure it's the bad stuff that's easy most of the time.”

“What was it you did?”

She sat upright and scooted back over to her side of the bench seat. “If I go through it all again, I'll just start second-guessing myself and there's no going back on this. I can only go forward and muddle through the best I can.”

Jake pulled his truck into the small parking lot behind Lacy's building and cut the engine. “I wonder if that's how Glenda Scott felt when Lester left—like she could only go forward and muddle through.”

“No,” Lacy said after some thought. “To do what she did, she had to give up feeling bitter about what was past. She had to let it go.”

Jake knew something about that. For months after he lost his leg, bitterness had threatened to unman him. Losing a limb meant going through a period of grief. Finally, he'd stopped asking why he'd survived when others didn't, or why he'd lost his leg when others came back from deployment without a scratch. Jake had come to a place of acceptance. Then he took stock of himself and decided what to keep and what to throw away. Bitterness was the first thing to go.

But while he had made good progress in his physical rehabilitation, his mind was betraying him more often with flashbacks and periods of hypervigilance. In some ways, that was worse than losing the leg.

Jake squeezed his eyes shut, trying to block out the problem. Back to Lester. That was the ticket.

“Do you think the fact that Mrs. Scott is letting Lester mow her yard means that in some part of her heart, she's already forgiven him?”

“If she has, she's a better woman than me.”

He reached over and stroked her hair. “Not possible.”

“You silver-tongued devil, you.” She flashed him a dazzling smile. “But you're wrong. I've been awfully bitter about what happened in Boston. I need to let it go if I want to move on.”

He liked the sound of that if it meant she was moving in his direction. “Well, this is way too serious a conversation for a Tuesday night. I got some salmon steaks marinating and a bottle of Chardonnay chilling over at my place.”

“Sure you want to cook after working over the grill all day?”

“As long as I'm cooking with you.” Over the course of the last month or so, they'd developed a rhythm between them in the kitchen, a give and take that Jake hoped was a sign of good things to come in other parts of the house. “I'll even let you pick the after-dinner movie.”

The on-demand feature on his satellite TV gave them tons of options.

Lacy climbed out of the truck, closed the door, and leaned on the open window frame. “What if I want to see a chick flick?”

“In that case, I'll sleep with my eyes open and try not to snore.”

“Oh, poor you! And after I yawned my way through that soccer match last night. Hours wasted on guys chasing a ball around and it still ended in a draw.” She came around the truck to the driver's side and punched his shoulder playfully through his open window.

“Hey!” After a bit of creative self-defense that involved using his beat-up atlas as a shield, he caught up her hand and kissed her knuckles. “Seriously. Whatever you want, Lace. A girl who made a tough decision she's not happy about deserves to get her way a little.”

She gave him a heart-melting smile. “What I don't deserve is you, Jake.”

“Too bad. You got me anyway.”

She stood on tiptoe, leaned in, and kissed him.

It was one of those kisses. The kind she took her time about, the ones that had him thinking all sorts of wonderful wicked things . . .

Then she pulled away and headed up the iron stairs that led to her apartment. “I'll just feed the attack cat and be right over.” She stopped on the bottom step. “Oh! And before we start supper, you need to water your plants. I noticed they were looking a little droopy earlier.”

“My plants?” The only plants he had were in the pint-sized herb garden growing on the windowsill in his kitchen. Jake knew they were doing just fine since he regularly used snippets of them in his dishes.

“You know what I mean. The barrel of flowers the town put out on the corner near the grill. You're supposed to keep it watered and weeded. Remember? See you in a bit.”

Jake watched until she disappeared into her apartment. Then he drove around to the alley behind the Green Apple on the other side of the Square and parked. Speedbump greeted him with a frenetic take-me-out-or-what-happens-to-the-floor-is-your-fault dance. Jake leashed up the dog, grabbed a bucket, which he filled with water for the flower barrel, and made his way around to the corner.

Most of the town's “beautification” barrels were filled with petunias that spilled over the sides in a red riot of fragrant color. For some reason, the barrel nearest the Green Apple got the nursery's leavings and instead of petunias, Jake's was planted with earthy-smelling geraniums and musty poppies.

Speedbump lifted his leg to the barrel.

“Yeah, buddy, that's what I think about it, too.”

Jake's nose twitched. As he dumped the bucket of water on the petals, his vision tunneled and he felt it begin.

 

 

—from the Fighting Marmot Notes section of the
Coldwater Gazette

 

 

L
acy appeased Effie the Demanding with her evening allotment of albacore and was rewarded with a brush of fur on her calves as Effie made her regal way to the supper bowl. The cat was definitely warming up to her.

She was barely out her apartment door when she heard a
kerflump-
ing sound coming up the iron staircase toward her. It stopped suddenly and was followed by a high-pitched whine. She hurried down to find Speedbump straining against his leash, which had become tangled in the iron fretwork on the landing.

“What on earth!” She knelt to free him. “You naughty boy. How did you get away from Jake?”

He couldn't have,
Lacy realized. Speedbump might not be at all the sort of dog a tough guy would be drawn to, but after risking life and limb to save the little bugger, Jake wasn't likely to let him wander off. She glanced down the alley, but Jake wasn't in pursuit.

Grabbing the end of Speedbump's leash, she trotted out to the Square. Perhaps Jake was preoccupied with watering the barrel of flowers nearest the Green Apple and hadn't noticed his dog had gone missing. The streetlights had come on, washing the Town Square in pools of yellowish light.

Jake was nowhere in sight.

She loped across the Square toward the grill, ignoring crosswalks and earning a honk or two from motorists when she failed to wait until they passed by.

Jake had given her a key to the back door of the Green Apple, but she didn't have to use it. The door was ajar. That wasn't like Jake at all. If Lacy had been in Boston, she'd have dialed 911.

Without hesitation, she picked up Speedbump and hurried inside, calling Jake's name.

There was no answer.

Instead, a sharp popping came from the apartment above her head. Even though she'd only heard something like it once back in Boston when she and Shannon had gone clubbing in a dicey neighborhood, she recognized the sound immediately.

Speedbump wiggled out of her arms and flew up the stairs. Not to be outdone by a dog, Lacy followed. But she climbed slowly, ears pricked, dreading what she might find at the top. The sharp scent of a recently discharged weapon assaulted her nostrils.

The blinds had been drawn so only a few slender bars of light from the streetlamps filtered through. Jake's apartment was awash in shades of gray.

She didn't see him anywhere.

But she heard something. It was a wet noise, the gurgling, strangled sound of someone trying not to cry and failing miserably.

There in the dark, Jacob Tyler, the heartbreak of Coldwater High, was weeping like a lost child.

“Jake?”

“Go away.” Then he loosed a string of profanity that made her flinch.

But Lacy was so relieved to hear his voice, she almost didn't care what he'd said. She felt for the nearest light switch and flicked it on. The place looked as if a twister had blown through it—chairs upended, lamps shattered on the hardwood, books torn from the shelves.

Jake was sitting on the floor in the far corner, his Beretta still in his hand. Speedbump had crawled into the space between his legs and, front paws on his chest, was trying to wash Jake's face with doggie kisses. Jake pushed the dog down and Speedbump curled into a quivering ball by his master's foot. Then Jake swiped his own eyes, schooled his features into a hard mask, and glared up at Lacy.

A stranger peered at her from behind his dark eyes.

“Jake, are you hurt?”

He shook his head.

“Then what happened? Was someone trying to rob the place and you interrupted him?”

“No.”

For some unknown reason, his leg was off. The prosthetic was lying crosswise over his good knee. Since he was wearing his camo shorts, Lacy saw his bare stump for the first time.

The reddened skin was stretched tight over the knob. The rest of Jake was so strong, so vital, the missing limb seemed like an insult. A cosmic joke no one found funny.

But he was still Jake and his stump was part of him. She knelt down beside him, eyeing the handgun still in his grasp. “What's going on?”

* * *

Jake had been watering those darn poppies and then, with almost no warning, the whole world went sideways. He remembered desperate snatches of the episode, part of it in Helmand province and part of it in a nightmarish version of Coldwater Cove, but after an image of glistening red petals, his next clear memory was the report of his own weapon.

How he'd gotten back into his apartment and opened the gun safe to retrieve his piece was a total blur. He'd trashed his own place without any of the destruction registering in his brain. Somehow, he'd even taken off his leg.

The “why” of any of it was beyond him.

And he needed to keep it beyond Lacy, too. “Go home.”

“Not until I get some answers.”

“There aren't any.”

Couldn't she see that he was broken? Missing so much more than his leg. There were places in him that were darker than a moonless night, colder than freezing rain.

Oh, he tried to present a brave face to the world. He was a returning hero making the best of the poor hand he'd been dealt. But unlike his missing leg, no one could see the damage Jake had suffered on the inside. He couldn't control it and it was getting worse.

He despised weakness in others. He hated it in himself.

Jake had tried to gloss over the trauma, to pretend it wasn't there. But there was no prosthetic for his mind, no artificial patch to put over his wounded soul. And he had no way of knowing when that damaged part of him would lash out, when the past would intrude on his present with violence.

He didn't want to hurt the people he was supposed to love and protect, the way Lester had.

Jake had no idea what he was doing with the Beretta. What if Lacy had been with him when he'd fired his weapon?

It didn't bear thinking of.

She laid her hand on his knee, close to the spot where his flesh-and-blood calf stopped and his phantom limb began. “Jake, let me in. I want to help.”

“You can't.” Nobody could.

“Then I want to go through this . . . this whatever it is with you while you work it out.”

Who said he ever would? The future was a long dark tunnel, and there was no light at the end of it. He brushed her hand away.

“No.” He didn't trust himself to look at her.

“But, Jake—”

He swore a blue streak. “I said no. Now get out of here. Go back to Boston. It's where you belong anyway.”

“No. I belong here. With you.”

“Not anymore. Coldwater isn't for you. And neither am I. You outgrew both of us years ago.”

She jerked back as if he'd slapped her. Her baby blues welled up.

It made him feel like crap to hurt her, but better this than to let her stay near him when even he didn't know what he might do next.

He held himself rigid, not daring to breathe as she slowly rose and walked toward the stairs that led down to the door to the alley and out of his life. He longed to call her back. Jake had taken his grandmother's ring out of his safety deposit box at the bank a couple of days ago, intending to ask Lacy to marry him. He ached to tell her yes, he wanted her to stay with him, please, God, not just for tonight, but forever. He'd only been waiting for the right time to pop the question.

Now the right time would never come. He let out the breath he'd been holding in a slow, measured stream.

Then she stopped at the head of the steps and looked back at him. He tamped down the wild hope that surged in his chest. He couldn't have it. Couldn't have her.

“I should have known, Jake.”

“What?”

“That you'd break my heart. It's what you do. Love 'em and leave 'em. I should have remembered.”

Couldn't she see it was for her own good? He didn't trust himself to speak. If he did, the words might pour out of his throat before he could get a handle on them and he'd be begging her to stay.

“You made me care about you,” she said softly. “You made me love you. Made me let you in. I can't help it. I love you so much it hurts. Don't you love me back . . . even a little?”

He steeled himself not to answer, but she ought to know anyway. Of course he loved her. He loved her more than his next breath. She was everything he ever wanted.

And shouldn't have.

Which was why he had to send her away and make it stick. If he didn't love her, he'd try to keep her even though he was a dangerous man to be close to. He'd lean on her and use her to try to fill up that damaged place.

But he couldn't do that to Lacy. He loved her too much to chain her to a wreck like him.

“You'll get over it. You're a survivor,” he told her. She'd blown off her attachment to Daniel easily enough. And that Bradford guy. Jake was under no illusion that he was any different. “It's what
you
do.”

“Not this time. I'm done. There's nothing left in me for another go-round. You're the last man I'll ever love.” As she started down the stairs, he heard her say, “Whether I want to or not.”

* * *

Lacy trudged back across the Square toward her place, not sure she'd make it that far. By rights, her heart should stop beating by the time she passed the courthouse, but her feet carried her on. Her vision wavered with unshed tears. She made her way up the stairs to her place more by feel than by sight.

Love was supposed to be joy and flowers and strawberries dipped in dark chocolate.

No one told her it would be like this.

Her insides had been hollowed out. After Bradford, she'd thought she knew what rejection felt like.

His betrayal was nothing compared to this.

She'd been ready to give all that she was to Jake and to accept all of him—the good and the bad. But he didn't love her back. He'd tossed her away as if she were a used tissue.

As soon as her door closed behind her, she slumped to the kitchen floor. Her legs wouldn't support her a second longer. She covered her face with both hands and wept.

Effie meowed, her tail arched into a furry question mark. When Lacy didn't respond, the cat circled her warily before sidling up to her hip and beginning to purr. Lacy ignored her and continued to let the grief pour out of her eyes. After a while, the Siamese rolled onto her side and began kneading Lacy's thigh.

“Oh, all right, cat. If you're trying to say I still have someone who loves me, I get it.” She relented and gave Effie a full-body pat, running her hand over the sleek head and on down to the tip of Effie's tail. “Can you blame me for hoping it would be someone who's a little taller? And doesn't shed.”

Before Lacy had the chance to rise from the floor, her cell phone rang. She pulled it out of her pocket, expecting it to be the DA's office again. She'd successfully avoided taking no less than six calls from them. Instead, caller ID flashed the name Neville Lodge on the screen.

The guy who'd bought the Erté. The last thing she needed was a reminder of the other disaster this day had brought—giving up thirty thousand dollars to the Bugtussles. But it would be rude not to answer a call from someone who'd sent her a five-figure check.

“Lacy, darling, I called to thank you again for uncovering that marvelous painting.” Neville's cultured New England accent didn't allow him to acknowledge the existence of
R
s.

“I'm glad you're enjoying it.”

“Oh, it wasn't for me, more's the pity. That check was written on the company account and FYI, we've already sold the Erté to a serious collector for triple the money.”

“Great.” Someone had skinned her like she'd almost skinned the Bugtussles. She understood that there had to be a markup in the art world. A business of any stripe couldn't stay afloat if it didn't make a profit. But three hundred percent seemed off the charts. Of course, she'd lost her business, so what did she know? “You didn't call to tell me I sold too low. What do you want, Neville?”

“To offer you a position with Boyleston, Quincy, and Lodge. When I told my partners you had such a good eye that you found the Erté in a . . . a thrift shop of all places, they decided we need to bring you on board full-time.”

Then he named a salary that was double what she'd made in her best year with her own shop.

“What exactly do you want me to do for you?”
Donate a kidney?

“We want you to find more undiscovered pieces. If Boyleston, Quincy, and Lodge develops a reputation for being able to provide our clients with heretofore unknown masterpieces, collectors will flock to our door. Art and high-concept design is a small and, fortunately, a very affluent world. A few more finds like your Erté and we'll be able to knock our European competition back on their heels.” Neville giggled. Evidently even he had trouble imagining himself knocking anyone on their anything. “The position will entail a good deal of travel, for which you'll be well compensated, of course.”

Her head was spinning while he went on to tell her about stipends and expense accounts. “We have one very avid Saudi prince who signed with us to replace the art in all his estates simply because we promised him we had a full-time expert actively acquiring new pieces.”