Jar Of Dreams Part 2

"When I suggested you come here, this wasn't quite what I envisioned."

Lucy started to tell the owner of the large Nikes not to step on her freshly waxed floor, but the order stopped in her throat. "Crockett!" Delighted, she came to her bare feet to hug the tall man with curly dark hair and a smile framed by the deepest dimples she'd ever seen. "What are you doing here?"

"Came to check on you, of course."

"Yeah, right. You knew I'd land on my feet, especially considering where you sent me. Gert Taylor wouldn't allow anything less on her watch."

Noah Crockett ruffled her hair and tapped the end of her nose. "And have you landed on your feet?"

"I think so. Gert's wonderful, and I like Taft. The tearoom's going like gangbusters. Gert even had to hire someone to mow the yard and work in the garden because we didn't have enough time to do it all. A kid named Jack that I've decided to keep for a little brother-I never had one, you know." Shadows darkened his blue eyes. The creases in his lean cheeks seemed deeper than they had only weeks ago. "You seem tired, my friend."

"I am tired. That's why I'm on vacation." But there was more in his shadowy eyes than weariness. He seemed wired with a tension she'd never seen in him before.

Suddenly, it was as though all the light had gone out of the room, though the sun still shone brightly through the windows' sparkling panes. Noah's attention strayed to a point beyond her, and the tension in him became almost a palpable thing.

She knew before she turned that Boone stood there. In the days since his arrival, it was as though she'd sprouted antennae where he was concerned. The good part of that was that it made it easier to avoid him. The bad part was discovering she didn't really want to. She liked rooms better when he was in them.

But this wasn't the loose-limbed man she was coming to know. This Boone Brennan stood tall and taut and dangerous, his dark eyes nearly black and his generous mouth set in a straight, hard line.

She didn't think she liked this Boone.

Crockett broke the noisy silence first. "Boone."

"Crockett."

"Lucy?" Gert's voice preceded her. Walking with her head down, she b.u.mped into Boone's straight-as-a-board back, sending him slithering across the still-wet floor, his arms windmilling backward for balance. When he reached the portion of board that had not yet been waxed, his feet stopped abruptly, but his forward motion did not.

Crockett caught him before he fell, and for a moment the two big men stood suspended in an awkward embrace that would have been hilarious if there hadn't been such a big cloud of tension in the room. They withdrew from each other's touch, but still avoided eye contact like two little boys who had been ordered to apologize but didn't know how.

"Thanks," Boone muttered, and turned away.

"No problem." Crockett's eyes followed him for a few tortured seconds before he said briskly, "Hey, Aunt Gert, are you still going to run away with me when I grow up? I'll carry your knapsack and everything."

"Take a number," Lucy suggested, her gaze following Boone as Crockett went to hug Gert, skirting the wet wax. "Would you all get on out of here now, so I can finish this floor before we open on Monday?"

Her arm tucked through Crockett's, Gert led her nephew into the hallway. "Come into the kitchen. I'm baking pies and can't stop in the middle. You can tell me what you've been doing."

Lucy resumed waxing. Boone stood silent and moody by the window. "Are you all right?" she asked.

He nodded, and abruptly got to his knees beside her. "You got another cloth? I'll help, since you have to redo where I went skating."

They worked in silence for a few minutes, then Lucy said, "He's your best cousin, isn't he? And your best friend?"

"Cousins, no. Kelly's and my uncle married his aunt when we were all little kids. All three of us used to visit for the same few weeks in the summer, so we sort of grew up together. Kelly and I came to live here when I was twelve and she was ten. A year or so later, Crockett's folks got divorced and rather than do the Solomon thing of splitting him up, they let him go altogether and he came here too." He stared into s.p.a.ce, his lips lifted in a half smile. "Best friends? Once upon a time." The words were clipped, and he rubbed doggedly at the wood floor. "Aunt Gert needs to polyurethane these suckers if she's going to have everyone in town parading over them."

"Sims has told some stories." She didn't want him to stop talking about the family they had been.

"I'll just bet he has. Crockett and I both worked at the station when we were in high school. It's amazing the business survived." He reached the edge of the room and sat back on his heels. "We'd do our homework while we were there. Sims would check it when he came to close up. If it wasn't done, he'd dock our wages. Pretty soon he got wise to the fact that I did Crockett's English and he did my math. Then there was h.e.l.l to pay."

"What happened?"

He pushed himself to his feet, his knees cracking. "We both graduated-not exactly at the top of our cla.s.s, but not in the 'get 'em out of here, they're beyond help' category, either."

She knelt before the fireplace, her gaze reaching up to meet his. "I mean, what happened with you and Crockett?"

He hesitated, pain settling into the planes of his face, darkening his eyes to the point she could scarcely distinguish the pupil from the iris.

"We both loved the same woman," he said quietly, and left the room.

She was still kneeling motionless on the marble frontispiece of the fireplace when the front door opened.

"Aunt Gert?" Kelly called.

For a reason she couldn't have begun to explain, Lucy wanted to stop Kelly's advance, to warn her of Noah Crockett's presence. But before any words could leave her mouth, Crockett stepped out of the kitchen. Kelly came to a dead stop at the bottom of the staircase, the color draining from her face. She clutched the newel post, her knuckles turning white. Panic trembled from every rigid line of her slender body.

"Kelly!" Lucy came to her feet and stepped gingerly across the floor. "You're just in time to help me with...you know, with that thing we talked about. Come on up to my room."

She grasped Kelly's arm and pulled her along, chattering meaninglessly until they reached the second floor hallway. Opening the door to her room, she pushed the other woman inside. "Sit down," she ordered. "I'll get you some water."

When Lucy came out of the small bathroom that adjoined her bedroom, Kelly was sitting on the edge of one of the chairs at the window, her gaze aimed toward the river. She accepted the gla.s.s Lucy offered. Finally, several sips later, she spoke.

"Isn't it amazing how you can go for years existing on the same planet with someone and not see them even when they're right in front of you? I've always been able to avoid him. When he visited Aunt Gert, I'd stay away. When he came to the weddings of mutual friends, I sat on the other side and pretended he wasn't there. At Christmas or Thanksgiving, if he was here, we managed to be in separate rooms or at opposite ends of the table. Even at Maggie's funeral, when Boone was depending on us both, I didn't have to confront him."

The suffering in her voice was so intense it seemed as though one should be able to touch it and push it aside. Having no idea how to do that, Lucy sat in the other chair and chewed at her thumbnail. Kelly was Gert's dearly loved niece-far better for her to be angry than in this paralyzing pain. "I don't know," Lucy said. "Till recently, my future's always been my problem, not my past."

Kelly's gaze met hers across the cloth-covered round table that sat between the chairs. The brown eyes, so like Boone's, glittered with animosity. "Ah, yes, your mysterious past."

Lucy thought it might be kind of fun to slap the scorn right off Kelly Brennan's face, but that would be counter-productive. "Better the devil you know than the devil you don't," her father used to say. She knew and was used to Kelly's disdain even though she'd never grasped the reason for it.

But the memory of that almost palpable pain remained, and Lucy sensed the stilted climate of their relations.h.i.+p was a little bit changed. Even the return of the familiar contempt was tempered by those moments of human frailty.

"My past isn't a mystery," Lucy said. "It's way too much of an open book. I'm surprised you haven't discovered that for yourself. Isn't that what lawyers do?"

"Not when Gert Brennan's their aunt, they don't. They have to use an entirely different playbook." For just a moment, humor gleamed on Kelly's face, and the resemblance to Boone was uncanny.

Lucy hesitated. "You know, you could have just asked."

"I did. I asked Aunt Gert. She said it was none of my business."

The resentful tone in Kelly's voice made Lucy want to laugh. She shook her head. "I meant you could have asked me."

"No, I couldn't. Aunt Gert wouldn't let me. She gave me the look-you've seen that, haven't you, where she sighs and rolls her eyes?-and told me to leave it alone. She said that people are ent.i.tled to their privacy and she didn't pay all that money to send me to law school so I could be a two-bit snoop."

Lucy couldn't help it. The laughter burst free. She had been the recipient of "the look" herself, accompanied by hands on hips and Birkenstock-clad feet shoulders' width apart.

"I'm sorry," she said to Kelly's glare. "Really I am. But did you know you and your brother both do the whole eye-roll and sigh thing as well as Gert does? I'm not naturally quiet, but when any of you puts your hands on your hips, I just shut up and go on about my business."

A hint of a smile lit Kelly's eyes, although her features didn't relax an iota. "And what would that business be? Exactly what do you want from Aunt Gert?"

Boone's voice came from the open door. "Good question. I couldn't even have a piece of pie because Aunt Gert said it was 'yours'-after she smacked me with a spatula. Exactly what is it you need an entire pie for?"

He slouched against the doorframe, arms folded loosely over his chest. Lucy's heart tripped over itself in immediate response to his presence even as resentment rose into her throat.

She got up. "Well, there you have it. I'm going to get the pie a.n.a.lyzed so I can ma.s.s-market it. And don't you know, she's changed her will? I stand to inherit her entire wardrobe of Birkenstocks. Maybe the two of you can start drawing up whatever kind of doc.u.ment it is that contests wills." She stalked out of the room, pus.h.i.+ng past him, anger and hurt at war in her chest.

It wasn't until she was in the parlor setting tables for Monday's lunch that she wondered why Kelly had been so upset by Crockett's arrival. And who was Maggie? Why had Kelly and Crockett been at her funeral and why had Boone depended on them?

Boone was waiting for her when she came out of the parsonage later that day. He leaned against the gate that led to River Walk-the cobblestone path that meandered beside the Twilight-and watched her approach.

"Why didn't you just tell me?" he asked.

Her glare took over her whole face. "Tell you what?"

He didn't know how she could stare down her nose at him when he was so much taller than she was, but she managed. He sighed. "That the pie was for the church supper and the reason Aunt Gert said it was yours was that you'd baked it."

Lucy walked past him, edging a little sideways so they didn't touch. "Because you'd pretty much already made up your mind that I was going to steal the recipe and become the next Mrs. Fields, only with pie instead of cookies," she said. "You and your sister have decided I'm a bad seed blown into Taft for the express purpose of taking advantage of Gert. I'm not going to waste my life defending myself against that."

G.o.d, she walked fast for someone with such short legs. They were very nice legs, it was true, but undeniably short. Her height, what there was of it, was in her torso. Boone double-stepped to catch up with her. "I explained to you how much she means to us."

"Yes, you did, and I explained to you that I wasn't going to bilk her of all her worldly goods. You act as though you believe me, then every time I turn around, you're throwing little verbal darts." She stopped and he almost ran over her. "Well, let me tell you this-" she faced him and poked his chest with one stubby-nailed finger, "-I bleed just like anyone else does and I'm tired of being picked at."

"You're right."

"Furthermore, if you and Crockett can't stand to be in the same room with each other, that's fine, but you worry your aunt to death. She says she expects to go up to the third floor and find a white line down the middle of the sitting room, dividing your half from his. You're adults, for G.o.d's sake, way up in your thirties. It's time you acted like it."

"You're right."

He'd heard that old aphorism where a guy told a woman, "You're beautiful when you're angry," and had always thought it was ridiculous. Lucy Dolan's ire did nothing to change that opinion. Her nose got red when she was mad. Not the slightly sunburned pink he found captivating, but honest-to-G.o.d-in-heaven Rudolph-red. Her cheeks were white in contrast, with a spray of freckles standing out like little beacons. b.u.t.terscotch-colored hair sprang loose from the French braid that was supposed to be confining it. Perspiration gathered in the hollow of her throat before rolling down into the scoop neck of her s.h.i.+rt and driving him crazy.

Crazy enough he lost track of where she was in her tirade. Playing it safe, he said, "You're right," again. Sims had always told him he couldn't go wrong by agreeing with a woman, even if she was wrong. Not that Sims had ever learned his own lesson-he argued with every word Gert said to him, but still...

"Stop saying that."

Boone gave Lucy an outraged sigh. "Saying what? I haven't said anything except that you're right." For good measure, he added, "You're pretty when you're mad." Because somehow she was, ridiculous old saying or no.

"Oh, sure, all I need is clown makeup to go with my Ronald McDonald nose," she scoffed, but laughter s.h.i.+mmered in her eyes.

"I like Ronald McDonald," he said. "He's one of the good guys. Will you go to the church supper with me? I'll even buy your ticket."

She hesitated, and he gave her his best smile, the one that had convinced Ca.s.sandra Whittenberger to... Oh, h.e.l.l, back into p.u.b.erty again.

"I'll behave," he promised. "I won't cast any aspersions on your character or the color of your nose. I won't break Crockett's pretty face. I'll even-" he stuck out his chest manfully, "-protect you from my sister. And I won't tell Aunt Gert you covet her Birkenstocks."

"That is something to consider. We wouldn't want her to know just how mercenary I am."

"That's what I thought."

"Okay," she agreed, "I'll go with you as long as we can walk over."

"You can't car date yet?" he said. "Aunt Gert's getting strict in her old age. You must be, what, twenty-eight?" He knew if he was stupid enough to guess a woman's age, he needed to err to the low side.

"Thirty-three." Her long-suffering sigh a.s.sured him the flattery had been wasted. "Old enough to know better than to get into a vehicle with you."

"You wound me," he protested. "I'll have you know I've never had an accident."

"Really?" The smile in her eyes belied the skepticism in her voice. "How many have you caused?"

"One, maybe, only the other driver took responsibility, so I-" He stopped. How could this conversation possibly come out well for him?

"Rescued her?"

"Yes, that was it. That's what I did." He had to touch her hair, to see if it really was as sun-hot and silk-soft as it appeared. He reached with a hesitant hand to stroke back one of the tendrils that had strayed from the braid, and didn't want to draw his hand away. It was just that hot and just that soft and he wanted to pull it loose from its plait and bury his face in it. What in the h.e.l.l was wrong with him? "Six-thirty?"

She nodded. The movement of her head forced his hand to cup her cheek. Really it did. Her skin was as silk-soft as her hair.

"I'll walk you home," he offered, and she nodded again, not drawing away from his hand on her face for a strange little s.p.a.ce of time. When they started walking again, it was in silence, but she didn't move away then, either. They were close enough that their hands b.u.mped occasionally, and he had to stifle an urge to grasp her fingers and swing their hands like they were kids making their first explorations into the world of touch.

She pulled open the door of the newspaper office. "I need to pay for the ad we put in every week."

"Hey, Lucy." A tall man in a University of Kentucky sweats.h.i.+rt and jeans stepped out of the gla.s.s-walled office that had Editor on its door. "It's my day for receptionist duty. Would you like some coffee?"

Lucy shook her head. "No, thanks. I've had your coffee before. I just want to pay for the ad. Micah Walker, do you know Gert's nephew Boone? He's here for the summer to keep an eye on...things."

Micah grinned. "We were in the same high school yearbook, Lucy, just different years. Taft better batten down its hatches. I saw Crockett earlier today. I don't know if the town can hold both of you again."

Boone shook hands with him. "Hey, you came back after twenty years away and it's still standing. Shaken, but standing. Micah probably hasn't mentioned this," he said to Lucy, "but he, Tom Simc.o.x, and Eli St. John were known as the Triangle of Terror. They left a reputation in their wake that the rest of us were powerless to equal."

"But G.o.d knows you and Crockett tried," Micah said dryly. His gaze behind his gla.s.ses became speculative. "Want to draw me some strips while you're here? Exclusive to the Trib? We can't pay your usual rate, but we'll run you up some nice business cards and advertise all your garage sales free of charge. As an added incentive, you know."

"I'd like that." Boone leaned his elbows on the counter. "I've got a new strip scrambling around in my mind called 'Eight Hours Work'. Want to be the guinea pig? And maybe write copy for it while you're at it? Didn't you used to do that with a cartoonist while you were in Lexington, pre-Pulitzer?"

Micah laughed. "Yeah, I did, though we never sold much. I'd like to do it again, though." He extended his right hand across the counter and the men shook hands again while Lucy observed in mild shock.

"Just like that?" she asked. They were both successful, handsome men-she might even go so far as to describe them as "hunky" if she were caught unawares. Surely forging a partners.h.i.+p would require a lot more noise and testosterone than what she'd just witnessed.

They looked at her, then at each other. "Yeah," they said in unison.

"This is Taft," Boone reminded her. "The home of no one special. He and Tom and Eli were kick-a.s.s-and-take-names seniors when Crockett and I were freshmen with brand new backpacks. I had Micah's number in basketball. Crocket had Tom's. Everybody knew everybody else. Far as I can tell, they still do."

She knew that. It's what had made her give in to Crockett's urgings to come here. But it still surprised her that a prize-winning journalist and an internationally syndicated cartoonist conducted business in a way that seemed unconnected to the twenty-first century.

The receptionist-the real one-came to the counter, her brow furrowed with concern. "Gert just called." Her glance moved between Lucy and Boone. "She'd like for you two to come home. Sims has been hurt."