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Caleb's Bride
Wendy Warren
Was The Perfect Man Right in Front of Her? Back in high school, Gabrielle had her future planned out, down to the perfect groom and the marriage proposal on graduation night. Instead, she ended up sharing one unexpected night of passion with Caleb Wells.Fifteen years later, the boy from the wrong side of town was back – now an irresistibly attractive single dad who was making Gabby wonder if she’d been given a second chance to land her Mr Right…
“You haven’t changed, Gabby.”
Her stomach plunked to her feet.
“I resent that.”
“Why?”
“Why?” Since Cal had left town, she’d shaved off twenty pounds and had grown out the curly hair she used to control by keeping it shaped like a spongy football helmet around her head. Sadly she was missing a fashion chromosome, so her wardrobe had transformed only to the extent that she now bought smaller size jeans and tucked in the blouses she wore to work. Still, she had made a true attempt this past decade and a half to look better, and it was beyond frustrating to discover that her makeover made no impression at all on someone who hadn’t seen her since shortly after she’d turned in her high school cap and gown.
“No thirty-three-year-old woman wants to be told she seems the same as she did at eighteen.”
Cal walked toward her. “I liked you fine at eighteen.”
He kept coming until they were inches apart, and Gabby felt every nerve sizzle.
Dear Reader,
Many of the characters in the HOME SWEET HONEYFORD series are based on my own family. You may recognize them!
My Uncle Henry had a new joke every day. From him I learned: Life is hard, now go play. Henry Berns and Poppy Max of Caleb’s Bride share a lot in common with him.
From my father I learned that some men will go the extra mile to ensure their families are safe and well cared for. Caleb Wells is like that. Committed to giving his daughter the childhood he never had, Cal moves back to Honeyford, where no dream is too broken to be put back together again.
My mother, Laura Lea, taught me that nothing has to be perfect to be beautiful—not a body, not a relationship, not a life. It’s a lesson Gabby Coombs must learn before she can grab the beautiful life awaiting her with Cal and his daughter.
Enjoy your stay in Honeyford, where life is, perhaps, just a little bit sweeter!
Wendy Warren
About the Author
WENDY WARREN lives in the Pacific Northwest with her actor husband, their wonderful daughter and the assorted four-legged and finned creatures they bring home. A two-time recipient of Romance Writers of America’s RITA
Award, Wendy loves to read and write the kind of books that remind her of the old movies she grew up watching with her mom and now shares with her own daughter—stories about decent people looking for the love that can make an ordinary life extraordinary. When not writing, she likes to take long walks under leafy trees, lift weights that make her sweat and her husband laugh, settle in for cozy chats with great friends, and pretend she will someday win a million dollars in a bake-off. Check out her website for more information on Honeyford, some great recipes from the townsfolk and other fun stuff. www.authorwendywarren.com.
Caleb’s Bride
Wendy Warren
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
For Libbi
My daughter and teacher, in-house comic relief and
dream come true.
I need only to think of you to feel blessed
beyond words.
“Mom” is the best name ever.
Prologue
Dear Diary,
It’s official: I’m in LOVE.
Lesley and I went to the pharmacy after school to get root beer floats because it was like record degrees out and also because I wanted to see DEAN. Hideous Len, who was hanging around the soda fountain doing nothing as usual goes, “Maybe you should make that diet root beer for Flabby Gabby.”
Caleb Wells was there and he hit Len so hard Len fell off the stool. Then Caleb picked him up and shouted, “Apologize, Imbecile!”
Lesley thought that was the most romantic thing ever. I thought he looked like a gladiator—his arms got really muscley this year—but Caleb Wells is like practically my brother, so it wasn’t r-o-m-a-n-t-I-c.
But then DEAN…DEEEEEAAAAAAN…comes over and goes (I am quoting, he said it exactly like this), “Guys. Let’s work it out without punching, okay? Len, apologize to Gabrielle, because that was a really ignorant remark.”
That was what he said (plus also he smiled at me sooo sweetly!) and that completely put Len in his place, and after he apologized Dean looked at me a reeeeaaaallly long time and said, “You look nice in pink, Gabrielle.” OH. MY. GOD!!!!!!
Dean Kingsley is the most mature, most gentle, most WONDERFUL boy in this entire town, and I LOVE him.
I will never love Anyone. Else.
Yours truly,
Gabby—age thirteen, which is old enough to know THIS IS NOT A CRUSH.
P.S. I am on a diet as of right NOW, but NOT because of Hideous Len. Just because I probably should be and also I want to make Dean feel proud when he’s with me.
P.P.S. The fact that he is two years older than me is absolutely perfect according to Lesley, who says older men make the best lovers.
Chapter One
“Just when the caterpillar thought life was over, it became a butterfly.”
—Anonymous
Twenty years later …
“You can do this.” Perspiration dotted Gabrielle Coombs’s forehead as she aimed her fountain pen at the papers on the desk in front of her. “You have to do this.”
Clutching the pen so hard her knuckles turned white, Gabby forced her shaking hand toward the real-estate document that would put her business, Honey Comb’s Barbershop, up for sale. Her heart quaked as much as her hand. She’d only worked in one place her entire life, and it was right here in this century-old, brick-walled storefront.
“�One cannot look into a bright future if her eyes are filled with tears from the past,’” she quoted aloud, pressing the quivering ballpoint to the signature line, but her fingers refused to move.
Spouting insights was easy. One of the signs in her window read “Haircuts—$10. Wisdom—priceless.” Her grandfather Max had started the custom of sharing philosophical quotes with his customers over fifty years ago. When he’d passed Honey Comb’s to Gabby, she’d gladly picked up the torch. She must have had hundreds of quotes packed into her brain by now. But talk was cheap unless action backed it up. Action—that was the hard part.
“Life is like crossing a set of monkey bars. You have to let go to move forward.” She muttered one of her grandfather’s favorite sayings, and taking one big deep breath, scrawled her name.
Wide-eyed and perspiring, she looked at the page. “Oh, my God, I’m really doing it.”
Unexpectedly, a chunk of anxiety fell away like rusted armor. Refusing to give herself time to chicken out, she quickly penned the date then signed on the other lines the real-estate agent had indicated.
For as long as Gabby could remember, she had planned to do two things with her life: Run Honey Comb’s—the coziest, warmest place on earth, and marry Dean Kingsley—the coziest, warmest man on the planet.
“�The best laid schemes of mice and men do often go awry…’”
Despite the fact that Dean had never been anything other than friendly and kind, Gabby had convinced herself that he would fall for her when she was thinner, prettier, funnier. When she figured out how to keep her red hair from frizzing in the summer, or when she’d read all his favorite books. His love was going to be the chrysalis that changed her from plain, awkward Gabby Coombs to confident, graceful butterfly.
Dean had screwed up her great plan by falling in love with someone else. Someone who had been a stranger to all of them until only a few months ago. Now the man she’d dreamed about for twenty years (twenty—aaaaaagh!) was married with a child on the way, and Gabby felt like an old train that had rattled too long on the same dusty route, never veering from its chosen course but expecting the scenery magically to change.
Well, not anymore.
“It’s time for me to say goodbye, Poppy.” She lifted her gaze to the framed black-and-white photo of the man who had given her this barbershop on her twenty-third birthday, nearly one decade ago. Despite her firm conviction (it really was firm), tears filled her eyes. “I hope you understand.”
Her benevolent grandfather smiled down at her, leaning against the striped barber pole that, to this day, swirled like a dancing peppermint stick out front.
Six weeks earlier, on a whim, Gabby had applied for a job that would take her far from her hometown of Honeyford, Oregon. Three days ago she’d received an offer of employment from Rising Sun Cruises. The next morning she’d accepted the offer, and yesterday she had visited the real-estate agent to put her business up for sale.
Bold moves, every one, which was exactly what she needed right now. Bold moves to create a brand new life.
And a brand new Gabby.
When a knock rattled the barbershop’s glass door, she realized she was several minutes past opening, something she couldn’t recall ever happening before. Jumping from her stool behind the small front desk, she headed for the door.
Wiping the moisture from beneath her eyes, she smoothed a hand over the kinky hair that inevitably escaped her ponytail and turned the key in the lock. She plastered a smile on her face as she swung the door open, but words of welcome died on her lips. Surprise—and the stirrings of something that felt like dread—tensed every muscle.
June sunshine silhouetted a tall man with square shoulders. As Gabby’s eyes adjusted to the light, she saw that he was gorgeous—still gorgeous—in a way few males in Honeyford were. An edgy, mysterious, dangerous kind of gorgeous.
“Hi, there. Can I get a haircut?”
The lump of emotion filling Gabby’s throat all morning doubled at the sound of his voice, which was deeper, more gravelly than it had been fifteen years earlier when Caleb Wells had been an eighteen-year-old farmhand bound and determined to make something of himself.
Her gaze rose to his chestnut hair. Thick, wavy and glittering with deep bronze-and-gold highlights, it had obviously been expertly styled.
“You don’t need a haircut,” she said, her voice hoarse with shock. “You look…” She hesitated.
As a teen, Cal had been whipcord lean, perpetually hungry looking. Now in his thirties, he impressively filled his designer suit. As sharp as three points of a triangle, the chin and jaw that used to sport a light shadow were smooth and whisker-free.
“You look good,” she concluded, feeling her face flame.
The right side of his mouth curled just a bit in response.
He turned his head, glancing into the barbershop. “May I come in?”
Gabby hesitated, apprehension tingling throughout her body.
One of the signs in her window warned, “No Shoes, No Shirt, You Better Get Your Hair Cut Someplace Else,” but Cal looked more like the CEO of a Fortune 1000 company than a small-town kid who’d once struggled by on odd jobs and church handouts. Since she couldn’t justify keeping him out, Gabby stepped back and got a whiff of expensive cologne as Cal brushed past her. Whatever he’d been doing all these years, he’d managed to effect a complete transformation.
How ironic, she thought dazedly, feeling as if she were having an out-of-body experience, that Cal Wells, of all people, should reappear again now, when I’m about to take the biggest risk of my life.
A decade and a half ago, he had been the biggest risk she’d ever taken. And that time she had concluded she’d made an awful mistake.
As Cal entered the barbershop, his gaze moved to the wall of black-and-white pictures that framed the large mirrors above Honey Comb’s two cutting stations. The photos, most of which she’d taken, were the only things that changed in the shop on a regular basis.
While Cal moved closer, studying her work, Gabby busied herself opening the blinds and flipping the sign that said, “Shut Till We’re Not,” to the side that announced, “Come In Already.”
Several times she glanced over her shoulder, until Cal caught her gaze in the mirror and raised a brow.
“Your photos?” he asked, indicating the display.
She nodded.
Again he gave her that flicker of a smile. “You’re good. I knew you would be.”
Her heart stuttered a little in response. “Thanks.” How many times had she taken photos of him while he’d worked on her family’s farm? Hidden from view, she’d snapped candid shots, using the rough and beautiful Oregon landscape as the perfect backdrop for Cal’s untamed looks and solitary personality. Her family had praised the many photos she took of them all, but only Cal had truly studied her work, commenting on the light and the composition. Telling her that her work showed “passion.”
“So how about that haircut?”
Slowly she shook her head. “You don’t need it.”
Still looking at her in the mirror, he ran a hand over the thick waves. “I do. It’s too long.”
Because his hair was trimmed neatly above his ears, the comment surprised her. “It’s shorter than I’ve ever seen it. It was way past your shoulders the last time—” With the nature of their last encounter—and its aftermath—filling her mind, Gabby fumbled. “—the last time I saw you.”
Cal turned toward her, pinning her with the unwavering hazel gaze that had always hidden more than it revealed. “I haven’t tried to wear my hair like a rock star for years, Gabrielle. It’s time for a trim. And you were always the best.” When she continued to stare without speaking, he pressed, “It wouldn’t make you uncomfortable, would it? Now that I think about it, cutting my hair used to make you pretty damn nervous.”
“No, it didn’t.” Automatic and defensive, her denial made Cal grin.
A real grin, not the partial, inscrutable smile characteristic of him. This one was full and beautiful, which was strange since the boy Gabby had known came from a home life that hadn’t offered up many reasons to smile. She felt slightly woozy now, trying to remember when she’d last seen unreserved enjoyment on his face. Then he said, “You haven’t changed, Gabby,” and her stomach plunked to her feet.
“I resent that.”
The brow arched higher. “Why?”
“Why?” Because fifteen years ago she had looked like little Orphan Annie on steroids, and he damn well knew it!
Since Cal had left town, she’d shaved off twenty pounds and had grown out the curly hair she used to control by keeping it shaped like a spongy football helmet around her head. Sadly, she was missing a fashion chromosome, so her wardrobe had transformed only to the extent that she now bought smaller size jeans and tucked in the blouses she wore to work. Still, she had made a true attempt this past decade and a half to look better, and it was beyond frustrating to discover that her makeover made no impression at all on someone who hadn’t seen her since shortly after she’d turned in her high school cap and gown.
In an effort to preserve some dignity, she kept her tone instructional rather than plaintive. “No thirty-three-year-old woman wants to be told she seems the same as she did at eighteen.”
Cal walked toward her. “I liked you fine at eighteen.”
He kept coming until they were inches apart, and Gabby felt every nerve sizzle.
“Remember the first time you cut my hair?” he asked, his voice softer than it needed to be given that there was no one else in the shop to overhear them. “You’d been practicing on your brothers. You made them sit through three haircuts each before you agreed to work on me. And then you only did it because they took off like rockets the second they saw you coming.”
“Well,” she said, wanting like crazy to back up a couple of steps, but refusing to divulge how nervous he really did make her. “I thought I should practice on family first.”
Though she hadn’t thought of it in ages, the day he mentioned popped vividly to mind. She could picture the way he’d leaned against her mother’s kitchen counter, drinking lemonade and eating shortbread while her brothers squirmed and complained about the dishtowels around their necks and their fear that Gabby might scalp them. Having just turned fifteen, but seeming years older, Cal had stood silently, observing, until finally she’d run out of siblings. Then he’d pushed away from the counter and announced, “My turn.”
Now those strange, translucent eyes of his narrowed slightly, and she realized she might have hurt his feelings by suggesting he wasn’t “family.” Throughout his teens, he’d practically lived at the Coombses’ farm, hanging out with her brothers and being as helpful to her parents as one of their own children. Maybe more. Her mother had lived to feed him, because unlike her own sometimes picky kids, Cal had always eaten two helpings of everything.
Only Cal and Gabby had never quite bridged the gap between friend and family.
“We’re not kids anymore,” he said. “I think we can both handle a haircut. Don’t you?”
Challenge filled his expression.
No. Absolutely not. I am a sissy.
“Of course.”
Cal’s eyes flickered with what Gabby suspected was amusement. Swallowing the last of her reticence, she nodded toward one of the two old-fashioned barber chairs. “Have a seat. You’ll probably want to take off that fancy suit jacket, though. You can hang it on the coat tree by the front desk. I’ve got to go in back to get a cape.”
He nodded. “Sounds good.”
Leaving him, Gabby headed to the rear of the shop and the laundry bag she’d brought with her this morning. Extracting a clean stack of neatly folded capes and a pile of white washcloths, she moved with the sureness of someone who had performed this task literally thousands of times. Inside, however, she felt like grape jelly.
How could she casually cut his hair after what had happened the last time they were together?
Detouring into a small restroom with a single overhead lightbulb, Gabby yanked the cord that illuminated the room.
She winced as she peered into the mirror. The red curls she typically bundled into a ponytail at the nape of her neck looked like a nuclear blast in Technicolor. Escaped tendrils provided fallout all around her head.
Setting aside the capes and towels, she quickly reassembled the �do, scraping her feral hair into something more managed. She didn’t need to look attractive for him. But she would like to exude confidence and self-possession, two qualities that had been in short supply fifteen years ago. Digging a tube of lip balm from her front pocket, she swiped it over her dry lips.
There was a whole river of white water under the bridges she and Cal had burned, and frankly she hated to churn it up, especially now. On the brink of personal change, she wanted to feel confident and bold—not to be reminded of one of the most awkward moments in her entire life.
It’s been fifteen years, Gabby.
To Cal, what had happened the last summer after their senior year in high school was probably nothing more than a dim recollection. Maybe an anecdote. He was a guy, after all. He’d walked away from Honeyford, from her family and from his best friends that year. One sexually inexperienced young woman desperate to discover what she was missing in life was unlikely to hold a place in his long-term memory.
The fact was that with a father, three brothers and a grandpa who owned a barbershop, Gabby had considered herself fairly comfortable around men (the ones she wasn’t hoping to marry). But Cal Wells, with his silent stares and inscrutable expressions, had always been the exception. Cal had thrown her off-kilter and…that one evening, anyway…excited her.
Hardening her gray eyes at the mirror, she made her reflection a solemn promise. “That was then, this is now. The old Gabby may have been a fuzzy caterpillar, but the new and improved Gabrielle Coombs is a butterfly, graceful and free.
“If he can act as if nothing happened, so can you.” Gabby gave herself a smile. Shoulders back, chin high, she collected her capes and towels and returned to the front of the shop.
Cal stood a couple of feet from her front desk, his suit jacket off, his hands in his trouser pockets. A sober, contemplative expression furrowed his brow as he studied a photo of her grandfather.
“He always liked you,” Gabby offered, knowing it was true. Max had considered Caleb Wells an old soul. “He said you had integrity.”
Slowly, Cal turned his head. Something that looked like pain flashed through his eyes. “I liked him, too.”
Crossing to the leather-cushioned barber chair, Gabby waited for Cal to follow. His serious expression was beginning to border on grim. The thoughts that hid behind his eyes seemed particularly alive and active now, even more so than when he’d first walked through the door.
For a moment she wondered if he’d changed his mind about the haircut, but then he moved, seating himself and patiently allowing her to adjust a paper collar and white towel around the neck of his dress shirt.
In their senior year of high school, Gabby’s best friend, Lesley, who had started dating her oldest brother, Eric, by that time, had claimed that Cal possessed “mystique.” Also, that he had lips made for kissing. Gabby, who, tragically, had yet to experience her first kiss at that point, could only wonder.
Lesley should see his lips now.
Matured, Cal’s features looked as if a master sculptor had carved them in a burst of love for the human race. His lips had clearly defined peaks, their fullness perfect for photographing and…other things. Lesley had married Eric shortly after college, eventually providing two adorable nieces for Gabby to spoil, but she was still willing to discuss a man’s kissing potential…for Gabby’s sake.
Best friends, sisters-in-law and confidants, she and Les had shared a lot of info with each other over the years, but not even Lesley knew that the kissing potential of Cal’s lips was no longer a mystery to Gabby.
“Something wrong?”
“Huh?” she answered stupidly, jerking to attention and watching the very lips she was pondering rise slightly—right side only, as usual.
His translucent eyes narrowed. “You seem…ruffled, Gabby. Something bothering you?”
“No. I’m not ruffled. Just deciding what to do with your hair. How much do you want off?”
“Enough so that I won’t need another trim for at least a month. I’m heading into a busy time. Afraid I may not get to a barber again for a while.”
“Okay.” Flipping open a cape, she settled it around him. Treat him like any other client. “So, Cal, what brings you back to—”
“How’ve you been, Gabby?”
They spoke over each other.
Clipping the ends of the cape together, Gabby reached for a comb and spray bottle of water and forced herself to smile. “Me first.”
“All right.”
“What brings you back to Honeyford? No, no, wait. First why don’t you tell me where you’ve been all these years?”
“Chicago,” he answered, accommodating her. “I went to the University of Illinois for graduate school, got an internship position in my field then stayed on with the company.”
Gabby spritzed his hair. “Graduate school.” She was impressed. Glad for him, too, because she understood the significance of his earning a master’s degree. No one else in his family had completed high school. Alcoholism had taken its toll on his relatives, diminishing their ability to work or parent in anything more than spurts of sobriety. Cal had spent most of his teen years trying to establish a clear difference between himself and the rest of the Wells clan, and it looked as if he’d accomplished his goal. “What’s your field?”
“Environmental engineering.”
Okay, she was really impressed. “Sounds like a good fit. You always loved the outdoors.”
Cal shrugged his broad shoulders. “I got a great job offer. The kind a kid who never had two nickels to rub together couldn’t pass up. As for being a good fit, I worked in a high rise, as a corporate consultant.”
Which explained the expensive suit, she supposed.
Setting the spray bottle down, she picked up her comb and scissors. Lifting the first hank of hair she planned to snip, feeling the thick silkiness, her fingers buzzed with the sudden, unexpected memory of the last time she had touched his hair.
Back then, her touch had been tentative, her fingers clumsy. Definitely more fuzzy worm than graceful butterfly. When he’d touched her, however, there had been an undeniable moment of exhilarating flight….
“So—” she cleared her throat, trying to change the channel in her mind “—you said, �worked.’ Past tense?”
“Very past tense.”
Forcing herself to focus on the actions that gave her confidence, Gabby took the first cut. Keep talking. Talking relaxes the client…and the barber. “You’re changing fields, then?”
As she began to work in earnest, snips of shiny brown hair floated to the cape like confetti. “Positions,” he responded. “I found a job that pays less, but I’ll be working on the land.”
“Where will you be—”
“Nope.”
“What?”
He looked up through the hair she’d pushed over his forehead. “How long have I known you?”
Gabby blinked at the unexpected question. “Well, technically we haven’t seen each other for—”
“Forget �technically.’” His gaze toughened. “Here are the stats. Years we’ve known each other—twenty. Times you’ve allowed conversations deeper than a puddle—fewer than a handful. Why is that, Gabby? I never noticed you skirting meaningful conversations with anyone else.”
Gabby faltered, blindsided, and loathing the feeling of being transparent. Yes, she had avoided deeper conversations with Cal. She’d put on a pretty good front with others, but Cal had read her too easily for her own comfort.
Sending her scissors skimming across the ends of his hair, she murmured, “I’m happy to have a conversation on any topic you like, but I want to finish your trim before my morning rush starts, so—”
“Let’s start with the topic of this barbershop,” he interrupted. “Why you’re selling it, for example. And whether it has anything at all to do with Dean Kingsley.”
Chapter Two
The scissors slipped, knicking Gabby’s knuckle. “Damn,” she swore, shaking the pained hand. After checking for blood (hardly any), she gaped at Cal in the mirror. “How do you know I’m—”
The answer came to her before she completed the sentence. She glanced toward the coat tree, where she’d told him to hang his jacket, then to the desk sitting right beside it, and her gape turned into a glare. “You snooped around my desk? When I went in the back? You read my private papers!”
“I glanced over,” he admitted. “Your �private papers’ are sitting out where anyone can see them, Gabrielle.”
“Anyone who leans over to read the fine print,” she snapped. Leaving him, she rushed to the desk to conceal the real-estate document. Good gravy, she didn’t need any of her other customers to walk in, read the papers and realize she was selling the shop—before she broke the news to her own family! Shoving the papers into a drawer, she slammed it shut…along with the scissors and comb she’d brought with her. Realizing her mistake, she yanked the drawer open, pulled out her tools and rounded on Caleb. “You couldn’t have known what those papers were about at a glance. You were snooping.”
As cool as ever, he shrugged. “I spent the morning at Honeyford Realty. I recognized their paperwork. Are you selling because of Kingsley?”
Resentment, hot and humid, filled Gabby from the stomach up.
Even though she’d tried to keep her infatuation for Dean under wraps, she knew Cal had figured out her secret.
Now his supernatural eyes pinned her to the spot. He looked like a boa constrictor laughing at a mouse.
“News still travels fast in Honeyford,” he said. “I bet I wasn’t downtown more than an hour before I heard that Kingsley got married a couple of months ago.” Cal’s head tsk-tsked slowly from side to side. “You’re not just selling the shop, are you? You’re running away.”
“Beep, beep! Comin’ through!”
Before Gabby could respond to Cal, Henry Berns, owner of Honey Bea’s Bakery across the street, opened the barbershop door. Pressing one scrawny shoulder against the glass, he bustled over the threshold, his knobby hands occupied with a pink pastry box. “Gotta set this down before I drop it. Don’t have the muscle strength I used to.”
Gabby watched Henry as if she were standing outside herself, a tight band of emotion constricting her breath so that she felt incapable of heaving a single word into her mouth.
Nearly a foot shorter than Cal, Henry nodded at the much younger man, whom he gave no indication of recognizing, then placed the string-wrapped box on the desk and winked at Gabby. “It’s a Dobish Torte. Two pounds of dark chocolate for my best girl.” Toddling happily to the vacant chair, he told Gabby, “You go ahead and finish up. I’ll grab a seat before the morning rush.” With a spryness that belied his seventy-five years (and the claim that he lacked muscle strength), Henry hopped into the chair next to Cal’s, helped himself to a comb and worked it through the gray waves he kept stiffly pomaded.
By sheer force of will, Gabby managed to murmur her thanks for the cake.
“Why, sure. Sweets for my sweetheart!” The old man winked into the mirror.
A knowing smile spread across Cal’s face, and Gabby blushed.
All her life she had felt a little more awkward, a little less beautiful than the girls around her, which was probably why the thought of Dean Kingsley had filled her with such joy. Dean had seemed so golden, so rich with gentlemanly grace, an innate country suave that had afforded Gabby countless hours of pleasure fantasizing about becoming Mrs. Country Suave.
In the barber chair to Cal’s right, Henry Berns hummed happily while perusing the latest copy of The Honeyford Buzz. All her most serious suitors were over seventy. Nothing had changed, and Cal knew it. As the curve of his lips bloomed into a full grin, Gabby felt once again that uncomfortable, haunting sense of déjà vu.
Reaching into his back pocket, Cal withdrew an expensive-looking leather wallet as he crossed toward her. Withdrawing a bill for the trim she hadn’t completed, he laid it on her desk. “See you around, Gabrielle.”
The door clicked softly shut behind him, and suddenly Gabby remembered exactly when she’d last seen his grin—full of enjoyment and humor and mischief—prior to today.
It had happened fourteen years, ten months and three weeks ago. The summer they’d graduated from high school.
Dean had come home from college to work in his father’s pharmacy, and Gabby had decided the time had come: She was going to tell her beloved exactly how she felt so they could begin their life together. Her courage stoked, her expectations huge and glorious, she waited for Dean to arrive at the Fourth of July celebration downtown. But when he showed up, there was a girl clinging happily to his arm, a lovely girl he introduced to everyone as the woman he hoped to marry.
Numb at first, feeling frozen inside, Gabby somehow managed to smile and congratulate Dean along with everyone else. Two hours past the fireworks display, however, her emotions thawed and the misery poured out in waves so overpowering it was difficult to breathe.
She had expected to become a woman in Dean’s arms. The best moments of her life were supposed to have happened with him. At eighteen, she had yet to experience her first kiss. Suddenly, it all seemed like such a horrid waste.
That was when Gabrielle Coombs decided enough was enough and threw herself at a boy for the very first time.
And Cal Wells took pity and made love to her.
Cal slipped on a pair of ridiculously expensive sunglasses, a gift from his ex-wife, who had never met a label she didn’t like. The dark glasses gave him the comforting illusion of privacy. He preferred not to make eye contact with others this morning. Not that many people in town were likely to remember him or would rush to welcome him back even if they did, but Cal’s emotions were running so high at the moment that he didn’t want to make small talk.
Gabrielle Coombs. She was still here, in their hometown. Still single from what he gathered. And, even though she hadn’t admitted a thing, he’d bet his last paycheck that she was still in love with Dean Kingsley.
Beneath his breath, Cal muttered a word that would cost his ten-year-old daughter a dollar if she said it.
“I acted like a jackass.” He spoke out loud to himself, a habit he’d gotten into since his marriage disintegrated. He’d gone years during which his lengthiest adult conversations occurred as he looked into the mirror while he was shaving. “Gabby never got over him,” he muttered.
Fifteen years ago, when Cal headed back to college after what had amounted to the best and worst summer of his life, he’d assumed that if he ever returned to Honeyford, he’d find Gabby married with kids, a home, a PTA membership. Her husband, he figured, would love her, but would have no clue as to how lucky he was to be part of the Coombs clan.
Cal would have known.
For five years—from the time he was thirteen until he’d gone off to college—Cal had spent every minute he could on the Coombses’ farm, making himself too useful for anyone to complain about his constant presence, studying every detail of normal family life as if there’d be a pop quiz at the end of each week.
He’d met two of Gabby’s brothers in wood shop at school, and they’d invited him home one afternoon to hang out. Their mother, Nancy, had made an enormous platter of sandwiches as a snack—not even for dinner, which had astounded him. At that time in his life, he was lucky to scrounge up enough food for a single daily meal at home. Nancy had insisted they all wash their hands before they touched a bite. While her sons had rolled their eyes and protested, their perpetually smiling mother had kept up a running commentary about the baseball jerseys she had mended that day, the old clothes she’d boxed and wanted her sons to drop off at the church, and the barn dance she would like them to attend, because “Lord knows your wives will thank me someday.” Cal had listened to the woman’s every word and followed her instructions without a peep.
For years he had wondered whether such a family existed outside of television reruns. After he’d found them, and even though they hadn’t belonged to him, he had known instantly that he wanted to be asked back again and again. And he had been. To this day, he counted what he had learned in the Coombses’ old farmhouse to be one of his greatest blessings.
Maybe you wanted Gabby so you could become a permanent part of the family. Maybe that’s all it ever was.
The old explanation, the one he’d been running through his head for years, cropped up again, and as always he played with it awhile, half-hoping he could make it ring true.
The thing was, that very first day on the farm he realized Gabby was someone special. His first clue had been when she’d admitted to her father, Frank, that she’d hidden one of their older lambs, Chester, until she could “talk some sense into” Frank and make him see that the little guy should be a pet, not a lamb chop. She spoke with persuasive passion and loyalty, claiming that vegetarianism would be better for the whole family. A few weeks later she saved a spider from the shoe her brother Ben had been about to hammer it with, and more times than Cal could count, Gabby showered the people in her sphere with a similar protectiveness. In school she befriended the new, the awkward and the adrift, pulling them into her circle of friends. She wasn’t one of the most popular girls, but she was well-liked.
Despite the fact that she’d never shown him quite the same level of concern, Cal felt drawn to the sensitive girl. He enjoyed feeling like one of her brothers and reminded himself that he didn’t want anyone treating him like some defenseless lamb or brainless bug, anyway, so who cared if sometimes she kept her distance? By the time he turned fifteen, however, he knew he was nursing a crush on Gabby. She represented something innocent and good. Something he wanted in his own life. Something that could change him.
At seventeen, he’d realized he didn’t stand a chance with her. In a million years he wouldn’t be able to measure up to the golden boy Dean Kingsley, whom Gabby appeared to love with a loyalty Cal would happily die to feel…from someone.
At eighteen, Cal graduated from high school, the first person in his family of drug addicts and wastrels to do so, and he graduated on the honor roll. He had a college scholarship, a student loan, a dorm room waiting for him and more self-esteem than ever in his life. And he still thought about Gabby.
So, when he found her crying in the gazebo in Doc Kingsley park after the July Fourth fireworks display, her spirit crushed because Dean had returned from college for the summer with a girlfriend on his arm, Cal claimed that exquisitely vulnerable moment for himself and became Gabby Coombs’s first lover. He and Gabby had been two young people hungry to be held.
It had been an aching, tender, heartbreaking night… each of them wanting someone who didn’t return the feelings.
Cal’s steps slowed as he realized he was abreast of King’s Pharmacy, the business Dean’s father had owned. Dean had worked here through high school. And Gabby had gone in on one fabricated excuse or another every chance she’d gotten.
Turning toward the window with its large gold lettering, Cal noted the sign that read, Dean Kingsley, Pharmacist on Duty. The golden boy had not disappointed. Cal shook his head. “You could have had her if you’d crooked your finger.”
In the morning sun, Cal studied his reflection in the glass. Well-groomed, well-dressed and, when he wasn’t acting like a petulant imbecile, well-spoken; he was a far cry from the boy he’d been. Back then, he’d been a struggling youth with a messy past, and he doubted that anyone, including Gabby’s parents and brothers, would have preferred him over Dean Kingsley as her boyfriend. Against the bright light of the doctor’s perfect son, Cal hadn’t been able to shine at all.
Turning away from the pharmacy, Cal strode up the street. Some of the best advice he’d ever gotten had come from Gabby’s own grandfather. Max was the only person Cal had ever told about his confusing feelings for Gabrielle. He’d even considered turning down his scholarship so he could remain in Honeyford, near her.
Begged for a clue about how to claim Gabby’s attention, Max had put a hand on Cal’s shoulder. “Son, if you keep one foot in the past and one in the future, you’re going to piss all over today. Just keep moving.”
Sound advice. There had been more, but that was the plainspoken guidance Cal had followed.
He planned to follow it again now.
His heart both hardened and softened as he thought of Minna, his beautiful, smart, talented, anxious daughter, who, so far, had been as unlucky in love as Cal. He had returned to Honeyford to give Minna the family they hadn’t been able to build in Chicago. The Coombs clan was the example he wanted to emulate.
He couldn’t afford another episode like today’s. He’d been rude and insinuating to the Coombses’ only daughter, a woman with whom he’d had no contact in fifteen years. What business was it of his whether she was staying, going or planning a trip to the moon?
Cal would die for his daughter. With a failed marriage to her mother, and no role models among his own relations, he required the Coombses’ guidance on how to create a successful, stable family.
If that meant killing off the last vestiges of his fantasies about Gabby, so be it.
By eight-thirty on Friday evening, only five hardy souls remained at the Honeyford Days Fourth of July Celebration Committee meeting. Unseasonably sultry June weather and Vernon Reynaud’s refusal to contribute to “wasteful government spending” by turning on the air-conditioning in the community center had considerably thinned their ranks. Gabby and Lesley remained, however, Lesley doodling idly on a yellow legal pad, and Gabby eyeballing the Honey Bunz—puffy croissant-style pastry balls with a crunchy honey coating—donated for the committee’s sustenance by Honey Bea’s bakery.
“No, leave it. We’re having dessert later,” Lesley whispered as Gabby’s fingers snaked toward a Honey Bunz.
“Right. Thanks.” She snatched her hand back, but holy sugar rush, Batman, did she long for the distraction of a quality insulin surge. She’d been horribly depressed since this morning.
“How late can you stay out tonight?” she whispered to her sis-in-law.
“Probably until ten,” Les whispered back. “I warned Eric I’d be late. He’s at your parents’ with the girls. What’s the matter with you? You keep kicking the table leg.”
“Are we still discussing the plans for Honeyford Days or have we decided to adjourn?” Flo Bixby raised her rickety voice above the irresponsible extraneous chatter in the room.
“Adjourn, I beg you,” Lesley muttered under her breath, but she rallied for the cause, smiling nicely at Flo and offering a succinct update on her choreography for Honeyford, A Retrospective in Dance, being presented by the Dancing Honeybees Senior Tappers.
As the secretary for tonight’s meeting, Gabby dutifully took notes, but her mind was a million miles away. She had a plan for The Radical Improvement of Gabrielle Coombs, a plan she intended to begin instituting immediately, and, forgive her, but plotting her transformation trumped working on yet another Independence Day lollapalooza. After this morning, she’d like to ignore July Fourth and its loaded memories altogether.
Cal’s reappearance and his pointed comments had whipped up a tumultuous sea of self-recriminations inside her. She’d been pretty successful over the years at burying the memory of the July Fourth when she’d lost her virginity to Cal Wells, but after his visit to Honey Comb’s, images from that long-ago night had been forming in her mind, growing sharper and clearer all day.
She recalled vividly, for example, that he’d found her in the dark shelter of the Doc Kingsley Park gazebo, sitting all alone, yielding to pitiful tears that had poured down her cheeks and trickled like brine into her mouth. The brackish flavor only partially masked the bitterness of Dean’s announcement that he was serious about the lithe beauty he’d brought home from college, someone he had known less than a year.
Gabby had spent five times that long trying to make Dean see her as a romantic possibility.
When the July Fourth fireworks had died down and most everyone filed out of the park, Gabby curled up on the gazebo bench and gave in to silent sobs that stabbed her abdomen. Time seemed irrelevant at that point, but she didn’t think she’d been there too long when a voice reached her, so soft and close that she jumped.
“Don’t cry.”
She’d turned to see Cal climbing the gazebo steps, his angular features tense in the moonlight. His plea, pained and earnest, only made her cry harder, however, and after a moment he’d slid onto the bench beside her. “Damn it, Gabby, don’t…”
She’d felt his strong arm curl around her shoulders, the unexpectedness of the gesture temporarily interrupting the flow of her tears. Other than the times when she cut his hair or he helped her with chores around the farm, they didn’t touch.
Through the shadows in the gazebo, she’d looked at him, her heart breaking, lips wobbling.
“What can I do?” he’d whispered.
A tsunami of hurt and frustration and regret and need had tossed her heart around like a piece of driftwood. Wetly, she’d blinked then pleaded with no forethought whatsoever, “Kiss me…”
“Stop kicking the table.” Lesley shoved an elbow into Gabby’s ribs.
“Sorry.” Heat flooding her cheeks, Gabby looked down at the notes she was supposed to be taking. Some secrets were too big to tell even your very best friend.
It took another half hour for the meeting to wrap up and then Gabby grabbed Lesley’s arm, hustling her to the diner, where they grabbed their favorite booth in the back and gave their order to Opal, who was hard of hearing and generally handed her ticket book to regular customers so they could write their own orders. She soon returned with a pot of decaf, a slab of marionberry pie and two forks.
“Oh, Mama, that’s good,” Lesley purred in appreciation.
Gabby picked up her fork. “You haven’t even tasted it yet.”
“I’m not talking about the pie, innocent child.” Lesley nodded pointedly toward the counter, where a lone man sat, his large hands cupped around a mug of coffee.
Gabby squinted. “Isn’t that the new pastor at Honeyford Presbyterian?”
“Yessiree. Pastor Keith. Single Pastor Keith.”
“Keith doesn’t sound like a pastor’s name,” Gabby commented, apropos of nothing, but grateful to have a moment before she launched into her own topic. Stabbing a few marionberries and a piece of crust, she moaned at the deliciousness.
“He doesn’t look like a pastor, either,” Lesley mused. “He looks like he should be on a TV show called Sex In The Small Town. Or Desperate Worshippers.” She waggled her brows.
Gabby put a hand over her mouth to trap the berries that nearly spilled out. “You’re ogling a man of the cloth? I’m telling Eric.”
“I’m not ogling him for me, you ninny.” Lifting her fork, she jabbed the tines at Gabby.
Gabby leaned forward, whispering fiercely. “You think I should date the minister of Honeyford Pres? Are you kidding? I grew up in that church. If we ever got serious, I’d picture half the choir in our bedroom, singing �Amazing Grace.’”
“Or �Glory Hallelujah.’”
“Lesley!” Gabby shook her head at her irreverent sister-in-law.
“He’s not a priest, Gabs. He can have sex. And FYI, so can you.” Abandoning the fork, she snatched a few tiny containers of creamer and laced her coffee, eyeing Gabby with barely concealed impatience. “So what about it?”
“No! I told you—”
Lesley waved a hand. “Forget the gorgeous man of God.” She took a fortifying sip of decaf. “I mean sex. What’s your excuse for not having any?”
Gabby squirmed, ironically feeling as if her best friend had caught her in the act, not out of it. “How do you know I’m not having any?”
Lesley slapped the table as if she’d heard a good joke. “Please.”
Gabby’s glance skittered away, a mouse hoping the cat one foot away might not notice her.
“I love you, Gabs,” Lesley said, sighing. “You know I’d never say anything to hurt you, but we’ve reached critical mass. I didn’t say anything while there was still a chance that Dean might…”
“I know, I know.” Plopping her elbows on the table, Gabby covered her eyes with her hands then peeked around to make sure no one they knew was nearby, but Les would not have spoken if there had been. Gabby knew her sister-in-law truly did have her best interests at heart. “If it comforts you any, I’ve been thinking the same thing. I’m in a rut I have to get out of. And I am. I have a plan. But first, I need to tell you something. I need to tell someone…”
Save for a brief hiatus when the waitress came by to refill their coffee cups, Gabby did not stop talking until she’d filled Lesley in on That Night with Cal. Lesley’s eyes grew wider and wider, until she practically shouted, “You and Caleb?! And you never told me? I’m going to go home and write in my journal that we are nothing like Oprah and Gayle after all. But first—” She climbed so far over the table, her bosom was nearly in the pie. “How was it?”
Picking up Lesley’s discarded creamer containers and stacking them, Gabby shrugged. “It was…you know…I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? What, it was too long ago? You can’t remember?”
She remembered. Sex with Cal had been desperate, frantic…
Out of control—that’s what it had been. What she had been that night. The experience stood, in fact, as the one out-of-control moment in Gabby’s highly controlled life. And her body had reveled in it, sweeping her mind right along with it.
At first, anyway.
Being a virgin at the time, she’d felt pain that had eventually allowed reality to intrude into the moment of madness, and once that happened…She shuddered. Regret and embarrassment had snuffed out lust. For her, at least. And, really, such a wild, out-of-control feeling—not her at all.
To Lesley, she responded, “I was young. And it was my first time, so…you know.”
“Oh.” Lesley nodded. “Right. Not great, then. My first time with Eric left a lot to be desired, too. But we tried again the next day, and that—”
“Too much info, too much info!” Gabby covered her ears, unwilling to hear details about her eldest brother’s love life.
“All right. Tell me what happened afterward for you two.”
“Nothing happened. He was going away to college.”
“Which left two months between the Fourth of July and September. So…?”
“So nothing. He dropped by the next day to check on me…” Reluctant to relive the details of that torturously awkward encounter, Gabby shook her head. “It was only a one-night thing.”
Lesley made a face. “Teenage boys and sex. Gotcha.”
Gabby shrugged noncommittally.
“Well, what do you want to do about it now?” Lesley questioned, finally digging into the pie that was unlikely to do any damage at all to her willowy, five-foot-nine-inch dancer’s body. “You say he’s back in town. I wonder how long he’s staying. Maybe you two could have a do-over and get it right this time.”
“No!” Gabby looked around a tad wildly, though no one new had entered the diner, and Pastor Sex Appeal was paying his bill. “Shhh. Don’t even suggest that,” she hissed across the table. “I’m hoping I don’t run into Cal again at all. I want a brand new start to my life, Les. Nothing I’ve done up to now requires a trip down Memory Lane.”
“That makes sense, I suppose.” Thoughtfully, Lesley licked berry juice off her fork. “You’ve had good sex since Cal, though, right?”
Lowering her gaze, Gabby confessed, poking at a piece of pie crust.
Lesley reached for her coffee cup, narrowing her gaze at Gabby over the rim. “I know you don’t like to talk about your sex life, and I’ve always tried to respect that, but there has been someone, right?” She nodded hopefully. “Someone who made your toes curl?”
Gabby’s brow knitted. She bit her lip. “Umm…no actual toe curling to report.”
“Huh.” Taking a sip of coffee, Lesley shrugged philosophically. “Okay. So someone who maybe wasn’t the greatest lover, but still…?”
“Ahh, let’s see…” Knuckles to her lips, Gabby closed one eye, pretending to have to think about it. “Mmmm…” She shook her head—a tiny, reluctant movement. “No.”
Lesley watched her for a protracted moment, her expression a symphony of shock, horror and awe. “Gabrielle Coombs! You are not telling me that you haven’t. Since that one time?”
Mouth open, Lesley braced her hands against the booth. “Are you serious? Caleb Wells has been your one and only lover?” She raised a hand to her heart. “I like a surprise as much as the next person, but this kind of shock could kill a girl!”
Chapter Three
Gabby looked frantically around the coffee shop then back to her sister-in-law. “Shhhh! You see? This is why I don’t like to talk about it. It sounds worse out loud than it really is.”
“No, it doesn’t.” Lesley was so frozen in shock, it took her a moment to move her lips again. “Gabby, you’re thirty-three. Out loud or not—”
“I know!” Groaning, Gabby lowered her forehead to the table, rolling her brow slowly back and forth on the cold wood. “I know.”
“How did this happen? Haven’t you wanted to?”
“Of course I wanted to. But with someone I loved. And I kept, I don’t know, thinking it was going to happen with Dean, and I didn’t want to be…unavailable.” She raised her head. “I get props for trying to hold out for true love, right?”
“You’re thirty-three, not in the novitiate and practically a virgin again. No, you get no props.” Lesley wagged her head. Her voice fell to a hushed tone generally reserved for announcements that all heroic attempts to resuscitate have failed. “This is bad.”
Sitting up, pressing against the hard-backed booth, Gabby rubbed her sweaty palms on the rough denim covering her thighs. “Remember how in love Poppy and Grammy Joan were? How they’d look at each other, and you could tell they knew exactly what the other person was thinking?”
Lesley nodded. “Yeah. I’d catch Max staring at her picture after she died. Sometimes he’d wink at her like he thought she could see him.”
“Right. They were practically a local legend. The couple nothing on this earth could part. Well, that’s what I was waiting for—a forever love. Time got away from me, that’s all.”
The women were silent awhile. Lesley reached for her friend’s hand. “Madly in love or not, you’ve got to start your romantic life, Gabby. The meter’s running.”
Sitting straighter, Gabby nodded. “That’s exactly what I’m planning, Les—to start my life, romantic and otherwise.” Pulling a manila envelope from the pink-and-black nylon backpack she’d brought with her, she extracted a brochure and some boldly printed trifolds, which she spread out on the table. “Look at this.”
Lesley scanned the papers. “These are brochures for that new cruise line—the one that caters to singles. I read about it in Via.” Looking up so suddenly she almost gave herself whiplash, she gasped. “Shut. Up. You’re going to have meaningless cruise sex! Have you booked the trip?”
“No, no. I’m not going on a trip. I’m going to work, Les. On the ship.”
Lesley blinked. “Work. Wha—Where?” She stabbed a finger at the brochure. “On one of these floating bedrooms?”
“It’s not a floating bedroom. They’re not like that. Singles’ cruises are—” Gabby tried to remember how the brochure had put it “—a way to experience exciting destinations with a sophisticated group of like-minded adventurers.” She smiled.
“And then have sex with them?”
“Lesley.” Directing her in-law’s attention to the color photograph, she said, “Look, they have waterslide races.”
“Ahh, yes. The sophisticated waterslide race.” Lesley shook her head slowly. “Gab, I don’t get it. You’re going to apply to this cruise line, and if they hire you…do what with the barbershop?”
“I already applied,” Gabby corrected, gauging her sister-in-law’s reaction and realizing that Lesley, who should be the easiest sell of all the Coombs, was nonetheless struggling with the news. “They did hire me. I’m going to be the ship’s barber. I leave in two months.” She took a breath. “I’ve put the shop up for sale, but if I don’t get any bites, I may rent to another barber.”
Lesley was deadly silent, her eyes wide and unblinking, obviously thinking, I was so not expecting that. Her lips compressed, and she swallowed convulsively. Because she considered herself an unlovely crier, Lesley typically went to great lengths not to weep in public. Now tears filled her eyes.
Gabby’s chest clutched. Okay. First family member I’ve told…. It’s going well, I think.
“I’m going to need your help, Les,” she said, reaching across the table to pat her sister-in-law’s wrist. “I’m going to tell the family Sunday night. I want your support. I suspect Mom’s going to freak out a little.”
“Your mom is going to freak out a lot. So’s your dad. And the girls will—Oh, Gabs. Are you sure this is the right thing to do?”
“You said I should kick my life into gear.”
“I said you should have sex, not move to the Pacific Ocean.” Lesley blew her nose into a paper napkin. “You won’t even have a zip code.”
Gabby rubbed Lesley’s arm. “Not while the ship is moving. But maybe I’ll have sex with some great guy who will romance me across the high seas then ask me to have his children and settle down in a house on Moon Lake. We’ll host fabulous family get-togethers, and Kate and Natalie will frolic with my children along waterfront property. How’s that?”
Lesley gave a watery laugh. “That’s all right.” She sighed, took several fortifying sips of coffee then rallied as Gabby hoped she would. “You’ll need a makeover.” She snuffled. “Total. You can’t get on a singles’ cruise with nothing but running shoes and blue jeans in your suitcase.”
Gabby did have other wardrobe items, purchased the last time she’d tried to make herself over—for Dean. Then, her goal had been to liberate her “true self.” This time, she was totally willing to assume someone else’s true self. The self of a woman who lived life to the fullest and had never seen Jerry Maguire or heard Tom Cruise tell Renee Zellweger, “You complete me,” which had probably depressed more singles than any other phrase in the history of spoken language.
Since Lesley’s help was both required and desired for the mandated makeover, Gabby nodded agreeably. “Check.”
While Lesley enumerated the myriad other activities necessary to become cruise-worthy—ballroom dance instruction, makeup lessons, bikini-ready exercise program, waxing—Gabby remembered that she used to sit in this very diner when she was a girl, imagining the day she would eat here with her husband and children, cutting hamburgers in half for small hands, intercepting straws as they jetted across the table, wiping milk shake spills…and smiling at her man, her very best friend, as they laughed together over the chaos called life and reaffirmed with their eyes alone that they were still crazy in love.
Despite what she’d said to Les about meeting someone, moving into a house nearby and having babies, Gabby knew she didn’t have the heart to perpetuate that fantasy anymore. This time she wanted to reach for a brass ring she could actually close her slightly chubby fingers around.
Travel. Excitement. Dancing on the middle of the Pacific Ocean under a sky smattered with stars—that was within her grasp. And there might be a man, eventually. She no longer required a be-all and end-all romance. She would accept it if the universe brought her someone…nice. Lively and fun. And maybe it wouldn’t last longer than the cruise, but, hey, compared to another twenty years loving someone who didn’t love her back—
It would be plenty.
“What do you mean, you know he’s back? You’ve been in touch with him?”
Gabby cornered her brother, Ben, in the kitchen of their parents’ home as their bi-regular Sunday-night-supper-and-Crazy-Eights tournament got under way.
Thirteen months younger than Gabby, Ben was still single, lived over an hour away in Bend and played the field with a success that rivaled George Clooney’s, but he usually managed to come home for Crazy Eights Sundays. And for the food.
“Don’t your girlfriends feed you?” Gabby asked, tugging on his sleeve to capture his attention and save the relish tray from demolition.
Ben popped two stuffed olives in his mouth before turning to lean against the kitchen counter. Lazily crossing his ankles, he winked. “That’s not why I date them, Gabrielle. Did Mom make rolls?”
“Ben.” She gritted her teeth. “I’m asking you a question. Have you been in touch with Caleb Wells for a long time?”
Possessed of the trademark Coombs red hair, but in a much darker, more auburn hue, Ben was too handsome and too chill for his own good. Their parents had always said that if a major earthquake hit Oregon, Ben would find out about it two days later on the evening news. He did everything on Ben time, including answering direct questions.
“What’s a long time?” he murmured now, eyeing the refrigerator as if the decision to walk over and examine its contents merited further deliberation.
“For cripe’s sake.” Gabby fished more olives from a jar and plunked them next to the gherkins on the neon-orange plastic tray her mother had left out for her. “Two months. Have you been in touch longer than two months?”
Ben’s green eyes examined the pot lights their parents had recently installed in the kitchen ceiling. “Two months sounds about right.”
“How did he find you? Facebook?”
“No, he phoned. Dylan gave him my number.”
“Dylan? He’s been in touch with Dylan?”
Ben shrugged. Reaching for a jar of roasted peanuts, he unscrewed the lid and shook out a handful. “He may have gotten in contact with Jeremy first. I’m not sure.”
“What?” At the mention of their youngest brother, Gabby upset an olive that rolled across the counter and onto the floor. “Why didn’t anyone tell me? What about Mom and Dad? Did Cal contact them, too?”
Crunching peanuts, Ben squeezed one eye shut, peering at his sister as if viewing her under a microscope. “Have you considered tranquilizers for this condition, Gabrielle, because, you know…” He sailed his hand like an airplane a few inches above his head. “Over the top.” He tossed a peanut in the air, catching it in his mouth. “What’s the problem, anyway? As I recall, you didn’t care one way or the other when Cal disappeared.”
Lowering her eyes, Gabby grabbed a towel to mop up olive juice. “I don’t like surprises, that’s all.”
“Hmm.” The doorbell rang, and, brushing the salt off his hands, Ben headed toward the doorway. “I hope Mom and Dad do.”
“What?” Gabby said, looking after her brother’s retreating form, but he either didn’t hear her or didn’t bother to respond and continued out the door.
Gabby remained in the kitchen, finishing the relish tray and wondering what was the matter with her. Ben was right: Her reaction to Cal Wells was over the top. In all likelihood he’d had so many, er, partners since her that he barely remembered he’d once spread a Navajo blanket beneath a giant oak and had seen her, the girl he’d practically grown up with, naked in the moonlight.
Gabby ate an olive. And then a gherkin.
Cal wouldn’t mention that night to anyone in her family. Would he?
Shaking her head, she dismissed her own anxieties. Because, come on, even if he did mention it, they were all adults, right?
She put three more olives in her mouth.
Please, God, I will do anything. Don’t let him mention it.
She couldn’t imagine having one of her brothers or—please strike me dead first—her parents finding out she’d begged Cal to make love to her.
Eeeeyeesh. What a sparkling romantic history—unrequited love with Dean and embarrassing teenage sex with Cal.
Her new life couldn’t start soon enough.
Picking up the relish tray, she headed for the living room where her family was assembled. Her brother Dylan and his girlfriend, Julie, were the recent arrivals, which meant everyone but Jeremy, who was backpacking across Ireland with a friend from grad school, was present. For the moment, she had to push aside the problem of Caleb and concentrate on the news she had for her family.
A florist by trade, Julie was handing their mother a vase of summer blooms.
“Those are gorgeous, Julie!” Lesley called out from the floor, where she and her two daughters were playing The Bee Game. “Dylan, please marry her so we can get a family discount on lilies. I love stargazer lilies.” She leaned back to see her husband, who was on the sofa, sharing a beer with his father. “You’re taking notes, right?”
“Stargazer lilies.” Eric nodded. “Check.”
Smiling, Gabby set the relish tray on the coffee table and went to hug Dylan and the lovely woman he’d been dating for almost two years. “The flowers are glorious. And you should marry my brother. However, unlike my opportunistic sister-in-law, I would love you even if you had only yourself to offer,” Gabby said as she took the flowers from her mother.
Behind her, Lesley snorted. “Suck up.”
“Suck up,” Lesley and Eric’s four-year-old daughter, Natalie, sang. “Suck up, Aunt Gabby!”
Eric nodded to his wife. “Nicely done, honey.”
The laughter helped soothe Gabby’s skipping nerves. She’d agreed with Lesley that she should tell her family about her plans at the top of the evening, just dive in, since the Coombses liked to process information for a long time and sometimes quite loudly. Telling them before dinner (the alternative being to mention it as she was backing out of the driveway) would be the mature thing to do.
Dive in.
Undigested olives and the beat of her pounding heart filled her throat. “Uh, excuse me, everyone,” she began. “I have some news, and I think it’s best if I—”
The doorbell rang.
Thank you God, thank you, thank you.
“I’ll get it,” Gabby offered brightly. Pretending not to notice the face Lesley made at her, she raced for the door.
Shifting the flowers to the crook of her left arm, she opened the door with a smile that was perky as heck.
It lasted an entire four seconds.
Staring at the person on her parents’ threshold, she almost dropped the vase she was holding.
Noooo. Seriously, universe?
“Don’t just stand there. Let him in, Gabs.” Ben’s sardonic voice nudged her. And then it clicked.
“You’re Ben’s surprise.”
Caleb, dressed in another crisp suit, this time navy blue, gave her a faintly apologetic smile. “Hello, Gabrielle.”
The deep timbre of his voice sounded disturbingly intimate.
“Who is it?” her mother queried from the other side of the room.
“Ben thought my showing up might be a nice surprise for your parents,” Caleb spoke softly, for Gabby’s ears alone. “If it’s going to ruin your night, though, I can say hello and go. Save visiting for another time.”
“Of course not,” she protested automatically, feeling lower than a snake, because, yes, she would love for him to make her night easier by leaving.
I am a butterfly, not a caterpillar, she reminded herself. I can handle this.
Retrieving her smile, she stepped to the side so Cal could enter, noticing for the first time that he held a bottle of wine. Fancy stuff, not the zipped-into-Sherm’s-Queen-Bee-while-the-motor-was-still-running variety. Tucked beneath his arm was a large box of truffles that probably cost as much as Gabby’s sofa. In the past, Cal had made her mother small gifts—carvings out of wood and music CDs he’d burned off her brother Eric’s system—saving his earned money for essentials. She may have been the same old Gabby, but he was certainly not the same Caleb.
As he entered the living room, the people inside the house fell silent. Except for Ben, who had known Caleb was coming over, and Dylan, who had already spoken to him, Gabby sensed that her family was experiencing the same shock she’d felt.
Stealing a glance at the surprise guest, Gabby saw a muscle twitch beside his left eye. A smile seemed to be fighting against his lips’ desire to remain in a straight line. Cal was nervous about his reception here tonight. He had, after all, disappeared from the lives of the family that had cared for him more than his own.
Seeing him look so vulnerable, Gabby’s heart squeezed uncomfortably.
Before she made a clear decision to act, she plucked the chocolate box from him and—oh, what the hell—looped her arm through his. “Look, everybody,” she said, turning toward the room. “Cal’s home.”
Finally, exclamations—and a gasp from her mother—circled the room. There seemed to be a brief time delay and then Coombses surrounded them. Nancy began to cry, enveloping the boy she had practically raised since puberty in a mother’s always-welcoming arms. Cal said hello to Eric and Lesley and the girls. Lesley made big Did-you-know-he-was-going-to-be-here eyes at Gabby. Dylan waited his turn to have Cal greet Julie.
The prodigal son had come home.
About to escape to the dining room to put the vase in the center of the table, Gabby looked up and caught Cal’s gaze seeking hers above her family’s heads. He didn’t say thank you, but she understood just the same. And then he did the thing that was so rare for the Cal Wells she remembered: He smiled openly. Boyishly. A little awed.
For a moment, she saw him as the young man who’d spent a good part of his early teen years offering to do chores for her mother and defending Gabby from her brothers’ roughhousing. The kid who never took the Coombses’ hospitality for granted.
Surprised by a sudden rush of nostalgia or sentiment or some dang thing, Gabby swallowed against the tears that filled her throat. Never one to cry copiously, she was surprised at the waterworks that turned on with the slightest provocation lately.
When Cal turned his head to respond to something her mother asked, Gabby moved off to set the flowers in the dining room and deposit Cal’s gifts in the kitchen. The problem, she realized, was that she suddenly felt a strong pull to be part of something which she would very soon be leaving behind.
Nancy’s expert nose told her when dinner was ready, and she enlisted her daughter’s help in ushering everyone into the dining room. Seated around a long pine table that was at least half as wide as it was long, the Coombses commenced serving themselves with an orchestral clinking of serving spoons against bowls, and lots of chatter. Gabby had long figured out that her family would make any authority on etiquette shudder, but she loved their casual, rowdy dinners.
Gabby hoped to seat herself next to her sister-in-law, but Lesley’s daughters clamored to sit on either side of her, and Eric sat next to them. Gabby moved toward Ben next, but he wanted to talk to Dylan and slipped into the seat beside him and Julie. Which, of course, left only her and Caleb standing while the others started helping themselves to the home-cooked food.
“A bit like musical chairs, isn’t it?” Cal cocked a brow.
Rats. He’d noticed her avoidance maneuvers. “I’m happy to sit next to you,” she lied, nodding toward the two empty seats at her father’s end of the table.
“You’re not happy about it at all.” He laughed. “But I forgive you.”
Gabby walked to the chair Cal held out. As she sank into it, he murmured, “Our reunion didn’t go too well the other morning. I owe you an apology.”
Surprised, she shrugged. “Forget it.” Forget everything, please. Especially the part about having sex with your favorite family’s desperate daughter.
Gabby plunked into her seat as Cal slid the chair toward the table then took his place next to her. “I’d like a moment alone, to talk,” he said quietly.
Alone? “Tonight?” she squeaked.
Cal shook out his napkin, set it in his lap then turned toward her, eyes glittering with wry amusement. “Tonight would be good, yes.”
Before she could respond, Ben passed her a bowl of rice pilaf, and her father boomed, “So, Caleb, what are you doing for a living?” Frank eyed the navy suit and well-groomed hands of the man who had been his hired hand on numerous occasions. “You don’t look like a farmer.”
Because the comment held more than a whiff of disappointment, Gabby’s brothers snickered. “All right!” approved Dylan, leaning forward to peer at his brothers. “Eric, Ben, we may be off the hook. Dad can hassle Caleb now about his career.”
“I don’t hassle you,” grumbled Frank. “You boys have fine jobs. But this farm is in your family, and someone ought to work it when I’m gone. Too many independent farmers are being run out of business these days.” He did a double take into the bowl Caleb passed him and sniffed. “What is this?”
“Rice,” Gabby offered.
“It’s brown.”
“It’s good for you,” Nancy scolded from the opposite end of the table, her plump arms supporting a platter of steaming corn on the cob. “Eat it.” She confided to Lesley in a loud whisper, “The doctor says he needs more fiber, but he refuses to eat oat bran.”
Lesley nodded back. “Fiber. Can’t live with it, can’t live without it.” Catching Gabby’s eye, she winked. “Just like men.”
“Thanks, honey,” Eric murmured.
Gabby smiled weakly, accepting a large, heavy ceramic bowl of homegrown string beans from Ben on her left. As she struggled to balance the dish while forking up vegetables, Caleb pulled the bowl from her hands and held it so she could serve herself more easily. “Atta girl,” he commended in a whisper. “String beans are loaded with fiber.”
Gabby glanced up to catch his wink, surprised by how much he was enjoying himself. His forehead was relaxed. She recalled noticing on several occasions years ago that Cal’s brow was furrowed every time she saw him at school, but in her parents’ home, it smoothed out. Softened. He relaxed here.
The fact that he’d lost touch with her family had surprised her years ago, and in some ways it still did.
How worried her mother had been when Cal had dropped out of sight, choosing not to return from college to share either Thanksgiving or Christmas that first year, despite the fact that he’d spent the previous five holidays with the Coombses. Eventually, her parents had accepted that he’d moved on, had wanted to build a life of his own, probably, away from the community that had given him as much pain as pleasure.
After their night together, he’d come to the house only that one miserable time; other than that, she and Cal had avoided each other like the plague the rest of the summer. Most of the time, Gabby was able to convince herself he’d walked away from that sultry July night unscathed, just a teenage boy with raging hormones and a gaffe under his belt. Whoops, shouldn’t have slept with the Coombses’ virgin daughter. Mustn’t let that happen again.
No biggie.
But sometimes she wondered whether he’d felt more guilt than she credited him with, and that was when she felt the weight of their secret. He hadn’t known she was a virgin, after all. Maybe he felt he’d betrayed her parents’ trust and hadn’t wanted to face them. Maybe he was so immensely sorry they’d…you know…that he’d run out of town. Ugh.
The first few years after he’d left, she’d actually worried about him, despite trying not to think about him at all. Cal had always held himself apart from other people, especially at school, where he had been the quintessential tough-kid loner. Had he found people to belong to after he left for college? And, if not, was she the reason he had denied himself the comfort of a family to come home to?
Not a pretty thought.
She sneaked a peek at him. Strong jaw locked into position, he watched her family closely. Gabby remembered that about him now, how observant he had been, often studying his surroundings as if life were a documentary. What, she wondered now, had he been looking for?
“So what is it you do, Caleb?” Frank tried again, reaching for the bowl of string beans and heaping them onto his plate next to a tiny serving of brown rice.
“I’m a civil engineer,” Cal answered, turning his full attention to her father. “I attended graduate school in Illinois, interned with a company in Chicago then stayed on.”
“Chicago.” Ben was mightily impressed. “I’ve heard it’s a great city. Hot women.” He waggled his brows at his mother, who pestered him constantly to mend his playboy ways and bring home “a nice girl, not someone in a skirt cut up to her yoo-hoo.”
Frank was less impressed than his son with Caleb’s choice of venues. “Chicago? What do they grow there?”
“Ideas, sir. I spent a lot of time on the thirtieth floor, thinking.”
“Huh. We can use more engineers right here in Oregon, doing something to increase crop production for the small farmer while politicians sit on their keisters in Washington, D.C., thinking up new ways to plow us under—”
“Dad….”
“Frank.”
“It isn’t Cal’s fault, after all.”
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