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He smiled. “A beginning.”
“What?” She blinked.
“Outside, by the truck, you asked what this is. That’s my answer to your question. That, and the kiss. Do you want the gum back?”
Chapter Two
She shook her head, still dazed. Then he brought her down to earth. Hard. “I’ve held scarecrows with more weight to them. I’m taking you to Brenda’s. You heard of it?”
She had to be cool, calm. Was he cool and calm? She couldn’t tell, but if he was, she had to be too. “No, I haven’t. You do know how to sweep a girl off her feet with the compliments.”
“You’re beautiful. But you’re too thin.”
She intended to move back toward the passenger seat, but he still held her, his arm around her waist, fingers wrapped over her hip bone. He was a big man with long arms, and he filled up the truck, seeming to surround her. “You can stay right where you are. I don’t need the space.”
“Maybe I do.”
“Maybe, but here you’re in a better position to look in the back and see the box your mom sent.”
Joy flooded her. He eased his hold as she twisted around and saw the medium-sized box. He helped her bring it up front and onto her lap as she settled back in her seat. She hugged the box to her, even knowing she was acting like a kid at Christmas. “You took a roundabout way to get here from Richmond.”
“About every couple months, I check on my grandfather’s place. Verify the people renting it are taking good care of it. Saves my dad having to make that trip during the school year when he’s up to his eyeballs in grading papers and doing lesson plans.”
The box would be one of her mother’s occasional care packages, including baked goods and little household items, like a hand towel with a crocheted top offered at the recent church bazaar, or a goatmilk moisturizer, obtained at the farmer’s market.
On top would be a thick letter full of local news. It would refresh the pictures in Les’s head of neighbors, places in town, and daily life there.
She tried to call her mother once a week, usually on Tuesdays. Daralyn and Rory ate dinner with Elaine on that night. Sometimes Thomas, her older brother, was there, too, with his husband Marcus. They’d bought and renovated the Hill farmhouse near her mother’s a few years back, and traveled frequently between there and Marcus’s penthouse in New York City. Marcus was an art dealer and gallery owner. He represented Thomas’s work, which was currently in demand worldwide, a thought that always made Les deeply grateful to all the forces—especially Marcus—that had made that happen.
Rory would put the phone on speaker as the meal was prepared. Les would mostly listen, imagining she was in the kitchen with her mother and Daralyn, helping with the cooking or setting the table. Then sitting around the big table laden with food, hearing the back and forth, the laughter, the snippets of things that probably didn’t seem like much to them. To a homesick and stressed-out medical student, they were gold.
“I tell her she doesn’t have to do this. I’m only a couple hours away.” Even though sometimes it felt like she was on the moon.
Brick rested his hand on her shoulder. As he stroked her with his thumb, it moved under the neckline of her scrubs, resting against her bra strap.
“She likes doing it,” he said. “I had to exert considerable will power not to tear it open, knowing she probably had zucchini bread in there, or Daralyn’s cookies. I should demand a percentage for my fortitude.”
She sniffed. “Weren’t you just paid for that?”
He chuckled at her tartness, a good cover for the slight quivering of her fingers as he kept playing with the tingling skin under her bra strap.
Removing her mother’s box had revealed another package in the back. It was small and rectangular, wrapped in red paper and tied with silver ribbon. “What’s that?”
“That’s from me, but you can’t open it until your birthday. My schedule’s not going to let me get back down here then, so I wanted to make sure you had it.”
She stared at him. Her father had died two days before her birthday, so for the past several years, that event had eclipsed her own. She didn’t resent that. She much preferred to honor her father’s memory. But Brick bringing her a gift, remembering it, confirmed the truth.
His visit wasn’t an afterthought. He’d come here for her.
“So tell me about this diner.” If she didn’t move away from thoughts of home or Brick’s distracting effect on her, she was going to get teary or try to jump him. “How’d you learn about it?”
“The guys teaching the class. Put your seatbelt on.” As he spoke, Brick backed the truck out of the spot. She missed his touch, but set the box in the floorboards at her feet before complying. “Good comfort food stuff, meat, three sides and a dessert for a college student price. Though tonight’s my treat. FYI, she’s open 24/7 in a safe part of town, so if things get too rowdy here when you’re trying to study, it’ll be a good spot. There’s a bus stop right near it.”
It was a fifteen-minute drive, which suggested one reason it wasn’t as well known to her fellow classmates. They had plenty of quick eateries clustered around campus and the hospital, like camp followers around a busy army. However, as they entered the diner, the smell of coffee and fried food were familiar scents from any diner back home, and the cozy feel of the place told her it could easily become a new favorite for her.
The décor was an homage to first responders. Framed photos showed firefighters and police on the job, from the 1950s to present day. There were also formal uniform shots of service men and women with serious eyes and young faces. Les suspected the photos had been brought in by patrons. Flags and badges from various precincts, firehouses, and branches of military service filled the rest of the available wall space.
Two police officers were finishing up a meal in a booth while talking to a firefighter sitting on a high stool at the counter. His firehouse logo was printed on his dark T-shirt, stretched over his shoulders and back.
