Take the Long Way Home Page 3

  “Okay.” She wouldn’t commit to anything, but to say no outright would be an insult not just to her father but to Harry, who’d gone to such great lengths to bring the Nolans back together. “We’ll see.”

  Her father drained his cup with one final swig. “I’d better get back to work,” he said, eyeing her plaintively. “I’m glad you’re back.”

  “I’m not the girl I was when I left,” she warned him.

  His smile was respectful. “I noticed.” He seemed to consider giving her another hug, but he didn’t beckon her out from behind the counter. Instead, he gave her a hopeful smile. “We’ll work it out,” he promised.

  She appreciated his not bothering to specify the it they’d work out. She wasn’t sure what it was. Everything, she supposed. The abandonment. The rejection. The long years apart. The long way home.

  She watched her father leave the shop. Outside the glass door he paused and gazed back inside. She gazed back. Something stood between them—that glass pane, their history—but that barrier was clear. They could view each other through it. Maybe he was right; maybe they would work it out.

  She brought his empty cup into the kitchen, set it on the dishwasher rack, checked her inventory. The big staples—white and whole-wheat flour, brown and white sugar, oatmeal, large sacks of nuts, peanuts and raisins, tubs of molasses and jars of spices—were already in place, arranged in cabinets and on shelves where she could easily access them. More perishable ingredients—butter, eggs, milk, and white and dark chocolate—would be delivered tomorrow. She would start baking Thursday, focusing first on the cookies that had a long shelf-life, then on the soft cookies, and finally on her squares and bars—so that she’d have a reasonable stock by opening time Saturday morning.

  The bell above the door chimed again. She wasn’t expecting any more deliveries. Had her father returned to nag her about joining him for dinner? If he had, her answer would still be no.

  Residual flour dust often settled on the sacks containing the flour, and she noticed her palms were white with it. She wiped them off on the back pockets of her jeans and strolled from the kitchen to the front of the shop, resolving to lock the front door as soon as she got rid of her father.

  But the man standing in front of the empty counter, gazing around, wasn’t her father. It was Quinn Connor.

  Chapter Three

  Torelli’s used to be one of his hangouts. He’d always been struggling to keep his weight up during his playing days, aiming for two hundred pounds. Consuming several thousand calories a day helped, and there was a limit to how many of those calories he could devour in the form of meat, dairy, fruits and veggies. So he’d paid frequent visits to the bakery on Seaview Avenue, where he’d pigged out on slices of anise pound cake and chocolate-chip biscotti.

  Today, as he cruised down Seaview Avenue in a nostalgia-fueled detour, he discovered that the Torelli’s sign above the door had been replaced by a large white rectangle featuring the word COOKIE’S in black-rimmed red letters, the word’s two O’s depicted by round chocolate-chip cookies.

  Maeve Nolan had told him she would be opening a cookie store. Here was a store called Cookie’s. Quinn eased his battered old Honda into the nearest parking space and got out to investigate.

  The place didn’t seem to be open for business yet, but when he tried the door, it swung inward, causing a bell above the door to ring. He stepped inside, and there stood Maeve, clad in faded jeans and a baggy gray T-shirt that read “Stoneworks” across the front, whatever that was.

  She appeared startled by his arrival, and then vaguely relieved. Like yesterday, she had a deer-in-the-headlights look about her, wide-eyed, wary, as if sensing danger. There was nothing dangerous about Quinn, but he couldn’t think of a way to tell her that without sounding peculiar.

  Instead, he said, “Hey.”

  She gave him a hesitant smile. “We’re not open yet.”

  “I can tell.” He gestured toward the empty showcases, where—he assumed—she would eventually display her cookies. Behind the counter, the wall held a broad white-board adorned by a frame of chocolate-chip cookies like those in the sign outside, and COOKIE’S printed across the top. On the left side of the sign, the word “Circles” was printed, below it a list of prices for jumbos, single cookies, half-dozen packages, and dozen packages. The right side of the sign was labeled “Squares” and included another price list for large squares, small squares, and packages. Between the Circles and the Squares, the word “Beverages” appeared in smaller print, with nothing listed below.

  She must have traced the angle of his vision. “I’m not sure what beverages I’ll be selling. I’ve just installed my coffee and cappuccino machines, and I’ll have hot water for tea. I’ll bring in bottled water. And milk, of course.”

  “Gotta have milk,” he agreed. “Cookies and milk.”

  “Exactly.” Her smile widened, brightening the entire room. “I can give you a cup of coffee if you’d like—only if you take it black. I’ll have cream and sugar tomorrow, but I haven’t got any today.”

  She was obviously busy setting the place up. He didn’t want to interfere or slow her down. If she’d minded his company, though, she wouldn’t have offered him something to drink. “Black works for me.” He dug into his pocket for his wallet. “How much do I owe you?”

  “On the house,” she told him, handing him a steaming cup filled with aromatic coffee. “I’m beta-testing the machine.”

  “So this is beta coffee?” He faked a scowl, then took a sip. “Skip the alpha coffee. Beta tastes fine.”

  Another broad smile, and she filled a cup for herself. “This is my second cup. I’ll be awake all night,” she said, then took a delicate sip.

  “I hope I’m not slowing you down or anything.” He gestured toward the empty display cases.

  She shrugged. “I’ve been working like a dog for the past few weeks. I’m allowed to take a break.”

  “Or two breaks, since this is your second cup.”

  Another honey-sweet smile from her. If her cookies were as delectable as her smile, her store would be a huge success.

  Neither of them said anything for a minute. They stood facing each other, the counter stretching between them. She looked like someone who, as she said, had been working like a dog. Her hair was pulled back from her face in a ponytail, but a few strands had come loose from the elastic and dangled around her face. He noted a pale smudge on her chin—dust? Flour, maybe. Her clothes were wrinkled. Her fingernails were cut short and devoid of polish. To Ashley, being seen in public without a proper manicure would be like walking down the street stark naked.

  Ashley. He was supposed to meet her in—he checked his wristwatch—twenty minutes. She wanted to discuss the whole Saturday thing with him again, in greater detail. As if there was anything left to discuss. During halftime at the Homecoming Game, they’d call his name and speechify about him for a bit, and then he’d go down to the field and accept a certificate or a plaque or whatever, and he’d say thank you, and that would be that. She wasn’t choreographing a Cirque du Soleil show. They didn’t have to rehearse the damned thing.

  He knew her insistence on rehashing the event one more time was only an excuse to get him to drive up from Boston and have dinner with her—and to go back to her place after dinner. She’d made it pretty clear that she wanted to pick up where they’d left off so many years ago.

  He supposed he could squeeze in a quickie with her before heading back to Boston. But the truth was, he didn’t want a quickie, with Ashley or anyone else. Ashley was great. She looked terrific. She’d had her ups and downs since breaking up with him, but she was clearly on an up now. He had recovered from having been dumped by her a long time ago.

  He was a different person now than when they’d been a couple—a better person, he hoped. A better person who didn’t do quickies. Not even with an old girlfriend who was firing so many steamy I-want-you vibes at him, he was surprised his skin wasn’t blistering with second-degr
ee burns.

  He took another sip of coffee and savored the dark, mellow flavor. It tasted so much better than the sludge he and his fellow residents guzzled throughout the day at Mass General, pumping themselves with enough caffeine to power them through their long shifts. Fans used to cheer him for his speed on the field, but scrambling for a first down when he couldn’t find an open receiver was nothing compared to the frenetic pace of his days now.

  That crazy pace, powered not just by caffeine but by adrenaline and fear and sheer willpower, enabled him to do something more valuable than move a pigskin a few yards closer to the goal line. Surely that proved that he was a better man today than he’d been ten years ago.

  What also proved that he was a better man today was that he was talking to Maeve Nolan, a woman who’d been about as significant as a dust mote to him in high school. He’d never once said hello to her in all those years, never acknowledged her with a smile or a nod. If he’d been aware of her at all, it had been because she was a weirdo. Weirdoes tended to leave an impression in your memory.

  But she wasn’t weird. She was quiet and still, her large hazel eyes both haunted and haunting, her chin tilted at a defiant angle as she regarded him over the rim of her paper cup. Her arms, visible beneath the sleeves of her T-shirt, had muscle on them. Her hips filled her faded jeans with subtle curves. He remembered how cool and smooth her hand had felt in his yesterday at the Faulk Street Tavern, when he’d prevented her from leaving before they’d shared a few words.

  “That song,” he said.

  She lowered her cup. “At the bar yesterday?”

  He smiled inwardly, pleased that he didn’t have to explain which song he was talking about. She knew. They were on the same wavelength, at least when it came to the old rock song the bar’s jukebox had played. “Yeah. What was it, ‘The Way Home’? Something like that.”

  “‘Take the Long Way Home.’”

  “Right.” He shook his head and felt his smile rise to his lips. “It’s not like it’s my favorite song or anything. I didn’t even get the title right. But it… I don’t know.”

  “It spoke to you,” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Me, too.” She lowered her gaze, as if admitting this embarrassed her.

  “Did you take the long way home?” he asked. “Because I sure as hell did. I’m not even sure I’m home yet.”

  “I’m home,” she admitted, raising her eyes back to him and smiling shyly. “I’m not sure I want to be here, though.”

  “Of course you want to be here. You’re starting a new business. Cookies! Everybody loves cookies.” That the song somehow connected them made conversation easier. He’d never spoken to her in high school, because what would he have said? They’d had nothing in common. But now, they had the song in common. And their journeys home—although he wasn’t sure if Boston was actually his home. Boston was where he lived, sharing an overpriced apartment in Back Bay with two other medical residents whose schedules were as insane as his. They hardly saw each other, even though they were roommates.

  It was an address. Not a home.

  Was Brogan’s Point his home? His parents no longer lived here; shortly after he’d started college, they’d moved to Maine, where the cost of living was cheaper. During his college years, going home meant going to visit his folks, although Portland hadn’t really been his home. Most of his school friends had moved away from Brogan’s Point—college, the army, wherever they found a job. He’d had no reason to come back.

  Unless you counted Ashley, of course. She’d spent four years at the University of New Hampshire and then returned to Brogan’s Point to work in her father’s automobile empire. But until she’d reached out to Quinn a month ago, he’d thought Ashley was gone from his life forever. He’d been fine with that.

  Chance, not choice, had brought him to Boston. Medical school graduates had little say in where they landed residencies, and fate had been kind enough to assign him to a residency at Mass General Hospital. He could just have easily wound up anywhere else, though.

  If he hadn’t moved to Boston, would Ashley have plotted this homecoming game extravaganza? Would she have decided to make a play for him, after having dropped him like a stink bomb when his life had taken a crazy U-turn? Would she be trying to lure him to Brogan’s Point if he’d become a fisherman like his father, instead of a doctor?

  Who knew?

  She was still gorgeous, rich, and charming. He wasn’t sure he trusted her. But he couldn’t just tell her to screw off. The old Quinn might have, but he wasn’t the old Quinn. At least he hoped he wasn’t. At least he was trying to be a better person.

  Bottom line: if Brogan’s Point was his home, he’d taken a very long, difficult, convoluted journey to reach it.

  “I’d like to hear about your long way home,” he said. Speaking the words made him realize they were true. He wanted to know more about Maeve Nolan, the school weirdo. The cop’s daughter. The cookie entrepreneur. The reserved, quiet woman whose delicate features hinted at deep wounds. He was a doctor, a healer. A saw-bones, really, but he’d like to have a shot at healing her.

  That thought was so presumptuous, he had to suppress a groan. He wasn’t the golden boy he’d once been. Maeve didn’t worship him the way so many people had back then. And no, he couldn’t heal someone just because he wanted to. For all he knew, she didn’t need healing—or, if she did—she didn’t want him to be the one to heal her.

  “But,” he added before she could respond, “I’ve got to be somewhere in—” he checked his watch again “—fifteen minutes. So…maybe some other time?”

  She didn’t say yes. Then again, she didn’t say no. She only smiled.

  “Thanks for the coffee. It was great. Beta-test is a success. I’ll—um—I’ll be in touch,” he said, handing her his empty cup, grinning a farewell and strolling to the door. It wasn’t until he was standing on the sidewalk, chased outside by a cheerful tinkle of the bell above the door, that he realized he had no idea how to reach her. Did she have a phone? An email address? A street address?

  She had the cookie store.

  And she had the song. They both did. That would bring them together again, even if they had to take the long way to get there.

  ***

  Gus lay beside Ed, her long, strong body motionless as she slept. He ought to be thinking about her, thinking about the sex they’d just enjoyed. He ought to be out cold like her, lost in that sweet, deep slumber that followed lovemaking. But he couldn’t sleep. His brain wouldn’t shut down.

  It turned out that, despite her still body and slow, steady respiration, Gus wasn’t sleeping, either. “Problem?” she asked, her voice thick with drowsiness.

  “Maeve,” he said. Just that one syllable, her name. His daughter. She’d been the only real problem in his life since Sheila had died. He’d learned to live with this problem, to go for days without even acknowledging it. Like a pebble in your shoe, if you can’t shake it out, you get used to it, and after a while, you develop calluses and you don’t feel it digging into your sole anymore.

  He’d lived entire days without feeling Maeve dig into his soul. But now she was in Brogan’s Point. “How could she come here and not tell me?”

  “She was going to tell you when she was ready,” Gus said, rolling onto her back and angling her pillow against the headboard so she was, if not quite sitting, not quite lying down, either.

  “When would she be ready? She must have planned this move for months. Some guy buys Torelli’s for her, and she sweeps into town and starts a business. And she doesn’t tell her father.”

  “She would have, eventually.”

  He peered at Gus. In the dark bedroom, she was only outlines, shadows, a silhouette. Her short, fluffy hair looked darker than it actually was, framed by the white linen of the pillow case. Her shoulders were almost too broad, but on her they looked feminine. She was a tall, athletic woman, a strong woman. He loved her shoulders, almost as much as he loved her breast
s. But he was a guy. Breasts would always take priority over shoulders in his mind.

  “Eventually isn’t good enough,” he complained.

  “She was looking for you yesterday when she came into the bar,” Gus reminded him. “She would have told you then.”

  “But I wasn’t in the bar, and she didn’t tell me. She’s got my phone number. She’s got my address. There are a million ways she could have reached me.”

  “And she probably would have, if you hadn’t jumped the gun.” Gus patted his arm. “She moved three thousand miles to get here. It’s okay if you took the last step that brought you together.”

  He snorted. “You’re a bartender even when you aren’t behind the bar. Dispensing words of wisdom.”

  “Yeah. That’s me.” She must have sensed that her wise words had consoled him, because she readjusted her pillow and rolled onto her side, her back to him. “Invite her for dinner. I’ll get Manny to cover for me at the bar. I’ll make a pot roast. She can bring dessert.”

  “I hope you like cookies,” Ed said. “That’s what she’ll bring.”

  “Cookies are fine,” Gus mumbled, the pillow garbling her words.

  Ed remained awake, his eyes focused on the ceiling above the bed. He couldn’t see it. He couldn’t see anything. But he could think.

  And those thoughts were: cookies were fine, but Maeve should have let him know she’d come home. She should have come home a long time ago, and she should have let him welcome her.

  Chapter Four

  Cookie seemed to have settled into the apartment on Atlantic Avenue more thoroughly than Maeve had. The gray feline sauntered confidently around the small flat which occupied the rear half of the building’s ground floor as if she’d signed the lease herself. The apartment’s windows in the living room, the kitchen, and the tiny bedroom overlooked the back alley, not the ocean, and Cookie was an alley cat. She probably felt more at home here than Maeve ever would, even if Maeve had been born and raised in this town.