Kiss Me Hello (Sweetest Kisses) (3 page)

“Why?”

Her smile was nowhere in evidence, but Mac understood the compelling urge to look gift horses in the mouth.

“We’re neighbors. I don’t know what that means where you come from, but out here, it means we help each other when the need arises. Whoever told you Damson Valley is a friendly place was telling the God’s honest truth.”

Though Mac himself wasn’t much given to friendliness—usually.

“Fine, then how can I help you?”

He wasn’t expecting that. Her question earned his respect—a little more of his respect.

“I’ll think about it.”

“Don’t think too long.” She pulled a towel from the handle of the refrigerator—more bright colors, chickens and flowers this time—and dried their mugs.

“Because you’re selling this place?” He rose and studied the line of her back, trying not to be mesmerized by the way that thick coppery-blond braid kept brushing the top of her backside over faded, comfortably worn jeans.

“Because I do not like to be beholden to anybody, Mr. Knightley. What do I owe you for coming by here today?” She kept her back to him, and Mac had the sense she was steeling herself for the answer.

Cash poor, indeed.

“A couple slices of pizza will do. Maybe three, provided nobody orders any anchovies. But first, Luis and I will have to get some stalls cleaned out in the barn and scare up something to use as halters. We’ll need buckets and bedding too.”

She dried the second mug and set it up in the cupboard, then turned back around. “Luis can be difficult.”

“Then we should get along, because I can be outright impossible.”

“Yes.” The smile bloomed again, that blessed, beautiful, soul-warming smile. “I can see this about you, MacKenzie Knightley. Outright impossible.”

Damned if she wasn’t giving him the impression she liked that just fine.

* * *

Sid sent Luis grumbling out to the barn. From the looks of his room, he’d been napping, not setting his personal space to rights.

To have both males out of the house was a relief. Men had a noisy, biological presence, and not the kind of noise Sid enjoyed. The noise she liked was suburban or urban. Varied, impersonal, too complicated to attribute to any one person or source.

“You miss it too, don’t you?” she asked a fat, long-haired marmalade cat reclining on Luis’s bed.

The beast squeezed its eyes shut in answer, and began to rumble when Sid scratched its neck. What if horses could purr? The racket from those two red monsters would resemble jet engines. Sid scooped up the cat and went to the window, the better to watch Luis shuffling across the yard to the barn.

He hadn’t wanted to move out here either, but where else were they to go?

For the thousand millionth time, the thought “if Tony hadn’t died” tried to take root in Sid’s mind, a useless, stupid thought. She pushed it aside, and brought the cat with her down the hall to her bedroom.

Sid hadn’t chosen the largest bedroom in the house, but rather, had taken the one at the back, with a high ceiling, a private balcony, and a view out over the fields and pastures that comprised her property.

“I will learn to appreciate it,” she informed the cat. “I may not like it, but for now, it’s home.” She put the cat down on her bed, a big fluffy four-poster that went well with the room, and sat beside him.

To close her eyes would feel heavenly. To enjoy for a moment the quiet of the house without male feet—teenage or otherwise—stomping through it, to know somebody else had an eye on Luis for even a little while.

Sid lay down, the cat curling up against her side, and let herself drift.

* * *

“How long you been taking lessons with Adelia?”

Mac posed what he hoped was a neutral question. With teenagers, anything,
anything
could become grist for the drama mill. He recalled his younger brothers’ adolescent moodiness as if it were yesterday, and gave thanks they’d all weathered those storms without irreparable injury.

“I’ve been taking lessons for a few weeks. Before we moved here, Sid brought me out on weekends once she signed me up with them.”

Nothing more, no polite overtures, no small talk. Maybe they’d get along after all.

“You muck your horse’s stall at the riding school?”

“And scrub the water buckets, groom my horse, throw hay, and clean my tack.”

“Then you’re just the man these ponies have been looking for.” Mac walked into the barn’s understory. The good news was the structure was built of chestnut beams and fieldstone and likely to last forever with minor maintenance.

The bad news was the minor maintenance probably hadn’t been done for ten years. Cobwebs hung everywhere, dust accumulated in sedimentary layers on every surface, and little light came through windows larded with fly specking and dirt.

“Water’s back here,” Mac said, going to the sidewall of the barn. The frost-free spigot was barely discernible in the gloom, a bucket festooned with cobwebs still hanging from the hook. “Say a prayer it works.”

He spoke in Spanish, a little to keep Luis’s attention, a little to practice. A criminal defense attorney with some bilingual ability had an advantage, both in garnering business and in earning trust with Hispanic clients. Then too, Spanish was easy and pretty.

“People who live beyond civilization’s borders can’t be expected to speak civilized languages.”

Mac looked up from the rusty water gushing into the old bucket, because Luis had spoken in the soft, lilting French of the islands.

“People who are new to a territory ought to do more listening than judging,” Mac replied in the same language, and he went on in French, because the look on Luis’s face was positively comical. “I dated a girl from Toronto in high school, and she helped me with what I’d learned in class. I also spent a couple summers crewing on a sailboat in the Caribbean. Dump this, would you? I’ll find us some brushes and rags.”

Luis took the bucket without another word and disappeared out into the sunshine.

Mac rummaged in the old dairy, which had been made over into a tack room of sorts, and came up with more buckets, muck forks, old toweling, and a bucket brush.

“Let’s focus on the run-in stall,” he said—in English—when Luis came back. “The rest of this barn needs a crew and some serious cleaning equipment.”

“May we speak French?” Luis asked, using what was apparently his native language. “I seldom hear it, and I don’t want—I prefer it.”

Luis didn’t want to forget his mother tongue, and Social Services had not thought to place him with a family who spoke it—if they’d had one to offer him.

“If you’re not too proud to ask,” Mac said, “I’m not too proud to stumble around, provided you correct my errors.”

A glint came into Luis’s eyes, humor perhaps, or guile. “I will correct you.”

“I will correct you as well.” Mac tossed an old towel at him. “Refill the bucket and start on those windows. You’ll need the brush too.”

“While you do what?”

“Muck the hell out of the run-in.”

They worked mostly in silence, which was fine with Mac. Luis worked hard, like a person his age could, with single-minded determination to do the job right. The windows didn’t exactly sparkle when he was done—the old single-pane glass needed newspaper and vinegar for a real shine—but they let in light.

“It looks better,” Luis said. “But that’s only one corner of the barn.”

“It’s a start. We’d better knock off now, or the feed store will close before we can get to it.”

Uneasiness crossed the kid’s features before his expression went blank. “Sidonie will prefer I remain here.”

“Then she can come with me, or you both can, or I’ll leave you directions to the feed store so you know where it is.” Getting into a truck with a strange man was apparently on Luis’s don’t-even list. Mac did not speculate about why. “We’ll need to clean up some before we’re seen in public, in any case, but, Luis?”

The boy stopped a few steps up the barn aisle.

“You put up the muck forks and buckets and so forth every time, because if a horse gets loose, he can tangle himself up in them, destroy them, or do harm to himself.”

Luis retrieved the muck fork from where he’d propped it near the water spigot. Mac gathered up the rest of the forks, buckets, towels, and brushes and followed Luis back to the dairy/tack room.

“How do you know the horses?” Luis asked as they turned for the house. “Sid says you know their names.”

“Buttercup has the blaze. Daisy has the star and the snip. I grew up around here, and those two were the state champs at one point.”

“They’re champions?”

“They were, years ago. Does Sid speak French?”

“She tries, but she is too proud. She has to be the mother.”

This last was said with a sweet smile as they walked back to the house. When this boy filled out, he would turn heads and break hearts—provided he stayed out of jail.

“Lost my dad when I was not much older than you are now,” Mac said. “A mother is a fine thing to have.”

Luis’s head came up. “My
mother
’s in jail. Twenty years for CDS distribution, and a lot of other bullshit.”

“You ever get to see her?”
Controlled
Dangerous
Substances, a.k.a. street drugs
.

“She’s in Jessup.”

Not an answer. Jessup was a lot closer to Baltimore, though, and moving out here would make visits to the prison harder to arrange.

“I’ve visited Jessup. The facilities aren’t bad, for a jail.”

Luis snorted and preceded Mac into the kitchen.

Mac tried to picture his own late mother in jail. A criminal defense attorney saw people go to jail almost daily. Bad people, good people, some of them even innocent good people.

But his own mother?

He followed Luis into the house and wondered what would make a woman like Sidonie Lindstrom—a pretty, unmarried city girl who probably read more magazines than books and loved the smell of car exhaust—take on the challenge of a kid like Luis.

Sid was dreaming of an expedition to White Flint Mall down in the thriving suburb of Rockville. To the bargain rack at Lord and Taylor, where the slickest Little Black Dress hung in just her size. Finished silk, a plunging neckline, the hemline at exactly mid-thigh, with floral aubergine embroidery on the hem and neckline. Modest, but with the potential to tease, particularly when matched with onyx and gold jewelry, and three-inch spikes. The dress would
feel
lovely against her skin, and make her want to move around in it simply for the caress of the fabric on her bare—

Something—the cat’s tail?—brushed her nose.

“Wakey, wakey, princess.”

That gravelly baritone had no place in either Sid’s dreams or her realities. She opened her eyes.

MacKenzie Knightley sat on the white frothy duvet covering her bed, perfectly at ease for all his size and dark coloring.

“I was resting my eyes.”

“Right.” He dropped her braid and stood, without cracking a smile—without needing to crack a smile; his amusement was that evident. “You’ve been resting your eyes for a while now, I’m guessing.”

“Why would you guess that?” Sid bounced and slogged her way to the edge of the bed. Big beds were for sleeping in, not for making dignified exits from.

“I’d guess that, because you’ve got a crease on your cheek from the pillows, and because I stood in that doorway there”—he pointed ten feet across the room—“and for about five straight minutes, I politely suggested you wake up.”

Sid made it to the edge of the bed, but her brain was having trouble waking up along with her body.

“Where’s Luis?” she asked.

“Braiding some baling twine halters to use until we can scare up the real deal. I suggested he and I make an excursion to the feed store and pick up the pizza so you could sleep, but he was reluctant to leave you here alone.”

“Pizza.” Sid’s mind latched onto the image of a big, piping hot, loaded deep-dish with a mug of cold root beer to go with it. “I suppose we can’t get anything delivered here?”

“You suppose right,” Mac said. “I’ll leave you to get yourself in order while I round up Luis.”

He headed for the stairs, giving Sid a chance to appreciate his departing side. Lithe, like a big cat, and quiet, but not as incongruous in her bedroom as he should have been. The high ceilings, the solid stone construction of the house, the old oaks in the yard, and the open fields beyond suited him.

Maybe she could sell the place to him, except a horseshoer—she forgot the other word he’d used—probably couldn’t afford this much land.

Sid stopped dead in front of her cheval mirror.

“God in heaven.” She had a crease on her cheek, her hair was a wreck, and her clothes looked like they’d never gotten acquainted with the dryer’s wrinkle-guard feature.

MacKenzie Knightley had seen her like this.

Apparently, country boys didn’t scare easily. Sid set to work with her brush, changed into fresh jeans that fit a little more snugly, and a green silk blouse that complemented her eyes. Brown suede half boots and a denim jacket with green and brown beading on the hems completed the picture.

“You’ll do,” she informed her image. When she sauntered into the kitchen, Luis and MacKenzie were sitting at the table, working lengths of some hairy-looking twine.

“You’ve taken up macramé, Luis?” She tousled his hair, because they had company, and Luis wouldn’t give her sass for it.

“Making halters for the horses. I’m supposed to bring them in at night and turn them out in the morning until the hot weather comes.”

“They might be gone by hot weather,” Sid said, going to the fridge.

Luis set the twine on the table and stood. “Gone where?”

“I’m not sure, but we know next to nothing about caring for livestock, Luis. You know this place isn’t long-term for us.”

“But you told Social Services—”

“Luis Martineau, what I tell that bunch of officious bi—biddies, or your good-for-nothing lawyer, has nothing to do with reality, any more than they’re really concerned with your best interests. Now what do you want on your pizza?”

She felt MacKenzie Knightley watching them, but what did a horseshoer know about the red tape, posturing, and endless regulations that went along with being a foster parent? What did he know about Luis’s family, much less Sid’s own situation?

And as far as Sid was concerned, “good-for-nothing lawyer” was a redundant term.

“You know how I like my pizza,” Luis said, “and I don’t see why we have to sell the horses when we just moved here.”

Sid was about to tell him that wasn’t his decision, but something in his eyes promised her a knock-down, drag-out, steel cage bout of pouting and sulking if she pulled rank on him in front of their guest.

“We’ll talk about it later,” Sid said.

“I’ll be the one taking care of them,” Luis said. “If they’re no inconvenience to you, I don’t see why you have to get rid of them.”

Damnably logical, until one of the mastodons stepped on his foot, and Child Protective Services was out here, sniffing around and muttering about lack of supervision.

“They’re not foster children, Luis, and playing the guilt card this early in an argument is a low shot, and bad strategy.”

“They aren’t foster children,” Luis said, his chin coming up. “They don’t have a lawyer. Nobody is required to report when those horses are abandoned or treated badly. Nobody owes them food or shelter. They have nobody and nothing, no rights.”

“I hate to interrupt,” Knightley said, getting to his feet, “but the feed store isn’t open all night. We can continue this over pizza, can’t we?”

“Yes,” Sid said, grudgingly grateful to him for intervening. “As long as you’re willing to look after the horses, Luis, we can take our time about finding them another home.”

“I’d leave it there,” Knightley said to Luis. “You’re too much of a gentleman to fight dirty in front of me, and Sidonie’s too stubborn to back down while I’m here. You’ll make more progress without a peanut gallery.”

“She is stubborn,” Luis said, the corners of his mouth trying to turn up.

“And you.” Knightley took Sid’s purse down from a hook near the door and passed it to her. “Don’t needle him over dinner. Let him spend a few days scrubbing water buckets, trudging in and out from the pasture in the pouring-down rain and wind and mud, spooning honey before and after school every day, and see if his position doesn’t shift closer to center.”

The prospect of Luis seeing reason all on his own cheered Sid, as did the idea that they were only a few miles—only!—from some place that served pizza and Greek fare Knightley swore was worth the drive.

“You two coming with me, or are we going to caravan?” Knightley asked.

His face gave away nothing, not eagerness for their company, not distress at having to share his vehicle. Nothing.

“We’ll follow you,” Sid said.

“Then we’ll find the pizza place by way of the feed store. You should have a couple bags of senior feed on hand for your ponies, and probably pick up some joint supplement for them as well.”

He climbed into his truck—a big blue thing that looked like it could pull house trailers—and fired it up.

“Diesel,” Luis said, which was proof positive guys had different genes.

Sid fished in her purse for the car keys. “You can tell that from listening to it?”

“You can’t?”

“You want to drive?” Sid asked, rather than admit her ignorance. Knightley’s wheels sounded like a truck. Like a big powerful truck.

She tossed Luis the keys and buckled in. Fortunately, Knightley drove below the posted speed, no doubt making allowances for the fact that they were following. In the waning light, the countryside was pretty enough, with a few fields already bright green, and others not yet planted.

“Do you know what the green stuff is?” Sid asked.

“Winter wheat. There’s fields of it near the high school.”

Where they’d registered him on Friday, because the Department of Social Services frowned on foster children having any time off from school, even when those children pulled straight A’s in merit classes. Sid had pushed it, giving Luis three days off before enrolling him, hoping social workers out here in the country were a more reasonable breed.

Maybe pigs could fly in this fresh rural air too.

“Feed store,” Luis said, dutifully putting on his turn signal and following Knightley into the parking lot of a building sporting a “Damson County Farmers’ Co-op” sign over a front-facing loading dock. “You coming in?”

“Sure, unless you’re paying for this pony chow?”

“I would, if that would make a difference.”

Sid got out and studied Luis over the roof of the car. “You just met these horses, Luis, right?”

He jammed his hands in his pockets, a young man trying to figure out how not to get in trouble for telling the truth, because he would assuredly get in trouble if he lied.

“I saw their tracks in the pasture the day we moved in, and I knew the tracks couldn’t have been there from last year. Mac’s waiting for us.”

Tracks. Oh, right. Little dude from way downtown saw horse tracks. Like she would believe that.

“You knew the horses were there, and you said nothing. This is not good, Luis.”

“They were abandoned,” Luis said again. “Left to starve or die. They don’t deserve that, Sid. They were state champions, and nobody cares what happened to them.”

Spare
me
from
crusading
adolescents.
“We don’t know what their story is, but we’ll talk more about this later.”

Knightley started walking toward Sid’s little Mustang convertible as if he’d heard his cue. “You might consider getting something with four-wheel drive,” he said. “Winters can be tricky out here.”

“This thing’s paid off,” Sid said, patting the candy-apple-red hood. “Car payments can be tricky too. Where’s the horse food aisle?”

“It doesn’t work like that,” Knightley said. “Come on inside, and I’ll show you the ropes.”

He held the door for her—for a farm boy, he had polished manners—and explained that they ordered the feed at the counter, and the nice man would put it in Sid’s car for them. This was good, because the feed came in fifty-pound bags, which meant hefting it out of her car’s trunk would be a job she and Luis shared.

Fifty dollars later, they had two bags of horse feed and some fancy fairy dust with joint supplement in it for horses. Luis was listening raptly as Knightley explained the ins and outs of feeding draft horses, as opposed to the school horses Luis had met thus far.

“Are we going to stand here all night,” Sid asked, “or take pity on a starving woman?”

The man and the boy turned to look at her at the same moment, their expressions showing the same consternation.

“Pizza,” she said, enunciating carefully. “Gyros, cheesecake. Nu-tri-tion, such as it can be found out here in the provinces. Ringing any bells?”

“Sid gets cranky when her blood sugar’s low,” Luis said. “And she’s tired.”

“I never would have guessed.” Knightley turned to open his truck door—his unlocked truck door. “The restaurant is right down this road about two miles on the left. You can’t miss it.”

“We’ll meet you there.” Sid hopped into her car and started the engine, lest Luis get Knightley going on some other No Girls Allowed topic. That had happened occasionally with Tony, but not often. Luis had kept his distance from Tony, and Sid hadn’t really known what to do about it.

But then, Tony hadn’t been trying to be any kind of role model for Luis. He’d regarded the foster children as Sid’s “little experiment.” They came and went, and if Sid wanted to send them birthday and Christmas cards, or go to their graduations, that was her decision.

When she’d told him Luis was different, Luis was a keeper, he’d scoffed.

“They’re all different to you, Sid. You’d keep every one of them if you could get away with it.”

Damn him, even if he was dead, he’d been right.

* * *

Mac had made a horrendous mistake, one evident before the food had been brought to the table. Aspidistra’s was getting crowded, because Saturday night was an eat-out night in the local surrounds, and the options were few unless driving forty minutes to Frederick or Hagerstown held some appeal.

Mac lived about four miles away, and the folks politely noticing MacKenzie Knightley sitting down to a public meal with a female-who-wore-no-ring were his neighbors. He’d taken the waitress, Marcella Ebersole, to the junior prom almost twenty years and many dress sizes ago, and had his hand as far up her skirts as nature and the backseat of a restored Super Beetle would allow.

He’d also defended Marcella’s son on shoplifting charges last year and gotten the kid probation before judgment, thus preserving the boy’s shot at some college scholarships.

Two booths down, Mrs. Fletcher, Mac’s old youth choir director, sat with her husband of five decades, beaming at the man, though in her words, he couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket.

At the bar, Mac’s nemesis from middle school wrestling tournaments, Joey Hinlicky Jr., sat nursing a longneck. Joey was referred to as Deuce now, because his son sported the same moniker, as well as his dad’s penchant for mischief.

And damned if Joe hadn’t winked at Mac before the pizza was even out of the oven.

Marcella had smirked at him.

Mrs. Fletcher had smiled.

What the hell had he been thinking?

Mac returned the smiles, nods, and winks with as much civility as he was capable of, which only seemed to amuse the idiots and goons around him. Fortunately, he was with a woman and a boy who took their tucker seriously. Luis matched Mac slice for slice, and Sid held her own as well, even finishing Luis’s piece of cheesecake.

“Never had key lime cheesecake before,” Sid observed. “Is it a local delicacy?”

“I’ve never had a dessert from Vespa Boon’s kitchen that wasn’t delicious,” Mac said. “Though I admit key lime cheesecake is new to me too. If nobody’s ordering seconds though, I’ll be on my way.”

He started to get out his wallet, but Sid reached across the table to circle his wrist with her fingers.