Be Mine (13 page)

Sabina nodded shakily.

“You
do
want to see me after you’ve finished your report, don’t you?”

The question circled wildly in her thoughts. She felt like a teenager who’d been asked for her first date. “When?”

“It may take me a few weeks.” His voice was pensive. “I wasn’t looking for something as important as this to happen to me.”

He tipped her chin upward, his coffee-colored gaze locking with hers. Bright sun lightened the bleached tips of his thick lashes and highlighted the lean plane of his cheek. “I think we can be very good for each other.”

For the first time in her life Sabina glimpsed a future filled with love. Her smile felt tremulous, and she knew her heart was in her eyes. “If you don’t come I’ll track you down. I might even put out a warrant on you.”

Chad flicked her cheek with his fingers. “I’ll bank on that.” He drew away. “We’d better go home before they send out a search party.”

The return trek took no time at all. Exhilarated, Sabina threw herself into the rhythmic glide of her skis, staying close behind him, filled with a sense of euphoria. The sunlight flashing off the brilliant white landscape and the exercise made her giddy. She laughed aloud with pure joy.

As they approached the rear of the house the door flew open to reveal Daniel’s lanky figure. “Chickened out last night, didn’t you, Chad? I’m pretty hurt.”

Daniel’s broad smile didn’t indicate any permanent damage. Accepting their congratulations with aplomb, he stepped back to allow them entrance. “What were you doing? Making snow angels?” The teenager brushed snow from Chad’s back. As Sabina turned, he removed a dead leaf from the cuff of her toboggan. “Oh ho! What have we here? Showed her the leaf slide, did you, Chad?”

Sabina stopped in mid-step. “The what?”

Erica joined them in the warm kitchen. “It’s sort of gully down the side of a ravine, and the leaves collect in it. If there’s snow, you don’t need a sled or anything. You just throw yourself on your back and go whoosh!”

Sabina felt the color rise in her cheeks. She turned toward Chad, who was making rather a project of opening the refrigerator door.

Oblivious to her rising temper, Daniel reached out to brush snow off her shoulder and teased, “Fooled you, did he? Bet you rushed to the rescue.” He waggled his eyebrows teasingly.

Sabina fled. In her haste to push through the swinging door, she nearly struck her hostess in the face with the heavy panel. Remorse made her stop to apologize, but Clara broke in, “Did that nephew of mine play that old leaf slide trick?”

Sabina couldn’t respond. Lovely as it had been to feel part of that great, warm circle of concern, she was appalled to find every detail of her love life under general discussion. She said from between clenched teeth, “Since Daniel’s home, I assume the roads are passable. I’m leaving.”

She rushed into the little apartment before Clara could answer, missing the determination on the face of the older woman.

Pulling off the knit hat, Sabina resisted the impulse to stomp on it and settled for hurling the thing onto the couch. Her parka followed. She reached into her closet for her dress boots and coat, determined to make her exit with all the dignity she could scrape together.

 Her parents might be cold, but at least they gave a person privacy. The openness which had seemed so endearing had lost its appeal. She was a grown woman, and she didn’t need a pair of precocious twins doing a running commentary. She told herself she’d been right in her assessment the day before — get out of town and run as fast as you can.

The zipper on her boot jammed, and she jerked furiously at the tab, breaking a fingernail. Forcing herself to slow down, she managed the zipper and fumbled in her handbag for an emery board.

The nail smoothed and her coat wrapped around her like armor, she closed the panel behind her, determined to escape before anyone asked any more embarrassing questions.

An uneasy silence pervaded the kitchen as, carrying her luggage, she backed through the swinging door. Daniel made a half-hearted move to rise from his chair to help her, then sank back down at a quick motion of Chad’s hand. Clara stepped forward from her position at the stove.

“No need for you to rush off, Sabina. Daniel and Erica won’t pry no more.” Her glance stabbed at the pair, as if to reinforce a lecture already delivered. “I’d like it real well if you’d stay the weekend.”

Ignoring Chad as if he were invisible, Sabina managed a polite smile. “I really must get back. I’m already a day overdue. Besides, you know what they say about fish and guests. After three days they start to smell funny.”

The elderly woman leaned forward abruptly and kissed her cheek. “It’s been real nice to have you. Come back.”

In her surprise at the affectionate gesture, Sabina allowed Chad to remove her clothing bag and carryall from her hands and disappear through the outer door. She murmured, “Thank you. You’ve been wonderful.”

The twins’ subdued farewells followed her through the door. She dreaded another encounter with Chad. She wanted to leave and get it over with. Her humiliation at being one of a series of women romanced in that wooded hollow was so great she didn’t even want to be in the same country with him.

* * * *

Chad watched Sabina stride briskly to her car. Her movements and her “city” clothes distanced her from him. There was no way he could take back his cousins’ teasing. Didn’t she know it stemmed from affection, that they expected her to laugh with them? They’d paid her a compliment, but he knew she couldn’t see it that way. Not yet.

Watching her firm jaw and the proud set of her head, Chad swore to himself that if he had the opportunity to surround Sabina Hanlon with love, nothing would ever make her unhappy again.

 His thoughts shook him down to his ski boots.

The car door slammed sharply; she rolled down the window. “I’ll send you a copy of my report. As you already know, your operation is clean and progressive. I appreciate your cooperation.”

To his sensitive ears, the stilted phrases sounded forlorn. Chad leaned toward the window. “I’m still going to follow you. Maybe when you’re on your own turf you’ll acknowledge what’s possible between us. And you won’t care who knows it.” Ducking his head inside the open window, he kissed her. Hard.

 “Incidentally, the last time I tricked a girl down the leaf slide I was a senior in high school.”

* * * *

Two weeks had passed. Two weeks during which Sabina had alternated between annoyance and yearning. After the first night, spent chafing at the pitfalls of conducting a fledgling romance with a Greek chorus in the background, she had realized that for the first time in her life she felt alive. How odd that she hadn’t been aware of her stultified condition.

Her senses were now attuned to everything. Early April’s promise of spring made her feel giddy and free. Her cheeks warmed and her pulse rate rose at the thought of Chad, and she welcomed the feelings, wallowing in anticipation.

In retrospect, the trip to Calico Mining replayed as a
Brigadoon-
like interlude, but Sabina had no intention of waiting a hundred years for Chad.

Any anger inside her bubble of well-being was directed toward herself for the years of human warmth she’d missed. As each day had passed with no word, the new Sabina toyed with the idea of staging a surprise inspection at Calico, then discarded the idea as unprofessional.

Her thoughts retraced familiar ground as she stirred tomato sauce. Her hand slipped, and the thick red mixture splashed upward. Ignoring the stain on her shirt, she dabbed at her cheek with a paper towel. The sound of the doorbell interrupted her efforts. If it was a salesman calling on a Saturday evening, she intended send him home with an ear full.

The figure lounging at her door seemed larger than life. Had she caused Chad to materialize just by thinking of him? There he stood, looking even more wonderful than she remembered. She yearned to be cool and sophisticated, but her brain wouldn’t relay the message to her lips. Instead she said, “It took you long enough.”

Sabina didn’t even smile to take the edge from her words.

He asked quizzically, “I don’t want to seem critical, but have you fallen into a vat of spaghetti sauce?”

Sabina cast a horrified look at herself. The dollop which had struck her minutes earlier hadn’t been the first to splatter the front of her oversized shirt. She wondered where else the stuff had landed. “I’m making lasagna.”

“Shall we just go on standing here and looking at each other or may I come in.”

Sabina stepped back so he could enter.

Chad removed her fingers from the door and close it behind them. He leaned forward and licked a spot of sauce from her cheek, then held her face between his warm hands as he kissed the tip of her nose. “Delicious. I can hardly wait to see your kitchen,” he teased.

In an effort to still her racing pulse, she moved away from him and said dryly, “You’re making yourself right at home for someone who took his time getting here.”

“You didn’t exactly issue a warm invitation when you took off in such a rush,” he reminded her. “I decided to come anyway.”

Memory of her hurried departure opened a wound in her conscience. “I tried to apologize when I wrote your aunt a bread and butter note, but things were so hard to explain . . .”
Impossible.
She’d been accepted into their family circle without question, but she had still felt alien. She’d wanted only to crawl back her apartment and draw the door in behind her. Time and distance had given her perspective.

“My love live fascinates Aunt Clara and the twins, mostly because they’ve never been able to find out enough. I never date anyone local, which drives them wild. My reputation is mostly a figment of their imaginations, and they know it. Then you came.” There was no resentment in his voice, only fond laughter.

“They love you very much.”

“I know. That’s why I try to make them happy by gingering things up now and then. Gives them more to speculate about.”

* * * *

Chad made a sudden resolution. After her response to him two weeks earlier, she had rushed off as if the dogs were after her. He wanted her to open her mind and her heart to him — and to his family, which had already taken her in, whether she knew it or not. He kept his voice steady as he said, “We’re going to start from scratch. As if I’d never kissed you and you’d never responded to me. Please, Sabina?”

Sabina flashed the dimple that intrigued him and turned toward the kitchen. “I have to finish my lasagna. Would you like something to eat?”

“I wouldn’t turn it down,” he said. The offer relieved any fears he had that she might send him packing.

“Then follow me,” she said.

His suspicion that her entire kitchen would be spattered with tomato sauce was unfounded. On the glass table where she seated him were half a dozen single serving containers already filled with lasagna and thickly sprinkled with shaved mozzarella cheese. She popped one into the microwave.

Without speaking, she gestured him to the a chair and set a place for him. When the oven announced the completion of its time, she returned to the task of wrapping the remainder in plastic film and zipping them in plastic freezer bags before crowding them in around a variety of ice cream containers. “I haven’t room for all this unless we eat some of the ice cream. Strawberries ‘n Cream?”

Chad thought the flavor perfectly described the becoming rose flush high on her creamy cheeks. Sabina was offering to come half way. “My favorite,” he replied softly.

* * * *

Sabina had always considered her kitchen spacious. With Chad lounging in the captain’s chair the room’s dimensions shrank to those of a closet. Fresh air blended with the fragrance of the tomato sauce, creating a homey atmosphere, but Chad’s presence added something she’d never realized she craved. The discovery panicked her, and she searched her mind frantically for a safe conversational topic. “How are the twins?”

“Daniel’s coming out of his depression after the team lost in the finals and Erica has dress rehearsals for the play this week.” Chad’s voice was amused, and his gaze was focused on the lasagna- laden fork laden in his left hand. He continued, “Aunt Clara is in the thick of the infighting at her church circle over the spring mother-daughter banquet. Some lazy types want to downgrade the event to an evening dessert gathering, and she’s on her horse. Jonas is the same as ever, only furious because the crew voted to call our encounter a draw and all the bets were returned.”

His eyes twinkled when he finally looked at her. “And that’s all the news I have. Can we start the getting acquainted phase of our courting now?”

Sabina dropped the half gallon ice cream container she’d been holding into the sink and began to laugh. “This is never going to work,” she finally managed. “We don’t have a thing in common.”

He was at her side before she could move, pulling the ice cream scoop from her hand and competently filling the glass bowls she’d set out. “That’s why I’m here. Do you like sports?”

“Of course.” She accepted the bowl he placed in her hands and dug in the drawer beside her for spoons.

“There’s no `of course’ about it. Since we’re baring our souls, I’ll let you in on a secret. My R & R’s that the twins make so much of are actually trips to Cavaliers and Indians games. And someday, when the Browns are back, I’ll have a football team to follow again.” The laughter lines at the corners of his eyes deepened. “The whole town thinks I slip away and party, and if you ever tell anyone otherwise I’ll have to hurt you badly.” He took his own bowl to the table and sat down.

Ignoring the laughing threat, Sabina settled herself across from him. “You’re a fake.”

“Harmless fun. Since I’m still single, Aunt Clara enjoys painting me as just a little profligate. I suspect she knows better, but her it sure doesn’t hurt her stock around town. Didn’t you know small communities thrive on the idea of a little sin touching them?”

“I think you’re trying to sell me a bag of moonshine,” she answered, digging her spoon into the ice cream.

“Nope. I’m trying to sell you me. I don’t gamble, except for a monthly low stakes poker game with a few old friends. I don’t drink to excess, and I’m kind to widows and orphans.” He smiled at her winningly and said coaxingly, “Mothers love me.”