Blackberry Summer (16 page)

So far, he had been too busy to enjoy any of it, a pretty sorry state of affairs.

“I’ve got a bike at home. Maybe when you get the cast off you can show me if there are any new trails around here since I was a kid.”

“Sure, that would be fun,” Owen said as he pushed open his front door. Claire’s droopy-eyed dog greeted them with a polite bark and a sniff at their wet shoes.

“Hey, Mom. I’m home. Where are the bandages?”

There was a pause of about five seconds, before he heard Claire’s voice growing louder as she approached them. “In the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, right where they’ve always been. Why do you need a bandage?”

She came from the kitchen on the last “bandage,” without the wheelchair, he was happy to see. She walked on crutches that had been rigged up to compensate for her cast, with a little platform to rest her arm. She wore a flowery cotton dress, a pale lavender this time that made him think of a meadow full of wildflowers.

She stopped in the doorway with an almost comical sort of double take. “Riley! Oh! Hello.”

He looked at her mouth and suddenly couldn’t remember anything but that shock of a kiss. When he dragged his gaze away to her eyes he saw the memory
of it there, in the slight widening of her pupils and the sudden flush on her cheekbones.

“Hi,” he said stupidly, unable to think of another damn thing to utter. His mind seemed filled with remembering the softness of her skin, the springtime taste of her, her tiny ragged breaths against his mouth.

“What are you doing here?” she asked. “And why does my son need a bandage? Owen, why are you covered in mud? And blood, apparently.”

The boy grinned. “I crashed my bike in a stupid puddle and flipped over the handlebars. It was awesome.”

She looked at her son as if he was some strange exotic creature. A clone fighter himself or something. Because she’d never been an eight-year-old boy, she probably didn’t grasp the particular nuances of the situation and how very cool it could be to endo your ride.

“Awesome,” she repeated.

“Yeah, like something on the X-Games. You should have seen it.”

“True story,” Riley put in. “A genuinely spectacular crash.”

She looked from one to the other. “You’re both insane.”

Riley met the kid’s gaze and they shared a grin. When he turned back to Claire, she was shaking her head, but he thought she looked more amused than annoyed.

“And how exactly were you involved in this, Chief McKnight?”

He offered what he hoped was an innocent smile.
It had always worked on his sisters, anyway. “Only an eyewitness, I swear.”

She raised an eyebrow and he was compelled to come clean. “Okay, I think I might have distracted him from paying as much attention as he probably should have to the road when I honked and waved.”

“It wasn’t your fault. It was that stupid pothole’s fault.”

“Something you can be sure I will be bringing up with the city council in the interest of public safety, of course.”

“He says he can fix my bike, Mom. We won’t have to take it to Mike’s Bikes. Cool, huh?”

She smiled. “Frosty.”

Riley gestured to her crutches. “Are you supposed to be walking around? Last I heard, I thought the docs wanted you to use the wheels for a while yet.”

She looked slightly guilty. “I tried. I really did. But I got so sick of it. I kept banging into doors and I felt trapped, not being able to tackle even a step. At my last appointment, I made Dr. Murray fix me up with crutches. It’s still not easy to get around and most of the time in the house I end up using that office chair to roll from room to room, but it’s better than trying to maneuver the stupid wheelchair.”

Riley could completely relate. When he’d been shot in the leg a few years back—a minor injury from a drug bust that had gone south, which he had decided not to share with his mom and sisters for obvious reasons—he had lasted about three days on sick leave before he’d been hounding his lieutenant to let him back on the job.

“So you’re feeling better?”

“Much. I’m going a little stir-crazy, if you want the truth. I need to get back to the bead store.”

“Hey, Mom, I’m starving. What smells so good?”

The house
did
smell delicious, the air rich with something Italian, full of tomatoes and garlic, basil and oregano.

“Your sister’s making dinner. It should be ready soon, but we need to clean up that mud before you can eat, young man.”

“And I still need a bandage.”

“Right.” She made a move as if to pivot, but Riley stopped her.

“You need to sit down. Point me in the right direction of your first aid supplies and I can take care of it.”

“I’m fine. You don’t have to…”

He cut her off. “Bathroom, you said, right? I’m on it. Owen, see what you can do with some paper towels to wipe off the mud, okay?”

He headed into the same room where he’d washed up after he had hauled away her branches the other day, a clean, comfortable space with textured walls painted a rich Tuscan gold and umber.

After grabbing a box of bandages off the shelf and some antibiotic ointment, he followed the sound of voices to the kitchen. He found Owen recounting his fall all over again, this time to his sister who was standing at the stove wearing a red-checkered apron and stirring something in a stockpot on the stove.

“Wow. It really smells good in here.”

Macy flashed him a pleased smile, looking very much like he remembered Claire at that age.

“Thanks. Hey, Mom, how much fresh rosemary did you tell me again?”

Claire was standing at the island in the kitchen, quartering tomatoes for the tossed salad in a bowl in front of her, he was annoyed to see. “One teaspoon ought to do it. Do you need me to check the flavor?”

“No. I told you I can handle it. You said you would sit down. So sit down.”

He decided Macy was an uncommonly sensible girl.

“Just a minute more. I’m almost finished,” Claire insisted.

She shifted her weight slightly on the crutches and he saw a spasm of pain cross her features. With a frustrated sigh, he set the first aid supplies on the kitchen table, where Owen sat near the dark, rain-splattered bay windows, then moved behind Claire and in one smooth motion, he scooped her into his arms and carried her toward the table.

Macy and Claire both made the same shocked sort of sound but Owen just giggled.

“Put me down,” Claire insisted. “Right this minute.”

Now why would he want to do that when she was soft and warm and smelled like strawberries and springtime? He smiled down at her and had the guilty satisfaction of seeing her gaze rest on his mouth briefly before she jerked it away.

“I plan to,” he answered calmly. “See? I’m putting
you down right here in this chair. I’m not going to stand here and watch you overdo.”

“Fixing broken bicycles, bandaging boo-boos, carting around invalids. You’re just overflowing with helpfulness, aren’t you?”

He smiled at her tart tone. “Doing my civic duty, that’s all.”

He finally decided he’d held her long enough—probably longer than was smart—and lowered her into a chair at the kitchen table adjacent to her son, who was watching the whole thing with amusement.

“What would you like me to tackle first? The boo-boo or the salad?”

She glared. “Oh, do I get a choice now?”

“If you can choose wisely.”

She rolled her eyes, but he thought he saw a hint of a smile lurking there. Might have been a trick of the light, though. “I can fix up Owen from here. I could actually slice the tomatoes from here, too, but because I have a feeling you’re going to insist on doing something, you can finish the salad.”

“Wrong. I’m going to insist on doing both. You’ve only got one good hand. Just relax.”

She looked frustrated, but he also saw the lines of pain around her mouth, so he didn’t let her annoyance bother him.

“Let me wash my hands and I’ll take care of the BMX casualty here first.”

He took off his jacket and hung it over a chair, then headed to the sink where Macy was watching the whole scene with interest. “It really does smell delicious,” he
said as he rolled up his sleeves and lathered his hands. “What are you fixing?”

“Spaghetti. It’s not very hard. I just have to boil the pasta. Grandma brought over the sauce, but we like it a little spicier than she does, so we always add some stuff to her sauce.”

Claire didn’t look exactly thrilled by her daughter’s confession—or maybe she was still annoyed at him.

“Whatever you’re doing, it smells perfect.”

“Thanks.” She smiled, adding pasta to another stockpot full of burbling water on the stove. “That’s probably the bread sticks. They’re just made with frozen dough, but they’re really good and super-easy.”

When he decided his hands were sufficiently degermed, he picked up the cutting board and knife along with the remaining tomato as well as the cucumber next to it and carried them to the kitchen table to Claire. He still didn’t think she needed to be fixing a salad, but he knew her well enough to know the small gesture would please her—and even though he knew damn well it was wrong and maybe even dangerous, he wanted to make her happy.

“Thanks,” she murmured with a soft light in her eyes.

“You’re welcome.” He deliberately turned away toward Owen. “Okay, sport, let’s take a look at the damages.”

The boy rolled up his pants leg, revealing a relatively minor scrape.

Riley cocked his head. “Not bad. I think you probably need only about five shots and oh, about ten, maybe twelve stitches.”

Owen giggled and Riley thought how peaceful it was to be in this warm, delicious-smelling kitchen while the rain pattered against the window.

“I do not.”

“Okay, maybe only seven or eight.” He caught Macy’s eye and she grinned just like her brother.

“Just wash it off and put a bandage on it,” Owen said in an exasperated tone.

“All right, bossy. You must get that from your mom.”

“Hey!” Claire protested. “I’m not bossy. I just usually know what’s best.”

He smiled at that and risked a look at her, then regretted it when he found her watching his mouth again.

“Hey, Mom, did you know Chief McKnight used to be a bike cop?”

She cleared her throat. “I did. Alex is my best friend, remember? And Riley—Chief McKnight—is her brother. She has always kept me up-to-date on what he was doing on the Coast.”

Had she wondered about him over the years? The idea of her talking about him while he was gone made his shoulder blades itchy.

“What did she tell you about me?”

“That you were a good cop and that you sometimes did things you couldn’t talk about. Oh, and that you were shot and didn’t tell anyone in your family about it but your partner called and spilled the beans so they all played along like they didn’t know.”

“You got shot?” Owen asked, his eyes huge.

He frowned at Claire. “It was just a minor injury. I
was back to work in only a few days. They seriously knew? Why didn’t anybody say anything to me?” he asked her.

“I guess they figured if you wanted to talk about it, you’d bring it up. Alex was all ready to head out to Oakland, but Angie talked her out of it.”

“Sisters can be a real pain in the…neck.”

“Yeah, tell me about it,” Owen said a tone of exaggerated misery, which made Macy glare at him.

“Hey, watch it,” she said.

“You think one sister is rough. Try having five, kid.”

“My worst nightmare!”

Riley laughed and stuck a large square bandage over the scrape, then rubbed the kid’s hair. “That should do it,” he said. “Now you’re ready to go take on a few more potholes. You might want to go change into clean clothes before you eat that delicious-smelling dinner your sister’s working so hard to fix.”

“Thanks. It didn’t even hurt.”

“Well, don’t forget, you’re still going to need those stitches.”

Owen grinned, then his eyes lit up. “Hey, you want to stay for dinner, if it’s okay with my mom? We always have tons of leftovers when we have spaghetti.”

The knife Claire was holding stilled, then flashed with renewed vigor, he noticed with interest.

“Thanks for the invitation but I’d better not. I’m sure you’ve got homework and your mom and Macy weren’t expecting company.”

“I did all my homework before I went over to the…”
He stumbled. “Before I went to Robbie’s house. Mom, is it okay?”

Claire had a hint of color on her cheekbones and she didn’t meet his gaze. “Of course. Riley’s always welcome here. I’m sure he knows that. We owe him anyway for cleaning up after the windstorm the other day and for helping you home.”

He thought of the sandwich she had so carefully made him and of the sweetness of her kiss. She didn’t owe him anything.

He should say no. Should leave this warm, cozy kitchen while he still could. “In that case, I’d love to,” he found himself saying. “I’m starving and those bread-sticks smell like the most delicious thing I’ve had in years.”

This will be good, he told himself. He could regain his footing with her. They needed to return to the easy friendship they had shared for years. No more flirting and certainly no more kissing.

No matter how hungry she left him.

S
HE HAD A CRUSH ON
R
ILEY
McKnight.

Claire would have been astonished if she could find any room around the mortification that swamped every thing else.

She was thirty-six years old, had two children and a failed marriage behind her, but she was still acting as if she were Macy’s age, trying to get the cutest boy in school to notice she was alive.

This was humiliating on so many levels. Every time he smiled at her, color soaked her cheeks until she imagined she was redder than the spaghetti sauce—which she was also terrified she was going to spill all over while she tried to wrangle the spaghetti one-handed and listen to his stories at the same time.

“My first week out of the police academy, I crashed a brand-new bike into a parked car.”

“You did?” Owen asked, eyes shining with a severe case of hero worship, despite Riley’s story showing himself in less-than-perfect light.

“Yep. We were chasing this kid who’d fled the scene of an attempted robbery on foot. My partner and I split up to try to cut him off and I had to book up a hill on a side street to get ahead of him. A car came up behind me and I could hear him coming right at me. We didn’t
know the kid had an accomplice in a getaway car. I don’t know if he was trying to hit me on purpose—and I didn’t really care. I just swerved out of the way. My bike hit a parked car and I went sailing over it.”

“Was your bike okay?” Owen asked, while Claire was still cringing from that mental image.

“Completely trashed. I had to get a new one. The guys called me McFlight after that.”

“Were you hurt?” Macy asked.

“Not bad. I felt it for a few days but I didn’t break any bones. Not like you guys.”

His gaze met Claire’s and she flushed and focused on dabbing at her mouth with her napkin, hoping she hadn’t trailed sauce there.

She did
not
have a crush. The very idea was ridiculous. She was only reacting as any woman would to the man who had rescued her and her children from a dire situation. Riley had risked his own health and welfare to stand out in that water for long moments to ensure they were safe. Any mother would be grateful to a man willing to wade into danger for her children, right?

Not to mention that he was an exceptionally gorgeous man, sexy even, with those green eyes and the tousle of dark hair. The part of her ego that felt frumpy and dried-up and
old
after the raw indignity of her divorce wanted to bask in his attention like Chester splayed out in the grass on a summer afternoon.

How foolish could she be?

The commonsense part of her was quietly whispering a warning. Riley was a womanizer. He collected women like Evie collected antique beads.

His mother and sisters delighted in telling about his heroic triumphs as a police officer. But Alex, at least, was just as quick to report with a combination of indulgence and frustration about how the man went through women like the store went through jump rings.

Yes, they had kissed. She couldn’t find a better example of just how different they were. That kiss had left her shaky and stunned, while Riley had acted as if the whole thing had been just a casual brush of mouth against mouth.

“Did you catch the bad guy?” Macy was asking and Claire forced herself to focus on the conversation instead of a kiss that never should have happened.

Riley grinned. “Matter of fact, we did. He came running up, trying to make it to his getaway car. I was sprawled out on the sidewalk amid the broken pieces of my bike, the breath still knocked out of me. I was thinking he was going to get away, but right by my hand was my front tire, which had come off in the crash. I wasn’t even aware of doing it really, but I chucked the bike tire at him like a Frisbee and down he went. Before he could climb back up and escape in the getaway car, my partner came up behind him just as our backup in a squad car came down the street to cut off their escape route.”

The kids giggled and Claire smiled, picturing a battered Riley chucking a bike tire at a suspect.

Her kids were crazy about him, she thought. All through dinner, they laughed at his jokes, they plagued him with questions, they vied to tell him their own stories. She might have thought he would find their simple experiences boring, but Riley acted as if a story
Owen told about breaking up a playground fracas was the most fascinating anecdote in the world.

Claire didn’t know why she should find it surprising that her kids loved him. Riley had always been good at charming people. Why wouldn’t he be? He’d grown up with five indulgent older sisters who probably offered plenty of opportunities for him to practice working the charm.

She had watched his technique in various incarnations dozens of times. She could vividly remember one day when Angie had spent an entire summer afternoon making macaroons, simply because he had mentioned with a passing sort of sigh that he’d woken up with a craving.

As the next oldest sister to him and probably the one most susceptible to sibling rivalry, Alex had been the most immune. She had accused him of manipulation—but even she could fall prey if she wasn’t careful.

Riley could nearly always sway people to his point of view by wielding that charm that made everyone want to be around him, at least until he turned into the moody, unhappy teenager he’d become after his father left.

The children tried to prolong the dinner as long as possible, but eventually everyone was full and Chester had planted his haunches beside Claire’s chair and waited, a clear indication he needed to go out.

“I got him, Mom,” Owen said, pushing his chair away from the table.

“Thanks,” she answered.

Owen opened the door for the dog, then returned to
the table to clear away his plate, which seemed to be the signal for everyone that dinner was finished.

“I guess we better clean this up,” Macy said. She stood and began to help Owen. When Claire started to rise, Riley froze her with a death glare.

“If you try to clear a single dish, I’ll be forced to handcuff you to the chair. Don’t think I won’t,” he said, his voice stern.

Both Owen and Macy apparently thought that was hilarious. Claire wasn’t nearly as amused as she was forced to sit idle and watch Riley and the kids joke around as they scraped dishes, packaged leftovers and loaded the dishwasher.

Riley was drying a pan with one of the pretty embroidered dishcloths when he took a careful look out the window above the sink. Was Chester digging up her flowers again, as he sometimes did when a particular capricious mood struck?

“Looks like you’ve lost some shingles from your shed, probably from all the wind and rain we’ve had.”

She frowned. “I hadn’t noticed.” Usually when she was at an angle where she had a vantage point over the window above the kitchen sink, she was focusing on staying upright on the crutches and not on the shingles of her shed roof. “Have many blown off?”

“I can’t tell for sure. It’s too dark, but I can see a couple missing in the porch light.”

“Oh, dear.” Just one more thing she had to add to her fix-it list.

“It shouldn’t take long to fix. I bet Owen and I could take care of it in an hour. Don’t you think, dude?”

“Maybe even a
half
hour,” said her son, who never met a competition he didn’t try to conquer.

Claire didn’t know what to think. What game was Riley playing? She dearly wished she had some idea of the rules so that she didn’t feel as if she were floundering completely in foreign seas.

Why did he seem to feel so compelled to help her every time she turned around? Why would he want to give up an hour of his life to fix the roof on her garden shed? Even as the cautious grown-up tried to figure it out, the silly junior high girl inside her squealed and did a happy little dance.

“I’m going to go work on my homework,” Macy announced, bored with talk of shingles.

“Let me know if you need help with anything.”

“It’s algebra.”

“Okay.”

“You’re worse at algebra than I am, Mom.”

True enough. “Between the two of us, we usually figure it out.”

Macy shrugged and headed from the room, Chester, whom Owen had let in a few minutes earlier, following behind. The reminder of her maternal responsibilities was exactly what she needed right then to give the mature grown-up the advantage and send the giddy girl to her room where she belonged.

“Thank you for the offer to fix the roof,” she said to Riley when Macy left. “But you really don’t have to do that. I told you I have a handyman. Handy Andy Harris. Do you know him? His family moved here about five or six years ago.”

“Don’t think I’ve met him yet.”

“He’s a nice guy. His wife comes into the store quite a bit.”

“So you pay him to fix things, then she comes in and spends the money on beads?”

She managed a smile at his baffled expression. “More or less. That’s how it works in a small town.”

“Well, while I don’t want to take work away from Handy Andy—or beads away from his wife, for that matter—this is a simple job. Seriously. It wouldn’t take long at all and I was planning on fixing the bike anyway. Two birds, right? Consider it my way to repay you for the spaghetti.”

Claire sighed. She knew that tone. He was going to be stubborn about it. A stubborn Riley McKnight was as immovable as Woodrose Mountain.

She could be stubborn, too, and she really hated being on the receiving end of help. But arguing was only going to prolong the inevitable. She needed her shed roof fixed, Riley wanted to do it and she had no real logical reason to refuse.

“I can come over right after school. We can fix the bike first and then take care of the roof. That work for you, kid?”

“Cool!” Owen looked as excited as if Riley were offering a trip to Disneyland. Even though Jeff was good to take him snowboarding and skiing, her ex-husband wasn’t a handyman sort of guy and Owen enjoyed working with his hands. He’d been begging her for a year to let him build a tree house in one of the mature maples on their lot.

“Can I go play on the computer?” Owen asked.

“Yes,” she answered. “Set the timer for half an hour, then we need to do your reading.”

“You don’t fight fair,” she muttered to Riley after he left.

“When have you ever known me to?”

She rolled her eyes. “Why are you so stubborn about this? I can handle my home repairs on my own. What I can’t do myself, I can hire out. I’ve been coping by myself for two years. Longer, really, because I’ve always been the one to coordinate these kind of repairs.”

Jeff had always been too busy with school and his residency and starting his practice, so the pesky details of day-to-day survival had fallen to her.

“Then it’s about time someone else stepped in to take a little of that load off your shoulders.”

“Why does that someone have to be you, Riley?” she asked, exasperated.

He didn’t answer for a moment. When he did, his tone was solemn. “If not for me, you’d be up and around and handling your own life with your usual terrifying efficiency.”

She stared at him as all the pieces clicked into place. “Are you still hung up on that? I told you, you’re not responsible for that accident.”

His jaw tightened but he said nothing.

“That’s what this is about,” she said. “All of it. Why you think you have to help me with my shed roof, why you’re fixing Owen’s bike, why you picked up my branches the other day. You think you owe me something because of the accident. Because you feel responsible.”

He gave her a cool look. “Of course not,” he drawled, even though she could see her words had struck home. “Haven’t you figured it out yet, Claire? I’m a guy. I just want to sleep with you.”

The air suddenly thickened with tension, currents seething in the air like the swirls and rivulets of melting snow running fast and high in Sweet Laurel Creek.

She had a wild image of them together, mouths and bodies tangled, heat and fire and glorious passion.

A shiver rippled down her spine, but she wasn’t sure if it sprung from her poor, neglected libido reacting with grand enthusiasm to the idea or the rest of her plunging into full-fledged panic.

“Relax, Claire. That was a joke. I’m not going to jump you right here in your kitchen.”

“Of course you’re not. I never thought you would.”

That incongruous dimple flashed. “One never knows.”

Her stomach trembled and for once she was grateful she couldn’t stand without difficulty because of her stupid cast. She had a feeling if she tried, her knees would barely support her weight.

Much to her relief, she was spared from having to answer by the return of Owen, followed by a waddling Chester.

“Hey, Mom, something’s wrong with the internet. I can’t get on the game site.”

She drew in a breath and tried to shift gears. “I’ll have to figure it out after Chief McKnight leaves.”

“Which I’m just about to do.” Riley grabbed his jacket off the hook by the back door.

“I didn’t mean you had to leave now.”

“You’ve got to help with homework and fix computers and I’ve got about four hours of paperwork to do. Owen, I’ll be by after school tomorrow with a load of replacement shingles. You still in?”

Her son looked suddenly sly. “Can I use a hammer?”

“I’m counting on it, ace. Claire, I’ll see you tomorrow. Take care of yourself.”

Good advice, she thought as she watched him go. If she were sincere about following it, she would tell him firmly not to bother coming back. She didn’t need the sort of heartache that was bound to follow Riley McKnight.