Christmas on 4th Street (Fool's Gold Romance) (10 page)

He had no idea what was going on, but wasn’t about to tell the seventy-something woman no. She led him out of the store and down the sidewalk. They walked to the corner and she pointed to a late model sedan. When they reached it, he handed her the package.

She smiled. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

Still confused about what she’d wanted, he turned, only to feel her pat his butt. He spun back. Her expression was both innocent and satisfied.

No, he told himself. He’d imagined the light touch. And if he hadn’t, there was nothing he could do about it.

“Ah, have a nice day,” he mumbled before backing toward the store.

The steady stream of customers continued until Noelle closed and locked the door at six-fifteen. They’d both been on their feet since seven that morning.

“My feet hurt,” she said, untying her apron. “My back hurts and I’m starving.”

“Me, too, and an old lady patted my butt.”

Noelle looked at him and started laughing. “You’re making that up.”

“I swear it happened.”

“Eddie or Gladys.”

“Eddie.”

“Then I believe you. Did you get lunch?”

“No.”

“Me, either. Want to come by my place? I’ll order the biggest pizza you’ve ever seen. You’ll love it.”

She had a smudge on her cheek and dust on her jeans. She looked as weary as he felt. But as she invited him over, all he could think was that what he really wanted for dinner was her. Because when he was around her, the world somehow righted itself. Even if he was being harassed by seniors.

For a second he wondered what she would say if he told her the truth. He figured he was at even odds for her wanting the same and slapping him. Which meant the most sensible course was to say, “Pizza sounds great.”

Chapter 6

Noelle pushed open her front door and flipped on the lights. The place was small—a two-bedroom starter home with a single bathroom. A classic ranch style, built in the fifties.

Gabriel walked in behind her. “Nice,” he said, glancing at the black leather sofa. “That looks comfortable.”

“Throw yourself on it. Seriously, I plan to do the same as soon as I order the pizza.”

She waited until he’d moved into the living room before sinking onto the bench by the door. She unzipped her boots and tugged them off, then stretched her aching feet. She hadn’t been kidding before—every part of her hurt. Even her hair. She couldn’t remember ever being this exhausted. And the thrill of it was she got to do the same thing tomorrow. At least she didn’t have to open until her regular time.

She stood and limped into the small kitchen. Once there, she pulled the pizza menu free of the magnet on the refrigerator door.

“All meat?” she asked.

Gabriel stood in the doorway of the kitchen. “You like that?”

“No, but I’ll get it on half.”

He crossed his arms over his chest. “You can eat half a large pizza?”

“Yes.”

“That I want to see.”

“You will.”

She placed the order, adding a pint of Ben and Jerry’s, then put the phone back on the counter. She opened the refrigerator and pulled out two bottles of beer.

Gabriel’s expression of surprise returned. “I would have said you drink red wine.”

“I have mysterious depths.”

“I can see that.”

They headed back to the living room.

Her sectional sofa took up most of the floor space, but she didn’t care. There was a chaise that was perfect for stretching out to watch movies and she had a great reading light. She’d bought a nice big television because she wanted to see all the period details in
Downton Abbey
. Maybe an apartment would have made more sense, but she liked having a yard. Her landlord, local retired cyclist Josh Golden, had told her she could plant whatever she wanted. This past summer she’d gone crazy with berries. Next year she was going to experiment with a few vegetables. If her cash flow improved, she would buy a place, but for now, the tiny house was plenty.

Gabriel sat at one end of the sofa while she collapsed on the chaise. She wiggled her toes, wondering when her feet would go from seminumb and sore to seriously throbbing. She pointed to the coffee table.

“Feel free to put your feet up. I bought that at a garage sale for twenty bucks. It’s indestructible.”

He hesitated for a second, then bent down to unlace his boots. He pulled them off and then raised his stocking-clad feet on the battered wooden surface.

“Thanks. I’m used to standing all day, but for some reason this was different. Harder.”

“I know. I’m used to running around, too, but I’m completely exhausted. I think it’s the intensity.” She picked up her bottle of beer and took a sip. “You remember the gift bazaar is coming up, right?”

He leaned back his head and closed his eyes. “Don’t remind me. What is it with this town?”

“We love to celebrate.”

“You need a twelve-step program. Hi, I’m Fool’s Gold and I’m addicted to festivals.”

She smiled. “I’m actually really excited about the bazaar next weekend. I stocked it with some really interesting items. Now you remember you can simply direct people to the store, right?”

“Yes, my goal is to sell as little as possible.”

“I need something to throw at you,” she grumbled. “Of course you can sell things, but you don’t have to. If they want it in a different color or whatever, tell them to come to the store. But that’s for next weekend. Tomorrow we only have to get through the post–Black Friday what-if-I-didn’t-get-everything-I-want shopping frenzy.”

She shook her head. “I should have taken part-time jobs in retail while I was in college.”

“What did you do?”

“Internships when I could get them. I was a nanny for a couple of summers and I temped in offices. I was a waitress. The usual. What about you?”

“I didn’t have summers off. I got through college quickly. Once I was in the army and they were paying for medical school, there weren’t any breaks.”

She angled toward him, taking in the strong profile and determined set of his jaw. “Did you really want to be an English professor?”

He glanced at her. “I don’t know. I didn’t want to be a soldier.”

“Yet you are one.”

He shrugged. “Not really. Being a doctor was a way to honor the family legacy and still do something I wanted to do. Hard to do that while writing a thesis on great American writers of the twentieth century.”

“Your dad pressured you.”

“That’s one way of putting it.” He drank from his beer bottle. “My dad was determined. He talked about Gideon and me going into the army from the time we were born. Doing anything else wasn’t an option. Looking back, I tell myself I should have stood up to him.”

“You were a kid. Did you even know there were other choices?”

“Not really,” he admitted. “I just knew I couldn’t go do what Gideon did.”

She’d been lucky with her family. They wanted her to do whatever made her happy. But not all parents were like that.

There was a knock on the door. She stood and groaned as her feet and legs protested, then hobbled to the door. Gabriel beat her there and pulled out his wallet.

“I’ve got this,” he said.

She grinned at him. “You’re such a guy.”

“Thank you.”

Ten minutes later they were seated at her small table. She put out plates and napkins, and they were digging into the pizza.

The crust was crisp on the outside and soft on the inside. The melted cheese was hot, the grilled vegetables the perfect texture.

Gabriel stared at her half of the pizza. “Vegetables? Seriously? On pizza?”

“I know. I can’t help it. But you have your manly all-meat.” She grinned. “Beer and pizza. Later you’ll probably feel the need to go challenge some teenaged boys to a drag race.”

“Or I could just watch wrestling on TV and have my manhood affirmed that way.”

“Really? Wrestling? Don’t they wear tights?”

“It’s not tights. It’s—” He sighed heavily. “Why do I bother?”

She laughed and took another bite of her pizza.

When they’d polished off every slice, she leaned back in her chair. “That was great. And later, there’s ice cream.”

“A gourmet meal?” he asked.

“One of my favorites.”

He started to say something, then stopped. She had a feeling it was going to be to ask her if she ate like that, how come she was so thin. And she didn’t want to talk about her weight or how she was still working her way back to what she had been.

“Any pizza where you were stationed?” she asked.

“Sure. The army provides. In Germany there were a few places around the base. In Afghanistan and Iraq, it was more of a challenge to find. The mess had it, but it wasn’t exactly the same.”

She got up and walked to her refrigerator, where she grabbed a second beer for each of them. “You were close to the front line, weren’t you?”

“Sometimes.”

She remembered what Felicia had told her. “You were also the doctor on the plane, right? The one who flies with those being medevaced to Germany?”

He nodded cautiously.

She could tell he didn’t want to talk about it. She would guess he’d seen a lot of horrible injuries on those flights. From what she’d read and seen on news reports, the injured were in pretty bad shape when they were flown out. Gabriel and his team would have been doing their best to keep everyone alive while working in really cramped conditions.

“It must have been intense,” she said.

“My work mostly is. I see the soldiers when they’re first injured. Get them stabilized and ready for whatever surgery they’re going to need.” He relaxed a little. “The hours are long and when I was in a field hospital, the injuries just kept coming.”

“How did you unwind?” she asked.

She was waiting for him to say volleyball or video games, or maybe make a joke. Instead, he stiffened and seemed to be looking at everything except her.

Her brain processed the change in him and tried to fill in the blanks. Then she felt herself starting to grin.

“Sex?” she asked, not bothering to hide her amusement. “Are you saying that there’s sex in the military?”

“I was on a softball team,” he grumbled.

“Is that what they’re calling it these days?”

He met her gaze. “Yes, sometimes sex was a way to escape.”

“Horndog,” she said cheerfully. “So is that why you never married? Because I think you’re going to need to give Ana Raquel an answer on that one. Not to mention your mother. Not that she’s going to want to hear what you’ve been doing in your spare time.”

“I don’t care what Ana Raquel thinks about me, you won’t tell my mother and no, that’s not the reason I’m not married.”

He opened his mouth as if he were going to say more, then closed it.

“Gabriel?” she asked quietly, wondering what he was thinking about. “What happened?”

He looked at her. “There was a woman. A doctor. I liked her a lot. We’d been dating for a few months. It was...different.”

“You cared about her.”

He nodded. “A few of her friends were going out in a Humvee. Just the girls. She went with them.” His mouth twisted. “One second they were driving away, laughing and the next they were hit by a rocket.”

Noelle gasped. Her stomach clenched and she regretted all the pizza she’d eaten.

“They were gone,” he said, staring past her. “All of them. Just gone. It happened so fast.”

“I’m so sorry. That must have been horrible.”

“It was. Everything about it. But it also affirmed what I’ve always believed. That there’s no point in getting married.”

She stared at him. “Excuse me? You’re dismissing the entire institution?”

“Sure. Life is tenuous at best. We could all be dead tomorrow. I’ve seen it again and again.”

“I know what happened is a tragedy, but you learned the wrong lesson.”

“No. I didn’t.” He glanced around. “I’ll admit it’s less likely to happen here than where I was, but we still don’t know what tomorrow is going to bring. Why risk it?”

“All the more reason to risk it,” she told him. “We should grab happiness while we can, because you’re right. There’s no promise of more time.”

“I’m not saying other people shouldn’t get involved and get married. Just not me.”

“What about a family? Don’t you want kids?”

For a second, his expression turned wistful, but then the softness was gone. “I don’t see that happening.”

“You’re going to be one lonely old guy.”

“Ana Raquel will enjoy being right about me.”

She wanted to say more, to tell him he was wrong, but she knew there was no point. Gabriel was an intelligent man who had obviously thought a lot about his future. He’d seen that life was tenuous and had decided to avoid future pain by not getting involved. She’d learned the same lesson about life’s tenuousness, but with opposite results. She’d thrown herself into her new life in Fool’s Gold—buying the store, making friends, having plans.

“I’m thinking about getting a cat,” she said firmly, because a pet was the next step for her.

“I like cats,” Gabriel told her. “They make you earn their respect. Webster would go home with anyone.”

“He’s a puppy.”

“You think he’ll be any different when he’s older?”

Noelle thought about the friendly dog and how he seemed to adore the world. “Probably not,” she admitted. “But he’s really sweet.”

“A good quality in a large dog.” He picked up his beer. “How did you come to live in Fool’s Gold?”

“I wanted to make a change. I’d been practicing law for a while and—”

He raised his eyebrows. “You were a lawyer?”

“Yes. You don’t have to sound surprised.”

“You’re not ruthless.”

“No, I’m not. That was part of the problem. I went into the profession with the idea I could help the world. Unfortunately, I was seduced by an offer from a corporate firm.” There had been a guy involved in that decision, but she didn’t want to go into that.

She sipped her beer. “I didn’t love my work but I also didn’t want to quit.”

That decision had been taken out of her hands when she’d gotten sick. She’d taken a leave and when she’d returned, she’d been taken off all the important clients. Instead, she’d been relegated to research and writing reports. The firm wouldn’t outright fire her for what had happened, but they’d made it clear they didn’t trust her anymore.

“Eventually I knew I had to walk away,” she continued. “I spent a few weeks figuring out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life and kept coming back to my family. Mostly my grandmother. She loved Christmas so much. It was a huge deal for all of us. She would tell me stories about when she was a little girl and all the magical things stored in the attic.”