Stay With Me (4 page)

I, however, believed in not having to dry clean anything, and in the power of climbing through occasional piles of garbage without the hindrance of skirts or heels. Men had it easier on the dress-up scale. I just had to make jeans and sensible shoes look successful.

“They didn’t empty the Dumpster again,” he said, pulling up the extra chair to have a seat.

I grabbed a fresh trash bag out of a drawer and arranged it in the can.

“I noticed,” I said. “I’ll call again.”

“You realize what he’s doing.”

“I know,” I said. “But I refuse to be bullied over a bunch of signs.”

The Copper Falls Water & Sewer Department had a beef with me. Or the guy over garbage pickup did, I should say. Terrence Hebert. His wife had some huge rusty old advertising signs that she thought she was going to hit the jackpot with, but they were worthless. Not only were they so badly oxidized you couldn’t read half the words, but what you could read was for things no one was interested in. They were garbage. And when we politely turned them down, Terrence blackballed us.

“What about borrowing Celia’s down the alley?”

I smiled. Celia Burns was a creepy old woman who had the building to our left, a little cottage-looking thing where she sold herbs and essential oils. In her younger years, some of those “herbs” had been of the spicier variety, hidden away in the back. I knew this because Ian and I had helped ourselves a time or two. Maybe that’s why Abby told me once that Celia threatened to hex her if she and her friends even looked like they might steal something. Like teenagers want essential oils.

“She locks the lid down with a padlock.”

He winced. “Seriously?”

“Yep. Trusting like that,” I said. “And I’ve used Lester’s a couple of times, but he makes me feel so guilty about it, I swear he stands out there and waits.”

Dad shook his head. “So how did Gracie’s appointment go?”

“Great,” I said.
I scored a date.

“Should be the healthiest dog in town,” he said, picking up a stack of photos from the corner of my desk.

“So I hear,” I said, letting that roll by. “Those are from the Casterly place,” I added, gesturing at the prints he was thumbing through. “Missy took those a few days ago. What do you think?”

Missy was a “picker,” where I started out. One of the people we sent out on runs to look for choice items or respond to calls on estate sales or people wanting to get rid of something. Sometimes when things were particularly slow, she trolled the curbs on garbage day. I used to love picking. The thrill of finding a treasure. Of digging through sometimes filthy crap and uncovering a gem that people didn’t even know they had.
That’s
what made my heart pound.

We had three pickers on speed dial, but Missy was the best. She had a natural eye for value. She also had a natural eye for my father, but only because he was a Capricorn.

“Looks good,” he said. “Especially these,” he added, holding up a picture of a table full of old clocks.

I smirked. “Yeah, I knew that would catch your attention.”

Dad had a clock fetish. Could not walk away from one no matter the shape it might be in. His house was full of clocks of every shape and size and style, and they could be heard ticking, chiming, or whistling at any given quarter of the hour. Even more so after Mom died, as there was no one around to complain about the noise. Or maybe, as I often thought, he did that because of the noise. To feel less lonely in that house.

“They’re downsizing quite a bit since the old man passed away,” I said. “I’ll make a phone call and try to snag some of it before Blaine swoops in.”

Dad did a mini-shrug. “I don’t know. Maybe we shouldn’t be adding anything new.”

“What?” I asked. “Why? This is perfect.”

“Just saying,” he said, slowly sliding one photo behind the other. “Have you heard about that Antique Nation place? The one that does the auctions and stuff? Maybe we should downsize, too. Hook up with a bigger fish like that to do the bigger work.”

I leaned forward. “Are you crazy? Besides, Blaine would eat us for lunch. He’d take all our customers.”

“Enh,” he muttered. “Not so much. Our stuff isn’t really his style.”

Blaine Hollis was the owner of the Brass Ass on the other side of town, a renovated Victorian house with a brass donkey adorning the front lawn. He sold more high-end antiques than we did, and that was fine. There was always a market for everything. The tide was beginning to shift, however. Nothing stayed the same forever.

“Didn’t used to be,” I said. “But lately, he’s been peddling more rustic merchandise.”

Dad’s eyebrows pulled together. “Why’s that?”

“Don’t know. Missy thinks it’s because he’s a Gemini.”

He rubbed at his eyes. “Good grief. That woman just—”

“Adores you?” I finished for him, biting back a smile.

“Wears me out. All that horoscope nonsense she babbles about. It hurts my head.”

I laughed. “Well, I don’t see you turning down the cookies and muffins she keeps bringing you.”

“No,” he said wearily. “I guess not. I’m weak when it comes to good food. Your mother knew that, too. Any time she had bad news to tell me, she’d make my favorite dinner.”

“Yeah, I remember,” I said. “Roast and rice and gravy.”

“Got to where I wanted to turn around and come back to work when I’d walk in and smell that,” he said. “It always meant the toilet was backed up or you or Lily broke something.”

“Usually me,” I said.

“Usually.”

I chuckled and then fiddled with my keyboard. “So, speaking of Lily, she told me something earlier.”

Dad met my eyes with a nod. “About that boy?”

“That boy?”

“That other McMasters boy,” he said. “Jim’s brother.”

My jaw dropped a little that he already knew. “Well, Dad, he’s my age, so boy probably isn’t really an apt description.”

“You’re all kids to me,” he said, standing and waving a hand absently in my direction. “So he’s coming back here.”

“That’s—that’s what she said. When did you find this out?”

“Day before yesterday,” he said.

I pushed back in my chair. “Seriously?”

His brows came together. “What?”

I held up my hands and gave him a look. “Hello? No one thought to tell me?”

“She told you this morning,” he said, like that fixed it. “She was just worried about how you’d take it. That you’d obsess over it or—”

“Excuse me?”

He held his palms up to ward off whatever I was going to throw. Not that I’d throw anything. But he might have questioned that for a second.

“Honey, that boy messed you up for a long time,” he said. “Personally, I was never so glad to see him go.”

Slam to the gut. “Thanks.”

“He was a thug.”

So was I, Dad.
“There was more to him than that,” I said, really perturbed to be put in the position of defending him. “He practically ran the butcher shop before Jim took over.”

“He was trouble,” he reiterated. “And you turned a blind eye to it every time you hooked up with him. That was not a healthy thing you two kept falling into. Like following Satan straight to hell.”

Once upon a time, I would have followed Ian anywhere, and pretty much did. Into stores to steal meaningless crap, into houses that weren’t ours, cars that weren’t ours, and sometimes even beds that weren’t ours. We both knew how to pick most locks by the time we were twenty. It was all part of the rush of being with Ian McMasters.

“Okay, I—remember, but still.” I took a deep breath and physically shook it off. “I’m not that person anymore. Y’all don’t need to protect me or whatever the hell you’re doing. I’ve done just fine.”

“You don’t date anyone,” Dad said.

My jaw really did drop that time. “That is such a lie.”

“For longer than three weeks,” he amended.

I blinked a couple of times and decided on a redirect. “Let’s talk about you,” I said.

“Oh, no, I don’t think so,” he said, waving as he turned.

“Oh, most definitely so,” I said. “How many women have you dated in the last ten years?”

“Plenty,” he said.

“Exactly,” I said. “And how many for longer than three weeks?”

“Mrs. Sullivan,” he said matter-of-factly.

I tilted my head. “Please.”

Dad walked back to my desk and leaned over it, trying to be intimidating, but it wasn’t working with the little smirk he had going. “I had my great love, little girl. I don’t need anything for longer than that.”

He always knew where to hit me with the Mom darts. Took all my thunder. “Well, maybe I had mine, too,” I said, looking away at the nearest focal point. A hot firemen calendar. Probably not the best choice.

“Abby’s dad was a flash in the pan,” he said. “Gave us Abby, and that’s his greatest donation to the world. But that wasn’t your big moment, baby girl.”

I looked up at him and then away again before he could see my thoughts. No, Abby’s dad wasn’t my big moment. But he didn’t want to talk about who was.
That boy. The thug.

“Dad, I’m busy,” I said. “I had Abby to raise, and now I have this place to run. I’m not worried about a love life.” I sat up a little straighter. “Although if you must know, I have a date tomorrow morning.”

I really needed to focus more on that. Get excited again like other women did. Let that work on my self-esteem and mood.

“Oh?”

“Yes sir, Duncan Spoon and I are having coffee across the street tomorrow.”

He frowned. “Across the street? Where Ian McMasters is going to be?”

I closed my eyes. Suddenly
that boy
had a name. “Would everyone quit worrying about him? I’m a big girl.” I took a breath and met my dad’s gaze. “And I made the date before I knew the location would be so friggin’ controversial.”

“Just—keep your head about you,” he said, turning to go again.

“And
you
just quit this nonsense about downsizing, or bigger fish, and all that crap,” I said. “Just because you changed the subject, don’t think I forgot that.”

“I just don’t want this place to be your whole world,” he said with his wink that said he’d had enough conversation. “There’s more to life than other people’s discards.”

“Says the man in the junk business for fifty years.”

He turned with one last look before rounding the door. “Exactly.”

• • •

Gracie kept pacing.

“Would you go land somewhere?” I said from my dresser, where I had pulled out and discarded four different outfits. “You’re making me itchy.”

Gracie just wagged her long tail and tilted her head as I spoke, her little Groucho Marx eyebrows toggling back and forth. She didn’t understand. All she had to do to impress Duncan was stand there and look adorable. Lick him a few times. Then again, she might have something there.

He’d seen me in all my best “looking casual” clothes, I always made sure of that. How dense of me not to hold something aside for this possibility. I needed something that said,
“I’m going to work in a barn after this, so I’m not going to be silly,”
but that also spoke of
“Don’t you want to know what else there is?”

I was not allowing even the tiniest inkling of a hint that any of my wardrobe dilemma had to do with someone else being there today. Not a bit.

Three times, I’d woken up during the night to stare into the dark and wonder if he was in Copper Falls yet. All three times, I wanted to slap myself senseless. Ian had betrayed everything that we once were. Friendship, trust—love. He had led me over that fence and then destroyed me with it. Had I known what changing the rules would do to us, would bring us to, I might have acted differently. Or answered differently.

“Ask me to stay.”

“What?” The words were soft and maybe I hadn’t heard him right. I blinked a couple of times in the low light from the lamp across the room, trying to read his face.

“You heard me.”

It was 3:22 in the morning, and we were basking in too much sex and the exhaustion of having to keep it quiet with Abby down the hall.

That was normal. This was not.

“I don’t think I did,” I said.

Ian pushed a strand of hair off my face and braced himself on his elbow. Even at thirty-two, there was no sign of slacking. But as crazy as my heart always got around a naked Ian, it was spinning in a whole new direction. Stay? What did that mean? We didn’t do that. But the look he was giving me—

“Let’s start our own business.”

I blinked again, whirling with the subject change and still reeling about the first question. “Jesus, are you high?”

He pushed up more. “I’m serious, Savi. Let’s do something. Something legit.”