Under the Lights (21 page)

“It's his loss, sweetheart.” Her mom stroked her back, saying almost the same words she had when Kelly returned home after the divorce.

And just as she had then, Kelly tried to believe it was
his loss
, but she was the one who felt as if she'd lost. She'd allowed herself, despite her better judgment, to believe Chase might be the one she could make a life with, and now she was paying the price.

I
n a diner slightly closer to New Jersey than New Hampshire, Chase sat in an uncomfortable booth and watched the sun rise while he drank strong coffee, ate shitty pancakes and missed Kelly.

He'd spent the night in the motel next door, but he hadn't gotten a lot of sleep. After nodding off shortly after he hit the bed, he dreamed of her and woke before dawn with a hard knot of emotion in his chest. There hadn't been any going back to sleep.

If he'd known missing her would hurt this much after just one night, he might not have been so quick to leave.

He was a chickenshit. There was no way around that fact. He'd been afraid of being rejected by Kelly—of not being good enough or stable enough or enough of anything else she wanted in a man—so he'd run away.

“You look like you got run over by a truck and just about the time you started getting up, it popped into reverse and backed over you again.”

Chase looked up at the waitress as she refilled his coffee cup. The tag pinned to her T-shirt said her name was Barb, and there was a note of sympathy in her voice that tugged at him. She was a stranger and he'd never see her again.

“I'm a chickenshit.”

“Well, at least that's something easy to fix. Suck it up and do what it is you're afraid to do.”

That made him laugh. “You've never coached high school football, have you?”

“No, but I had three sons play. You pick up stuff.”

He dumped sugar and cream into his cup and gave it a more thorough stirring than was probably needed. “My life fell apart on me a little, and then I met the woman I've been waiting for.”

“Having somebody makes putting your life back together suck a little less. I can speak from experience on that.” She didn't sit across from him, but she leaned her hip against the back of the other bench in a way that signaled she'd be sticking around for a minute or two.

“She's looking for somebody whose life is already together.” The words were painful to say.
I love her, but she doesn't want me.

“Oh, that's too bad. But if you asked her to be a part of your life, no matter what's going on, and she said no, then she's not the right person.”

“I didn't actually ask her.”

Barb put the hand not holding the coffeepot on her hip
and gave him a look. “So that's where the chickenshit part comes in?”

He ended up telling her a condensed version of the story, feeling safe in baring his feelings because, again, she was a stranger he'd never see again. When he got to the kiss on the sidelines, she actually smiled, but she stopped once he got to the aftermath. Especially the part about the parade and her unwillingness to look him in the eye. And his text message.

“There are other ways to look at that, you know,” she said. “She's there at the barricade, in her uniform, so a lot of people are looking at her. Maybe after your little public display of affection on the sidelines, she was trying to look like she wasn't looking for you and ended up trying too hard.”

He wanted to believe her, but he couldn't figure out how to explain how her expression had been different. It wasn't just that she wouldn't look directly at him. She'd looked as if she was hiding something—like there was something there she was afraid he would see.

“If nothing else,” she continued, “you should have said good-bye. The text was a mistake and the tone of it was even worse.”

“It would have been too hard to hear her tell me that, basically, I was good enough for a fling, but not for anything more.”

She shrugged. “Harder than wondering for the rest of your life if being a chickenshit cost you the woman you love?”

He took a sip of the coffee, considering. “I thought so. But now you're making me doubt what I thought I saw.”

“There's really only one way to find out.” She stood up and started walking away, but paused to look over her shoulder at him. “And not by text.”

Once he'd reached his limit of coffee—which was roughly when it started burning the lining of his stomach—Chase paid his bill and went out to his truck. Once again, he was faced with a decision. He could continue heading south and try to work hard enough rebuilding his life that he'd forget the piece that was missing. Or he could turn the truck around and head back north. No matter what happened, he'd know he had looked her in the eye and told her what was in his heart. No questions and hopefully no regrets.

After backing out of the parking space, he made his way to the parking lot exit and sat there for a few minutes without turning his blinker on. Then, calling himself every kind of an idiot, he headed north and set the cruise control for five over the speed limit.

When he finally, after several stops along the way—including a half hour or so spent at a truck stop cleaning out his truck—reached the Stewart Mills town line, he adjusted his speed down to exactly the speed limit. He wasn't going to start his second trip into town on the wrong foot this time.

Even over the music blaring from his radio, Chase heard the siren behind him and he slammed his palm on the steering wheel. That damn stop sign.

—

K
elly slammed the cruiser into park and popped the latch release for her seat belt. If Chase Sanders thought he could send her a lame-ass text, sneak out of town, make her
spend a whole night crying into her pillow and then run the stop sign coming back, he had another thing coming.

She got out, not untethering her weapon even though it was protocol because, as tempting as it might be, she couldn't shoot him. Especially since there were people out and about, and the sirens had attracted attention. Now they were watching, and she was over the Chase and Kelly show being their entertainment.

The truck door started opening and she kicked it closed. “Stay in the vehicle.”

“Kelly, I want to talk to you.”

“License and registration.”

“What?” She braced herself and looked directly into his face, seeing nothing but confusion.

“I asked for your license and registration.”

“You're going to give me a ticket?”

“You ran the stop sign again. You were let off with a warning the first time. This time you're getting a ticket, yes.”

“Oh.” He looked around and then nodded once, as if things made sense all of a sudden. “We don't want Edna thinking you're letting me off easy.”

“I'm giving you a ticket because you ran the stop sign and that's the only reason. And now you're walking a fine line toward failure to comply.”

He frowned. “I know you're upset, but—”

“Give me an excuse,” she said in a low voice. “Give me a reason to drag you out of that truck here in front of God and everybody and put you on the ground and show you that handcuffs are, in fact, the unsexiest thing you'll ever wear.”

“Okay, you're
really
angry. And that's actually a good
thing because it must mean you care, right? So just let me explain.”

“Send me a text if you have something to say. All I want from you right now is your license and registration.”

She'd gotten out of the cruiser on a wave of hurt, anger and disbelief, but looking into his face was harder than she'd thought. It took everything she had to stand there with her cop face on and not let him see how utterly devastated she felt.

When he leaned over to get his paperwork out of the glove box, she realized something looked off and stretched up onto her toes. “You cleaned your truck out.”

“Yeah.” He handed her his papers. “I don't know why. Show of faith, maybe? Some way to prove I'm capable of cleaning up my act.”

She clenched her jaw and walked back to the cruiser, where she wrote out the ticket. Recognizing it was a petty way of lashing out at him, she might have let him off with yet another warning, but word had gotten around, and there was now a substantial crowd trying to pretend they weren't watching her and Chase. There wouldn't be any special treatment this time.

When she walked back to his truck and handed his license, registration and the ticket through the window, he gave her a look that threatened to tear down the wall she was barely keeping in place.

“I just drove for hours, Kelly. Please. Give me ten minutes.”

He was a hard man to say no to. “No.”

“Five minutes. I came back to say something to you, Kelly McDonnell, and I intend to say it. If I have to stand
in the middle of the street and yell it after you while you drive away, so be it.”

She'd managed to hold her head up while people gossiped about her and Chase. She'd survived Edna Beecher sticking her nose into it. But there was no way in hell she would take the chance of breaking down in tears while in her uniform, doing her job, in front of everybody.

“I'll meet you in my dad's driveway. Leave your truck running, because you won't be staying long.”

She took a different route than Chase, mostly so people wouldn't know they were going the same place. As ridiculous as it sounded, she wouldn't put it past some of them to find a reason to walk down Eagles Lane, and she didn't want an audience for this.

By the time she pulled into the driveway next to his truck, she felt as if she had her emotions mostly under control. Or the tears, at least. She didn't think she'd cry. After killing the engine, she took her time getting out of the cruiser, making him wait.

He was leaning against the passenger side of his truck, where he knew she'd have to park, but he didn't look relaxed. She walked to the front fender of the SUV and basically mirrored his posture. “Okay, five minutes. Go.”

“I'm sorry.”

“You're going to have to be more specific.”

He held up his hands. “I'm sorry about everything, but mostly that I left without saying good-bye. It was a chickenshit move.”

“So you drove all the way back to say good-bye? I'm surprised you didn't text me.”

“I'm definitely sorry about the text message.”

“And what you said? What the hell was that?” She wanted to shove him, so she put her hands in her pockets instead. “You'll never forget the frozen pizza?”

“That was stupid and I'm so sorry. I was trying to be funny. To keep it light because I thought that's what you wanted from me. And the frozen pizza was special to me, actually. It'll always remind me of that night, so it wasn't as idiotic as it sounded.”

No, she guessed it wasn't. The frozen pizza night had been one of her favorite evenings with him, so she could see where he was coming from. She guessed if he'd stayed gone, it would have been a long time before she passed the frozen pizzas in the grocery store without thinking of that night, and of him.

“Why did you leave without saying good-bye?” she asked, since that seemed more important than analyzing his text to her.

He rolled his shoulders a little, and she realized he was nervous about what he was going to say. “Because you wouldn't look at me during the parade. I felt . . . dismissed. Like I'd screwed up so badly kissing you on the sidelines that you couldn't even stand to look at me.”

Kelly closed her eyes for a moment, willing them not to tear up. She'd never for a moment imagined she'd come across that way, and the only way to explain why he'd been wrong was to confess how she felt about him.

Her heart had taken a hard knock, and she wasn't sure about making herself that vulnerable, but the man had to have made it at least halfway home to New Jersey, and he'd come back just to talk to her.

“I was trying not to look at you because I'd made a
decision to tell you something, and I was so intensely emotional about it, I was afraid you'd see it. I didn't want to scare you off.”

She watched his face as she spoke and could almost see his mind turning as he tried to make sense of what she was saying. “What were you going to tell me?”

“That I . . .”
What the hell,
she thought. If he didn't like what she had to say, he could put a few more miles on that truck of his. “That I didn't want you to go. I mean, I know you have to go for now, but that I wanted you to come back to Stewart Mills. To me.”

“Why?” His look was so fierce, she thought she might melt.

“Because I fell in love with you,” she said, surrendering to saying it first. Assuming that's what he'd come to say. “I love you.”

All the breath rushed out of his body and he seemed to sag against the truck's door. “I came back to tell you I love you, Kelly.”

Tears prickled at her eyes again, but she blinked them away. At least they were leaning toward happy tears now. “You should have led with that and closed with the frozen pizza joke.”

“I was afraid to tell you. I was afraid you wouldn't want me because my life's not really in order.”

“It's scary,” she admitted. “But we'll figure it out, because being with you means more to me than having all of our ducks in a row.”

“Like you said, I've got a few things to take care of in New Jersey. I might even have to do four days there and three days here for a while, but everything I do will be working toward being here with you.”

“What will you do here?” She knew things were still tight in the building market.

“Whatever it takes. I'll find work, or I'll drive down to the southern part of the state every day because there's new building going on there. The commute will be worth it if I get to come home to you every day. Eventually people will start buying all the houses for sale and want them remodeled. I'll find work.”

She laughed, wiping a tear from her cheek. “Listen to me. I'm being all practical and ruining our romantic moment.”

He crossed the distance between them and cupped her cheek in his palm. “Practical things are important to you. I'll stand out here and make spreadsheets and pie charts if it means you'll take a chance on me.”