Catching Fireflies (8 page)

They climbed up to the top row, where three women moved over to make room for them. He already knew all of them, at least by sight.

“You sly girl,” Nancy Logan said in what was meant to be a whisper but was easily overheard. “How’d you snag the hottie?”

Laura blushed furiously. “I haven’t snagged anyone. J.C. and I were just having a quick bite to eat and realized it had gotten late and we both had plans to be at the game.”

“So you had dinner and then you came to the game together,” Nancy said, her grin spreading. “In my world that sounds a lot like a date.”

“Mine, too,” the others echoed.

J.C. saw that their teasing had Laura even more flustered. He leaned down to whisper in her ear, “Don’t panic. I can handle the talk, if you can.”

She turned to him wide-eyed. “But there shouldn’t be any talk, not about dating. You don’t date at all. I don’t date you. I just explained what happened.”

“And they’re obviously not buying it,” he said, impulsively taking her hand snugly in his. “Let’s just go with it.”

“Go with it,” she repeated, her eyes widening with alarm. “What does that mean, go with it?”

“It means tonight you and I are on a date. We’ll think of it as an experiment. Maybe I’ll discover that I’ve been wrong to forego a social life since moving to Serenity,” he added, though he suspected the opposite was more likely. All the talk might very well reinforce his conviction that he was better off alone.

Laura already looked uneasy. She swallowed hard at his assertion. “This is a bad idea, J.C.”

“Not to worry,” he consoled her. “Tomorrow we can break up. Happens all the time.”

“Not to me. Not in this town.”

He winked at her. “Then I’ll be your first.”

Something in the way she blanched at his choice of words set off alarm bells. No way, he thought. It wasn’t possible, was it? Could Laura Reed possibly be as innocent as all that? It should have terrified him, but suddenly he found himself more intrigued than ever.

5

L
aura had spent most of the night wrestling with the covers and her confusing thoughts after spending the evening with J.C. To her surprise he’d fit right in with her friends from school. Once the teasing remarks had quieted down, they’d all cheered themselves hoarse as Serenity had managed to prevent a tying touchdown in the final seconds of the game.

Outside the stadium, he’d offered her a ride back to her car, but she’d insisted that Nancy could drop her off. He’d looked vaguely disappointed, which had surprised her after his insistence earlier in the evening that she wasn’t to construe his dinner invitation as anything other than a chance to discuss Misty and the problems she was having at school.

On the way to the parking lot by the medical practice, Nancy had had a million questions, which Laura had managed to sidestep fairly deftly, she thought.

“The man just offered to bring you over here himself. What is wrong with you?” Nancy had asked, regarding her with dismay. “I know his company has to be far more scintillating than mine.”

Laura had laughed. “Despite what he said at the game, we were never on a date, Nancy. Scintillating doesn’t enter into it.”

“Well, it should,” Nancy told her. “He’s the most available bachelor in the entire town, a doctor, no less. The competition has been fierce for years, and you’re the first woman I know of, at least locally, that he’s been out with.”

“Well, I happen to know for a fact that he has a date with a nurse practitioner in the morning,” she said, hoping to silence any more uncomfortable speculation about the two of them. J.C. might be a mystery she wouldn’t mind unraveling, but it simply wasn’t in the cards. One bit of wisdom she’d taken from past experience was an understanding of when to cut her losses.

“He told you he has a date tomorrow?” Linda asked. “What kind of man brags about a date when he’s out with someone else?”

“The kind of man who wants to make it clear he isn’t on a date with me,” she told her. “Do you get it yet?”

Nancy shook her head mournfully. “Well, I say it’s just sad. You looked cute together, and there were sparks. I could feel them.”

“Because you have a vivid imagination. It’s all those romance novels you read.”

“True, I want sparks like that,” Nancy admitted wistfully. “I have this sinking feeling, though, that I’ll never find them in Serenity. You know what slim pickings there are in this town. There are a few decent guys our age, but finding the whole package—intelligence, a sense of humor, good looks and a solid career—that’s all but impossible. Those guys get snapped up the minute they cross into the city limits. And now you already have the last man standing in your clutches.”

“Will you quit saying that?” Laura begged, though she couldn’t argue with Nancy’s premise that exciting, stimulating men were hard to find in Serenity.

“Only if I never see the two of you together again, which, if you want my opinion, would be a crying shame.”

“Thanks for the input, and for the ride,” Laura told her, quickly climbing out of the car. “See you on Monday.”

Unfortunately, even though she thought she’d managed to curb Nancy’s wild imagination for the moment, once she was curled up in bed, she couldn’t seem to stop herself from daydreaming about all sorts of scenarios that could play out between her and an intelligent, thoughtful, compassionate man like J.C. He was everything Rob Jefferson hadn’t been. Of course, Rob hadn’t really been a grown man when Laura had fallen for him. He’d been an irresponsible bad boy, which had been the allure for the quietest girl in school.

Don’t go there,
she warned herself. Thinking about the disaster that relationship had become and the repercussions that haunted her still would keep her awake the rest of the night.

After banishing thoughts of both J.C. and her past, she’d finally fallen into a restless sleep around three in the morning, only to be awakened at six by the ringing of the phone.

“Yes, what?” she murmured sleepily.

“Not a morning person, are you?” a man’s voice inquired with a hint of laughter.

“Who is this?”

“It’s J.C.”

“At six o’clock in the freaking morning on a Saturday?” she grumbled, all of the kindly thoughts she’d had about him fleeing.

This time there was no attempt to hide his laughter. “Definitely not a morning person. Good to know. I was hoping to persuade you to go for that run with me.”

Sufficient blood finally reached her brain for her to comprehend what he was asking. “You woke me up to ask me to go for a run?”

“That’s the invitation,” he confirmed. “Breakfast after.”

“Was there absolutely anything in our very brief acquaintance to suggest that I run?”

“Nope, but I don’t mind if you’re a beginner.”

It suddenly dawned on her what he really wanted. “You’re looking for a buffer to warn off that other woman.”

“Congratulations! For that you get a giant mug of coffee to chase away the rest of those cobwebs.”

“You’re certifiable, you know that, don’t you?” She felt totally within her rights to declare that. No sane man made the sort of request he’d just made.

“But you’re considering this, right?” he pressed. “What’ll it take to push you over the edge? Danish? Croissants? An omelet?”

Since she was awake by now and surprisingly hungry, she gave up the fight. “I’ll take the omelet,” she said decisively. “With hash browns. And I need an hour to get ready.”

“Nobody needs an hour to get ready for a run,” he said. “I’ll give you fifteen minutes, twenty if you insist on me stopping to pick up that coffee.”

“I insist,” she said fervently. “I’m going to need a lot of coffee.”

She hung up without waiting for a response or offering him her address. If he couldn’t figure out where she lived, so much the better, but something told her he wasn’t the sort of man to leave a detail like that to chance.

* * *

J.C. pulled to a stop in the alley behind Sullivan’s. Half the town knew that sous-chef Erik Whitney was there at the crack of dawn and that he always had a pot of the best coffee in town brewing. Thanks to the occasions when they’d hung out at the gym and the frequency of late-night calls when Erik and Helen’s little girl had earaches, he allowed J.C. to take advantage of that from time to time.

“Sarah Beth’s next appointment is free if you’ll give me three cups of coffee to go,” he told Erik.

Erik grinned. “You sound like a desperate man. Late night with the pretty schoolteacher? And exactly how does that third cup of coffee fit in? Sounds mysterious.”

“It wasn’t that late a night,” J.C. admitted, figuring there was little point in denying that Laura was involved. “But apparently by her standards, it’s an early morning. I convinced her to go for a run by promising her coffee. Yours is far more likely to impress her than Wharton’s.”

“Interesting,” Erik said grinning. “So, the two of you really are an item? That was the hot topic in here last night, anyway, after your cozy meal together. I suspect there’s already a pool going at Wharton’s. Grace loves a romance.”

J.C. winced. “Whoa! We’re just acquaintances,” he insisted. “I asked her to bail me out of a jam this morning, and she’s gone along with it. I need to hurry, though, before she changes her mind.”

“You’re in a jam that involves going for a run?” Erik asked with unmistakable confusion. “Do I even want to know? And you still haven’t explained the extra cup.”

“If you’re like everyone else in this town, of course you want to know,” J.C. said, amused. “But I don’t have the time or the inclination to fill you in. Coffees, please.”

Erik handed over the cups. “Okay, but you owe me more than a free office visit for Sarah Beth. My wife’s not going to be happy if I come home without details. Then, again, she’s getting together with Maddie and Dana Sue this morning. If anything’s going on, they’ll already know about it.”

Sadly, J.C. thought, they probably would.

* * *

Laura was waiting outside on the front steps of her apartment building when J.C. rolled to a stop on the street. She walked in his direction, regarding him with suspicion.

“There had better be coffee,” she said before even touching the handle of the passenger door.

He held up a cup. “Freshly brewed, as promised.”

“Gimme,” she said, getting into the car. She took a deep sniff. “I don’t recognize this aroma. It smells amazing.”

“Sullivan’s.”

“They’re not open this early,” she said, regarding him with amazement. “Who’d you bribe?”

“Erik. I promised him his daughter’s next office visit on the house.”

“Given what doctors charge these days, this is one pricey cup of coffee,” she said as she took her first sip. “Oh, my God, it’s worth every penny.”

He laughed. “That’s what I think every time I take advantage of Erik’s good nature by sneaking in there before work. I think he considers the coffee to be his version of community service.”

“I really do need to get to know him better,” Laura said. “Do you think Helen would mind if I start hanging out with her husband?”

“She’d probably string you up a tree,” he said with conviction as he pulled up in front of an unfamiliar house.

“Why are we here?” she asked, then remembered. “Ah, the date. Would you like me to escort you to the door?”

“No, I think I’ll be safe enough from there to here. Just don’t drink her coffee.”

“If she’s a real runner, she probably doesn’t touch the stuff,” Laura said. “I’m actually surprised you do.”

“Some men have sex to start the day. Since there’s none of that in my life at the moment, I drink coffee. Seems to work,” he said right before he headed up the walk.

Just as he reached the door, it opened and a woman came out with her red hair pulled high in a sassy ponytail. She was wearing running shorts and a tight-fitting sports top, both meant to display an awful lot of well-toned flesh. Laura glanced down at her sweat pants and ancient T-shirt and sighed. There wasn’t a woman in the world who’d buy that she was serious competition for the woman walking her way, talking animatedly with J.C. as if it weren’t practically the middle of the night. She might be up at dawn on weekdays, but most Saturdays she indulged herself by sleeping as late as she wanted. Today’s was the first Saturday sunrise she’d seen in ages.

In the car, J.C. made the introductions, then headed for the park. As Laura had anticipated, Jan turned down the coffee and stuck to bottled water. J.C. practically gulped down a long swallow of the rejected coffee, then gave Laura an apologetic look. “Did you want this?”

She grinned at his guilty expression. “Not to worry, I’m still savoring the first cup.”

“Good,” he said and took another long slug of the coffee.

“Careful there,” she said, lowering her voice. “You don’t want to choke in front of your date.”

He glanced at her with a frown. “Was inviting you along a mistake?”

She beamed at him. “More than likely. So far, though, I’m fascinated to see what’ll happen next.”

Jan turned out to be a perfectly pleasant, intelligent woman who took her running seriously. When J.C. dutifully insisted on staying back with the lagging Laura, she ran on ahead, clearly determined to make it a real workout.

“You could go with her,” Laura told him. “I’m not going to catch up. In fact, I’m thinking I wouldn’t mind sitting in the shade of that old pin oak over there for a while and enjoying the rest of my coffee. It’s a beautiful morning. It finally feels like fall.”

He regarded her with amusement. “You really are out of your comfort zone, aren’t you?”

“So far, you probably can’t even imagine it,” she admitted. “I don’t sweat. I don’t glow. A brisk evening walk is about my limit.”

“Then I’m all the more grateful that you made an exception and came along this morning.”

“I don’t think you really needed my protection. I hope it won’t destroy your ego, but I’m not getting the sense that Jan’s any more into you than you’re into her.”

He looked surprised but not displeased by the assessment. “That’s what I thought, too, but Debra seemed so determined, it rattled me.”

“I suppose you wouldn’t be the first couple to be pushed together by an overly zealous matchmaker, but something tells me you’re both made of tougher stuff than that.”