Just Desserts (13 page)

She hadn’t touched her beer other than that first draw, but instead sat with her hands in her lap. Justin took a long drink, met her eyes. Smiled.

Layla wasn’t biting. “It bothers you that they can’t find Rachel.”

“I’m sure she’s all right. Her parents weren’t the most cooperative people in the world.”

“Did you two date a long time?” Layla asked, tracing a path in the condensation on her glass, focusing on it rather than on him.

“Almost a year.” The words came out clipped, and Layla looked up at him, probably wondering why a relationship that’d been over for more than ten years was making him respond like this. If their positions were reversed, he would have been wondering the same thing.

“Bitter breakup?”

“It’s in the past, Layla.” He reached across the table and took her hand, squeezed gently, but she didn’t squeeze back.

CHAPTER EIGHT

LAYLA SAID NOTHING. What could she say? Perhaps she could make the observation that something was bothering the hell out of Justin and it was pretty obvious what it was.

Rachel.

Or the mention of her.

But Layla had enough Taylor in her to know not to push. Her gut said back off now, back off fast.

Justin was backing off even faster.

Time to put him out of his misery. Either that or spend a long, uncomfortable evening together. “You know, maybe we should call it a night. In all ways.”

A look of sheer relief crossed his face. “I, uh—”

“It’s been a strange evening. Not a good time to… Not a good time.”

He nodded in agreement. A few minutes later he’d paid the tab and followed Layla past the dartboard and the Akita, out into the cool, early-evening air. They walked to his car without saying much, and he drove to her house a few silent minutes after that. He walked her to her door, dropped a kiss on her forehead.

“How chaste,” she said.

He looked down at her and opened his mouth as if about to explain, but then closed it again. Instead he pulled her close and held her against him. She pressed her face to the soft corduroy of his jacket, inhaled and wondered what on earth was going on.

“Maybe we’ll talk about all this sometime,” he said when he stepped back a few seconds later, but Layla knew they wouldn’t. Justin was a keeper of secrets. She’d always assumed he was an open book, but there was more to him. And somehow getting close to her threatened him.

“We’re not going to go out again, are we?”

His expression didn’t change, didn’t take on any hint of regret as he said, “No. I don’t see that happening. But we will still be friends.”

Layla nodded and opened her front door. She stepped inside and closed it without looking at him. Simply shut it in his face. And then she leaned back against the solid wood in her beautiful green dress and wondered where the evening had gone so wrong.

COULD HE HAVE RESPONDED more transparently? Justin asked himself in disgust. Made it clearer that hearing about Rachel disturbed him?

No. There was something about Layla that made it harder to keep up the front. Probably because she’d known him for so long.

After dropping her off, Justin drove to the kitchen, parked in front and let himself in that way. Like all sane folk, he avoided back alleys after dark—even his own.

He shrugged out of the blazer and hung it in his locker, then went into his room and turned on the music. He’d get ahead of the game tonight, do as much of tomorrow’s work as possible.

Justin pulled his stocking cap down to his ears.

The evening was unfortunate, but in some ways a godsend. Maybe Layla had had such a rotten time that she’d no longer be interested in seeing him in any capacity, and then he wouldn’t be in danger of edging toward territory he had no intention of traveling through.

Maybe now they’d both go back to their own lives, hang with their own kind. Justin would find another party girl who understood just how temporary he was, and Layla could find a stable guy that wasn’t an A-l jerk.

LAYLA DECIDED THAT with the green dress she’d be just like Sam. Wear it once and discard it, because it reminded her of one of the strangest evenings she’d ever had.

Yes, she’d stood up to Robert and Melinda, and that had held a certain satisfaction. But nothing else had gone according to plan. Even before the reunion committee had stopped by in the bar, the connection she’d felt with Justin up until tonight had gone missing.

What had happened between the frosting kiss and this evening?

She was damned well going to find out, because she didn’t feel they were done yet.

THE NEXT TWO DAYS were crazy busy. Justin got up at five o’clock to work on the cakes he’d booked, then he drove up to the lake to fill in for a vacationing chef, arriving home around one in the morning and then getting up four hours later. And he welcomed the numbing exhaustion. Between the emotions Layla was stirring up and the reunion committee looking high and low for Rachel, he was doing way too much thinking.

Eden and Reggie weren’t helping—at least not on the Layla front. Somehow they’d gotten wind of the bust of a date. Someone other than Robert and Melinda and his graduating class officers must have seen them out and about, and ratted him out to his sisters. The only reason he knew was because Eden asked him if he’d enjoyed his date with Layla. He said yes, and left it at that.

Eden didn’t. She didn’t ask a lot of questions, but those she did ask were carefully planned and delivered in a nonchalant way.
What were Layla’s plans for the future?
He didn’t know.
Any chance that they might see her at their yearly summer picnic at the lake?
He didn’t anticipate that happening. Finally…
are you still seeing Layla?
No.
Why?
Mind your own business, Eden.

She smiled with an odd sort of satisfaction when he snapped at her, as if she’d just figured something out. Well, he’d let her think that way all she wanted, as long as she left his private life alone.

His decision to back off fast from an entanglement with Layla, before any damage was done, had been a good one. He might have given her ego a knock during a vulnerable time, but better now than later.

The only problem was that if he wasn’t thinking about her, he seemed to be thinking about his son, his speculations about the boy made worse by the almost ninety-nine percent guarantee that he’d never get answers.

Was he having such a hard time with this because his son was approaching his teen years, and Justin didn’t know if he had someone to guide him through those turbulent times? He’d so wanted a father figure in his life back then, when the pain was still so raw from losing his mother. The one time he’d needed his dad, when he’d confessed that he was going to be a father, he was told that he’d made his bed and now had to lie in it.

Thanks, Dad.
That was a lot of help for a frightened eighteen-year-old kid.

“Hey, Justin.” Tammy Barnes, one of the waitresses who had just gotten off shift with him, sidled up as he unbuttoned his chef’s jacket. “Want to get some coffee before you head down the mountain?”

He was so buzzed at the moment from a mixture of service-induced adrenaline—it had been a busy service for a Sunday night—and caffeine that he couldn’t see having yet another cup.

“Maybe tomorrow,” he said, folding the coat over his arm. He grabbed his jacket, then smiled at Tammy. “If I leave now, I may get an extra forty-five minutes sleep.”

“You look done in,” she said with a concerned expression.

“No more than usual,” he assured her, suddenly having a very strong urge to yawn. He held it in until he turned his back and opened the door.

“Drive safe,” she called, as he stepped outside and saw that the light rain had become sleet. There’d be no sleet in the Washoe Valley, but he’d have to keep his wits about him until he got below the freeze line.

He cranked the music up, cracked the window to get some air blowing over his face and pulled out onto the highway. He made this drive an average of three times a week, and sometimes the monotony got to him and his mind wandered.

When he hit age thirty, he’d quit the lake. Eighteen months to go. By that time, hopefully, he’d have the cake business established to the point that he didn’t need the extra income from the hotel. The balloon payment would be made on his condo. From that point on, he’d go to Tahoe only to snowboard or play.

But again he was lying to himself. He worked to keep busy—to keep from having free time to be alone and think. His workaholic tendencies hadn’t started until after culinary school, after he’d had the realization that his son was about to start first grade. About the time that pushing his guilt down deep had become more difficult.

Justin started up the summit, the sleet coming at him in mesmerizing streaks of white that the wipers swept away at the last minute. He was going to the kitchen late tomorrow. Maybe an hour late.

The car came up behind him fast, its lights flashing in his rearview mirror, causing a surge of adrenaline to jolt through him before it pulled out into the passing lane and zoomed by, traveling at too high a speed for road conditions.

Justin forced himself to loosen his death grip on the steering wheel as the other vehicle disappeared around a corner.

He swallowed drily. Shouldn’t be any trouble staying awake now. Not with his heart knocking against his ribs.

Nobody’s forcing you off the road tonight.

Like they had a year ago when he’d been mistakenly identified as a narc. His soon-to-be brother-in-law, Nick, a drug task force detective, had arrested the guy, who was now cooling his heels in prison, but the incident had left a mark.

Driving past the spot where the accident happened didn’t bother Justin as much anymore, but headlights coming out of nowhere still triggered a reaction, one he was working on combating. Tonight he was kind of glad it had happened because maybe he’d get home without nodding off.

He cleared the summit and started down the other side, traveling even slower because of the accumulation of slushy snow on the road. Another vehicle came up behind him, but Justin had seen him miles ago. Being another invincible Californian in a four-wheel drive truck, the guy sailed by, signaling to pull back into Justin’s lane. Only it didn’t exactly work out as planned. The bed end of the truck, which had no weight to speak of, started to drift to the left on the slick road as the driver attempted to pull in.

“Hold on, buddy,” Justin muttered, tapping his brakes, trying desperately to keep some distance between them. They were almost at the place where he’d been forced off the road. Surely this couldn’t happen twice....

Oh, it was happening.

The truck went into a sideways skid, smashing into the guardrail in front of Justin, then bouncing back off, the front wheels catching the edge of the pavement and flipping the four-wheel drive onto its side seconds before the Challenger also went into a skid and rammed into the rear bumper.

The two vehicles slid to a stop in tandem. Justin, fearful of other traffic coming around the curve and slamming into them, flipped open his cell and dialed the National Highway Patrol with his thumb as he went to check the other driver. No need.

“Son of a bitch!” the guy yelled as he pushed open the passenger door of his truck like the hatch on a submarine and climbed out. He walked over and kicked one of the tires.

Justin took a few steps back. Probably best not to engage him. He appeared uninjured, but was tottering on the brink of losing it.

The dispatcher came on the line and Justin reported the accident, then went back to his car for the road flares he kept in his trunk. It wasn’t the first time he’d used them to mark an accident on the grade, but it was the first time since the wreck last year that his car had been involved.

The other driver was pacing in the snow around the truck, ranting, kicking slush, flailing his arms, so Justin leaned back against the guardrail several yards away after lighting the flares, and calculated the cost of putting a new front end on his car.

He hoped this ranting guy with the big-ass four-wheel drive had insurance. And he hoped his sisters didn’t ride him about this, because it wasn’t even close to his fault.

He also hoped his life started easing back to its normal path.

Since agreeing to give Layla a ride home, he’d gotten a black eye, broken into a school and wrecked his car. And somehow he had a feeling that his run of questionable luck wasn’t over yet.

“HEY, LAYLA?” Sam called from the back room of her shop. “Your phone is ringing in your purse.” A second later, as Layla pushed the beaded curtains aside, Sam said, “Layla’s phone. Yes. She’s right here.”

She held out the cell, and when Layla answered, she found herself slightly breathless. Justin, maybe? Very few people called her.

“Hi, Layla. Dillon Conrad.”

Good grief. What now? “Hello, Dillon,” she said cautiously, wondering why the guy who taught science down the hall from her room could possibly be calling. Had they figured out that she and Justin had taken her lessons? And if they did, then what?

“I’m calling you on the q.t. Have you gotten an invitation to the Merit Awards?”

“No.”

“I didn’t think so. When Ella gave me my invitation, I saw an invitation clearly addressed to you in care of the school sitting on her desk. I don’t think it’s right if she doesn’t inform you of it.”

“Thank you.”

“Not that you’d want to go, but you’ve won another award and you deserve it.” There was a brief, uncomfortable pause and then he said, “Are you doing all right? Is there anything Judy or I could do? If you need a recommendation or something…”