Summer Kisses (274 page)

“This is really nice,” I said, unfavorably comparing my riverfront Cincinnati condo, for which I paid a near fortune. It had been decorated by a top-notch designer. Also magazine worthy. Turns out, a home featuring black leather, glass, and chrome is very functional. And cold.

She smiled, and I could tell she was pleased I’d noticed. “Thanks.”

An enormous orange tabby cat nonchalantly strolled to my side and wound its way around my ankles in a figure-eight pattern.

“Hi, Mr. Whiskers,” she said before leaning down and picking up the behemoth. He had to be twenty pounds, but he lay in her arms like a baby. A purr which could have come from a Mac truck rumbled from the cat’s throat.

“Mr. Whiskers? Looks more like Jabba the Hut to me.” I expected her to at least smile.

She shrugged, and I tried not to feel disappointment. “I didn’t name him. Will gave him to me several years ago as a kitten, already named.” She set the cat down. “Kitchen’s this way.”

I started to follow but got distracted by a wall of matted and framed photographs hanging in her hallway. She started the coffee as I perused the gallery. “This must be your mom,” I said loudly enough to be heard over the gurgling of the coffeepot. There was a definite family resemblance. “You have the same eyes.”

She didn’t reply, and I wondered what it would take to get her to engage. Maybe getting her to talk about her family. All of them were crowded in together. But unlike most family portraits, they seemed to be having a good time with it.

Her dad was at least partly Hispanic, which made sense given her last name. He had short, salt-and-pepper hair, brown eyes, tan skin, and Katherine’s smile. Her mom’s hair was dark blonde and waist-length. Katherine obviously got her clear skin and those amazing eyes from Mom.

“Younger or older?” I asked indicating her sisters as she stepped back into the hall. All three had dark hair, the same noses and chins, and similarly shaped eyes, with a slight tilt up at the outer corners. They looked happy and complete in a way that my family had never been growing up. And given our history, never would be.

“Younger. Grace and Ingrid.” The last felt reluctantly given. I finally gave up trying to get a real conversation out of her. I opened my mouth to offer to let her out of the coffee invitation when the doorbell rang. “That’s weird. I’m not expecting anyone.”

She passed me, and I followed, figuring I could take my leave.

Her shoulders tensed as she peered out the peephole. She sighed with obvious resignation and opened the door. On the other side stood what appeared to be a high-school cheerleader turned soccer mom holding a basket and wearing a big smile.

“Katie Mendoza!” she exclaimed, striking me as the kind of person who exclaimed, gushed, or shrieked as a matter of habit.

“Bizz.” Katherine was decidedly non-exclaim-y. She wasn’t rude, exactly. But she wasn’t gushing either.

“It’s been so long!”

“Almost two months,” she said.

“Oh, that’s right! We ran into each other at the farmer’s market last spring. Just one of the things I love about living in a small town!” Bizz handed Katherine the basket she’d been holding in front of her. “I want to officially invite you to the fifteen-year reunion of Sudden Falls High Class of 2000!”

Katherine accepted the basket like it might be harboring a poisonous snake. Though, for the record, it looked like it only contained some custom cookies, M&Ms in gold and black, and an invitation shaped like a mortar board, “You shouldn’t have.”

“Oh, I don’t mind! I’ve done them for all of our classmates who stayed local!”

Bizz caught sight of me at that moment. “Oh,
mmyyyyy
. Who’s this?”

Katherine paused.

“Hi! I’m Bizz Cooper-Robertson. Katie and I graduated from high school together.” She hip-checked the door, forcing it wider.

Katherine stepped back in time to avoid getting whacked in the face.

“Quinn Mitchell. Nice to meet you.”

She looked me up and down slowly. “Aren’t you delicious?” I felt decidedly like a cupcake display in the bakery next to Weight Watchers. “How do
you
always end up with the really hot guys?” That seemed unnecessarily bitchy. I expected Katherine to flatten Bizz—who at that point had it coming—but instead she kind of…
shrank.

“It was so nice to see you.” Katherine’s tone was quiet and even and completely unnatural. “Don’t want to keep you from your rounds.”

“No worries. I have a few minutes to spare. Are you coming to the reunion, Quinn?” Bizz turned back to Katherine. “That would be an even bigger coup than bringing Tony Canfeld to the prom. Especially…
now.
” She used an index finger to indicate the entirety of Katherine’s body.

Katherine visibly paled. There was definitely a story here.

“Bizz, I hate to cut you off, but I’m afraid I’m on my way out,” Katherine said between gritted teeth.

“Well, geez, Katie. It was
fifteen
years ago. Ancient history! And you can always say you lost your cherry to the captain of the football team.”
Ouch.
“Even if he did it on a bet.” This she leveled at me with a raised eyebrow and a smirk.
Double ouch.

I shot a quick glance at Katherine. Mortification tinged her cheeks pink, which were nearly hidden by her hair, but the horror of the moment was plainly visible in the slump of her shoulders and the bend of her head.

I grabbed the reigns of the situation before Bizz could do any more damage. “Off you go, Bizz.” I didn’t need to hear any more.

“Wha—?”

Her expression was one of wide-eyed shock as I closed the door directly in her face.

Katherine shoved the basket onto the table by the door with a great deal more force than necessary. She swallowed audibly then cleared her throat, not meeting my gaze.

“You okay?”

She jerked her chin in a semblance of a nod then expelled all the air in her lungs with a
whoosh
. “Well, that was a train wreck.” She adjusted the gold chain at her neck with hands that trembled slightly. “I should probably thank you for getting rid of her.”

“What did you ever do to her?”

She shrugged. “It’s a long story.” She still wasn’t meeting my eyes. This wasn’t a problem I normally had. But at least she was pissed off at someone other than me.

“How about that coffee?” A gentleman would have begged off and let her lick her wounds in private. But I was not a gentleman.

“This way.” She led the way into the kitchen.

“You must cook a lot.” I noted the huge stainless-steel refrigerator, double-stacked ovens, and big island in the middle with its own sink and lined with bar stools.

She nodded. “I love to cook. In college, I briefly toyed with the idea of becoming a chef, actually.”

Progress!

I sat down at the island while she poured the coffee then dropped into the stool across from me. As she spooned sugar and a generous splash of cream into hers, I tried hard not to count calories.

“So what’s the story?”

“Let’s say that high school was one of those things I looked forward to putting behind me. I was kind of a misfit, actually.”

“Really?” I couldn’t picture it. Of course, most people wouldn’t recognize me for the awkward, overweight kid I once was either. “That surprises me. You seem like the kind of girl who would have been popular, with lots of friends.”

Katherine scoffed. “Not me. I was a social outcast. Kind of chubby, though smaller than I am now, and constantly with my nose buried in a book. I didn’t belong to any of the ’cool clubs.’ As a matter of fact, I was the president of the Calculus Club. I skipped second and seventh grade, so I was younger than everyone else in my class.”

“So you were one of the really smart kids?”

She rolled her eyes and nodded.

“Don’t you want to go back to show them what you did with all that smart?”

Katherine was attractive and professionally successful. All the things people wanted to say they were at a fifteen-year high-school reunion.

From her “chubby” comment, the weight thing must be an issue.

“It’s probably too late to whip off fifty pounds before mid-July, isn’t it?”

“In a little over two months? Yeah, unless you amputate something.” My eyes narrowed on her as she worried her lip with her teeth. This path was infested with landmines. And she was already shaky after tangling with Bizz. I needed to choose my next words carefully. “Please understand that I’m offering this advice as a fitness professional, not as a friend or business associate, okay?”

She nodded but looked prepared for a direct mortar attack.

“Yes, you would improve your health if you lost some weight. But it’s not like you need to start buying two seats when you fly or anything. There’s nothing wrong with you that healthy eating and an exercise regimen wouldn’t cure.”

Katherine went dead quiet. Obviously, I hadn’t chosen my words nearly carefully enough. I didn’t mean to hurt her feelings, but it was true.

I’m the face man for a chain of fitness centers, so I can’t go around telling people they don’t need to get in shape if they do. I have to make sure I’m in the best possible shape at all times. That’s what I expect of myself and my customers expect of me. But I had learned not to expect the people around me to do what I did. I hoped she didn’t think I was judging her.

“It isn’t like that’s news or anything, I guess,” she said. “It’s just...”

I didn’t know what to say to make it better, which annoyed me. Given what I do for a living, I should be able to find a way to be tactful, which obviously, I hadn’t been.

I tried a new tack. “Not to push my business down your throat, but maybe you could hire a personal trainer to help you get in shape?”

“Maybe.”

She was holding back. Maybe she was unwilling to put her feelings about exercise out there to a guy who owned a chain of fitness centers. That would be tantamount to telling a preacher you didn’t believe in God.

“So, if you worked out and got in shape, then would you want to go to your reunion?”

Katherine made a face. “Hardly. I’m not sure I want to face them. Especially after…
that.
”

We were getting into sensitive territory here. My own less-than-exemplary adolescent years weren’t so far away that I’d forgotten the pain of them.

“So that story was true?”

She nodded with a quick jerk of her chin. “Oh, but it’s even worse than what you think. I fancied myself
in love
with the jerk. So that night, I went with him to his older brother’s apartment instead of the after-prom festivities.”

It really was like a train wreck. I wanted to look away but watched, fascinated, as she continued her story.

“While I awkwardly lost my virginity to Tony Canfeld—all the while fearing that his brother or his brother’s roommate might walk in on us—his buddies were exchanging money about the event. Let’s say that the last two weeks of my senior year were a major exercise in humiliation.”

Which I suspected was quite an understatement.

I cleared my throat uncomfortably. “I guess so.”

“He’d dated Bizz at the beginning of senior year, but they’d broken up long before he and I started going out. At the time, I suspected that it was Bizz who made sure the entire class knew what happened with Tony.” Katherine shrugged, her pink face clearly telegraphing her embarrassment. “I got over it a long time ago. But I’m not sure that I’m ready to go back and face those same people who pointed, whispered, and laughed at me behind my back.”

“So don’t go.”

That was the simple option.

“But, I feel like it’s something I
have
to do. Something I need to prove.”

I nodded slowly. “What’s he doing with his life now? The football captain?”

“I have no idea. Fortunately, he left town, and we didn’t have a ten-year reunion.” She shrugged and
finally
met my gaze. “I daydream that he has some horrible job, like plane de-icer in Anchorage, Alaska, or the guy who changes gunked-up filters in a sewage treatment plant.”

That made me laugh.

“So, Quinn, what were you like in high school?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“Captain of the football team?”

That spoke volumes about what she thought of me. I shook my head, feeling hesitant. “Not hardly.”

“Band geek?” She didn’t seem ready to believe that about me.

Was she ever in for an awakening. This was something I didn’t often talk about, but all she’d have to do was ask Will and the whole story would be out anyway. Besides, she’d pretty much been laid open bare, so it was only fair.

I shrugged. “I played tuba.”

Her eyes opened wide as if she’d been startled by my answer. “Shy?”

“Painfully.”

“Really?”

“Is that surprising?”

“Yeah, it is. I’d think that it would be impossible to be shy looking like you do.”

With that, she reminded me how far I’d come since those days. It didn’t mean I wanted to relive them. “What’s wrong with the way I look?”

“Absolutely nothing, which is my point. I’m mean, you’re a complete...” She bit her lip and cut herself off, much to my disappointment.

“A complete what?” I’d put her on the spot, but the conversation had shifted back to more comfortable territory for both of us, thank God.

“You have to know that you’re fairly nice looking,” she said finally.

“Trust me when I say I know what it’s like to be the butt of the jocks’ jokes.”

“Really!?”

I nodded. “Of course, now I
am
one of the jocks, and instead of barely being able to make it around a set of Little League bases, I run five miles a day.”

Katherine shuddered. “Five miles? Why would anyone run five miles
deliberately
?”

I laughed. Brave to take on an obvious health fanatic. “Got to stay in shape somehow.”

I checked my watch. I didn’t want to make a pest of myself, and I had a lot to do very early the next morning, so I stood to leave. “I’ve got to get going. Thank you for the coffee and the conversation. This was nice.”

Nice?
It had been more than that. Comfortable. Fun. Good conversation. The kind of time I didn’t normally have with women. And the button on her blouse had come open again, so the view had been fantastic. This time I’d managed not to get caught ogling.