Take the Long Way Home (10 page)

So you think you’re a Romeo...

The opening line of the song buzzed through
Quinn’s head as he cruised south toward Boston. The expressway was
nearly empty at this hour. His headlights shot two shafts of silver
light onto the asphalt in front of him. Seventy-five miles per
hour. He ought to keep one eye peeled for cops, just in case. He’d
hate for the evening to end with a speeding ticket.

So you think you’re a Romeo…

Did he think that? Did he think that with
one or two kisses, Maeve would melt in his arms?

She very nearly had.

Except that he wasn’t sure who’d been
melting whom. She’d already set him on fire with that cookie. First
the aroma, then the flavor. Then the kiss.

He glanced at bag propped up in the
passenger seat next to him. Less than an hour ago, Maeve had been
in that seat. The Cookie’s bag was a pitiful substitute, but he
knew he’d enjoy the cookies. Not as much as he would have enjoyed
her, but he was no Romeo. He’d take what he could get—which, right
now, was a dark brown cookie and what appeared to be an oatmeal
cookie, given the color and the corrugated texture. He’d peeked
into the bag before he’d started the engine, and he’d very nearly
devoured both cookies after he’d pulled away from the curb in front
of her store. But he was exercising willpower. He could wait. The
cookies would be his treat once he got back to his apartment, a way
to extend the evening a little longer.

Before tonight, the last woman he’d had in
that seat had been Ashley. Seated beside him, smelling not of
baking cookies but of some exotic, no doubt expensive perfume,
she’d remarked that since he was a doctor, he ought to be driving
something a little fancier, a little newer. She’d told him she
could put him in a Mercedes, or a BMW—if not a brand new car,
something just off lease and still under warranty.

Right. Like he had money for a Mercedes or
BMW, even if it was used—or “pre-owned,” as Ashley put it. Like he
had a place to park such a vehicle. He’d snagged a resident sticker
for street parking in his neighborhood, but he wasn’t crazy enough
to park a classy, pricy set of wheels on the street, where it could
get sideswiped, vandalized, or buried beneath a mountain of snow in
the winter.

Strange that he’d known
Ashley so long, known her so well—yet he’d felt more comfortable
sharing a sloppy lobster roll with Maeve than he had the past few
times he’d seen Ashley. Maybe that was
because
he knew Ashley so well. When
he’d stopped being a football star, he’d stopped being good enough
for her…until he became a doctor. Now he was good enough for her
again. She had her rating system, and he’d obviously plummeted
below the acceptable range when he’d abandoned his chance at a
pro-football career, and then risen back up once he’d made a go of
it with a prestigious medical career.

He didn’t want to be rated.

At that moment, what he wanted were
delicious cookies, baked by someone who worked as hard as he did,
who had earned everything she had. He wanted a woman who didn’t
think he needed a fancier car. He wanted a woman who didn’t rate
him.

He wanted a woman who could set him on fire
with one simple kiss.

Maeve Nolan. The weird girl
in school. The soft-spoken, doe-eyed woman who probably hadn’t been
weird at all. She’d been grieving, and shy, and not plugged into
the whole cool scene at Brogan’s Point High. She hadn’t been weird,
but
he’d
been
insufferable. He’d had his own rating system back then. If a person
was in his social circle, popular and confident and revered by
lesser folks, that person existed. If not, that person didn’t
exist.

He was a better person
today than he was then—or at least he was trying to be a better
person. He hoped there was a statute of limitations on high school
behavior. He’d been so full of himself back then, believing his
press, basking in adulation. He was going to get more adulation on
Saturday at the damned homecoming game, and the thought made him
queasy. He should have told Ashley not to put together that whole
retiring-his-number ceremony, although she’d presented it to him as
a
fait accompli
.
He hadn’t really gotten a vote.

He could have said no,
though. He could have refused to go to the game. But how could he
turn his back on the people who wanted to honor him? Ashley had
organized a whole army of people behind this thing: his football
coach, who was now the school’s athletic director, and the current
football coach. The principal, Mr. Kezerian, who’d been old when
Quinn had been a student there and was now ten years older—why
couldn’t they have a ceremony to retire
him
instead of Quinn’s number?—and
the Boosters Club, all those business leaders and over-the-hill
athletes who poured money into the varsity programs at the school.
According to Ashley, the current students still spoke Quinn’s name
in a reverent hush. No one had ever come as close to big-time
football as he had.

But that was then. Couldn’t they all move
on? Couldn’t they get over it? He had.

Too late. He’d told Ashley he’d attend the
homecoming game ceremony, and he wouldn’t renege on that
commitment. He suspected, though, that he wouldn’t enjoy that
experience anywhere near as much as he’d enjoy eating the cookies
Maeve had tucked into that bag for him.

***

“All right,” Maeve said to Joyce as they
stocked the refrigerator behind the counter with milk, cream,
bottled water and flavored iced tea. “I’m an ignoramus, I admit it,
but just exactly how important is a homecoming game?”

“You mean the homecoming game at the high
school this weekend?”

Maeve sighed. Even her punky employee, with
her feathery platinum hair and the butterfly tattoo on her wrist,
knew more about this special game than Maeve did. “Yes, that
game.”

“Well, I guess it’s a big thing if you care
about football.”

Which Maeve didn’t. She’d discussed it with
Cookie over her morning coffee, and her cat didn’t seem to care
much about football, either. The beast simply swished her tail,
crunched a few kibble pellets between her tiny teeth, and then
leaped onto the window sill to inspect the alley through the
window.

Maeve would have liked to join her. She felt
as if a transparent layer separated her from the rest of the
world—not glass but consciousness. While she went through the
motions at the shop, organizing inventory and preparing her
schedule, which would entail baking the crisper cookies on Friday
and the softer ones early Saturday morning so they would be chewy
and fresh when she sold them, she felt as if there was another
Maeve inside the busy, efficient Maeve. A dreamy Maeve. A Maeve who
couldn’t stop reliving Quinn Connor’s kiss.

It had been everything she’d imagined
kissing the golden boy of Brogan’s Point High would be like—except
that he was no longer the golden boy of Brogan’s Point High. He was
as different from his high school self as Maeve was from hers. She
hadn’t been an emotionally overwrought teenage girl locking lips
with the boy every girl in the entire school had a crush on. She’d
been a woman, and he’d been a man, and they’d been…friends.
Companions. Two adults who’d wound up eating a late supper together
and then kissing each other good-night, as adults who went on
dinner dates so often did.

It all seemed surreal to her. Quinn might no
longer be a superstar jock, but he still struck Maeve as pretty
spectacular. His black hair and pale blue eyes, his tall, strong
body, his smile—sometimes gentle, sometimes ironic, sometimes
self-mocking—all came together in such an appealing way, she could
scarcely break out of her daze to get her work done. The fact that
she hadn’t slept much last night—she’d been too busy reliving that
kiss over and over—didn’t help.

She could have happily spent the entire day
perched on a window sill next to Cookie, staring out at the world
and seeing nothing but her own sweet yearning. Who was she kidding?
She might be a grown woman, but she felt like a goofy teenager with
a crush on a football star. And maybe that wasn’t so crazy. This
Saturday, Quinn was going to regress as well, resuming his persona
as the football star he’d once been.

Once he’d reverted to being a football star,
with his beautiful former girlfriend by his side, would he want
anything to do with Maeve? She didn’t want to believe he was that
shallow, but who knew? In the spotlight once more, with fans
lionizing him, he might remember that he still craved the spotlight
and the glory, and that he had no use for a cat lady who baked
cookies. He might remember that he was a doctor, and she hadn’t
even gone to college. He was saving lives and she was making
praline squares and butter-chip bars.

She really had to forget about last night,
break the damned layer of unreality she was gazing through, and get
her head back in the game. A sports metaphor, she thought wryly.
Perfect for the occasion.

“So this homecoming game, it’s a big thing?”
she asked Joyce.

“My daughter’s only in
middle school, so I don’t know what it’s like now. But when I was
in high school, it was always a major game against a traditional
rival. Lots of town people and alums would return for the game. The
stands would be packed. Then in the evening, there was a homecoming
dance. Big hoo-ha thing,” Joyce said with a grin. “New dress,
manicure. You
had
to go. What was it like when you were at the high
school?”

Maeve shrugged. She’d been whatever the
opposite of school-spirited was. “I never went to a game. Or a
dance.”

“Aw, you poor thing,” Joyce said, but her
tone was bright with laughter. She clearly didn’t think Maeve had
missed much. “High school dances are awful. Someone’s always
breaking up with someone. Girls are in tears. Boys are drunk.
Someone spills something on your new dress. Pfft.” She fluttered a
hand through the air, dismissing the entire notion as if it were
nothing more than a dust mote she was brushing away.

“Well, here’s what I’m wondering,” Maeve
said, doing her best to shake her head clear of the haze Quinn’s
kiss last night had left behind. “Saturday is opening day for us.
Can we promote Cookie’s at the game? All those people—not just the
students but the locals, and the returning alums. Maybe they’ll
want a cookie before the game, or afterward.”

Joyce stopped filling the napkin dispenser
on the counter and gave Maeve a thoughtful look. “They’ve got a
snack bar at the stadium, so during the game, anyone who wants a
snack will buy it there. They used to sell the absolute worst hot
dogs in the world. Boiled instead of grilled.” She wrinkled her
nose in disgust. “But before or after the game…why not?”

“Do they have programs? Maybe, if it’s not
too late, I could buy an ad.”

“They never used to have programs,” Joyce
told her. “They’d just hand out a sheet of paper with the Brogan’s
Point roster on one side and the opposing team’s roster on the
other. I don’t know if that’s changed.”

Maeve pondered the situation. “Maybe we
could print up some fliers and hand them out to people arriving for
the game. Except we’ll be here, working…” More thought. “We could
hire some kids to hand them out. Or pay them with cookies.” She
needed to watch her bottom line. She’d budgeted for one
staffer—Joyce. Not a team of kids. What was the minimum age for
workers, anyway? Could she hire middle-school students, like
Joyce’s daughter? Her daughter might have friends. What were the
legalities?

Her father might know. He was in charge of
enforcing the law, after all.

She pulled her cell phone from the hip
pocket of her jeans, then hesitated, her thumb poised above the
screen, and contemplated the implications. Turning to her father
for advice was something she hadn’t done in a decade. More than a
decade—once her mother had died and her father had fallen to
pieces, she’d realized she could no longer depend on him for
anything. The man had been unable even to put together an evening
meal. Or eat one. Maeve had cooked a decent dinner a couple of
times—grilled chicken or minute steaks, baked potatoes and green
beans—and he’d just picked at the food, lavishing much more
attention on the glass of whisky beside his plate. She’d given up,
lived on soup from cans and salads, asked him for grocery money
when she needed it, and, when he was off on a bender, experimented
with one or another of the cookie recipes in the loose-leaf
notebook she’d found in the cabinet above the stove.

He’d been useless. Grieving, of course—she
couldn’t blame him for that—but he’d had a daughter who was also
grieving, and he’d completely abdicated. When she’d told him, the
day after graduation, that she was leaving, his eyes had misted up,
but all he’d said was, “I don’t blame you.”

So now, all these years later, did she
really want to pick his brain?

She couldn’t think of any other brain to
pick. Sighing, she speed-dialed his number.

He answered almost immediately, delight
filtering through his gruff voice. “Maeve?”

“Hi, Dad. I’ve got a question. You know
there’s a homecoming game at the high school on Saturday. Is there
any law against handing out flyers about my store’s grand opening
there?”

That she’d rushed into the purpose of her
call without pausing for small talk or how’ve-you-been’s seemed to
take him aback. He was silent for a moment, and then said, “Not as
far as I know. The school might have some rules about it, but
there’s no law.” He paused, then added, “To be on the safe side, I
wouldn’t distribute anything inside the stadium. But lots of people
will be crowding around the gate to get in. You could probably hand
something out there.”