Take the Long Way Home (2 page)

Apprehension fluttered in Maeve’s throat,
tiny spasms that made swallowing difficult. She resisted the urge
to cough as she stared at the woman who had healed her father, who
had helped him put his life back together, who had filled Ed
Nolan’s empty heart with new love. Maeve didn’t know whether to be
grateful or resentful. She supposed she was both.

Gus Naukonen had been tapping her finger
against the screen of a tablet, but when she looked up, her gaze
immediately locked onto Maeve’s, and she spoke Maeve’s name. Given
that a good thirty feet separated them, and the air vibrated with
the chatter of men bickering about whether the Bruins coach knew a
hockey puck from a cow pie and women debating which movie stars
they suspected of having undergone plastic surgery, Maeve couldn’t
hear Gus’s voice. But she could read her lips.

Those lips had taken the shape of Maeve’s
name. This shouldn’t have shocked her. She recognized Gus. Why
wouldn’t Gus recognize her? If her father had shown Maeve a picture
of Gus, why wouldn’t he have shown Gus a picture of Maeve?

She was tempted to flee. But she’d made it
inside the tavern, so she figured she should say hello to the
woman. Whether she was ready was irrelevant. She was here.

She walked toward the bar. As she stepped
onto the empty dance floor, a song suddenly started playing behind
her, a rock-and-roll oldie from her father’s era. She glanced over
her shoulder at the jukebox; one of the fishermen was strolling
away from it, back to his table. He must have chosen a song and
started the machine playing. It looked too ancient to be
functional. Probably a fake, hiding a modern sound system behind
its old-fashioned façade.

Gus’s stare remained on Maeve for the
duration of her walk—which took less than a minute, although it
felt like a century. “Maeve,” Gus said again as Maeve neared the
bar. This time, Maeve heard her.

“And you’re Gus,” she said.

Gus nodded and extended her hand, and Maeve
shook it. The woman had a firm, hard grip. Not a surprise.

An awkward silence stretched between them,
and then Gus spoke. “Does your father know you’re in town?”

“Not yet,” Maeve admitted.

“Should we call him?”

“No.” Maeve answered so sharply, she felt
ashamed. Her cheeks, still damp from the raindrops that had
spattered her face when she’d walked from her parked car to the
bar’s entry, grew warm. She was probably blushing. “The curse of
Irish complexions,” her mother used to lament.

Gus said nothing for a minute, and then,
“Okay.”

Maeve felt herself relax. “I’ll get in touch
with him when I’m ready,” she said, telling Gus what she’d been
telling herself for two weeks now. “I thought he might be here and
I’d surprise him. He told me he stops by your bar most
afternoons.”

“Not today. He’s in Salem, testifying at a
trial.”

It struck Maeve as odd that this woman, this
total stranger, should know where Maeve’s father was when Maeve
herself didn’t. But then, Gus wasn’t a total stranger to Maeve’s
father. “A trial,” Maeve echoed, recalling that her father did
indeed testify at trials sometimes. He was a police detective. Part
of his job was to arrest people and then go to court to explain why
he arrested them.

This was Brogan’s Point. Her home. Her
father. She felt disoriented, everything so strange and so familiar
at the same time.

“How long will you be in town?” Gus
asked.

Forever? Or only until her business crashed
and burned, and the money Harry had left her ran out, and she
discovered she couldn’t stand to live in the town where she’d once
been so miserable? “I don’t know,” she admitted.

The waitress approached the bar, twirling
her empty tray. “I need a merlot and two cosmos,” she said.

Gus nodded and reached for a glass. “Can I
get you a drink?” she asked Maeve.

“No, thanks. I just…” She floundered, not
sure what to say.

Gus worked efficiently, pouring cranberry
juice and then vodka into two martini glasses, measuring the
amounts with her eyes. “You just came here to see your father,” she
finished Maeve’s sentence for her. “And he’s not here. He should be
home this evening.”

“Maybe I’ll stop by his
house, then,” Maeve said, knowing she wouldn’t. Her father’s home
had once been her home, too. She’d grown up there. She’d lost her
mother there. She’d experienced pain and grief and rage there.
Among the many things she wasn’t ready for was reentering that
house and getting gobsmacked by all the awful memories. Two days
ago, she’d driven to her father’s street, idled at the corner, and
then U-turned without cruising past the house. Her only thought
then, and now, was,
I’m not
ready.

Another old rock song began to play. It
sounded familiar; she was pretty sure it had been used as the
soundtrack of a TV commercial a few years back. The opening chords
conjured an image of a revving sports car in her mind.

She watched Gus finish preparing the
cocktails and then fill a goblet with red wine. She ought to say
something, yet she felt lost. What did you say to a six-foot-tall
woman who knew her way around bottles of liquor, whose every motion
was executed with grace and certainty? Maeve couldn’t imagine ever
being that confident.

She felt even less confident when a young
couple entered the bar. She recognized them both. They’d gone to
high school with her, and they’d been the king and queen of—well,
not just the prom. The entire school, pretty much. He’d been the
quarterback and captain of the football team. She’d been the
captain of the cheerleading squad. Quinn Connor and Ashley Wright,
the reigning royalty of Maeve’s high school class.

They’d been gorgeous then. They were
gorgeous now. Ashley’s hair looked a little lighter than it had
been in high school, the honey strands streaked with platinum,
spilling in lush waves around her face. She was slim and elegant,
dressed in tight jeans and an embroidered jacket that had probably
cost as much as Maeve’s car. Quinn was less beefy than he’d been in
high school but just as handsome, his hair as black as Maeve
remembered, his eyes the same icy blue. He still had the thick
lashes all the girls used to sigh over, and the broad shoulders,
and the tall, rangy body. His jeans were not skin tight, however,
and his blazer was shapeless in a cozy, comfortable way.

So Quinn and Ashley, the
Zeus and Hera of Brogan’s Point High, were still together and still
in town, ten years after they and Maeve had exited the school
building for the final time. Maybe young love
could
be true love. The thought
pleased Maeve, even though it left her a little pensive. She’d been
with a few guys in Seattle, but she’d never been that crazy about
any of them, and now, well past adolescence, she was too old to
experience young love.

The golden couple strolled to a booth and
sat, Quinn facing the bar and Ashley across from him. Maeve had to
exert herself not to gawk at him. Even though she’d been a loner in
high school, and a total wreck, she’d had a crush on him, just like
every other girl in the school, and probably a few teachers. He’d
aged remarkably well.

She didn’t bother to cross the room and say
hello to her former classmates. They wouldn’t know who she was. She
hadn’t spent her years at Brogan’s Point High traveling in their
exalted circle. Quite the contrary—she’d spent those years
searching for dark corners with deep shadows.

She turned away from them and gave Gus
another forced smile. “I should be going.”

Gus smiled gently. “I’m glad you stopped
by.”

Maeve wished she could say
she was glad, too, but the words wouldn’t come. She managed a quick
nod before turning to leave. She was a few steps from the dance
floor when a new song blasted from the jukebox. She wasn’t sure
she’d ever heard it before—no growling sports cars flashed across
her mind—but it was bouncy and catchy, sung in a clear, high tenor.
She couldn’t make out most of the words, but the refrain was
clear:
take the long way home.

A silent laugh escaped her. She knew a thing
or two about taking the long way home.

And then she stopped laughing, because she
realized Quinn Connor was staring straight at her.

***

He knew that woman. He wasn’t sure where he
knew her from, but he knew her. He knew the heart-shaped face, the
soulful hazel eyes, the hair the color of wet sand, straight, limp
locks dropping past her shoulders. She looked so damned
familiar…but he couldn’t place her. Sometimes when you saw people
away from their usual milieu, the lack of context made it hard to
identify them.

Well, hell—the context was Brogan’s Point.
He’d probably known her when he’d last lived here. He and Ashley
were twenty-eight, and the woman on the dance floor looked a little
younger. Maybe she’d been a couple of years behind them in high
school. Not that he’d ever paid much attention to
underclassmen.

He hadn’t paid much attention to anyone back
then, other than his coach, his friends, and Ashley. He’d been such
an asshole in those days.

Across the booth from him, Ashley presented
him with a cute little pout. She’d loved having his undivided
attention when they were in high school, and she seemed to want it
again now. But they were different people today, older and—he’d
like to think—wiser. She was still beautiful, still blond and
curvy, stylishly dressed and impeccably made-up. Maybe that was why
the woman ambling toward the exit looked younger. She wore no
make-up.

“Quinn?” Ashley only
uttered his name, but in her intonation, he heard,
Look at me! I’m here. She’s no one.

That woman wasn’t no one.

His gaze had locked with hers the instant
the song had erupted from the jukebox on the far wall of the bar.
An old rock number, probably from the seventies. Dave Herschberg,
one of the most gifted orthopedists Quinn had ever had the
privilege of working with, liked to blast old rock and roll tunes
in the OR when he was performing surgery. Thanks to Quinn’s
residency at Mass General, he’d learned almost as much about
seventies rock as he had about repairing torn ACL’s.

“Take the long way home,” the singer
crooned. “Take the long way home.”

Yeah, Quinn knew about
that. He’d taken the long way, for sure. Maybe that was why the
woman was gazing at him. Maybe she was seeing him and
thinking,
there’s a guy who took the long
way home
.

Maybe she was looking at
him and thinking,
there’s a first-class
asshole who took the long way home.

The possibility made him want to confront
her, to assure her he had changed. Except, of course, that she
might not be thinking anything of the kind. She might just be
staring at him because he had bird shit on his shoulder.

He glanced at his shoulder, just to be sure.
Just a few wet spots where the rain had caught him on the way from
the car into the tavern.

“Quinn, pay attention,” Ashley said, rapping
her knuckles against the table as if it were a door and she
demanded entry. “I went through a lot of effort to make this
happen. I want Saturday to go smoothly. They’re giving us as much
of halftime as we want, and—”

The song was winding down, fading out. As if
released from a spell, the woman started moving, resuming her
stroll toward the exit, averting her gaze as if she could no longer
bear to look at Quinn. He sprang to his feet.

“Quinn!”

“I’ll be right back,” he told Ashley,
ignoring the indignation in her tone. Several long, quick strides
brought him to the door one step ahead of the woman. Before she
could pull the door open, he touched her wrist. “I’m sorry, but—do
I know you?”

She raised her eyes to him. She looked
bewildered and uncomfortable. “How should I know if you know
me?”

“You look familiar, that’s all.” That wasn’t
all. She had shared that song with him somehow, the song about
taking the long way home.

“We were classmates in high school,” she
said.

“I thought that might be it.” He extended
his hand. “Quinn Connor.”

“I know who you are.” But she let him shake
her hand. Her fingers were cool and delicate, so slender his hand
seemed to swallow hers.

Of course she knew who he
was. Back then, everyone had known who he was. “I know you, too,”
he said, feeling guilty that he really
didn’t
know who she was. “But I’m
sorry, I can’t remember your name.”

“You never knew my name,” she said, not
sounding terribly judgmental about that. “Maeve Nolan.”

Maeve
Nolan
. He did know her name. She’d
been…God, she’d been a head case in high school. A cop’s daughter.
Everyone had been afraid to break any laws around her—no drinking
beer in her presence, no lighting up a joint—and she hadn’t seemed
to mind. She’d dressed in black a lot. Rumor had it she’d sometimes
walk out of a classroom in the middle of a lecture; Quinn hadn’t
had any classes with her, so he had no idea if that was true. Rumor
had it she would sometimes hide in one of the girls’ bathrooms and
cry; Quinn had never been in a girls’ bathroom, so he had no idea
if that was true, either. But yes, he’d known who Maeve Nolan was:
a sad, gloomy loner.

He’d never looked closely at her in high
school—he’d been blind to anyone outside his inner circle—but damn,
she was pretty. A lot prettier than a whack-job loner ought to be.
Maybe she hadn’t been that pretty in high school. More likely, he’d
been too much of a jerk to notice.

He noticed now. Her skin was pale, and it
looked as soft as freshly fallen snow. Her golden-brown lashes were
astonishingly long. Her lips were a dusky pink. There was
naturalness about her, something clean and fresh, and a spark of
determination in her wide hazel eyes. If he had to describe her
now, sad and gloomy would not be the words he chose.