Take the Long Way Home (7 page)

Except...it was home.

“Why don’t you wash up, and then we can grab
a bite,” he suggested gently.

“Am I a mess?” The smile that flashed across
her face was like lightning—fleeting but blindingly bright. “Wait
here. I’ll be right back.”

She vanished into the back room, leaving him
to explore the shop. She’d made some changes since he’d been there
yesterday. More prices were listed on the whiteboard behind the
counter. The shelves inside the glass cases were decorated with
lacy white paper. A napkin dispenser stood on the counter near the
register, and another one, along with linen-lined straw baskets
filled with sugar packets and stirrers, occupied a small table
against the wall.

He’d enjoyed the coffee she had given him
yesterday. Everyone thought Riley’s served the best coffee in town,
but Maeve might give the diner its first real local competition
among caffeine addicts.

She returned to the front of the store much
sooner than he’d expected. Ashley would have taken at least fifteen
minutes, styling her hair, touching up her make-up, whatever it was
that women spent so much time doing when they were in the bathroom.
Maeve had washed her face—the flour was gone and her cheeks
appeared damp. She hadn’t applied any make-up, though, and her
hair, while nominally neater, just hung there, framing her face
with straight strands of pale brown and dark blond. Her apron was
gone and she carried a canvas tote bag. Her jeans sagged slightly
at the knees, and her leather sneakers were scuffed and worn. She’d
donned a hoodie that might have once been navy blue but was now
faded to gray, the zipper drawn halfway up. “I’m done,” she
announced, another lightning-bright smile flashing across her face.
“It’s been a long day.”

A long day for him, too. He’d started his
shift at six a.m. By seven, he’d been in the ER, setting the broken
radius of a nine-year-old who’d fallen off her bike on her way to
school, then doing rounds, then assisting in two knee replacements.
Meetings, more rounds, another pass through the ER to examine an
X-ray and tape a broken toe, and admitting a middle school kid
who’d suffered a nasty fracture of his femur during a Pop Warner
practice. Football was a crazy, dangerous sport, he’d thought as
he’d explained to the kid how, once the swelling decreased a
little, he would perform surgery to bolt the bone together. If
Quinn had a son, he’d steer him toward baseball, basketball, or
soccer. Hell, even ice hockey was safer than football.

Maeve’s shop, with its divine atmosphere,
seemed like the safest place on earth. He could happily skip dinner
and remain there, getting high on the smell. But he’d invited Maeve
to eat with him, so he ought to offer her some food. “It’s kind of
late for a big dinner,” he said as he held the door open for her.
Its bell sounded far too cheerful for this late hour, when both he
and Maeve were dragging butt from their long, demanding days. “How
does a lobster roll at the Lobster Shack sound to you?”

“Great,” she said, hesitating in the
doorway. “My car is parked in back.”

“Let’s take my car,” he said. His Subaru was
a battered old clunker, but as long as he was street-parking in
Boston, he wasn’t going to invest in anything fancier. If she
didn’t like it, that was her problem.

He had the feeling Maeve wouldn’t care how
new or elegant his car was. Her father didn’t own a bunch of
automobile dealerships. She wasn’t Ashley.

He had to stop thinking about Ashley,
comparing the two women. One wore make-up, one didn’t. One was into
pricy vehicles, and the other, he suspected, didn’t give a shit
about cars, as long as they got her where she needed to go. He
wasn’t with the rich, chic lady tonight—and probably never would be
again. He was with the shy, decidedly un-chic lady. The high school
whack-job. The woman who filled her shop with an aroma that could
make a strong man fall to his knees and weep in ecstasy.

He chuckled to himself at that image. Maeve
shot him a quick, puzzled look, then settled into the passenger
seat of his car and let him shut the door for her.

The drive to the Lobster Shack took only a
couple of minutes. They could have walked there, if it hadn’t been
so late and the moon had been a little brighter.

The restaurant, a squat, rough-hewn
structure on one of the docks, was nearly empty at this hour on a
weeknight. The hostess waved at the vacant tables and told them to
take their pick. Maeve glanced at Quinn, allowing him to choose. He
headed for a table against a wall near the back, telling himself he
hadn’t selected the out-of-the-way table out of a desire to remain
unnoticed. If someone came into the restaurant and recognized him,
and word got back to Ashley that he was having dinner with Maeve
Nolan, so what? For one thing, Ashley had no claim on him. For
another, it wasn’t as if he and Maeve were involved or anything.
Spur-of-the-moment lobster rolls at the Lobster Shack at
nine-thirty p.m. didn’t qualify as a date.

If pressed, he wouldn’t be able to say why
he’d asked Maeve to see him tonight or what exactly was going on
between them, other than “Take the Long Way Home.” As soon as the
old rock song had started playing at the Faulk Street Tavern a
couple of days ago, he’d felt drawn to her, connected to her in
some way. He couldn’t explain it, and right now, as tired and
hungry as he was, he didn’t want to. He just wanted to eat
something and see if he could coax another electrifying smile out
of her.

They ordered lobster rolls, and he asked for
a beer. “Just an iced tea,” she said when he suggested she reward
herself for a hard day’s labor with something a little stronger.
“Three sips of beer and I’ll fall asleep.”

“What were you doing in the shop all
day?”

“Testing the machinery. Testing the timing.
Making sure everything will bake properly.”

“You’ve got a bunch of home-made cookies
stashed somewhere? The display cases were empty. If they hadn’t
been, I probably would have suggested we skip the lobster rolls and
pig out on dessert.”

A faint half-smile crossed her lips. “I’ve
got some cookies I can give you if you’d like, when you take me
back to get my car. Tomorrow I’ll start baking inventory for good,
but today was just a series of test runs.” That was probably the
most words she’d ever said to him at one time. When the subject was
her store, she came alive. “My father stopped by during the
afternoon and took some cookies with him. He said he was going to
share them with his buddies at work, but I bet he ate them all
himself.”

Her smile widened. When Maeve gave herself
over fully to a smile, Quinn’s temperature rose ten degrees. He
smiled back at her, enjoying the warmth, enjoying the twitch in his
groin. As exhausted as he was, certain parts of him seemed wide
awake in Maeve’s company.

“Your dad’s a cop, right?”

Her eyebrows fluttered in surprise. “A
police detective, yes. How did you know that?”

“Everyone in high school knew your dad was a
cop. Didn’t you ever wonder why no one ever offered you a
joint?”

She shrugged and unfolded her paper napkin.
“I assumed it was because I pretty much stuck to myself.”

That was a nice way of saying she’d been an
outcast. But then, maybe she hadn’t felt like an outcast. Maybe
she’d felt that being alone was her choice, not the result of
everyone steering clear of her.

“We were all terrified that if we drank or
lit a spliff in front of you, your dad would find out and arrest
us. Or, in my case, get me kicked off the football team.”

Her eyebrows popped up again. “Terrified?
You were terrified of me?”

The waitress arrived with their drinks and a
plastic basket filled with rolls. Their lobster rolls would come
with bread, and Quinn ate a lot less now than he used to. Maeve, on
the other hand, could use a few more pounds on her bony frame.
Clearly, she wasn’t eating enough of her cookies. A roll slathered
in butter might help.

She only sipped her iced tea, her eyes
steady on him, the gold in her multicolored irises glinting like
metal fibers.

He gazed back at her. Yeah, he’d been
terrified of her in high school, the way kids were always terrified
of anyone who was different from them. He hadn’t given her much
thought back then, but on the rare occasions he did, it was to
figure out ways to avoid her. She was odd, a freak. To a shallow,
self-involved guy determined to maintain his position at the top of
the school’s social pyramid, anyone who strayed from the normal
posed a threat.

“You were kind of scary,” he allowed, hoping
she wouldn’t be insulted.

She laughed. “You’re kidding, right?”

He sipped his beer. The old
Quinn would have assured her that he was. He would have smoothed
out the moment, sidestepping the treacherous path of honesty. But
he was a better person now, or at least he was trying to be. “I
didn’t really know you in high school,” he said, stating the
obvious. “But you were…different. You were the Other. Just by being
different, you were a challenge to all of us who were trying so
hard
not
to be
different.”

Her smile faded, her expression growing
reflective as she leaned back in her chair and regarded him. She
said nothing.

“What?” he asked.

She shrugged. “Just…you’re kind of deeper
than I expected.”

Okay. She was doing honesty, too. This
dinner could wind up being disastrous, or very interesting.
Possibly both. “You thought I was a dumb jock?”

“Well…yes.” Her smile softened the
insult.

He smiled, too. “I was a
jock. Not as dumb as I came across.” Another sip of beer. “Not as
dumb as
I
thought
I was.”

The waitress arrived with
their orders—long, thick cylinders of toasted bread heaped with
mountains of chunky lobster salad, baskets of French fries
glistening with salt and oil, and bowls of cole slaw. Maeve’s eyes
widened with delight as she surveyed the feast. “I am
so
hungry,” she said,
then popped a fry into her mouth, chewed, and sighed
happily.

He suppressed a laugh. In all the years he’d
known Ashley, he had never once heard her admit to being hungry.
She was always foisting half her meal on him, urging him to eat her
fries, passing him chunks of her sandwich. He’d appreciated her
slim figure, but he’d always suspected there was something more
than weight-watching behind her refusal to acknowledge her hunger.
It was as if she thought admitting she wanted to eat was
unladylike, or unclassy, or unattractive.

Maeve wrapped her hands around her sandwich
and lifted it off the plate. Chunks of lobster spilled out of the
bread as she took a bite. She chewed, swallowed, and released
another contented sigh. “So,” she said, “tell me how smart you
are.”

It almost sounded like a dare. If she’d
thought he was dumb, he’d thought she was meek. Obviously, they’d
both been mistaken. “I’m a doctor,” he said, hoping he didn’t sound
boastful.

She looked impressed. He shouldn’t have been
so pleased by that. “I didn’t know doctors worked such lousy hours.
Aren’t you supposed to be on a golf course?”

He chuckled and dug into his lobster roll.
“I’m a resident in orthopedics at Mass General. The hours are
better than last year, when I was a first-year intern. But they
still suck.”

“I always figured you’d be playing football
professionally,” she said.

“A lot of people figured that,” he agreed.
“At one time, I did, too.” He washed down a few fries with a
swallow of beer. “Fate, in the form of a three hundred twenty pound
tackle, had other plans for me.”

She shook her head. “A tackle? Those are the
guys who knock people over, right? I don’t know much about
football.”

He found her ignorance refreshing. “Lots of
people knock lots of people over in football. This particular
tackle knocked me over. Fifth game of the season at Michigan. First
game I’d started. I was a freshman, but our starting quarterback
was having a lousy season, so the coach thought he’d shake things
up by putting me in. I was having a decent game until I got
sacked.” At her perplexed look, he clarified. “That’s when someone
from the other team knocks the quarterback over. This tackle
dislocated my patella—my kneecap—and broke my tibia. That’s the
shin bone.”

She winced. “It must have been painful.”

“It didn’t hurt too bad. God bless
morphine.” He ate some more. “I was out for the season, but after
my leg healed, I could have gone back to playing. The doctors,
though, and the nurses, the therapists—they were such amazing
people. I was in awe of them, in a way I’d never been in awe of
athletes. They worked miracles. They did something meaningful. I
decided I wanted to do something meaningful, too.”

“That’s quite a turnaround,” she said.

“It was crazy.” He smiled, remembering how
crazy everyone had thought it was. He’d had to start enrolling in
real classes, not the easy-A courses designed for football players.
He’d had to bust his ass studying. He’d had to give up his athletic
scholarship at the University of Michigan, although he’d managed to
change his legal residency to Ann Arbor so he could pay in-state
tuition, and fortunately, he’d qualified for need-based financial
aid.

His parents had been shocked. His father,
especially, had taken enormous pride in Quinn’s gridiron prowess,
and both his parents had assumed he would wind up earning millions
of dollars in the NFL. They’d supported him in his decision to
change direction, but to this day, they still didn’t understand
it.

The Michigan coach had been furious. His
teammates had been bewildered.

Ashley had dumped him. She’d wanted to be
with a football star, not a drudge grinding it out in pre-med
courses, struggling through organic chem labs, pulling
all-nighters, and stressing over every B that should have been an
A.