The Pretty Lady and the Cowboy (Songs from the Heart) (2 page)

“How about a cup of coffee next door?” He wasn’t giving up. What could Jess have offered the guy to keep going with this charade after I’d made it obvious that I knew what they were up to?

“Sorry,” I said icily. “Carrot-apple juice is probably the strongest thing I drink.” The words were no sooner out of my mouth than I was kicking myself for the sheer lameness of the comeback. Argh. Why is it you can usually think of about ten snappy replies the day after you need them?

“Well, at least tell me your name so I’ll be able to tell my friends about the cute little lady who waited on me here at The Finish Line.”

I felt my blood begin to simmer again, but I held out my hand for a handshake to convince myself I was in charge of the situation. I felt the warmth of his hand surround mine, but I tried to ignore the way his touch aroused a secret yearning. I pulled myself up to my full height and said, “My name is Katharine Addison. My friends call me Kitty. I own this store. And,” I added, “I am perfectly capable of getting a date on my own.”

At this point, I could barely manage to be civil. I think being described as “cute and little” was what did me in, even though it’s true I’m only five foot two and my dad had called me cute all my life. I felt my chin jut out.

“I’m sure you can rustle up all the dates you want,” he said, grinning.

I was way too mad to be impressed with his ability to improvise flirtatious lines. In fact, I was half a heartbeat away from telling him a thing or two about women running a business when he took my hand, bent over, kissed it, and said, “I sure do hope, Miss Kitty, that you’ll count me as one of your friends.”

And then he picked up the shopping bag, tipped his hat one last time, and was gone.

I had to hand it to him. Even after he knew I’d figured the whole thing out, he stayed right in character.

Seconds later, Jess came tearing through the door yelling my name.

“Kitty! I can’t
believe
it! Do you know who that
was
who just walked
out
of here?”

“Oh, please,” I said, giving her a steely look. “Yes, I know exactly who it was.”

I checked the receipt that was still on the counter. “Levi McCrory.” I gave her a stern look. “I suppose that’s a real name? I sure hope so since it was written on what looked like a real credit card.”

When Jess gets excited, she tends to talk in italics. She put her hands on her hips and glanced heavenward. “So what you’re
telling
me is that you
actually
have
no idea
who he
is
,” Jess said.

“I’m sure he’s a great guy, Jess,” I said. “Where did you find him?”

And then she absolutely exploded with information about this Mr. McCrory in speech that tumbled out so quickly I figured she must have memorized it for the occasion. “Levi is the
number one star
in the country western music
skies
, gossip pages have linked him with everyone from
Lindsay
(I’d heard of her—who hasn’t?) to
Taylor
(nope), his recordings repeatedly
top all the charts
, he has over a 
million
friends on his Facebook page…” Her voice trailed off as she gave me a puzzled look.

“Wait a minute,” she said. “What do you mean, where did I find him?”

Jess looked like a firecracker with her green eyes and her wild curly red hair, and frequently came on like one, too. But her good sense and good humor usually kept her feet and mine planted firmly on the ground. I knew she had been an acting minor in college, but this act had gone way over the top and I was way beyond tired of it.

“Come on, Jess. Joke’s over. It’s pretty obvious that this was the guy you’ve been trying to set me up with.”

It seemed to take her a while to process this and I confess I was savoring the moment. I had figured it out all by myself. I was one up on her and this Levi guy.

But she seemed to feel compelled to go on with the gag. “Girlfriend, practically every female in the country from age sixteen to ninety-six would like to be set up with this man. Trust me, if I had any influence at all, I’d have set
myself
up with him.”

“Jess, really. I’m not a total lost cause. I can find my own dates.”

“Sure you can, honey. The place has been positively littered with them the past few months.” As she spoke, she dug her iPhone out of her pocket, typed something, and then passed it over to me. It was the homepage of a person named… Levi McCrory.

An awful realization dawned on me. I felt a blush start somewhere down around my toes and slowly work its way up until my face was once again running-shoe pink.

“And you didn’t dummy up this website?” I asked lamely.

“I may be many wonderful things, but computer code literate isn’t one of them,” Jess said.

“And you didn’t send this McCrory person in here to flirt with me?”

“I am
so
flattered that you think I could accomplish that,” she said.

“Then I’ve just made a total fool of myself in front of a complete stranger?” I asked. “Worse. I’ve just made a total fool of myself in front of a famous complete stranger who probably now thinks I’m a crazy groupie or something?”

“Yeah, probably.” She shrugged her shoulders as if to say it was no big deal. “But on the bright side, that sort of thing probably happens to him all the time.”

“Why doesn’t that make me feel any less like an idiot?”

“Oh, lighten up. If you weren’t such a music snob, you probably would have heard of Levi McCrory and all this wouldn’t have happened,” she said.

Music snob? Me? Could I help it that my dad, who had played bass in a jazz band in his spare time, had insisted on jazz piano lessons for me? And that throughout my childhood, the radio at our house was almost always tuned to a jazz station? Still, Jess liked to tease me about my taste in music.

And I might have teased right back if I didn’t feel like crawling under the nearest rock. Fortunately for me, just then a family of four walked through the door—mom, dad, and two teenage sons. It was the perfect excuse to drop this embarrassing conversation and get back to selling shoes and running my store, the two things I do best. Dan, a newly hired college student who worked for me part-time, was in the back putting away new stock, and I quickly buzzed him to come out front. It took Jess, Dan, and me the next half hour to get the mom, dad, and younger brother fitted and then write up an order for some size 16s for the oldest boy. By then, I’d forgotten all about Levi McCrory.

Well, almost.

# # # # #

It was nearly 1:30 before I could retreat to the little corner of the stockroom that I’d claimed for a makeshift office and sit down to eat my lunch. Before I left my apartment this morning, I’d juiced some carrots and an apple—I preferred natural juices even though my store sells a score of different energy drinks—and made myself a turkey sandwich on whole wheat, no mayo. At the bottom of my lunch bag there was an Oreo cookie that I planned to eat when I was sure Jess and Dan weren’t looking. Hey, nobody’s perfect.

I thought again about the notice I’d received from the landlord. I had opened The Finish Line about nine months ago, and word was spreading up and down the Connecticut coast that we were the premier running shoe store for a terrific selection and an excellent fit. I sponsored fun-runs, outreach in local schools, training sessions, and basically did everything I could think of to get our name out there. And sales were building, slowly but surely.

It had taken me months of visiting the shopping districts in more than a dozen Connecticut coastal towns to find the perfect location. I knew what I wanted: a small town with local shops run by local business people. I also wanted my store to be near the shore since I love running along the beach.

What I hadn’t counted on was the impact one “mall” store would have on our little shopping district. A few months after we opened, a Victoria’s Secret had appeared in the middle of the next block, followed by a Gap. Now landlords were seeing dollar signs. What they could charge a national chain was a lot more than they were charging local merchants.

And a lot more than I could afford. So a slow build of sales just wasn’t going to make it work. I had to figure out how to send sales skyrocketing. Or figure out how to get additional investors, which I was very reluctant to do since I liked being the sole owner.

As I munched my sandwich, I thought about sharing my worries with Jess. But I knew she had her own problems, including a just-widowed mother who was leaning pretty heavily on her for support.

A memory of my father came into my mind. What was it he always said? “If you want something done right, do it yourself.” That was what he told my sister Ally and me when we were kids. When I worked at his law firm, he added, “Rely on yourself and you’ll only have one person to blame if things go wrong.”

I owed the existence of The Finish Line to my dad. He had given me a job in his office right after I graduated from college. I had been an English major, which, to him, meant that I would have to go to graduate school before I could actually get a job in the real world. So he took me on. He never even bothered trying to conceal his ulterior motive: he wanted the firm to be Addison and Addison someday. He knew he could count on my work ethic and he repeatedly told me I had inherited the brains for working in law. My methods, like his, were slow, steady, and absolutely reliable.

He was right. He gave me the freedom to research the defense of an important case myself, one that involved a father of three who suffered burns on almost 90% of his body when his truck caught fire. The liability was stalled until my persistence uncovered a memo from the manufacturer of the truck that said they knew a faulty twenty-five cent part was likely to result in engine fires… but that it would be cheaper to litigate than to issue a recall and fix the part.

The punitive damages the court assessed in that case were a state record. The firm’s recovery was substantial. And my father gave me half his share, expecting me to use it for law school.

I dutifully put in my application to the Yale School of Law and the University of Connecticut Law School that summer, and waited, still working for my dad. In my spare time, to clear my head, to remove thoughts of the harsh world where good people are often harmed through no fault of their own, I started running competitively.

At first I entered short races—5K (a bit more than three miles), then 10K (a little over six). And then… a marathon. I’m not a speedy runner; slow and steady was my motto in the marathon, too. But when I crossed the finish line, I knew what I wanted to do. I was determined to open my own running store.

My father passed away only a few months after I opened The Finish Line, but I knew how proud he had been of my hard work and determination.

Now I was on my own and I had to stay strong. I gave myself a mental pep talk. I would have to figure out how to take care of this rent increase myself. Slow and steady, I told myself.

# # # # #

So there I was, still munching my sandwich, doing my best to repress the way I’d behaved with Levi McCrory, and looking forward to guilty pleasure of my Oreo, when I glanced at the closed-circuit TV overhead and saw a long, white limousine pull up in front of the store. I swallowed as quickly as I could and made my way out front.

I enjoy watching celebrities as much as anyone, and here in New Chester, CT, where the nearby casinos host nightly concerts, we get to see plenty of them—though, as today’s debacle had shown me, I didn’t always know much about who’s who.

The man getting out of the car wasn’t anyone I recognized, but, like Levi McCrory, he was wearing a Stetson. Two cowboys in one day was something of a record for me.

He looked down at a slip of paper in his hand and then leaned back to check the sign above my door. His hat added nearly a foot to his already tall frame, so he had to duck a bit as he came in. He saw me walking toward him and tipped his hat. Twice in one day! I was really on a roll here.

“Miss Kitty?” he asked. I nodded, though that wasn’t a name I usually answered to. More than a little too
Gunsmoke
for my taste. Plus, I have to admit I was still embarrassed enough by my earlier performance that I was reluctant to say anything at all to anyone who looked like a cowboy. Who knew who he might be?

“Then these are for you.” He handed me the envelope, tipped his hat once again, and ducked his way out. The limousine was pulling away from the curb before the thought crossed my mind that I should have said something—thank you, at least.

I looked at the envelope. On the front in a large scrawl it said,

For a Friend

I tore open the envelope and found myself looking at a pair of tickets to Levi McCrory’s concert tonight, row J, seats 23 and 24. Sounded like the center of the orchestra section. And there was a smaller envelope that contained a printed invitation to a private party after the concert. Scrawled on the invitation was a note:

Hope you can make it, pretty lady. — LM

I tossed the envelopes, tickets, invitation and all, into the recycling bin. As a matter of general policy, I try to limit myself to one moment of mortifying, toe-curling embarrassment per day. At the top of the list of things I didn’t need was another encounter with Levi McCrory. I inwardly cringed as I recalled telling him he was wearing a nice “costume.” And assuring him that I could get plenty of dates on my own. I stopped myself from continuing the awful litany of humiliating things I’d said to him.

I couldn’t imagine what had prompted him to even send me the tickets. Maybe he just needed another good laugh, I thought ruefully. More likely, he simply sent tickets to a lot of local merchants to make sure all the seats were filled. That was probably it.

I told myself that I couldn’t spare the time, that I really needed to catch up on my sleep tonight. The 14- and 16-hour days I’d been putting in at the store were beginning to take their toll. When I added a daily three- to five-mile run and some weight training to my work schedule, which I did most days, I was lucky if I got five hours of sleep a night. And country music? Well, that was just a bunch of songs about how somebody done somebody else wrong, wasn’t it?