The Trouble With Valentine's Day Read online

  He looked about the room as if really seeing it for the first time. "Ahh. That explains the hearts."

  Her gaze lowered past the mustache framing his mouth and chin, down the wide column of his thick neck to the hollow of his tan throat. "I think we're the only two in here who aren't a couple."

  "Don't tell me you're here alone?"

  Kate returned her gaze to his and laughed. She liked the way he'd said that, as if he found it hard to believe. "Yeah, go figure." In her favorite fantasy, she was trapped with a hunk of man in Nordstrom's shoe department. "How about you? Anyone going to be angry with you for forgetting Valentine's Day?"

  "Nope."

  She'd never set a fantasy in a ski lodge, but she was thinking about it now. She couldn't help it. The man was throwing off pheromones like he was a nuclear reactor at Chernobyl. Sitting so close to ground zero, the fallout was lethal.

  He pushed up the sleeves of his flannel shirt and exposed what appeared to be the tail of a snake or some sort of reptile on his thick left forearm. "Is that a snake?"

  "Yeah. That's Chloe. She's a sweetheart."

  Right. The tattoo was dark gold with black-and-white bands and appeared so real she leaned in for a closer look. The scales were perfectly defined, and without giving it a thought, Kate reached out and touched his bare arm. "What kind of snake is she?" She half expected to feel cool scales instead of warm, smooth flesh.

  "An Angolan python."

  Python. Yikes! "How big?" Kate looked back up into his face. Something hot and sensual shimmered within the green depths of his eyes. A need that made her pulse jump and tingles spread up her wrists.

  He raised the beer to his mouth and looked away. "Five feet." He took a long drink, and when he returned his gaze to her, that flicker of that something was gone, as if it had never been there.

  She dropped her hand. "Are all five feet of her tattooed on your body?"

  "Yeah." He pointed to his forearm with the mouth of the bottle. "Her tail ends here. She's wrapped around my arm, down my back, and is coiled around my right thigh."

  Kate looked down at his thigh and straight at his groin. Soft worn Levi's covered his legs and cupped the bulge in his crotch. She quickly looked away before he caught her staring. "I have a tattoo."

  He laughed. A low rumble in his chest that did funny things to her chest. "What? A heart on your ankle?"

  She shook her head and took a long drink from her mug. Her temperature shot up and her face felt flushed. She didn't know if it was the rum or the testosterone cocktail sitting next to her, but she was starting to feel a little light-headed. Not the kind of light-headed that made you faint, but the kind that brought a grin to your face even when you didn't feel like smiling.

  "Hmm?" He lowered his gaze down the side of her throat. "A rose on your shoulder?"

  The kind of light-headed that made a girl think of hot sweaty things. Hot sweaty naked things she probably shouldn't act upon. "Nope."

  He looked back into her eyes and speculated, "A sun around your navel."

  "A moon and a few stars, but not around my navel." Hot sweaty naked things that no one else would ever know about.

  "I knew it would be something girly," he scoffed as he shook his head. "Where?"

  It couldn't be just her. He had to feel it too, but what if she did proposition him and he turned her down? She didn't think she could handle that kind of humiliation. "My butt."

  Smile lines crinkled the corners of his eyes, and he laughed again. "Full or half?"

  Wait, he's a guy, she thought as she polished off her drink. Guys were guys were guys. He wouldn't turn her down. "Crescent."

  "A moon on a moon." He cocked one brow and leaned to one side and looked at her butt as if he could see through her clothing. "Interesting. I've never seen that before." He took a drink of his beer and straightened.

  Maybe it was the rum and her hot sweaty naked thoughts. Maybe it was because it was Valentine's Day and she was lonely and didn't want to wear Hush Puppies yet. Maybe for just once she wanted to act on an impulse. Maybe it was all of those things, but before she could stop herself, she asked, "Wanna see?" The second the words left her lips, her heart seemed to stop along with her breath. Oh God!

  He lowered the bottle. "Are you propositioning me?"

  Was she? Yes. No. Maybe. Could she really go through with it? Don't overanalyze it. Don't think it to death, she told herself. You'll never see this guy again. For once in your life, just go for it. She didn't even know his name. She guessed it didn't matter. "Are you interested?"

  Slowly, as if to make sure he understood her perfectly, he asked, "Are you talking sex?"

  She looked into those eyes staring back at her and tried to breathe past the sudden constriction in her chest. Could she use and abuse him? Could she twist him into a sexual pretzel then toss him out the door when she was through? Was she that kind of person? "Yes."

  There it was again. That hot, sensual need that flickered and burned. Then in the blink of an eye, his features hardened and his gaze turned cold. "Afraid not," he said as if she'd offered him up a fate worse than death. He set his beer on the bar and rose until he towered over her.

  Kate managed a stunned, "Oh," just before her cheeks caught fire and her ears started to buzz. She raised a hand to her numb face and hoped she didn't pass out.

  "Don't take it personal, but I don't fuck women I meet in bars." Then he walked away, moving from the lounge as fast as his big boots could carry him.

  Two

  By thirteen, Kate had become an infrequent visitor to Gospel, Idaho. As a kid, she'd loved hiking in the wilderness area and swimming in Fish Hook Lake. She'd loved helping out at the M &S Market, her grandparents' small grocery store. But once she'd entered her teen years, hanging out with her grandparents hadn't been cool any longer, and she'd only visited on rare occasions.

  The last time Kate had been in Gospel had been to attend her grandmother's funeral. Looking back, that trip had been a short, painful blur.

  This trip was less painful, but the moment she lay eyes on her grandfather, she knew there would be nothing short about her stay.

  Stanley Caldwell owned a grocery store filled with food. He butchered fresh meat and bought fresh produce, yet he ate TV dinners every night. Swanson Hungry Man. Turkey or meat loaf.

  He kept his house clean, but after two years, it was still cluttered with Tom Jones memorabilia,which Kate thought odd since her grandmother had been the Tom Jones fanatic, not her grandfather. In fact, he'd gone out of his way to indicate that her obsession was something he supported but did not share. Just as she had not shared his love of big game hunting.

  Of the two, Melba Caldwell had been more devoted to Tom than Stanley had been to hunting. Every summer Kate's grandfather had driven her grandmother, like a pilgrim journeying to holy sites, to Las Vegas and the MGM Grand to worship with the faithful. And every year, instead of bits of paper or teaspoons of milk, Melba had carried an extra pair of panties in her handbag.

  Kate had accompanied her grandmother to one of Tom's shows a number of years ago. Once had been enough. She'd been eighteen, and seeing her grandmother whip out a pair of red silkies and toss them on stage had scarred Kate for life. They'd sailed through the air like a kite and had wrapped around Tom's mic stand. Even now, after all these years, the mental picture of Tom wiping sweat from his brow with her grandmother's panties disturbed her and caused a deep groove in the center of her forehead.

  Kate's grandmother had been gone for two years, but nothing of hers had been packed up and put away. Tom Jones chotchkes were everywhere. It was as if her grandfather kept the memory of her grandmother alive through sex bomb ashtrays, Delilah shot glasses and pussycat bobble heads. As if to lose those things would be to lose her completely.

  He refused to hire more day help in the grocery store, even though he could certainly afford it. The Aberdeen twins and Jenny Plummer rotated the night shift. The store was closed on Sundays, and the only real difference wa
s that now Kate worked with him at the M &S instead of Melba.

  He was so old-fashioned that he still did the bookkeeping by hand in a big ledger. He kept track of his sales and inventory in different color-coordinated books just as he had since the 1960s. He absolutely refused to step into the twenty-first century and didn't own a computer. The only piece of modern office equipment he owned was a desk calculator.

  If things didn't change, he was going to work himself into an early grave. Kate wondered if that was what he secretly hoped. She'd come to Gospel for a break, to get away from her life for a short while. One look into her grandfather's sad face and even sadder existence, and she'd known there was no way she could leave him until he was living again. Not just going through the motions.

  She'd been in Gospel for two weeks now, but it had only taken her two days to see that Gospel really hadn't changed that much since she was a kid. There was a sameness about Gospel, a day-to-day predictability, that Kate was surprised to discover appealed to her. There was a certain peace in knowing your neighbors. And even though those neighbors were all locked and loaded, there was comfort in knowing they weren't likely to go on some wild killing spree.

  At least not until spring. Like the black bears that roamed the wilderness area, the town pretty much hibernated during the winter months. Once the regular hunting season was over in the late fall, there wasn't a lot to do until the snow melted.

  As far as Kate could tell, the townspeople had a love/hate relationship with tourists and were suspicious of anyone without an Idaho "famous potatoes" license plate bolted to their bumper. They had a distrust of California and felt a superiority over anyone not born and raised in Idaho.

  After all these years, Gospel still had only two diners. At the Cozy Corner Cafe, the specials of the day were still fried chicken and chicken fried steak. The town had two grocery stores. The M &S was the smaller of the two, with only one checkout. On the outskirts of town, two different churches lined the same street. One nondenominational, the other Mormon. Gospel had five bars and four gun and tackle shops.

  The only new business in town was a sporting goods store located in what had once been the pharmacy right across the parking lot from the M &S. The old log building had been refurbished and restored, and big gold letters spelled out SUTTER SPORTS just above the stained-glass fish in the huge front window. It had a green tin roof and awnings, and a Closed Until April sign hung on the double glass-and-brass doors.

  According to Stanley, Sutter's didn't sell guns. No one knew why. This was Gospel after all, gun-nut capital of the world. A place where kids got their NRA membership cards before their driver's license. A place where all pickup trucks had gun racks and THEY CAN HAVE MY GUN WHEN THEY PRY IT FROM MY COLD DEAD FINGERS bumper stickers. People slept with handguns stuck in the headboards of their beds and stashed in panty drawers. And they took it as a matter of pride that no citizen of Gospel had been killed with a gun since the turn of the century, when two of the Hansen boys had shot it out over a whore named Frenchy.

  Well, there had been that incident in '95 when the old sheriff of the town had taken his own life. But that didn't count since taking your own life really wasn't a punishable crime. And no one really liked to talk about that particular chapter of the town's history anyway.

  Most everything inside the M &S Market was the same as Kate recalled from her childhood. The antlers of the twelve-point buck her grandfather had blown away in '79 were still on display above the old battered cash register. Around the commercial coffeemaker, conversation ranged from the mysterious owner of Sutter Sports, to Iona Osborn's hip replacement surgery.

  "You can't weigh that much and not have hip problems," Ada Dover said as Kate punched the keys of the cash register, then hit Add with the side of her hand.

  "Uh-huh," she responded as she set a can of cling peaches in a plastic grocery bag. Even the sounds inside the store were the same. From the back room, she could hear the whine of the meat slicer, and from the speakers overhead, Tom Jones sang about touching the green grass of home. Melba's presence was still everywhere in the M &S, from the horrible music to the velvet Tom painting hung in the back office. About the only thing that had really changed inside Melba Caldwell's store since her death was the stream of widows trolling for her husband, Stanley.

  "Iona should have gone on Weight Watchers years ago. Have you ever tried Weight Watchers?"

  Kate shook her head, and the end of her pony-tail brushed the shoulders of her black shirt. Last week she'd substituted Tom Jones with Matchbox Twenty. But halfway into the second verse of "Disease," her grandfather had ejected her CD and plugged Tom back in. As Ada rambled and Tom crooned, Kate felt a slight brain bleed coming on.

  "It really keeps my figure trim. And Fergie's too. Being that I'm Iona's good friend, I tried to get her to at least check out a few meetings over at the grange." Ada shook her head and her eyes narrowed. "She said she would, but she never did. If she'd listened to me, she'd have lost that weight huckity-buck and there would've been no need to have that hip replaced."

  What the heck was a huckity-buck? Fearing the answer, Kate pointed out instead, "It could be that Iona has a low metabolism." According to her grandfather, Ada Dover arrived every day around noon, coifed, decked, and doused in Emeraude. No doubt about it, she was looking to make Stanley Caldwell husband number three.

  "She should buy one of those mountain bikes from over there at the sports store."

  Now that Kate was here, her grandfather always found something to do in the back room to avoid Ada and the widow posse who had him in their sights. He also made her do the home deliveries the widows called in on a regular basis. Kate didn't appreciate it either. She didn't like getting pumped for information about her grandfather, and she had better things to do than listen to Myrtle Lake rattle on about the horrors of heel spurs. Better things-like giving herself a lobotomy. "Maybe Iona should just start out walking," Kate suggested as she rang up a box of Wheat Thins and placed it in the sack.

  "Of course, even if Iona wanted to buy one of those bikes, she can't. The owner of that store is probably in the Carribean, sunning himself like a lizard. His mama is the nurse over there at the clinic. She's not from around here. Minnesota, I think. Tight-lipped as Tupperwear." Ada dug into her huge purse and pulled out her wallet. "I don't know why he opened his store in Gospel in the first place. He'd probably sell more bikes and what-nots in Sun Valley. He doesn't sell guns over there. Don't know why, but that's a Minnesotan for ya. Liberal and contrary."

  Kate wondered what being a Minnesotan had to do with not selling guns or being contrary, but she was too busy fighting the shudder passing through her to ask. Sun Valley. The scene of the greatest humiliation of her life. The place where she'd gotten drunk and propositioned a man. The one time in her life when she'd managed to suppress her inhibitions and go for it, she'd been shot down by a man who'd practically run from the room to get away from her.

  "He's handsome as sin but doesn't park his boots under anyone's bed. Everybody knows Dixie Howe's been trying her best to hook him, but he isn't interested. 'Course I don't blame him for avoiding Dixie. Dixie's got a gift for hair dye, but she's been rode hard and put away wet more often than Aunt Sally's mule."

  "Maybe he doesn't like women," Kate said and hit Total. The guy in Sun Valley hadn't liked women. He'd been a misogynist. At least, that's what Kate liked to tell herself.

  Ada sucked in a breath. "Homosexual?"

  No. As much as Kate would have liked to believe the jerk had been gay, and that's why he hadn't taken her up on her proposition, she really didn't think so. She was too good at reading people to miss those signs. No, he was just one of those men who liked to degrade women and make them feel really bad about themselves. That, or he had erectile dysfunction. Kate smiled, maybe both.

  Ada was silent a moment, then said, "Rock Hudson was gay, and that Rupert Everett fella too. Regina's son Tiffer is gay, but he isn't good-looking.He was in one of those gay pageants
down in Boise. He sang "Don't Rain on My Parade," but of course he didn't win. Even drag queens have their standards." She pulled out a pen and began writing out a check. "Regina showed me the pictures. I swear, Tiffer in a wig and rouge looks just like his mama. And Regina looks more like Charles Nelson Riley than Barbra Streisand. Seems a waste and a shame if that Sutter fella is gay, though. But it would explain why he isn't married and never dates." Ada ripped out the check and handed it to Kate. "And Myrtle Lake's granddaughter, Rose, is after him, too. Rose is young and cute as they come, but he's never parked his boots under her bed neither."

  Kate wondered how Ada knew so much about the owner of the sporting goods store. Kate could have found out the same information easily enough, but she was a licenced private investigator. Ada was the manager of The Sandman Motel and obviously a very busy body.

  After Ada left the store, Kate locked the cash register and walked to the back. The room smelled of fresh meat and the bleach her grandfather always used to sanitize his equipment and cutting boards. At the far end of the room was the store's small bakery, where her grandmother had made cakes and cookies and homemade bread. The equipment was covered, and no one had used it in over two years.

  Stanley sat at a long white table, having finished packaging T-bone steaks in six blue Styrofoam trays and plastic wrap. On the wall above him hung the same meat-cutting charts that Kate remembered from her childhood. Other than the deserted bakery, it appeared as if nothing had changed in a few decades, but it had. Her grandfather was older and tired easily. Her grandmother was gone, and Kate didn't know why he didn't sell the store or hire someone to run it for him.

  "Ada's gone," Kate said. "You can come out now."

  Stanley Caldwell looked up, his brown eyes reflecting the dull sadness of his heart. "I wasn't hiding, Katie."

  She folded her arms beneath her breasts and leaned a shoulder into boxes of paper products that needed to be carried into the storage room. He was the only person in the world who called her Katie, as if she were still a little girl. She continued to simply look at him until a slight smile lifted his white handlebar mustache.