A Kiss in Winter Read online

  “Now my day will be complete,” he said with a hand over his Brooks Brothers tie.

  “Because you blew on my neck?”

  Two weeks ago, Caroline had made the mistake of giving in and going to dinner with Kent. He’d caught her at a weak moment, when she’d been feeling more like a middle-aged mother than a single woman of twenty-six.

  When she hadn’t been particularly receptive to his post-meal advances, he took it with a wink and a shrug. Behind that “can’t blame a guy for trying” façade, Caroline recognized the spark in his eye; she was now his new personal challenge.

  He tilted his head slightly. “Because seeing you always brightens my day, sugar.”

  Kent called everyone “sugar,” even strangers, but it still rubbed her the wrong way.

  “You’re laying it on a little thick this morning, don’t you think?” she asked.

  He grinned again and lifted a shoulder. That was Kent, a stone that could tumble and roll with the currents, yet find the advantage wherever he was tossed. She supposed that was part of his appeal.

  “How about really making my day and having dinner with me tonight?”

  She’d had Kent figured out in the ninth grade. He loved the chase, the hunt, the challenge. Once the prize was in his hands, he set his sights on the next conquest. It was the same in every aspect of his life, including personal relationships. Thus, Caroline’s role as his current challenge. The guy didn’t seem to get that she wasn’t interested in any new attachment in Redbud Mill.

  Not that he’d be interested in keeping her once he’d gotten her. But she just didn’t have the emotional energy to expend on a romantic relationship—even one guaranteed to fail in short order.

  “Sorry, I can’t,” she said over her shoulder after they’d inched forward another couple of feet.

  “I’ll cook.”

  Caroline half-turned, dipped her chin, and raised a brow. “Cook?”

  “Okay, order takeout,” he admitted.

  “Sounds like a trap. Once you get me in your lair…”

  He laughed and raised his hands. “I promise to be a good boy.”

  She gave her head a slight shake. “Not possible.”

  The line moved again.

  He apparently decided to give up the direct approach and wheedle his way in the back door. “Hey, I saw you on the news the other day.”

  What did one say to that? Thanks? What did you think of my clever comments? Did I have lipstick on my teeth? During the interview she’d felt like someone trying to converse in a foreign language. She was sure she’d sounded like an idiot. Unable to face the humiliation, she’d shut off the TV just before the interview ran.

  She had yet to learn to deal with her local celebrity.

  Kent saved her by continuing, “Are you doing another calendar?”

  She shook her head. “No. I’m concentrating on finishing up the stuff for the Department of Tourism this fall and winter.”

  “I guess I’ll just have to tape next year’s new months below the pictures on my current calendar then.”

  “That’s sweet.” The customer ahead of Caroline moved away from the service counter. “My turn. I’ll see you.”

  “You bet you will, sugar.”

  When Caroline shot him a discouraging look, he winked. She laughed and moved to the window.

  Once back in the car, Caroline looked at the large manila envelope. Her hands trembled. That excitement that had been buzzing like high-tension lines earlier in the day was back. It reaffirmed that her life plan was definitely moving in the right direction.

  She paused before opening the flap. It hardly seemed a year ago that she’d been sitting in this very parking lot, her trembling fingers hovering over the box that contained the first copies of her Kentucky Blue calendar.

  Part of her had wanted to tear into it like Christmas morning. Another part of her had wanted to leave it untouched. She’d known that that particular moment in her life would never come again. She’d stood at a threshold—of change, of infinite possibility. Opening that box would take the first faltering step across that threshold. Unopened, it was all possibility. What if she screwed it up?

  She had finally opened it while still in the parking lot. She’d slit the tape with her car key and opened the flaps. For a long moment, she hadn’t been able to breathe. There, protected by shrink-wrap, had been her name in bold calligraphy: Kentucky Blue, Photographs of Caroline Rogers. Just as if she was somebody—like Ansel Adams or Robert Mapplethorpe or Anne Geddes.

  It had taken her a half hour to stop shaking enough to drive home.

  And she was still terrified she’d screw it up. Each new opportunity seemed to breed more anxiety, more uncertainty about her abilities. More opportunity equaled more risk. She’d always been a risk-taker; why did this rattle her so? Would she ever learn to stride forward with professional assurance and confidence? When she looked at the world through her camera lens, she felt it. When she worked in solitude in her darkroom, she felt it. But when it came to exposing her work—and consequently, her innermost self—to the outside world, it was a much different story.

  Laying her head back on the headrest, she groaned. It wasn’t like her to be so dramatic.

  She sighed and said gruffly, “So open the damn envelope.”

  When she did, she was somewhat surprised that the trembling didn’t take over, as it had when she’d seen Kentucky Blue for the first time. But then, this was a contract for work; they could still find her actual photographs lacking.

  “Stop it.”

  She shoved the contract back inside the envelope to read over after dinner and headed home to see if Sam was finished packing for school.

  Chapter 4

  Debra Larsen gathered chocolate cake crumbs from her dessert plate with the tip of her fork. The dinner she’d eaten felt like an indigestible mass in her stomach. She’d hoped Charles would reopen the argument they’d ended in a stalemate six days ago, when they’d settled into an uneasy truce of silence.

  Throughout dinner she’d attempted to lead him into conversation that would naturally slide in that direction, but Charles Larsen wasn’t one to be led. After forty-seven years, she should know that much about the man.

  At the end of the meal Charles’s newspaper had come up and her hopes for a resolution had gone down, pulled beneath the icy waters of her husband’s inapproachability.

  Their union had been happy for the most part. But for thirty-four of their forty-seven years together, their son had been a rough stone that chafed between them, a pebble in the shoe of their marriage. As usual, Mick was the source of this most recent unresolved discord.

  Debra had had just about enough of Charles’s silent rebuke. They had spent most of the past week in an artificial politeness that stretched thinner by the day. And it was about to snap, because she was going to pull it beyond tolerance.

  She drew a quiet, deep breath. “Don’t you think it’s time to call Mick?”

  Charles remained hidden behind the newspaper and responded with an indecipherable mumble-grunt.

  She felt like a jack-in-the-box ready to spring; and she’d had enough of “Around and Around the Mulberry Bush.”

  Charles had always expected more of Mick than he did of the girls. Well, she thought, that wasn’t really fair; the girls had been motivated by a strong need to please him. With Charles and the girls it was normally fair weather, with an occasional wispy cloud to dim the sun. But Mick and Charles had mixed like opposing jet streams, creating storms whenever they were rubbed up against one another. Normally she let those storms crash and blow until they settled in their own way, but this time… well, there was something serious going on with her son. She could feel it like the charge of a nearby lightning strike. She had tried to talk to him herself, but he’d assured her that everything was fine.

  “Charles?”

  He pretended he didn’t hear her; as if that were possible with only the quiet drone of the air conditioner to compete wit
h her voice. She stared at the wall of newsprint, picturing his brows drawn together and his lips pinched in firm disapproval behind that paper. It was an expression he wore often when they discussed their son.

  It was all she could do to keep from reaching across the dinner table and snatching the newspaper out of his hands. “Put down that paper and look at me.” Charles had drummed it into the children that when they were addressed, they stopped what they were doing and made eye contact. Obviously, that lesson fell into the arena of “do as I say, not as I do.”

  A few seconds lapsed. Slowly, deliberately, as if it were all his idea, Charles folded the newspaper and set it beside his half-eaten dessert. Then he picked up his coffee and sipped.

  Debra gritted her teeth. I’ll hold my temper for Mick’s sake. “Why don’t you call him now? He should be finished with patients.” They always called Mick on his cell phone; if he was busy with a patient, it just rolled to voice mail.

  “He doesn’t want to talk to me. I offered my opinion already. He didn’t like it.”

  “He’s a grown man; he doesn’t need your permission. He needed to talk. He was reaching out.” And you slapped his hand away. But Debra knew comments like that… like the truth… would serve no good purpose, so she swallowed them down like bitter medicine.

  “He chose psychiatry. Psychiatry, for God’s sake!” Charles said the word as if it ranked somewhere between drug runner and circus clown in his eyes. “He’s always looked for the easy way out. A man doesn’t just throw in the towel if he grows dissatisfied with his choices. We sank a lot of money into his education,” he continued, his voice rising with agitation, “and he wants to throw it all away.”

  Again Debra bit back her instinctive response, Did we ever really ask Mick if he wanted a career in medicine? Instead she kept her voice even and said, “I think there’s a reason. Something started all this. You didn’t even let him explain—”

  “What’s to explain? He wants to quit! Just like that. I won’t condone it. Besides, I figure Kimberly has talked some sense into him by now. We haven’t heard anything for two weeks.”

  Debra worried that Kimberly was part of the problem, not the solution. Two months ago, when Mick had first called with this idea to abandon his career and move back to Redbud Mill, he hadn’t mentioned Kimberly at all.

  “Maybe I’ll drive up to Chicago next week,” Debra said. “Maybe I can help him work through whatever is going on.” At least if she saw him face-to-face, he couldn’t get away with “everything’s fine” and cutting her off.

  Charles shot her a disappointed look. “I suppose you’ll do what you want, no matter what I say.”

  “You suppose right.” She got up and began to clear the dishes.

  As she pulled onto Butler Street, her street, Caroline mulled over the idea of putting their house up for sale. Although it had seemed impossible when they first moved in, at some point over the past few years she and Sam and Macie had begun to think of the turn-of-the-century cottage on the bumpy brick street as home. If she sold it, where would the three of them gather for the holidays? Where would Sam and Macie go during summer break?

  Leaving a house empty three-quarters of the year didn’t seem wise. An empty house was an easy target for vandals and kids with spray paint—Sam had proven that. And she’d have to arrange for a caretaker, someone to check the furnace to ensure the pipes didn’t freeze, to maintain the lawn, to ensure roof leaks didn’t go unnoticed for months. The details buzzed in her brain like a swarm of bothersome gnats.

  It seemed she’d been so caught up in waiting for the future that she hadn’t really been preparing for that future’s arrival. Suddenly, a thousand decisions needed to be made.

  When Caroline pulled up in front of the house, she saw Sam’s dirt bike tethered in the bed of his buddy Ben’s muddy Silverado pickup. As she started up the porch steps, the two boys burst through the front door. She didn’t miss the look Ben cast Sam, the one that said, Busted.

  Sam didn’t seem fazed by her arrival. “Hey, sis.” He grinned the innocent grin that always made her insides twist with apprehension. “We’re headed out to Benson’s Pond for a little dirt tracking.” He brushed a kiss on her cheek as he rushed past on feet he’d just recently grown into. He hadn’t shaved today, and it showed; a boy caught in that nether land between childhood and manhood.

  “Hold it,” Caroline said as he tried to hustle on past. She hated that dirt bike but hadn’t had the heart to take it away from him. It had been Sam’s last birthday gift from their father. Although Sam had only been thirteen at the time, their father had said Sam needed a way to express his “rowdy side.” Caroline thought it only fueled Sam’s inborn lust for things dangerous. But farm kids learned to drive nearly as soon as they learned to walk; their father had felt Sam could handle it. And he had. It was Caroline who needed a defibrillator every time the telephone rang when he was out on that thing.

  Sam kept moving.

  She grabbed his arm. “I suppose since you’re headed out, you’re all set to leave at six in the morning.”

  “Don’t worry.” He tried to slip his arm from her grasp by inching down another step.

  “Saying that to me is a sure sign I have reason to worry.”

  “Don’t be so uptight. I don’t need to be there right when the dorm opens for move-in. There aren’t classes until next week.”

  “There are lots of social activities this week. And you’ll need time to get your books, find your way around campus, locate your classes—”

  “Hey!” He jerked his arm away. “I’m going. Isn’t that enough for you?”

  Sam’s anger felt like a slap in the face. They’d talked; he’d understood the importance of a college education. She’d thought this resentment had dissipated weeks ago.

  “Sam.”

  “You think college is so important, you go.”

  She sighed. “We’ve been around this block a thousand times.”

  “And I’m going! Just let me have today—it’s my last day.” He made it sound like it was his last meal.

  “Okay!” She breathed, then said more softly, “Okay.”

  The cloud lifted from Sam’s face.

  As he hurried on toward the pickup, she said, “I don’t want to have to take you to school with a cast.”

  He waved without turning around. “Don’t worry.”

  Her stomach turned over and she prayed the telephone wouldn’t ring until after he was back in one piece.

  Mick prowled the dark rooms of the old house, listening to the crickets and tree frogs through the open windows. The heavy night air smelled of new-mown hay. His spirit drew energy from the earthy fragrance and from the long history of the farmhouse. He’d been so weighted down, so despairing, before he left Chicago that he feared he would never resurface. But the simple smell of fresh-cut hay and the sound of his own footfalls on solid plank floors acted as a balm to his guilty soul. Not that anything would undo what had been done. But at least he couldn’t ruin innocent lives by farming. If he failed here as he’d failed there, only he would suffer.

  A clatter near the barn drew him to the dining room window. In the dim glow of the ancient hooded light that hung over the double doors to the barn, he saw a low, fat shape move along the ground. Raccoon. Probably the same one that had taunted him right here in this room earlier today.

  That memory drew a smile. He wondered what he would have done if Caroline Rogers hadn’t picked that particular moment to walk into his house. He’d most likely still be chasing the little bastard.

  As the smile faded from his lips, he realized he’d settled back into a dark mood after Caroline had left. The lighthearted banter they’d shared only drew a more stark contrast to his real life. It seemed that he hadn’t left all of the ugliness of the recent past in Chicago; it had just been a little slower coming down I-65 than he had.

  He rested his shoulder against the window frame and looked out at the barn. Concentrate on the things you can do, not
the things you can’t undo. It had seemed easy enough when he doled it out as advice; quite another thing, he was discovering, in practice. But he forced himself to try.

  The barn needed paint—the sooner the better with that vulgarity scrawled all over it. He could handle that.

  The tractor and bailer needed to be checked out. Miranda Stockton had said she hadn’t started any of the farm implements during her tenure here. Machinery maintenance he could handle.

  Overgrown pastures should be baled. He could harvest hay.

  Despite Caroline Rogers’s skepticism—and his inept dealings with the raccoon—he did know something about farming. He’d spent his high school and college summers working on various farms, doing grunt work and brute labor mostly. As a compromise with his father, he’d worked in the hospital on weekends. But the summer was his; he shouldn’t have had to compromise. He’d resented every summer minute he’d had to spend inside those disinfectant-smelling tiled corridors.

  Sometimes he wondered if he had been adopted; he belonged less in the Larsen family than Caroline seemed to belong in a family that had taken her in when she was half-grown. Her love for this place radiated from every pore, scented her every exhaled breath, danced in her eyes like stars in the summer sky. He wanted to love something that much.

  Mick turned from the window and made his way up the dark staircase. In the upstairs hall, he stubbed his toe on a box that had been left outside the bathroom. Turning on the bathroom light, he hefted the box and carried it into the room. The door to the large linen closet sat wide open, showing old wallpaper that had long since been stripped from the rest of the bathroom.

  He stuck his head inside the closet for a better look. Running his finger across the floral pattern, he realized just how old this paper was. It clearly predated cell phones, microwaves, and even television. He glanced around the room to see if there was evidence that the paper had been painted over, but the visible cracks in the plaster indicated it had not.