Chapter Twenty
That afternoon, Aidan and Beck took off with Ruff and headed to Mike’s house with their whole speech planned, along with a Jeep full of pizza slices they hoped were from heaven. They’d certainly worked hard enough on them, which hadn’t been easy since the Monday lunch had been the busiest yet, and neither one of them could wipe the silly-ass grins off their faces.
They’d worked side by side all morning, with Sarah buzzing around and chirping about a new table or another rush, both of them working on autopilot and thinking about last night. When they were alone, he’d steal a kiss or brush his fingers over her cheek, their silent look saying what they both were thinking.
More. Tonight. Again.
It was certainly the only cohesive thought in Aidan’s brain that morning.
But once the lunch rush ended and they selected their samples, he tried to focus on their plan for Mike to win the twenty-fifth Best of Bitter Bark award in the pizza category. He had to get Mike to think like a Night Stalker and not quit until the mission was a success.
Ruff greeted them at the door with a few friendly barks, but he backed off when Mike called him from the living room.
“That’s a good boy.” Since Aidan held the pizza boxes, he let Beck open the screen door that not so long ago Ruff had nearly annihilated. But he was a different dog now, content in his new situation, and happy when he went to work in this house.
“Hello, my precious.” Beck bent over to greet him, snuggling her face over his. “Did you have a good time with Uncle Mike?”
He barked twice, turned in a circle, then trotted to the living room where Mike sat, showered, shaved, and dressed in a clean shirt and fresh khaki slacks. He was a different dog now, too, Aidan noted.
Beck greeted him with a big kiss and hug, that he returned. His left arm lifted—slowly and with effort—to complete the embrace, making him add a proud grin. “You feel that, Beckie?” he asked, patting her back. “That Janet is a mean one, but she knows what she’s doing.”
They’d met the physical therapist the last time they were here, and the petite twentysomething with a few tattoos and a nose ring was hardly mean, but she was a damn good therapist.
“Somethin’ smells good,” Mike said, turning his attention to Aidan and the boxes. “More secret-recipe attempts?”
“Not attempts.” Aidan set them on the coffee table. “This is the stuff right here, Michael Leone. Somewhere in this batch is the pizza worthy to be called a ‘slice of heaven.’ Dig in, my man. Eat it and weep.”
As Mike chuckled at that, Beck got right in his face with a big grin. “And guess who you’re looking at?”
“My favorite niece?”
“And a girl who ate pizza last night.”
His jaw dropped, and he inched back, looking at Aidan in shock. “What did you do?”
A slow burn started in his chest because, well, he didn’t do anything before the pizza. But he did plenty after. “Not a thing,” he said quickly. “Beck finally…let her guard down.”
They shared a quick glance, and Aidan added a wink. She let her guard down, all right. All the way down. To the floor, along with her clothes.
“Well, that’s music to my ears,” Mike said. “Now lemme taste your offerings. And, uh, Beckie, can you get me some water?”
“Sure.” She snagged his glass from the table and snapped her fingers for Ruff to follow. As they left the room, Mike’s gaze followed her, then his attention shifted right back to Aidan, no smile, not even one of his half smiles. Nothing.
“You hurt her and I’ll kill you even if I only have one strong arm.”
Oh boy. Was it that obvious? “I won’t hurt her, Mike. You have my word.”
His gaze flickered, making Aidan sure Mike and Charlie had the same promise that he and Charlie had. Your word was your word. Maybe Mike had been the one to teach that to Charlie.
“Because she’s a gem.” Mike’s words were much clearer now, along with his intent to protect his niece.
“Yes, sir. She’s amazing. I’ve never met a girl like her.” The admission slipped out, surprising Aidan a bit, but not Mike.
“And you never will,” the other man assured him.
Aidan swallowed and leaned closer. “I know that,” he said softly. “And I have no intention of hurting her, sir.”
Mike’s brow twitched, and that wasn’t an involuntary muscle movement. It was doubt. And warning. And the abiding love of a man who considered himself her father.
“She’s been through hell,” Mike said, fighting to make every word crystal clear. “The only thing she needs is a solid, steady, stable man who keeps his word and protects her.”
He doubted that Beck would agree that was the only thing she needed, but Aidan certainly knew she deserved exactly that. And one who’d make love to her like he had last night and would again tonight. And for many, many nights, he hoped.
“And no more pain,” the older man added. “No more loss.”
“No more.” He heard Ruff’s approaching steps, and by silent agreement, they ended there. But Mike’s arm wasn’t the only thing working better. His gaze was direct, and the message in it was clear. He meant business.
“So, Uncle Mike. We want you to try three slices today.” Beck set the glass down and opened the first box. “And while you eat, we want to tell you some very big and exciting news.”
He took the first slice. “Even bigger and more exciting than you eating pizza?”
She threw a look at Aidan and smiled. “So big. So exciting. Now, taste this one first. It’s mine. Did we find the secret ingredient?”
He bit down on the slice she gave him, carefully and slowly, the way he did everything. When he swallowed, he slowly shook his head. “My secret ingredient would never be that crunchy salt.”
“It’s sea salt. Finishing salt. Don’t you like it?”
“Feels fake. They don’t use it in Italy.”
Beck’s shoulders slumped, and Aidan reached over to give her hand a reassuring squeeze. “Good try, Beck.”
“This one’s good, though.” He nibbled on the edge of Aidan’s experiment with saffron. “Sweet. Maybe a tad too exotic. Not my recipe, but this one isn’t bad.”
The last one was a hard pass. He ate it, but made it clear there was no secret recipe. “What’s this big news?” he asked, wiping his own mouth now, which was a pretty major step forward from where they’d started on this journey.
Beck leaned closer. “Did you know the Best of Bitter Bark contest is coming up in three weeks?”
His eyes flickered, then faded. “I forgot.”
But something told Aidan he hadn’t forgotten at all. “You need to make it twenty-five consecutive wins, big guy.”
Silent, Mike looked down at Ruff, who was curled at his feet.
“Uncle Mike, this year is different. Food Network is coming to town to film a segment of Best Kept Secrets, and they’re going to go into the kitchens of two winners. We have an inside track since Aidan’s sister-in-law is the tourism director who set it up. You have to win, and if you do, they’ll do a segment at Slice of Heaven.” Her voice rose as she tried to get him to react to this news.
“I can’t win without the secret ingredient,” Mike replied, his voice low and harsh, but his words were no longer slurred, though halting in delivery. “I don’t remember it, and you haven’t found it. And you never will.”
“Well, that’s a positive attitude.” Beck let her shoulders sink in defeat.
“Come on, Mike,” Aidan urged. “Dig through that brain. Try to remember. Don’t give up so easily.”
“All I can remember is Sarah. She must be the secret ingredient.” He attempted a playful grin. “It must be love.”
Aidan glanced at Beck to see her reaction to that, but she shook her head. “Sarah doesn’t remember what it is,” she said. “And she’s been in and out of that kitchen for every pie we’ve made you. And every pie you ever made. How can she not know?”
“I think you’re the secret ingredient, Mike.” Aidan fought a burn of frustration about the damn secret stupid ingredient. All this pizza was prize-worthy, in his opinion. “Your hands, your work, your signature.” He inched closer to make his point. “You have to try, Mike. You have to get in that kitchen and not give up.”
Mike sighed, but at least didn’t argue.
“Aidan’s right,” Beck said. “You need to try. Your muscle memory will kick in. You’ll make that sauce like nothing ever happened, and it won’t matter what you remember or forget sitting in this room.”
He lifted his gaze to look hard at her. “I don’t have muscle memory in my brain, and something did happen.”
She slipped off her chair to kneel next to his. “Couldn’t you try? This publicity could save Slice of Heaven. And once you go back in, I know you won’t want to leave.”
He studied her for a long time, then lifted the very hand that no longer hung useless to touch her face. “I should have told you and not Charlie.”
She patted his hand in forgiveness. “I was never the one who was going to take over your business, Uncle Mike. It’s okay.”
“And every time I go to look, Sarah scolds me for going into his room.”
She drew back, throwing a look at Aidan to see if he was also confused by that statement. He sure was. “What are you talking about?”
“He wrote it down.”
“Charlie wrote down the secret recipe?” Beck and Aidan asked the question in perfect unison.
Mike nodded. “I remember that, clear as if it was yesterday. We were in the kitchen, and I was giving him a list of instructions.”
“When?” Beck demanded.
“Oh, he was still in high school, working for me in the summer.”
“Between our junior and senior years,” Aidan chimed in. “I worked for my dad, too, at the vet office that year.”
Beck was already up. “Why didn’t you tell us that? I know my way around his room. I’ll go look now.”
“Beckie, you haven’t seen that room for a while. Sarah tried to clean it out, but…” He added a warning look. “She couldn’t finish. And I haven’t had any luck looking. I tried once when Ruff was here, and he ’bout lost his mind diggin’ around and sniffing under all the furniture.”
Sniffing for Charlie, Aidan thought, reaching down to give Ruff a loving pet. That couldn’t have been easy for him. And it wouldn’t be easy for Beck. “I’ll go look with you,” Aidan said.
“Okay. You keep Ruff down here, Uncle Mike. Aidan and I will go look.”
Mike didn’t argue as they headed up the stairs, but Beck paused halfway up, turning to Aidan. “I tried going in there after his funeral,” she said. “I couldn’t.”
“I can do it,” he told her. “You don’t have to go.”
“But I know where he kept stuff. I…need to.” She slipped her hand in his and gave a squeeze. “I didn’t have you with me last time.”
He lifted her hand to his lips. “We’ll go together.”
The room wasn’t locked or, surprisingly, dark. The drapes were wide open, and sunshine poured in. Aidan expected a pang of misery when he went inside the room he’d hung out in plenty in high school, but sometime in the fourteen years since then, it had changed enough that it wasn’t like walking right into the past.
The bedding was different, just a simple beige with some geometric designs. Not the navy blue comforter with a UNC throw blanket. Of course not. Aidan had made Charlie get rid of that blanket when they got into Wake Forest. There were no Army posters on the walls, either, but innocuous art, as though Sarah had attempted to decorate a guest room and, in the process, had taken out all the personality.
The dresser was there, still. And a chest of drawers. And a sizeable closet along one wall. And all over the floor was…stuff. Open plastic bins, some cardboard boxes, piles of books, magazines, and music CDs. An older-model computer was on a desk under the window, all of it covered with a thin layer of dust.
“Beck, this could take hours,” he said, checking his watch. “Do you want to pick a day and spend it here, rather than squeeze it in between lunch and dinner rushes?”
“It won’t take hours.” She closed the door and headed directly to the dresser, gingerly passing some bins. “Unless Sarah cleaned out these drawers.” She pulled the top one open, far too easily for it to have anything in it. “Shoot. Okay. Next?”
The second and third were empty, too.
“Should I start looking through bins?”
“You can, but…” The fourth drawer was stuck, making her grunt.
“Here, I can get it.” He climbed over in a flash, dropping down and pulling the drawer out easily. It was stuffed with crap.
“His high school drawer,” she said. “After he went to college, Sarah demanded he clean all the stuff out of his room one break when he was home. He wanted me to help, but wouldn’t pay me—”
“Brat.”
“Seriously. But I watched him from the hall, and he literally dumped everything into these drawers. So if he wrote down the recipe in high school, my guess is it’s in here.”
Aidan scanned the contents. Papers, trophies, tin boxes with Star Wars images on the top. Fat files, filled notebooks, and three baseballs Charlie had signed himself.
“Home-run balls,” Aidan said, reaching for one. “This was from the championship tournament against Holly Hills our junior year. Number nine hit a killer over the center-field wall.”
She smiled, but it faltered. “I should have been there.”
“Why weren’t you?”
She lifted a shoulder. “Too busy wallowing in my own sadness.”
Well, from the looks of this drawer, they might be wallowing in more of that today. Aidan thumbed the seams of the ball. It felt as familiar to him as the scent in this room and the handwriting on the front of a blue spiral notebook with World History in one corner and a lousy interpretation of the Call of Duty logo in the other.
Man, they’d played hours of that game. Then did it in real life.
There was the punch of pain he was expecting, low and right in the solar plexus.
“You okay?” Beck looked up at him, her eyes clear.
“I’m good.”
“Then let’s divide and conquer. We’re looking for a recipe, not a trip down memory lane.”
“A recipe.” He snorted. “Not what I’d ever expect to be hunting for in Charlie Spencer’s high school memory drawer.”
“You look in his memory drawer,” he said, going to the bed. “I know where the good stuff was.”
She glanced over her shoulder. “If you mean those well-worn copies of Maxim and that joint he had since you guys went to that Good Charlotte concert in Raleigh, they’re gone. I found them on my one visit to this room and got rid of them.”
He laughed softly. “We wanted to smoke it but chickened out at the last minute. Fear of not getting into ROTC.” The stash in the mattress gone, he sat next to Beck to help her look in the drawers, bracing for more emotional explosives as he perused the Star Wars box and fluttered a few notebooks. After about twenty minutes, they’d finished going through the drawer and come up with nothing.
Below it was another much like it, only this one had less school and sports stuff and things that were more personal. A few yearbooks, a handwritten notebook that contained something that might have been poetry, but no recipe. While he flipped through those pages, he smiled at the mention of a girl named Dana DeWitt. God, she was hot, and they’d fought over who had a chance with her.
Neither one, if he recalled correctly.
He and Beck dug through that drawer, came up with nothing, then moved to the bins, picking through the remnants of Charlie’s life. Each fragment kicked Aidan’s gut, mining fresh grief, but no recipe. As he looked up to meet Beck’s gaze and confirm the exercise was doing the same thing to her, they heard a low growl outside the door.
“Someone doesn’t like that we’re in here and he’s not,” Aidan said.
“Can we let him in?” Beck asked. “He’s not barking and acting wild.”
Aidan pushed up to get the door for Ruff. “Sure. I’m not sure how much more of this I can take, though.”
She closed her eyes and nodded. “Yeah. This is tough.”
When Aidan let him in, Ruff gave one short bark of gratitude and marched inside, sniffing noisily before he was all the way in.
“Brace yourself, buddy,” Aidan said, giving his head a rub. “Nothing but heartache in here.”
Beck looked up, her eyes misty. “I know. This is a fool’s errand, and this fool is about to burst into tears.”
Instantly, he reached down and brought her up to hug her. “We don’t need to do this, Beck. Let’s keep working on the pizzas. We’ll find it on our own secret.”
She laid her head on his chest and sighed. “I feel like I’ve lost him all over again.” Her voice cracked, and so did Aidan’s heart.
“I know.” He pulled her closer, adding a kiss to her hair. “And I don’t know why we’re putting ourselves through this to make this happen.”
She inched back, eyes wide. “What? You don’t know why? To save Slice of Heaven, remember?”
Why not state the obvious? Maybe because it wasn’t obvious to her, only to him. “The sooner we succeed, Beck, the sooner you leave.”
“Aidan.” She sank in his arms. “What happened to casual?”
“I hate that word. It’s the antithesis of everything I am.” He lowered his face and kissed her lips lightly. “Let’s go back to your apartment and use this afternoon for good instead of sadness.”
“Don’t complicate this,” she whispered.
“Too late. Complicated.” He kissed her again, but she drew farther away, and he could practically count the bricks as she built her wall. And he didn’t want to have to start all over tearing them down. He’d take what he could, casual or otherwise. “But, you’re right, we can just—”
A loud, frantic bark interrupted him. Ruff was bent over, his nose shoved under the space at the bottom of the dresser, sniffing noisily, barking madly, then growling at whatever was down there.
“Probably a twenty-year-old bag of M&M’s, if I know Charlie,” Beck said, pulling away to get down next to him and look.
Aidan snorted. “More like a dirty sock.”
“We’re both wrong,” she said, her face as deep in the crevice as Ruff’s, but with a much better backside in the air. “It’s a baseball mitt. But I can’t get my hand in there.”
“Really?” He joined them on the ground. “Well, I’ll be damned. It’s his glove. And even I can smell Charlie on it. No wonder Ruff’s going crazy.”
“Let’s get it for him,” Beck said. “He’ll sleep with it. It’ll make him happy to smell Charlie on that.”
Still on the ground, he turned to her. “I’d have never thought of that,” he said.
“That’s why Charlie left his dog to me,” she teased. But the reminder gave Aidan a kick in the stomach.
He’d never told her about that DD93. Did it matter anymore?
“Can you lift the dresser?” Beck asked from the floor. “I can get it out then.”
He did, easily, and Beck slid out a tan mitt he instantly recognized. Before he could get down there to look at it, Ruff had his face deep in the pocket, his tail thwomping back and forth with pure joy.
Aidan got on his knees to take the mitt, but Ruff growled protectively, getting his teeth around the webbing and turning to make a getaway from anyone who threatened to take his treasure.
Watching him go, Aidan slipped his arm around Beck. “He’s happy,” he said. “And that’s all Charlie ever wanted, right?”
“Yeah.”
That eased his guilt…a little.