Five
Felicity switched on the lights in her living room, but it didn’t change anything. Gabe had followed her inside and stood by the glass doors that opened onto the deck above the river. The man was as sexy and maddening as ever.
Sexier, maybe.
This wasn’t a welcome thought as he turned from the view and set his duffel bag on the floor by her IKEA couch. It probably had cost her less than his pants. Less than his shoes. Maybe even less than his haircut.
She stopped herself. She didn’t care if he had money. She never had.
He glanced around the living room. It had a woodstove and glass doors that opened onto the main deck. Felicity hadn’t left too much party-planning paraphernalia laying about, but she did have printouts of various badgers spread out on the coffee table. Gabe looked at them without comment.
“Different from the world of financial spreadsheets and such,” she said.
“At least these woodchucks don’t bite.”
“They’re badgers.”
He raised his eyes to her and smiled. “I know. It was a joke.”
“Ah. Right. You’re still a New England country boy at heart. You know your badgers from your woodchucks. You just don’t run into them often in your line of work.”
“One hopes you don’t run into them in your work, either. Badgers and woodchucks don’t mix with parties.”
“Morwenna Mills’s badgers do. Have you met her yet? Her real name is Kylie Shaw.”
“I haven’t met her, no. I met her husband last night. He and Dylan flew from California together.”
“Russ and I have discussed security for Saturday’s boot camp,” Felicity said, hating her awkwardness. “I’ll go over the details of your party with him.”
“It’s not really my party.” Gabe stifled a yawn and shuddered. “I’m still readjusting to East Coast time. I was in California for two months. Doesn’t seem to matter it’s three hours earlier there.”
“Feel free to crash, but you don’t need to sleep on the couch. I have a guest room. It’s not fully set up for company yet, but it’s got a bed.”
“Thanks.” His gaze settled on her, his eyes half closed. “It’s good to see you, Felicity.”
“You, too.” She waved a hand vaguely. “I’ll see to the guest room.”
She was aware of Gabe watching her as she went down the hall to the linen closet. She dug out a stack of twin-size sheets and took them into the guest room, more or less where Gabe’s grandfather would pitch his tent before the house was built. The windows looked out on the side yard, with a glimpse of the river down through the woods.
Gabe stood in the doorway. “I stayed here once while the house was being built and a few times after Mark moved in. He’s good at what he does.”
Felicity set the linens on the floor by the bed. “I didn’t know until tonight you’d gone in together on this place. Maggie and Olivia knew, but they would—I’ve hardly seen Mark in the past few years, never mind you. I didn’t buy the house because of the past.”
“Mark and I were helping my grandfather.”
“That was a decent thing to do.” She lifted a box of party supplies off the bed and set it on the floor. “I weighed the pros and cons before I made an offer.”
“Was I a pro or a con?”
She glanced back at him, slouched against the doorjamb. “Maybe I didn’t consider you at all,” she said lightly. “It’s a little stuffy in here. Feel free to open the windows.”
He stood straight. “I can make up the bed.”
“I don’t mind. You’re my first company. It’ll be good practice.”
She didn’t need to tell him that the guest room shared a bathroom with the house’s third bedroom, which she used as her office—when she wasn’t working in the living room, out on the deck or in the town library. The master bedroom had its own bathroom. Mercifully, Felicity thought.
He stepped into the room and peered out a window. “The trees are bigger now. Mark and I planted the apple tree out front when we were in high school. We promised each other we’d be out of here before it was big enough to climb.”
“And now it is,” Felicity said.
“The apples will be ripe soon. My mother talked about making pie with apples from that tree, once it was big enough. She didn’t get that chance, but she liked coming out here when she was sick.”
“I remember.” Felicity could see it wasn’t a subject he wanted to pursue. She pointed at the single blanket on her stack of linens. “There are more blankets in the closet. I’ve never lived anywhere but New England. I have lots of blankets.”
“It’s the humidity that gets to me compared to Southern California.” He drew away from the window. “I’ll take a walk. Don’t let me keep you from anything.”
“No problem.”
“And, really, leave the bed to me—I still know how to make up a bed.”
But he didn’t, she realized. He had household help. She didn’t. Every chore at her house had her name on it. “Enjoy your walk.”
“I will, thanks.”
He headed back down the hall. Felicity heard the front door open and shut. She made up the bed, fluffed the pillows and checked the towels and basic supplies in the bathroom. All set for a guest, if not for one accustomed to five-star accommodations. But he’d known what to expect. He’d been here before. He’d been a part owner of the place.
She went into the kitchen and pulled open her baking cupboard. She scanned the shelves and saw she had the ingredients for brownies. She could have taken some of Maggie’s brownies home with her, but she’d been thinking of her waistline, not Gabe showing up in her driveway. She grabbed the ingredients she needed—flour, sugar, baking chocolate, vanilla—and set them on the counter, then collected eggs and butter from the refrigerator. She got out a bowl, measuring spoons and cups, turned on the oven to preheat and went to work.
She hadn’t really made brownies that February morning. She didn’t know why she’d lied, probably just an impulse after the shock of seeing him. What did the truth matter, anyway? She hadn’t stuck around that morning, but she hadn’t acted out of spite about the brownies. If she’d taken the time to make brownies, she could have cooled off, vacated the premises for the evening and come back for more pizza deliveries and Judge Judy. She’d have prolonged the inevitable, and so she’d skipped the brownies and left.
When she’d knocked on Gabe’s door after losing her latest job as a financial analyst, she hadn’t expected to stay for more than a day or two. She’d been broke, in debt, kicked out of her apartment, desperate not to go crawling to her parents for help. She’d turned to Gabe, then living in the smaller of two apartments in a house he owned on the Charles River in Watertown, just outside Boston. They’d known each other since nursery school. He’d taken her in, but he hadn’t been that excited to see her. “Again, Felicity? Wasn’t this job supposed to last three years?”
“It didn’t.”
“Did you quit or get fired?”
“I was outsourced.”
“Fired, then.”
He’d let her sleep on his couch and take as many hot showers as she’d wanted. It had been winter. The showers helped with her perpetually cold feet. After five days of putting up with her camped out in his living room, he’d read her the riot act. It couldn’t have been more than an hour before he’d written his fateful note. Maybe he’d already had it written, because he’d started his speech while she’d been getting out of the shower.
“You need a career change,” he’d told her. “You’re a lousy financial analyst.”
“How would you know? You quit college. I have an MBA.”
“Your MBA isn’t doing you any good, is it? You get jobs, but you don’t keep them. Why is that?”
“Bad luck.”
“Bad career choice. Do something else. You’re hacking away in the wrong jungle.”
She’d been incensed. How could he be so blunt? How could he not get how terrible she felt about herself?
She’d shouted through the bathroom door about his lousy people skills.
He hadn’t responded, and she’d stared at her reflection in the mirror above the sink. She’d seen the truth of what he said in the dark circles under her eyes, the lines of fatigue at her mouth, the puffiness of her skin. Brown hair dripping, eyes somewhat bloodshot from too much television and last night’s bottle of wine, full lips, high cheeks, a strong chin. In high school, Gabe had said she reminded him of Maureen O’Hara in The Quiet Man. Felicity had taken that to mean he’d wanted to spank her and told him as much, thinking it was funny—but he’d found it sexy, provocative.
She’d loved Gabe Flanagan then, as a teenager, before college and graduate school. Her first jobs after getting her degrees hadn’t worked out, but she’d had high hopes when she’d landed a job at a large insurance firm in Boston’s financial district. She hadn’t known many people in Boston, and she’d been so busy keeping her nose above water, scrambling to learn the job, that she hadn’t made many new friends. Certainly none who would take her in after she’d been fired.
There’d been Gabe, and she’d landed on his doorstep with her weekender bag in hand, explaining she needed a couple of days to regroup. She’d rented a house with two other women, but they had a friend willing to take her room, since she could no longer afford it. Gabe hadn’t asked for details. He was successful and hard-driving and impatient, and he could read between the lines and didn’t need her to spell out how broke she was.
She’d been making wrong choice after wrong choice. But it hadn’t seemed that way. It’d seemed—she’d truly believed—she just needed the right fit, the right job. She just had to tough it out. Persevere. She wasn’t a quitter, she’d told herself—and Gabe. But that had been part of the problem. She’d needed to quit. He’d pointed out he’d started businesses that failed. He’d made mistakes. “I learned from my failures. That’s the trick, Felicity. Acknowledging your failures and learning from them.”
In all the years she’d known him, she’d never let Gabe see her cry. Even when he’d broken her heart that summer after high school, she hadn’t let him see her melt down. It wasn’t as if it had been unexpected. That’s what Gabe Flanagan did in high school. He broke girls’ hearts. Everyone knew.
Still, they’d been there for each other through high school, college, their first jobs, various ups and downs. They’d go weeks without speaking, texting or emailing, and then she’d call him to tell him she’d just burned her mouth on a hot pepper or he’d send her a silly puppy video off the internet at 2:00 a.m.
She’d known their friendship had needed to change. They were proper adults. Gabe needed to be free to get on with his life. He’d sell his place and move into something grander, more expensive. He’d meet other up-and-coming, hard-driving entrepreneurs. People who got him. People he got. He’d come to rely on her, the hometown girl, to be there when he didn’t have time or want to take time to socialize. She was easy, familiar and there.
She’d needed to figure out her life, but she resisted confronting how she’d managed to find herself out of another job. She’d had a five-year plan, but she’d kept having to restart the thing.
Back to Go, Gabe would tell her. You can do it.
By that day in his apartment, even he had lost patience.
And he’d lost faith in her.
After her shower, she’d put on clean clothes, including socks and shoes, dried her hair—Gabe had actually owned a decent hair dryer—and hung up her towel on a peg next to his threadbare towel. He had pegs, not towel racks. She didn’t know why she’d noticed that or what it said about either of them. Probably nothing. When she’d emerged from the bathroom, she’d felt more in control of herself, but Gabe was gone.
That was when she’d found his note on the counter where he kept his recycling schedule, take-out menus, pens, stamps, paper clips, notepad and phone charger. There was a clear block with a photograph of the covered bridge in their hometown, a mile up the river from where he’d grown up with his brother and their unreliable but otherwise wonderful parents. They’d had dogs, cats, gerbils, hamsters and at least one cow. And chickens. Felicity was positive she remembered chickens.
After dashing off her response, she’d returned the Sharpie she’d borrowed to its mates. She wiped crumbs off the couch, folded the throws she’d used during her stay, fluffed the cushions, ran the vacuum and took her dirty dishes and various leftovers into the kitchen. She’d loaded the dishwasher, run the garbage disposal and taken out the trash, including her pizza boxes. She’d packed up her meager belongings, folded her blankets, put her sheets and towels in the wash—of course he had an in-unit washer and dryer—and gathered up her garbage. Twenty minutes later, she was on her way in the February cold.
By the end of the week, she had a job with a successful event planner in Boston. She’d meant it to be a temporary job—an ultra-temporary job, for that matter—to make ends meet and get herself on firmer financial footing. She wasn’t going back to Gabe’s couch, or moving in with her parents. But a few weeks turned into a few months, and then it was summer...and fall...and finally she’d realized she’d found a career she truly enjoyed and was good at. Serendipity, desperation, strategic thinking, accident—whatever it had been, she’d never looked back to emerging markets, municipal bonds and any of the rest of it.
She scraped the brownie batter into a pan and placed it into the oven to bake. A peace offering, maybe. An acknowledgment that their fight three years ago was in the past and their drift apart had started before she’d stalked out of his apartment. For better or worse, they’d both changed since then, and there was no putting the Humpty Dumpty of their broken friendship back together again.
Gabe didn’t return from his walk before she got the brownies out of the oven. She set them to cool on the counter and disappeared into her bedroom. She shut the door, something she seldom did when she was home alone. She checked her messages, tossed her phone onto her nightstand and grabbed a book she’d started the other night, reading to the faint, tempting smell of brownies.
* * *
Gabe figured he deserved every backhanded, aggrieved and otherwise vengeful comment and act on Felicity’s part. He’d hurt her three years ago. He saw that now. He hadn’t just pissed her off. They’d been friends—the best of friends—and he’d thrown a bucket of ice water on that friendship. So had she, but she wasn’t looking at her role in their estrangement at the moment and might never get there. She was the injured party. That was how she saw it.
He hadn’t been dishonest. Just the opposite. He’d been honest, maybe brutally so from her point of view. He hadn’t taken into consideration her ego, her emotions, her hopes and her dreams. He’d flat-out let her have it without regard to anything except knowing he was right.
He had been right, too.
What did he want now?
He had no idea. Part of him wanted to pick up the pieces of their friendship—to get her back, counseling him, seeing through him, speaking her mind without any of the filters he so often encountered in other people. Hearing what was on her mind. Seeing through her, telling her what he thought. He’d never had that kind of open give-and-take with anyone else. For him, it defined a real friendship, and he missed it.
That didn’t mean he could get it back, or that it was wise to try. Resurrecting their dead friendship, even if possible, wasn’t necessarily good for either of them. The best he could do was to repair any damage caused by the way they’d ended things.
It would be easier if he hadn’t noticed her curves and smile and the spark in her eyes.
And being here, he thought, taking in the familiar surroundings. It was night now, warm and quiet on the winding country road. He heard an owl hooting through the trees, somewhere down by the river. He wanted to stay in the moment, be here, now. He didn’t want to hurl himself into the past, and yet he could feel memories tugging at him. Sneaking down to the river with Mark as young boys to throw rocks in the water. Riding his bike out here. Sitting by the fire with his grandfather. Fishing, camping, playing hide-and-seek.
The river—this land—had been the best part of his childhood. The smells, the trees, the river, the night sky were all unchanged. Felicity hadn’t known he’d built the house with his brother. Would she have bought it if she’d known?
That was the least of his worries.
He turned around and walked back to the house, in no rush. He flicked away a few mosquitoes, but none landed. He remembered the night he’d made love to her, realized it was her first time. Damn, they’d been so young. Afterward she’d stood next to him in the dark. “If I ever build a house in Knights Bridge, I’d build it here. What about you, Gabe?”
“I’m never coming back here.”
He’d meant it, too. He remembered her expression—a mix of understanding, acceptance and the slightest hint of disappointment, as if she hoped he might leave himself some wiggle room. But he hadn’t. His future wasn’t in Knights Bridge. He’d been sure of it.
He pulled himself out of his thoughts before he could examine them too deeply.
As he approached the house, he noticed the smell of brownies.
His imagination? A trick of his mind because he was lost in the past?
He shook his head, breathing deeply. No, it was brownies he smelled.
He went inside through the kitchen—Felicity had left the door unlocked—and found a pan of fresh brownies cooling on a rack on the counter.
He grinned. “About time, Felicity.”
Three years ago, he’d read the note she’d left on his kitchen counter and had realized she was angry with him, but he’d figured she’d get over it—because they were friends and he was right. But when he’d opened his freezer and didn’t find brownies, he’d known she wouldn’t be back. Everything had changed. He’d known this because he knew Felicity.
Had she made brownies as a way of apologizing for overreacting that day?
No.
She was establishing control. She was in charge. This was her house, her town, her event on Saturday, and he could damn well toe the line.
She’d left him a note on the counter by the brownie pan.
Help yourself. Sleep well. I’m an early riser but I’ll be quiet.
Felicity
Gabe got a knife out of a drawer and cut a two-inch square, getting warm brownie on the blade. He wiped it with his finger and licked it. Felicity still made a hell of a brownie. He could pull together a decent stir-fry—or he used to. These days he seldom cooked.
He lifted out the brownie and ate it in two bites. It was one of the best he’d ever had, just the right balance between chewy and gooey. Perfect.
He smiled, feeling better, and took his duffel bag to the guest room. He set it on the floor and decided not to unpack. Keep his options open.
Sleeping well would be a trick with Felicity in the next room.
Gabe exhaled, hearing an owl somewhere in the woods. Tomorrow he’d see Mark and Jessica. There were other people he wanted to see while he was in town, and some he needed to see—but he didn’t want to think about that.
He returned to the kitchen and checked the refrigerator. No beer, but he noticed an unopened bottle of a decent New Zealand sauvignon blanc. He decided not to open the wine and poured himself a glass of milk, helped himself to another brownie and headed out to the deck.
A citronella candle burned with a low flame in the center of the table. He set his milk on the deck rail and ate the brownie while he listened to the river down the steep bank. On another night, perhaps, or for anyone else, the sounds of the water would have been soothing, restorative after a long trip. For him, they were unsettling, stirring up past longings and insecurities, reminding him of the boy he’d been, managing an unstable if loving home. He’d always admired the MacGregors. They were solid, smart, stable, predictable. He wasn’t the only one who’d expected Felicity to be the same. She’d expected it of herself. If she had been, would they have become friends? Would he have slept with her?
Not worth thinking about now.
He finished his brownie, drank his milk and got back inside before the mosquitoes found him.
He heard the owl again.
He took The Badgers of Middle Branch, the first book in the popular series, to the guest room with him. Well, what the hell, right? He was in Knights Bridge. Might as well read about badgers.