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“Sara will let me bring them to school, won’t you, Sara? They can be…” Joey’s face scrunched up, but in the end he puffed out his breath in defeat. “What’s it called when they belong to the whole class?”
“Mascots?” Sara supplied.
“That’s it! They can be mascots to the third grade. We can all take turns bringing them home on the weekends.”
“I doubt Mrs. Erskine-Lippert will agree to that,” Sara said.
Joey snorted. “Ooh, the principal. I heard Mr. Jamison, the sixth-grade teacher, call her Mrs. Irksome. I was gonna look it up in the dictionary, but I figured it meant, you know, trouble. And I couldn’t spell it,” he added as an afterthought.
“You shouldn’t repeat things like that,” Max admonished. He managed to hide his smile, but his eyes, when he lifted them to meet Sara’s, were shining with amusement.
She couldn’t help smiling back, her sadness lifting as she watched father and son bicker good-naturedly over the kittens. She might not have Max’s love, let alone his ring on her finger, and she might not have a paper labeling her Joey’s mother, but she still got moments like this, precious pearls strung between the humdrum, lonely hours that made up the greater part of her life. And who, she asked herself, could ask for more than that?
“I’ll make you a deal,” Max said to his son, resorting to bribery when reason didn’t work. “If you leave the kittens here, I’ll take you to the diner and you can have anything you want.”
Joey stopped in midobjection. “Anything I want?”
“Yep, and we’ll take Sara with us and feed her some pie—just as soon as I’m finished.” He had to yell the last part because Joey was already running across the feed store to return the kittens to their cardboard home. “And then we’ll take you to the market afterward,” Max said to Sara.
“It’s nice of you to invite me, but—”
“No buts. It’s been two weeks since…you know,” he finished, bending to heft another sack and muscle it into the truck bed. “You can’t hide away forever.”
No, she couldn’t hide away forever, and even if she could, Sara thought, the people of Erskine would still be waiting to rub her nose in what had happened at the Open House. It wasn’t just that, however; she didn’t think she could bear to spend the next few hours with Max. For two weeks she’d been trying to forget those few seconds she’d spent plastered against him. Her memory was just too darned vivid; all she had to do was close her eyes and she was back there again, fighting a real battle with spontaneous combustion.
Watching him work only fanned the flames. He bent, lifted, twisted and dropped each sack, the slide and bunch of muscle beneath worn denim and plaid making her heart pound and her breath shorten until her head began to spin. She couldn’t have taken a steady step if her life depended on it; going to the diner with him would be sheer foolishness. Worse than tempting fate, she would be daring fate to make a fool of her again.
“Really, Max, I’d rather just go home and open a can of soup,” she said, her voice growing stronger when she pulled her gaze off his backside. “I have a lot of papers to grade tonight, anyway.”
“What papers?” Joey asked as he rejoined them. “You let us grade each other’s papers today.”
“And I still have to check them over,” she said to Joey, tweaking the hair that was growing past his collar. “Maybe your dad should take you to get a haircut, instead, and I’ll bake you a whole pie of your own this weekend. Cherry.”
Cherry pie was one of the basic food groups to Joey, but he didn’t even waver. “Nope. Dad promised me the diner and he never goes back on a promise.”
“Well, then, you guys have a good time, and maybe I’ll see you later at the ranch.”
“Nope, Sara, I promised you the diner and I never go back on a promise.” Max bent to lift the last sack of feed and heave it into the truck.
The combination of all those muscles flexing and the sexy little grunt he uttered completely stalled Sara’s thought processes. If Jack the Ripper had popped in and asked her to take a walk, she’d have wandered into the closest alley with him, no questions asked, so it was no wonder she said okay to Max.
She watched, dazed, as he pulled an old, faded bandanna from his back pocket and wiped his face, but it wasn’t until he yelled out to Mrs. Landry that he was leaving his truck in the feed store for a while that she snapped out of her haze and realized what she’d done.
Max gestured for her to precede him, and Sara had no choice. He figured he was helping her get over her latest humiliation, and she didn’t have the courage to tell him otherwise. Maybe if she didn’t look at him she’d be okay.
The street side of the feed store was a huge door that rolled aside to let vehicles in to be loaded. In the middle of the large door was a smaller pedestrian door. Max opened it, warning Sara to step over the lip at the bottom. And just to make sure she didn’t trip, he cupped her left elbow.
She tripped.
How could she stay upright with his fingers wrapped around her arm, shooting heat and need into her bloodstream in such a quick and overwhelming burst that she forgot she even had feet, let alone what she was supposed to do with them?
Max’s fingers tightened around her arm, hard enough to bruise, but Sara stumbled forward anyway, right into the flow of pedestrian traffic on the crowded sidewalk of the town’s main street. Her right arm shot out for balance, knocking a bag of groceries from old Mrs. Barnett’s arms. The sack hit the sidewalk, but Sara barely noticed the brown paper bottom burst open, disgorging an assortment of cans and boxes, along with a spreading puddle of white.
Max and Joey stooped to help the elderly woman salvage what she could of her groceries. Sara went after the half-dozen oranges that had tumbled out of the bag and headed for freedom, oblivious to the potential for disaster. She managed to scoop up five of them and place them in the shallow pocket formed when she lifted the hem of her sweater. The sixth orange insisted on giving her trouble, rolling and bumping down the sidewalk between the feet of unsuspecting pedestrians as though it had a will of its own and no concept of the laws of physics.
Sara ducked and weaved like a quarterback dodging line-men, cradling her sweaterload of oranges more carefully than any football, her goal an even half-dozen rather than seven points. But every time she reached down to grab that last orange, the obnoxious little fruit managed to skip away at the last instant.
Frustrated, she elbowed her way in front of Mr. Fellowes, the undertaker, and planted her foot sideways in front of the orange. It rolled to a nice, obedient stop less than a finger’s width from her arch, as if it were planning to stop there anyway. Sara bent to pick it up, and Mr. Fellowes ran smack dab into her backside.
They both went sprawling, the oranges flew out of Sara’s sweater, bounding off the boardwalk and down the curb. Right into the path of the delivery boy from Yee’s combination Chinese Laundry and Restaurant. He hit the brakes, too late to prevent the front tire of his bicycle from squishing a navel orange into aromatic, slippery pulp. The bike skidded, the delivery boy jumping off just before it slammed into the curb and lurched sideways.
The sack of Chinese food made a graceful arc as it flew out of the bicycle’s basket, the plastic bag flapping cheerfully before it plopped down on the sidewalk, right at Sara’s feet. The bundle of laundry in the rear basket slipped its paper and string constrictions, pelting her with some unfortunate man’s clothing.
And to top it all off, she’d drawn a crowd.
But then how could she not? she asked herself, as she pulled a pair of white boxers from her shoulder and dropped them at her feet. She stood in the midst of chaos, a bag of Chinese food, an undertaker, a delivery boy and his bicycle at her feet. A circle of white shirts and underwear surrounded her, with oranges supplying just the right splash of color here and there. All that was