Winning His Heart

CHAPTER EIGHT

AT FIRST KAYLA THOUGHT it was a trick. Kevin had not been above using what she wanted most to get his own way.

Once we get established, in our new town, then we can talk about a baby.

She whirled, already angry that something about David being here was bringing all this stuff up. She was prepared to be very angry if David had used her dog to make her do what he wanted.

He was not looking at her, but had gone to the railing of his deck and was watching something intently. She followed David’ gaze, and though it was dark, she saw Bastigal’s little rump, tail tucked hard between his legs, disappearing through the Blazes’ hedges and heading out onto the street.

Kayla’s heart leaped with hope.

David stepped back inside the door, shoved his feet in a pair of sneakers and went down the back porch steps two at a time. He blasted through the boxwood, careless of the branches scraping him.

Kayla looked down at her own bare feet, and contemplated the skimpy fabric of her nightgown. By the time she went and got shoes on, or grabbed a sweater to cover herself—her sweater had gone inside with Mrs. Blaze—the dog would be gone. She doubted Bastigal would come to David even if he did manage to catch up to him.

It was the middle of the night. It was not as if anyone was going to see her.

Except him. David. And he thought I should be painted.

Without nearly enough thought, with a spontaneity that felt wonderfully freeing, Kayla took off through the hedge after David.

She saw he was crossing the deserted street at a dead run. If Kayla had had any doubt that he had maintained the athleticism of a decade before, it was vanquished. He ran like the wind, effortless, his strides long and ground covering. In the blink of an eye, David had crossed the silvered front lawn of a house across the street. Without breaking stride he charged around the side of a house and disappeared into the backyard.

She followed him. She thought her feet would give her grief, but in actual fact she had spent all the summers of her life barefoot, and she loved the feeling of the grass on them, velvety, dewy, perfect lawns springing beneath her feet.

She arrived in the backyard just in time to watch David hurdle effortlessly over a low picket fence into the next yard. She scrambled over it, catching her nightie. She yanked it free and kept running. She didn’t see Bastigal, but David must have seen the dog, because he was chasing after something like a hound on the scent.

She caught up with David after finding her way through a set of particularly prickly hedges. They were in the middle of someone’s back lawn. She cast a glance at the darkened windows.

“Do you see him?” she whispered.

He held a finger to his lips, and they both listened, and heard a rustle in the thick shrubs that bordered the lawn.

“Bastigal!” Kayla called in a stage whisper, both not wanting to frighten the dog or wake the neighbors.

Twigs cracked and leaves rustled, but she didn’t catch so much as a glimpse of her dog, and the sound was moving determinedly away from them.

David moved cautiously toward it. She tiptoed after him. And then David was off like a sprinter out of the blocks, and Kayla kept on his heels.

Three blocks later, she had done the fast tour of every backyard in the neighborhood, and they now found themselves on Peachtree Lane, in the front yard of a house that was on Blossom Valley’s register of most notable heritage homes.

“I think we lost him,” David said, and put his hands on his knees, bent forward at the waist and tried to catch his breath.

“Dammit.” She followed his lead and rested her hands on her knees, bent over and gasping for air. She was so close to him she could see the shine of perspiration on his brow, the tangy, sweet scent of a clean man’s sweat tickled her nostrils.

“Don’t move a muscle,” David whispered. He nodded toward the deep shadow of a shrub drooping under the weight of heavy purple blossoms.

One of the blossoms stirred in the windless night. The leaves parted.

Kayla stopped gasping and held her breath.

A little beige-colored bunny came out, blinked its pinky eyes at them and wiggled its nose.

“Is that what we’ve been chasing?” she asked.

“I think so.”

“Dammit,” she said for the second time.

But despite her disappointment, Kayla was aware that her blood felt as if it were humming through her veins, and that she felt wonderfully, delightfully alive.

She began to laugh. She tried to muffle her laughter so as not to disturb the sleeping neighborhood.

David straightened, watched her, arms folded over his chest. He shook his head, and then smiled. Then he chuckled.

She collapsed on the grass, on her back, knees up. She tugged her nightie, now torn at the hem where it had snagged, down over her bare knees, and then spread her arms wide, giggling and still panting, trying to catch her breath.

After a moment, David flopped down on his back beside her, his arm thrown up over his forehead.

Their breathing became less ragged, and the night seemed deeply silent. Some delicious fragrance tickled her nostrils. The stars were magnificent in an inky black sky.

“This is one of the things I missed after we moved to Windsor,” Kayla whispered. “You don’t see the stars like this in the city.”

“No,” he agreed softly, “you don’t.”

The silence was deep and companionable between them. “Why did you move to Windsor?” he asked. “You always liked it here.”

I hoped for a fresh start. I hoped a baby could repair some of the things we had lost.

Out loud, she said, “Kevin got a job there.”

She didn’t say that Kevin’s job had not lasted, but by then they could not afford to move back, let alone have a baby. She did not say the kind of jobs she had done to keep them afloat. She had waitressed and cleaned and babysat children and even done yard work.

She did not say how she had longed for the sweetness of the life she had left behind in her hometown. Didn’t David long for it like that? She asked him.

“Do you miss it here? Ever?”

His silence was long. “No, Kayla. I don’t have time to miss it.”

“If you did have time, would you?”

Again the silence was long. And then, almost reluctantly, he said, “Yeah, I guess I would. Blossom Valley was the place of perfect summers, wasn’t it?”

The longing was poignant between them.

“I can’t remember the last time I looked at the stars like this,” she murmured. But she thought it was probably in those carefree days, those days before everything had changed.

“Me, either.”

It was one of those absolutely spontaneous perfect moments. His bare shoulder was nearly touching hers. Peripherally, she was aware of the rise and fall of his naked chest, and that it was his scent, mingled with the pure scent of the dew on the grass and the night air and those flowers drooping under their own weight, that had made the night so deliciously fragrant.

“Is that Orion above us?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said, “the hunter.”

“I remembered how you impressed me once by naming all the stars in that constellation.”

She laughed softly. “Zeta, Epsilon, Delta. That’s his belt.”

“Go on.”

So she did, naming the stars of the constellation, one by one, and then they lay in silence, contemplating the night sky above them.

“I always thought you’d become a teacher,” he said slowly. “You had such an amazing mind, took such delight in learning things.”

She said nothing, another road not taken rising up before her.

“I at least thought you’d have kids. You always loved kids. You were always a counselor at that awful day camp. What was it called?”

“Sparkling Waters. And it wasn’t awful. It was for kids who couldn’t afford camp.”

“Naturally,” he said drily. “One of the most affluent communities in Canada, and you find the needy kids. I didn’t even know there were any until you started working there.”

“That whole neighborhood south of the tracks is full of orchard workers and people who clean rooms at the motels and hotels.” She didn’t tell him that now that she had been one of those people she had even more of an affinity for them. “It was Blossom Valley’s dirty little secret then, and it still is today.”

“And how are you going to fix that?” he asked.

Instead of feeling annoyed, she felt oddly safe with him. She replied, “I bet I could think of some kind of coupon system so the kids can come for ice cream.”

“Ah, Kayla,” he said, but not with recrimination.

“That’s me. Changing the world, one ice cream cone at a time.”

“No wonder those kids adored you,” he remembered wryly. “What I remember is if we saw the kids you worked with during the day at night, they wanted to hang out with you. I hated that. Us ultracool teenagers with all these little tagalongs.”

“Maybe you were ultracool. I wasn’t.”

“I probably wasn’t, either,” he said, that wryness still in his voice. “But I sure thought I was. Maybe all guys that age think they are.”

Certainly Kevin had thought he was, too, Kayla remembered. But he never really had been. Funny, yes. Charming, absolutely. Good-looking, but not spectacularly so. Athletic, but never a star. Energetic and mischievous and fun-loving.

Kevin had always been faintly and subtly competitive with his better-looking and stronger best friend.

When David signed up for lifeguard training, so did Kevin, but he didn’t just want to be equal to David, he wanted to be better. So if David swam across the lake, Kevin swam there and back. When David bought his first car—that rusting little foreign import—Kevin, make that Kevin’s father, bought a brand-new one.

The faint edge to Kevin’s relationship with David seemed like something everyone but David had been aware of.

Hadn’t Kayla spent much of her marriage trying to convince Kevin he was good enough? Trying to convince him that she was not in the least bowled over by David’s many successes that were making all the newspapers? Trying to forgive Kevin’s jealousy and bitterness toward his friend, excuse it as caused by David’s indifference to the man who had once been his friend?

But Kayla remembered David really had been ultracool. Even back then he’d had something—a presence, an intensity, a way of taking charge—that had set him apart.

And made him irresistible to almost every girl in town. And on one magic night, I’d been the girl. That he had shared his remarkable charisma with.

I tasted his lips, and then he hardly looked at me again.

“I adored them back,” she said, wanting to remember the affection of those moments and not the sense of loss his sudden indifference had caused in her.

“They were pesky little rascals,” David said. “You never told them to go away and leave you—us—alone. I can remember you passing out hot dogs—that I had provided—to them at a campfire.”

Maybe that was why he had stopped speaking to me.

“Did I?”

“Yeah. And marshmallows. Our soda pop. Nothing was safe.”

“I love kids,” she said softly. “I probably couldn’t bear to think of them hungry.”

“Our little do-gooder.” He paused and looked at her. “You did love kids, though. That’s why I thought you’d lose no time having a pile of them of your own. Especially since you seemed in such a hurry to get married.”

Kayla bit her lip. For the first time since they had lain down beneath the stars, she was certain she heard judgment there.

Marry in haste, repent at leisure.

“So why didn’t you have kids?” he persisted.

Kayla begged herself not to even think it. But the soft night air, and this unexpected moment, lying in the coolness of the grass beside David, made the thought explode inside of her.

She had wanted a child, desperately. Now she could see it was a blessing she had not had one.

“The time was just never right,” she said, her tone cool, not inviting any more questions.

“Aw, Kayla,” he said, and as unforthcoming as she thought her statement had been, she felt as if David heard every unhappy moment of her marriage in it.

She felt an abrupt, defensive need to take the focus off herself. “So why aren’t you married, David? Why don’t you have a wife and kids and a big, happy family?”

“At first it was because I never met anyone I wanted to do those things with,” he said quietly.

“Come on. You’ve become news with some of the women you dated! Kelly O’Ranahan? Beautiful, successful, talented.”

“Insecure, superficial, wouldn’t know Orion if he shot her with an arrow.”

The moment suddenly seemed shot through with more than an arrow. Heat sizzled between them as his gaze locked on hers.

“What do you mean, ‘at first’?” she whispered.

He didn’t answer—he just reached out and slid a hand through her hair, and looked at her with such longing it stole her breath from her lungs.

The air felt ripe with possibilities. Kayla again felt seen, somehow, in a way no one had seen her for years.

Somehow, feeling that way made her feel more intensely guilty than her disloyal thoughts about her husband.

And then, thankfully, the uncomfortable intensity of the moment was shattered when the darkness exploded around them, and they were both frozen in an orb of white light.

“End to a perfect day,” she said, happy for the distraction from the intensity. “Beesting, hospital emergency room, lost dog—” disloyal thoughts about my deceased husband “—now alien kidnapping.”

He didn’t smile at her attempt to use humor to deflect the intensity between them.

“Don’t forget the stargazing part,” he said softly.

She looked at him. Not many people would look better under the harsh glare of the light that illuminated them, but he did. It brought the strength of his features into sharp relief.

It occurred to her that the stargazing was the part she was least likely to forget.

David broke the gaze first, sat up and shielded his eyes against the bright light that held them.

“Police! Get up off that grass.”

CHAPTER NINE

THEIR PREDICAMENT STRUCK KAYLA as hilarious, but she suspected her sudden desire to laugh was like biting back laughter at a funeral. Her nerves were strung tight over the moments they had just shared. Her emotions felt electric, overwhelming and way too close to the surface.

Could David possibly think she was more attractive than Kelly O’Ranahan, the famous actress?

Of course not! She was reading way too much into his hand finding her hair and touching it. He probably felt nothing but sorry for her.

“Put your hands in the air where I can see them.”

Poor David. She cast a look at his face. If David had been ultracool back then, he was even more so now. A proven track record of ultracoolness.

It occurred to her she was about to get one of Canada’s most respected businessmen arrested. It was no laughing matter, really, but she couldn’t help herself.

She laughed.

David shot her a look that warned her he wasn’t finding it in any way as amusing as she was. His expression was grim as he reached for her hand and found it. Then he got his feet underneath him and jumped up lithely, yanking her up beside him.

She noticed he stepped out just a little in front of her, shielding her torn nightie-clad body from the harshness of the police searchlight with his own.

It reminded her of something a long time ago—a thunderstorm, and seeking shelter under the awning of the ice cream store. She remembered him pulling off his shirt and putting it over her own, which had become transparent with wetness.

Was it in some way weak—a further betrayal of her marriage—to enjoy his protective instincts so much? He let go of her hand only after he had put her behind him, and then shaded his eyes, trying to see past the light.

“Sir, I need you to put your hands up in the air. You, too, ma’am.”

The light they were caught in was absolutely blinding. Kayla squinted past the broadness of David’s shoulder and into the brightness. She could make out the dark outline of Blossom Valley’s only patrol car.

She did as asked, but the laughter had started deep inside her and she had to choke it back. She slid a look at David. His expression was grim as he put his hands up, rested them with laced fingers on the top of his head.

The spotlight went off, and a policeman came across the lawn toward them. He looked grumpy as he stopped a few feet away and regarded them with deep suspicion. He took a notepad from his pocket, licked his pencil, waiting.

When neither of them volunteered anything, he said, “We’ve had a report of a prowler in this area.”

Kayla bit her lip to try and stop the giggle, but she made the mistake of casting a glance at David’s face. Naturally, he was appalled by their predicament, his face cast in stone. A snort of laughter escaped her.

“Have you folks been drinking?”

“No,” David bit out, giving her a withering glance when another snort of laughter escaped her.

“I’m sorry,” she managed to sputter.

“Is this your house?”

“No,” David snapped.

“Have you got any ID?”

“Does it look like we have any ID?” David said, exasperated and losing patience fast. She cast him a glance, and saw instantly that he was not intimidated, that he was a man who was very accustomed to being in authority, not knuckling under to it.

“Well, what are you doing half-dressed in front of a house that isn’t yours? How do you know each other?”

David sucked in a harsh breath at the insinuation that they might have been doing something improper. He took a step forward, but Kayla stepped out of his protection and inserted herself, hands still on top of her head, between him and the policeman. She sensed David’s irritation with her.

“We’re neighbors. We’re looking for my dog,” Kayla said hastily, before David really did manage to get himself arrested. “We thought we saw him and gave chase. I’m afraid we did trespass through several backyards. It turned out to be that bunny over there.”

“What bunny?”

Kayla turned and lowered one arm to point, but the bunny, naturally, had disappeared. “There really was one. We haven’t been drinking.” She could feel a blush moving up her cheeks as she realized a nightie that was perfectly respectable in her house was not so much on the darkened streets of Blossom Valley.

“Or doing anything else,” she said, lowering her other arm and folding both of them over the sheerness of her nightie.

The policeman regarded them both, then his suspicion died and he sighed.

“You can put your hands down. My little girl has been looking for that dog since the posters went up. She went to sleep dreaming about the reward. She wants a new bicycle.” He squinted at David. “Do I know you?”

David lowered his arms and lifted an eyebrow in a way that said I doubt it. How could he manage to have such presence, even in such an awkward situation?

“Are you that investor guy?” the cop asked. Deference, similar to that Kayla had heard in the care aide’s voice, crept into the policeman’s tone. “The one I saw the article about in Lakeside Life?”

“That would be me.”

“You don’t look much like a prowler, actually.”

“Do most prowlers not go out and about in their pajamas?” David asked a bit drily.

“Well, not Slugs and Snails pajamas,” the officer said, recognizing the name brand of a Canadian clothing icon that produced very sought after—and very, very expensive—men’s casual clothing.

Kayla squinted at David’s pajama bottoms. They did, indeed, have the very subtle label of the men’s designer firm, and she had to admire the officer’s professional powers of observation.

She also had to bite back another giggle as she realized her own attire, her summer-weight, white nightie, might be worthy of a painting, but it was way too revealing. She maneuvered back into the shadow cast by David.

David shot her a warning look over his shoulder when she had to bite back another giggle.

“What do you think of AIM?” the policeman asked, putting the dark writing pad he’d held in his hand back into his shirt pocket. He snapped a flashlight onto his belt.

“Personally, I think it’s a dog,” David said.

“Unfortunately, not the dog we are looking for,” Kayla inserted helpfully.

David gave her a look over his shoulder, and then continued as if she hadn’t spoken, “If you have it, now’s the time to dump it. If you don’t have it, don’t buy it. Try—” he smiled a bit “—Slugs and Snails. It trades as SAS-B.TO.”

“Really?”

David lifted a shoulder. “If you’re into taking advice from a half-naked man in his pajamas in the middle of the night.”

The policeman finally relaxed completely. Now it was all buddy to buddy. He laughed. “Well, the pajamas are Slugs and Snails. How far are you from home?”

“Sugar Maple,” David said.

“I can give you a lift back over there.”

“No!” David’s answer was instant. “Thanks anyway.”

“Speak for yourself,” Kayla said firmly. “It’s a perfect finish for this day—a ride in the backseat of a police car. Plus, it’s on my bucket list.”

David glared at her. “Why would that be on your bucket list?”

“Because it’s what everyone least expects of me.”

“You got that right,” David growled.

But a deeper part of the truth was that Kayla knew David wouldn’t get in the police car because he would be aware, as she was, that everyone had phones and cameras these days. He was the CEO of a company that relied on his reputation being squeaky clean. He was publically recognizable because of his success and his involvement with well-known and high-profile people. Kelly O’Ranahan was only one of a long list.

David Blaze was a public figure. Kayla didn’t really blame him for not getting in, but she was aware as she smiled at him, as the policeman opened the door for her and she slid into the backseat, that she needed for this encounter with David to be over.

She felt she had, somehow, revealed too much of herself on the basis of a starry night and an old friendship.

Now she felt the vulnerability of her confessions, felt faintly ashamed of herself and as if she had betrayed Kevin.

But worse than any of that? The yearning she had felt when David had reached out and touched her hair.

Kayla felt she had to escape him.

Being determined that he would not see any of that, she gave David a cheeky wave as she drove away in the police car.

And then she let the relief well up in her, a feeling as if she was escaping something dangerous and unpredictable and uncontrollable.

She liked being in control. Especially after Kevin.

“Hey, good luck with your dog,” the cop said, a few minutes later. He very sweetly got out and opened the car door for her before he drove away.

Despite the fact her day had unfolded as a series of mishaps, and her dog was missing, and she had discovered, within herself, an unspoken bitterness toward Kevin, Kayla was uncomfortably aware of something as she climbed the dilapidated stairs to her house.

She felt alive. She felt intensely and vibrantly alive, possibly for the first time since she had left Blossom Valley.

She could not even remember the last time she had laughed so hard as when the police light had been turned on her and David.

Her life, she realized, had been way too serious for way too long. When had she lost her ability to be spontaneous?

But she already knew. Her marriage had become an ongoing effort to control everything— fun had become a distant memory.

Yearning grabbed her again. To feel alive. To laugh.

Despite the hour, Kayla didn’t feel like sleeping. She didn’t feel ready, somehow, to leave the night—with its odd combination of magic and self-discovery and discomfort—behind. She went into the kitchen, turned on the light, opened the fridge.