One True Thing

She missed that.

“You ready?”

Refocusing her attention, she saw Jace was holding a foil pan and their ticket and was about to stand. As she slid to her feet and slung her purse over one shoulder, he dropped some ones on the table, then gestured for her to precede him to the cash register near the door. There she withdrew her wallet, but he gave a shake of his head.

“I can pay for my own lunch.”

“It was my invitation.” He handed a twenty to the waitress, pocketed his change, then followed her outside.

Though the grocery store was only half a block away, they drove. Jace parked in the shade of a huge oak, then glanced back across the street when he got out. “I need to make one stop,” he said when she joined him at the back of the truck. “Why don’t you go on in, and I’ll catch up with you.”

“Sure.” She was not disappointed, she told herself as she crossed the parking lot. She always did her grocery shopping alone and there was no reason to mind it today.

Always shop on a full stomach, her mother preached. The theory, as Cassidy recalled, was that she wouldn’t make impulse purchases based on hunger. The downside was that, with her stomach so full, she couldn’t work up much enthusiasm for any of the foods available.

It was going to be a salad kind of week, she decided as she gathered the ingredients for chicken salad, pasta salad, garden salad and potato salad. She added a few staples—cereal, milk, ice cream and chocolate—along with a paperback from the limited selection, and was finishing up on the pop-and-potato-chip aisle when a man near the checkout caught her attention. Jace, she thought with a rush of warmth that was more pleasurable than was good for her.

No, not Jace. The clothes were a match, but this man’s back was to her and there was no long, silky black ponytail to be seen. His hair was short, as short as hers.

Then he turned, saw her and started toward her.

“You cut your hair,” she blurted when he was still fifteen feet away. Damn! As if he hadn’t been handsome enough before. He was a dangerous man, she’d decided on their way into town. Now she amended that to very dangerous.

He combed his fingers through it, dislodging a few stray hairs. “It’s getting too hot to wear it long. I never liked it that way anyway.”

“Then why let it get so long?”

“It was easier than getting it cut.”

She wanted to ask when he’d last cut it. Back in the winter, she would bet, when he hadn’t wanted anyone’s attention. What had happened? Had he undergone some personal crisis, been depressed or sick or in trouble?

He would tell her…if she answered all his questions first.

She didn’t want to know that badly.

Instead of getting his own shopping cart, he turned hers back from the register and took it—and her by default—on a quick sweep through the store. Though he wasn’t working from a list, he knew what items he wanted and in what brands and sizes. He gathered twice the amount of food she had in less than half the time, then steered the cart to the checkout.

The cashier was a pretty woman with auburn hair and a name tag identifying her as Ginger pinned to a snug-fitting T-shirt. “Hi, Jace,” she said warmly before turning her attention to Cassidy. Her gaze narrowed and her smile slipped a bit, but when she finally greeted her, it was with almost the same warmth. She rang up Jace’s purchases first while a teenage boy in baggy denim shorts sacked them.

“Are you visiting Jace?” she asked as she started on Cassidy’s groceries.

Cassidy glanced at Jace, talking football with the bagger and paying them no mind. “No. I’m renting the Davison cabin out at the lake.”

“Oh, you’re the one—the writer from Alabama.” Ginger smiled. “I go out with Buddy Davison from time to time. He mentioned it.”

“Actually, it’s South Carolina,” Cassidy corrected her. Ask the same question ten times and she would give ten different answers. That was one of her methods of survival.

“No, I’m pretty sure Buddy said Alabama. He says you write history books.”

Had she told Paulette Fox that? Cassidy wondered. Maybe. Hell, she’d told the woman she was from Alabama, when she’d never set foot in the state. She’d gotten in the habit of not paying a great deal of attention to her lies. After all, she was rarely in one place long enough for her untruthfulness to catch up to her, and this place wasn’t likely to be any different. “Not history books. Historical novels.”

As soon as the words were out she inwardly grimaced. That was dumb. If she knew little about writing books in general, she knew nothing about writing historical books. The only history she was intimately familiar with was her own, and it had always been fairly innocuous…until six years ago. Then it had gotten interesting. Three years after that it had become movie-of-the-week material. Now it was boring and lonely, but tempered by the certain knowledge that it could all blow up at any moment.

Baseball, her father liked to say, was a game made up of long stretches of tedium broken by brief spurts of excitement. It was an apt description of her life.

“I don’t read much,” Ginger said, “but I always thought it would be cool to write a book. Of course, I just barely squeaked through senior English, and I don’t have a clue what I would write about, and really I don’t think I have what it takes. I can’t even bring myself to write a letter from time to time, so I think a book is pretty much out of the question.”

That was something else Cassidy had learned in her brief “career”—not only was everyone planning to write a book someday, but they equated completing a four-hundred-page novel with writing a one-page letter to Grandma. It was as if they defined write in its simplest form—putting words to paper—and never acknowledged the difference between that and telling a logical, compelling, cohesive story.

She had learned the difference all too well in her past few days at the computer.

Ginger read out the total of her purchases and Cassidy handed over three twenties. She glanced up as Jace moved to her side again, but he wasn’t looking at her. Instead his gaze was on her open wallet. The wallet where a Wisconsin driver’s license was half revealed behind an old photograph. Abruptly she snapped the wallet shut, accepted her change and dropped it, coins and all, into the bottom of her purse.

“See you, Jace,” Ginger said, then added to Cassidy, “Nice meeting you.”

Cassidy murmured something appropriate—she hoped—then followed the bagger toward the door, Jace right behind her. Her jaw was clenched as she waited for him to say something about the license, but when he finally spoke, the subject was harmless.

“You like to fish?”

The relief that rushed over her was enough to weaken her knees. It must have been the photograph he’d seen and not the driver’s license, or surely he would be questioning her about it. He’d never hesitated yet to ask whatever came to mind, and surely a license in a different name from a different state would rouse a curiosity too strong to resist.

“I don’t know,” she replied, hoping her tone was as casual as the question deserved. “I’ve never tried.”

Naturally that wasn’t entirely true.

There had been the time with her dad, when she’d impaled a fish hook in her foot and required a trip to the emergency room to remove it. And the time with her brother, David, when she’d knocked his precious hand-tied lures overboard and he’d tossed her after them. And the time with Phil, trying to impress him by removing the ugly creature she’d caught quite by accident from its hook. It had latched onto her finger the way Liza Beth had claimed Jace’s, and in her resulting hysteria, that time it had been Phil who’d gone overboard. Not surprisingly, none of the three had ever invited her fishing again.

“It’s not a bad way to spend an afternoon. We’ll give it a try sometime…when you don’t mind being distracted.”

She frowned at him and saw he was giving her a sidelong look and grinning. He was entirely too handsome when he grinned, with all the mischievousness of a boy run wild…and all the sexiness of a man full grown. It made her want to blurt, How about now? Thankfully she managed to keep the words inside and politely said, “That sounds like fun.”

And for once, she thought as she climbed into the truck and turned the air-conditioner vents her way on full blast, that was the honest truth.

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