Final Score, page 16
“Is Cassie here? I have something for her.”
Cassie’s mom hollered up the stairs, in true mom fashion, “Cassie, honey, there’s somebody at the door to see you.”
“Who is it?”
“Come down and see for yourself.”
He heard scuffling and then the sound of her feet running down the stairs. She saw him and stopped. Her cheeks pinkened and her mouth opened in surprise. “Dylan.”
Looking up at her made everything click into place somehow. “Hi,” he said, feeling like a fool standing there while Cassie’s mother looked on.
“Hi.”
She came down the rest of the way. “What are you doing here?”
Seriously, did the mother not have anything better to do than stand here and listen to every word?
“I brought you something.”
“What?”
He offered her the paper with the sketch on it. “I was thinking about the upstairs bathroom, your en suite. If you went with a smaller vanity, there’s room for a good-size cupboard for towels and things.”
She glanced at the paper and back at him. “Thanks. I’ll give it to my dad. He and Mom came up from California to help me finish the house renovation.”
She seemed as though she was waiting for him to leave, but he couldn’t go. He couldn’t walk away again.
“Could I talk to you outside?”
She looked as if she might refuse. Stuck her hands in the pockets of her jeans. Then she nodded. Once. “Sure.”
He opened the door and held it for her, happy that Mom didn’t follow them out. Though he wouldn’t put it past her to peek at them out of the window.
When they got outside, he didn’t know what to say. She appeared tired, as though maybe she hadn’t been sleeping any better than he had. “I miss you,” he said, which wasn’t at all what he’d intended.
She made a sad face. “I miss you, too.”
“Look, I can’t give you what you want right now, but it doesn’t mean I never will. Can’t we get back together and see where this goes? What’s the rush?”
“There’s no rush. But you don’t want what I want, and it hurts me too much to hang around hoping you’ll suddenly love me.” He could barely hear her with the damn cat purring so loudly in his ear.
He scowled, feeling that he’d somehow been led astray and not knowing how or when it had happened. “Everything was great until the day Adam and Serena got married. And then it’s like you flipped into bride mode. All I’m asking for is time.”
Once more she looked at him sadly. “See, I’ve done this before. Waited around for a guy to realize that he cares for me. In fact, I’ve been right where you are before, too. You think this is okay. It’s better than being alone, and who knows, maybe one day I’ll realize that this person really is the love of my life. But the truth is, you know it or you don’t. I think you might be it for me. And I’m not it for you. So it’s not your fault and it’s not my fault, but I deserve better than to have the man I love hanging around trying to decide if he wants more.”
“You’re not being fair.”
“Maybe not. But I’m thirty years old. I’ve got a house, a biological clock.” She glanced at the vibrating fur ball on his shoulder. “And I’ve got a cat. All I need now is the right man.”
It had been bad enough having the door to her home opened by another contractor, even if the dude had turned out to be her dad, but to have another man in her bed? Another man putting kids in her nursery? In a second of blinding clarity he realized there was only one man who was going to do those things. And he was that man.
“No,” he said.
“No?”
“No. You’re not putting another man in my place. I’ve put a lot of myself into that house.”
She raised an eyebrow.
“And this cat is crazy about me.”
She glanced at the cat with something like pity. “Lots of females are crazy about you. We can’t help it. You’re like catnip.”
His jaw fell open. “Did you just compare me to a weed?”
“I believe I did.”
“Well, this chunk of catnip has taken root in your garden and it is not going to be dug out.” What in the hell was he talking about?
Her lips twitched but her eyes remained serious. “What are you trying to say, Dylan?”
“I love you.” Once more, words seemed to come out of his mouth that he didn’t remember forming in his brain and sending down the appropriate neural pathways. They seemed to form randomly and leap out.
And yet, exactly like when she’d walked down the stairs and he’d felt something click into place, as he told her he loved her, he realized it was true. He hadn’t planned it, didn’t even notice it was happening while he’d been falling, but fall he had. And hard.
He felt a smile start to split his face. “I love you.”
She wasn’t throwing her arms around him and inviting him home for dinner with the folks. She narrowed her eyes. “I don’t believe you.”
“It’s true. I have never said those words to another woman. Except my mom. And then only on Mother’s Day and her birthday. I don’t go throwing around I love yous like they’re nothing.”
“I don’t think so.”
“It’s true. How can I prove it to you?”
“You don’t have to prove you love someone.”
But, he thought, sometimes when you’d hurt someone and you didn’t mean to, then maybe you did need to prove it.
He simply needed to figure out how.
He handed her back the kitten, then kissed her hard. “I’ll be back. Don’t you even think about dating anyone else.”
“I—”
He yanked open the door of his truck. “Oh, and don’t let your dad touch the en suite.”
“He came here to help finish the renos.”
“He had to cut one piece of molding three times before he got it right. Your mom told me. He is not touching that bathroom.”
“You have no right to—”
He walked back to her, pulled her to him and kissed her while she was still talking. He smiled down at the outrage on two female faces glaring at him.
24
“IT’S A FOUR-HOUR drive to the rink where Badges on Ice is being held, so we should carpool,” Max said, as they headed for the ice and their last practice before the big tournament. Max was always the one thinking ahead about things like logistics.
Dylan rubbed an itchy spot where his wool sock rubbed, right under his knee. “Sure, whatever.”
“We can meet right here at the practice rink. It’s central for all of us and then we can all go in one vehicle.”
It was exactly what they’d done last year, so Dylan wasn’t sure why they were having a discussion. They’d all piled into his truck last year. The backseat was a little cramped, but Max was shorter than Dylan and Adam, so he hadn’t complained. They’d thrown all the hockey equipment in the truck bed and they were good to go.
Adam must have wondered the same thing, but Max didn’t start a conversation without a reason.
“I’m wondering if we should take two vehicles. I can’t see how we’re going to fit five adults and all our equipment into one of our current rides.”
Five people? Then it hit him. Max was taking Claire and Serena was going along to cheer her new husband. He was the fifth wheel.
“I’ll take my own truck,” he said. “We can throw all the equipment in the back. You can put four adults in Adam’s Jeep.” Since Max had one of those stupid billionaire sports cars.
“We should travel together,” Adam argued. Half the fun last year had been the joking around on the way down. But even if they could all cram into one vehicle, the ride was never going to be the same with two women along. They might as well accept that things had changed.
“I’ll want my own wheels. When we win, we’ll be heroes. I might get lucky with some hot groupie. Wouldn’t want you guys cramping my style.” He tried to exude excitement at this prospect, but really all he felt was a dull ache when he thought about hooking up with anyone but Cassie.
Both of the other men nodded, and Adam said, “Sure,” but he was pretty certain they could see right through his bravado to the pain of loss.
She wasn’t taking his calls. Ever since he’d dropped off that sketch, she’d ignored his calls and texts. Okay, you didn’t have to be a genius to see she didn’t want to talk to him. Fine. He’d never in his life gone crawling back to a woman with his tail between his legs. Why the hell was this one different?
* * *
TWINKLE DID NOT love Cassie’s parents. She wasn’t sure why, since they were perfectly nice people who liked animals. But the cat would either jump into Cassie’s lap and loudly demand attention or stalk out of the room, tail in the air, stiff with displeasure whenever they were around. It was her mother who diagnosed the problem. “She’s jealous.”
The strange thing was, the cat hadn’t been a bit jealous of Dylan when he was around. If anything, Cassie thought Twinkle associated the arrival of her mom and dad with the disappearance of her hero.
Well, the kitten might as well learn the bitter truth while she was young enough to recover. Guys like Dylan were great when they were around, fun and sexy and excellent to look at. But don’t count on them for the long term.
She knew she wasn’t being entirely reasonable. Was he really supposed to delay his return to his job because he’d committed to her and her house? Was it his fault he couldn’t return her love? But disappointment and the crushing humiliation of having told a man she loved him and seeing his eyes look wild with panic had soured her on reason.
She’d loved. She’d lost. She hurt.
Her parents had taken the day off to visit some old friends in the area. She had a feeling her dad might also be suffering a little hurt pride. She hadn’t let him touch her upstairs bathroom. And not because he’d cut one piece of molding three times—though she could see that his work wasn’t quite the professional standard of Dylan’s—but because some foolish flicker of hope still insisted on burning within her.
She noticed that Twinkle hadn’t touched the food she’d put out this morning, very un-Twinkle-like behavior. You could pretty much set your clock to Twinkle’s inner dinner gong. “Twinkle?” she called, looking in all the cat’s favorite spots around the house. But the kitten wasn’t sleeping on the window seat in her bedroom, or in the rocking chair in the spare room, or the one chair she allowed her in the living room.
She wasn’t curled on the warmest spot on the heated tiles on the bathroom floor.
Cassie headed outside at last. “Twinkle?”
A sad and mournful meow filtered down through the branches of the cedar tree in the backyard.
She walked under it and looked up. Way up. She had a moment of déjà vu when she recalled Dylan climbing down this same tree with the kitten that first day.
“Oh, come on. You know how to climb down from there.”
The piteous cry she received in return suggested that she was mistaken. And indeed, it did seem as though the little cat had gone a lot higher than ever before.
She went back into the kitchen and fetched the dish of cat food and took it out, standing under the branches where the cat could see it. “Look, here’s your favorite kibble. Mmm. Tuna. Come on.”
Nothing could have been more heartrending than the sound that traveled down to her. She saw the cat make a tentative move, and then it seemed to tumble with a screech, claws digging into rough bark. Cassie’s heart felt as though it was caught in her throat as she watched the bundle of fur skid down and finally come to rest in a V of branches. She thought she might be more scared than the cat as she put the food down.
If only Dylan was here. But Dylan wasn’t here and, like fixing up the house, she was going to have to add rescuing cats out of trees to the list of her responsibilities. “Well,” she said to the cat, “I helped rescue a baby whale stuck out in the ocean. I guess I can manage one small kitten in a tree.”
Of course, she was a water person. She swam like a fish, had been diving for years. Water, especially the ocean, was her natural medium. Trees, not so much.
However, she was not about to call for help, and her parents wouldn’t be back for hours. She’d taken responsibility for the cat—even though she mostly blamed Dylan for that, too—so she was going to have to figure this out.
There was a ladder in the garage. She hauled it out. It was a stepladder that she’d bought to use in her painting projects. She set it up under the tree. The ground wasn’t particularly even, but she moved the ladder around until she felt secure climbing up the rungs.
She got to the first thick branch and hauled herself up. Okay. So far so good. Twinkle was now much closer. Though farther up the tree than she’d realized.
Twinkle’s eyes were wide and the cat stared at her as though she were her only hope.
Cassie felt the stickiness of sap on the next branch as she gingerly pulled herself up. The smell of cedar was strong. If she didn’t look down it wasn’t too bad. She took a breath. Rose shakily, scraping her knee on tree bark as she did so. There were cedar fronds tangling in her hair and bits of greenery were dropping on her.
Her stomach felt the way it used to when she got onto a roller coaster, or one of the wild and scary rides at the fair, right before the ride began, when the bar was locked in place and it was too late to change her mind, a kind of excitement tinged with fear. Or more likely fear tinged with excitement.
She breathed in and out slowly. A diver learned to control her breathing or risk disaster. She felt the principle must be the same on land.
Something about the way that cat was staring at her gave her the courage to go on. It was only a tree, for goodness’ sake. She’d dived shipwrecks under the ocean, sailed through storms that chucked heavy waves over the bows and tossed the ship around like a cork in a washing machine. This was a giant evergreen rooted to the earth. She’d be fine.
She pulled and hauled herself up to the next branch. She could see that strategy would be needed to get the rest of the way. She had to pick a route with well-spaced branches. At one point, Twinkle put out a paw and batted the air as though encouraging her progress.
“Hang on,” she said. Probably to both of them. “I’m coming.”
She heard a car go by and was shocked at how far below her the rumble of the engine sounded.
But she was close now, too close to give up. “Almost there,” she assured Twinkle, who meowed helplessly in response.
The branches were getting skinnier, so she tested each one thoroughly before putting her full weight on it. Finally, she got within reaching distance of the cat.
“There you go,” she crooned. “There’s my girl.”
Until this moment she hadn’t realized how much she’d come to love this small creature who’d adopted her. The fur was soft against her face as she lifted Twinkle into her arms. She thought they were both trembling, or maybe that was only her trembling enough for both of them.
She gave them both a minute, then said, “Okay. Now all we have to do is get back down.” With a lot more confidence than she felt, because the thing about that famous advice not to look down was that it only worked when you’re climbing up something. It was impossible to climb down a tree and not look in that direction.
Which was paralyzing.
How had the ground slipped so far beneath her?
And how had it not occurred to her that climbing up unencumbered was a lot easier than climbing down with a terrified kitten in tow?
25
“OKAY, THAT’S THE last of it,” Max said as the final hockey bag thumped into the back of Dylan’s truck.
The two couples were driving together in Adam’s Jeep since Max’s Tesla only seated two.
“Are you sure we can’t all fit in one vehicle?” Serena said, seeming uncertain.
“Can’t fit all five of us and the luggage in one,” Max reminded her.
Serena, however, was both intuitive and tenacious. She said, “Well, why don’t we girls drive down together in your fancy sports car? And you boys can travel together.”
Claire agreed, but it was Dylan who refused the change of plan. And suddenly, he exploded. “Damn it, she should be here.”
No one had to ask him which she he was referring to.
“I agree,” Serena said. “She should.”
“Well, it’s too late now,” Adam said. “We’re locked and loaded.”
“You go on ahead,” Dylan said. “I’ll call her again.” And if she didn’t answer, he figured he’d drive by her house. Badges on Ice was a big deal to him, to Adam and to Max. They both had their women by their sides. He wanted his woman, wanted her so badly he felt as though part of him was missing.
Adam sent him a level look. “You’ve got all our stuff. Could you maybe kiss and make up after the weekend?”
“No.”
His old buddy shook his head. “Don’t screw this up.”
But Serena walked up to him, Claire right behind her. “Don’t let her go.”
“I don’t plan to.”
“You need some performance coaching?”
He was about to say no and make a joke, but he realized he needed all the help he could get, and this woman was brilliant at what she did. Plus, she was friends with Cassie, so that had to be a bonus.
“Honey, we don’t have time,” Adam said, with barely controlled impatience.
“We built extra time into the schedule,” she said with unruffled calm. “We can spare a few minutes.”
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