He wound the thread and dubbing to the eye of the hook, then spun the bobbin and loosened the stand. During a pause in the music, the clock on the mantel in his living room downstairs chimed ten times. He wanted Kate. She wanted him. She wasn't crazy. It was inevitable.
Both times he'd kissed her, she'd kissed him back like she was never going to stop. Earlier, she'd melted against him, so hot his hair had about caught fire. He'd touched her breast and thrust his hard-on into her, and if those boys hadn't come into the store, he would have had her naked and up against the wall before she'd known what hit her.
The bobbin swayed as he stripped the excess dubbing from the thread. He turned in his chair and selected a gold-and-black hackle feather from his assorted trays of feathers and fur. He stripped the barbs, then secured the stem to the hook shank with three tight wraps of his thread.
Other than wanting Kate on her back and in his bed, he didn't know how he felt about her. She was stubborn and competitive and had a smart mouth, but he didn't mind those qualities in a woman.
He clamped a pair of hackle pliers on the tip of the feather and wound it toward the bend in the hook. By rote, his hands passed the pliers back and forth as he wound the feather over and under the shank.
Kate was competent and believed she could damn well take care of herself. Some men didn't like that about her, but he didn't mind those qualities either. In fact, he didn't care for clinging, needy women.
At the bend in the hook, he tied down the hackle feather with wire, then wound it up the shank toward the eye. Kate was smart and beautiful and sexy. Most important, she wasn't a psycho.
The cordless telephone sitting next to his elbow rang. He glanced at the caller ID and hit the mute on his stereo. He pressed the connect button on the phone and said, "Hey, Lou. What's up?"
"Well, I've been thinking," his ex-wife began.
"About?"
"About our conversation the other night, and I didn't want you to think I was mad about Easter."
He released the pliers and set them on the workbench. "Amelia is young enough that she won't remember, and besides, it's not your weekend anyway."
A suddenly reasonable Louisa worried him. "Are you dating someone?" The last time she'd been this pleasant had been the time she'd been in love with a Boeing executive. She'd wanted Rob to stay with the baby while she flew off to Cancun with her new man, which he'd been happy to do. Her relationship with the exec had ended last fall, before she'd started dropping hints of a reconciliation.
"No," she answered. "I'm not dating anymore."
Rob stood and moved his head from side to side. "Why not?"
"Because I think you and I should give our relationship another try. We're older and wiser now. We have Amelia's future to think about."
There it was. Right out in the open now, and he could no longer ignore it. "Why are you bringing this up now, over the phone? I'm going to be there in a few days."
"I didn't want to hit you with it when you walked in the door. I wanted you to think about it before you got here." She took a deep breath and let it out. "We can make it work this time, Rob."
He walked from the room and turned off the light behind him. "We talked about this when I moved to Gospel. You wouldn't be happy living here, and I'm not happy living in Seattle."
"We can work something out."
He entered his bedroom and walked past the entertainment center to the big window. "You'd hate it here. No Nordstrom, or jazz clubs, or dinner at The Four Seasons." He looked out at the dark shores of Fish Hook Lake and added, "The closest movie theater is an hour away."
Silence stretched across the distance and he didn't think there was anything she could say to make him consider a reconciliation. They'd screwed it up too many times in the past. "Amelia misses you."
Except that. He closed his eyes and leaned his forehead against the cool glass, "What's she doing?"
"She's asleep."
He hadn't been there to put her to bed. He loved when she fell asleep in his arms and he carried her to the crib he'd converted into a little bed. Guilt ate him up inside, but he reminded himself that he would miss putting her to bed every night even if he lived full time in his loft in Seattle.
"I think we can work it out and be a family. Will you think about it?"
A family. They'd never really been a family. He loved his daughter, and at one time, he'd loved Louisa. The idea of a happy family life held a lot of appeal for him. He was often lonely, but the key word was happy. Could he and Louisa be happy together? He didn't know. "I'll think about it," he said.
After he pressed disconnect, he tossed the phone on a chair to his left. He scrubbed his face with his hands and looked out at the lake. The wind had picked up in the last few hours and blew black ripples across the surface.
He thought of his ex-wife, pictured her gorgeous face and killer body. At one time she'd seemed like the ideal woman. The perfect balance of natural beauty and expensive grooming. And she wanted to try and live together again. Problem was, when he was around her gorgeous face and killer body, there was no urgency to grab her up and bury his nose in her neck. There was no twist and pull of desire that made him want to run his hands all over her.
Kate made him feel those things. He wanted her like a man should want a woman. She made him feel the biting, animalistic urge to pick her up, throw her down, and get on with it. The kind of urge that a man should feel for an ex-wife he was thinking about getting back together with. But was desire, or lack of desire, a reason to reject the notion out of hand? Wasn't there more to a good relationship than sex? When he and Louisa had been married, the sex had been good but everything else had pretty much sucked. So if everything but the sex was good in a relationship, could it work?
The more Rob thought about it, the more confused he got. His temples began to pound, and the longer he let it all tumble around in his mind, the bigger his headache got until he could hardly think at all.
There was only thing he was real clear about. Until he got it all sorted out in his own mind, he'd have to resist Kate Hamilton.
He'd learned his lesson about talking reconciliation with one woman while having sex with another. He'd been there and done that, and he didn't need that kind of trouble.
Thirteen
Instead of bread, the next morning Kate made something different. It was five days before Easter, so she baked cupcakes and topped them with a thick layer of white frosting. She dyed coconut green for grass and placed tiny hummingbird candy eggs in the coconut grass. As she stuck pipe cleaners in the cupcakes to look like little handles, her thoughts turned to Rob, where they'd been stuck since yesterday. span You can't say no forever, Kate Hamilton. Someday I'm going to make you say yes, he'd said. Someday real soon.
His threat worried her. Not on a physical level. She didn't believe for a second that Rob would force her to do anything. She was worried about her attraction to him—worried that if he whispered her skin was like dessert, and that he fantasized about her, she'd get all weak and brain dead—again.
She knew Rob. She'd dated men just like him. She didn't want yet another bad relationship, but there was a part of her that tended to forget all of that when she was alone with him. The next time he called for a delivery, her grandfather would have to make it.
Kate placed the last tiny egg on the last cupcake and took a step back to view her work. "Martha Stewart, wherever you are, eat your heart out." By noon, she'd sold all five dozen and had orders for five dozen more.
At two, while Stanley sat in the back office working on a poem, Regina Cladis came in for a rump roast, a bag of baby carrots, and some red potatoes. "Tiffer's home for a visit, and he loves my roast."