All of which had come to a screeching halt when he’d been gone from their bed before she’d woken up that last morning.
The only thing he’d left behind was a note that he’d “call.” He’d scrawled the message on the flattened pink bakery box that had held the small chocolate cake he’d managed to track down after searching three different stores.
The cake that—after she’d made a wish and blown out the candles, all of which he’d insisted upon—they’d managed to share over those two days in shockingly creative ways that still haunted her dreams.
But call?
Right.
Not only had he been gone from her bed, but he hadn’t shown his face in Weaver afterward. Not the next day. Not the next week. Not the next month.
The thoughts they’d shared. The laughter they’d had. The love they’d made. None of it mattered.
One weekend was all they had in common.
Well, she was a big girl. She would live with the consequences.
She grabbed the storage box and drew it out, squaring her shoulders and straightening her spine in the same motion.
Axel, unfortunately, was still leaning atop the display case, his shoulders seemingly wider than ever beneath the nubby, gray turtleneck sweater he wore.
The last time she’d seen those shoulders, they’d been bare and golden and glistening with sweat while he’d made love to her as if he’d never wanted to stop.
She banished the painfully vivid thought and looked pointedly at the case. “Do you mind?”
He backed away slightly. Ignoring his solid chest only inches away, she flipped open the case and drew out one of the sliding trays from beneath.
“I can explain the four months.” His voice was quiet beneath the laughter coming from the nearby kissing booth.
“No explanation needed,” she assured him. “It was what it was.” There. That was breezy. She even managed to top it off with a careless shrug and a small smile. “When did you get back into town?”
“This morning. I intended to call.”
Too little, too late. Four months too late.
“No big deal,” she said, still breezy.
She was an adult. They’d had a “one-night stand” that happened to last an entire weekend, and the aftereffects were her business and hers alone.
The only thing that bothered her now was that she was bothered by his four months’ worth of silence.
Liar. Tell him.
She ignored the insistent whisper inside her head and with no regard for her usual order, dumped the contents of the jewelry tray into the box. She’d sort it out when she got back to the shop.
“Something important came up,” he said. She made the mistake of glancing at him and caught the grimace that crossed his unreasonably handsome face. “I know how that sounds.”
“It doesn’t matter how it sounds. It was months ago. No big deal. I hardly—” she said as her tongue nearly tripped “—hardly remember much about it.”
The corners of his lips lifted ever so slightly. “D’you know that there are five little freckles on your nose that only show up when you lie?”
She shoved the empty tray back in its slot and grabbed the second one. “You’ve offered the obligatory explanation, but as you can see, I’m busy.”
“I don’t think I explained anything.”
He hadn’t, and they both knew it.
What she didn’t understand, though, was why he bothered pressing the matter. “Let’s just save our breath and say that you did.” They’d spent a weekend together and she’d come close to losing her heart. He, on the other hand, had just taken a powder when he’d decided it was time to go.
He grabbed the tray before she could shake its contents into the box. “Tara.”
She wasn’t going to engage in a tug-of-war over a jewelry tray. Nor was she going to get into any sort of conversation about what had occurred between them when there were still too many people around who could overhear.
Gossip was going to be rife enough about her soon without anyone overhearing that.
She let go of the tray and reached for the last one, pulling it out and tipping it into the box.
He muttered an oath and set down the tray. “Tara—”
“Axel Clay, is that you?” A bright, female voice accosted them from across the gymnasium.
“We will talk,” he told Tara before turning to greet the curly-haired blonde aiming for him. “Hey, Dee. How’s it going?”
The young woman unabashedly threw her arms around him, giving him an exuberant hug. “I’m going to have to give Sarah a lashing. She didn’t tell me you were coming home. We all thought you were still in Europe trying to buy up some fancy horse. Hi, Tara,” she added absently.
Under other circumstances, Tara would probably have been amused by Deirdre Crowder’s actions. Dee was a teacher at the elementary school. She and Sarah Scalise—another teacher and Axel’s cousin—were frequent visitors to Classic Charms.
But it wasn’t “other circumstances,” and the day had taken its toll on Tara’s humor.
She was fresh out.
She nevertheless managed a casual response for Dee and took advantage of Axel’s diverted attention to quickly finish unloading the jewelry case. She couldn’t help but overhear Axel telling Dee that his cousin hadn’t known about his arrival. She also couldn’t help but notice the way Dee kept her slender fingers latched onto Axel’s arm.
“Excuse me,” she told Dee, whose other hand was near the display case.
“Sorry.” Dee moved her hand, but didn’t take her attention away from Axel. “So, how long are you going to be around? We ought to all get together.”
Tara hefted the acrylic display unit off the table and perched it on the boxes, then slid out from behind the booth. She still needed to disassemble the clothing rack but she wasn’t going to listen to Dee, avowed man-hunter that she was, set up a date with Axel.
Without looking at them, she made her way to the storage room to retrieve her handcart that she’d left there after unloading her wares earlier that day. She pulled it out, struggling with the recalcitrant folding mechanism.
“Let me help you with that.”
Her shoulders drooped. Dee hadn’t kept Axel’s attention nearly long enough to suit her. That fact was probably as displeasing to Dee as it was to Tara.
“I don’t need help.” She jerked on the cart handles and it sprang into place. Her fingers narrowly avoided being pinched, but she gave Axel a smooth smile. “See?”
She wheeled the cart smartly around his tall form and headed back toward her booth. Her legs were no match for his, though, and he beat her there, only to block the boxes as if it would take dynamite to dislodge him.
Her lips tightened and she turned to the clothing rack, deftly dismantling the rods to fit into the last box. Still ignoring him, she pulled on her coat—a new one since she’d lost hers completely that night at the Suds-n-Grill—and wrapped her scarf around her neck. Pulling the loaded cart, she headed toward the gymnasium exit.
She hadn’t reached it yet when Joe Gage, the tall, balding elementary school principal, stepped through it. “Shutting down shop, Tara?” He held the glass door