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  Tommy grinned, old enough to appreciate his aunt’s adoration.

  Annie reached for a hymnal and turned to the first song listed on the board to the right of the pulpit, trying not to look as flustered as she felt. She had not expected to see Jack here this morning. Her insides felt as if they’d suffered a small earthquake, and her hands shook a little where they gripped the songbook.

  Annie...

  The self-chiding might be deserved, but the truth was her reaction to Jack Corbin was not something she had any control over. She couldn’t obliterate its existence altogether, but she could ignore it. Which she pointedly set out to do.

  The choir director stepped up to the podium and raised a hand for everyone to stand. The piano and organ struck up with one of Annie’s favorites, “Just as I Am,” and she turned her focus to the song’s poignant strains.

  Was it her imagination, or did she feel Jack’s gaze from across the aisle? And why was it that among all the others in the congregation, she singled out his voice following the music, rich and deep?

  * * *

  ANNIE AND TOMMY pulled into the parking lot of Kinley’s Grocery just before one that afternoon. After the service, Clarice had hung back to say hello to Jack and tell him she was looking forward to tonight. Annie had said she and Tommy were going on so they could make a quick stop at the Dairy Queen to get some lunch.

  “Why are we helping Aunt Clarice grocery shop?” Tommy asked when they were headed toward Kinley’s.

  “She’s cooking a special dinner tonight and wants some advice on what to fix.”

  “Doesn’t she know how to cook, Mama?”

  “Some things,” Annie said. “She’s just never taken a lot of interest in it.”

  “Is that why the cake she made me that time wasn’t very tall?”

  “I think she forgot to put the baking soda in it.”

  “Oh. I like them better with baking soda.”

  “Don’t tell Aunt Clarice that.”

  “I won’t. It’d hurt her feelings.”

  Kinley’s was the kind of old-fashioned grocery store disappearing from small towns like minnows being swallowed up by much bigger fish. It had its own bakery, the smells greeting customers at the front door, no sales pitch needed. Their meat department was so top-notch that people came weekly from two counties away just to buy their first-quality steaks and the fresh trout raised on a farm in Langor County.

  Clarice was standing in the produce department looking like someone who’d jumped in a swimming pool only to realize she couldn’t swim. She looked up, spotted them, waved. “Help!”

  “You haven’t even gotten out of fruits and vegetables yet,” Annie said, smiling.

  “There are four hundred kinds of lettuce in here.” She gave Tommy a hug and said, “Forgot to pay you for cleaning out my car the other day.”

  Tommy gave her an I-didn’t-forget-about-it nod.

  “He’s way too shrewd for a seven-year-old,” Clarice said to Annie.

  “I know.”

  Clarice reached in her purse, pulled out the five dollars they’d agreed on. “I’m surprised you didn’t tack on interest for late payment.”

  His smile said he’d thought about it.

  “Way too shrewd,” Clarice said again, shaking her head.

  “Thanks, Aunt Clarice,” Tommy said. “Mama, can I go look at the comic books?”

  “Sure, doodles, but remember—”

  “Half in my piggy bank, I know,” he said.

  “Didn’t think he’d forget that rule, did you, Annie? He’ll be starting his own mutual fund by the time he’s ten.”

  Annie laughed, watching Tommy trot down the produce aisle to the other end of the store where the comic books were displayed. She was proud of how responsible Tommy already was. The effort had been deliberate on her part. She’d wanted to teach him the value of saving. It wasn’t something J.D. had ever believed in, and he’d somehow managed to go through most of the money he’d earned playing ball (she still wondered where it could have all gone) so that now he’d been reduced to spokeperson ads for fast-food fried chicken.

  “Thank you for coming,” Clarice said, giving Annie a hug. “I know I’m ridiculous.”

  “It’s not ridiculous,” Annie said.

  “Hey, I’m the one who called the Butterball hotline last Thanksgiving, remember?”

  “Three times,” Annie said, the memory making her laugh until she felt weak.

  “You snorted!” Clarice accused.

  “Did not.”

  “Did, too!”

  “Come on, Julia, why don’t we start with the lettuce?”

  “Annie, you’re a lifesaver.”

  LIFESAVER ANNIE DROVE home late that afternoon feeling like the world’s biggest hypocrite. She’d put a good face on helping Clarice with her dinner, but deep down, something that could only be identified as jealousy simmered like a bitter brew. She’d helped out with the meal Clarice had planned like Santa’s best elf packing up all the toys, which made her envy all the uglier.

  And she disliked herself intensely for it.

  Clarice had a date with Jack tonight. That was that. And in all likelihood, he’d walk away as smitten as every other man who ever came under Clarice’s spell. She was going at it full throttle. He didn’t have a chance.

  So get over it, Annie.

  She looked at Tommy, who was deep into one of the comic books he’d bought at Kinley’s. “What do you think about going to a movie tonight?”

  Tommy shot a fist in the air. “All right! Can we get popcorn?”

  “The largest bucket they have,” Annie said.

  “What are we gonna see?”

  “Whatever you want.”

  The pleased smile on her son’s face filled her with gratitude. She was so lucky to have him. Lucky to be living in a place she thought her son would one day be proud to call his hometown. So she might yen for companionship now and then. For all the negatives of her marriage to J.D., Tommy made the enduring of every one of them worthwhile.

  She didn’t need a crystal ball to tell her it wasn’t wise to dwell on her feelings for Jack. So she’d thought for sure he was going to kiss her last night. So he made Tommy laugh the kind of belly laugh little boys had a right to.

  So...he had a date with her sister tonight. And that made all the rest null and void.

  * * *

  CLARICE HADN’T BEEN this nervous since her first prom in high school. She glanced at the clock beside the fireplace in her living room. Six twenty-five. Five minutes if he was on time.

  Thanks to Annie, the entire meal was ready. Nothing to do there. She did another recheck of her makeup, glanced again at her sheer-stockinged legs to make sure there were no runs and brushed at the skirt of her black dress with the back of her hand.

  A car slowed on the street outside her house, turned into the drive with a recognizable rumble, lights piercing the living-room window before flicking off.

  He was here! Clarice’s stomach dropped twenty stories. It seemed like two hours before she heard footsteps on the walk outside, and then the doorbell rang.

  She counted to ten—don’t look too anxious, Clarice!—then went to open it. All the clichés applied to the man standing on her doorstep. He had on casual clothes, white shirt and jeans, a three-button blazer, and he looked good enough to devour.

  “Hi,” he said, holding up a bottle of red wine.

  “Come in,” she said, waving him inside with one hand, taking the wine with the other. “Thank you. You didn’t have to bring anything, though.”

  “Hope red was all right.”

  “Red is great. We’re having steak. Come on in.” She waved him inside, beckoning for him to follow her through to the kitchen.

  “Nice house,” he said.

  “Thanks. I like it. It’s not huge, but I’m gone a lot and don’t really need extra space to take care of.”

  She opened a drawer, rummaged around for a corkscrew and held it out to him. “Do you m
ind opening the wine?”

  “No,” he said and made short work of it while she pulled two glasses from the cupboard above the sink.

  “I was surprised to see you in church this morning.”

  “Figured it would do me good.”

  “Did it?” she asked, punctuating the question with her most flirtatious smile.

  “It certainly didn’t hurt,” he said, the smile he gave her back falling way short of the response she’d hoped for. Hmm. Too much? Maybe subtle was more appropriate, which wasn’t going to be easy. She didn’t do subtle. Annie did subtle.

  The point didn’t pass without a pinprick and a flash of the scene in her sister’s kitchen the night of Tommy’s birthday party. The look she’d seen on Jack’s face then was the one she wanted to see now. Only directed at her.

  She led the conversation in a general direction: tell me about your work, what sports do you like. A half hour or so later, she’d employed every Carnegie conversational tactic she knew. But Jack, unlike most men she’d known, had a way of turning a question around so that she ended up doing the talking. “So where did you and Annie grow up?” he asked before she could think of another Carnegie-approved question.

  “All over the place,” she said, hitching a thumb over her shoulder at the grill visible through the sliding glass door at the back of the kitchen. “Let me just throw these steaks on.”

  “Can I do that?”

  “Got it under control,” she said.

  He got up from the bar stool and reached for the platter where the two steaks had been marinating. “At least let me carry this.”

  Clarice smiled. “Thanks.”

  Outside, she lifted the grill lid, turned on the gas and then forked the steaks onto the rack and closed it again.

  “How do you like yours?” she asked.

  “Medium-well.”

  “Me, too,” she said. Good sign. Anything they had in common was a plus.

  They went back inside.

  “So what was it like, growing up all over the place?” he asked.

  “Daddy never gave up believing the next town would be where he hit it rich. Annie and I never had time at any of our schools to make a best friend. Our houses were always rented, usually with someone else’s belongings still scattered in closets and drawers. I didn’t mind it so much. But Annie hated it. She always wanted to live in one place, have the same best friend, ride the same school bus every day. One year we had just moved again, I think it was somewhere in Tennessee, right before school started, and Annie actually held a strike in our front yard. Made signs and everything. She didn’t want to go to a new school. Of course, being her sister, I was required to participate. Daddy was less than pleased to come home to find his two daughters had formed a union against him.”

  Jack smiled. And this time it was a real smile. “That must have been hard, starting all over with every new place.”

  “More so for Annie than me. She was shy to the point of being sick to her stomach the first day of school. I was more the type to go through the front doors both barrels blasting. Which made it easier, no doubt. My skin had gotten thick early on, and if anyone wanted to pick on Annie, they had to come through me first.”

  “Then she was lucky to have you,” Jack said.

  “We were lucky to have each other,” Clarice said. “We’ve always been close, except for the first couple years after she married J.D. He didn’t like the fact that we were more than sisters.”

  “Why?” Jack asked.

  “Oh, I guess because he knew I had him nailed from the beginning. Annie met J.D. her senior year in high school. He was in town with some minor-league team he was playing on. I was in college and not coming home too much. No one like J.D. had ever paid attention to Annie before, and he pretty much swept her off her feet. He sold her the whole batch of goods about why they should go ahead and get married. Anyway, they did, and I can’t say it was the wrong thing, because Tommy wouldn’t be here if they hadn’t, but I know Annie put her own goals on the back burner so J.D. could chase his dream.”

  “Playing ball?”

  Clarice nodded. “And I can say without hesitation that she was a big part of the reason he was able to get there. J.D. had talent, no doubt, but he didn’t make any money for a long time, and she supported them, really tried to make the marriage work. Which was like trying to push a wheelbarrow full of cement up Mount Everest. And when it came time for the divorce settlement, he somehow managed to make it seem as if Annie had been the one riding on his coattails all along.”

  “Was it a bitter divorce?” Jack asked, arms folded across his chest.

  “Not on Annie’s part. It should have been. No, it was just a case of J.D. thinking of what he always thinks about. His own self-interest.”

  “Sounds like you were the bitter one.”

  Clarice smiled. “The big sister in me, I guess.”

  “That’s admirable.”

  “Thank you.” Not exactly the type of positive feedback she was hoping to incite, but hey, it was a start. “Oooh, I better check those steaks.”

  “Let me,” Jack said.

  She handed him a fork and knife. He went outside, raised the lid and cut into the center of both pieces. He nodded, and she pulled a platter from the cabinet, passing it to him through the sliding glass doors.

  “Smells good,” he said.

  “Great. If you’ll pull them off the grill, I’ll get everything else ready.”

  They ate at Clarice’s small dining-room table. Halfway through the meal, guilt-laden by the number of thank-yous she’d proffered in response to Jack’s sincere-sounding compliments, she fessed up and admitted Annie was the talent behind the meal.

  “She’s the cook in the family,” Clarice said. “I have pretty much zero talent. Luckily, she enjoys sharing her skill.”

  He smiled at that. “That chocolate cake she made the other night was pretty unbelievable.”

  “My mom had this old Southern cookbook, and for some reason, Annie loved it. When she was about thirteen, she started making stuff out of that book. I think she tried everything in it. Anyway, I thought it was kind of weird for someone her age to be so into cooking when I was into begging Mom to let me start dating and all that stuff. But looking back on it, I think it was Annie’s way of setting down roots. She’s been trying to do that her whole life.”

  Clarice glanced up just then and caught the look on Jack’s face. And she knew in one of those lightbulb moments that it wasn’t for her. Where this man was concerned, it was never going to be for her.

  * * *

  AT JUST AFTER MIDNIGHT, Jack sat at the kitchen table with a batch of C.M. files spread out around him. Pete had called around eleven, and they’d talked for nearly an hour, sorting through some business details on which they’d both needed to state an opinion.

  “So when are you heading back?” Pete had asked when they’d finished with the business stuff. Jack had surprised himself with his own inability to answer the question. The trip back to Macon’s Point was not following the road map he had envisioned when he’d arrived here.

  He picked up one of the files, flipped through it again. He’d run across another piece of interesting information since yesterday. Three of C.M.’s best customers in North Carolina were no longer buying. Earlier that day, he’d made some phone calls and spoken to an irate owner who was happy to tell Jack why his store no longer bought C.M. product. He’d seen the same furniture at local flea markets for half of what he’d paid for it at wholesale.

  A couple more calls had gotten him in touch with one of the flea-market vendors. Jack had said he was a builder and needed a large amount of product for a series of spec houses he was furnishing. The vendor had assured him it wouldn’t be a problem. He had two warehouses of product to choose from. Jack agreed to meet him tomorrow at five o’clock. The man had then given him the addresses to the warehouses. Jack planned to drive down in the morning and take a look around himself.

  He stretched hi
s legs out in front of him now, dropped his head back against the chair and stared at the ceiling, conscience stinging. He never should have gone over to Clarice’s tonight.

  What had he been thinking? That having dinner with Clarice would get his mind off Annie?

  Boy, had that backfired.

  Annie.

  If he’d learned anything tonight, it was that she did not need another guy in her life for whom commitment wasn’t in the cards. He didn’t like the idea of being paired up with her ex-husband in a comparison contest. But he’d messed up one woman’s life by trying to do the exact thing he’d always said he’d never do. By denying what he’d known deep inside was true. Because if a man just didn’t believe in something, how could he ever follow it through?

  And Jack did not believe that the love a man and woman might start out with would last. He just didn’t. He’d seen proof of it in his father’s ability to let another woman into his life so quickly. And in the fact that three-fourths of the weddings where he’d been asked to be a groomsman since college had already ended in divorce.

  Annie was the kind of woman who did believe in the lasting variety. Who would keep looking for it until she found it. He did not need a flashing neon sign to tell him that; the very way she lived her life gave it perfect illustration.

  And he hoped that she did find it.

  He wasn’t a man who could give that to her, but in the short time he was here, did that mean they couldn’t be friends?

  * * *

  ANNIE LAY AWAKE, staring at the ceiling.

  She glanced at her alarm clock. Twelve-thirty.

  Strange that Clarice hadn’t called yet.

  She always called after a first date to report initial impressions to Annie and get her read on them.

  Ah, Annie, maybe she hasn’t called because the date’s not over yet.

  That realization came at her like a blast of arctic air.

  She fish-flopped onto her side and gave her pillow a quick jab it did not deserve.

  Go to sleep, Annie. Just go to sleep.

  CHAPTER TEN

  SHE WAS ON HER WAY out the door to take Tommy to school the next morning when the phone rang. Certain it would be Clarice, Annie picked it up and said, “Hey. Can I call you back from the car?”