Chapter Two

Lacy pulled a shot of espresso, then steamed some lowfat milk in a small, stainless steel pitcher. She piled a cloudlike layer of foam atop the coffee in a thick ceramic cup, and then finished the drink by adding a sprinkling of cinnamon on the top.

She passed the cup across the counter to Kate Bennet, one of Lacy’s best friends and the owner of Swept Away, a bookstore a few doors down on Main Street. Lacy had passed the cup to Kate with her left hand, and as she began to pull the hand back, Kate reached out and grabbed, pulling it to her so she could examine the engagement ring that sparkled like starlight in the coffeehouse’s overhead lights.

“Good God, that stone is huge,” Kate exclaimed. “Whatever else he may be lacking, Brandon has excellent taste in jewelry.” As an afterthought, she added, “And when your back starts to hurt from lugging that thing around, he can give you an adjustment. So that’s handy.”

Jitters, the coffeehouse where Lacy worked as a barista, had a light crowd—about average for nine a.m. on a Tuesday in September. She was alone behind the counter. Connor, her coworker, was in the back room, organizing the stock and taking out the trash.

“What do you mean, ‘whatever else he may be lacking’?” Lacy asked defensively. “What is he lacking?” Lacy was well aware of what Brandon was lacking—ranging from his fashion sense to his taste in movies—but with the ring on her finger and the plans for the engagement party underway, she felt the need to defend him.

“Nothing,” Kate said. “I didn’t mean anything. It’s just … he does have that thing he does with his throat.” Kate raised her eyebrows and regarded Lacy.

Lacy wanted to protest that she didn’t know what Kate meant about Brandon’s throat. Unfortunately, she did know. Brandon had a tendency to clear his throat when making what he thought was a particularly salient point. When discussing politics or personal finance, he sounded like he was suffering from smoke inhalation.

“So he has one annoying habit,” Lacy said. “We all have annoying habits. I leave wet towels on the bathroom floor!”

“She does.” Genevieve Porter, owner of Main Street’s Porter Gallery, had just come in the front door to grab a coffee to go. She was dressed in her usual gallerywear: a form-fitting black dress and high-heeled black pumps. Her hair, a glorious mass of unruly red curls, was pinned up in a loose bun. She’d heard the tail end of their conversation, apparently, and chimed in to support Lacy regarding the towels. “I shared a hotel room with her that time we spent the weekend in San Francisco. She’s a slob.”

“Hey!” Lacy said.

“I’m sorry, honey, but you are.”

Lacy knew without asking that Gen wanted a large black coffee, no sugar. She poured it into a to-go cup, added a lid and a cardboard sleeve, and moved to the register to ring her up.

“Somehow, I can’t see Brandon being okay with the towels-on-the-floor thing,” Gen observed as she dug into her purse for her wallet.

“Is Ryan okay with the way you make that whistling noise in your sleep?” Lacy asked.

“I don’t do that.”

“You do. The trip to San Francisco, remember? You sound like my mother’s tea kettle.” Lacy took three dollars from Gen, put it into the cash register, and handed her some change.

Gen protested. “Well, that’s just—”

“We’ll work it out,” Lacy said, interrupting her. “People work things out.”

“I guess.” Gen sulked, looking put out about the whistling remark.

“What are we working out?” Rose Watkins had just come in the front door, and she wanted to get caught up.

It wasn’t an accident that all of Lacy’s three best friends had come into Jitters at about the same time. Their routine on workdays was to pop in for coffee sometime between nine and nine thirty just to check in with each other. But now, Lacy was starting to wish they’d all made their coffee at home.

“We’re working out the fact that Brandon clears his throat when he talks, and that Lacy leaves wet towels on the floor,” Gen informed her, her brows still gathered in an irritated pout.

“And that Gen whistles in her sleep,” Kate added helpfully.

“Ah. I guess that brings me up to speed,” Rose said.

Rose, who was more than five months pregnant and who was, therefore, watching her caffeine intake, had taken to ordering half-caff lattes in a compromise she’d reached with the baby’s father, a biology professor who’d moved in with her the same day that news of the baby had come out. One thing Rose had been unwilling to compromise on, though, was hair dye. Her hair was fire engine red this month, and her facial piercings—a delicate silver ring in one nostril and a silver barbell in her left eyebrow—appeared faintly pink in its reflection.

Lacy went to the espresso machine to pull the coffee for Rose’s drink.

“Honestly, Lacy, are you sure you even want to?” Rose asked. “Work things out with Brandon, I mean? It’s better to break it off now than to make a run for it at the church on your wedding day. Although, if you do that, I’ve totally got your back.”

The other two nodded in agreement.

“That’s just … Why the hell would I want to make a run for it?” Lacy was wiping the counter with a white towel, and she threw the towel down irritably. Ever since Lacy’s friends had learned about her engagement, they’d been dropping hints that Lacy might not want to go through with the wedding. At first, she’d just been puzzled, but now it was annoying the hell out of her. Marriage to Brandon meant a home, children, stability—all the things she wanted. Or, most of them, anyway. Why shouldn’t she have those things? Why shouldn’t she want them?

“It’s just … the two of you don’t seem all that … compatible.” Gen was looking at Lacy earnestly, standing at the counter with her coffee cup in her hand.

“We’re compatible!” Lacy threw her hands into the air in frustration. “We are! We’re compatible! He’s handsome, and smart, and he’s nice to me, and … and it’s easy for all of you to criticize, when you have what you want! You’ve all got these … these perfect men! What do you want from me? Do you want me to be alone? Is that it?”

Lacy hadn’t planned the outburst, but now that it had happened, she could see that it had been brewing for some time.

“Oh, sweetie.” Kate’s eyes were brimming with sympathy. “Can you take a little break and come sit down with us?”

She was on the verge of saying no—of kicking all of them out, in fact—but she was due for a ten-minute break, and she didn’t feel that she could leave things like this. If she’d had doubts about Brandon—which she told herself she didn’t, regardless of what they thought—then she could live with that. But when things weren’t right between her and her friends, well, that was something that just couldn’t stand.

 

“We don’t want you to be alone.” Kate was rubbing Lacy’s forearm as they all sat at a café table in a corner of the coffeehouse, with Connor peering over at them curiously from where he was manning the counter.

“Well … it seems that way sometimes,” Lacy said, her voice sullen.

“We just think … we’re not sure that Brandon is the guy who’s going to make you happy,” Rose said.

“You don’t want me to be happy!” Lacy tossed her hands skyward again. “You don’t want me to have what you have! Why not? Why shouldn’t I have what you have?”

“You should,” Gen said. “You should have exactly what we have. That’s why Brandon isn’t the right guy for you. Because he’s not going to give it to you. He’ll try, but he can’t. Lacy, he can’t.” Gen was looking at Lacy with the intense, serious gaze of someone staging an intervention. Which, now that Lacy thought about it, she was.

It was easy for Kate, Gen, and Rose to judge Lacy’s relationship. After all, each one of them had found what appeared to be true love. Kate was living with Jackson, one of the top chefs in Cambria. Gen had married Ryan, a hot, ridiculously rich rancher. And Rose was having a baby with Will, a truly sweet guy who, Lacy had no doubt, would walk through fire if Rose asked him to.

So what if Lacy’s relationship with Brandon lacked that kind of passion? It didn’t make Brandon any less of a good man. It didn’t make Lacy any less worthy of love.

“Does this mean none of you are coming to my engagement party?” Lacy sat with her arms folded over her middle, her gaze firmly on the tabletop. “I wouldn’t, if I felt that way.”

“Of course we’re coming. Don’t be stupid,” Kate said.

“Honey.” Rose put a hand on Lacy’s arm. “We’re your best friends. If you killed somebody, we’d tell you that murder is wrong. But we’d still help you hide the body.”

 

The Vegas job hadn’t been installed and unveiled yet, but after months of intense work, the glass was done. That meant Daniel had to get back to work on the bowls and vases, the plates and candleholders that usually made up so much of his income.

Bowls and vases might not be as artistically satisfying as a big installation, but they were popular with the tourists who streamed through Cambria year-round. He regularly had pieces in a half dozen shops around town. He placed the lower-priced items—the kinds of things a middle-class shopper might buy on impulse during a weekend in town—in boutiques on Burton Drive and Main Street. The higher-ticket items—the larger pieces that would appeal to collectors—usually were shown at the Porter Gallery.

The Vegas deal had already gotten him some press, and Gen Porter said some of her clients were inquiring about buying his pieces—even clients who’d never shown an interest in him before. The flip side of that was that he’d been so busy he had nothing new to show them.

If he wanted to capitalize on the publicity from the Eden job, he had to get back to work, and he had to do it now.

That was fine with him. The business of art—the schmoozing, the accounting, chasing publicity—was a necessary part of his work, and he knew that. But in his heart, he didn’t give a rat’s ass about that end of things. He wanted to work. He wanted to create things. He wanted to put his soul into the glass and see what that looked like.

The rest of it only mattered because he had bills to pay.

At the moment, he was working on a vase. A vase wasn’t flashy, it wasn’t high-profile. A vase wouldn’t get him a mention in Art in America. But there was a certain satisfaction in the shape, in the graceful lines. He started by gathering molten glass on the end of a blowpipe. Then he rolled the glass back and forth on the marver—a flat steel slab—to get a rough cylindrical shape. Into the furnace, then back to the marver for shaping. Back into the furnace, and then he rolled the hot glass over dark red powder and put that into the furnace again to melt it onto the piece. Now more shaping, this time with an inches-thick slab of wet newspaper that was rounded and blackened with use. The color streaked across the piece in fiery waves.

He had to keep the glass hot—somewhere in the neighborhood of a thousand degrees Fahrenheit—and he had to keep it in constant motion to preserve the shape. One hand on the blowpipe, turning and turning, one hand on his tools, shaping the glass, forming it into the vision he had for his piece.

Sometimes the vision changed in the middle of the work; the feel of the thing suggested to him what it wanted to be. Daniel believed in rolling with the intuition, in being as flexible and malleable as the molten glass itself. You had to listen to the glass. You had to hear the story it had to tell.

Somewhere in the middle of the meditative process of heating and shaping, heating and shaping, Lacy Jordan popped into his mind. If he worked with Vince Jordan on the house thing, then maybe Daniel would get to spend some time with Lacy. He’d been around her a lot, mostly as part of the big group that included his friends and their significant others. He’d been intrigued by Lacy, and yeah, he could admit that at first, it was about how she looked. But there was more to it than that. He wanted to know how she thought. Images of Lacy worked their way through his mind as he carried the blowpipe back to the furnace and heated the glass until it glowed.

What he did—it was all about the fire. The heat was everything.

Daniel repeated the cycle of blowing and shaping and heating. He was starting to get somewhere with the piece. He’d been doing this long enough that he didn’t have to think about it much anymore—he felt it. The process relaxed him, soothed him, as he thought about everything from books he’d read to movies he’d seen to problems with family, with women.

He looked at the glass form on the end of his pipe and admired the streaks of color. He wondered if Lacy would like it.

Lacy. There she was again, in his thoughts, unbidden.

Jesus, it was hot in here.