Chapter Seventeen

Jitters usually closed around six p.m. on a weeknight. But on the weekends, when Cambria’s tourism was at its peak, the coffeehouse stayed open as late as ten, serving hot drinks and snacks to people who weren’t quite ready to retire to their hotel rooms.

Live music wasn’t a regular evening offering at the coffeehouse, but they did it on occasion; it was usually one guy with an acoustic guitar, a tip jar, and some CDs to sell.

Tonight, Lacy had put a chalkboard sign out on the sidewalk announcing LIVE MUSIC, 8-10 P.M. She’d added a chalk drawing of a guitar and a steaming cup of coffee just to amuse herself. They weren’t expecting much of a crowd, but it didn’t matter; the singer worked for free, so if they got ten people drinking lattes and enjoying the music—along with some additional takeout traffic—they would consider it worth the effort.

Lacy’s shift had started at four, and now, at 7:45, she and Connor were moving tables and chairs around and bringing out a platform they kept in the back room to create a stage for the guitarist, who’d just arrived with his guitar in a case slung across his back.

In a venue of this size—barely a thousand square feet—they shouldn’t have needed a microphone, but they wanted the guitarist to be heard over the milk steamer and the whir of the blenders they used to make their frothy iced drinks. Plus, the owner thought that if the music was loud enough to waft out onto Main Street, it might attract more of a crowd. So Connor brought the sound system out of the back room and set up a speaker and a single microphone on a stand atop the platform.

By eight, the guitarist, a guy in his mid-forties with a blue chambray shirt and prematurely gray hair that was long enough to curl slightly at the collar, was settled into a chair on the platform, singing a cover of Jason Mraz’s “I’m Yours.”

They’d turned down the lights a little for the sake of atmosphere, and within twenty minutes they had a medium-sized crowd of people sitting at the café tables, sipping cappuccinos, and listening appreciatively—or at least passively—to the music.

Lacy was going through the motions of doing her job—making lattes, ringing up sales, making sure the tables were wiped and the trash cans were emptied—but she was having a hard time focusing, because she couldn’t seem to stop watching the door for Daniel.

She’d already had to remake two drinks because she’d gotten them wrong—a mocha that was missing the chocolate and a latte sans the drizzle of caramel sauce the customer had requested—and she mentally berated herself for her silly, teenage behavior.

When she dropped a drink behind the counter and had to retrieve the mop from the back room to clean up her mess, Connor gave her a pointed look.

“What’s going on with you, Lacy?” he asked, not unkindly. “Is everything okay?”

“Yeah, yeah. Of course. Yes,” Lacy answered as she mopped up coffee and milk.

“Because if this is about a guy, I can kick his ass for you.”

Lacy had been working with Connor for a couple of years now, and the boy—she thought of him as a boy, since he was nearly ten years younger than she was—had been flirting with her for that entire time. She didn’t mind, though. It was the kind of benign, companionable flirting a guy did when both he and the object of his flirtation knew that he was hopelessly out of his depth.

“It’s not about a guy,” Lacy lied. Just then, the front door of the shop opened, and the unmistakable form of Daniel Reed filled the doorway. Lacy froze in the middle of her cleanup efforts, having completely forgotten what she was supposed to be doing.

“Oh, really?” Connor said, glancing at Daniel and then at Lacy, a smirk on his face.

“What?” Lacy asked him. “I’m sorry, did you say something?”

 

When Daniel walked in the door, his eyes went to Lacy immediately. It just seemed to work that way. His attention had a way of going right to her, wherever she was, whatever she was doing. It didn’t matter that she was crouched halfway down behind the counter. He didn’t have to look for her; he could feel her.

The guy on the makeshift stage was singing “More Than Words” to maybe a dozen people scattered among the café tables. Daniel didn’t know the singer, and he thought that he knew just about everybody in Cambria. Must have been a guy from Morro Bay, or maybe Paso Robles.

Daniel didn’t want to disturb Lacy when she was trying to do her job, so he found himself a table and sat down to relax and take in the atmosphere.

It had been a long day. Daniel had been commissioned to do a large piece for a hotel in Los Angeles: a five-foot-tall sculpture that would sit on a table in the center of the lobby. He’d toured the place—all cool, modern minimalism—and he knew how he wanted the sculpture to look. The trouble was, he couldn’t do a piece of that size and weight alone. And the assistant he’d used on the Eden job had just moved up to the Bay Area. Daniel needed someone new.

He didn’t have time to train someone from the ground up. He’d talked to the guys down in Harmony—they did a lot of glass work down there—in the hopes of borrowing somebody for a short period, but that hadn’t panned out. Now, he was going to have to use a student from the Art and Design program at Fresno State. You never knew what you were going to get with a student. He’d interviewed one today, and after an hour of conversation, Daniel doubted the guy would be able to find his ass with a mirror and a GPS program. That left him back at square one.

He’d have to deal with that tomorrow, though. Now, the presence of Lacy Jordan—she didn’t have to be with him, she just had to be in the room—was washing over him like a cool, gentle breeze.

He caught her eye, and he grinned at her with what he knew had to be a pathetic, lovestruck expression.

The kiss.

He kept remembering the kiss.

Lacy gave him a little wave, but she was busy doing her job, so he just sat and watched her. Faded blue jeans, torn at the knees. A fitted white tee with a low neckline that showed a creamy expanse of tanned skin. A white apron tied around her waist. Golden hair piled atop her head in a messy bun. Her usual, effortless grace was nowhere in evidence at the moment; as he watched, she nearly dropped a tray of drinks on a customer’s head before righting herself at the last moment.

She seemed rattled by something.

It occurred to him that he might be that something, and the thought wasn’t an unwelcome one.

He liked the idea that he might have gotten under her skin—though he would have preferred to be on it instead.

Once all of the customers had been served and she got a brief break, she came to his table and hovered nervously over him. “Hey,” she said. She was holding a round tray, and she partially released her death grip on it to wave at him with the fingers of one hand.

“Hey,” he said back. “Can you sit for a minute?”

Lacy looked around to make sure the other customers were all well tended, then slid into the seat across from Daniel. “Glad you could make it,” she said, giving him a shy smile that just slayed him. Then her eyes widened. “Oh. Can I get you a coffee?”

“Nah, I’m good,” he told her. And he was. Better than good, in fact, now that she was sitting with him.

The guitarist segued into “And I Love Her,” a classic from the Beatles, and Daniel thought he sounded pretty good, which wasn’t a given; these coffeehouse deals could go either way. The other customers seemed to be enjoying themselves, either talking quietly among themselves or swaying gently to the music.

The nervous tension between Daniel and Lacy was thick; it was the tension of having had a first kiss, and not knowing where things would go from there. Would they date? Would they kiss again? Would they perhaps, God willing, sleep together? Would it be more than that? And did both of them want the same things?

Daniel thought about making small talk, things about his day or hers, observations about the weather, or about the annual Scarecrow Festival that had just ended the weekend before.

Instead, he opted to directly address the elephant in the room.

“About the kiss,” he said, leaning toward her.

Lacy looked a little bit startled. “What about it?” she said.

“I’d like to do it again.” He felt the flutter of butterflies in his stomach, but plowed ahead anyway. “Not right here, obviously. But sometime. Sometime soon. Just so you understand my thought processes here. I really enjoyed the kiss. A lot. And, yeah. I’d like to … explore that further.”

He wasn’t at all sure that this was wise, but he also wasn’t sure it was still a decision he could make, a thing he could think about and say yes or no to. If she was agreeable, then it seemed he could no more stop himself from kissing her again—as soon as possible—than he could stop himself from breathing or blinking.

“Daniel—”

“Just think about it,” he said, interrupting her. He’d interrupted her because, if she was going to say she didn’t want that, too, then he hoped to delay hearing it as long as he could.

A couple of people strolled in the front door from Main Street and headed up to the counter.

“I’d better get back,” she said. She gathered up her tray and went behind the counter to make lattes or hot teas or whatever the hell the new arrivals had come for.

The fact that she hadn’t answered him—that she’d hurried off without any indication of where she stood on the matter—rattled him. Of course she had to work. Of course she did. But had she hurried away just a little more quickly than she otherwise would have? And if so, what did that mean?

Well, hell. He’d stated his intentions—the information was out there. And now she had her job to do, so he figured he should probably get the hell out of there just in case her answer was no. The ball was in her court, and if she chose not to lob it back over the net, then continuing to sit here would be painfully awkward.

Not that it wasn’t already.

He was still pondering what to do when the lights went out and he heard a crash.