“It’s been almost two weeks, Mom. Almost two weeks and people are still talking about this?”
Jenelle Bishop dusted maple sugar over the top of the cupcakes she’d just finished frosting and then set the tray in the display case. “It’s a boring time of year, you know. The foliage is past peak and the leaf-peepers are gone, but the ski area isn’t open. People have nothing to do between tourist seasons, honey.”
“I feel like you could have taken a more sympathetic direction than that,” Reyna said, using her finger to scoop a small remnant of buttercream frosting out of the empty mixing bowl.
“I gave you sympathy for days. I also told you to stay off of social media, and you refuse to listen. You ignoring my advice and my lack of sympathy at this point are not unrelated.”
“I can’t just stay off the internet, Mom.”
“Why?”
“Because.” She was sure there was a good reason, though she couldn’t come up with one at the moment. Sure, she had to be online for her side business nobody in this stupid town knew about, but she didn’t have to scroll through her Facebook feed or go on Twitter or, even worse, the YouTube channel with a bunch of subscribers that had picked up the video. #shesaidno and #hellonmen were not her favorite hashtags.
“Turn the sign to Open and then you go get to work,” her mother said. “Sally called me twice to see when her transmission would be done.”
“Oh, Sally Barnard? How come she hadn’t called me since I’m the one actually fixing her transmission? Because she knows I’ll tell her hashtag, it sucks to be you, that’s why.”
Jenelle laughed. “You need to let that go. She got caught up in the moment and she’s very sorry she added to your pain.”
“She wasn’t sorry until she blew her transmission,” Reyna pointed out, and then yelped when her mom snapped a towel and hit her in the butt.
“I love you. Go to work.”
After turning the bakery sign over to welcome customers, Reyna went down the hallway that connected the two businesses and entered the Bishop’s Auto Care office. It had been her dad’s and she’d grown up in the garage, often choosing his company over being home with her mom. When he’d gotten cancer, she’d left her job as a restaurant hostess, dropped the community college business classes she was taking and moved home from the city to help him out. After he passed away, she’d stayed to get her mother on her feet and help her open the cupcake shop, and then she’d never left. Now she couldn’t imagine doing anything else.
It was warm enough to have the big garage door open to the parking lot behind the building, and it wouldn’t be warm enough for much longer, so she raised it up and got to work. It didn’t take her long to finish with Sally’s transmission—she might have been dragging her feet just a little out of spite—and she’d just washed her hands when a truck pulling a trailer pulled into the lot.
It wasn’t until she saw Nash Electric on the door that she realized the truck was Brady’s, since Blackberry Bay didn’t suffer from a shortage of black, late-model Chevrolets, and the little tingle of excitement totally took her by surprise.
That was weird. Been there. Done that. Didn’t particularly enjoy the very short ride.
But the 1970 Chevelle on the trailer got her to step outside. It was rough—like one-wheel-in-the-vehicular-graveyard-level rough—but it was arguably one of the greatest cars Chevrolet ever made and if her bones were still good…
“Hey, Reyna.”
“Where did you get this?” she asked, skipping right over the niceties. She was too busy fighting the itch to climb up on the trailer and start looking her over.
“A friend of mine’s dad was clearing some land he bought and found her abandoned in some scrub brush at the back of the property. They did the paperwork to make it legal, but didn’t want to keep it, so I picked her up for next to nothing.”
Reyna laughed. “You? What are you going to do with it? You can’t even change your own oil.”
“I can change my oil,” he said, giving her a look. “I just choose not to.”
“Sure.” She stepped closer to the trailer, bending in an effort to see the car’s frame.
“I was hoping you and I could talk about restoring it,” he said, rubbing his palms together in a nervous gesture. “Like, maybe if it was a side project you worked on in your spare time, it wouldn’t cost a million dollars.”
She already had a side project, though she had no intention of telling him that. But it didn’t stop the thrill she felt at the thought of this challenge. Or the pang of regret that her dad wasn’t still here to take it on with her. They’d always talked about restoring an old muscle car, but they’d never gotten to it.
Maybe this Chevelle could fill the voids in her life, she thought. A void left behind by her dad. And the void that wasn’t going to be filled by the baby she so desperately wanted anytime soon.
Over the last couple of weeks, she’d come to terms with the fact her reaction to Lucas breaking things off with her after she rejected his proposal hadn’t been heartbreak. His disastrous proposal had humiliated her, but she hadn’t been sad to lose him, which meant she probably wasn’t falling in love with him anytime soon. He’d been nice and she had genuinely liked him. But mostly he’d been the sort of man she thought would make a good father and she’d hoped that would be enough.
Clearly, she was going about this all wrong. She didn’t necessarily want a husband. She just wanted a child.
“Reyna?”
Startled, she turned away from the car to face Brady. She’d forgotten he was there. “She is in really rough shape.”
“Nobody better than you to save her.”
“Flattery will get you… Well, it might get me to consider it.” She laughed and put her hands on her hips. “I won’t know anything until I get under her and check out the frame at the very least. If you want to drop the trailer, I can look her over for a couple of days and then we can talk about what it would take for a frame-off restoration, or if it’s even worth it.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
She stared at the car while he moved the truck and backed the trailer out of the way so he wouldn’t block the lot. Then, as he unhooked the trailer, she watched him. She’d always been physically attracted to him, though she’d never told anybody that. Not even her friends in school. And even after that disastrous night they’d hooked up, she still got a thrill from watching him.
Blackberry Bay’s resident ladies’ man, she mused as he bent over to chock the trailer wheels. He had no interest in being a husband, as far as she could see. And he’d probably be a pretty terrible one, based on his history with women.
As far as Reyna knew, the longest Brady had dated anyone was three months at the most. She could only assume he made them no promises since all the women he’d dated had taken the inevitable breakups unusually well. There had never been any whispers about him cheating, so he seemed to be capable of monogamy, but only for the short term. Definitely not husband material.
But he sure would make pretty babies.
And he had blue eyes, like her, so they’d probably have pretty, blue-eyed babies. And that thought hit her like an unexpected ocean wave, almost knocking her off her feet. It was ridiculous. She couldn’t ask Brady to father a baby for her.
She probably couldn’t afford it, anyway. She’d looked up the cost once, of having a baby with donated sperm so the fact she was hell on men wouldn’t be an issue, but just the estimated costs had been enough to put that dream on a maybe someday list. But someday never seemed to come around, and neither had Mr. Right. She wasn’t getting any younger.
“You okay?” Brady was finished dropping the trailer and she hadn’t even noticed. “You seem a little…distracted.”
She was very distracted, actually. “I’m fine. So give me a couple of days with her. Maybe stop by Saturday around lunchtime and we can talk about it?”
“Yeah. We can hit up the café, if you want. Grab something to eat while we discuss the car’s future?”
“Sounds good. I’ll be here.”
She stood outside the garage door until his truck was out of sight, and then went back inside with that single thought still echoing around in her mind. Maybe she could have a baby, after all.
Brady Nash’s baby.
* * *
On Friday night, Brady drove the twenty minutes to his brother’s house for their traditional end-of-the-week dinner. Chris’s wife, Marcy, taught fifth grade and they always celebrated the arrival of the weekend with Chris cooking while she soaked in the hot tub with a glass of wine. When they had their first child, his brother had roped Brady into helping him out and he’d become part of the tradition, too. And with two boys—one a rambunctious three-year-old and the other just starting to walk—Chris still needed all the help he could get.
As soon as Brady walked into the cookie-cutter Colonial house that looked like every other Colonial in the two-year-old housing development, he could hear the screeching. Not a mad screech, though. More like a kid trying to sound like a fire truck siren and, sure enough, his nephew CJ turned the corner from the family room at a run. Benny followed at a fast crawl, his palms and knees slapping on the laminate floors with a sound that made Brady wince.
CJ didn’t slow down as he launched himself into his uncle’s arms, though he thankfully stopped making the siren sound. Brady ruffled the blond curls the boy and his brother had both inherited from their mother, and then did the same to Benny when he used Brady’s pant leg to haul himself to his feet.
“Why are you so quiet all of sudden?” Brady heard Chris yell, and a few seconds later his brother stepped into the foyer with a pair of barbecue-sauce-coated tongs in one hand, with his other hand underneath to catch the drips.
“Uncle Brady’s here!” CJ yelled, just in case it wasn’t obvious.
“What happened to the cute little wee-woo?” Brady asked his brother, referring to the much quieter sound they’d taught the child that fire trucks made.
“Last week one went by us in full-siren mode when we were walking back to our car from winter coat shopping and it was not making a cute little wee-woo sound.”
“They go like this, Uncle Brady!” Before they could stop him, CJ took off and the house echoed with an earsplitting screech Brady never would have believed could come from such a small kid.
Benny was either trying to pants him or wanted to be picked up, so Brady swung the baby up and carried him into the kitchen behind Chris.
His brother picked his phone up off the counter and chuckled. “A text from Marcy, wanting to know if that’s a smoke detector going off or our son.”
While he responded to her, Brady looked over the ingredients on the massive center island and guessed Chris was making pizza for dinner, which was always fine by him. He was tempted to pop out the sliding glass door onto the deck and say hi to Marcy, but he knew from experience if Benny saw her, he would want to stay with her and Mom’s Friday night hot tub time was a kid-free zone. And Benny had Brady’s shirt balled in his fists, so he wasn’t ready to be put down.
“What can I do to help?” he asked his brother, even though he already knew what the answer would be.
“I’ve got this.” Chris waved a hand in the direction of the family room. “If you go hang out with the boys, I can finish this up. And you can take any leftover pizza home if you can get CJ to stop being a fire engine for five minutes.”
“Challenge accepted.”
All it took was the bucket of building blocks and letting the boys take turns knocking down the towers he built. For whatever reason, the blocks tumbling to the ground made them laugh. Or maybe it was the greatly exaggerated looks of horror he put on every time they did it. But it was a fun game that didn’t involve sirens, so as far as Brady was concerned, it was the best game ever.
Nothing made him happier than hanging out with his nephews. He liked kids in general, but he really liked these two, and in a perfect world he would have one or two of his own already so the group of cousins could grow up together and be almost as tight as a sibling group.
But it wasn’t going to happen. At the rate he was going in his search for a woman who took him seriously and wanted to start a family, there would be too big an age gap between his kids and Chris’s for them to be really close. He’d even expanded his dating pool to include tourists and dabbled in online dating, but all of the initial sparks fizzled after a few dates.
He was starting to wonder if he’d have to move to a new town if he wanted to find the future Mrs. Brady Nash. Blackberry Bay had shoved him into a box they thought fit him, but it didn’t. They called him a ladies’ man, so the women who expressed interest in him were only looking for a temporary good time with no pressure. Women who were looking for husbands and picket fences didn’t knock on Brady’s door.
And maybe in a new location, he’d meet a woman who knocked his emotional socks off. Every time he went on a second or third date with a woman and thought maybe this time it would stick, he’d run into Reyna. It wasn’t fair to ask any woman to be with a man who thought of another woman every time he closed his eyes, so he always broke it off.
Though he sometimes imagined it, he knew he’d probably never move away from Blackberry Bay—especially since his mom lived alone—so everybody would just go on thinking they’d put Brady in the right box. That he obviously couldn’t commit to one woman. But what they didn’t know—what only Chris knew—was that he could commit to one woman. But that woman was Reyna and he’d blown the one shot he had with her.
He’d been in love with her so long that his excitement over finally having her in his arms overpowered his self-control and he’d been too quick on the trigger. She hadn’t stuck around long enough to give him a chance to rally and try again. The next time they’d run into each other, it had been so awkward they’d barely spoken. The only way to put it behind them was to talk about that night and neither of them seemed to want to talk about it, so they’d just stopped speaking to each other instead.
When a very relaxed blonde woman appeared in the doorway, Brady put the last block on a tower and smiled at her as Benny knocked it over and laughed. “Hey, Marcy.”
“How’s the Nash Demolition Company doing?”
He laughed and pushed himself to his feet with a slight groan. He was getting too old for sitting on the floor. “The demolition is fine as long as nobody calls the F-I-R-E department.”
“I hope this is a very short phase,” she said, but her eyes were warm as she looked at her older son. “Okay, boys. Pick up the blocks while Uncle Brady helps serve the pizza, okay?”
Happy to avoid the cleanup, since there were blocks everywhere, Brady went into the kitchen, where Chris was using a rotary cutter to slice two mini cheese pizzas into triangles for CJ and little bites for Benny. He’d also made two big rectangular barbecue chicken pizzas, which seemed like a lot for three adults.
Brady laughed. “You hungry tonight?”
“I might have made too much.”
“I’m glad, since I get to take the leftovers home with me.”
“The big ones need to cool another minute or two before I cut them.” Chris pinned him with a familiar look that signaled a serious talk was coming Brady’s way. “Let’s talk about why you hauled an old Chevelle over to Bishop’s Auto.”
“Seriously?” Brady held out his hands in an are you kidding me? gesture. “You don’t even live in Blackberry Bay anymore. How do you already know about that?”
“I ran into Finn at Home Depot yesterday. He told me he’d heard from somebody else that you dropped an old Chevelle off with Reyna, but nobody seemed to know why, and he hadn’t had a chance to call you yet.”
Brady and Finn Weaver had been friends for so long, neither had a clear memory of the first time they met. He assumed it was kindergarten, since their friendship was solid enough by first grade so Finn was the only person Brady told when he decided he was going to marry Reyna Bishop someday. But apparently that friendship didn’t extend to him keeping his mouth shut when talking to Brady’s brother.
“Since when is it news that somebody dropped a car off at a car repair shop?”
Chris’s expression made it clear he’d be having none of that. “First off, what are you even doing with an old Chevelle? You’ve never been a car guy. And, secondly, Reyna? How many times are you going to burn yourself touching that hot stove?”
Brady’s skin heated and he regretted ever confiding in his brother about that night. He hadn’t even told Finn about it, and he told his best friend almost everything. “Who else would I take it to? Of course I’m going to take the car to Bishop’s.”
“Calling it Bishop’s doesn’t make it any less Reyna’s. And just how much is this ridiculous gambit to get back in Reyna’s good graces going to cost you?”
“It’s not a gambit. It’s a cool-looking car and, if it turns out I don’t like driving it and I sell it, I’ll make a good profit since I didn’t pay much for it. Assuming getting it back on the road doesn’t cost more than I’m willing to pay, in which case I’ll throw it up on the internet in as-is condition. I’ll get that number tomorrow.”
Chris leaned against the counter and folded his arms across his chest. “So what I’m hearing under all this car nonsense is that you’re meeting with Reyna tomorrow.”
“Leave it alone.”
“Okay, I’m sorry. I’m your brother, Brady. I worry about you and… That’s it. I just worry about you.”
“I know.” He picked up the boys’ mini pizzas and nodded toward the dining room. “Let’s go eat. I’m good, I promise.”
He was good as he could be, anyway, considering the fact his brother wasn’t wrong. He was going to show up at Reyna’s tomorrow and touch that hot stove again. And just like last time, he was going to get burned.