Kai doubted it.
“Oh, and I heard that you spent the afternoon with Flick. I’m presuming you weren’t playing Monopoly?” Sawyer demanded.
There was no right way to answer that question so Kai kept quiet, wincing internally. Crap. “How did you hear that?”
“It’s Mercy, dude. Nothing stays a secret, ever,” Sawyer pinned him to his seat with a hard glare. “Especially since they now have an online bulletin board.”
"What are you talking about?” Kai asked, puzzled.
“The Mercy OnLine forum. I emailed you the link. You’ve been here a couple of days and you’ve already made the board twice.”
Kai threw up his hand. This damned town! “You're shitting me.”
“Nope. All true. Anyway, I’m not going to ask what’s going on between you—that’s your business—but if she sheds one tear over you, I’m going to wipe the floor with your face. We clear?”
Kai knew Sawyer well enough to recognize the seriousness of the threat. “Yeah. Crystal.”
Who was the famous author who said the only thing worse than being talked about was not being talked about at all? Oh, none of the customers—or any members of Flick’s extended family— had the guts to come out and directly ask her why she spent the afternoon in Kai's house, but she’d lived in this town long enough to know that they were thinking about it, and speculating their heads off.
And she wasn’t even going to think about that damn forum!
Didn’t these people, her aunts, and her cousins, and all their friends, have something better to do than talk about her love life? It seemed not. Flick gave the outside tables a vicious wipe-down as she and her staff prepared to close the bakery for the day. She just hoped her brothers, especially Jack, and Sawyer, stayed in the dark.
She wasn’t too worried about her dad though. He was, thank God, generally clueless, and seldom paid any attention to family gossip. He was a professional ostrich, able to shove his head in the sand whenever life got tough. It was the way he coped with Andy’s, and then her mom’s death, he checked out emotionally. She frequently envied his ability to do just that. She’d never been able to create that distance between herself and an event like her father, brothers, and male cousins managed to do. Whether it was a relationship, a death, a breakup, or a fight, she immersed herself in the situation, sinking into what was frequently a hot bubbling mess, rolling over and over in it until her soul reached saturation point.
It was what she always did. She had no concept of taking a breath, thinking things through, or finding some perspective. Since her return to Mercy a few months ago, she’d been trying to be a little less impulsive, calmer. More thinking and less acting. She was trying to be more authentic and not to be a reflection of what was happening around her.
She’d thought that she might be getting the hang of being just Flick, but then Gina and her house full of secrets happened, and Kai came along. But Kai was just a distraction, a fun way to spend some time. He wasn’t another man who would cause havoc in her life because he was gone, gone, gone. Thank God, she thought, because he was the type of man who would turn her inside out and flip her over.
And not just sexually, although he’d done that too. Metaphorically and, she blushed, literally.
“Flick?”
Flick was so deep in her thoughts that she jumped at the hand on her shoulder and whipped her head around. When she saw who was standing next to the table she straightened, a huge smile on her face. “Mr. Mo! Oh, wow, it’s so good to see you!”
Flick gripped the man’s still-strong arms and dropped a quick kiss on his cheek, breathing in his familiar scent. It was the smell of her childhood, of running into this bakery after school and having to hug Moses, who smelled of Ivory soap and flour, before he’d give her a piece of still-warm ciabatta slathered with homemade butter. “Oh, I’ve missed you so much.”
“The bakery looks wonderful,” Moses said, a smile reaching his faded blue eyes.
“Thank you. Are you back in town? I heard you left the bakery to go the city a few years back; a while before Grandma died,” Flick said, noticing the blond-haired moppet who had her head tucked into Moses' side. She was looking up at Flick with deep green eyes and when Flick smiled at her she turned her face away and buried her head under her grandfather’s arm.
Moses stared at the lime green pots dripping with geraniums. “We went to my daughter, to help look after her.”
Flick remembered his dark-eyed daughter, who was a little more than ten years older than her. “Maria? How is she now?”
Moses shook his head. “She died of breast cancer about six months ago. She was a single mom, so the wife and I are looking after Melanie here.”
Oh God, Flick thought, her heart bumping and her eyes burning in sympathy. “Ah, I’m so, so sorry. That’s dreadful.”
Moses shrugged. “We still have the house here and it’s cheaper to live here than in the city, so we came back.”
Flick didn’t want to use the word “father” in front of the little girl. “And the paternal figure? Is he part of the equation?”
“Maria never told us who that was, and she passed with the knowledge.”
Flick looked down into Melanie’s face and felt a tug of awareness. There was something so damn familiar about that face...
Rufus sat up and she half-jumped when he emitted a high-pitched, excited bark. Looking past Moses, her heart fluttered when she saw Kai, dressed in black cargo pants and a gray long-sleeved henley t-shirt, climbing out of what looked to be a brand-new Range Rover. What a beautiful machine, Flick thought, her body tingling.