Moonstone Beach

  Chapter Four

  “He’s hung up on his ex. He’s a tourist, which means he’s leaving soon. And he doesn’t read.” Kate held up three fingers, ticking off the reasons she should say no. The four of them had pulled her small dining table out onto the back deck, and they were eating moo shu chicken, egg rolls, and sweet and sour pork as the sun dipped toward the ocean. Rose had selected a German Riesling, and they were most of the way through the first bottle, with a light breeze on their faces and the sound of crashing waves in the background.

  “But, God, there’s his looks,” Gen said. A stray strand of curly red hair had fallen into her face with the breeze, and she pushed it away as she took another sip of wine.

  “Yes. The looks count for at least three items on the plus side,” Rose said before crunching into an egg roll.

  “Also on the plus side,” Lacy said, “is the fact that you need practice.”

  Kate lifted an eyebrow. “Practice?”

  “You really do,” Rose said, pointing one black-lacquered fingernail at Kate. “You haven’t dated anybody since Marcus. And that was, what? Two years ago?”

  Marcus Hoffman, Kate’s husband for six years, had been a cheater and a manipulator. When he’d finally left, it had been more a relief to Kate than a trauma. But the way he’d treated her for their entire marriage had left her so wounded that she hadn’t even been able to think about men until recently. When she’d told her friends that maybe—not for sure, but maybe—she might be ready to get out there again, they’d thrown themselves into the task of shoving the baby bird out of the nest.

  “Yes, I have!” Kate demanded. “I’ve dated!”

  “Okay. Name them. Who have you gone out with since Marcus?” Gen asked.

  “I … Well …” Kate put up her hands in surrender. “Okay, maybe I haven’t dated much since Marcus. But I know how to date.”

  “Of course you do, honey,” Lacy said soothingly, putting a hand on Kate’s arm. “But you might be a little rusty, that’s all.”

  Kate stalled by shoveling some more sweet and sour onto her plate and opening the second bottle of Riesling. After she’d poured some into her glass and offered it to the others, she sighed. “So, what we’re saying, then, is that Zach could be, what, a refresher course? Fine. But isn’t that kind of unfair to him? If I know it’s not going anywhere, isn’t it wrong for me to use him for practice?”

  “No! That’s the beauty of the situation!” Rose insisted. “He’s going home in a few days, and he’s in love with someone else, so he’s not planning on it going anywhere anyway!”

  Kate considered this. “Well, I guess that’s true.”

  “Look, you’re not out to marry him,” Rose said as she arranged a delicate moo shu pancake on her plate. “But if you get a nice dinner at Neptune while enjoying a little eye candy, what’s the harm?”

  Despite the unassailable logic of their arguments, Kate stared into her wine glass and felt glum. “If this is such a great idea, why don’t one of you go out with him?”

  “He didn’t ask us,” Gen said. “He asked you.”

  “Well.”

  “You’re going,” Lacy announced, as though the decision had been hers to make all along. “And then we’ll have a post-game debriefing after.”

  Rose sighed. “I love a good post-game debriefing. Especially if we get to talk about sex.”

  Kate pointed at her. “We won’t be talking about sex. There won’t be any sex to talk about. It’s a first date. And probably the only one with this guy. Jeez.”

  “Yeah.” Rose seemed to deflate slightly. “Well, maybe we can just talk about sex in general.”

  “Sure, honey.” Kate rubbed her arm. “We can do that.”

  Kate and Zach met at Neptune at seven p.m. on a Wednesday. Gen had insisted on coming up from her downstairs apartment to help Kate dress for the occasion. She was wearing a silky knee-length slip dress in royal blue with a pair of low-heeled silver sandals. Her short-cropped black hair was carefully styled, and the color of the dress brought out the intense blue of her eyes. When she’d finished dressing, Gen had sat back, sighed, and said she looked stunning.

  When she walked into Neptune and saw Zach sitting at the bar waiting for her, she had to admit that Gen’s choices might have been effective. The look on his face when he took in the sight of her—the way his gaze traveled over every inch of her—suggested that she’d achieved the desired effect.

  Falling on her face the first time they’d met might have been good strategy, but she didn’t think it would play as well a second time, so she was glad she’d chosen shoes that were attractive but more sensible.

  “Kate,” he said, standing to meet her. “You look gorgeous.”

  So do you, she thought. He was wearing a black dress shirt, open at the collar, and black slacks. He was sporting a day or two worth of stubble that gave him a rugged look, as though he’d just come from a day of rock climbing. His dark eyes and chiseled jaw could have come straight out of a GQ ad. Other women in the restaurant were stealing covert looks at him. Some were less covert than others.

  He put a hand on her arm. “Shall we get our table?”

  “Of course.”

  He flagged the hostess, an acquaintance of Kate’s from her Thursday yoga class. Janie, a tall blonde who proved to be far more strong and flexible than Kate when performing everything from downward dog to the side plank, took them to a table in the center of the room.

  “You look fabulous, Kate,” Janie said as she seated them and placed menus in front of them.

  “Thanks.” Kate accepted a menu and got settled into her chair. “It’s no thanks to yoga, though. I’ve missed class the past couple of weeks.”

  “You should come back,” Janie said. As she talked to Kate, her eyes kept cutting toward Zach and the way he looked in a close-fitting shirt. “We’ve got a new instructor, and she’s really good.”

  “I will.”

  “I’ll tell Jackson you’re here. Enjoy your meal!”

  Janie swept off to attend to other customers before Kate could protest. She did not want Jackson Graham to know she was here. That’s all she needed while on a date—to have him come out and grouse over her choice of wine, or which appetizer she chose to precede which main course. The man thought he was the only one qualified to eat.

  And maybe that wasn’t the only reason she would prefer for him to stay safely tucked away in the kitchen. If he came out here to say hello, her female hormones might implode over having both him and Zach in such close proximity. Zach, with his movie star looks, and Jackson, with his—well, everything.

  She was in her own world pondering this when she realized Zach was saying something.

  “I’m sorry. I was distracted. What was that?”

  “I was asking, who’s Jackson?”

  “Oh, he’s the head chef. Jackson Graham.”

  “And how do you know him?”

  Kate arranged the menu in front of her. “It’s a small town. Everybody knows everybody.”

  “Ah.”

  The waitress—someone Kate also knew, but not well enough to force the need for small talk—came to take their drink order. Zach chose a bottle of wine without asking Kate’s opinion. To her horror, it was a white zinfandel. She personally didn’t mind drinking white zin, but she knew without a doubt that if Jackson came out to their table to say a friendly hello, there’d be hell to pay. Jackson placed white zinfandel on the same level of taste and sophistication as Red Bull or cherry Kool-Aid, and she knew from her conversations with Rose that he strenuously protested its presence on the Neptune wine menu at all. Well, at least if he came out here spitting fire, she’d be able to say that Zach chose it. The results might be fun. She smiled privately at the thought.

  They studied the menu, placed their orders—porterhouse steak for him and sea bass for her—and settled in to begin the excruciating ritual of first-date small talk.

  “So, Zach, how long are you staying in Cambria?” Kate
sipped at her wine, reflecting that she would have preferred a nice chardonnay.

  “Oh, I’ve gone home already.”

  She raised her eyebrows at this, surprised. “Really?”

  “Yes. I was only at the B&B for a few days. I came back to see you. I live in San Luis Obispo. Less than an hour on Highway 1, and here I am.”

  Taken aback, Kate said, “Oh.”

  “Look,” he said. “I know I talked a lot about Sherry when we met before. But I really think it’s time for me to move on. And I’m very attracted to you.”

  Suddenly, everything Kate had assumed about this date was no longer true. This … whatever it was didn’t have a built-in expiration. He lived close enough to Cambria that a relationship was on the table, if they wanted it. Which she did not. He didn’t read, he ordered white zinfandel—and there was also the ex-wife thing. Why was she even here? Then she looked up at his face, which appeared to have been chiseled out of marble. Oh, right. That’s why. Was she really one of those people who went out with someone just because of their looks? Not entirely. She was here partly because her friends had insisted on it. And they were right about one thing. She did need practice with men.

  It’s just dinner. It’s practice.

  Still, she felt a bit smarmy. Was she using him as arm candy? Was she just like the popular guys she knew in high school who were interested in girls only because of nice hair and a good pair of breasts?

  Okay, I am not interested in him for his breasts. She felt a hysterical laugh start to bubble up, so she drowned it in white zinfandel.

  “What are you thinking?” he asked. “Seems like you’ve got a lot going on in there.” He pointed to his own temple.

  “I’m sorry. I’m thinking about the store,” she said, covering. “Sales have been down, and we’ve got a big event coming up that could give us a much-needed boost if I handle it right. I can’t screw it up.”

  “Oh yeah, the Art Walk,” he said.

  “Right. The thing is, it’s kind of turned into a competition. The shop with the most impressive Art Walk event gets bragging rights for the whole year. It’s gotten bigger and bigger every year. It’s silly, but …”

  “You want to win.”

  She laughed. “Yeah. I really do.”

  “It’s like real estate,” he said.

  “Really? How so?”

  He explained. He began explaining before the entrees arrived, he continued explaining after their plates were placed on the table, and he explained some more as they ate. Kate was halfway through her sea bass while he was still explaining. She suddenly remembered why real estate agents had such a reputation for being blowhards. He told her about his biggest sales, his sales average, how that compared to the sales averages of other Realtors in San Luis Obispo, his strategy during an open house, his strategies for staging, and his philosophies on how to select a client to work with. By the time he got to, “… and the way I look doesn't hurt,” Kate was ready to climb out the bathroom window.

  She didn’t enjoy rejecting men—he didn’t seem like a bad guy, after all—but it was clear this wasn’t the man for her, even for a fling. She decided to steer the conversation in a direction that might give her a clear way out.

  “So, tell me more about your ex-wife.”

  His face changed, going from arrogant know-it-all to vulnerable child, and Kate hurt for him. “You don’t want to talk about her, do you?” he said.

  “Well, I just … Back at the store, you said you might need someone to talk to.”

  So he did. He began with how they’d met, then proceeded with their courtship, wedding, and early years together. By the time he got teary-eyed over the tale of their breakup, Kate was no longer thinking of it as a date. She was thinking of it as somebody comforting a broken-hearted friend. And she was a hell of a lot better at that than she was at dating.

  Jackson Graham was in the middle of bitching out the salad chef for a wilted piece of red leaf lettuce when Janie breezed by, mentioning that Kate Bennet was in the restaurant with a date.

  The information filtered into his brain in stages. The mention of the name—Kate Bennet—made his hands and feet tingle in a not unpleasant way. But then the next word to penetrate—date—made the blood pound in his ears so that he could no longer hear the excuses being made by the salad chef.

  He wrapped up his diatribe with “Just goddamned fix it,” and the salad chef took the opportunity to get himself out of sight as quickly as possible.

  Kate Bennet is here with some guy?

  He was torn between his need to see the guy and the impulse to simply throw himself into his work and pretend he’d never heard what Janie had said. When another waitress came into the kitchen and said some local muckety-muck wanted to give Jackson his compliments, he decided it was his opportunity to do a little sleuthing.

  Not that he cared what Kate Bennet did, or who she dated.

  Oh, hell, who am I kidding?

  He took off an apron stained with Bearnaise sauce and stormed out of the kitchen in search of the muckety-muck. On his way to the man’s table, he searched the dining room with his peripheral vision, and he saw her almost immediately. It was funny how that worked. His eyes were instantly drawn to her wherever she was in the room. He’d have found her if she’d been hiding in a closet, buried under a half-dozen blankets. Something about her energy drew his attention. It always had. It likely always would. The air around her buzzed with electricity, with light. It was impossible not to see her.

  The first thing he noticed was that she looked beautiful. No surprise there. The second thing he noticed was that the asshole with her was insanely, stupidly handsome. He felt a surge of anger inside his cave-man brain, wanting to pound the guy into dust right next to Table Five. Since that would have been bad from a career standpoint, he shut down the part of his mind that was glaring red and proceeded to the muckety-muck’s table to hear that his portobello risotto was genius. Which it was, obviously.

  Having exchanged pleasantries with the local official, who was a city councilman or a county supervisor or some damned thing, he took a moment to weigh his options. He could skulk back to the kitchen and pretend he hadn’t seen her. Or he could go by her table on the pretense of inquiring about her meal. At first he leaned toward skulking, but then he got mad at himself, thinking, Why should I sneak around? This is my damned restaurant.

  And so, to spare himself the humiliation of sneaking on his own home territory, where if anyone should be sneaking, it should be her, he took a deep breath, steeled his resolve, and strolled over to her table—it was a stroll rather than a skulk—and presented himself as though he were just doing his job.

  “Kate.” He smiled, though it felt strange as it was not his usual facial expression, and looked down at her. The next words he had planned to say fled from his brain like sparrows from a nest as he saw how she looked. “Uh … I … wow.”

  “Hello, Jackson.”

  She was looking at him expectantly, and he realized he was supposed to say something. “I … um … Janie told me you were here, and I wanted to check and make sure everything was satisfactory.”

  “It is. The sea bass is delicious.” She smiled, and he felt the smile like warm honey spreading through his chest.

  He turned to the date and extended his hand. “Jackson Graham. Head chef.”

  “Zach Lockwood. Kate mentioned you. The food is great.”

  Kate added, “Zach has really been enjoying this bottle of white zinfandel with his porterhouse steak.”

  White goddamned zinfandel? With a goddamned steak? There were no words. Such an offense against taste and reason called for violence, but again, there were career concerns to consider. Speechless and outraged, he looked toward Kate, and saw that she was smirking at him, a delicate hand shielding her mouth as she tried to suppress a giggle.

  She was playing with him, a state of affairs he would have welcomed under different circumstances.

  He took a deep breath and called up
on his inner calm.

  “You know,” he said, turning toward Zach and gesturing toward the bottle on the table, “this isn’t one of our better wines. Please allow me to send something out to you as my gift.”

  “Thanks—that’s really nice—but we’re enjoying this. Right, Kate?” Zach looked to her for affirmation.

  Kate’s mirth was barely suppressed. “Oh, yes. It pairs so well with everything. Steak, sea bass … Wouldn’t you agree, Jackson?”

  He felt much like a cartoon character in the moment before the pig or frog or whatever turns bright red and flies into the air and steam comes pouring out its ears. This was probably why Neptune’s owner had urged him repeatedly to stay in the kitchen where he belonged.

  “So, have you got a house here in Cambria?” Zach asked.

  “Uh … I live in an apartment above the restaurant, actually. Why do you ask?”

  “Zach’s a Realtor,” Kate added helpfully, the amusement in her eyes telling him that this, right here—this painful exchange—was far and away the best part of her night.

  “Here, take my card.” Zach thrust a business card toward Jackson. “You know, you really should consider buying. It’s been proven time and again that real estate is an excellent investment. Despite the ups and downs, over time, it’s the safest place to put your money. Now, Cambria’s a pricey area, no question, but there are still some good bargains if you don’t mind being a little bit away from the beach. Also, if you don’t mind doing a little fixer-upper work—a little DIY, am I right?—then that increases the range of what you can get for your money. You really ought to let me …”

  He was still going on when Jackson mentally flailed around for an escape. “Zach, I hate to interrupt, but I have to get back to work. I don’t want to let the kitchen staff get backed up.”

  Zach looked around at the abundance of empty tables. “Not too busy tonight, a weeknight and all, I’d have thought you …”

  “Enjoy your meal!” he said, and hurried back to the relative safety of the kitchen without waiting for a response.

  Holy hell.

  He went back to work, only partly focused on what he was doing. As he simmered and sautéed and corrected the inevitable errors of his staff, he kept peeking out at the dining room to see what Kate and Gorgeous George were doing. When he caught a glimpse of her heading toward the ladies’ room, he handed off what he was doing to an underling, slipped out the door into the dining room, grabbed Kate by the arm, and pulled her into the hallway that led to the restrooms, away from Zach’s line of sight.

  “Excuse me,” Kate said, reclaiming her arm.

  “What the hell are you doing with that guy? He’s a stiff.” Up close and standing beside him, she was even more beautiful tonight than he’d realized. Her eyes were hypnotic. He tried to focus on his line of thought.

  “What am I doing? I’m on a date. I’m an adult, single woman. I date.”

  “Yeah, but him?” He noticed her smell, and it threw him off. She smelled of jasmine and warm, clean skin. It almost made his knees weak.

  “Is this because of the white zinfandel?” Her lips quirked up into a grin, and he couldn’t help it—he had to laugh.

  “You did that to me on purpose.”

  “Well, he did choose the wine on his own, with no prompting. But I maybe did poke at you a little. For fun.”

  Back to the topic at hand. “Listen, what do you want with that guy? He’s a Realtor, for chrissakes.”

  They gazed at each other, an electricity building between them.

  “Jackson?”

  “Yeah?” He almost couldn’t find his voice.

  “I really do need to visit the ladies’ room, if you don’t mind.”

  “What? Oh.” He backed off and let her go. When she was gone, he peeked into the dining room, and looked at the guy, this Zach.

  Christ.