How to Knit a Heart Back Home Page 21
“Wait,” Owen said. “Let me look at you.”
“My mother.” Lucy rolled onto her stomach to glare at him. “Is downstairs. We’re going to do yoga with her. And all I can see are colored condoms dancing in front of my eyes.”
Running a finger down the soft, straight line in the middle of her back, he said, “We’ll make it work, heart.” That name again. That he couldn’t stop saying. Where the fuck was his edge? And how could her skin possibly be this soft?
Lucy’s eyes crinkled at the edges as she smiled. She hesitated and then said, “You’re a nice guy, huh?”
“Well, this morning I wasn’t.” Even though he’d had the time of his life, Owen mentally kicked himself again. He shouldn’t have. “I might have . . . Well, I took advantage of you.”
Lucy laughed and slipped out of bed on her side, wrapping a pink knitted afghan around her body as she moved. “You’re implying I didn’t want my advantages taken. What if I took yours instead and you just didn’t notice?”
He sat up halfway. “Did that happen?”
Lucy looked down at the ground and back at him. She grinned, and her smile lit her whole face. “Oh, yeah. I took ’em good.”
Chapter Twenty-four
There’s no need to be careful in knitting. The worst that can happen is a hole, and you have the tools to fix it. You can fix everything.
—E. C.
Now, lift the sit bones and let the inner thighs roll forward. That’s it, the ischial tuberosities feel as if they’re floating up into the air as your feet ground into the earth, bringing you into alignment. Good, Owen, good. You’re getting it.”
Lucy shook her head and hung upside down in downward dog. She cheated in the position and tucked her head and bent her elbow so she could peek under her arm at Owen. Four feet away from her, on his mat, he was also in an upside down vee, and his face looked bright red and unhappy.
Toots said, “Rest in the breath. Move deeper with each exhalation, lengthening your spine. Now, on the inhalation, move forward into plank pose. Eliza Carpenter always liked this one best, even more than downward dog. Said it was good for the wrists. Strengthens them for knitting.”
Lucy came forward into a high push-up. Owen swiveled his head up and around to look at her and then followed her motion.
“Lucy, breathe deeper, that’s it. Move that oxygen. Good, good. Now, stay here in plank. Pulse up just an inch, take a breath, moving up between your shoulder blades, and now, breathe out, remaining in plank.”
The move was subtle, and should have been barely visible, but Owen managed to make it almost a military push-up.
Toots sighed. “All right, lower yourself to the floor. And cobra, good job, Lucy. Much better than you usually do. That’s odd. Owen, not like . . . Well, okay, push back into child’s pose. Oh, Owen.”
Lucy turned her head to the side to look at him again. This really wasn’t going well.
“Maybe this isn’t your thing,” she whispered.
Folded forward into a truly uncomfortable-looking crunch, Owen looked at her. “You think? She’s trying to kill me.”
“It’s just yoga. And wasn’t it your idea?”
Toots snapped her fingers. “That’s it. Thirty minutes will have to do.”
“That’s it?” said Lucy. “Really?” Usually her mom made Lucy go at least an hour, and a session taught by Toots at the local studio was ninety minutes.
“Owen’s going to hurt himself.” Toots’s voice was sympathetic, but Lucy knew the tone. When Toots had decided something was done, it was done.
“What about savasana?” It was Lucy’s favorite, the corpse pose. Really, it was the only move she was any good at.
“Fine.” Toots looked disappointed. “Lie on your back, feet outstretched, hip distance apart. Hands open, close your eyes.” She flopped back on her own mat, and gestured that Lucy and Owen do the same.
A minute later, Owen said, “I like this one.”
“Me, too,” said Lucy.
“Quiet, both of you. Rehearse for death.”
Lucy snorted.
But the ten minutes that followed were excruciating. Why had she asked for this again? She should have just let her mother wrap up the session with no fanfare. Instead, Lucy was lying next to Owen, just feet apart, listening to his breathing.
And thinking about how his breathing had been earlier, ragged and fast. In her bedroom. Oh, God. Lucy grew warm in places she had no business growing warm in, not with her mother in the same room.
Think about something else. Anything.
That swatch for Ruby’s bookstore sweater. Think about how it had come out perfectly at four and a half stitches per inch, as if Abigail’s yarn from Cade’s sheep had been meant for the project, even though Eliza Carpenter had died two years before her nephew’s yarn began being commercially produced.
Squeezing her eyes more tightly closed, Lucy tried not to think about what was really racing through her mind—whether or not she could still taste Owen on her lips. About how her hands had fit interlaced with his, during the last moments of being together, as he’d pushed into her, their eyes locked.
Later. She’d deal with that, pay for it, later.
“Enough! Owen, honey,” said Toots, sitting up. “Namaste. Namaste, Lucy,” Toots folded her hands in front of her and gave a quick bow.
“Was I awful?” asked Owen.
Toots nodded. “Horrible. But it’s about the practice, not the execution, thank God, and I’ll make you do it again sometime. Don’t you worry about that. Lucy, can you give me a ride home on your way to work? Dad dropped me off but he was going to the hardware store, and that way I don’t have to bother him.”
“Of course.” Now Lucy had to look at Owen and deal with him sensibly, in front of her mother. “So . . .”
Toots interrupted her. “Go upstairs and get ready for work. I’ll make Owen something to eat.”
She took a quick shower and changed, and when she came back down, Toots had made Owen breakfast with ingredients out of Lucy’s cupboards that she didn’t even know she had.
“You made pancakes?” Lucy was flabbergasted. “I had them here all along?”
“I had to improvise a bit, but yes.”
“Can I have one?”
Toots grimaced. “Oh, no. I only made enough batter for three, and I gave them all to Owen. I’m sorry.”
Owen, to his credit, looked horrified. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t know that was all there were. I would have saved two for you.”
“Mom!”
“I’m sorry, hon. I forgot you were up there.”
And that’s where the truth resided. Toots didn’t leave Lucy out on purpose, maliciously. She never had. But a combination of Toots always being busy with side projects, important community ventures, and Jonas and Silas being bigger, louder, and stronger, meant that Lucy had always come downstairs to find the pancakes were already gone.
She sighed. “That’s okay. I’ll get a doughnut at work.”
Toots brightened. “I’ll go to Whitney’s and we’ll get you something really yummy, how about that? Wouldn’t that be nice?”
“It’s fine. Are you ready?”
Toots nodded.
Owen rinsed his dish and flipped the switch on the garbage disposal, which made a groaning, heaving noise.
“Oh, don’t do that! It’s broken.” Lucy leaped to switch it off. “It ate a spoon and I haven’t been able to use it since.”
He leaned against the sink and said, “You want me to fix it for you? I’ll start my handyman business with you. Maybe you can give me . . . a good reference.”
And just those words, rumbled near her, reminded her of what his voice sounded like in her ear, what he sounded like when he was inside her. Lucy’s knees went to jelly and she touched his elbow, trying to ignore her mother’s curious stare.
“Yeah,” said Lucy. “That would be nice.”
“It’s okay if I stay?”
“There’s a tool box in
the pantry.”
“I’ll be creative.”
Lucy knew he would. Oh, God, would he ever.
In the car, her mother said, “Owen’s very attractive.”
Well, Lucy should have expected this. “Yeah.”
“And probably really hot-cha-cha in the sack, huh?”
“Mom!”
“Good,” said Toots. “I know that your dad and your brothers don’t trust him, but I’m fine with him, I really am. I swear it.”
“Really?” Lucy said. “You sound like you’re protesting a little much. And besides, it’s not serious. I’m just having fun. Doing something exciting. For once.”
Of course it wasn’t serious. It couldn’t be any kind of serious.
Toots nodded and looked out the car window.
“You always tell everyone to have fun, Mom.”
“Yep.”
“You gave me those condoms.”
“Honey, I just said it was good that you’re having a fun time. You always take everything to heart. Weigh things out, plan your life so carefully. And I agree with you. It’s time for you to embrace danger, have a fling, throw caution to the wind. Fall in love. Even if it means certain heartbreak.”
“I don’t think mothers are supposed to say things like that.”
“Watch out for the mailman. He’s going to pull out.”
“I’m a proficient driver, thank you. Been doing it for twenty years.”
“Just be careful.”
Lucy tucked the nose of her car into her mother’s driveway. “I don’t understand. You want me to go crazy, get all wild. But I should be careful?”
“Are you falling in love?”
Lucy didn’t answer. When she was around Owen, she wondered if she’d even really been in love before. She had no idea what she was doing.
And God, she’d wanted to talk like this, heart to heart, woman to woman, to her mother for so long. Lucy opened her mouth to ask her for advice, to ask how she’d know if, when, it was love.
But then her mother said, “Let your body have fun. But keep your heart from taking things so seriously. You don’t deal that well with change, and when I look at him, I don’t see his aura staying in Cypress Hollow long, so be a tiny bit careful, okay?”
Lucy wrapped her fingers around the wheel and pulled it toward her like it was the yoke on a plane, as if could pull herself up and out of the car. “There you go again. Do you want me to be wild or cautious?”
Toots went on as if she hadn’t heard her. “And let me know if you want to try this new thing out that I just got for my pleasure business. It’s this cone-shaped thing that you get on top of, and then I think the man positions himself behind—”
“I will die if you don’t stop right now.”
“Love you, too,” said Toots as she leaned to kiss Lucy’s cheek.
Chapter Twenty-five
The best way to peek inside a woman’s mind is to steal a glance into her notions bag. If her stitch markers are jumbled, so are her thoughts, I’d bet my last tape measure.
—E. C.
Owen gave the wrench one last twist and was tempted to stick his head under the cold water faucet.
Lucy was gorgeous. Even when presented with the disgusting slime at the bottom of her disposal, half his brain was still thinking about her.
Hell, she made overalls look sexy. Before he’d seen her wearing them, he would have said that it was impossible.
He rolled over and stared at the underside of the sink.
She was more than just sexy. He was in deep. Holy shit.
Owen had dated Bunny for only a year. Before Bunny, he’d been with a woman that he’d ditched after an argument over taco seasoning.
He’d wondered if he’d been broken—if in fact he’d spent so long outrunning his fractured childhood and chasing his career that he’d just never understood what his friends talked about, or couldn’t make sense of the reason they fought so hard to work the long overtime hours in order to pay for the weddings, the houses, the kids that made their faces light up like Christmas trees.
And then along came Lucy.
Owen twisted himself out from under the sink and felt suddenly nervous in a way he hadn’t felt in a long time.
No way in hell could she be a firefighter, paramedic, EMT, or coastal search-and-rescue anything that required her being anywhere that wasn’t safe. At least, nowhere that he couldn’t protect her. And with the way that he got around nowadays, that was just about everywhere.
Owen knew too well it was the quiet nights when things went wrong—the simple calls, an old man having a heart attack, the medic not watching his back, completely unaware that the son was off his meds and triggered by a stranger touching his father, still writhing in pain. Or a simple domestic, and the brother-in-law no one mentioned pulling up with a gun. The medics were the ones in the most danger. They weren’t armed, not prepared, not trained. And in a sleepy town like this, where meth was going to be a problem, where the volunteer department did it all, combined firefighters and medics, cobbling them out of citizens? Hell, no.
Not Lucy.
Not after he’d found her. Shit, he couldn’t even run after her right now, and he’d been the fastest in the academy.
Owen stood slowly. Goddammit, his hip hurt. This was the worst pain he’d felt since recuperation, in fact. And damn, it was worth it.
Owen ignored the fact that it was already too fucking late, that his heart was already involved. It probably had been too late since she’d kissed him on the porch of the parsonage. Maybe since she’d kissed him at that high-school party seventeen years ago, if he looked the truth straight in the eye.
He’d left his holster and overshirt upstairs in her bedroom. It took him a long time to make it up the stairs—he could barely remember climbing them last night, which was a miracle in itself. He’d kissed her on every step, he did recall that. Now he took his time with each one. Stairs were the one thing that were sometimes almost unnavigable for him, and he breathed carefully, using the banister for support.
He liked that, last night, when they’d tumbled into her room, still wrapped around each other, the immense bed hadn’t been made. He didn’t trust anyone who was neat all the time. The downstairs was tidy enough, but this looked like she really lived here.
Now, he saw that a pair of jeans was in the corner of the room, next to an old wooden upholstered armchair, as if she’d shucked them off over there, in front of the window. An old lamp that matched the intricacy of the carved bedposts stood next to the armchair, which looked like an ideal reading spot. He could picture her there, her legs kicked over the arms of the also oversized piece of furniture, book in hand.
A nice, safe image. See? He wasn’t too sprung over her yet.
Unless she wore sexy librarian glasses when she read. Owen bit back a groan.
As he slung his holster on and then buttoned his shirt, he pulled open the closet door.
Nothing but clothes.
There. That should satisfy him. No skeletons. No ex-boyfriends’ bodies, no counterfeiting supplies. Get over it, he told himself.
But once a cop, always a cop. It wasn’t something he was going to be able to just turn off, not so quickly, not this soon.
He moved out of her room and down the hallway. In the bathroom, he took a quick peek into her medicine cabinet. Nothing but over-the-counter pain relief and three different kinds of toothpaste.
Behind the next door was a small office: a desk, two chairs, some boxes. A long bookcase ran the length of one wall.
You’re not a cop anymore. Owen breathed more easily. What the hell was he looking for?
Pulling back the sheer curtain, he peered down into the backyard. A wooden table, flanked by four big wooden chairs, sat next to a barbeque grill. Lots and lots of trees. A small shed in the lower garden.
And a man, creeping through the yard, looking over his shoulder.
A man going toward the shed, and moving quickly.
Owen mo
ved as fast as he could to the top of the stairs and then went down them slowly, clutching the handrail. God, that hurt. His hip protested so much he was surprised he couldn’t hear it grinding through his skin, and when his knee locked, he stumbled for a second.
Fuck.
But he’d be damned if fell down a flight of stairs while a burglar broke in to Lucy’s shed. He spun to the side and grabbed the handrail with both hands. He steadied himself. He was okay.
Owen felt himself switch into cop mode. The training hadn’t left his body. His heartbeat wanted to pick up speed, but he concentrated on slowing all his motions, all his reactions. And thank God he hadn’t stopped carrying his gun yet.
He didn’t go through the rear kitchen door; that was too obvious. He went out the front door, after checking out the windows in the living room. Nothing on the street but parked cars.
Owen moved to the right of the house. The gate that had been closed when he arrived now stood open.
He consciously lowered his center of gravity. Moving slowly, he kept to the side of the house. Whoever was out here was obviously stupid, moving through the yard, out in the open. He wouldn’t expect Owen, so he had the advantage of surprise.
He heard a scraping noise behind the large oak tree. The small storage shed’s door stood open. Good. Just a petty burglary. Easily handled. Small-town criminals didn’t want anything other than to find something of value to sell, usually so they could buy meth. They didn’t tend to have weapons, since they’d already sold them long ago.
Each one caught was another off the streets. For a couple of days, anyway.
Owen ignored the protest of his hip as he eased forward, staying behind the oak. A good look around the yard showed that the burglar appeared to be alone. If he’d had any kind of lookout from the front, Owen would have already known it—the lookout would have blown the warning, and the criminal would have run.
This was almost too easy.
At the door of the shed, he paused. Waited. Listened. The person inside rummaged through something. A scraping noise. A cough.