Page 42 of Mixed Signals
“No one will ever find out.” She settles into one of the stools, her long gray hair tumbling down her back, the lines of her face softer in the muted light of predawn. She’s wearing her standard ripped up band t-shirt beneath denim overalls this morning, heavy black boots on her feet. She pulls a tattered-up spiral notebook out of the bag on the floor and pats the cover twice. “Let’s talk rhubarb.”
We sit in my kitchen and we talk about rhubarb and dark chocolate and hazelnut ganache. We discuss the consistency of shortcake batter and what we’re going to make with the strawberry crop Beckett is almost ready to harvest. She criticizes my lemon custard and I give her grief about her homemade whipped cream.
It is an ordinary Wednesday morning.
Until someone starts pounding on my front door.
We freeze with our mugs halfway to our mouths. Ms. Beatrice’s eyes dart to mine, accusing.
“Who is that?” Beatrice looks like she’s ready to climb out the tiny narrow window above my work sink.
“I have no idea.”
No one is ever here this early. No one except for us.
Another knock raps against the glass window in the front. I slip from my stool and crack open the door that leads to the front of the shop as Ms. Beatrice drops to the floor.
“What are you doing?” I whisper, incredulous.
“Hiding,” she whispers back. She crawls two feet forward to get a look out the door and tilts her head to the side, a sly grin tipping her mouth. “That looks like Caleb.”
I squint. It does look like Caleb, though I have no idea what he’s doing here at five in the morning.
He knocks again, not realizing he’s being watched by two creepy-ass women lurking in the back.
“Layla?” His voice is muffled by the thick glass of the front door. “It’s me.” He shifts on his feet and then glances over his shoulder at the dark cluster of trees behind him. “I brought you some breakfast.”
“Does he realize you literally specialize in breakfast?”
“Shut up,” I hush her. “Where did you park your car?”
“In the gravel lot Beckett uses for storage. The one behind the pine trees and the chicken coop he keeps insisting he’s not building.” She arches an eyebrow at me. “Do you think I’m an idiot?”
Kind of. With the way she’s army crawling across the floor of my kitchen.
“Wait until I open the front door to slip out the back. I’ll distract him.”
She snickers. “I bet you will.”
I don’t bother dignifying that with a response. I smooth my palms over my hair, set down my coffee mug, and slip through the door to the front. Caleb straightens as soon as he sees me, a grin blossoming on his handsome face. A cascade of butterflies erupts low in my belly, my own smile as easy as breathing. I feel like I’m caught on the other end of a string, pulled closer and closer to wherever he is.
I flick down my row of locks, watching him through the glass. Khaki pants and a short sleeved button up today, ironed to perfection. My eyes travel from the jut of his collarbones to the dimple in his cheek. The straight line of his nose and the … absolutely horrendous black and purple bruise around his eye.
I open the door and usher him in. “Your eye looks terrible.”
But also really incredible, somehow. Attractive in a rough-and-tumble sort of way. With the khakis, its downright delightful—two drastically opposing looks on one man.
He touches the swell of his cheek with the tips of his fingers. “It does, doesn’t it? It’s why I wore the khakis. I thought they might help.”
“Help you look like a 90’s sitcom dad?”
He shrugs. “Help everyone be focused on something that isn’t my face. The kids think it’s hysterical when I wear khakis, for whatever reason. I don’t know what I’m going to tell them about the eye, though. I can’t tell them the truth.”
Yeah, I’m not so sure Caleb should tell his students that he got a black eye after Gus elbowed him in the face while trying to use a fake foot to open a fake safe in a fake zombie apocalypse. I imagine the teenagers would have something to say about that.
Caleb frowns and steps past me to the countertop. He drops a plain brown paper bag on top. “Maybe I’ll say it was something with a cougar.”
“Oh?”
