All He Ever Dreamed (2 page)

Josh pulled off his Patriots ball cap and pushed his dark hair back before settling the hat back on his head. He’d need a trim soon, she thought, and she had mixed feelings about that, too. On one hand, she knew what it felt like to run her fingers through his hair. On the other…she knew what it felt like to run her fingers through his hair. It could be excruciating, touching him like that—especially when he made that little moaning sound if she washed his hair before cutting it—but she couldn’t deny herself the pleasure. Plus, there was nowhere else to go but the beauty parlor, and sending Josh there would be too cruel a thing to do to her best friend.

“What the hell are you doing?” Josh yelled, sitting forward on the couch as if he could physically intimidate the television into taking back whatever had set him off. His voice was almost drowned out by the other guys shouting, and Katie realized she’d been so busy mooning over the side of Josh’s head, she’d missed the kickoff. Damn.

She grabbed a handful of chips and forced herself to focus on the replay. If she got caught making googly-eyes at Josh in this crowd, she’d never hear the end of it.

* * *

After almost fumbling the ball during the first kickoff return, the Patriots got their act together and Josh relaxed against the superior cushions of Max’s couch, wishing he could afford furniture like this for the lodge. Someday he was going to get a straight answer from the guy about what he did for a living. It wasn’t easy to keep a secret in Whitford, but Max Crawford managed.

But if anybody would know, it would be Fran. And if Fran knew, Rosie would know, which would mean Katie might know.

When Max went into the kitchen at the start of halftime, Josh slapped Katie’s leg. “Hey, does Rose know what Max does to earn couch and television money?”

He’d kept his voice low, so she had to lean closer to him to answer him in the same tone. “Nobody knows. It’s no secret he doesn’t go anywhere on a regular basis, so I guess he works in his basement.”

“It’s quite a lock he’s got on the door.” Had a security keypad and everything.

“So nobody can find the bodies.”

Josh snorted and shook his head. “It’s weird that he’s lived here, what…five years? And nobody knows what he does?”

“Has anybody actually asked him outright? I haven’t.”

She usually got her information the normal way—from Fran, her mom or from keeping her ears open and her mouth closed while the old bucks chatted in the barbershop. But Josh didn’t get out quite as much, and Fran didn’t share gossip with him as much as she did with other women.

“I did once,” he said. “He changed the subject and didn’t even try to make it smooth.”

“I bet I can find out before you do.”

That perked him up and he turned his body so he was fully facing her. “Whaddya got, Davis?”

“If I find out how he makes his money before you do, I’ll cut your hair free for six months.”

He snorted. “Lame. Winner washes the other’s vehicle once a month for a year.”

She hesitated, but he’d expected that. It was a half-hour drive to the car wash and twelve bucks down the drain, but Katie never backed down from a bet. “Car wash when it’s cold, but hand wash and wax from May through August?”

“Done.” He stuck out his hand, then pulled it back before she could shake it. “Wait. I have a condition.”

“Admitting it’s the first step.”

“Funny, smart-ass. The condition is no using feminine wiles.”

She laughed, which made everybody in the room stop talking for a few seconds. Katie had a great laugh. “Feminine wiles? What are you, eighty?”

“Call it whatever you want, but no flirting or making kissy faces or letting him look down your shirt to get information out of him.”

“How do you see that going, exactly? ‘Hey, Max, if you tell me what your job is, I’ll let you see my boobs’? You’re a moron.”

“That’s the deal.”

“Fine.” She shook on it.

Josh loved a good challenge. Gathering up their empties and a couple of used paper plates off the table, he headed for the kitchen to restock.

Max was leaning against the counter, cell phone to his ear, and Josh shoved the stuff into the garbage can as quietly as he could. Then he opened the fridge, looking for a couple bottles of water.

“I promised you it would be there before Christmas, and it will be,” Max was telling whoever was on the other end of the line. “I’ll shoot you an email when I ship it out, okay?”

Josh didn’t try to pretend he wasn’t eavesdropping as Max ended his call. He really had no choice but to overhear, since they were the only two people in the kitchen. “Christmas present?”

“Yup.” Max snapped his phone back into its holster.

“Family?”

“Nope.”

“Something for work?” It was a natural segue into the conversation he wanted to have.

“When are you and Katie finally going to hook up?”

Josh’s head whipped around. That wasn’t the conversation he wanted to have. “What the hell are you talking about? Why would I hook up with Katie? She’s…Katie.”

Max shrugged. “Just seems as if you two would be good together.”

“We are good together. That’s why she’s my best friend. Hell, we practically grew up together, so that would be weird, man.”

Max shrugged again, then grabbed a soda off the counter. “Shame. You guys are a great couple.”

He brushed by and was out of the kitchen before Josh could think of a response. What was he supposed to say to that? Katie was like one of the guys and they’d known each other their whole lives. If they were going to be a great couple, it probably would have come up before.

Halfway back to the couch, he realized Max had managed to evade answering the question about whether his phone call was work related. And he’d done it by deliberately blowing Josh’s mind with the concept of hooking up with Katie. It was a slick move on Crawford’s part, Josh had to admit.

During a lull in the third-quarter action, Josh pulled out his phone to make sure he hadn’t missed any calls. Butch and Mike had disagreed on a referee’s iffy call and the volume level had been pretty intense for a few minutes. There was nothing, so he had to assume Rosie was still watching television. It was tempting to call and check on her, but she wouldn’t take kindly to that. Or to being woken up if she’d nodded off.

“Waiting for the 1-800-Loser hotline to call you back?” Katie asked, sticking her toe out from under Max’s blanket to poke at Josh.

“Yeah. I told them I was worried about you.” He shoved the phone back into his pocket. “Have you talked to your mom lately?”

She frowned. “A couple of days ago. Why? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, probably. Did anybody ever say how long her cough might linger after the pneumonia?”

“A little while, I guess, but it should be getting a lot better by now. Is it bad?”

He tilted his head and shrugged a shoulder. “I don’t know. She seems to be coughing a lot, but she says she’s fine.”

“She said she was fine last time, too, right up until she passed out. I think she was even saying it as she hit the floor.”

“If it gets any worse, or doesn’t get any better, you should talk her into a follow-up appointment.” He felt bad when he saw how the concern scrunched up her face. Rosie said she was fine, and he was certainly no doctor. “I’ll keep an eye on her. It’s probably just left over from having pneumonia.”

“You’ll call me if you think there’s anything wrong with her, right?”

“Of course. Unless I’m on the phone with the 1-800-Loser hotline. You getting help is really important.”

She laughed and shoved at his hip with her foot before pulling it back under the blanket.

The other guys cheered and Josh turned back to the game, but Max caught his eye. Crawford jerked his head toward Katie and then made some goofy motion with his eyebrows. Josh gave him a what-the-hell look and then focused on the television.

Dude was losing his mind. He’d run with Katie for as long as he could remember, through good times and bad. He wasn’t screwing up a lifelong friendship to get in her pants, even if she
was
into him. And she’d never given any sign she wanted him in her pants.

Yeah, Max Crawford was totally barking up the wrong tree.

Chapter Two

At work the next morning, Katie snipped at what little remained of Dozer Dozynski’s hair while pondering how best to get Max Crawford to tell her what the hell his job was. Assuming he wasn’t a serial killer, what did he do in the basement that kept him busy, earned him money and required a security system? CIA? Computer hacker?

“How did you manage to sneak away from the hardware store on a Monday morning?” she asked when she realized her silence might come off as awkward, since there was nobody else Dozer could talk to.

“Lauren and my wife came in to drive me crazy looking at a million paint samples, so I told them to watch the store and ran as fast as I could.”

Katie laughed. Lauren was his daughter and she was also recently engaged to Ryan Kowalski. Lauren and her teenage son, Nick, were in the process of preparing to move to Ryan’s home in Brookline, Mass, and there had been a lot of talk about paint samples. The house was beautiful as far as form, function and resale value, but it was very bland. Lauren had declared her first act as the future Mrs. Kowalski would be to “unbeige the place.”

“I stopped by Lauren’s a few days ago,” Katie said. “Looks like they’re almost ready to make the move.”

He nodded, but fortunately she saw that coming from experience and paused the snipping until he stopped moving his head. “Very soon. Nick will finish school here in a couple of weeks. They want to have a week to move in, and maybe he can familiarize himself with the neighborhood. Then they’ll come spend Christmas week here so Nick can be with his father and the little ones while Ryan and Lauren finish getting her house ready to sell.”

Katie moved to the other side of the chair, halfway done with the cut. “So Nick can start his new school with the new year, instead of starting and then having time off. Makes sense. How’s Mrs. Dozynski taking it?”

“She’s happy for our daughter, of course, but it will be hard for her. She doesn’t drive and Lauren helped her a lot. Now she’ll be nagging me even more to retire.”

Katie hoped not, though she didn’t say out loud. The hardware store ran on such a thin thread, Dozer didn’t even have hired help anymore. The only way he could retire was to close it, which would be heartbreaking and inconvenient, or sell it. There wasn’t much of a market for small-town hardware stores anymore. Not with the big-box stores springing up around them.

Before she could respond, the big black phone on the wall rang with a loud jangle. The thing was practically a relic, but she’d answered it when she was a little girl hanging around with her dad, and she couldn’t bring herself to replace it with something less alarming. “Just a second, Dozer. Don’t move.”

The phone rarely rang. The shop’s hours hadn’t changed in at least thirty years, so the only time anybody bothered to call was during the winter, when somebody might check to see if she was there during a snowstorm. Since she lived upstairs, she usually was.

“Barbershop.” She didn’t bother identifying herself. There had only ever been one barber at a time in Whitford. First her dad, then the idiot who’d “run” the business for her mom after her dad died, and then Katie as soon as she met the licensing requirements.

“Hey, it’s Josh.”

The little zing she’d been feeling at the sound of his voice since her body had reached zinging age was chased by a pang of anxiety. He never called her at the shop. “What’s up?”

“It’s not a wicked emergency or anything, but I’m taking your mom to the hospital.”

The pang of anxiety solidified into a knot of fear in her gut. “What’s wrong?”

“Same as last time, more or less. The cough’s gotten worse since yesterday and she’s got a fever. She won’t let me take her temperature, but it’s pretty obvious.”

“Is it bad enough for an ambulance?”

“No. She’s arguing with me, actually. Says she just needs to have some tea and lie down for a while, but I can tell from looking at her she feels like she did when we took her in before.”

Katie’s fingers tightened around the old-fashioned phone receiver. “So you think she has pneumonia again?”

“I’m not a doctor but, like I said, seems to be the same symptoms that got her that diagnosis last month.”

“Can you wait for me? I need maybe five minutes to finish this cut and then I’ll hang the sign and lock up.”

“Yeah. She’s still trying to convince me she doesn’t want to go, so we’ll be here debating the point for a while yet.”

“I’ll be there as quick as I can.”

She hung up and walked back to Dozer, but took a few seconds to calm herself before taking the scissors to his hair. The first bout with pneumonia had been scary enough, but her mom was a pretty healthy woman. Now if she had it again, it could be so much worse. Her immune system was still building itself back up and she hadn’t fully regained her strength.

“Is Rose sick again?”

Katie shook off her dread and made sure her hands weren’t shaking before lifting the scissors. “Maybe. Josh doesn’t like the sound of her cough and he says she has a fever, so we’re going to take her to the hospital to get checked.”

“I can have Pat finish this if you want to go.”

“I appreciate that, but I’m almost done.” And she’d seen what Pat Dozynski had done to his hair when the hardware store was busy and he hadn’t had a chance to get away while the barbershop was open.

Ten minutes later, Katie locked the door behind Dozer and used a dry-erase marker to write Gone Fishing on the bottom of the Closed sign before turning it around. She’d probably take less flack if she wrote Closed for Family Emergency, but that news would spread through Whitford like wildfire and concerned neighbors would descend upon them like torch-bearing villagers.

When she got to the lodge, she found her mom in the front room, still arguing with Josh.

“I’m fine,” she said to Katie when she saw her come in, but then she broke into a coughing fit that took her breath away.

“If you’re fine, the doctor will tell us you’re fine and send you home with us,” she said. “Please, Mom. If Josh thinks you need to go, then I need you to go. For me.”

Rose sighed dramatically. “Fine, but I’m going to change my clothes first.”

Josh waited until she’d disappeared up the stairs to turn to Katie. “I don’t think I’m overreacting. I could hear her coughing and hacking all night and she’s wicked pale, except for her cheeks and around her collar, which are red.”

“She’s definitely sick. I just really hope it’s not pneumonia again.”

“How we doing this? One vehicle? Two?”

“You don’t have to go, you know. I can drive her.”

“I’m going. One vehicle or two?”

“Even though it kills me to say it, she’ll be more comfortable in your truck.” She ignored his smug grin. “And there’s no sense in burning extra gas. I’ll just ride with you guys, unless you don’t want to stick around at the hospital.”

“You know I’m going to stay.”

She nodded, because she did know. All five of the Kowalski kids considered Rose almost like a mother and they loved her as much as Rose loved them. Josh wouldn’t leave the hospital until he knew she was going to be okay.

Rose took her sweet time getting changed and, when she came down the stairs, she was lugging her big tote bag. Josh rushed up the last few stairs to take it from her. “Jesus, Rosie. You moving out?”

“You know how waiting rooms can be. I have my book and my knitting and a few other little things.”

Katie’s heart twisted as she looked at the heavy tote. There was more than a book, a skein of yarn and a few little things in there. Her mother was afraid she wouldn’t be coming home from the hospital and she’d thrown the things she couldn’t live without into the bag.

“I’ll go start the truck and throw this in there,” Josh said. He grabbed a set of keys off the side table and went out the door.

“I feel horrible,” Rose said.

“Which is why you’re going to the hospital.”

“Hush, little miss smart-ass. I mean I feel horrible that you kids have to bother with this. It’s an hour just to get there.”

“So it’s an hour drive. You took at least a year off my life when you passed out last month.”

“Just let me double-check that everything’s off in the kitchen.”

Katie went to get her mom’s coat out of the closet and then watched Rose check the stove burners and oven she had never once left on. She was obviously worn down and, maybe it was Katie’s imagination, but she seemed to be looking worse by the minute.

There was a clinic the next town over, but the doctor was more the ear infection, stepped on a nail, need a physical kind of guy. Since Rose would almost certainly need chest X-rays and an IV, he’d only refer her to the hospital anyway, and charge her a hefty exam fee for the advice.

Josh stuck his head in the back door. “You ladies ready?”

Katie watched as Josh helped her mother climb up into the shotgun seat, and then she settled herself next to Rose’s tote on the narrow bench that passed for a backseat. As tempting as it was to say to hell with the gas and follow in her Jeep, she wanted to keep an eye on her mom.

They hadn’t gone very far down the road when Rose nodded off. Her face was flushed and her breathing raspy, and Katie’s concern was reflected back at her from Josh’s gaze in the rearview mirror.

* * *

Rosie had pneumonia again, and they weren’t letting her go home. Josh sat in the waiting room, turning his cell phone over and over in his hands while he debated who to call first. Even though there wasn’t much anybody could do, they all had to be informed that Rose was being admitted.

Mitch was someplace or another for work. He owned a controlled demolition company, which required a lot of travel, and he was pushing hard to wrap up a job so he could enjoy an extended holiday stay at home with his new wife. Ryan had left Whitford last night and gone back to Brookline for the workweek. He was still commuting back and forth until Lauren and Nick were ready to make the final move. His other brother, Sean, lived in New Hampshire, and Liz—the only girl—was even farther away, in New Mexico.

He’d call Paige, he decided. Mitch’s wife could spread the word not only to the rest of the family, but around town, as well. And she’d do it without adding drama. Since she’d still be at the diner, he pulled up that number on his cell and waited for her to answer.

“Trailside Diner,” she said a little breathlessly after four rings.

“Hey, it’s Josh. Sorry to bother you at work.”

There was silence on the line for a few seconds. “What’s wrong? Did something happen?”

“Katie and I brought Rosie to the hospital this morning. She has pneumonia again and they’re admitting her.”

“Oh, God. What do you need? Do you need me to call people? Bring some things from the lodge for her?”

One of the many reasons he adored Paige—she didn’t hesitate before offering to make a two-hour round-trip to help out the family. “I think she has everything she needs, but I was hoping maybe you could call everybody. After your shift ends, of course.”

“Absolutely. What should I tell them? I mean…do they need to come home?”

“No,” he reassured her. “It’s not that bad. But it could be if they don’t have her on the antibiotics and IV and shit. She’s going to be okay and nobody needs to come home. I just don’t want anybody finding out later Rosie was in the hospital and they didn’t know.”

“I’ll take care of it. You’re there now?”

“Yeah. Katie’s with Rosie, getting her settled and everything. Once she’s in her nice hospital jammies and tucked in, I’ll go in again. Oh, and she has her cell phone, but they’ll probably be fussing over her today, so tomorrow she might like to hear from people.”

After he got off the phone with Paige, he leaned his head back against the wall, stretched his legs out and closed his eyes. He should have listened to his gut instead of Rosie and brought her to a doctor sooner. Maybe she wouldn’t have had to be admitted to the hospital and stay for who knew how long.

And he had no idea how he was going to keep her corralled once she got out. With less than two weeks until the first guests of the season arrived at the lodge, the list of things to do was insane and quite of few of those things usually fell to Rosie. She was a stubborn woman and there was no way he could do everything and make sure she stayed in bed. As soon as he turned his back, she’d be running the vacuum or sneaking bedding down to the washer.

“The way the nurses keep walking back and forth, giving you the eye, I’m surprised you haven’t been offered a bed yet.”

Josh opened his eyes and grinned at Katie. “I’m holding out for the hot doctor who examined Rose down in Urgent Care.”

“Pretty sure she was wearing a wedding ring.”

He shrugged and pushed himself upright in the really uncomfortable chair. “So I’ll be holding out awhile. How’s your mom?”

“Worried about getting the lodge ready for guests.”

Josh sighed and scrubbed his hands through his hair. “She can’t feel too awful, then.”

“I feel bad. They might have let her come home, but when they asked me if I thought she’d rest, I said probably not.”

He threw one arm around her shoulders and gave her a squeeze. “It was the right thing to say, because she probably wouldn’t.”

“I offered to stay, but she said we should go back to Whitford and get on with things.”

“Let’s say goodbye, then, because the thought we’re actually getting stuff done will comfort her a lot more than sitting around watching daytime television with her.”

Katie shook her head. “She was actually nodding off when I left her. She said to tell you she’d call you tomorrow.”

It didn’t seem right to leave Rosie without at least a kiss on the cheek or something, but he’d heard how rough her night had been and he didn’t want to wake her up if she was managing to sleep. “Probably with a list of things to get done.”

“Of course.”

He waited while Katie went to the nurse’s station to double-check all the contact info they had, and then they went outside to find it had started snowing at some point. It wouldn’t amount to anything, since it hadn’t merited a mention on the morning news, but every little bit helped.

The snow cover wasn’t quite as good as he’d hoped for, but the white stuff had been building up on the ground. Though there was hardly anything in town, in the woods and higher elevations there was enough for the groomer to pack down. Maybe every trail wouldn’t be open for the fifteenth, but the gates would open and there would be enough riding to keep their guests happy. Unless they had some weird warm-up and rain and all the snow melted. But that was something to worry about when he was supposed to be sleeping, as usual.