Her Minnesota Man (A Christian Romance Novel) (10 page)

"Why wouldn't I
 
.
 
.
 
." His words trailed off as his mystified expression gave way to surprise. "You think that house is what brought me back to Owatonna?"

"Jeb, I don't know what to think." All she knew was that spending time with her no longer seemed to be a priority in his life. "I hardly know you anymore."

"You know me," he insisted in a voice that was oceans deep.

"Not anymore." She shook her head and then couldn't seem to stop shaking it. "I don't know anything anymore."

"Come here."

He pulled her into an awkward sideways hug. The rigid arm of the otherwise fluffy chair dug into her ribs and she felt a painful twinge in her shoulder, but she was too upset to protest.

"That house isn't my home," he murmured into her hair. "
You
are."

Oh, really? She lifted her face to glare at him. He had some nerve, pretending nothing had changed when
everything
had changed.

"You haven't seen me in more than a year," she accused. "And not counting last night, when was the last time you called? Do you even remember?"

"Yes, I remember!" he snapped. Letting her go, he sat back on his heels and rubbed his forehead as though his head ached. Then he closed his eyes and repeated the words in a dejected, barely audible tone, "Believe me, I remember."

An awful suspicion settled over Laney. "You've been staying away on purpose?"

He winced and averted his face. It was all the confirmation she needed.

She had to tilt her head to recapture his gaze. "Don't I deserve an explanation?"

He just stared back at her, pleading with his eyes for her to let it go, but she couldn't do that. If he wouldn't tell her what was wrong, how were they ever going to fix it?

"Jeb,
please
."

Finally, he nodded. But when he again turned his face away from her, she was gripped by a foreboding that made her want to cover her ears and protect herself from hearing the explanation she'd demanded.

"You call me your best friend," he said slowly. "But that doesn't quite explain what's between us, does it? Do you really think a husband will accept that?" He rose to his feet and rubbed his forehead again. "Laney, we're not kids anymore. Our relationship has to change."

"No!" Her voice broke on the word, but somehow she got the rest out. "Besides, you just said I was your h-home."

"I shouldn't have said it. Things aren't that simple anymore." A bitter smile bent his lips. "We're all grown up, Laney. And this—" He spread his arms in a vague gesture that suggested he, too, was frustrated. "This is how life works. Kids grow up and move on."

"Well, sometimes life stinks," she muttered.

"Yeah." He walked over to the window. Bracing his hands on the sill, he slumped forward, his shoulders rounding as his chin sank toward his chest. "Sometimes it does."

Observing his defeated posture, Laney silently berated herself. Her happiness wasn't Jeb's responsibility; he had his own dreams to follow. It wasn't right to make him feel guilty for leaving her behind.

He raised his head and fixed a hard gaze on something outside the window. "My calendar's clear for the immediate future," he said. "I'll stay for a while and do my best to help you get settled. But when I go, Laney, I won't be back for a long time, and I won't be calling you much, either." Sliding his hands from the sill, he turned to face her. "Tell me you can accept that."

Laney opened her mouth to protest, but then thought better of it. She'd save this fight for later, when she wasn't so annoyed with him and she'd worked out the best way to make him understand that if he had just
called
her once in a while, his emotions wouldn't have gotten into such a tangle that he'd concluded it would be in her best interest to end the most amazing friendship either of them would ever know.

Deep breath. Okay.

"I'm sorry about getting all emotional," she said with a nervous laugh. "I've been a little depressed lately, but it's nothing, Jeb, really. I'll be fine, I promise."

His troubled gaze searched her face. She stared back at him, her mind carefully blanked, until she sensed his tension receding. Only after the last glimmer of doubt disappeared from his eyes did she allow herself a slow, careful breath.

"Come on." She slapped her palms against the arms of her chair and pushed herself up. "Our ice cream is melting."

When her alarm clock buzzed at six-thirty the next morning, Laney extended a hand from her cozy, quilted cocoon and smacked the snooze button. She'd spent most of the night turning in her bed like a chicken in a rotisserie oven; it couldn't have been more than three hours since she'd stopped worrying about Jeb and succumbed to an exhausted, dreamless sleep.

She hit the snooze button twice more, and then had to rush through her morning routine. But at least the pain in her shoulder had begun to fade.

By the time she made it down to the kitchen, it was too late to brew a pot of coffee and savor her usual two cups while perusing the morning paper, so she microwaved a mug of instant espresso. She had just leaned against the kitchen counter to enjoy a few bracing sips when in the orange-pink light of dawn she saw Jeb slog past the windows,
head down and shoulders hunched
.

To say that Jeb wasn't a morning person was to understate the case to the point of hilarity. Laney couldn't imagine what he was doing awake at this hour, but the fact that he'd dragged himself over here could mean only one thing: She'd forgotten to buy coffee when she'd picked up his groceries.

She let him in and surrendered her mug of espresso. He grunted like an exhausted caveman and swallowed some of the hot beverage, and then he paused to stare at her in bleary-eyed puzzlement.

"It's instant," she said. "But it's fully caffeinated."

His eyes slid shut and he drank deeply.

"Look at you," she said. Outside, the grass was covered with frost, but Jeb was barefoot. He wore jeans and a plaid flannel shirt with only one button fastened—and that button had been matched up with the wrong hole, causing the shirt to hang crooked on his lanky frame. His too-long, almost-black hair, stringy and uncombed,
completely hid his
right
eye
.

"Honestly, Jeb, you need a keeper."

He grunted again and moved past her to slump onto a chair, adorably pathetic.

Shaking her head, Laney opened a cupboard and got out a can of ground coffee. A single cup of instant was never going to do it for Jeb, so she fitted a paper filter into the basket of her drip coffeemaker
and
loaded it up.

Filling the carafe with tap water, she looked at Jeb over her shoulder. "What are you doing up, anyway?"

"Some idiot journalist called from New York City." Scowling ferociously, he scratched the black stubble on his chin. "Who makes phone calls at seven-thirty in the morning?"

Laney opened her mouth to point out that it was eight-thirty in New York, but then she thought better of it. "People who don't realize musicians sleep in the daytime," she offered instead. "Why didn't you just turn off the ringer and go back to sleep?"

He tilted his head so that
the
tangle of hair flopped away from his right eye, affording Laney an unobstructed view of his indignant stare. "Because that would have meant—" He interrupted himself with a huge yawn. "—waking up twice. Once a day is bad enough."

Laney clucked in sympathy as she poured water into the coffeemaker's reservoir. She could hardly wait to see how he would handle leaving for church at nine o'clock on Sunday morning.

"And I can't turn off the ringer," he grumbled. "What if you needed to call me?"

Laney flicked the coffeemaker's switch and grabbed her heaviest wool cardigan off its peg by the door. "You're seriously underestimating my instinct for self-preservation," she said as she pushed her arms into the bulky sleeves. "I'd never call you before noon. Not even if my hair was on fire."

"Laney." His severe tone made her freeze in the act of buttoning the sweater.

Wishing she'd thought twice before teasing him at this early hour, she moved behind his chair and hugged his neck.

"It was just a joke, Jeb. You know I didn't mean it."

He patted her forearms, possibly to indicate his forgiveness but more likely to signal that he wanted to drink his coffee. Laney released him and straightened, but didn't move away. As her coffeemaker rumbled and hissed, wafting a delicious aroma through the kitchen, she finger-combed Jeb's hair.

He could talk all he wanted about childhood friends growing up and growing apart, but he was still her wild boy, still desperately in need of love and acceptance but terrified of admitting it. His taciturn nature and his piercing stare led people to believe he was dangerous, but Jeb was as sweetly vulnerable as a child.

"Call me when you wake up." Laney rubbed a silky lock of dark hair between her finger and thumb. "I wouldn't say no to a nice supper tonight." She paused. "Or do you California people call it dinner?"

He muttered something unintelligible and drank some more coffee.

"I haven't been to that French place in a while," Laney hinted. Her favorite restaurant was in Minneapolis, more than an hour's drive from Owatonna, but Jeb liked driving.

He grunted again, and Laney decided she'd better stop pestering him. Anyway, she had to get to the tearoom and start the day's baking.

"If my newspaper's not on the front porch, check the azalea bushes," she said. "And you'll find some apricot-oatmeal bars in the cookie jar. I don't suppose they'd make a bad breakfast." Not for Jeb, who could stand to put some meat on his bones. "Just be sure to have some orange juice, too."

As she worked one last tangle out of his hair, she realized there was something unfamiliar about his scent. Leaning forward, she sniffed to determine whether he
was using a new shampoo. When that experiment yielded no conclusive result, she decided that her nose must still be accustomed to Nathan's expensive colognes.

She moved her hands to his shoulders and gave him two light, affectionate pats. "You have a good day," she said, and turned to go.

Jeb's hand snaked out and captured one of her wrists. He squeezed hard, for just a second, and then he released her without looking up.

"You're welcome," she said softly. "I don't know how I forgot to buy coffee for your house." She scooped up her bag and headed out the door, trusting him to switch off the coffeemaker and lock up when he left.

Having Jeb home always righted her world, but there was nothing for him in Owatonna. He needed to make music, and he couldn't do that here.

Approaching his garage, Laney pressed the button on her remote and waited while the door rumbled upward. Maybe all of this would be easier to accept if she'd had some inkling, back in those halcyon days when Jeb had been a fixture of her daily life, that things would eventually change. That his phone calls and his trips home would dwindle in frequency and duration and then stop entirely.

Last night he'd said this was simply the way of things. Maybe it was, but why did it have to hurt so much? And why did this revelation have to come at a time when her emotions were already stretched to the breaking point?

"I just can't deal with this," she muttered several hours later as she stood in the tearoom's kitchen stirring the thick batter that would become tomorrow's lemon-pecan tea bread. "If one more thing goes wrong this week, I'm going to scream."

"No, you're not," Caroline said bracingly. "You'll handle this little setback like the strong woman you are."

Little setback? This was an unmitigated disaster. The tearoom's furnace had stopped working, and where she was going to find the money to have it repaired, Laney didn't know.

She shoved the mixing bowl aside and pressed her fingertips against her eyelids until she saw sparks, but that did nothing to ease her tension headache. Neither did the low roar of the fan she'd placed in the doorway to blow the kitchen's heat into the dining room.

"Just tell me it's warm enough in there," she begged.

"It's not too bad," Caroline said. "The thermostat says it's 65 degrees, and I don't think it'll get any colder because it's 50 outside and the sun has just come out. A lady from Missouri complained about being cold, but everyone knows those people have thin blood. Aggie found her a sweater to wear at the table instead of her bulky coat, so she's all right now."

Laney stopped abusing her eyeballs to look hopefully at her great-aunt. "Was that the only complaint?"

Caroline dipped her head to peer at Laney over the rims of her glasses. "Do you honestly think Minnesotans are going to whine about having a few
goosebumps
?"

"I guess not." Most Minnesotans didn't even bother zipping their jackets before January, but they weren't whiners in any case, the majority of them being descendants of hardy Germans or Scandinavians. And they couldn't listen without embarrassment to people who complained about their troubles, either.