The Trouble With Valentine's Day

She took a step back. 'See ya around.'

He bent and picked up the trunk of one evergreen. 'Yeah.'

While she felt little tingles, he clearly felt nothing. It was embarrassing. She turned and started for her car. But his lack of interest wasn't exactly a news update-which was just as well. She wasn't in town to date-especially men like Rob. She was here to help her grandfather.

The following Friday she helped him out in a way that changed his life.

She'd inadvertently given her grandfather her cold, and he was forced to stay home in bed. Before Kate left for work, she spoke to Grace Sutter about bringing him into the clinic. Grace didn't believe it was necessary, but she promised to look in on him on her lunch break and after she closed up for the day.

The first thing Kate did when she got to the M &S that morning was to pull Tom Jones out of the CD player and plug in Alicia Keys. She followed Alica up with Sarah McLachlan and Dido. It was definitely kick-butt girl day.

At one o'clock that afternoon, she called a gourmet food wholesaler down in Boise and ordered olives, jalapeno jelly, and wafer thin crackers. She thought it best to start out small, and if those items sold, her grandfather would have to agree with some of her other ideas.

At five, the Aberdeen twins came to work, and Kate changed out the tills. She counted the money, recorded the amounts in her grandfather's ledgers, and put the money in the safe until the next morning. The telephone rang just as she was about to leave the office at six. It was her grandfather, and he wanted her to do two things for him. 'Grab the books,' which she'd already done, and make one delivery on her way home.

'Rob's special order came in yesterday,' he said between coughing fits. 'Take it out to his place.'

Kate glanced down at her beige wraparound blouse that closed with three leather buckles at one side, and she brushed dust from her left breast. 'I'll call him, and he can come get it tomorrow.' She didn't want to see Rob. It had been a long, exhausting day and she just wanted to go home, get out of her black twill pants and leather boots. 'I'm sure he doesn't need whatever it is tonight.'

'Katie,' her grandfather sighed. 'The M &S has stayed in business all these years because our customers depend on us.'

She'd heard it a hundred times before, so she grabbed a pen. 'Give me the address.'

Five minutes later she was driving around the left end of Fish Hook Lake. The sun was about to set behind the sharp granite peaks, throwing jagged shadows across the landscape and into the cold bluish-green lake. Kate glanced at the directions propped up behind her gearshift and took a left up a long drive with a split-pole fence. She could barely see the roof of a house, but motion sensor lights turned on like a runway, so she figured she was headed the right way. Then the house seemed to rise up in front of her, huge and imposing within the gray darkness of the setting sun.

The house was made of lake rock and logs, and the huge windows reflected towering pine and clumps of shaded snow. 'Pa rum pum pum pum,' she whispered. It looked more like a hotel than a private home. She pulled her Honda to a stop in front of the four-car garage and grabbed Rob's grocery bag off the passenger seat. She'd never given any thought to where he might live, but even if she had, this wouldn't have been it.

She checked the address her grandfather had given her against the numbers on the house. Professional hockey must have been very good to Rob.

She got out of her car and hung her leather backpack over one shoulder. The heels of her boots echoed across the concrete and stone as she moved up the wide porch to the double front doors.

With the grocery bag hanging off one arm, she raised her hand and knocked. The light above her head wasn't on, and there didn't appear to be any lights on in the house. After several moments, Kate set the bag by the front door and opened her purse. She dug around for a piece of paper and found an old grocery list, a bank deposit receipt, and a paper gum wrapper that smelled like mint. She pulled the wrapper out along with a pen and used the door to write against.

About halfway through the note, the light above her head flipped on and one side of the doors flew open. Kate stumbled and almost did a header into Rob's chest.

'What are you doing?' he asked.

She grabbed hold of the other door to keep from falling. 'I'm delivering your groceries.' She looked up past his bare feet and jeans to an old, worn T-shirt. Blue, she believed, and stretched out of shape.

'You didn't have to do that.'

He had a white towel around his neck, and he lifted one end to dry his wet hair. The loose sleeve of his shirt slipped down the hard mounds of his muscles to the dark hair nestled in his armpit. His snake tattoo circled his thick biceps, and something warm and delicious slid into her stomach. 'My grandfather said…' She frowned and shoved the bag toward him. 'Never mind.'

He turned and walked into the house without taking the bag. A chandelier made of elk horns shone overhead and slid crystal prisms down his wide shoulders and back to the behind of his jeans. He looked at her over his shoulder. 'Come in and shut the door.'

Nine

'You live here alone?'

Rob tossed the towel on the back of his leather couch and finger-combed his hair. 'Yeah.' She'd caught him just out of the shower. He wouldn't have even seen her standing by the door if he hadn't walked by and noticed her through the windows at the top of the stairs.

Kate set the bag of groceries on a coffee table as she moved past him across the great room. 'Wow, I've never really seen the lake from this side,' she said as she looked out the floor-to-ceiling windows.

Rob glanced out at the patches of snow around the clear lake. In the summer, the water reflected the dense pine and took on an emerald green color. Tonight the quarter moon was just starting to rise over the jagged teeth of the Sawtooths, casting the mountains and lake in a light gray.

'Do you like it?' he asked as he ran his gaze down the back of Kate's coat and pants to the heels of those dominatrix boots of hers. No female, other than his mother, had ever been in his home. That Kate was even here felt a bit disconcerting-like watching the star from your favorite porn film step from the screen and into your living room. He'd been thinking about her so much it was embarrassing. Almost as if he were sixteen instead of thirty- six.

'It's gorgeous.' She pushed one side of her hair behind her ear. 'When I visited Gospel when I was young, my grandmother used to take me to the public beach.' She pointed to her right, toward town. She leaned forward and placed her palm against the glass, her long ringers spread out and pressed flat. Her short, shiny nails pointed toward the ceiling. 'I can see the marina over there.' She dropped her hand and looked over at him. 'Oops. Sorry.' She frowned and turned toward him. 'I got my handprint on your clean window.'

'That's okay. It'll give Mabel something to do when she cleans next week.' He folded his arms across his chest and rested his weight on one foot. His gaze took in her smooth, red hair resting against the thin column of her throat. He knew that the skin where her shoulder met her neck was as soft as it looked.

'Your house is beautiful, Rob,' she said, and it was the first time he could recall her using his name.

Of course, he'd imagined her using it. But in a context that would probably get his face slapped. Inviting her in had been a bad idea. Very bad. He should show her the door. Instead he heard himself say, 'Do you want to see the rest of it?'

'Sure.'

Too late now. 'You can leave your coat down here, if you'd like.' He didn't offer to help her. He'd pretty much learned his lesson about that the last time.

She shrugged out of her coat and laid it by the grocery sack. She walked toward him, and his gaze took in her sweater, which wrapped across her breast and closed with buckles on one side. Black leather buckles. The kind that wouldn't be that hard to open. Don't think about the buckles.

He turned, and she followed him upstairs. The first room they entered was filled with free weights and exercise equipment. In front of a wall of mirrors sat his treadmill and Nordic Track.

'Do you really use this stuff?' She pushed up her sleeves, exposing the delicate blue veins on the insides of her