The Trouble With Valentine's Day

thirty, she was just taking the loaves out of the big ovens.

'That smells wonderful, Katie,' He hung his coat and knit cap next to the back door. He rubbed a hand over his bald head.

'You got home late last night,' she said as she sliced off a hunk for him and spread it with butter.

'Grace read me a few of her poems and then was kind enough to give me some pointers.' He took the bread from her and bit into it. She didn't know if it was the chill clinging to his cheeks, but they were definitely pink.

She moved to a cabinet and reached for bread bags on the top shelf. 'You're writing poetry now?'

'Poetry feeds the soul of mankind.'

She dropped on her heels and slowly turned toward him. The man in front of her looked like Stanley Caldwell. He stood there eating his bread, getting butter on his mustache, and he had the same white pants and shirt her grandfather always wore. Same apron he tied in place before he left the house every morning. But he didn't sound like her grandfather. 'Did Grace say that?'

He nodded and took his bread out into the store. A few moments later, she heard him starting the coffee machines. He has it bad, she thought as she shoved the bread in clear bags and closed them with twist ties. He was moving on. Starting to live again. She was glad. Really.

She got out the sticker gun and marked each loaf. Yeah, she was happy for him, but at the same time, a tiny part of her wondered when she was going to get her life together enough to move on. He was seventy-one. If he could do it, she certainly could too.

She dragged out a card table and set it at the corner of the bread aisle. She draped it with a green-and-white- striped cloth and set her ten loaves of bread on it.

Eden Hansen, owner of Hansen's Emporium, was the first to bite.

'A dollar seventy-five is a lot to pay for a loaf of bread,' she complained. 'Melba used to sell her loaves for a dollar.'

'That was several years ago,' Kate explained, purposely keeping her gaze locked with Eden's so she wouldn't get distracted by her pile of lavender hair. 'With inflation, the cost of utilities, and my labor, you're getting a bargain, Mrs. Hansen.'

She pursed her purple lips. 'How do I know it tastes as good as Melba's?'

'I used my grandmother's recipe,' she said, determined to be pleasant even if it killed her.

'I don't know.'

'Wait one minute.' Kate held up a finger, then went into the back room and carved off a slice from the loaf she'd cut into earlier. She quartered it, then brought it out on a small paper plate for Eden. 'Try it.'

Eden chewed. 'Will you take a dollar fifty?'

'Sure, but only if I get to come into your store and haggle over the price of T-shirts and Cow Pie candy.'

Eden tipped back her head and laughed, or what might have been a laugh if it hadn't turned into smoker's hack.

See, she told herself and smiled. I'm a people person.

'Everyone says you're stiff as a dead dog in January,' she said when she quit coughing. 'But I think you're all right. I'll take your bread for a dollar seventy-five, and I'll tell my sister to get down here too.'

Stiff as a dead dog in January? That wasn't very flattering, but Kate was too happy over her first sale to let it bother her. After Eden left, she went into the back room and cut up the extra loaf of bread into bite-sized chunks. She set them on the card table, and by the end of the day, she'd sold every loaf of bread and had requests for more.

Later that night she found some wholesalers who sold the prefect ingredients for focaccia. She tracked them down on the Internet, and by the time she was through, she'd also ordered pickled asparagus and smoked cheddar.

She searched the house for her grandfather to tell him about her orders, and she found him sitting at the kitchen table working on a poem. His hand held a pencil stub over a sheet of notebook paper, and his gaze was fixed somewhere near the ceiling.

'What rhymes with change?' he asked.

'Strange?'

He looked at her, then wrote on his paper. 'Thank you. That's the perfect word.'

It certainly was the perfect word to describe his behavior lately. 'I ordered some things for the store,' she told him and expected him to raise a fuss.

'That's nice.' He was so absorbed in his poem that he didn't care.

The next morning, she made fifteen loaves of wheat bread and sold ten of them by noon. Also at noon, a delivery call came in from Sutter Sports. As always, her grandfather handed her the grocery bag he'd already filled. Kate hadn't spoken to Rob since the night they'd decided to be friends, or at least decided to give it a try.

'Why can't he walk over here and get it himself? We're just across the dang parking lot.'

'Katie, we don't complain about business.'

'We should if the business is just across the parking lot,' she grumbled as she left the M &S.

Twelve

The sun was out, and site didn't bother throwing her coat over her lime green beb‹ sweater and black jeans. On her way across the parking lot she glanced in the plastic grocery bag and discovered a Paper Mate mechanical pencil some Krazy Glue, and three granola bars. She'c never been inside the sports store, and a set of bells hanging on one side of the double doors announced her arrival.

Her first impression was of dark varnished wood and forest green wainscoting. Canoes and kayaks were suspended from the ceiling, and a row of mountain bikes were lined up in front of several aisles of fishing poles and camping equipment. She glanced around for the owner of the store, but she seemed to be the only person around.

'Kate.'

She looked up past a wall of hiking gear to the loft. Rob stood looking down at her, his hands gripping the half wall that extended across the loft and down the stairs.

'Could you bring that up here, please?'

The sound of her shoes on the hardwood echoed off the walls. He watched her progress as she climbed up the stairs and entered the loft. An oak desk sat in the center with a flat-screen monitor and keyboard on it. Stacks of papers and folders and magazines cluttered the top of the desk.

'Finally. Lunch,' he said as he walked toward her wearing a pair of jeans and a deep beige chamois shirt with the sleeves rolled up his arms. He reached for the sack, and the sleeves slid up his forearms, the color of the shirt closely matching the deeper shades of his tattoo.

'I didn't see a snake when I was at your house,' she said as she handed him the grocery bag.

He looked into the sack, then returned his gaze to hers. 'I had to sell Chloe back to the breeder once Amelia came home from the hospital. Couldn't keep a six-pound baby in the same apartment as a python.'

'No. I guess not.' And because she was dying to know, she asked, 'How long were you married?'

He moved to the far corner of the room and, for the first time since she met him, she watched the way he walked. 'From beginning to end, a little over a year.' His long, graceful strides showed no lingering sign of injury. He moved as easily as if he'd never been hit with a.22, and his knee shattered. He set the bag on a scarred workbench crowded with feathers and thread.

'Short marriage.'

'We'd been together off and on for about four years. We never should have married, but Louisa got pregnant so we gave it a try.' He took the mechanical pencil and glue out of the bag and set them on the workbench. 'Come over here. I want to show you something.'

Kate didn't think cheating was giving a marriage much of a try, but she really didn't want to pass judgment when she didn't know anything about the relationship. Or maybe she was rationalizing his behavior because he looked incredibly hot today.

She moved across the room and stopped next to him. He was bent at the waist, inspecting something through