“Is that so strange?”
“My mom took off when I was small, and I never knew my dad. My grandparents worked all the time—”
“And you were always one of the happiest, most well-adjusted kids I’d ever met.”
She nodded, understanding that even though her upbringing had been unorthodox, she’d enjoyed a childhood full of love and safety, one rich in ways that had nothing to do with money. Rourke had grown up in luxury with servants, private schools, summer camp, trips to Europe. Yet she knew what he had endured. Joey had told her once, their second summer together. She had gone up to the camp to watch the annual boxing matches, and Rourke seemed to win every bout. Although the crowd cheered wildly, he seemed to take no joy in winning. In fact, when he was declared the champion, he got out of the ring, puked in a bucket and stalked away, unable to savor his victory.
Joey had touched her shoulder and leaned over to whisper in her ear, “His father beats him.”
Jenny had been stunned. “Are you sure?”
He nodded solemnly. “I’m the only one who knows. And now you.”
So now, when Rourke looked at her across the table and said he envied her childhood, she understood. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I wish things had been different for you.”
“They’re different now.”
Maybe, she thought. But he still held things in. A part of him was still a prisoner of the past, held hostage by his father’s cruelty and his mother’s indifference.
Matthew Alger came in for his usual morning coffee, and Jenny noticed that he left his usual stingy tip of leftover pennies. He wasn’t Jenny’s favorite person and he sure wasn’t Rourke’s. She knew that. In charge of the town’s purse strings, Alger tended to make it difficult for Rourke to do his job. Too often, Rourke had to go to Alger, hat in hand, when he needed any sort of special funding. Zach came through the doors from the back and went over to his father’s table. Although she couldn’t hear them talking, Jenny could see the tension in both father and son. She wondered what the dispute was about, but Zach tended to keep things to himself.
Zach was a dedicated member of Rourke’s youth group. He’d formed it when he first became chief of police. There had been several incidents of violence at the high school, and Rourke was determined to do something about it. His first step had been to take down the barriers between the generations by visiting their schools, listening to them, finding out what was going on in their lives.
That was another reason he was such an anomaly. His personal life seemed to take a distant backseat to the community. He had kids in the youth group going to the old folks’ home at Indian Wells and making oral-history videos with the residents there. He’d formed a group charged with picking up day-old bread from the bakery and delivering it to the church pantry. Some of his work teams had done a mural on the side of a derelict building at the edge of town. This year, a team of them was going to create an ice sculpture for Valentine’s Day.
And the kids. They told him things. Maybe that was the reason Matthew Alger didn’t like Rourke—because he was worried about what Zach might say about him. Zach’s face was pale and grim as he left his father, shoving through the swinging doors as he went back to work. The older man picked a secondhand newspaper out of the discard pile, folded it back to the crossword puzzle and got to work at the window counter.
She shifted her attention back to Rourke and gazed across the table at him. “I wonder what that was all about,” she said.
“What?”
“Zach and Matthew.”
He shrugged. “I didn’t notice. Too busy with this pastry.” He took a bite and sent her a beatific smile.
Jenny’s heart sped up. This was starting to feel too good. Too comfortable. Too romantic.
“What?” he asked, noticing her stare.
“I need to find a place to live,” she said.
“You have a place to live.”
“Listen, you’ve been really nice to let me stay with you, but I’m wearing out my welcome.”
“Who says?”
“I say. At the very least, I’m cramping your social life.”
“Maybe you’re my social life.”
“Yeah, I’m a barrel of laughs,” she said. “I was referring to the women you date.”
“That’s not a social life,” he said. “That’s…” He couldn’t seem to find the word for it.
She refrained from suggesting “sleeping around.”
He shook his head and said, “You’re not cramping my style.”
“You haven’t had a date since the fire.”
“It’s only been a week,” he pointed out.
“When was the last time you went a whole week without dating?”
“I don’t keep score, but obviously, you do. Why, Miss Majesky, I didn’t know you cared.”
Yes, he did know, and he was reveling in it. “I can’t stay with you forever,” she said.
He studied her for a long moment, his expression unreadable. How did he manage to shave like that? she found herself wondering. It was flawless, and now that she knew his routine, she knew he did it in about two minutes flat.
“Nope,” he agreed. “Of course not.”
She sensed that she had hurt him. Which simply did not compute, since he was the one who had been teasing her. “You know,” she said, “I could simply walk away from everything.” Saying the words aloud both frightened and exhilarated her. It was scary, because the town and bakery had been her whole world. Even scarier was the fact that she was finally making some sort of connection to this man. Yes, she thought, that was scarier than running away. If she stayed, she might have to deal with this uncomfortable collision of their past and present.
He leaned forward across the table. “You can’t walk away. You need the bakery so you’ll have something to write about.”
Here’s what she hated—the fact that he could read her. “Nice, Rourke.”
He threw back
