Getting Lucky (The Portland Pioneers Book 2) (7 page)

“It was no big deal,” he said. “Like I said, I enjoy tinkering with stuff.”

She gave him another speculative glance from under surprisingly thick lashes. Noah wasn’t an expert or anything, but he would have bet she wasn’t wearing a speck of makeup. But then, why would she? Who knew how early she had to get up to open this place and even with the exhaust fan going, the size and strength of that grill would heat up the kitchen in a heartbeat.

He tried remembering any occasion when Tabitha had ever voluntarily gone out in public without deploying a full face of makeup, and couldn’t remember one. Then it hit him, like another baseball to the head. He couldn’t use his experience and knowledge of Tabitha to deal with Maggie. They might be related by blood, but fundamentally, they were totally different creatures.

“I’m sorry I haven’t emailed Tabitha yet. I’m going to. But last night was late, and I have to be up so early.” Maggie flushed, and Noah was pretty sure there was something about last night that she wasn’t telling him, but he supposed she didn’t really have to. It wasn’t any of his business. Then he remembered the semi-possessive glares that Cal guy had been sending his direction, and Noah thought maybe he understood a little better.

He hadn’t gotten the vibe Maggie and Cal were involved from her body language, but if they weren’t yet, he was definitely interested in making that possibility a reality. So even if Noah hadn’t sworn to himself he’d avoid any other woman with the last name of King like she was the plague itself, he would have left Maggie alone. He wasn’t about to encroach on Cal’s territory, especially for an affair that could only have lasted a few days anyway.

Besides
, Noah told himself,
if you stay here longer than a week, you’ll gain a hundred pounds from her cooking.

“But you still will?” he asked, forcing himself to remember why he was here. He was here for
Tabitha
, not for her sister, even if she was annoyingly intriguing.

Maggie looked down at her hands, wrapped around her coffee mug. “I said I will, and I will. But I have to warn you, you’re not going to like what you discover. It might be better to just call her a lost cause.”

“Is that what you think she is?” he asked, even more intrigued, despite his best intentions.

She thought hard for a moment. “I don’t want to think of her that way,” Maggie said, picking her words carefully. “I don’t want to think of anyone that way. But sometimes, someone goes so far down a particular path, they turn into a stranger.”

“And you two are strangers now, I take it.”

Noah half-expected Maggie to glare at him and say it was none of his damn business, but she surprised him again.

“I stopped talking to Tabitha because whenever we
would
talk, it was like we were speaking two different languages. Tabby would tell me about her life, about the men she saw, about the work she was doing, the clothes she was buying, and it felt like a different world than the one I lived in. I couldn’t understand how she could be happy with such a superficial life. And she thought I was dumb as a rock for wanting to come back to Sand Point after living in the city. The idea was completely incomprehensible to her. So we fought, and at some point a few years ago I just got sick of fighting with her. So I stopped calling, she didn’t make an effort either, and we drifted apart.”

“Is that why I bothered you so much?” Noah asked. “You thought I must be part of that life, too.”

“That life doesn’t bother
me,” Maggie corrected with a heated glance in his direction. “You didn’t bother me either. I’ve just spent most of a lifetime cleaning up after her, and I’m not eager to do it again. Plus, I didn’t want to upset you. And if she does pass on a message, chances are it won’t be what you want to hear.”

“I’ve got a tougher skin than that,” he insisted, even though that didn’t seem true anymore. Tabitha, and then the concussion, had eroded his thick skin until it felt alarmingly thin in spots. He just hoped Maggie wouldn’t poke and prod until she found one of them and realized just how vulnerable he was.

“You’d better.” Maggie drained the last of her coffee and slid out of the booth. “I’ll email her after lunch.”

He tried to flash her one of his trademark smiles, but it felt weaker than normal, as if she’d already found that weak spot and exploited it. “You know where to find me.”

After lunch, Maggie sat down at an empty booth with her laptop and screwed up her courage.

She didn’t really want to know how Noah and her sister had gotten involved. She’d warned him about not liking what he found in the rabbit hole, but she hadn’t said it entirely for his benefit. Maybe Cal’s offer had temporarily helped her forget about Noah’s request, but she also hadn’t wanted
to remember.

But now she owed Noah, and this was the method he’d chosen as repayment, as foolish as it might be.

Maggie’s fingers hesitated over the keys, then she finally took the plunge, googling Noah Fox’s name paired with Tabitha’s. And she wasn’t surprised at what she found.

Pictures of the two of them, posing together, Noah’s dark looks set off by Tabitha’s flawless blond perfection. The smile on his face seemed so much easier then, almost carefree, but like Maggie expected, Tabitha still had that sly calculation hiding behind her eyes. How anyone missed it, Maggie didn’t know. She’d been seeing it in her sister’s face for too many years, and it had broken her heart over and over again.

The text articles were even worse. Rumors of journalistic impropriety, and not just with Noah, but with a handful of other players on the Pioneers team. All leading to Tabitha’s “triumphant” exit to return to her home of Northern California to cover collegiate athletics, specifically Stanford and Cal, for ESPN, leaving behind a flurry of questions of about exactly how involved she’d been with the Pioneers.

There were a number of tense “no comment” remarks from Noah and a lot of defensive posturing by the Pioneers and the Pacific Northwest Sports Group. It was enough for Maggie to come to the conclusion that her sister hadn’t changed at all. If anything, she’d become more crafty and cunning, using everyone around her for her own ends. It was enough to make Maggie sick.

She leaned back in the booth, and let her head tip back until it hit the padding. It was an absolute mystery how two sisters could be so fundamentally opposite in character. Maggie wondered, not for the first time, if maybe her own giving streak had developed in response to Tabitha’s tendency to take, take,
take
.

For a moment, Maggie was almost tempted to call her mom and vent, even though they’d made an unspoken agreement never to discuss Tabitha anymore, shortly after Maggie had cut off her own communication with her. Luce King had always believed in the best of people, and her naivety had made it impossible for see her daughter for who she really was.

Maggie, even though she was younger, had been forced into the position of juror, judge and then janitor, cleaning up Tabby’s messes as she’d made them. When Tabitha had gone off to college at USC, Maggie had finally been able to take a deep breath of relief and try to live her own life for a change. Unfortunately, Tabitha’s foibles had a nasty habit of popping up despite the distance.

Noah Fox was just the latest in a long line of them.

Googling him, she found a history of professional success on the field, and personal success with the women of whatever city he happened to be in. He’d come to Portland with a big contract after a few good years in Arizona, but until Tabitha had seemed to devote his free time to having as much fun with as many women as possible. Maggie was not even a little surprised by this discovery.

Then she found the YouTube video. Someone had shot it from the stands, close to home plate. He’d been at bat, his body tightly coiled with tension as the pitcher threw one wild pitch after another. And then the pitch that had sent her stomach to the floor.

The ball had winged its way down from the mound and had kept rising, and there was simply no time. Noah tried to get out of the way, but he couldn’t, and the ball hit him right in the temple, at the edge of the plastic batting helmet. He’d had crumpled into the dirt, obviously unresponsive.

With growing dread, Maggie found more articles about his concussion and the subsequent inability to be cleared by the doctors for baseball activities in time for the playoffs, which the Pioneers had made for the first time ever. As far as she could find, he still hadn’t been cleared. There was even some mild speculation that his career was over and he’d be forced to retire.

She was still trying to figure out what this meant, along with everything else she’d found, when Cal slid into the booth opposite her.

“Hey,” he said, and she glanced up in surprise.

“I didn’t know you stuck around,” she said. She’d kind of hoped he hadn’t. This was the first time they’d been alone since that aborted kiss, and awkwardness was billowing between them like a mushroom cloud.

“I left, but I came back after lunch to check on the repair that idiot made.”

“I’m assuming it was fine,” Maggie said, pulling up her email and typing in the last email address she had for Tabitha. “The fan worked perfectly through lunch.”

“It was,” Cal admitted reluctantly.

“I’m glad Noah was here to fix it,” Maggie said. It was a low blow, and it was unlike her to verbally twist the knife, but Cal’s absence had upset her, and her realization of how reliant she was on him had upset her even more. He was her best friend, not her slave. She needed to become more conversant with her own equipment so if this happened again, she wouldn’t have to call anybody but herself.

“Maggie,” he sighed. “I’m sorry, again.”

“For what?” she challenged. “For not being here to fix the fan or for asking me to be your girlfriend?”

“I’m sorry I wasn’t available to help you this morning. You obviously needed it or you wouldn’t have let pretty boy touch your kitchen. But I’m not sorry about last night. I meant what I said.”

Maggie sent him a half-hearted glare over the edge of her laptop. “And I meant what I said. No.”

“You’re not even giving yourself a chance to think about it, Mags. You should at least give it a few days, at least, so the idea can sink in.”

This time her glare was not quite so half-hearted. “Cal, you’re my best friend. I’m not going to date you just because you’re lonely. As your friend, I’m happy to help in whatever way I can, but I am not willing to risk a twenty seven year friendship on your sudden need for a picket fence.”

Cal’s face fell, and Maggie instantly regretted the harshness of her words. He’d come to pour his heart out to her last night, and what had she done? Thrown it all back in his face. Maybe she should
think about it, even if the idea terrified her.

The truth was, losing Calvin as a friend terrified her the most of all.

“It’s not a sudden need for a picket fence,” he said, and she was almost relieved to hear the annoyance in his voice. Annoyance was better than hurt feelings. “If that’s what you think, you weren’t really listening.”

She sighed. “If I promise to think about it, will you stop bringing it up?”

“Yes,” he said, so smugly satisfied she was almost afraid that she might change her mind. After all, he seemed pretty convinced she would.

“Now leave me alone. I have work to do, but first I have to write this email to Tabitha.”

Cal’s face closed so fast, it was like a trap door slamming shut. “Tabitha? So you’re really going to try to contact her.”

“I said I would.”

“I can tell him right now that it’s a waste of time,” Cal said so self-righteously that Maggie was nearly
tempted to call him out on it.

“I already told him it was, but you know how Tabby is. She’s like a siren, luring men to their deaths. Maybe this will be enough to jerk him out of it. He seems a nice enough guy.”

“Yeah, if you like biceps instead of brains,” Cal grumbled, though his own biceps were hardly undeveloped from all his years helping his dad build houses.

“You don’t like him,” Maggie stated, which was unusual in of itself. Cal liked everyone.

“I don’t like the way he looks at you.”

“Trust me,” she said, “he doesn’t really look at me. Or if he does, he looks at me and sees a less beautiful copy of Tabitha.”

Cal’s expression grew impossibly harder until it practically turned to granite. “I hate hearing you talk that way. You’re beautiful, Maggie.”

“Well, I appreciate the sentiment, but I know what the mirror’s shown me for years now, and I’ve made my peace with it. If I was as beautiful as Tabby, I might have gotten her mile-wide streak of vanity too, and that would just be a terrible waste of time. I definitely never would have started cooking.”

“And that would be a terrible shame,” Cal said with a smile. “I just don’t want you to get too distracted by him. He’s . . .well. . .you know what he looks like.”

She shot him a disgruntled look. “And when have I ever cared about that? Jesus, Cal. Don’t tell me you’re jealous.”

He rose to his feet, signaling the end of the conversation. Maggie rolled her eyes. How like him to just exit when he didn’t want to answer a question—and wasn’t that an answer, all the same?