Authors: Christa Maurice
He pulled open the door. Nobody lingered in the tiny waiting area and a blonde in a white t-shirt and black pants with a little red waitress’s apron wrapped around her waist bounded over before the door even fell shut.
“Hi, Miss Donnelly, you need a table? Benny’s clearing one now.” The waitress’s gaze shifted over Maureen’s shoulder and her eyes went wide. He had about ten seconds before his cover went up in hysteria.
“Thanks, Tara. How’s your sister doing?” Maureen scanned the restaurant. When she returned to the waitress, the girl’s gaze pinged back to her, still wide eyed.
“My sister? Um, Ellie’s fine. Um... I’ll, um...check on Benny.” The waitress spun around and all but sprinted for the back of the restaurant. Probably headed for the kitchen where she would tell the entire staff he was here.
“Tara’s little sister was in my class two years ago.” Maureen turned and frowned. “You have grease on your face.”
“I do?” Bear watched over her shoulder for the kitchen staff to come boiling through the swinging doors to check out the visiting celebrity.
“Yeah. Do you want a Kleenex?” She dug in her purse.
“No, I’ll just go wash it off in the bathroom.” He lunged past her in the direction the waitress had gone, crossed the dining room without touching the floor and burst into the kitchen.
The entire staff huddled around Tara. They turned as a unit to stare at him. All of them in Touchstone’s target audience range.
“I told you!” Tara shrieked.
“Hush,” an older man hissed. The only one not in the crowd. “The customers will hear you.”
“Listen, I just want to have a nice quiet dinner.” Bear held up his hands. “I’ll sign all the autographs you want in here, but out there I’d really appreciate it if you treated me like anybody else.”
“But you’re not anybody else,” a girl with black hair and black rimmed glasses whimpered. “You’re Bear D’Amato from Touchstone.”
“You know Brian Ellis,” another girl said.
“And Jason Callisto.”
That broke their spell and they rushed him, order tablets out for autographs, babbling about how much they liked the album and the single and were they going to be doing a show anyplace close? He started signing. “I’m going to be in town for a few more days and I really want to keep it quiet. I just want to have dinner like anybody else. If everyone could just keep this between us until I leave, maybe I can talk the band into swinging by here while we’re on tour. But seriously, if there’s a breath of a rumor that I’m here, I can’t promise anything.”
The whole group gasped, exchanging conspiratorial glances. Hopefully, it would be as easy to arrange as it had been to promise. Sandy was going to murder him.
Tara stood in front of him with bright eyes. “Are you dating Miss Donnelly?”
“I’m having dinner with Miss Donnelly.” Eventually. If he ever managed to get back to her. He’d been gone a really long time and still had grease on his face.
“I bet she doesn’t even know who you are.” Tara clutched her autograph to her chest. “She’s so tragically unhip. I’ll go seat her.”
“Not a word,” he cautioned as she scooted through the door. Now he was lying. Flat out, no doubt, lying.
But if he told her, she’d either run screaming or latch on tighter for all the wrong reasons. He just wanted one night. Not even the whole night. For the next three hours, he wanted to be nobody special.
2
By the time he parked in her driveway, Maureen had been wrestling with the idea of coffee for five minutes. If she invited him in, he might take it to mean something more than the offer of a hot beverage on a chill night. Worse, she wasn’t sure if she didn’t mean it to be something more, which was completely out of character.
Dinner had been nice. Weird, but nice. Michael could recite whole episodes of
The Simpsons
with voices. He’d claimed he was working on the movie, but hadn’t had time to study it yet. That made up for the fact that the entire wait staff had gone crazy.
Tara hung around the table so much, Maureen had no idea how much soda she’d drunk. Every time her glass dropped below two thirds full, Tara swooped in to refill it. Jenny Riggs argued with a customer over their check until she was screaming and Joe had to come out to settle things. Jenny had stood in the middle of the dining room clutching her glasses in her fist so she could rub tears out of her eyes with both hands. Odder still, it appeared they hadn’t been arguing over the price, but the paper it was written on. Then Benny tripped over the jukebox power cord, unplugging it, and no one bothered to plug it back in.
“This the place?” Michael asked.
“I know it’s not much to look at.” What did he see when he looked at her tiny house? A one story yellow brick box on a postage stamp lawn? But hers, all hers. “I had a nice time tonight.”
“What are you doing tomorrow?”
“What?”
He turned in his seat, leaning toward her. “What are you doing tomorrow?”
Why was he asking about tomorrow? “Well, I was thinking about doing some laundry.”
He reached for her, but instead of stopping at her hand like she expected, he ran his fingers up her arm, over her shoulder and around the back of her neck. The electric sensation continued down her spine causing her thighs to clench and her nipples to tighten in sympathy. So out of character. “That sounds like one of those excuses,” he murmured.
“It’s not. I can’t really go anywhere. No car, remember?” She tried to draw a breath, but her lungs didn’t seem interested.
“I’ll take you anywhere you want.” Michael brushed his lips across her cheek.
A whimper escaped her. “Anywhere? What if I said Paris?”
“I’d take you to Paris. Get your passport.” He kissed the corner of her mouth.
“I have to be back on Monday for school.”
“The Concorde is really fast.”
“The Concorde doesn’t fly anymore.”
He pressed his lips to hers.
Maureen closed her eyes. Her fingers clutched his leather jacket. This was not like her at all. First dates ended with a chaste kiss at the door followed by a minimum one week interval before the second date. Michael was so unlike any man she’d ever dated. Something about him made her feel like she was standing at the edge of a volcano, considering hopping in to test the temperature of the lava.
His tongue brushed across her lips.
She pulled back. “Slow down there, cowboy.”
Michael stared at her. His heavy breathing was the only sound in the car.
Cowboy? Urg. Well, it had been nice while it lasted. Before she screwed it up, she’d had the focused attention of a really sexy guy for a whole evening.
He bit his lip and shook his head once. “So what are you doing tomorrow?”
“Are you serious?”
“Absolutely.”
“But I’m a prude,” she blurted out.
Michael shrugged. “I can work with that. How about I pick you up around noon? We’ll grab some lunch and go see what there is to do.” He jumped out of the car and hurried around to the passenger door.
Maureen looked up at him when he opened it. “You’re serious.”
“I said I was.” Michael held out his hand.
As he guided her from the car, she protested, “There really isn’t a lot to do around here.”
“I’m sure we can find something.” He stopped in front of the door and looked at her expectantly.
Her mouth went dry. What was he waiting for? An invitation in? Another kiss? Either one would be nice. Not her, but nice. What would he do if she stepped forward, wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him?
Dumb question.
“Are you going to unlock the door?” he asked.
That, on the other hand, was an excellent question.
Maureen dug through her purse for her keys. She unlocked the door quickly as if it would make up for standing on the porch like a thunderstruck teenager. “So you’ll come over tomorrow?”
“Noonish, and I’ll see what I can do about getting your car finished.” He kissed her cheek. “Good night, Maureen.”
“Night.” After she’d closed her front door, she leaned against it trying to remember how to breathe. She’d lost her mind. That was the only explanation. Too many blind dates and she’d gone gaga for the guy who fixed her car. Check that. The brother of the guy who fixed her car. The way she was acting, he was a movie star.
Well, as long as she managed to keep her head, it wouldn’t be so bad. Once he went back to wherever he lived, it would fizzle. Long distance relationships never worked for her. The two times she’d tried, they’d imploded in months and both of those had been established before the separation.
No, this would be short and sweet, emphasis on sweet because she wasn’t going any further with some guy she was never going to see again. Especially since she had to face his brother every time her car broke down.
* * * *
Bear went straight back to Tony’s house. He wanted to turn in early so he could work on Maureen’s car before he went to pick her up. If he could get the parts, he’d have it done by the time he needed to pick her up. The Satellite wouldn’t be finished before he left town anyway and the lure of being her hero was enticing. He was already imagining the expression on her face when he pulled into her driveway with her car.
“You hung out at the garage late,” Pam said as he walked in the front door. “You get much done?”
“No. One of the regulars showed up with bad brakes so I took her to dinner.” Bear walked through the living room headed for the rumpus slash guest room they put him in when he visited. “Wake me up in the morning. I want to get a head start on her car before I pick her up.”
“What?” Tony floundered off the couch like a turtle trying to turn off its back. “What did you just say?”
Bear stopped at the end of the hall. “One of your regulars came in with a brake problem. I want to get it taken care of so I can take her car back when I pick her up tomorrow.”
“Pick her up?” Tony put his fists on his hips. “You asked her out on a date?”
“Yeah.”
“Bear.” Pam stood too. “What are you doing?”
“Don’t screw with the locals, Bear. These are my customers,” Tony said.
“I’m not screwing with the locals. She doesn’t even know who I am. I just want to have a nice normal couple of dates before I have to go back to the circus. Trust me.”
Tony glanced at Pam and scowled at him. “Who is it?”
“Maureen Donnelly.”
“Miss Donnelly?” Tony folded his arms.
“Bear, that’s the teacher we’re hoping to get for Nicky next year.” Pam wrung her hands.
“So?” Bear looked from his brother to his sister-in-law. They were clearly peeved, but why? Other than a momentary loss of reason in the car tonight, he’d been on his best behavior. The whole night, he’d been a perfect gentleman and he planned to continue. “What’s the big deal?”
“This is not some groupie you can walk away from,” Tony said.
“I’m not treating her like a groupie. We went to dinner. Tomorrow we’re going to go to lunch and then we’re going to go do something in the afternoon. And I’m hoping to get up early enough to take care of her brakes before I pick her up. Is that okay?”
“No, it’s not.”
“Well, that must suck for you.” Bear dropped his keys into his pocket. “I’m gonna go out with Maureen a couple of times while I’m in town and then I’m gonna leave and you all can get back to your regularly scheduled programming. She never needs to be the wiser and we can just be those two ships who pass in the night. See ya in the morning.”
Inside the guest room, he sat on the foot of the sofa bed. If on that day, freshman year of high school, when Brian and Jason had walked up to him in the hall and one of them had said, “We heard you play drums” if he’d said no, he could have had this life. The mortgage, the business loan, the regular programming. He could have met Maureen when she brought her junker in for a repair and taken her out for dinner without Tony and Pam freaking out. Hell, by now he might have been sharing that mortgage with her. As shaky as the car was, she must have had it in a lot. The repairs could have served as a courtship.