Lisa Kleypas - Rainshadow Road

So yes. He owed Kevin.

“How many times do you want me to take her out?” Sam asked tersely.

“Just a couple of times. Maybe once for drinks, and then for dinner.”

Sam put the steaming sandwiches onto plates, and cut Holly’s into four precise triangles. “After I take this woman out—if I can even get her to agree to go somewhere with me—the score is even, Pearson. No more favors. We’re done.”

“Absolutely,” Kevin said at once.

“How do you want to introduce us?”

“Well, the thing is…” Kevin looked uncomfortable. “You’ll have to find a way to meet her on your own. Because if she knew I had anything to do with this, she wouldn’t go for it.”

Sam stared at him disbelief. “So you want me to track down your bitter, man-hating ex-girlfriend, and talk her into going out with me?”

“Yeah, that’s basically it.”

“Forget it. I’d rather pay you for the dirt work.”

“Don’t want your money. I want you to take my ex out. Once for drinks, once for dinner.”

“I feel like a manwhore,” Sam said sourly.

“You don’t have to sleep with her. In fact—”

“What’s a manwhore, Uncle Sam?” came Holly’s voice as she wandered into the kitchen. She went to Sam and linked her arms around his waist, smiling up at him.

“Manhorse,” he said hastily, reversing the pink ballcap on her head so the bill hung in the back. “It’s what a guy smells like after he’s gotten sweaty working outside. But don’t use that word, or Uncle Mark will rip my lips off.” He bent obligingly as she reached up to pull his head down.

“Who is that?” she whispered.

“He’s an old friend of mine,” Sam said. He gave her a plate with a sandwich on it, sat her at the table, and went to ladle out some soup. Giving Kevin a narrow-eyed glance, he asked, “You got a picture of her?”

Taking a phone from his back pocket, Kevin scrolled through some photos. “Here’s one. I’ll send it to your cell.”

Sam took the phone from him and looked down at the woman in the photo. His breath caught as he recognized her.

“She’s an artist,” he heard Kevin say. “Her name is Lucy Marinn. She’s staying at Artist’s Point, has her own studio in town. She does stained-glass stuff … windows, lampshades, some mosaic stuff … she is cute, see?”

The situation was interesting, to say the least. Sam considered mentioning that he’d already met Lucy, that he’d walked to Artist’s Point with her the previous night. But he decided to keep it to himself for the time being.

In the taut silence that followed, Holly said from the table, “Uncle Sam, what about my soup?”

“Here you go, gingersnap.” Sam set the bowl before her, and tucked a length of paper towel at her neck.

With that concluded, he turned to face Kevin.

“So you’ll do it?” Kevin asked.

“Yeah, I’ll do it.” Sam gestured casually to the doorway. “I’ll see you out.”

“If you like Lucy,” Kevin said, “you should see her sister. Younger and hotter.” As if to reassure himself that he, Kevin, had still gotten the best of the bargain.

“Great,” Sam said. “I want this one.”

“Okay.” Kevin looked more puzzled than relieved. “I have to say, I didn’t expect you’d go along with it this easy.”

“No problem. But there’s one thing I don’t get.”

“Yeah?”

“What’s the real reason you broke up with Lucy? And don’t give me crap about wanting someone younger or hotter, because what this woman doesn’t have, you don’t need. So what is it?”

Kevin wore the bemused expression people sometimes had when they tripped on their own feet and turned around to check out some invisible obstacle on the sidewalk. “I just found out everything there was to know about her, and … it got boring. It was time to move on.” He frowned as he saw Sam’s faint smile. “Why is that funny?”

“It’s not.” Sam wasn’t about to explain that his amusement stemmed from the uncomfortable awareness that he was no better than Kevin when it came to women. In fact, he hadn’t been able to manage anything close to a long-term relationship, nor would he want to.

“How will I know what happens?” Kevin asked, as Sam shepherded him through the front hallway and opened the front door.

“You’ll find out eventually.” Sam saw no need to tell him that he was going to call Lucy that night.

“I’d rather know up front. Text me when you go out with her.”

Leaning one shoulder on the doorjamb, Sam gave him a mocking glance. “No texts, no e-mails, no PowerPoint presentation. I’ll take your ex out, Pearson. But when I do, and what happens afterward, is my business.”

In the morning, Lucy checked her voice mail and listened to a message that Sam Nolan had left the previous evening.

“The condo’s still available. It’s got a great view of the port, and it’s only a two-minute walk from Artist’s Point. Give me a call if you want to check it out.”

It took almost until lunchtime for Lucy to work up the nerve to call him back. She had never been inclined to dither over what she wanted. But ever since the breakup with Kevin, she was questioning things she didn’t usually question … especially herself.

Over the past two years she had become entirely too wrapped up in her relationship with Kevin. She had let friendships drift, and she had set aside her own opinions and desires. Was it possible that she’d tried to make up for that by nagging and controlling Kevin? She wasn’t sure how to set herself on the right course, how to find herself again. But one thing was clear: There was no point in fooling around with Sam Nolan, who was a dead-end street where serious relationships were concerned.

“Does every relationship have to be serious?” Justine had asked, when Lucy had said as much the previous night.

“Why bother if it’s not going to go anywhere?”

“I’ve learned some great things from relationships that didn’t go anywhere. What’s more important, the destination or the journey?”

“I know I’m supposed to say the journey,” Lucy said glumly. “But right about now, I’m ready for the destination.”

Justine had laughed. “Think of Sam as one of those roadside attractions that turns out to be unexpectedly fun,” she said.

Lucy had given her a skeptical glance. “Like the world’s largest ball of twine? Or Carhenge?”

Although the questions had been sarcastic, Justine responded with unbounded enthusiasm. “Exactly. Or maybe one of those traveling carnivals with the fun twirly thrill rides.”

“I hate fun twirly thrill rides,” Lucy said. “You feel like you’re going somewhere, but when it’s over, you find yourself in the same place you started. Not to mention dizzy and sick to your stomach.”

At Lucy’s invitation, Sam dropped by her glass studio in the afternoon. He was dressed in worn jeans and a black polo shirt, his eyes a startling turquoise against his tan. As she welcomed him inside, a jumpy feeling awakened in the pit of her stomach.

“Nice place,” Sam commented, glancing at their surroundings.

“It used to be a garage, but the owner converted it,” Lucy said. She showed him her soldering and light tables, and stacks of trays filled with cut glass that was ready to be built into windows. One section of shelves was laden with cans of waterproofing compound and whiting powder, along with disciplined rows of tools and brushes. The largest section of the studio, however, was taken up with floor-to-ceiling vertical racks of glass. “I collect every kind of glass I find,” Lucy said. “Sometimes I’ll salvage some antique glass that I might be able to use in historic restoration projects.”

“What is this?” Sam went to a treasure trove of blue-green glass misted with silver. “It’s beautiful.”

She joined him, reaching out to run her fingers over a sheet of glass. “Oh, that was the score of the year, let me tell you. It was going to be used for some massive public art installation in Tacoma, but the funding fell through, so all this gorgeous experimental glass was sitting in some guy’s barn for more than twenty years. Then he wanted to get rid of it, and a mutual friend told me about it. I got the whole lot for practically nothing.”

“What are you going to do with it?” Sam asked, smiling at her enthusiasm.

“I don’t know yet. Something special. Look at how the color is flashed into the glass—all those blues and greens.” Before she thought better of it, she glanced up at him and added, “Like your eyes.”

His brows lifted.

“I wasn’t flirting,” Lucy said hastily.

“Too late. I already took it that way.” Sam wandered to the big electric kiln in the corner. “Some oven. How hot does it get?”

“It can go up to fifteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit. I use it to fuse or texture glass. Sometimes I’ll cast pieces of glass inside a mold.”

“No glassblowing, though?”

Lucy shook her head. “That would require the kind of substantial furnace that you would have to keep hot all the time. And although I did some glassblowing in the past, it’s not my forte. I like working on windows more than anything.”

“Why?”

“It’s … creating art with light. A way of sharing how you look at the world. Emotion made visible.”

Sam nodded toward a set of speakers on the worktable. “Do you usually play music while you work?”

“Most of the time. If I’m doing some intricate glass cutting, I need it to be quiet. But other times, I’ll put on whatever I’m in the mood for.”

Sam continued to explore, browsing among jars of colored glass canes and rods. “When did you first get interested in glass?”

“Second grade. My father took me to visit a glassblowing studio. From then on, I was obsessed. When I’m away from my work too long, I start to crave it. It’s sort of like meditation—it keeps me centered.”