First Comes Love

Now the women at the tables on both sides of Tess were gawking at her. And they were all looking at the saltines and sparkling water sitting on the table before her. Tess closed her eyes in mortification. Rumors in Marigold, Indiana, traveled faster than the speed of light. What was worse, though, the things piped over the Marigold grapevine almost always ended up being true. A little more embellished than usual, maybe, but still essentially true. If you heard it over the backyard fence in Marigold, Indiana, then, by golly, you could pretty much count on its reality, in one form or another.

By midafternoon, everyone in town was going to be certain Tess was pregnant. And they would be sure it had come about after some sordid one-night stand. She had to put a stop to this now.

“It wasn’t a one-night stand,” she said through gritted teeth.

“Then it was someone special,” Susan surmised.

“No, it wasn’t,” Tess insisted. “It was nobody. I’m not pregnant.”

But Susan was having none of it. When Tess opened her eyes, it was to see the other woman sitting back in her chair with a dreamy little speculative look in her eyes. “Let’s see now, who could it be…?” she murmured. “Last time I saw you out with a man, it was at the Christmas bazaar. Donnie Reesor brought you.”

“Donnie’s just a friend,” Tess said. “And you know it. And as everybody in town knows, he’s about to ask Sandy Mackin to marry him.”

Susan chuckled. “Well, this just might put a little crimp in those plans now, mightn’t it?”

Tess closed her eyes again. “Susan, please…”

“Fine,” the other woman relented. “Like I said, I won’t tell a soul. I’ll let you break the news to everyone when you’re ready. ’Course, you won’t be able to wait too long,” she added jovially. “These things have a way of…showing themselves.”

“There’s no news to break and nothing to show,” Tess said. “I—”

“Oh, but I can’t wait to see how your brothers are going to respond to the news,” Susan interrupted again. “Those Monahan boys were always ripe for a fight when we were growing up—anytime, anywhere. They’re going to pound the father of your baby once they hear.”

Although she was beginning to understand that the gesture was pointless, Tess tried one last time to deny Susan’s assertion. “Susan, there is no father,” she stated as levelly and forcefully as she could. “Because there is no baby. I’m sick, that’s all. The flu, food poisoning, something. Not pregnancy, I assure you.”

Susan leaned forward, wrinkled her nose in something akin to a smile and patted Tess’s hand. “Don’t you worry, Tess,” she said. “Your secret is safe with me. Oh, look, there’s Sister Mary Joseph. I absolutely must speak to her about a matter of grave importance.”

And before Tess could stop her, Susan Gibbs rose from the table and scrambled across the room toward a gaggle of nuns. Tess buried her head in her hands and wanted to cry. The Award for Excellence in Teaching wasn’t the only thing she would be up for today, she thought. No, by day’s end everyone would be thinking of her in terms of Mother of the Year.

Two

The mood in the third bay of Will Darrow’s Garage and Body Shop was, as always, laid-back. He had officially closed shop over an hour ago, at his usual weekday 6:00 p.m., and he relished the end of a productive day—a day of good, honest labor—like he relished nothing else in life. Cool jazz wafted from a portable CD player that sat atop the cluttered desk in the attached office, Will was sprawled beneath the chassis of a ’68 Corvette that just so happened to belong to him, and his best friend, Finn Monahan, sat leaning back in the rickety desk chair he’d pushed into the bay, enjoying a long-neck bottle of beer.

Life, Will supposed, didn’t get any better than this.

He had his own business—which was thriving nicely, thank you very much—and his best friend from childhood was his best friend in adulthood. Matter of fact, Will was still close to the whole Monahan clan, and although he hadn’t thought it would be possible, he’d been drawn even closer into the circle of their affection since his father’s death ten years ago. His old man had never remarried after his mother’s death when Will was four, so the Darrow family had never numbered more than two. The Monahans, however, had always welcomed Will with open arms. They were the family he’d never had himself, right down to little Tess.

Of course, little Tess wasn’t so little these days, which was something Will tried really, really hard not to notice whenever he saw her. Or whenever he thought about her. Or whenever he fantasized about—

Not that he ever fantasized about Tess, he quickly reminded himself. Not much, anyway. Well, hardly ever. Maybe just on those occasions when he saw her and tried really, really hard not to notice how she wasn’t so little anymore. Unfortunately, with her looking the way she did now, it was pretty much impossible not to notice, because she was just so damned—

Best to think about something else, he told himself quickly as a vision of not-so-little Tess unwrapped itself in his mind. Because, as was frustratingly common nowadays, whenever visions of not-so-little Tess appeared in his brain, she was always not-so-little dressed. In fact, this particular image was one of her wearing a skimpy little scrap of pale-yellow lingerie and some of those fuzzy high-heeled things and—

Oh, boy. Not again.

Will squeezed his eyes shut tight and concentrated on other things—anything—that might make the vision of a scantily clad Tess Monahan go away. The capital of Vermont is Montpelier, he thought. Babe Ruth hit 714 home runs in his career. The atomic weight of Boron is 10.81. A Scout is brave, trusty, kind, cheerful, obedient, thrifty, lusty…

No, wait. That wasn’t it. Where was he? Oh, yeah. Tess Monahan in wispy lingerie and—

No! That wasn’t it, either.

Will sighed with much exasperation, reminded himself that Tess’s oldest brother was in the room and started over again.

Marigold, Indiana, had been his home since he was seven and a half, and Finn Monahan had been his best friend since he was seven and a half and a day. Hell, Will could still remember when Mr. and Mrs. Monahan had brought Tess home from the hospital when he and Finn were ten, a tiny bundle of pink lingerie…uh, pink flannel…surrounded by five raucous little boys—six, if you counted Will. And Mr. and Mrs. Monahan always had.

Nope, Will thought as he twisted a wrench and loosened a lug nut—and recalled a faint image of Tess wearing that yellow lacy number—life definitely didn’t get any better than this.

“Hello? Anybody home?”

Oh, great, Will thought. As if fantasizing—or, rather, thinking—about Tess Monahan wasn’t enough to mess him up, now she had to come calling at the garage.

“Hey, Tessie!” he heard Finn call out from the corner of the room. “How was school today?”

How was school today? Will replayed the words in his head and smiled. He could almost erase ten or fifteen years from their lives and hear Finn asking Tess that very question as she bounded through the front door all scrawny legs and tattered braids. He settled the wrench onto the oily concrete and pushed himself out from beneath the ’Vette.

“Hi-ya, kid,” he said as he rose, nearly choking on the last word when he got a look at Tess.

Kid. Right. With a body like hers and a mouth that tempting, Tess Monahan was anything but. Even so, to remind himself just where he and she stood in the scheme of things, he strode over to where she had parked herself and, as had been his habit for two dozen years, ruffled her hair.

Bad mistake, he realized, as he invariably did upon completing the action. And not just because she turned a mutinous, murderous gaze on him for doing it, either. But because Tess’s hair was like the finest silk, all soft and shimmery beneath his hand. He wondered how it would feel to, instead of rubbing her head like a good-luck charm, skim his palm lightly over those long tresses, or knife his fingers gently through the soft mass, or wrap a strand around his thumb and pull her closer, close enough to cover her mouth with his and—

Nothing, he told himself brutally. He would never do anything to—or with— Tess Monahan. She was a kid, even if she didn’t look the part. And she was his best friend’s sister.

And there was another reason, too, one Will didn’t like to dwell upon, one that unfolded in his head, anyway, as he wiped his hands on his soiled coveralls. It was no secret to anybody in Marigold that Tess Monahan had always had a crush on him. Hell, Will had known it himself since she was ten years old. And as much as he thought about—all right, fantasized about— Tess, he would never take advantage of that crush. Because crushes had a way of turning into infatuation. And infatuation never led anywhere at all.

Yeah, Will knew Tess had a thing for him. And maybe, just maybe, he had a little bit of a thing for her, too. But that thing, for her, at least, was little more than a habit by now. If she had feelings for him, it was only because she’d had them for so long, they had become second nature to her. They weren’t the result of an adult emotion that was destined for greatness. For Will to take advantage of her crush on him would be reprehensible, immoral. And it would only lead to trouble and a whole heap of hurt.

So Will kept his distance, because he knew it would be foolish to act on the attraction. Whatever might heat up between him and Tess would no doubt burn to a crisp in no time flat. Then the tenuous friendship they had would begin to feel awkward and uncomfortable. And in messing up things with Tess, Will might very well lose Finn, too. And Finn was the best pal he’d ever had.

“Hi, Will,” Tess greeted him as she pushed her—soft, silky, shimmery—bangs back into place. And, as she always did when she saw him, she took a couple of steps backward.

He hated it that he intimidated her the way he clearly did. But hell, he had twelve inches and about eighty pounds on her—not to mention ten years—so there wasn’t much he could do about it. And he knew she still felt embarrassed about that incident in her mother’s kitchen four years ago, when she’d gone so far as to blurt out the reality of what a big crush she’d had on him all her life.

Truth be told, Will wasn’t all that comfortable with the recollection of that, either. Even though there had always been a certain unspoken knowledge of her crush on him, neither of them had ever overstepped the bounds of propriety by actually talking about it. Not until the day Tess had just up and put voice to it the way she had.

But Will had moved on and forgotten all about the incident. He would put it right out of his mind. Totally and completely. Well, pretty much. Sort of. Hey, just because he couldn’t quite bring himself to look Tess in the eye anymore, that wasn’t any big deal, was it?

Nah.

“School was great today,” she told her brother. But there was something in her voice that didn’t quite ring true, something that sounded a little strained.

“They give you the big award?” Finn asked.

He’d risen from the chair long enough to give his sister a quick peck on the cheek, and now he folded himself back into it. The physical resemblance between the two siblings was amazing, Will noted, not for the first time. Except that Finn’s hair was black instead of blond. Then again, all of the Monahan kids resembled each other—all had those piercing blue Monahan eyes, all were extraordinarily good-looking, and all of the boys, at least, were tall and fit and slim. Tess, too, was fit and slim, but at five foot two, she didn’t exactly qualify for tall.

Upon closer inspection, though—but not too close— Will noted that she didn’t exactly qualify for fit today, either. Even standing in a slash of evening sunlight that spilled through the open bay door, she seemed a little pale, a little fatigued. A little…sick? But that was impossible. Tess Monahan never got sick.

“It wasn’t that big an award,” she told her brother, scattering Will’s thoughts. “But, yes, they gave it to me.”