The Happiness Pact. Liz Flaherty

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СКАЧАТЬ instead of poring over cookbooks and using her friends as guinea pigs when she developed Seven Pillars’s menu.

      Tucker stayed her hands when she started to stack dishes. “Leave them. You’re the guest today, and it may be the last time—surely to heaven someone will buy the Albatross soon. Let’s get going on our first adventure.”

      Back in the car after heaping praise and a substantial tip on Colby, Tucker headed north and east. “Why didn’t you take classes?” He frowned at the hovering clouds.

      She shrugged, thinking back to those putting-one-foot-in-front-of-the-other days. “Jess was out of the navy, but still in vet school. We’d just sold part of the farm’s acreage to the Grangers for the winery and were finally out from under the threat of foreclosure. I was still living on the farm and managing the dairy, but I hated every minute of it. I only intended to stay until he finished school and came back there to live, but one weekend when he was home, he found the realty poster for the house on Main Street. It wasn’t a tearoom then, just a grand old lady who needed some new clothes, but I had all the plans written out for making it one.” She laughed, remembering. “I had a business plan, too, written in longhand in a spiral-bound notebook, and even paint chips for the outside and the trim. I’d never even been inside the house, but it was my dream and Jesse knew that. He suggested we sell the cows and invest the profit in Seven Pillars. Inside of a week, that’s what we’d done. I suppose I should have given things more time and more thought, but it had been rough since my mother died. I couldn’t wait to start a new life.”

      She stopped. “Why did I just tell you that? You were there for the worst of it.” Tuck had been there with her the whole way, flying home from wherever he was at the time on weekends to scrape and steam wallpaper until he swore he’d never get either the paste or the moisture-induced curl out of his hair.

      “I was,” he agreed. “But you never let anyone see how bad things were. You just kept laughing.”

      “That was how I kept going. Jesse just clammed up. I couldn’t do that—I’d have gone out of my mind—so I stayed social and laughed a lot.” She smiled at him. “It’s a tactic you recognize.”

      She didn’t have to say more. Of course he recognized it. It was a coping mechanism they shared. There was more to her story, too—things Tucker didn’t know. And she wanted to keep it that way.

      “Where are we going?” Libby loved farmland, but she saw it every day—Lake Miniagua sat smack in the middle of it. Driving through it wasn’t all that adventurous.

      He reached to place his hand over her eyes. “I’ll wake you when we get there.”

      “I never fall asleep in the daytime,” she said scornfully. And promptly did just that.

      * * *

      TUCKER LOVED DRIVING. It would be fine with him to just keep going until they reached Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where one of the satellite plants of Llewellyn’s Lures was. He flew up there sometimes, if the visit was urgent, but he preferred the drive. It would be a great place to show Libby, even in the dead of winter. They both had their passports with them, so they could go on into Canada whenever they liked. But she would panic if they did that. She was okay with spending the night somewhere, but she needed to be back by Tuesday morning—Seven Pillars was as much a safe haven for her as driving was for him.

      Adventure. He’d promised her that, but he had no idea how to deliver on the promise. The lunch back at the Albatross had been great, but he hadn’t made up his mind where to go from there.

      While Libby slept, he thought about the young woman she’d introduced him to that morning. In all fairness, Allison had been both attractive and pleasant—he’d enjoyed what little conversation they shared. He didn’t mind her kid being bratty, either. In his experience, most of them were at one time or another. Charlie, Jack’s precocious and hilarious twelve-year-old son, had gone AWOL from his grandparents’ home a few weeks ago—during an ice storm, no less—and had the family and everyone else at the lake in an uproar. Of course, the kid was still grounded. Jack insisted puberty would be a nonissue because Charlie was going to spend the duration in his room.

      But, as Tucker had told Libby, the chemistry hadn’t been there with Allison. It was too bad. Really, it was. He’d meant what he said—he honestly did want a wife. A family. A home. But he wanted what Jack and Arlie had, too, that click between them that was both indefinable and undeniable.

      He looked over at where Libby slept with her head tucked into the pillow he kept in the car. It would be nice if they could develop that chemistry, because she was pretty close to being his favorite person. But, regardless of what happened in some of the movies she’d dragged him to and he’d pretended he didn’t like, he didn’t believe friends necessarily made good lovers.

      As he drove, the sky appeared more and more as if it was filling up with snow to dump on them. Winter had been an ongoing progression of record-breaking badness so far, each snowfall or ice storm heavier than the one before it. Buying the new Farmer’s Almanac had done nothing to prepare him for the unpredictable weather.

      It had promised a cold but clear day today, but no one who lived in the Midwest ever took promises like that seriously.

      Taunting him, the clouds opened and began the process of dropping their contents. They weren’t on the interstate, which made driving through the snow in a Camaro even more of a challenge than it might have been otherwise.

      Two inches of snow later, the clock in the car insisted it was four, but the lowering sky indicated it was lying. The wind speed had increased at least ten miles per hour, making the thick white stuff even more impenetrable. Libby came abruptly awake. “Where are we?”

      “The North Pole. I took a wrong turn.”

      She called him a mildly profane name in a pleasant voice, then reached back between their seats. “Coffee?”

      “Please.”

      She found the thermos and filled their cups. “I’m sorry.”

      He sipped, welcoming the warmth, and arrowed her a quick glance. “For what?”

      “If we weren’t going on an adventure, we wouldn’t be driving through a snowstorm.”

      He laughed, reaching over to give her hair a tug. “It’s not the first one we’ve driven through.”

      “That’s true.” She peered through the windshield. “Are we near a town?”

      He nodded. “About six more miles, I think, judging by that sign about an hour ago that said it was eleven miles away.”

      She punched his arm lightly. “Do we exaggerate much?”

      His cell phone made a percolator sound that signaled a text. Tucker sighed. “There’s my brother, telling me to get off the road. He’s so predictable.”

      “Do you want me to check it?”

      “Yeah, you’d better. The last time I drove in a storm, the plant had a fire and Charlie ran away.”

      “But the Colts won that day, so it wasn’t a total loss.” Libby tapped his phone to read the message. “You’re right. It is Jack. He says if you’re driving to get off the road, you—” Her eyes widened. “I don’t think that was a very nice thing for him to call you.”

      “You’re СКАЧАТЬ