All He Ever Desired (The Kowalskis) Read online

  “Get anything good?” Lauren had never had the patience for knitting, but it was one of her mother’s passions.

  “They had a gorgeous pink cotton on clearance. Now I just need a baby girl to knit a sweater set for.”

  Lauren laughed and held up her hands. “Don’t look at me. I gave you a grandson and, trust me, one is enough.”

  “How is Nicky doing?” her dad asked. “It’s been quiet here without him.”

  Nick worked part-time at the hardware store during the summer, though it only earned him a little spending money because her dad was old-school and felt it was the natural way of things for his grandson to help out. Lauren had certainly done her time as a teenager. Once school started, however, not only did he want his grandson to focus on his studies, but there really wasn’t much to do around the store besides gossip and make sure they kept up the stock of snow shovels.

  “He had detention Monday,” Lauren said, taking her usual seat on a wooden kitchen stool. She was pretty sure there was a conspiracy not to buy it so the men would have a place to sit when they visited Dozer. “Didn’t do his homework.”

  Her mother made a tsk sound and shook her head. “Boys.”

  “Boys are just as capable of doing their homework as girls, Mom.”

  “I never had this trouble with you.”

  That was because she’d had big plans to get a full scholarship to some big, faraway college and have a fabulous career doing...something. But there had been no scholarship and no college. Instead she’d fallen in love with Dean. Then she’d accidentally gotten pregnant and, before she knew it, was married. Her dad hadn’t literally brought out the shotgun, but the Dozynskis and the Carpenters had been very emphatically pro-marriage. And she had loved Dean.

  “What are you going to do about it?” her dad asked.

  “I emailed the teachers Monday, and every day Nick has to write down his homework assignments and they’ll initial each one. No video games. If it happens again before midterms, he’ll lose the iPod.”

  She didn’t need to tell them that was probably the most dire punishment she could administer. Besides not letting him take driver’s ed, of course.

  “When are you coming over for dinner?” her mother asked.

  Lauren knew she was looking for an in to give her grandson a lecture and hedged. “Soon, Mom. I’ll call you and see if there’s a good night.”

  The bell over the door rang and a couple of guys walked in. She didn’t know the first man through the door. But the second one made her pulse quicken and she focused on not showing any reaction to Ryan Kowalski as he walked into the store. The last thing she wanted was for her mother to guess she was attracted to the man.

  “Hey, Dozer,” Ryan said, stepping around the other man. “This is Matt Russell. He works for me and so does another guy named Dillon Brophy. They might stop in from time to time, and the plastic they use will have my name on it.”

  “I’ll make a note of it,” her father said.

  “Hi, Mrs. Dozynski. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen you, but I swear you haven’t aged a day.”

  Her mother was still preening over the compliment when he turned his head and saw Lauren. How her parents didn’t feel the sizzle and pop when those blue eyes made contact with hers, she couldn’t say, but she sure as hell felt it.

  “Hi, Lauren.”

  So much for avoiding him. She might have guessed a builder doing renovations might spend some time at the local hardware store, but what were the chances they’d end up here at the same time? “Hi. Nice to see you again.”

  “Definitely.” He smiled and she was glad she was sitting down, because her knees going weak while she was standing up surely would have attracted her mother’s attention.

  “Boss, you got the list?”

  Ryan turned his attention back to the guy who’d come in with him, and Lauren let out a deep breath. She might have spontaneously combusted if he’d kept looking at her like that—which was also something her mother, who had told her on numerous occasions that it was past time to find a new husband, would notice.

  She wasn’t husband shopping. She wasn’t even seriously boyfriend shopping. But there was something about the way Ryan looked at her that reminded her it had been a while since she’d had a man in her life and that certain parts of her body weren’t quite as over-the-hill as she sometimes felt.

  “You need to talk to your father.”

  Lauren blinked, belatedly realizing her mother was talking to her. Her dad had disappeared into some aisle or another with Ryan and Matt. “About what?”

  “I want him to retire.”

  “He’ll never sell this store, Mom. You know that.” Even if he wanted to, he’d be lucky if he could find a buyer. Small-town hardware stores were an endangered species.

  “These are golden years and I want to enjoy them.”

  “You’re hardly in your golden years yet. Maybe things will get better soon and he can afford to hire somebody to work a few days a week.”

  “How much does that insurance company pay you?”

  Oh, no. She’d been dodging this conversation with her mother for several years. “They pay me more than Dad could, and I get health insurance. Plus, remember when I was a teenager? Dad and I don’t work together all that well.”

  Her mom sighed. “It seems like it’s taking forever for Nicky to grow up.”

  Lauren opened her mouth and then closed it again. Nick wasn’t going to take over Whitford Hardware when he graduated from high school. Not only did Lauren want him to go to college, but her father wanted more for his grandson and had made that clear over the years. It was only her mother who was convinced that if Nick stepped into his grandfather’s shoes, it would make everybody happy.

  She heard Ryan laugh and she lost her train of thought as the deep sound echoed through the store. The man was distracting as hell, and she only half-listened as her mom moved the conversation to preparations for winterizing her garden.

  And when he turned the corner at the end of the building-supplies aisle and looked at her again, she lost all interest in when a person should cut back her peonies.

  The look in his eyes made her wonder if he was having the same kind of thoughts about her as she was having about him. And when he smiled at her, she had to become suddenly interested in untying and retying her shoelace to keep the heat that rushed through her from showing on her face for everybody to see.

  “I’ll need to borrow Nicky one day after school,” her mother was saying. “It’s almost time to yank the annuals out of the garden, and he can push the wheelbarrow to the mulch pile for me.”

  Lauren nodded and, for once, was thankful her mother’s obsession with her garden gave her something to focus on. This was Lauren’s real life, and she needed to keep her fantasies about Ryan out of it and firmly in her imagination where they belonged.

  * * *

  Ryan was doing his best not to ogle Dozer’s daughter right in front of the man—and her mother—but she drew his attention anyway. And, because he liked the way a little bit of pink colored her cheeks when he smiled at her, he did it again.

  When she bent over to retie a shoe that didn’t need retying, it took all his willpower not to chuckle at her. Luckily, Mrs. Dozynski was talking to her about something and didn’t seem to notice that her daughter was blushing.

  “You want this on the Northern Star account?”

  Feeling guilty, even though he hadn’t really done anything wrong, Ryan stepped up to the counter and turned his back on the corner where Lauren was perched on a stool. Dozer not only was the guy who controlled the building supplies in town, but he could probably break Ryan in half if he wanted to. “No, I’ll throw it on my card.”

  He stood in silence while Dozer ran the transaction, trying to think of some small talk he coul
d make. At the very least he should ask Mrs. Dozynski how she’d been or ask Lauren how Nick was doing, but he felt so awkward lusting after her while her parents were in the room—to say nothing of Matt, who was standing at his elbow—that he just waited to sign the credit slip and grabbed one of the bags from the counter.

  “Have a good day,” Dozer said, as he always did.

  “You tell Rose I said hello,” Mrs. Dozynski added.

  “I will.” He nodded at Lauren and fled, not even making sure Matt grabbed the other bag and followed him out.

  “Pretty lady,” Matt said on their way back to the lodge. “The one sitting on the stool, I mean.”

  “Yeah.” That was an understatement. She’d only gotten more beautiful with age.

  “I wonder if she’s single.”

  Ryan’s fingers tightened on the steering wheel. “Doesn’t matter, since you’re here to work, not socialize.”

  “Can’t work all the time.” Matt was looking out the window, so he most likely missed the boss’s knuckles turning white. “I’ll probably have to make trips to the hardware store. Maybe I’ll run into her again.”

  “And maybe her father, who was the barrel-chested guy behind the counter, will bury your body in the woods.”

  “Dads always love me. I’m a solid guy, or so I’m told.” Matt laughed. “Moms love me, too. My problem is finding a woman who loves me longer than a couple of months.”

  “Maybe you need to worry more about them and less about impressing moms and dads.”

  “True. But I bet I could romance the hardware store–guy’s daughter without getting buried in the woods.”

  Rather than let on he had his own eye on Lauren—not that it meant anything—Ryan let the conversation die and turned up the radio.

  Not only was Lauren being at the hardware store a kink in his plan to stay out of her way, but now the whole thing was twisted up. If he kept doing the hardware store runs, there was a good chance he’d keep running into Lauren. But if he sent one of the guys, which made more sense, it would be Matt, since Dill was temporarily unable to drive thanks to a combination of driving too fast and forgetting he hadn’t renewed his license. While he didn’t see why women found Matt irresistible, he’d seen and heard enough to know they did and he didn’t want the man around Lauren.

  He was just going to have to make damn sure they planned ahead for the work they were doing and could keep supply runs to a minimum. Considering the way both his brain and body seemed to short-circuit when he was around her, it would only be a matter of time before he said or did something stupid.

  Asking a woman he’d been in love with once upon a time out on a date when he was only in town for a month or so would definitely be stupid. Not only would he be starting something he couldn’t finish, but she had a teenage son. Things could get messy when kids were involved.

  When they got back to the lodge, he left the supplies for Matt to deal with and went into the house. He had an email from an architect he needed to deal with and the PDF sheet with the specs was too small to read on his phone. He fired up the desktop in the office and waited for it to boot up.

  And waited, and waited. When Josh stuck his head in, Ryan growled and gestured at the PC. “How old is this damn thing?”

  “I’m pretty sure it’s antique in computer years.”

  “How am I supposed to work with this? And how are you supposed to keep up with a website and a Facebook page when it takes this long just to turn on. I’m afraid if I try to check my email, it’ll start smoking and spew computer parts all over the place.”

  “Mitch has somebody from his company working on the computer crap.”

  “Finally.” Ryan started on the process of signing into his email account. “Were you looking for me or just being nosy?”

  “I wanted to tell you something.”

  “Okay.” Maybe he should go fix a snack while the piece of crap took its sweet time opening the attachment.

  “Ry.”

  He realized he was multitasking badly and gave all his attention to his brother. “Sorry. What’s up?”

  “I just wanted to tell you I appreciate you coming up here. I know you’re busy with your business and all. And I’m sorry I couldn’t swallow my pride and ask for help before it got so bad.”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t get up here more often. I should have seen what was going on and we all should have realized we’d left you holding the bag.” He’d stayed away because of Lauren and wounded pride, and his family had suffered for it. “We’ll have the place fixed up in no time and then we’ll figure out where to go from there.”

  When his brother nodded and left, Ryan tried to focus on the spec sheet the computer had finally displayed for him. There was some argument about how far the generator would be placed from the electrical panel and what gauge wire had to be run, and he wanted to know exactly what he was dealing with before calling the electrical inspector.

  But he kept picturing Lauren sitting on the stool in her father’s hardware store just as she’d been doing for as long as he could remember. When it was his turn to go to town with his dad as a little kid, she’d often be sitting there during the summer, and she’d offer to share the penny candy she’d gotten at the variety store, which had been gone for years now.

  Even then he’d been aware of how pretty she was and that her smile made his belly feel kind of funny. As he got older and realized what that funny feeling was, he’d never worked up the courage to ask her to go steady. And then, one day, Dean had.

  Ryan was a grown man now, but that smile still made him feel kind of funny. And he suspected if he ran into her too often, he might have to resort to his younger self’s way of dealing with it, which involved a lot of time in the shower with plenty of lathery soap.

  With a growl, he forced his focus back to the computer screen. Just like Matt, he was there to work, not socialize. But, unlike Matt, he would work all the time if it kept his thoughts off Lauren Carpenter.

  Chapter Three

  “I can’t make it this weekend.”

  They were the words Lauren dreaded hearing on a Friday afternoon. Nick was going to get home from school expecting Dean to be there to pick him up right after dinner, and instead she was going to have to tell him his dad wasn’t coming. It didn’t happen a lot, but often enough she’d grown to dread seeing the disappointment on her son’s face.

  “You and I need to talk,” she told her ex-husband, trying not to squeeze her phone until it popped. “He’s already had detention this year.”

  “So we’ll talk next weekend. One week isn’t going to make a difference.”

  “It’s pretty important, Dean.”

  She heard him sigh over the phone, and she clenched her jaw. “Look, the kids don’t feel good,” he said. “Jody said there’s something going around at day care and she’s already got her hands full. Plus, if Nicky’s having trouble in school, getting sick wouldn’t be good for him.”

  Their son hated being called Nicky and she’d forced herself to break the habit when he hit middle school. But trust Dean to turn it around so it looked as if he was doing Nick a favor, even though Lauren knew he’d deliberately called before school let out so he wouldn’t have to break the news to Nick himself. The insurance office closed at two on Fridays, so she beat Nick home from school and Dean knew that.

  “You and I can meet somewhere and talk,” she said.

  “I don’t know. Like I said, Jody’s got her hands full with the kids and I think she’d be pissed if I take off.”

  And a pissed-off wife trumped a pissed-off ex-wife. “Fine. I hope the kids feel better soon.”

  She hung up and tossed the phone on the counter rather than giving in to the urge to chuck it across the room. Her ex-husband had that effect on her a lot. He wasn’t a bad guy and she knew he tried
, but sometimes he really drove her crazy. One of his worst habits was trying to dodge the hard stuff when it came to Nick, leaving it squarely on her shoulders to be the tough one.

  Lauren had been having a pretty decent week, too. Nick had done his homework every night. He was in a slightly better mood. And she’d managed two days without seeing Ryan Kowalski. She hadn’t gone two days without thinking about him, but at least she hadn’t run into him again.

  Usually she used her free Friday hour to crank up the radio and wash the kitchen floor, but today she didn’t give a damn. The linoleum was getting old, anyway, and didn’t hold a shine for much longer than it took to dry.

  Instead, she turned on the television and, when she got tired of flipping through channels, watched some show about a bunch of housewives who whined their way through spending obscene amounts of money.

  She’d just started being able to keep track of which blonde was which when Nick walked through the door. He tossed his backpack down, then froze when he saw her.

  “How come you’re not washing the floor?”

  Gee, at least she wasn’t stuck in a rut or anything. “I decided to see how real housewives live instead.”

  He made a face at the television, then plopped down on the sofa next to her. “Dad’s not coming, is he?”

  “How did you know?”

  “You have that look, like you don’t want to tell me something but you have to. That’s pretty much the only thing you don’t like telling me.”

  “He said the kids are sick and they don’t want you getting sick, too.”

  “Whatever.” He lifted one shoulder.

  “You want to do something tomorrow?” What, she didn’t know. She had to go grocery shopping before they totally ran out of food and she didn’t even want to think about the laundry pile.

  “I’ll just hang out. See if Cody’s around.”

  Cody had been Nick’s best friend since kindergarten, but Lauren had heard from Fran—who owned the Whitford General Store & Service Station with her husband, Butch—that Cody had been getting in some trouble lately, and Nick didn’t need any more of that. “Stay out of trouble.”