And Then There Was You Read online

  There was Riley, and how could he leave his sister in her grief for her lost husband, with a toddler and a newborn to care for? What kind of brother looked at that situation and thought not my problem as he walked away? They were his family. His parents didn’t know the meaning of the word, but he did. So he stayed. He held Rivers as she cried, changed the kids’ diapers and rocked Gigi to sleep, did the grocery shopping and dealt with Jesse’s terrible twos. He made sure the bills got paid and he yelled, literally yelled his fool head off, at their cell phone service provider when Riley called to remove Ari’s phone from the family plan. The callous twat on the line tried repeatedly to upsell until Riley lost his temper and bellowed that his brother-in-law was dead and had no need of extra services.

  He held them together the best that he could. That was what family did.

  He hadn’t really understood at the time what he was taking on, but now he did. He was the closest thing that Jesse and Gigi had for a dad. He was the one who got their cards and presents made at school for Father’s Day. He soothed their bumps and scrapes and took them to the park to give Rivers some sanity time. When a weird old guy had shadowed Gigi at a carnival, paying far too much attention to an unrelated three-year-old girl scampering all over the place, it was Riley who scooped her up protectively and leveled the man with a look so ferocious that he stammered and went away.

  Rivers could not be everywhere and do everything. She needed another set of hands. They were Ari and Rivers’s children, but over time they became Riley’s children, too. He would have torn that creep to pieces if he’d dared to come any closer.

  One day he would move out of the guesthouse. He was saving up for a house of his own, but that house had to be in Weathership. The business needed him, Rivers needed him, and most of all, the kids needed him present in their lives. And Riley needed them, too.

  Dreyer would have walked away without a second thought. In the end, Riley walked away from him. Riley had walked away from several guys over the years. Sometimes he thought that he might have walked away from a few of them too quickly. But when it came to leaving Dreyer, he never doubted himself at all. Love had nothing to do with giving to the poet; love was a selfish act, something to hoard to oneself and guard against all competition. Rivers and Jesse and Gigi were competition to him.

  Theo was quiet. Riley wondered what was going on behind those sea-blue eyes. “What?” he asked.

  The handsome veterinarian’s lips quirked. “I put my foot in it, didn’t I? You’re looking pretty hot under the collar. I didn’t mean to bring up a sore spot for you.”

  He was either perceptive, or Riley was just super obvious to read. Likely it was the latter. Embarrassed, Riley said, “It’s not you. I’m arguing with an ex in my head about living in the guesthouse. And that’s an incredibly weird thing to say. It didn’t sound half so weird when I thought it.”

  “I know exactly what you’re talking about.”

  “You’re just being nice.”

  “No,” Theo said in a voice so firm that Riley believed him. “And I hope that I would have done the same thing in your shoes, if I’d had a sister in need like that.”

  Relaxing, Riley said, “Are you an only child?”

  “That’s a harder question than it should be.”

  “It is?”

  “My parents spent a lot of money on IVF to make me happen. They didn’t want to go through that again so they looked into adoption. Two fell through, the second after we had actually had the baby in our house for quite some time. I had a little sister and then I didn’t. Technically I’m an only child, but for a while there I wasn’t.” Theo looked highly self-conscious. “I haven’t told anyone that in years.”

  Rivers swept into the front to get something from under the register. She threw Riley a dirty look, unable to see Theo tucked into the corner between the table and the cases. “Do you need something to do?” she asked sarcastically.

  He made a face at her. She made a face back and disappeared into the kitchen. Riley chuckled. “That was my twin sister. She’s a real charmer.”

  “I heard that!” Rivers yelled.

  They laughed. Theo crumpled up the empty cup and brushed the crumbs into a pile with a napkin. “That was an amazing cupcake. Thank you.”

  “What are you doing for the rest of your birthday?” Riley asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing? You can’t do nothing! You aren’t going to get dinner, see a movie, anything? What did you do last year?”

  Theo grinned cheekily. “Nothing.”

  “And the year before that?”

  The grin faded.

  “Now I put my foot in it, didn’t I?” Riley asked. Eager to salvage the friendliness between them, he said, “Would you like to go out to dinner with me tonight? There’s a great Mexican restaurant down on 6th. It’s called Chips. I promise not to tell the server that it’s your birthday, so you won’t have to sit through the song again.”

  “Sure,” Theo blurted.

  They smiled at one another.

  Riley had the odd feeling that this was why he had been so deliberately keeping his schedule clear. That was ridiculous, of course, but he couldn’t shake the sense that something was snapping into place.

  The door opened with a new load of customers. He got up to return to work. “Seven o’clock then? I’ll meet you there?”

  Theo got up as well to dump his trash. “Seven will be great.”

  Then it’s a date, Riley thought, and he slipped behind the counter to take the next round of orders.

  Chapter Four

  Theo

  The pinot? Or the cab?

  It used to be easy. Vaughn told him what to grab from the wine cellar, and Theo searched until he found it while his ex waited impatiently at the front door. The names of different wines rolled off the man’s tongue as easily as the legal terms he bandied about. Hey, Theo? Theo! Get a bottle of wine, would you? We’re going out for Italian with Lane and Derrick tonight and there should be a sangiovese in there.

  Until he met Vaughn, Theo’s knowledge of alcohol ranged no higher than his father yelling across the house for a beer. And that beer was nothing fancy, just cheap, rank Squaders in their red-and-blue aluminum cans. No matter what Theo was doing, he was expected to drop it and run to the fridge. Heaven help him if the only cans were in the pantry, warm and displeasing to his father’s taste buds.

  Dad had been a yeller beyond compare, a match that easily took light again and again over the course of an average day. Sometimes he yelled for so long that he went hoarse, and then he croak-yelled. On the other hand, Theo’s mother was a soother who extinguished the flame over and over only for the match to catch fire once more. Except when she wasn’t a soother. Sometimes she seemed to deliberately say or do things to set him off, nagging about projects that he had already done or was in the process of doing, complaining incessantly about how so-and-so’s husband bought her a new car when the Sullivan family was still driving around in an ancient, wood-paneled station wagon. She picked and prodded and repeated herself until Theo’s dad roared in temper, and then they were back where they had started.

  As for Theo, born with a naturally peaceful spirit, he just stayed away from home as much as he could. He’d liked how Vaughn’s temper ran to ice rather than fire, although in the end, the ice was just as bad. Maybe it was worse. It was easier to put out a fire than crack the ice.

  So, which bottle of wine was he taking to the restaurant tonight?

  He sat back on his haunches, considering the meager supply of bottles in his little wine fridge. Target was plopped down atop the fridge, lazily batting at his hair every time he leaned forward to peruse his options.

  “Has anyone ever told you that you’re annoying?” he said to the cat.

  She regarded him pleasantly, her paw at the ready.

  “Because you are. You are intensely annoying. A vet’s cat should be better behaved.” He gave her a scratching on the top of her head. She pur
red, and then stretched out to the shelf to swat at the jar of salt. He pushed it out of her reach.

  The invitation to dinner had taken him by surprise. It was twenty to six right now, so he needed to make a decision and head towards the car. From the website, Chips didn’t look like the kind of place where one even took a bottle of wine.

  Then why was he agonizing over it? There hadn’t been any need to agonize over his outfit either, but he’d spent fifteen minutes in his closet debating between suits before he pulled a pair of blue jeans out of his dresser drawer.

  He closed the wine fridge without taking anything and ushered the cat out of the pantry. She had a liking for small spaces, pantries and closets and bathrooms, creeping in when his back was turned to knock everything off the shelves and take a nap in the apocalypse. He closed the doors firmly behind him.

  Going to the mirror, he smoothed out the tousles that Target’s swats put in his hair. She wound around his feet, begging shamelessly for dinner. He turned halfway to her food bowl before he remembered that she’d already been fed. She was such a brat. Picking her up, he delivered her to her cat bed and dumped the basket of toy mice over her head.

  The cat flopped onto her side to kick and paw at them, twelve years old and still a kitten at heart. He collected his keys and went out to the garage, hopeful that hiding the mice under the chairs and sofa would keep her busy for a while, rather than getting into mischief.

  A date. He was going on a date.

  He was so nervous as he drove away that it took an act of willpower not to pull a U-turn and go straight back home. To stay calm, he focused on his surroundings.

  Weathership, Oregon. Vaughn would rather have died than ever move here, but it reminded Theo of the humble neighborhood in which he grew up. Modest and homey, full of people who got up early to put in a hard day’s work and spent their weekends mowing the lawn and washing the car. Their personal castles weren’t large in the town of Poke, but everybody took pride in what they had.

  Chips was less than a mile away from his house. Despite his efforts at distraction, his stomach was tight as he pulled into the parking lot. How long had it been since he’d gone on a first date? He had lost the lingo of it, his command of the rituals. Then again, he hadn’t ever been a social butterfly, so his command was paltry at best.

  He could plead illness and go home.

  No! After the devastating end of his relationship, he retreated into his cave to lick his wounds. Now it was time to stretch out of his comfort zone a little. If he got too accustomed to his solitary comfort zone, he suspected that he wouldn’t ever leave. That didn’t strike him as healthy. For a person who enjoyed being alone, it was fine. He, however, didn’t enjoy it. Loneliness came to him with the break-up, losing Vaughn and Vaughn’s family and almost all of their friends, but it was a choice to dwell in that lonely land forever.

  Theo was doing this, and that was final. He got out of the car.

  Riley was waiting at the front door, hands squashed into his pockets as he stared up to the star-speckled sky. Darkness fell early these days. The dwindling autumn was adding a cold snap to the air that noticeably sharpened from night to night, Theo loving the change in season. He had done his undergraduate schooling at a college in San Diego, the relentless heat flattening him from May through October.

  Looking over to him, Riley smiled. “Nice night.”

  “It’s beautiful,” Theo said, relieved that he hadn’t put on a suit. Riley was in jeans, his green-and-blue plaid over-shirt unbuttoned and hanging loose over a crisp white T-shirt. Just like at the clinic and at the bakery, he had an easy, confident stance. Riley Carder knew where he was and what he was about.

  “After you.” Riley hooked the door handle in his fingers and pulled it open.

  Theo entered the bustling restaurant, catching a whiff of the bakery from Riley’s clothes. It made his mouth water. He could only be thankful that it wasn’t his line of work; he would weigh a thousand pounds in no time with the siren song of all that tempting sugar forever dancing in front of his face.

  Passing by the entryway with a tray of drinks, a server called out, “Grab any table that’s free!”

  They tucked themselves into the last open booth in the far corner. Riley pulled something from his pocket and pushed it across the table to Theo. “Happy birthday from the Carder clan,” he said. “In case you’re wondering, no, it’s not my artwork. Mine is worse.”

  Theo laughed. The kids had made him a card from a folded piece of yellow construction paper. A black blob with eyes was on the front. “Is this the dog?”

  “It is, Gigi tells me. She was quite offended that I couldn’t figure it out without a clue. The blue stripe cutting him in half is his collar, and those little brown blotches along the bottom of the card are supposed to be squirrels. Sherlock takes off at warp speed every time he sees one in the yard.”

  Theo opened up the card and a gift card to the bakery fell out onto the table. Motioning to it, Riley added, “And that’s from Rivers and me.”

  This was the sweetest thing that anyone had done for Theo in a long time. “I love it,” he said, touched.

  “You can’t let your thirty-fifth birthday pass by unnoticed!” Riley exclaimed. “It’s not right.”

  There was a message scrawled within the card from Jesse. Squinting at the wobbly, wandering print, Theo said, “Your nephew wants to know if my car says VET on it? Why?”

  “He said what?” Theo turned around the card to show him. Riley skimmed the message and cracked up. “He hates when we drive him anywhere in the bakery van. Vet must sound cooler to him than Mad Batter Bakery.”

  “You can tell him that my car says nothing whatsoever. I prefer to operate in secrecy.”

  “Then he’ll think you’re a spy, and you’ll become even cooler in his book.”

  Theo snorted. “I’d like to imagine that somebody out there in the world thinks I’m cool.”

  A server stopped at their table as a busboy slipped around her to drop off glasses of water. “What can I get you?” she asked, skipping the usual preliminaries with the restaurant so busy.

  Riley ordered the supreme burrito while Theo hastily consulted the menu. “The enchiladas, please, with shredded chicken.”

  “Okey-dokey.” In a flash, she was gone.

  “So, before this pause becomes awkward,” Theo said. “I never know what to say to keep a conversation going. Please feel free to talk as much as you want.”

  Riley’s eyes brightened with levity. “Wow. Okay. Well, I talk way too much, so jump in wherever you like and I won’t be offended. You asked earlier about how I got into the bakery business, but I didn’t get a chance to ask how you got into the veterinary business. Did you have a lot of pets growing up?”

  “Actually, no, not a lot. There was always a cat or two knocking about, usually strays that wandered into the yard and stayed, and sometimes we cared for my grandmother’s dog when she was too sick to do it. And her parrot, that awful parrot. His name was Rubicon.”

  “What made Rubicon awful?”

  “His decibel level and his dirty mouth. Someone taught him all sorts of unpleasant phrases before Gramma adopted him. The first time he stayed with us was the same day my mother had a social group of very prim and proper church women over to our house for a meeting. Someone arrived late and Rubicon suddenly shrieked ‘JESUS SLAM THE DOOR!’ at the top of his lungs.”

  Riley laughed. “I was expecting worse than that.”

  “That was the cleanest of his expressions, but this looks like a family restaurant.”

  “Couldn’t you just put him in another room?”

  “Oh, no.” Young Theo and his mother tried to do precisely that on many occasions. “He would just yell all the louder and fouler for attention.”

  “You’re keeping this conversation going just fine, you know.”

  Theo flushed and lost his track of thought.

  Riley just chuckled at him. “I drew attention to it. Never mind.
But you still haven’t answered me about why you became a vet.”

  Embarrassed at how pink his cheeks had to be, Theo said, “I volunteered at an animal shelter all through high school. That was where I got hooked, and science was always a favorite subject of mine. You?”

  “Science?” Riley scoffed. “No. I wasn’t a great student. Decent, but never great. I just copied off my sister’s homework when she wasn’t looking. She was the brains of the operation; I was the brawn. Not much has changed.”

  A stirring round of the happy birthday song broke out at another table. Riley’s eyes twinkled teasingly.

  “No,” Theo said. He hated being the center of attention, even for the length of a short song.

  “I’ll keep my promise. Was that your major then? Veterinary medicine? Is that a major when you’re an undergrad?”

  “It wasn’t at my school, so I majored in biology. And you?”

  “I have a degree in ancient history that I’ve never used for anything. I really had no business being in college. I just went because that’s what everyone around me was doing, and now I’m stuck paying back those loans.” Riley rolled his eyes about his younger self. “One of those things that if you could turn back time, you would have made very different decisions. But your loans must be ten times worse with veterinary school on top of it.”

  Vaughn had paid off those loans. If he hadn’t, Theo would be living on rice and beans and peanut butter. He just nodded rather than explain: he wanted to be here with Riley, not thinking about his ex.

  Funny. The tension in his stomach had gone away without him noticing.

  “I would have done better picking up a trade,” Riley went on. “Rivers had direction. I didn’t. It wasn’t until I was helping her make cakes and process orders one night that I realized I liked what I was doing. Everyone smiles to see a cake coming their way. Everyone smiles to come into the bakery. It’s not a chore to get through but a break from the day. I liked that about the amusement park I worked in a long time ago as well, how everybody was happy to be there. That was Fast Wheels. But this time I’m not having to work for someone else’s company, so it’s even better.”