Anything but Minor - Kate Stewart Page 0,26
a mouthful of perfectly fried, breaded goodness. “I like your life,” I noted as I looked around the cabin of the small restaurant. “Your friends seem incredible and completely supportive. It must be a good feeling to have so many people in your corner.”
“I can’t complain. Most of them have watched me throw balls my whole life.”
“Surely, you can’t think it’s just baseball.” Rafe stayed silent as I continued shoving hushpuppies in my mouth. “You have this charisma, this genuine strength, patience, and tenderness when you speak to people. It’s admirable.”
I picked up a bottle of tartar sauce and squeezed it over a hushpuppy and felt the air whoosh out of the bottle as I sprayed us both in the mayonnaise/relish concoction. A large clump of it landed directly in my eye, and I stood up suddenly, forgetting the bench behind me, and fell backward, landing hard on my butt. I began choking on the bread that remained in my mouth and heaved as I tried to breathe around it.
Rafe was at my side seconds later as laughter spilled from his lips. Sue rushed to us with a tray full of freshly cooked fish and an “Oh shit, honey, you okay?” It took Rafe a solid minute between laughing and scraping me off the floor to get me seated at the table. I wiped at my eye furiously with a napkin from the dispenser, and when I could see clearly, I looked to Rafe, who resumed his seat at the table, his eyes fixed on me, his lips twisted into a half grin. His face was dotted with tartar sauce, and there was a large clump of it on his ear and embedded in his hairline. He looked over at me as I adjusted my newly sore butt in the seat and tried to shake off some of the embarrassment.
“Sorry,” I said as I looked at the table below us filled with perfectly cooked, golden fish.
Rafe lifted his shirt, revealing an edible chest, and wiped his face. “You owe me another shirt.”
“Yeah,” I said as nervous laughter spilled out of me. “Put it on my tab.”
Rafe and I ate greedily, and when the last bite of delectable fish was gone, I twisted sideways on the bench and sipped my tea.
“That was delicious, thank you.”
I knew I’d made the right call when I’d asked Alice to help me. What I didn’t expect was the amount of heart the woman had and how freely she gave it. Without so many words, and zero protest, she’d gone straight to work with me to help Dutch, and even gone above and beyond. I spent the majority of the day watching her work tirelessly, covered in sweat and sunshine. When she briefly paused in her work, her gaze always drifted to me, and her smile sucked the breath from my lungs. More than once I thought of ending the charade we played as “friends.” There was something between us. Even a field away, I could feel the need on both our parts to bridge the gap. I wanted to freeze time when she looked at me the way she did. She was doing a poor job of hiding her attraction and more than once the asshole in me had wanted to call her on it, but I didn’t want to scare her. She’d felt comfortable holding my hand, and I didn’t want to fuck that up. Just the feel of her tiny hand in mine made me feel invincible. It was addicting in the best way.
She’d given me the best compliment of my life right before she’d landed on her adorable ass, and I was still choking on the way it made me feel.
As we observed our quiet surroundings, I found myself grasping at straws to keep her with me a little longer. I suddenly understood it when she said it was criminal for good days to come to an end. She said she admired me in a roundabout way. I wondered if she even knew the power of her words, of what just a simple look from her or a smile did to me.
“Alice, let’s go take a bath.”
Her eyes widened as she looked over at me like I had two heads.
“Trust me?”
I looked over at her smudged in dirt and mayonnaise as she gave me a careful nod.
“Let’s go.”
She followed me out to old man Thompson’s pond a quarter mile away from the camp, and I saw her pause just outside her driver’s