baritone cut through her thoughts, spinning her around to face him. Spence McKaslin pushed open the door on the other side of the hold shelf. He emerged from the fluorescent glare of his office, looking gruff, the way he always did when he worked on the accounts. “I’ll be in the back going through the new order. Katherine’s still out, so if it gets busy, buzz me.”
“Sure, but it’s been really quiet. Do you want me to start restocking or something?”
“No, we’re all caught up. Just watch the front until your dinner break. Study while you can. It could get busy later.”
“It never gets busy on a Friday night.”
“Don’t argue with me, I’m the boss.” He gave her an extra-hard glare on his way to the drawers beneath the till, but he didn’t fool her.
Spence was strong and stoic and tough, but also one of the kindest men she’d ever met. Her opinion of him had been pretty high ever since he’d hired her, which had saved her from losing her apartment when she’d been laid off from her previous job. Spence would have been her cousin, had things worked out differently with Joe.
A lot of things would have been different if she’d been able to marry Joe.
Feeling as if she’d been sucker-punched, she tried hard not to let the pain show. She didn’t know how something so powerful would ever go away, but she did her best to tuck her grief down deep inside. Her gaze strayed to where Mitch still browsed, looking like everything good and noble and strong in the world.
But she also saw memories. And she wanted nothing to do with the past.
Spence grabbed the key ring from its place under the counter and studied her in the assessing way of a good big brother. “Did you manage to fit in lunch today?”
“Well, I ate a granola bar while I was stuck in traffic in the big parking lot on campus.”
“I knew it. Take your dinner break at five, and I’ll go when you get back,” he ordered over his shoulder, already marching away.
Mitch watched the older man pass by the gift section and disappear through a door in the back. It was less than an hour before her dinner break. Interesting. He couldn’t say why, but he felt out of his element. And it wasn’t because he was in a store full of flowery knickknacks and breakables.
A plan hatched in the back of his mind, and it had nothing to do with his shopping mission.
Kelly remained in his peripheral vision. She made a lovely picture, sitting straight-backed with her head bowed over a book. The math text was still in the stack, so she must be working on another subject. Absorbed in her reading, she tucked a strand of rich honey-blond hair behind her ear, revealing a small pearl earring and her bare left hand.
While he was at home creeping through enemy territory in the rugged mountains of Afghanistan or the deserts of the Middle East, his extensive training did not include what he was about to do.
He kept her in his line of sight as he approached the register. The light from the window seemed to find her and grace her with a golden glow. She kept her head bowed over her book as he approached, but her shoulders stiffened with tension. Telling. But he continued his approach, taking in other details. The soda bottle, her nearly worn-out leather watchband, the pink barrette in her hair that matched the tiny flowers on her blouse. The two sociology textbooks stacked neatly at her left elbow.
He wondered about her life. Did she like being a college student? Did she live on campus in a dorm room or in a nearby apartment? Alone, or with a roommate?
When she looked up from her reading, her smile was cordial but he didn’t mistake the sadness, like a shadow, in her dark-blue eyes. He felt a tug of sympathy from his heart. “You look pretty busy,” he noted, easing the books onto the counter by her register.
“It’s the life of a college student. I have a test on Monday.” As she leaned to scan the books, her hair bounced across the side of her face, leaving only a small sliver of her profile visible. “Did you find what you were looking for?”
“I found more.” He wasn’t talking about the books.
“I do that all the time.” Her gaze didn’t meet his and her polite smile was too brief. She turned her attention to the cash register. All business.
Okay, he got the signal, but he didn’t let it deter him. “How long ’til you get your degree?”
“After this summer, I have two semesters left.” She paused to study the cash register and searched for a key.
“It’s gotta be slow going, working your way through.”
“It’s taking twice as long, but at least I don’t have a major loan to pay back when I’m done.”
“That’s one perk of enlisting. My college will be paid for.”
At least he wasn’t mentioning the past or Joe again, Kelly thought thankfully as she totaled the sale. Her chest was still clogged tight, like the fallout of an avalanche still pressing her down. “Twenty-one ninety-three, please.”
Mitch held out his credit card.
When her fingertips caught the other end, she felt a flash, like a shock of static electricity in the air. The sunlight changed to a bright piercing white. The floor rocked beneath her feet. It lasted only for a second. Then the earth steadied, the sunlight turned golden and there was Mitch, unmoved, looking calm and as cool as steel.
That was so not a sign from heaven. Just the pieces of what remained of her dreams, longing, in the way faint embers from a fire’s flame could glow briefly to life when exposed to air. Her fingers trembled as she swiped his card and plunked it back onto the polished counter between them.
If there was a way to breathe life back into her dreams, she would ask the Lord to show her how. But she didn’t bother. Some things really were impossible. “I still can’t believe you’re a soldier. What happened to your pocket protector?”
“No place for it on this uniform. I love what I do.”
“What exactly do you do?”
“Well, I started out at oh-six-hundred with a ten click—kilometer—run in full gear and spent the day mountain climbing to five thousand feet.”
“You get paid to climb mountains?”
“That’s not all. I get to do things like scuba dive, parachute, drive around in Humvees and play with explosives.” He said it all as if it was no big deal, just in a humble day’s work. “Keeps me out of trouble.”
“Seems like that would get you into trouble.”
“Nothing I can’t handle.”
Wow, Kelly thought, as she bagged the books. He’s grown up into quite a man. “See, my day is a piece of cake by comparison.”
“Except for the math.”
“Oh, you had to mention that again. I was trying to forget for a while.” She hadn’t laughed out loud in a long time. “Where you get paid to do things that you think are fun, I pay out good tuition money to be tortured by algebra.”
“I’ll
