Kaine met an apologetic pair of hazel eyes. She didn’t typically find scruffy men striking, but this one was—in an artsy, earthy sort of way. His black plastic-framed glasses were trendy, and his sandy-blond hair was in enough disarray to make her question whether it was purposefully styled to look like he’d just crawled out of bed.
Kaine pulled her arm away. She was betraying her dead husband with her appreciative flutter toward the good-looking stranger.
“It’s all right.” She rubbed her hand over the sleeve of her jacket.
“Are you okay?”
Oh for heaven’s sake, she’d tripped, not flown over the edge of the Grand Canyon. Kaine sucked back her defensive retort. He didn’t deserve it. He gave her such a remorseful look, she got the distinct impression he was a mama’s boy.
“Fine. I’m fine.” She really wasn’t, but that was on so many levels deeper than tripping over a man in the doorway of a gas station.
“’Kay.”
They danced in the doorway. He moved one direction as she did, then the other, and then he chuckled and stepped aside. “Go ahead.” His arm extended toward the inside of the station.
Chivalry wasn’t dead.
Kaine avoided his gaze. It was—unnerving.
The smell of coffee slammed into her senses as she entered the store, accompanied by the reedy sound of a polka playing through an archaic radio perched behind the counter. A display of brilliant yellow foam cheese triangles greeted her. Ahh, yes. The famed Wisconsin “cheeseheads.” Mama’s boys and cheeseheads. This town was . . . promising?
Kaine couldn’t fathom putting that yellow foam on her head and sporting it as a hat. Who would be silly enough to wear such a thing?
Apparently, the older woman behind the counter.
Sparkling brown eyes greeted Kaine as she paused to control her reaction.
“What can I help you with?” The attendant had to be nearing sixty. Her short brown hair was permed and squashed beneath the foam hat. An oval nametag informed Kaine of her name. Joy.
Kaine snatched a Snickers bar from the display in front of the counter. Her hand shook with nervous energy as she set it on the Formica countertop. “Only the candy, please.”
She glanced out the gas station window. No daffodils. No faceless stalker. Just her car, and the handsome stranger jogging across the street toward a brick office building.
Joy waved the candy bar under the infrared scanner. “Are you passing through?”
No. She wished she was. To Canada, maybe. But she’d signed for that rotted house. How could she walk away? She’d be throwing away everything Danny had left her. But then how could she stay?
“I’ll be here for a bit.” It was all she wanted to offer.
Joy smiled and slid the candy bar back to Kaine. “Where ya staying?”
Were all Midwesterners this nosy? Kaine handed two one-dollar bills to Joy. “I’m—not sure.” Some place with about thirty dead bolts, grilles over the windows, an alarm system, and a closet full of high-powered automatic rifles would be nice. And, she was from California where gun control was popular. Kaine bit back an ironic smile. Circumstances certainly changed a person’s ideals.
“There’s a motel not far from here. Just head down the road about a mile. It’s small, but it’s clean.”
That sounded comforting. Four walls would be better than four car windows exposing her to the dangerous world outside.
Kaine took the quarters Joy offered. “Thanks.” She had planned on camping out in her new house, but now it was an utterly horrific idea.
“Where are you from?”
Good grief. Kaine pocketed the change. “San Diego.”
“San Diego?” Joy parroted.
Was there more than one? Kaine nodded.
“You don’t say!” Joy’s brows raised, the lines darkened from the overuse of an eyebrow pencil. “I have a brother in California. But not in San Diego. He lives closer to Oregon.”
“Mm.” Kaine nodded. As if she cared. She should care. She had always cared about people before.
“What brings you to Oakwood?” Joy leaned against the counter. “I’m sorry, we don’t get many tourists here. Just a tad too out of the way. Wisconsin Dells is the place where they like to congregate, what with all the water parks and the circus nearby. But we’re too far north for them to care.”
“I’m . . .” What could she say—that she thought God wanted her to buy a dilapidated house in the hometown of her ancestors just so she could fulfill a dream of her dead husband? Her stomach rolled. If only she had listened to Danny three years ago, when her job started eating her contentment.
“You all right, buttercup?”
Drat. Kaine swiped at her eyes. The wetness on the back of her hand betrayed her.
“Aww, sweetie.” Joy snatched some Kleenexes from a box behind her and shoved them toward Kaine. “Don’t mind me and my questions. I can be a motormouth.”
Kaine took the tissues. She wasn’t accustomed to being on the receiving end of care. She was the one who cared. The social worker who could read a broken woman simply by the way her shoulders bent and her head hung.
Joy rounded the counter. “Do you drink coffee? You do, don’t you? Who doesn’t?” She filled a styrofoam cup with coffee from a utility-sized carafe. These Midwesterners and their styrofoam. Whatever happened to going green?
But Kaine didn’t argue when her hands wrapped around the cup. She didn’t even argue when she tasted the burnt gas-station coffee. The warmth in Joy’s eyes comforted her raw nerves. Joy’s smile, even though it was bordered by red lipstick that bled into the wrinkles around her lips, reminded her of a mother’s. Kaine’s mom had died when she and Leah were preteens, and their dad had disappeared years before that. They’d been raised by Grandpa Prescott. There’d been little feminine influence in their lives after Mom. Joy appeared to be what every little girl imagined in a mother—at least at first impression.
“I bought the house on Foster Hill Road.” Kaine offered it up in exchange for the complimentary coffee.
Joy’s caterpillar brows hunched upward again. “Foster Hill House?”
Kaine sipped the coffee and nodded.
“Well, I’ll be.” Joy filled her own cup with brew. “That place is—well, I—hmm.”
Even Joy didn’t have words.
Kaine nodded.
Joy grimaced.
They laughed.
Kaine heaved a shaking sigh. “I have no idea why the realtor sold it to me.” Sure she did. Unsuspecting out-of-state sale, easy money, effortless off-load of a property that had probably been tacked to his bulletin board for years. She, the out-of-her-mind, still-grieving widow, jumping at a chance to escape. Smart.
“It’s a mess.” Joy nodded. She slurped her coffee as if cooling it between her teeth. A flicker of concern flashed across her face. “I keep telling my daughter to stay away.”
“Your daughter?” Kaine knew the house had been deserted when she arrived. But maybe that explained the open door.
Joy blinked rapidly.
Oh no, now the gas-station lady was going to cry.
“Please, don’t be upset.” Joy sniffed. “I know it’s your property now. But, Megan is—well, she likes to wander, and that old place . . . she pretends it’s her playhouse.” She waved her hand in her face as if to dry the tears.