Janet Evanovich - Love in a Nutshell

Kate pulled her arms from the sweater’s sleeves. Inside the sweater’s protection, she reached back and unhooked her bra. Those miserable years of middle school gym class had served a purpose, after all. She could still remove her underwear without showing a square inch of skin.

One hot-pink bra with black lace overlay was history in three seconds. Kate chucked it onto the truck’s seat, then jammed her arms back through her sleeves.

“Please, please, please,” she murmured. Just who outside of her own rebelling body Kate was begging, she didn’t know.

Her digestive system emitted a groan that silenced the chickadees up in the trees. Temptation grew. One polite burp that no one other than her feathered friends would hear might fix the whole issue. But then she flashed back to her last beer episode. She’d been sucked in by that whole “one burp” theory, and the aftermath hadn’t been pretty.

She pulled on her sweater’s neckline until she got some good air between herself and the knit fabric. Then she took the sweater’s bottom, looped it up through the top, and drew it back down. The rig held, even though her posture made a gargoyle look good. She turned and just about smacked into Matt.

“How long have you been standing there?” she asked.

“Long enough,” he said. “Do I even want to know?”

“Probably not.”

“You’ve been gone awhile,” he said. “Bart and Travis wanted me to come out and check on you.”

Which was a lie. They were negotiating the terms of a winner-takes-all arm-wrestling match over the pumpkin brew recipe. A rabid fox dropped into the middle of the room wouldn’t have distracted them.

“As you can see, I’m kind of having a problem.”

“Either that or you’re into some voodoo ritual. What’s up with your face, though?”

“My face?” Kate’s voice rose an octave in alarm. “What’s wrong with my face?”

“You’ve gone from red to spotty. Is it possible that you have an allergy to something in beer?”

She clamped her hand over her mouth in what he would have said was an expression of shock, except for the way her chest and shoulders heaved.

“You’re not going to hurl, are you?” he asked.

Hand still over mouth, she shook her head no.

In Matt’s estimation, whatever else was about to happen appeared to be equally bad.

“Hang on,” he said. “Let’s get you back to town.”

She nodded her head a frantic yes.

MATT RETURNED to the barn, where Bart and Travis were going mano a mano.

“I upped the stakes,” Bart said without turning his dead-eye glare from Travis. “If Travis loses, he’s spending the next month of Wednesdays coming to Keene’s Harbor for poker night and then he works for me on Thursdays.”

“Sounds good,” Matt said. Adding Travis to poker night would bring a new, if warped, dynamic. But Matt had more important stuff to deal with right now. “I’ve got to head out now. Bart, I’ll catch up with you on Monday. Travis, you’re not going to take him in any kind of match. And even if you do, when it comes to your beer, he wins. Got it?”

“Dude, that is so not fair,” Travis said.

“When you can pay me back, we’ll talk about fair. Until then, it’s all about leverage.”

Bart slammed Travis’s hand to the tabletop, winning the match and illustrating Matt’s point.

“Just like that,” he said.

Back outside, Matt found Kate waiting for him in the truck. As he climbed into his seat, a pink-and-black bra went flying into the back. He’d witnessed a bra toss before, but not in these circumstances.

“I think it’s the hops,” he said rather than comment on the projectile. “I’ve seen it happen to people before-the redness you started out with, at least-just not this bad.”

Kate snorted, or maybe wheezed. “Great. Put it on my tombstone. Kate Appleton. Went to hell in a hops basket.”

“So you’re not feeling any better?”

“I’d give that a no.”

He started the truck. “Let’ cC;Ldiv›s get a move on, then.”

“Gently, and unlock my window control, could you?”

They started down the road, Kate with her head out the window and hair rippling in the breeze. And Matt feeling really bad she was so sick but thinking how great she looked with her hair wild, blowing all around her face.

KATE NEVER thought she’d be so grateful to work for a man who’d bought a kitschy, not to mention mostly dilapidated, motel.

“Are you doing okay in there?” Matt called through the bathroom door in the manager’s tiny apartment.

Kate was still toweling her hair from the long and chilly shower she’d taken. “Better.”

“I’m glad I had the utilities turned back on this week. Sorry there wasn’t much hot water.”

“It was perfect.”

Actually, it had taken a while before she’d felt safe to go near the shower. First had come the belching with enough gusto to win a frat boys’ contest. From her side of the bathroom door, she’d heard Matt saying that he’d be taking off for a while. Kate had figured he’d been engaging in chivalry or self-preservation. Either way, he’d missed the worst of the episode.

“I’ve brought you some stuff I thought you might be able to use,” he called.

She opened the bathroom door enough to reach out her arm and grab a plastic sack. “Thanks. That was really nice of you.”

Though, again, it still could have been self-preservation. Keene’s Harbor remained over an hour away, and her stomach still sounded demonically possessed. Kate riffled through the bag. Antihistamines, as promised, plus antacids.

So much for Matt Culhane ever being tempted by her again, she thought. She was gross-inside and outside. Arms wrapped around her bloated midsection, she regarded her spotty reflection in the bathroom mirror. This was what she wanted, right? Not to have to worry about any hot and messy sexual entanglement that took place outside the privacy of her imagination. Now that she faced that reality, the answer came back an edgy maybe not.

“Can I bring you anything else?” Matt called.

“No, thanks.”

After antacids, what was left?

MATT BELIEVED in choosing his moments and in letting others choose theirs. When Kate decided to stick on her bug glasses and pretend to sleep most of the way back to Keene’s Harbor, he’d respected that choice.

“Hey,” he said when she finally stirred.

“Hi.”

“Feeling any better?”

“Yes.”

“Are you up to having a conversation longer than one syllable?”

“No,” Kate said.

“All the same, can I ask you something? Did that happen to you the last time you drank beer?”

She didn’t answer immediately. “Kind of, I think. I mean, I sort of recalled discomfort, but it wasn’t this bad.”

“In that case, I’m sorry. I never would have asked you to try it if I’d known this was what happened to you.”

“My fault. Even with that vague memory, I shouldn’t have risked it, except…”

“Except what?”

“Except I also did it because I wanted to, and because it seemed important to you. I mean, this is what you do. You’ve got great reason to be proud of all you’ve accomplished. Then, here I come and turn up my nose. I wanted to be… I don’t know…”

“Nice?”

She sighed. “Yes, nice. You deserve that.”

“So do you, Kate.”

“I know, but it’s been so long. It’s like I can hardly recognize it. That long without nice in your life… and I don’t mean that I was abused or anything… it was just the absence of nice. But, anyway, you forget how it feels.”

He didn’t know where she’d been, other than geographically, before she’d landed in Keene’s Harbor. All he knew was that he liked it when she was happy.