Page 41 of Perfectly Matched: Harbor Falls Romance Collection

It was unusual for Chris to be sitting in his booth at Sydney’s on a Sunday morning. Since he and Katie had been dating, he usually woke up in her bed, sampling some of her morning offerings. The fact that he was sitting in a cold vinyl booth at seven o’clock in the morning, drinking coffee that had seen a better brew, while staring a hole in the Formica tabletop before him, told him one thing.

He was a pitiful sucker.

A goner.

And it wasn’t just about the sex. He loved Katie. He’d be damned if he would lose this battle. He would have her. And for the rest of his life.

“Sassy little spitfire.”

Someone slid into the booth opposite him.

“What the hell are you doing here on a Sunday morning?”

Matt.

“Hell, if I know.”

He sipped the bad brew again and jerked his head up.

“Hey Sydney, you got any more coffee? I need something a little stronger. This is pretty darned weak this morning!”

He raised his cup in the air.

“And bring Matt one of those new buns or something. On me,”

Matt put his hand on Chris’ arm, and he lowered the cup.

“Down boy. What’s got you riled?”

“Need I remind you?”

Chuckling, Matt agreed.

“Saw you in the window as I went by. Shelley sent me out for a Sunday paper.”

“Too bad they don’t deliver up on the mountain.”

Matt shrugged.

“Doesn’t matter to me but Shelley likes to keep tabs on the world a bit.

So, what happened now?”

“Nothing.”

“Still?”

“Yeah.”

Silence.

Sydney sidled up to the table.

“Here’s a fresh pot, Chris. You sure are a sour puss this morning. Slide that cup over here.”

She gave Chris the eye, then glanced to Matt and sat an empty cup in front of him, filling both cups.

“What’s brought the two of you out on a Sunday morning?”

Chris harrumphed.

Matt rolled his eyes, looked up at Sydney, and ticked his head Chris’s way.

“He can tell you his story. I’m just out for the paper. Shelley sent me.”

Sydney nodded.

“Ah. That girl always did like to read the Sunday paper in bed.”

“Which means that I’m up early to get it.”

He shrugged.

“It’s all right though. The girls are at her mom’s and she deserves to sleep in occasionally. Besides, with the baby coming…”

Sydney set the coffee pot on the table with a bang.

“What did you just say, Matt Branson?”

Chris looked to Matt, who suddenly had a deer-in-the-headlight look. Matt and Shelley were having a baby?

“Ah, shit, Sydney,”

Matt said.

“Please don’t go spreading that around. Shelley didn’t want me to tell anyone yet and she was going to surprise the family next weekend at the reunion. Please act surprised.”

Baby. Matt and Shelley were having a baby. Chris gulped a drink of hot coffee, grimaced, and then glanced away. He could hear Matt and Sydney chatting beside him but didn’t hear a word they said. A baby. A thud landed deep in his gut.

This was a happy occasion. So much so that Shelley wanted to surprise her family. And here he was in the same position and couldn’t even talk about it. Something not right with that picture….

“Chris?”

He turned when Sydney poked him. “What?”

“So, what’s up with you?”

He shook his head. “Nothing.”

“All hell, Chris,”

Matt prodded.

“Tell her. Maybe she can help.”

Glancing to Sydney, he arched a brow.

“I doubt it.”

Leaning into the table, Sydney replied.

“Don’t underestimate me, Chris Marks. I’ve got skills.”

He had to chuckle at that.

“I’m sure you do, Syd, but this I gotta fix myself.”

Rising, she exchanged a glance with Matt, who shrugged and said.

“He’s got woman troubles.”

Chris pushed back from the table.

“Hell, Matt!”

“Well you do! Maybe Sydney has some pointers.”

She interjected.

“I knew something was going with you and Katie. I can tell these things.”

Matt sat back with his coffee.

“It runs in the family.”

Chris had no clue what that meant.

“I’m good. I don’t need a woman to solve my woman problems.”

He stared at Matt.

“As you so eloquently put it.”

“Well you need to do something other than sulk over your coffee every morning.”

“You just need to get back on the horse,”

Sydney told him.

“What?”

“Go out on a date.”

“She won’t go.”

Sydney rolled her eyes.

“Not with Katie, you dufus, with another woman. I could find you someone easy peasy. I mean, like women walk in here all the time. Like… Oh look, there is Lyssa Larkin right now.”

She pointed out the window.

Chris followed her pointing finger to a woman who walked by the bakery about this time every morning, with about six dogs leading her down the sidewalk.

“Her?”

“Of course! She’s single and she’s pretty and she…”

“She’s older than me.”

Sydney shrugged.

“Well, maybe. I’m not sure.”

“She’s always walking those dogs.”

He watched her for a moment.

“Oh, there they go again.”

“That’s because she’s a puppy nanny. You know, she boards and trains dogs and stuff. What?”

“The dogs. They got loose again.”

It happened a couple of times a week.

“Oh, hells bells.”

Matt stood. The three of them, Sydney, Chris, and Matt watched while the tangle of dog flesh righted themselves and Lyssa recovered, stomping on leashes and snatching them up post haste.

“False alarm,”

Matt said.

“She’s getting better at that,”

Chris added.

“Most days,”

Sydney chimed in.

“Sure you don’t want me to ask her for you, Chris?”

He shook his head. Chris couldn’t see himself with the puppy nanny.

“No, I don’t think so.”

“You could give it a try. It might make Katie wise up.”

Or jealous. He didn’t want Katie to be jealous. He had managed to soften her somewhat from madder-than-a-firecracker to soft-fluttering-flame, but she was still refusing to talk. He just wanted her to come around to his way of thinking. Shaking his head, he said.

“No. I’m not going out on a date with another woman. That would send all the wrong messages.”

Sydney sighed.

“You’re sure?”

“I’m positive.”

The bell on the door tinkled and all three of them looked to see who was coming in. Sydney took a step away from the table.

“Hi Mary Lou. Scone du jour today and the house brew?”

The woman nodded, glanced to the men, and said.

“Yes, please, Sydney. Thank you!”

She moved off to the opposite end of the bakery to a table in the corner. Chris watched her pull things out of her bag and set them on the table.

“Mary Lou is taken,”

Sydney said.

Chris looked up.

“I’m not interested in her, Sydney.”

“Well, you were looking.”

“I was looking because she’s there every day, same time, doing the same stuff, day in and day out. Her life must be boring.”

He’d also seen her at the library late in the day too, when he’d dropped by to see Katie. She and Katie chatted from time to time.

Sydney laughed.

“Her life is what she made of it. Besides, she’s working. She’s her own boss so she can work anywhere, and she chooses to work here often. Hey, isn’t that what you do when you come in here? Work?”

She laughed and swatted Chris on the shoulder.

He frowned.

“That’s not funny, Syd.”

But she kept giggling, putting the back of her hand to her mouth.

“Well, it was a little. But back to Mary Lou. She wasn’t having much luck in the relationship department either until Suzie stepped in. Right Matt?”

“Oh yeah. Suzie doesn’t give up.”

Chris was confused.

“I have no idea what you are talking about.”

“We know,”

Sydney said.

“It’s a family thing. Anyway, Suzie matched Mary Lou up with Nash Rhodes when he was here a few weeks ago. Remember? So that’s why she’s taken. Mary Lou and Nash are getting married as soon as he gets off the road and I hear they are building a cabin up in the mountains. That right, Matt?”

He nodded.

“Sure enough. There was some acreage for sale between my place and the lodge. Nash snatched it up before he left on tour.”

Sydney sighed.

“I just love a happily ever after.”

Chris felt like the two of them were talking in code. Then he realized they were both staring at him. Was Mary Lou the woman he saw at the church that day with the cowboy in the black hat? “What?”

Matt rose.

“All right. Enough is enough.”

He glanced toward the counter. “Sydney?

Pop those pastries in a bag and give us a couple of coffees to go. We’re going to the source.”

He grasped Chris’ sleeve and pulled him to his feet.

“C’mon. We’re going to Suzie’s.”

“What? I can get coffee and pastries here. I’d rather sit and…”

“And mope yourself to death. Sit here and wait, hoping that Katie walks by. No, not happening. Besides, we’re not after Suzie’s coffee or buns. We’re going for something else.”

Chris stared at him.

“What are you talking about?”

A sly grin broke Matt’s face.

“Don’t you know? Besides being a cookbook author, my sister-in-law is a matchmaker. So far, she is two-for-two. Let’s see what she can do with the miserable likes of you.”

****

Katie made it through the night. She slept only a few hours but that was okay. Her head a little clearer now than yesterday, she rose about four o’clock in the morning, stumbled to the kitchen to make coffee, and then mug in hand headed for her favorite chair in the sunroom.

She recalled sitting out here with her grandmother early in the mornings when she was a little girl and had spent the night. Grammy was always up early—perhaps not as early as Katie was up today. Having grown up on a farm, an.

“up with the chickens”

every day, it was difficult for her to break the habit. When Katie stayed over, she liked getting up early too, because Grammy always had crisp sugar cookies with her coffee, and she’d let Katie have some with her milk.

Besides, she and Grammy had talks and Katie learned so much. She missed her grandmother like crazy and wished she were here right now to discuss her recent issue.

Katie’s mother wouldn’t have approved of the cookies—and perhaps not the talks—because according to her, sugar cookies were definitely not proper breakfast food, and Katie’s mom and grandmother didn’t exactly get along. But Grammy would smile and wink and say.

“What your mother doesn’t know won’t hurt her.”

Leaning back in the easy chair, Katie put her feet up on the ottoman. She smiled, thinking of Grammy and her matter of fact, pull-no-punches ways. She’d been a flower child in the sixties and had grown up on free love and no responsibilities—until she met Katie’s grandfather. That was a story Katie always loved to hear. Gramps died a good decade before Grammy and Katie knew she had missed him terribly.

She had grown up to be a lot like her in many ways. Probably Grammy’s influence led her down the path o.

“what people don’t know won’t hurt them.”

She found it interesting that years later, she was living in Grammy’s house, and smiled. Katie had attached herself to her grandmother’s philosophies over the years, especially with relationships.

And it hadn’t hurt her. Had it?

Of course, Grammy changed a little when she met Gramps. Would Katie change because of Chris?

Katie had never been dishonest with anyone. She just kept to herself, didn’t tell things that didn’t need to be said, and often let people wonder.

“Your business is yours, Katie Marie,”

Grammy would say.

“The whole town doesn’t need to know.”

Many people assumed she was distant and aloof because of it and in some ways, she was. Her private life was no one’s business but hers—she was not one of those millennials who lived on social media and plastered every action and thought into the cyber-sphere.

Grammy would have hated Facebook.

For as outgoing as she appeared on the outside, Katie was a secret introvert and book nerd on the inside. Today, she planned to play book nerd up all day long and forget her troubles for a while. She might even carry things over to Monday, since it was President’s Day and the library was closed.

Setting her cup on the side table, she pulled her laptop onto her lap and turned it on. In a few minutes, she was into her story, back inside her characters’ heads, and acting out first one scene, then another. Followed by third.

She reached for her coffee to take a sip. Cold.

Rising out of her characters’ worlds, she set the laptop on the ottoman and grasped her coffee mug. She made her way into the kitchen thinking about where those characters were going next, poured the hot coffee, and stood holding the beverage in both hands, looking out the window lost in thought.

Working out the scene in her mind, she pondered calling Mary Lou. She’d become dependent on her lately when it came to the book. Mary Lou Picketts was a professional book editor. Sometimes she called herself a book doctor. She had a great listening ear and gave solid direction. She’d been coaching Katie about following her gut more when she was writing. To lighten up on some of the rules and let her voice and her own writing style shine through. Katie listened back. As much of a carefree rule-breaker she was in her personal life, she’d grabbed on to the grammar and sentence-structure rules of her English professors in college and found a safety net in making her passages clean, tight, and grammatically correct.

A few weeks ago, when Mary was in the library doing some research, she and Katie started chatting, and before Katie knew it, Mary had offered to read and give her some pointers on her book.

Katie was sure Mary was going to love the story.

Mary returned the half-written, dog-eared and bleeding profusely hard copy of the manuscript with a frown.

“I do love the story line and your characters, Katie,”

she said.

“But there is so much that needs work to get this sold in New York. The good news is I can help you.”

Katie stared. “Really?”

Nodding, Mary added.

“It’s simple, really Katie. You need to trust your gut more. I’m not hearing your voice yet.”

“What? Are you sure?”

“Oh yes. I’m sure. What I’m reading is stiff prose. You need to put the life back into it.”

Katie was stunned.

“But I’ve worked and worked to make sure that every sentence and every paragraph is concise and clear and…”

“And all of the i’s are dotted and the t’s are crossed. Boring.”

Shocked, Katie stared back at Mary.

“I don’t understand.”

Mary thumbed through the manuscript.

“Look, Katie. I’ve known you since grade school. We were never friends because we were opposite ends of the spectrum when it came to popularity. In fact, back then, if I thought we had books in common, I would have been amazed. You were gregarious and expressive and fun. You took risks and didn’t let grass grow under your feet. You still don’t. But your prose? Well, it reads like a sample in an English book, like sentences ready to diagram. No life. No passion. Reflect your personality in your writing, Katie. Be haphazard and unpredictable sometimes. Heck, drop in a sentence fragment once in a while, especially in dialogue. Your dialogue is rather stilted.”

“Stilted? A sentence fragment? Seriously?”

Mary grinned.

“Yes. Be a risk taker with your words. I promise it will be fine.”

Katie stared at her, processing the information. Finally, she said.

“You’ve just undone everything I was taught about writing. I don’t know where to start first.”

Sighing, Mary grasped her hand.

“No worries and don’t panic. The good part is you have a fantastic and fresh story line, and you know the rules. Now you need to learn how to break the rules intentionally. We’ll get there.”

Katie was still reeling. “Really?”

“Yes, and stop using semi-colons in dialogue. People don’t talk in semi-colons!”

It wasn’t an easy afternoon for her but over time, all of Mary’s advice sunk in. Since that day, Katie had been rewriting and Mary had been reading, and they had become friends. Even though Mary’s initial critique was a little difficult to swallow, Katie knew the story would be better because of it.

She was finding the balance in her writing and her voice, according to Mary, was beginning to shine through. She wondered how the three scenes she’d written this morning would measure up. Perhaps she would email them off to her to find out.

She stared out the window at the backyard a little longer, imagining Grammy wandering about in her nightgown trimming her roses. She smiled. Grammy was a risk taker in all parts of her life, but she had found harmony and balance. Her worlds had collided when she meant Grandpa, Grammy had told her once, and her free spirit hippy days of her youth had meshed with the conservative banker persona of her husband. They were happy together until the end.

Balance. Maybe that’s what she needed. Often it seemed whether in her writing, or in her personal life, it was either all or nothing. No in-between. Could she find the in-between and the balance in both? Mary was already helping her see that she didn’t need to be so rigid in her writing. She could break the writing rules once she knew and understood the writing rules—and broke them to her advantage.

Could she break her own relationship rules in real life? Could she find the balance between having her dream and having Chris too? That was really what she was afraid of, wasn’t it?

****

Before he knew it, Chris was sitting in Suzie’s kitchen at Sweet Hart Inn, chatting over cinnamon coffee and blueberry muffins. Suzie took in the conversation, glancing back and forth between Chris and Matt, as Matt explained why they were there and told her of Chris’ dilemma. Suzie sure didn’t look like a matchmaker to him.

What the hell. Matchmaker? Aren’t those people only in books, or in Broadway plays, or in Ireland or something?

While Matt did most of the talking, Chris nodded occasionally and agreed. Suzie took it all in. She bit her lip, frowned now and again, and even grimaced once or twice.

Finally, she added her two cents.

“My work is cut out for me. I need to think about this.”

“Can you help?”

Matt asked.

She nodded.

“Absolutely. I first need to consider the approach.”

“Approach?”

Chris shook his head.

“How about hog-tying and throttling her?”

Suzie’s left eyebrow shot up and she leaned forward.

“Look here, Chris Marks. I don’t know you that well, you being fairly new in town and all, but I do know Katie Long, and that girl won’t take to being treated as chattel.”

She sat back in her chair and eyed him another second. Or two.

Chris bristled a little.

“Suzie, I’ve lived here for two years and you see me several times a week at the bakery. You know me.”

She leaned in.

“Not like I know other people around here, whose families have had their roots in this town for generations. Two years is nothing, Chris, when you live in a small town.”

That again. How could he forget? He figured she was right. He was always amazed at the inner workings of this small community.

“I get it. So now what?”

Suzie ignored him and continued.

“I trust my brother-in-law here. He thinks you have potential and says you love her, so I’m thinking we can work together.”

She paused and eyed him.

Chris was almost afraid to move or take a breath. He started to say something them shut his mouth again as Suzie tapped her manicured fingertips on the tabletop.

“Now Katie?”

she started again.

“She grew up here then went away to college and didn’t come back until recently. Always was a little spitfire but smart as a tack. Runs in the family. That grandmother of hers was a pistol. I never thought Katie would settle down although I do have my hopes that you could be the man. I’m an old school type of person who thinks that everyone needs a partner, so I believe in love and happily-ever-afters. I think you have a chance with her. I simply think you have been going about it the wrong way.”

He’d had about enough talk and stood.

“Suzie, I appreciate your involvement, but I know how to handle Katie Marie Long. I’ve been handling her…”

“With kid gloves?”

“Um, no.”

“Buying her roses?”

“Well, not lately.”

“Picnic at the lake?”

“Not really our thing.”

“Take her out for a fancy dinner in Asheville?”

“No, but we get take-out from the BBQ Hut every Friday night.”

Suzie crinkled her nose and scoffed.

“Ever bought her chocolate? Perfume?”

He thought briefly about the red silk gown he’d had delivered to her house last night but figured he’d struck out on that chord too. Katie had not even acknowledged that it arrived. He shook his head.

“A fancy pink rabbit-eared vibrator?”

Suzie questioned, staring a hole through him.

Chris felt his eyes grow wide.

“No. With me around she has no need for a dil—.”

Suzie put her hand up and stood.

“Don’t go there.”

Pausing, she squinted.

“Hey, you know I witnessed what happened a few days ago, remember?”

“What?”

She stepped closer. For a moment, he thought she might grasp his chin and turn his face from side to side.

“You know, across from the church?”

He gave her a slow nod.

“You and Katie were arguing. The day Nash came to rescue Mary from her wedding. I saw her red car peel out of your driveway. She was saying something like…”

Chris interrupted.

“It will be a cold day in hell before I marry the likes of you.”

That statement rang through his head for days.

Suzie exhaled and he did the same. Then she pulled herself up to her full five-foot-and inches-to-spare height and said.

“We’ll see about that.”

Glancing at Matt, she added.

“I know what I need to do. Go spruce him up and have him back here at ten minutes of seven. Don’t be late and come in the back door.”

She scrambled off, grasped her cell phone from the counter, and dialed while muttering to herself.

Matt shrugged and grinned.

“So, we’re gonna do what she says. Believe me. Crossing the women in this family is a big mistake.”

“This is all a big mistake. I can take care of my own problems and I don’t need a damn matchmaker.”

Chuckling, Matt continued.

“Of course, you don’t. That’s why Katie is running away from you.”

He glanced at his watch.

“We’ve got nine hours. You need a haircut. Probably have to go to Asheville. Maybe a suit. I’d say roses would be good, too.”

“This is gonna cost me.”

Matt snickered.

“She worth it?”

“Yeah. Shit.”