Page 11 of Love & Rockets

Chapter 3

Jake liked to tell people he did his best work at night. A lame joke. The astrophysicist equivalent of ‘a priest, a rabbi, and a duck walk into a bar’, but in many ways it was true. His day-to-day work as an engineer focused on the practicalities of space exploration. At night, he had the stars. Tipping his head back, he checked his course the way sailors did in the days before GPS made it impossible to get truly lost. The North Star shone bright in the clear night sky. Temperatures had finally started to drop after sundown, which meant nighttime readings hovered around seventy instead of eighty or more, as they did through the summer. Still, he’d managed to work up a decent sweat sometime between miles two and three.

In the summer, his late night runs were a matter of practicality. Southern heat was nothing to trifle with, no matter how cool the breeze off the bay. He’d run every night starting back in his senior year of college. Barring illness, injury, or tropical storm warnings. In fact, he hadn’t skipped a run until his brother moved back to town. Not that Brian was a bad influence. Jake wasn’t even sure Brian knew he still ran. But until his brother had bought his half-finished house on Dauphin Island, Jake hadn’t found a better method of clearing the cares of the day from his mind.

Pound the pavement or swing a hammer—those were his two surefire ways to jettison a payload of stress. Helping Brian finish his house had been a revelation. Running kept him physically fit. Working on construction projects added to that and kept him on an even keel mentally. Having Darla Kennet’s address and an invitation to dinner made him twitchy.

Turning the corner, Jake exhaled as he caught sight of the moon shining bright in the sky. One of the true constants in his life, the moon never let him down. Jake felt a sharp pang of sympathy when he thought about all those poor fools who never took the time to marvel at the wonders beyond their world. The moon had been his friend since he’d received his first telescope for his sixth birthday. A couple years later, their dad had given Brian one, too, but the little freak traded for a microscope. Why anyone would prefer to spend their days staring at squiggly little worms trapped on glass slides when they could have billions of stars was beyond the limits of Jake’s comprehension.

He was scheduled to have dinner with Darla Kennet and her kid. The mind boggled.

He trotted another three blocks with his eyes locked on the glowing orb in the sky. The address she scribbled on the back of an order ticket wasn’t too terribly far from where he was now. A left then a right. Another mile, or maybe two. He could make the distance easily. The night was bright, the streets deserted. He could show up at her door and...what? Say he was there to show Grace the moon?

There were things he could tell her about Earth’s only satellite. Things she probably hadn’t read in her science books. In the years since he’d first stared up at the Man on the Moon’s glowing face through a spindly little telescope, he’d become intimately acquainted with his old friend. He knew all about the stretches of plains the ancient astronomer mistook for seas. He’d learned all he could about the crevices and craters marking the desolate surface, inspected samples of moon rock and lunar soil, and studied the intricacies of each mission, manned and unmanned, in detail.

Phases of the Moon. He’d presented his first scientific study to Mrs. Norton in the fifth grade. Jake smiled as he jogged past the old Rexall drug store where he’d nearly driven his mother over the edge with his insistence on a gray report cover. To him, was the only option that made sense. The moon wasn’t red or blue and certainly not the bright green his mother had snagged from the supply rack. But they didn’t make gray report covers. Or if they did, they didn’t stock them in the school supply aisle of their local pharmacy. After a heated battle, he’d settled for black, the color of space beyond the moon, but neither of them left the store happy. Still, there’d been chocolate-oatmeal cookies waiting on waxed paper the day after he’d brought the report home, a bright red ‘A’ scrawled across the title page.

Slowing to a top at an intersection, he shuffled in place as a tricked-out Monte Carlo cruised past. By the time he’d reached graduate school, he’d moved far beyond the moon in his explorations, but moving on never stopped him from looking up and saying a silent hello when he stepped outside for a run.

His shirt clung to his chest. Sweat ran in a rivulet down his spine. The sight of a neighborhood grocery store closed up tight for the night combined with the memory of Darla’s stammering invitation. Wasn’t often a guy got to see The Pit’s sassiest waitress flustered.

Was her nervousness simply because she’d had to swallow her monstrous pride and ask for help, or was there more? She certainly hadn’t shown any particular interest in him up until today, but sometimes things changed. Or not. Sometimes wishful thinking got a guy in trouble.

Hooking a right, he headed away from the address she’d given him and toward the waterfront. She’d asked him over to help her kid. Supposedly. He knew next to nothing about kids, but he did know some things about women. He usually knew when one was attracted to him. If he was reading her right, Darla Kennet was…but she didn’t want to be.

Then again, he wasn’t quite as adept at reading people as he was with the sky.

Swiping at the sweat on his forehead with his forearm, he shook off the nagging tickle of insecurity. Acknowledging what he’d seen clear as day in her eyes wasn’t his ego talking. There’d been empirical, scientifically established evidence to back up his assertion. Her obvious nervousness. The extra effort it took her to meet and hold his gaze. She’d pressed a hand to her throat, but rather than hiding the rapid beat of her pulse, the move only drew his attention to the spot. He’d plowed halfway through his lunch before he realized he hadn’t tasted a bit of Bubba’s savory sauce, but in his mind he’d sampled that tiny patch of skin in a dozen different ways. Dilated pupils. Flaring nostrils. The way she kept wetting her lips.

Darla Kennet was interested in him. Well, what do you know?

Oh, yes. He’d thought about her. A guy would have to be dead not to notice her obvious assets. The woman was a pint-sized powder keg. He’d never actually had reason to stand next to her, but he was pretty sure if he did, she’d barely come up to his chest. Tiny and curvy. She wore her Pit-issued T-shirts snug and tucked into shorts or jeans millimeters shy of painted on.

Her hair was the exact same shade of brown-black as her eyes. She kept it cut short. Really short. He usually preferred long hair on a woman, but on Darla, short hair was the polar opposite of matronly or masculine. The close-crop exposed the long, graceful curve of her neck. Curls sprang up at her nape, but waved at the translucent skin of her temples. She was fair, but not pasty. No, her skin was as luminous as the opal in the ring his mama inherited from her mama. Creamy white warmed by the peachy-pink flush of heat and exertion.

The knock-out punch was her figure. Bubba ought to be required to post a ‘Dangerous Curves Ahead’ sign outside The Pit’s front door, because Darla had them. Full, high breasts, a waist Jake was pretty sure he could span with both hands, and a heart-shaped ass capable of distracting the man from both her rack and the ones Bubba served up with his tangy sauce. There probably wasn’t a man in Mobile who hadn’t given some thought to snagging one of her squeeze bottles of sauce, dousing Darla in the rich spiciness, and taking a big, healthy bite.

More than once, he’d heard Zelda Jo call her Betty Boop, and he had to admit the nickname fit. She was sizzle and sass served up with a side of back-off-jack. He’d always taken her standoffish air to mean she wouldn’t entertain anything more than some friendly ribbing with a dash of harmless flirtation. He wasn’t very good at either of those, so he’d never really tried.

Attractive as she was, she was also sharp-tongued and prickly as the day was long. She carried the air of the untouchable about her. A single mom. A walking, talking scandal. Not that he really cared about local gossip.

He’d never had trouble attracting interested females. Ones that didn’t come with a boatload of baggage. Why waste time and energy on a woman who seemed to enjoy knocking guys down?

Kicking up a gear, he set his sights on the old Tarrington Industries buildings around a curve in the waterfront. Cade Construction was converting the row of abandoned warehouses into luxury loft apartments. Pushing beyond the stitch developing in his side, he zoomed in on the lights shining in the third set of windows from the left.

Home.

He wasn’t quite used to thinking of the condo as his yet. Spurred by his younger brother’s foray into homeownership, he’d purchased the unit from Harley Cade himself a month before. Who’d have thought the lunch lady’s thug kid would transform himself into Mobile’s most successful real estate mogul? Jake was amused and amazed that in the years since graduating from St. Pat’s, Harley’d done better than most every kid born with the silver spoon jammed into their mouths. There was nothing Jake liked more than watching someone defy and overcome odds stacked against them. Harley’d gone from working construction over the summers and after graduation, to flipping houses, to transforming dilapidated property into livable space for people of every income level. If there was something happening in the bay area, Harley had a hand in.

To his surprise, Jake discovered he actually loved building earth-bound things almost as much as he loved rocket propulsion when his younger brother bought a half-finished house on Dauphin Island. With the work on Brian’s place complete, his future sister-in-law suggested he put his tools to work for a higher cause and re-introduced him to Harley Cade. He’d been volunteering his weekends with the Home Again rebuilding project ever since, rehabbing storm-damaged properties so displaced coastal families could return from Mother Nature-imposed exile.

Eyes fixed on the lights he’d left burning in his unit, he picked up the pace for the home stretch. Jake couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. Unlike Brian, he’d never had the itch to travel the world. He was an Alabama man through and through. And if his crappy vision kept him from being a space man, then Alabama was as good a place as any.

He didn’t slow until he reached the chain link fence blocking off the areas currently under construction. Cade Construction’s interlocking C logo graced the corner of the warning signs posted at regular intervals. The condo he’d bought was part of the reclamation of dilapidated waterfront warehouses. Due to his work with Home Again, which started as a Cade Construction initiative, Harley’d given him first crack at the new units coming on the market.

Harley and Darla were close. Everyone knew they were. There were some who flat-out wondered if Harley’d played a part in the creation of little Miss Grace Kennet. Harley’s mama, Connie Cade, had been the one who took Darla in when her parents kicked her out. Jake had been off at college when the news broke, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t heard all about Darla’s fall from grace and the speculation surrounding her new living situation. She’d steadfastly refused to name the father of her child, which only added fuel to the fire.

Frankly, Jake didn’t think Harley was the one. He knew the guy well enough now to know he wouldn’t have hesitated to claim his kid. Besides, Harley was all snugged up to Delaney Tarrington these days and was happier than any ten men had the right to be. Jake’s past wasn’t exactly snowy white, either. A few weeks after Darla had given birth to her baby, his relationship with his college girlfriend exploded like a supernova.

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