Page 8 of Big Island Horizons
She hadn’t seen him since the day that he had shown up at her front gate and confessed his feelings.
It had been the same day that she and Mitch signed their divorce papers. Dating again had been the last thing on her mind. She had been completely taken up with the new business that she had started to make ends meet, not to mention helping her children through this transition and wading through the mind-numbing legal hurdles required for even a no-contest divorce.
She had zero interest in making time in her busy life for dating or meeting anyone new.
But Liam… he had been a dear friend for years. She had been friends with his wife first, but after Laura had passed away and left Liam with a little girl to raise on his own, a true friendship had formed between him and Tara.
For years, she had looped his daughter Maddie in the homeschool activities she had carted Cody to. These days, Maddie was nearly grown and teaching lessons at the family ranch.
And Liam wanted more than friendship from Tara.
Her predominant reaction to his confession had been a blank sort of shock. For the past couple of weeks, she’d had Cody drive his sisters to their riding lessons.
It was partially avoidance, maybe, but she was also impossibly busy. More and more people were buying into her weekly meal deliveries, and most days she sank a solid fourteen hours into caring for her animals and preparing food for sale.
Of course, those long hours spent in the kitchen left her with plenty of time to think. And more and more, she had been thinking of Liam.
Now, following the road up the mountain that she had driven a thousand times before, she could hardly believe the fluttery feeling that had overtaken her limbs.
His words had awoken a part of her that she had believed to be long dead, a sort of adolescent excitement that she had never expected to feel again.
All the pressure that she was under, all the responsibility of homeschooling her children while running a business, and a few words from him had still managed to turn her world upside down and steal her attention.
Her nerves seemed to vibrate as she drove up the long tree-lined drive to Liam’s place. Paige, happily oblivious to her mother’s nerves, laughed at her audiobook. When Tara parked near the stables, Paige was out of the car before the engine was even off.
“Got your helmet?” Tara called after her.
“Right!” She dove back in through the window and grabbed her purple riding helmet, the one with fat ponies dancing around the brim. She had added those herself with silver sharpie.
“God give us all the energy and confidence of an eight year old girl,” Tara murmured as she watched Paige sprint towards the stables.
Then again, she couldn’t remember having even a fraction of her girls’ confidence at their age. School had whittled her spirit away already, and had continued to do so for years. The bare hallways, monotonous classes, and mean-spirited teasing that she had endured in her school days had taken their toll.
Then her mom had moved her to Hawai’i as a teenager, and she had opted for a GED instead of finishing up in school. She had found jobs working on local farms and discovered her calling, caring for plants and animals in the Hawaiian sunshine.
Or, as today would have it, a heavy Hawaiian mist. It beaded on the car windows and clung to her face when she stepped out into the open.
Liam stood on his front porch, hands in the pockets of his jeans. As soon as she climbed out of her minivan, he freed them and jogged down the steps.
“I have your meals for the week,” she said by way of greeting.
He had been one of the first to sign up for her meal delivery service. Most weeks he gave her frozen beef in lieu of payment. Always such monstrous portions that they far outstripped the value of the meals, though he stubbornly claimed otherwise.
Liam was quiet, his blue-gray eyes intent on her face, and she could feel her cheeks color. She opened up the back of the van and stood beneath the hatchback door, sheltered from the drizzle.
“I made coconut soup this week,” she said. “Tom Kha Gai with lemongrass and Thai lime leaves from my garden. I found some galangal at the market, too. I should really start growing that myself. It’s island grown, right down to the fish sauce. There’s a lady at the market who makes her own.”
“Tara,” he started, but she kept talking.
“I madelaulautoo,” she went on, nerves getting the better of her. “For dessert I made purple sweet potato pie bars. My girls are crazy about them, though I’m not sure how they’ll go over with my customers. I guess we’ll see. Cody added a feedback page to the website, where people can tell me what they thought of the food and make requests.”
“Do you want to help me carry these inside?” he asked.
She nodded. He could have easily carried the food inside himself, like he did every week. But he was inviting her in out of the rain, and she wasn’t going to say no.
They walked through the gentle drizzle and into the house, where Tara set the two half-gallon jars of Tom Kha Gai on the kitchen counter. The ranch house was beautiful, with bare wooden walls on one side and wide mountain-view windows on the other.
“I wanted to apologize,” Liam said.
