Read the book: «It Began with a Crush»

Chapter One

Mr. Capelli was not going to be happy.

Turning into the driveway of Capelli Auto, Mary Jane was already rehearsing her excuses. She knew her little blue car was overdue for a service, but it was the start of the summer season and they’d been so busy at Spruce Bay Resort. The car had been making a strange noise for a while, she would have to admit it, but the noise was definitely louder now than it had been at first, so it wasn’t as if she’d been ignoring something so blatant all this time.

Even in her own head, it all sounded feeble, and Mr. Capelli was so good at that tolerant yet reproachful look of his. The Cherry family had been bringing their vehicles to him for service and repair for as long as she could remember.

The garage, an old-fashioned and very reassuring place, was on a quiet backstreet. Art Capelli was the kind of mechanic who told you the truth and never overcharged. He didn’t deserve Mary Jane’s embarrassingly neglectful attitude toward her car. Dad was always so scrupulous about maintenance, but she...

She was the worst of sinners in that department, and she knew it.

Right now, she felt as remorseful about the noise in the engine as she would have felt about bringing the vet a mangy and half-starved kitten with a splinter in its infected paw.

She parked out front of the repair shop with its brightly painted Capelli Auto sign, leaving the car windows down and the key in the ignition. There was no one in the office but she could hear sounds coming from the workshop so she went through, needing to pause for a moment or two so her eyes could adjust to the light because it was dimmer in here.

A pair of legs clad in oil-stained dark blue overalls stuck out from beneath a red pickup truck. She addressed them tentatively. “Mr. Capelli?”

There came a grunt and an inarticulate noise that probably meant, “Give me a second.”

She awaited her moment of shame. Really, the noise had only gotten so bad these past few days, although it had been sounding on and off since... Oh, shoot, since her three-day spa vacation in Vermont, and that was back in mid-March, three months ago.

Problem was, when the noise occasionally stopped for a few days, she thought the car had—well—healed itself.

What? Cars didn’t do that?

There was another grunt, and the overall-clad legs suddenly shot toward her. A pair of sturdy tan work boots fetched up inches from her shins.

“Hi, Mr—” She stopped. It wasn’t Art Capelli, with his tanned and lined sixtysomething face, his wiry gray hair and fatherly brown eyes. It was Joe, his son.

Joe, whom she hadn’t seen in probably fourteen years. Longer.

Joe, with the sinfully gorgeous looks that began with his thick dark hair and ended with his perfect olive-skinned body, and encompassed pretty much every other desirable male attribute in between.

Cocky, egotistical Joe, who’d always known all too well how irresistible he was and had played on it for everything he was worth.

Possibly, she was blushing already.

“Hi,” he said. They looked at each other. He lifted his head from the wheeled roller-thingy that allowed him to slide easily beneath a vehicle. “Mary Jane, right?”

“Yes.”

“I saw your name in the book.” And probably wouldn’t have recognized her in a police lineup if he hadn’t.

“Where’s your dad?” she asked, and it sounded abrupt and clumsy.

He didn’t answer right away, occupied with levering his strong body up off the roller-thingy so he could stand. “I’m helping him now. Taking over, really. His health isn’t that great.”

Once he was standing, she could see him a lot more clearly. He hadn’t changed, she quickly concluded. He was every bit as good-looking as he’d been in high school. Better-looking, in fact. Her own eye for a man’s looks had matured with the years, and she liked the laugh lines around his eyes and mouth, and the fine, scattered threads of silver in the short but still thick hair that framed the top half of his face.

“Right. I’m sorry to hear that,” she answered him. “I mean, that he’s not well. Not sorry you’re helping out. Obviously.”

Smooth, Mary Jane. Real smooth.

There were a hundred questions she wanted to ask. What happened to the Hollywood plan? Was Joe back here for good, or just as an interim arrangement because his dad wasn’t well? Wasn’t there someone else who could take over the garage? What had gone wrong?

It was ridiculous how shocked she felt at seeing him, and how instinctively she’d gone back in time about eighteen years to when they were in high school together and she’d loathed him more than any other guy in school.

Yes, loathed him.

Insist on that a little more, Mary Jane. Protesting too much? Never!

She’d loathed her own reaction to him even more. He’d been so cocky back then, so magnetic and sure of himself, wearing his sense of his own sparkling future like an Armani suit. No, wait a minute. Not a suit. He was rougher than that. Make it a biker jacket, black Italian leather.

She’d tried so hard not to look at him, not to notice him, and to stay immune to the charm that oozed from him, the—what were they called, pheromones or something—that made her heart beat faster if they merely passed each other in a corridor.

The ones that made her tongue turn into a flapping fish in her mouth, and made her blush and giggle if he said something arrogant and cheeky in class. Arrogant and cheeky and usually pretty dumb, because he never did the required reading. If he ever happened to catch her looking at him after one of those smart-mouth comments, she always glared back, just to make sure he wasn’t in the slightest danger of thinking she might have a crush on him.

And now here he was in his father’s dilapidated garage, where he used to help out in his teens, hands stained with engine grease, forehead lightly sheened with grimy sweat, fixing cars for a living.

While she struggled to find the right thing to say, he pulled the overalls down to his waist, laying bare a dark blue T-shirt that molded to his chest and casually showed off the toned muscles and washboard abs. He grabbed a water bottle from a benchtop and took a gulp, then took a towel and wiped it across the sweaty, grimy forehead.

She thought she should probably feel sorry for him for being here, or maybe maliciously pleased at the contrast between his openly paraded ambitions of wealth and Hollywood stardom back in high school, and the place he’d ended up. Right back where he’d started in his dad’s garage.

And yet she didn’t feel any of that. Instead, the emotions that washed through her were curious and empathetic and wry and—

“Life’s a funny thing, huh?” Joe said quietly with a half smile, and she felt the blush heating her cheeks in reality now, not simply in her imagination. How long since she’d done that? Blushed? A hundred years?

“Um, yes. Yes, it is.” She took in a dragging breath and breathed in him, along with the air—his slightly salt scent, his body heat, a hint of some tangy and irresistible male grooming product, and the faint odor of engine oil that should have been off-putting but for some reason wasn’t.

Jeepers, how did the man do this? Less than a minute in his company and she’d already been knocked sideways by the way he looked, and even the way he smelled, for pity’s sake.

She cleared her throat quickly, and there was a shift as they both pulled back onto a businesslike footing. She really was not going to ask all those questions about what he’d been doing since college and why he wasn’t by this time a Hollywood heartthrob on the level of George Clooney, Bradley Cooper or Johnny Depp, or maybe a high-powered casting agent or film director.

And if she wasn’t going to ask, then even less did he look as if he wanted to tell her.

“So, the car,” he said. “Regular service, you said, plus you’ve been having a couple of problems with it?”

“It’s making a noise.”

He gave her his father’s look, the tolerant and reproachful one, but with an additional hint of smoke that Mr. Capelli had never worn on his face in his life. Again, it took Mary Jane right back to high school and made her furious with herself. Back then, she used to think he did it on purpose—and maybe he had—because the girls fell for it like ninepins. She’d bent over backward to make sure it never worked on her.

If it was physically possible for a pair of male eyebrows and the corners of a male mouth to give the equivalent of a seductive drawl, then that was what his were doing, then and now. But today he didn’t look as if he was doing it on purpose. It was just part of his face, an unconscious habit, something that betrayed a dry sense of humor.

“A noise,” he said patiently.

“Yes.” She tried to produce it. “Rgrk-rgrk-rgrk. Like that. Sort of.”

To her relief, he didn’t laugh, just said very plainly, “I’ll take a look, and give you a call when I know what’s going on.”

“Uh, thanks, Cap. Yes, that would be great.”

There was a silence as she realized what she’d said. Cap. Everyone had called him that in high school, but she had no idea if they did anymore.

He’d noticed the nickname, too. “Make it Joe,” he said.

“I’m sorry.”

“Cap is... Yeah. I don’t go by that now.”

“Sorry,” she said again. And for some reason remembered something she’d learned in passing—she couldn’t remember where or when—that Joe Capelli was also the name of a character in a shoot-’em-up video game.

“No big deal,” the non-computer-generated Joe said. “Do you need a ride somewhere?”

“My sister’s picking me up. She should be here any minute.”

“I’ll call you later, then, when I know what’s going on with the engine.”

“Thanks. Um, say hi to your dad for me. Give him my best wishes.”

“Will do.”

She got herself out of the grease-smelling workshop and into the June air, just as her sister Lee pulled onto the concrete apron at the front of the garage.

Lee was engaged to be married and five and a half months pregnant, beyond the tired and queasy first trimester and not yet into the big and uncomfortable third trimester, and she looked radiantly energetic, happy and alive. Her caramel-colored hair was thick and shiny in its casual ponytail, and her skin was glowing. “So what’s the noise?” she said, after Mary Jane had slid into the front passenger seat.

“Don’t know yet. He’ll take a look at it and call to let me know.”

“He must be getting pretty old for lying around under cars.”

“It wasn’t Mr. Capelli. It was his son. Joe.”

“Joe. Wow!” Lee said. “I thought he was in Hollywood, being a movie star.”

“You remember that? You were two years behind us in school.”

“The whole school knew about Joe Capelli’s plans. I think everyone believed in them, too.”

“Really?” Mary Jane infused a watery amount of skepticism into her voice for appearance’s sake, and yet she had believed in his plans just as much as everyone else. Had believed in them utterly, to the point where she looked for his face on TV or in movies for years afterward, and even once thought she’d spotted him on screen, playing a gangster’s henchman who died under dramatic movie gunfire without speaking a line.

“Don’t you remember him in West Side Story?” Lee said. “Every girl in the audience was practically moaning out loud.”

“Not me.”

“Well, you weren’t the moaning type. I never understood why he hadn’t gotten the lead role.”

“Because he couldn’t sing in the right range,” Mary Jane answered. “He’s a baritone, not a tenor.”

“You do remember.”

“But you’re right, I wasn’t the moaning type,” Mary Jane hastened to emphasize. “I couldn’t stand him.”

“He did think he was God’s gift to womankind, I seem to remember. Bit of a joke where he’s ended up, compared to what he planned.”

“Not a joke. And not the end, either. He’s only thirty-five.”

“Now you’re defending him.”

“Because I’m sure he must know what everyone is thinking,” Mary Jane retorted. “He was a bit of a jerk, maybe, a bit arrogant and cocky, but he doesn’t deserve that. He wasn’t a bad person, just...”

“Way too much ego. Isn’t that almost the definition of jerk? You mean he doesn’t deserve people thinking that being back in his father’s garage is a far cry from what he expected?”

“From what we all expected.”

“I know what you mean. When some people say, ‘I’m gonna be a star!’ you roll your eyes, but with him...”

“We were rolling our eyes for other reasons,” Mary Jane agreed.

“The arrogance.”

“Exactly. I never doubted he’d make it big.”

Just as she’d never doubted her own future—no grand ambitions, in her case, just the usual one—the triple play of decent marriage, beautiful and welcoming home, healthy kids. Enough of a win in the lottery of life for anyone, she’d always considered.

So far, she’d scored just one out of the three.

A few minutes later, Lee turned into the driveway that led to Spruce Bay Resort and Mary Jane thought she could hardly ask for a more beautiful place to live, surrounded by pristine white snow in winter and glorious views of mountain and forest and lake in spring, summer and fall.

And yet she would have exchanged it in a heartbeat for a two-bedroom apartment over a dingy little store if it meant she got the decent marriage and healthy kids instead.

It was embarrassing. Painfully embarrassing. Way more embarrassing than Joe Capelli working in his dad’s old-fashioned garage.

Incredibly embarrassing that she wanted something so outwardly ordinary and conventional and yet still it hadn’t happened.

Embarrassing...and painful...and horrible...that she could feel the bitterness kicking in. She had to try so hard, sometimes, not to mind that both her younger sisters were now happily in love, married or engaged, with babies on the way.

She had a secret little chart tucked away in her head, and mentally awarded herself a gold star for every day she went without feeling jealous, or saying something pointed and mean, or wallowing in regret.

And even though the mental chart had quite a few gold stars on it, she hated that it existed in the first place, and no matter how much she’d disliked...well, tried to dislike...“Cap” Capelli in high school, she understood so well what he’d meant when he’d said with that wry drawl and quirked mouth, “Life’s a funny thing.”

* * *

Mary Jane Cherry was one of those women who looked way better at thirty-five than she’d looked at eighteen, Joe decided.

In high school, she’d had frequent skin breakouts and an orthodontic plate and puppy fat, and her hair had been an indifferent brownish color, worn too long. Now she had it cut to shoulder-length in bouncy layers with professional blond highlights, her skin was smooth, dewy and well cared for and the puppy fat had turned into a kind of ripeness that looked warm and inviting, along with the soft creases at the corners of her eyes and the smile lines around her mouth.

It was a little disturbing that he remembered her so well, but then, he’d made an extensive study of girls in high school. If he went to a reunion—which, to be clear, he had no intention of ever doing—it would probably turn out that he remembered them all.

Joe listened to Mary Jane’s car engine, heard “the noise” and knew she should have brought it in for a checkup about five hundred miles ago. He did some further exploration and diagnosis, and came up with at least three major repairs that the car needed right now.

Mary Jane was lucky it had held up this far, and hadn’t left her stranded somewhere with smoke billowing from the engine. He would need to order parts from the distributor, and when they arrived he’d need to pull apart the whole engine to put them in. It was Tuesday today. She wasn’t getting the car back before Friday at the earliest.

He did a grease and oil change on another car, and then a wheel alignment and a tire rotation on a third, knowing that both clients would be back soon to pick up their vehicles. The bad-news phone call to Mary Jane would have to wait.

Which was a pity, because it gave him more time to think about her.

How well she’d held up in the looks and youthfulness department. How surprised he was that she was still here. She’d been intelligent, articulate, hard-working, always earned good grades. He somehow would have expected her to have moved away, in search of wider horizons.

In high school, the girls had been divided into two groups—the ones who thought he was gorgeous and had wild crushes on him, and the ones who thought he was gorgeous and couldn’t stand him.

Naturally, Mary Jane was in the second group, and naturally, he had been all about the girls in the first.

He’d dated—hell, he couldn’t remember—at least five or six of them. The prettiest and wildest and most popular, because those were the ones you could get the farthest with, and were the ones that made the other guys look at you with envy and respect, cementing your position as the coolest kid in school.

Looking back, he could see how much he’d been riding for a fall. Sometimes, he wanted to reach back in time and slap his teenage self upside the head. Hard. He could also see that if just a few things had gone differently, the fall might never have happened.

Because he’d come so close.

Seriously close.

Even now, he might easily have been starring in some long-running TV crime show, or choosing between movie scripts that had Oscar potential written into every line. As he’d said to Mary Jane, life was a funny thing.

There had been a major series of audition callbacks where he’d ended up in the running, along with just one other guy, for the lead role in a crime drama series, and the other guy—now a household name—had gotten the gig. There had been one gorgeous female smile that he’d caught in a crowded diner and had followed up on instead of letting it slide.

Just those two events, and his whole life had gone off on a completely different track from the one he’d envisaged.

He couldn’t let himself think about it, because on the one hand, he’d fallen so far short, but on the other, there were two things about his life now that were so incredibly precious he couldn’t imagine himself without them.

The owners of the other cars showed up both at the same time, and he took their money and returned their keys and remembered he still hadn’t called Mary Jane Cherry, even though it was nearly four o’clock. He was just about to pick up the phone when his father came in, towing two identical seven-year-old girls and looking pretty tired.

The girls, of course, were Joe’s two precious things.

“You’re going to tell me it’s easier fixing cars than taking care of these two,” he told his dad.

“Nah, we had a great day.” But a tiring one. Dad couldn’t gloss over that.

“What did you do?”

“Played on the beach at the lake. Did a round of mini golf up at that place with all the waterfalls. Had ice cream.”

Dad couldn’t keep up this pace all summer. He had prostate cancer, and the only good thing about this was the doctor’s promise that it would kill him so slowly he’d likely die of something else first, fifteen years from now.

Joe was starting not to believe the doctor, but maybe it was the sheer energy of two little girls that had Dad looking so tired today. “I’ll get them into a vacation program,” he promised his father. “Day camp, or something.”

“Horseback riding camp?” said both girls together, in identical and intensely hopeful voices.

Joe sighed. “Maybe horse-riding camp. We’ll look into it.”

He didn’t know where this horsey thing was coming from, but it was rabid. The girls had a shared subscription to a pony magazine, and the walls of their room were covered in horsey pictures. They had a whole shelf of horsey books. Not just stories, but books on how to ride and groom and look after your pony. They had a plastic pony play-set, and plush ponies that they slept with every night, and unicorn socks—apparently unicorns counted as ponies—as well as horseshoe bracelets and pony T-shirts and pony pajamas.

Now that he and the girls had left California and come back east, it might actually be possible for them to meet a pony or two, face-to-face.

“You don’t have to shove ’em into some day-camp program just because of me,” Dad said.

“Pony camp! Pony camp!” said the girls.

“Well, I won’t, not unless it’s one they enjoy,” Joe promised, but he knew he might be stretching the truth.

They might be forced to enjoy it whether they wanted to or not, because Dad really could not look after the girls all summer, five and a half days a week. The whole idea of Joe being here in the garage was to give Dad a break until they decided whether to sell the place or close it down. His taking care of the girls was a stopgap measure until the three of them got settled, because they’d only moved from California two weeks ago and still weren’t fully unpacked.

Holly and Maddie had spent half their lives in day care and day camp in the four years since Joe had had full custody, because he’d had no other choice in the matter. Even so, all the child care was still way better than what they’d had before they’d come to him. He’d spared Dad most of the details on that, and it was cute...and warming, somehow...that Dad, in his innocence, viewed professional child care as such a poor option.

He would try to get a little more of the unpacking done tonight after Dad and the girls had gone to bed, he promised himself, so that at least his father didn’t have to deal with the mess. Joe didn’t really have time to devote a whole precious evening to going through cardboard boxes. He had studying to do. But if he didn’t take care of Dad...

“Ready to close up shop?” Dad asked now, betraying his eagerness to get home and take it easy.

“Not quite. I have a phone call to make, and she’s probably going to want the loaner car, so I’ll have to arrange that. Why don’t you take them home and put them in front of TV, while you get a break? If they’ve had ice cream, they won’t be hungry.”

Wrong.

“Yes, we are!” Again, Holly and Maddie spoke in unison.

They did this all the time quite unselfconsciously, and Joe was used to it. Didn’t even hear it, half the time. Grandmotherly women thought it was “adorable,” but when it came to things like begging for riding lessons, it just doubled their pester power. In his darker moments, Joe considered identical twins to be a whole lot less cute than they were cracked up to be...and still he loved these two with every particle in his soul.

“Okay, they are hungry,” he said. “There’s a bag of potato smiles in the freezer. Put half of them in the toaster oven. Girls, if Grandad doesn’t hear the oven timer when it goes off, you tell him, okay? Don’t try to get them out of the hot oven yourselves.”

He knew they would, if he didn’t specifically forbid it. They were incredibly ambitious when it came to attempting practical tasks that they weren’t ready for yet. He’d caught them trying to fry their own eggs when they were two.

Dad, Holly and Maddie left again, and Joe found himself wondering just how quickly he could arrange to get the loaner car to Mary Jane, assuming she wanted it, because he really didn’t want to leave Dad on his own with the girls for much longer.