Painting Kisses Read online

  Cover image by Covenant Communications, Inc and Painted watercolor background © donatas1205, courtesy istockphoto.com

  Cover design copyright © 2014 by Covenant Communications, Inc.

  Published by Covenant Communications, Inc.

  American Fork, Utah

  Copyright © 2014 by Melanie Jacobson

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any format or in any medium without the written permission of the publisher, Covenant Communications, Inc., P.O. Box 416, American Fork, UT 84003. The views expressed within this work are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect

  the position of Covenant Communications, Inc., or any other entity.

  This is a work of fiction. The characters, names, incidents, places, and dialogue are either products of the author’s imagination, and are not to be construed as real, or are used fictitiously.

  First Printing: October 2014

  20 19 18 17 16 15 14 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  ISBN 978-1-62108-895-0

  For my parents, who I know would have been proud.

  That really is its own gift.

  Acknowledgments

  My husband is incredibly supportive. I couldn’t have done any of this, any books before this one or since, without him. I know because I never even had it in me to try before he came along. Thank you to my children and their patience with my general air of distraction. Thank you to Amy Lou, who reads first and often last and who babysat so I could write. Thank you to Kristine Tate and Brittany Larsen for their patient weekly feedback. Thank you to my beta readers, who offered encouragement, praise, and honest criticism: Rachel Gillie and Susan Auten (whose book you should read if you haven’t yet). Thank you to Jana Parkin and Krista Jensen, who fact-checked my art details. Thanks, as always, to my editor, Samantha Millburn, for her eagle eye. Thank you to my extended family and my family by marriage, who are both full of adopted aunts on either side who cheer for me and are proud of me, and that matters. And I apologize to anyone I missed: I promise it’s because I’m thinking I made you read one of the other projects I have waiting in the wings, and I get it all jumbled up in my head. It happens a lot. Thanks to everyone for their regular patience with that too.

  Chapter 1

  Hell was full of either coffee or dried bits of omelet.

  Maybe both.

  Definitely both, I decided as I wiped up the spillover from the twentieth breakfast I’d served since starting my shift. These construction guys made a bigger mess than my niece Chloe did. Then again, Chloe was probably the world’s only three-year-old who ate with the table manners of the Queen of England . . . when she wanted to.

  I swept the plates into a plastic bin and pocketed the five-dollar bill tucked under the salt shaker. It was more than fair for a fifteen-dollar ticket. I minded the clean up a little bit less. A very little bit less.

  “Lady? Lady, I need a refill.”

  I put on a smile and scooped up the coffeepot on the counter. “Coming, Mr. Benny.” It had taken me only a couple of weeks to memorize the regular orders for a dozen different customers, including this raisin of a man’s, but he still hadn’t learned my name after almost a year of coming here. Was it such a jump from “lady” to “Lia”? For someone who shorted my tip three times a week, apparently yes.

  The diner’s door swished open, and Aidan stuck his head in. A happy sigh tried to sneak out of me, but I didn’t let it. I barked at him instead. “You’re confused. It’s not Saturday.”

  “Is it clear?”

  Clear like your lake-blue eyes? Yes. Desirable for you to be here in the middle of the week unexpectedly? Yes. Acceptable for me to be all schoolgirly about it? Nope.

  “Ramona isn’t here. It’s clear.” Ramona was the R of the T&R Diner, co-owned with her husband, Tom, who was a killer short-order cook.

  Aidan made his way to the only open table, with Chief, his Australian shepherd, at his heels. He folded his long body into the corner booth, and Chief settled down beneath the table with a faint jingle of his tags.

  “Did I hear Chief?” Tom hollered through the pass-through window. “Ramona’s going to catch us one day.”

  “Not us,” I hollered back. “You. You let that dog in. Not me.”

  “You know you love him,” Aidan said. “Also, I just heard his stomach growl.”

  “His stomach?” I repeated. “Better be, because I know you wouldn’t try telling me how to do my job with that lame hint.”

  “Of course not,” he said, grinning. “But I’m not going to stop you if you want to come take my order.” He couldn’t be that much older than me, but crow’s-feet already framed his eyes. Too much working in the sun, probably. Not that they looked bad. Not that anything about him looked bad.

  “Don’t care what you want, but Chief’s is done.” I darted to the window and scooped up a plate of breakfast sausage, then made my way to Aidan’s table.

  One of the other regulars protested. “That’s supposed to be my sausage. I ordered first.”

  Tom grunted. “It’s time I told you the truth, Hogan. I like that dog better than you. You can wait.” He slapped his spatula against the griddle for emphasis while several of the other men chuckled.

  I set Chief’s plate down in front of the dog before crossing my arms to brace for Aidan. “What are we on today?”

  “We? I like that you’re showing team spirit.”

  “You’re making me. This is a stupid goal.”

  “You’re full of . . . energy this morning. What are you on? And can you give me some?”

  “Sleep,” I said and held up my hand to cut him off when I saw the glint in his eye. “Whatever joke you’re about to make, don’t. You, me, and the word sleep have no business in the same sentence, so don’t go there.”

  He put on a wounded look. “I can’t believe you’d even think I’d make that joke.”

  I rolled my eyes. “You’re right. Sorry.”

  “I mean, it’s way too easy. I like a joke I have to work for.”

  “Why are you even here on a weekday?”

  “School’s out. I’m on a summer schedule now.”

  He went to school? A lot of the blue-collar guys who came into T&R would never consider trying to start college in their late twenties. Most of them were focused on working their way up in their unions or getting themselves foreman jobs, from what I’d overheard in their conversations. They weren’t academics, just down-to-earth guys who had wives and kids and who were trying to pay the bills. And that was exactly why I’d chosen a dive like T&R to work at and not one of the high-end breakfast cafés farther up Big Cottonwood Canyon. Down-to-earthiness. For the rest of my life, I could never get too much of it.

  “Summer schedule?” I asked. “Does that mean I have to put up with you on more than Saturdays?” I didn’t know if I wanted him to say yes or no.

  “Probably. You’re on the way to my jobsite. And by you, I don’t mean you, Tom!” he called. “Especially not on number twelve day. You can bet that when I get the number twelve, I’m just here to see Lia.”

  “Get a room!” a guy in a red hat said.

  “At least get her digits,” another guy yelled out.

  “I try every time I’m in here. No dice.”

  “If it works, give them to me,” Red Hat said. “She always tells me no too.”

  “Liar,” I said to Red Hat, trying to act like having the whole diner’s eyes on me didn’t fluster me, even though my cheeks had warmed. “You haven’t asked me for anything but breakfast.”

  “Can I have your number?” he asked.

  “No.” I hadn’t meant to be funny, but laughter rolled across the diner, along with a catcall. Mr. Benny scowled and clapped his hands over
his ears.

  “How come I can’t have your number either?” Aidan asked.

  “Because you can’t order me off the menu like you do a chicken-fried steak.” More laughter from the other guys. Aidan took it all in with a smile—that one I’d actually been trying to earn.

  “How come you’re not like this every day?” Hogan asked, grinning despite still not having his sausage.

  “Don’t know what you’re talking about,” I growled and stared pointedly at my order pad. But I did know. In the three years I’d worked at the diner, I’d made a point of meeting every flirtatious customer remark with a polite smile that discouraged any follow-up. If it didn’t work, I went with pretending I couldn’t hear the comments. The regulars knew they could expect friendly, quiet service. I didn’t have the knack for the patter and teasing that the other girls had. First-timers came in and tried to flirt with me from time to time, but I couldn’t do it. I wished I could wave a wand and make them think of me as an invisible food-delivering robot.

  I couldn’t be clever with anyone I didn’t know well. Only the other employees got jokes out of me. Other employees . . . and Aidan.

  He’d startled them out of me the first time. He always had The New York Times on his iPad when I dropped food by his table. After a while, I’d maybe, sort of, definitely spied to see what kind of stuff he was reading. Current events, arts, sports, business. He read it all.

  One day he’d been reading a review of an artist I’d known and loathed ever since I’d met him at a joint show we’d done. He called himself Zhaday, which sounded stupid on a middle-aged white guy from Delaware. I read about this band once who insisted on a huge bowl of M&M’s in their dressing room with all the brown ones picked out because they were rock stars and they could. This guy was like that. But worse was that Zhaday’s art had no soul. His earlier work did—I’d studied it and liked his sense of form and color—but he’d lost that somewhere along the way.

  The piece on Aidan’s screen had shown Zhaday’s interpretation of the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan as a decaying monument, rotting almost organically. “Disturbing View of New York’s Place on the International Art Stage,” I read the headline aloud. “Disturbing? Sure, if we’re talking about the pandering he’s doing with that painting.”

  Aidan choked on his coffee, spluttering and laughing at the same time. It was kind of cute. “That was perfect. I’m buying you a drink.”

  I shook my head, embarrassed at outing myself for reading over his shoulder. “I don’t drink.”

  “Sure you do. Coffee? Orange juice?”

  And I reddened even further because I thought he meant meeting me for a drink, date-style. “Orange juice is great.”

  “Tom?” he called. “Can you get Lia here a glass of orange juice on me when it’s convenient?”

  “Don’t hurt yourself, big spender,” Tom grumbled, but that only made Aidan laugh again.

  And somehow a tradition had been born—whichever one of us made the other one laugh first when Aidan came in got treated to a glass of OJ.

  “Speaking of chicken-fried steak,” Tom said, tapping the bell and derailing my memory train. The bell was supposed to let the servers know a meal was done. He never actually used it for that. It was more like a punctuation mark. Ding, ding, ding, ding. “Get that joker’s order, and maybe I can cook him something that’ll keep him too busy eating to talk.”

  “You’re a genius, Tom,” I said. He waved a spatula and bent over the grill again. I whipped out my notepad and gave Aidan an expectant look. “What can I get for you?”

  “Your last name.”

  “You’re like a bad movie. I already told you—I’m not on the menu.”

  “What did I get last time?”

  “You think I remember that kind of thing? That I’m sitting around memorizing what you get every time you come in here?” Even though I had my eyes narrowed at him, I had to fight a smile at the easy way we fell into this routine. Not having to wait until Saturday for this felt like eating dessert first.

  “You don’t remember?” he asked, faking a hurt face.

  “Yes. But you shouldn’t assume it.”

  “Oh, come on. Tell me I’m special, that you only remember for me.”

  I gave him the look my sister Dani used to give me when we were kids and I said something she thought was stupid. I pointed to Mr. Benny. “Two cups of coffee, fifteen minutes apart, with a plate of scrambled eggs and a side of hash browns in between. Red Hat over there? Short stack with a side of bacon and two glasses of OJ. Guy coming in from the parking lot? Three eggs over easy, hash browns, and two cups of coffee, black.” I tapped my pencil on the order pad. “This is a prop so I don’t intimidate the rest of you with my gigantic brain. Also, you’re not special.”

  His grin broke out. “Why ask me when you know what I’m getting?”

  “I like to give you the illusion of choice. You’re on number eleven, chicken-fried steak. It’s not too late to back out.”

  “Should I?”

  “Have you regretted anything yet?” Tom asked from the pass-through.

  “No,” Aidan admitted. “But I’m worried that at some point you’ll make me pay for mouthing off.”

  Tom snatched the next ticket down from the window. “I might spit in it, but I won’t screw it up. You gotta—”

  “Respect the grill,” I finished. “You’ve mentioned that a time or two.”

  “You’re worse than him,” Tom said, slapping a piece of steak into the flour and dredging it like he was trying to kill the beef again.

  Aidan winced. “You should take that personally, Lia. Very personally. Worse than me is pretty bad.”

  “You win,” I said, losing the fight against a laugh. “You are bad. Orange juice is on me today.”

  Aidan pumped his fist in victory. “That’s ten to seven. I’m pulling ahead.”

  “Don’t be so impressed with yourself.” I lowered my voice. “Mr. Benny makes me laugh first every single day.”

  “But is it on purpose?”

  I grinned. “No. And today I get the last laugh on you because next time you come in, it’s the number twelve.” Number twelve was liver.

  Aidan sighed.

  “No one’s making you do it. You can skip to thirteen.”

  “No, I can’t, and it’s your fault. When I came in that first day and asked you what the best thing on the menu was, you should have told me. Then I wouldn’t have to try it all myself.”

  “I did tell you.”

  “You said it’s all good. Twenty-five things can’t all be the best thing.”

  “Why not?” Tom interrupted. “You think I haven’t figured out a thing or two after owning this grill for nine years?”

  “Don’t worry, boss. Aidan only means about half of what he says. I’ll buy your orange juice today too if it makes you feel better.”

  Tom snorted. “Why would it make me feel better to have you buy me something I have to make if I want to drink it? And don’t you have other tables to serve?”

  I rolled my eyes at Aidan, making him laugh, and made my way over to the guy at table three and poured his coffee without even asking. “Three eggs over easy with a side of hash browns?”

  He nodded, bleary-eyed.

  I turned to Aidan and stuck my tongue out.

  He shook his head and turned his attention to his iPad. Must be something good. I’d sneak a peek when I dropped his chicken-fried steak off.

  The next table was a new face. Dirt-crusted boots and a tan face this early in May meant he was probably one of the construction guys working on the new ski resort. “What can I get for you?” I asked.

  “Hey, beautiful. Straight to business with no foreplay? I like it.”

  I heard someone snort into their coffee cup. It sounded suspiciously like Mr. Benny. I didn’t look around to check. I could handle stuff like this only if I convinced myself that no one was watching. I drew out my order pad and lifted my eyebrows slightly without acknowledging
the guy’s come on. “Would you like to hear the specials?”

  His eyes brightened like I’d issued a challenge, and I struggled to keep my face blank. Great. The challenge guys were the worst. I’d gotten used to customers who ranged from teen snow junkies to old men flirting with me, even though, at first, I couldn’t figure out why they did it. I wasn’t a knockout. When my life-drawing instructor had assigned us to do self-portraits in art school, I’d titled mine The Median.

  Medium brown hair, longish. Medium height. Brown eyes. Not pasty white skin, not tan. Kind of scrawny. Nice mouth, maybe, but lips always chapped from biting them. I was nothing to object to. I also wasn’t anything to stop and take notice of. I was the middle, which is why I figured out pretty fast that the reason customers flirted with me was that I was here. They flirted with all the waitresses, even Dot, who was older than my grandma.

  Most of them backed off after I ignored their passes a time or two, but not the challenge guys. They made it some kind of personal mission to get an acknowledgment of their pickup skills. It was weird. They didn’t even want a date out of it. They wanted to force you into playing along or snapping at them.

  They hated when I ignored them, which left me one option: run away.

  “Why would I want to hear the specials when I already see something special?” he said in a silky voice that I wanted to believe, for the sake of self-respecting women everywhere, had never worked on any woman, ever.

  “The corned-beef-hash plate? Yeah, it’s great. I’ll bring it to you with a side of home potatoes.”

  I tore off his order sheet and fled to the kitchen.

  “That’s not what I want,” he called after me.

  “Son, it’s what you’re getting,” Mr. Benny said. “You’d best eat it.”

  “But—”

  Aidan cleared his throat, and I glanced out at him through the pass-through window in time to see him cross his arms over his chest. The construction guy’s eyes widened, and he started to say something, but Aidan nodded once, and just like that, the guy shut up and fiddled with some sweetener packets instead.