Bliss and the Art of Forever - Alison Kent Page 0,2

I mean. The kids are absolutely worshiping that man, and he looks like he could eat them for breakfast.”

“I’d like to give him something to eat for breakfast,” Lindsay Webber, the second volunteer and mother of Adrianne Drake’s best friend, Kelly, put in, eliciting a sharp groan from the third.

Brooklyn looked at Callum. His gaze came up and met hers, and she pressed her hand to her throat to hide the throb of her pulse at the base. Surely he hadn’t heard; he was half a room away.

But the words were out there, as was the sound, and both had her mind going places it didn’t need to. Places she’d avoided for ages because she’d made her peace with being alone.

She’d had twelve years with the most wonderful man she’d ever known. Twelve years traveling the globe, and cooking breakfast for dinner, and watching every Bruce Willis movie ever made multiple times.

Until the roof of a burning building had collapsed, trapping Artie and another member of his firefighting crew and turning her world upside down. The love of her life had been gone for almost two years, and that was that.

Which didn’t explain why was she thinking about Callum Drake’s tats, his green eyes and ginger hair, and how his skin would taste smeared with chocolate.

Another hour, Brooklyn decided, and she was calling it quits. School had been dismissed for the four-day weekend, though since no one she knew actually celebrated Presidents’ Day, it was less a holiday than it was a paid day off.

She’d stayed late the last three afternoons to put her classroom in order and get her lesson plans in tip-top shape. Organizing her work life made it a lot easier to enjoy her personal life guilt-free. She planned to do a lot of enjoying over the upcoming break, even if Valentine’s Day fell smack in the middle of it.

The idea of a single day set aside for shallow, meaningless rituals of love had never sat well with her, even before meeting Artie. It was one of the things they’d shared, even if, ironically, the date itself ended up having a special meaning for them, and they’d used the it in other ways.

For Artie, it had been work. Every year he’d volunteered to swap shifts with any buddy who’d felt pressured to devote the day to romance. Then he’d chuckled about the poor soul not understanding the rewards of said devotion practiced daily. “You don’t just brush your teeth after eating cotton candy. You see to the things that matter every day.” Artie, practical to the core.

For Brooklyn, it had been doing nothing but anything she wanted. A movie at Hope Springs’ small art house theater after school. Antique shopping in Gruene and a solo dinner at the Gristmill restaurant. If she had the day off, a book in the backyard hammock. An afternoon nap in the same. And if the cold weather had been too much to bear, she’d done her reading and napping on the sofa in front of a fire.

Doing nothing but anything she wanted was exactly how she planned to spend the next four days, starting with lunch tomorrow at Two Owls Café with Jean Dial. Her next-door neighbor, a schoolteacher herself, though retired, loved Two Owls as much as Brooklyn, and they made a date of it monthly.

They had great fun swapping recipes and cooking tips and school district gossip, and discussing the medieval romances they both read until the spines cracked and the pages fell out. But Brooklyn enjoyed even more so listening to Jean’s stories—and advice—from forty years in the teaching trenches.

After lunch it would be home again for a movie marathon with a six-pack of Kaylie Keller’s brownies. The owner of Two Owls had made a name for herself and her Austin bakery with an incredible selection of the treats; now having sold the Sweet Spot and moved to Hope Springs, she offered a variety on the café’s buffet for dessert.

As far as what to watch while nibbling through all that chocolate, Brooklyn was thinking the original Die Hard trilogy, followed by Unbreakable. Oh, how Artie had loved Unbreakable. She pulled in a deeply felt breath and shuddered with it. The long afternoons she and her husband had spent cuddled up on the couch watching those movies and, as newlyweds, season after season of Moonlighting on VHS . . .

Eyes closed, she allowed the sadness its moment, then shook it off. Artie had been gone two years. She would