Twice the Chance

“I think I’m asking you out.” He’d checked out her left hand for rings at the park and found none. When she didn’t respond, he checked again. Nope. No ring: wedding, engagement or other. But that didn’t always tell the full story. “Unless you’re dating someone?”

“No,” she said. He wasn’t sure which question she was responding to.

“I don’t mean to be rude, but I need to be getting back to work.” She glanced over her right shoulder toward the kitchen and winced.

“Have you seen a doctor about that shoulder?” Matt asked.

“It’s fine.” She repeated the phrase she’d used at the park, inching backward as she talked. “I really need to go.”

“Of course,” Matt said, taken aback by how eager she was to get away from him. Even so, he felt compelled to ask another question. “So when you said no, that was to the date?”

She nodded. “But thank you very much for asking.”

She disappeared through the swinging kitchen door. He grimaced, feeling as stunned as if the door had hit him in the face. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been so summarily dismissed by a woman, if ever.

The people at the nearby tables weren’t paying attention to him. His luck ended there. Danny stood beside the empty hostess stand, his mouth hanging open while he waited for Matt to reach him. “Did you just get shot down?”

Matt frowned at his brother. “Weren’t you supposed to wait in the car?”

Danny ignored the question. “Who was that, anyway?”

“Just some woman.” Matt walked past his brother out of the restaurant and into the sunny August afternoon, where it became glaringly obvious he hadn’t told the truth.

If Jazz Lenox were just another woman, her rejection wouldn’t sting so much and Matt’s goal wouldn’t be to turn her no into a yes.

AN HOUR LATER Jazz slid a plate of chocolate-chip pancakes through the pass-through window, turned back to the griddle and methodically flipped over the apple streusel pancakes arranged in a neat row.

“These are supposed to be cherry, not chocolate chip.” Helen Monroe’s pinched face appeared through the opening in the window. “And where’s the order for table seven? Some of us work for tips, you know.”

“Sorry,” Jazz muttered, grabbing the plate, annoyed at herself for making the mistake. “Table seven’s coming right up, then you’ll have your cherry pancakes.”

“I can only hope,” Helen said before disappearing.

“Don’t be nice to her.” Carl Rodriguez, the other short-order cook, had also done time in prison. He didn’t say much in the course of a shift, but Helen, who had complained to the owner several times about his hiring of ex-cons, was a hot button. “She makes many mistakes.”

Jazz set a couple of plates beside the griddle. “That doesn’t mean I have to.”

“You don’t usually.” In his thirties with dramatic dark hair and eyes, Carl was of medium height with a slender build. He quirked a black eyebrow at her. “You okay?”

Jazz had been fine until Matt Caminetti made his surprise appearance. More than two weeks had passed since she’d met Matt and the twins at Ashley Greens Park. She’d altered her jogging route and schedule, although she’d nearly convinced herself that they couldn’t be her birth children.

Then again, she considered it likely that children were placed for adoption in a different part of the state from where they were born. Jazz had been arrested in Florence and given birth in Columbia.

One thing, however, was certain. If the twins were her biological children, she never wanted them to know they had a mother who’d been locked up.

“I’m kind of tired today.” Misleading, but not a lie. Four nights a week Jazz worked as a telemarketer selling magazine subscriptions. Last night she’d finished at 10:00 p.m., which took a toll considering she hadn’t been sleeping well and her shift at Pancake Palace started at 5:30 a.m. “It makes it tough to concentrate.”

“That’s not why you can’t concentrate,” Sadie Phillips declared. Jazz hadn’t even noticed the waitress enter the kitchen. Sadie’s lips, painted a deep pink, were smiling. Her hands rested on her curvy hips. “It’s because of the hot guy. Who is he?”

Jazz felt heat creep up her neck. “Nobody.”

“Oh, come on, Jazz. Stop being so blasted private,” Sadie said in her thick Southern drawl. “If a man like that was interested in me, you couldn’t get me to shut up about it.”

“It’s not like that,” Jazz said.

“Oh, really? Then why didn’t he look twice when I shook my stuff at him?” Sadie demanded.

“You got good stuff,” Carl said without glancing up from the potatoes he was slicing.

“Why, thank you, Carl.” Sadie sounded pleased by the compliment. “The only reason for a man not to look is if he’s interested in other stuff.”

Carl chuckled softly. Jazz kept her head down, glad she had the excuse of transferring pancakes to plates. In prison, she’d quickly learned that knowledge was power. She wasn’t about to tell Sadie why she had no interest in dating Matt Caminetti. She wouldn’t tell anyone.

Jazz got through the rest of her shift without another mention of Matt. When two o’clock arrived, her mind turned to the lonely night ahead. A legion of short-order cooks had come and gone since she’d started at Pancake Palace three years ago, enabling Jazz to choose a shift that allowed her to take a second job. Too bad she hadn’t been able to find one that gave her more hours.

“Hey, Jazz.” Sadie was waiting for Jazz beside the front door. The waitress’s eyes sparkled. “That man who’s not interested in you? He’s in the parking lot.”

Jazz’s breath snagged before a logical explanation occurred to her. “He probably has some shopping to do.”

Pancake Palace was located in a shopping center a few miles west of historic downtown Charleston, sharing space with a grocery, a drugstore and other assorted businesses.

“We’ll soon find out, won’t we?” Sadie asked.

The waitress opened the door, stepping aside to let Jazz precede her. Matt Caminetti was leaning against a silver coupe. He immediately straightened and walked toward them.

“Told you so,” Sadie said teasingly, her voice a whisper. “I expect to get the whole story on Monday.” She headed away from Jazz, waving and calling, “Bye, Jazz.”

“Bye, Sadie,” Jazz said automatically. She couldn’t seem to get her feet unstuck.

She’d been so focused on the twins at the park that Matt had barely made an impression. That wasn’t the case today. Matt was the sort of man women looked at, not so much because he was drop-dead handsome but because he had an unmistakable energy. Like someone had thrown on a light switch inside him, causing everything about him to seem more vibrant. Even his slight Southern accent was attractive, smooth instead of twangy.

“I promise I’m not stalking you,” Matt said when he stepped onto the sidewalk. He was smiling, his light brown eyes trained on hers. She was five-nine in her bare feet but he was half a head taller. He held out a few sheets of paper along with something red and stretchy. “I brought you some elastic tubing and printouts of isotonic exercises for your shoulder.”

She crossed her arms over her chest. “Why?”

“Because this is what my orthopedist said to do when I strained my shoulder back in college.” He continued to extend the items to her. One corner of his mouth lifted in a half smile. “I promise I didn’t attach any strings.”

She uncrossed her arms and took the sheets and the tubing, being very careful not to accidentally touch him. “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.” He held up a hand in farewell and did a slow jog to his car. Halfway there, he turned back and called, “Notice how I didn’t ask you out again?”

“I noticed.”

“Out of curiosity, if I had asked, would the answer still be no?”

“Yes,” she said.

He jumped on her reply. “Yes? You changed your mind?”