Kitabı oku: «Hometown Cinderella», sayfa 2

Chapter Two

Cam had done his usual morning workout before he’d gone on duty. But he knew if he didn’t work off some of what Eden Perry had riled up in him he’d never be able to relax, let alone sleep that night. So about eight o’clock he went out the back door of his house and braved the cold January air to cross his yard to the garage.

Both his and Eden’s houses and garages had originally been built by identical twin brothers who had designed the ranch-style houses and the garages to be as much alike as the brothers themselves. Which meant that both garages were single-car sized with a second story containing very small studio apartments. Each apartment was comprised of an open space for a combined living room-bedroom, a tiny bathroom, and a bare-basics kitchen made up of a few cupboards, a sink and a section that could accommodate a refrigerator and a stove.

Cam had had plans to buy the house, garage and apartment at the end of his lease, figuring to eventually add the now-missing stove and refrigerator, and rent the place to a college kid for some extra income. Until then, it was a decent spot for his weights and other gym equipment.

But after spending even a small amount of time that afternoon with Eden Perry he thought he should reconsider buying the place at all and being right next door to her indefinitely.

He wasn’t sure he was going to be able to even live out the next two months of the lease so near to Her Royal Highness The Mighty Forensic Artist.

He slung the towel he’d brought with him over the stand that held his weights, and stripped off his sweats so he was only in gym shorts and a T-shirt. Then he started to do his second warm-up of the day, hoping that exercise would get Eden Perry out of his head. Because that’s where she’d been since the first minute he’d set eyes on her at the station today.

If there were any justice in the world, he thought as he stretched his calf muscles, she would have stayed looking the way she had when she was a teenager—hair that had been such a bright orange and so stick-out-everywhere curly that it had looked as if it belonged on a clown wig, glasses as thick as the bottoms of mayonnaise jars, braces imprisoning crooked teeth, bad skin and a body that had been as flat as a pancake with only knobby knees and pointy elbows to give her any shape at all.

Her homeliness had helped him make it through that miserable time he’d had to spend with her fourteen years ago. He’d figured that it served her right, that it was a warning of what was below the surface—foul on the outside, foul on the inside. It had seemed fitting.

But now?

Hell, now she was so damn gorgeous his mouth had nearly dropped open when she’d stopped at the end of that hallway coming back into the office.

And that didn’t seem fair….

Sufficiently warmed up, he got down on the floor for sit-ups. But that still didn’t allow him an escape from thinking about Eden Perry.

Her hair wasn’t orange anymore, now it was the color of Colorado’s red rocks when they were drenched with spring rain—a deep, warm, fresh lobster hue. And the kinky curl? That had calmed down to thick, shiny waves that fell to her shoulders.

It didn’t frame a splotchy, zitty face any longer, either. Her teenage blemishes had cleared and what she had left was skin like the petals of a pale pink rose. Dewy, soft-looking skin over high cheekbones, a delicate nose and a facial structure that had somehow blossomed into a kind of subtle elegance.

Damn her, anyway.

The braces had apparently done their job, too, because her teeth were straight. And gleaming white behind lips that were no longer chapped and uninviting. Lips that had the barest blush to them and were anything but uninviting….

He picked up the speed on the sit-ups.

But no matter how fast and furious he did them, the mental image of Eden kept assaulting him.

He’d been shocked to see her eyes. He guessed he’d never noticed them when they’d been hidden behind the lenses of her glasses. But when she’d raised them to him that afternoon? It had been hard to believe he could have ever missed them. They were blue—like a clear summer sky—but they were like looking at that clear blue sky through frosted crystal. They almost seemed transparent. And coupled with that hair? Geez, she was a knockout.

He flipped over and started doing push-ups even faster than he’d done sit-ups, counting them aloud in hopes that that would distract him from thinking about Eden. From picturing her.

But did it?

No, it didn’t. At number thirty-one it occurred to him that that was Eden’s age. And that her thirty-one-year-old body was better than it had been, too. Not centerfold better, but definitely better enough that he hadn’t been aware of her elbows or knees. Instead he’d noticed that she was a tight, compact little package, with just enough up-front. Just enough to draw his interest. More than once.

Yeah, if Eden Perry wasn’t the transformation of the century, he didn’t know what was.

On the outside.

But what about the inside? That probably hadn’t changed, he thought with some satisfaction.

The satisfaction was short-lived, however, because when he tried to think of how her bad disposition had displayed itself he couldn’t come up with anything.

He’d been the one with the bad disposition today. She hadn’t acted the way she had when they were teenagers, and he reluctantly—very reluctantly—admitted that.

Of course she also hadn’t been warm and friendly.

But then neither had he.

He’d been rude and obnoxious, if the truth be told. And she hadn’t even shot back at him.

How come? he wondered suddenly.

That sure as hell wasn’t the old Eden Perry. The old Eden Perry would have shot first. And barring that, she would certainly have returned fire. Hell, the Eden Perry he’d known would have mounted a savage counterattack.

But the Eden Perry he’d known had also been sixteen years old, he thought—again for no reason he understood. Sixteen years old and as ugly as a mud fence. And this Eden Perry wasn’t either of those things anymore.

So, what if she also wasn’t the rude, mouthy, insulting, aggravating nightmare she’d been before, either?

That would be hard to believe!

But somehow the possibility slowed his push-ups and eventually brought them to a stop.

Was it possible Eden Perry was different outside and inside? he asked himself as he moved on to the weight bench for a few biceps curls.

Eden Perry different…

Huh.

Did he buy that? Did he buy the all-business version she’d been today? Kind of wooden but not nasty or mean-spirited or bitchy?

He didn’t know. He supposed that he could concede that she might—just might—have learned to curb her tongue in the course of growing up.

But so what? he asked himself. Did that mean that she thought of him any differently than she had when they were kids?

Probably not.

And given that, did he want anything more to do with her than he had when he’d been expecting that sharp tongue to fly out and cut him like a razor blade?

No, he didn’t.

Even if she was something pretty eye-popping to look at.

He’d still keep his distance, thanks just the same, he thought.

Because eye-popping or not, better behaved or not, there was one thing Eden Perry had made clear enough to him when she was sixteen—she thought he was an idiot.

And the last thing he needed—or wanted—was to be within a hundred yards of any woman who thought of him as someone dumber than a doorknob.

No matter how she looked.

But damn, Eden Perry did look good….

Eden had changed her clothes and gone right to work on her bedroom when she returned from the police station.

By about 8:30 that night she had located her mattress pad, sheets, blankets, pillows and quilt, and made her bed so she would have a place to sleep. She’d hung shades and curtains on both bedroom windows and put most of her clothes in the closet. She’d filled the underwear drawer of her dresser and unpacked all the toiletries she would need to start the next day.

And while it may have been only 8:30, she’d been up since before dawn, driven for two hours to reach Northbridge, overseen the three movers unloading her things, and then she’d had that unpleasant encounter with Cam Pratt before laboring all evening, too. She was tired and hungry and ready to drop.

So she went into the kitchen in search of food, grateful that her sister Eve had stocked it with a few things to tide her over until she could do some shopping.

Weaving through boxes stacked everywhere, including on her kitchen table, she opened the refrigerator. Eggs, butter and cream for her coffee were its sole occupants.

She hadn’t located her pots and pans yet but she knew where to find a bowl so she could scramble an egg in the microwave. But she decided to check the pantry first.

Bread, cheese puffs—her sister knew her well—and Chinese noodle soup already in its own microwavable cup.

She opted for the soup because it was the simplest of all to prepare.

With cup in hand, she went to the sink to fill it with water. When she reached the sink her gaze automatically drifted out the window above it and went instantly to the garages nestled so close together in back.

Only it wasn’t her own garage that caught her attention. It was Cam Pratt’s. Specifically, the light that was shining through the undraped window in the space over the garage.

She knew that that space in her own outbuilding was a makeshift apartment. She intended to use it as an art studio. But she didn’t know if it was also an apartment in the other garage and if that was rented out, too, to someone other than Cam Pratt.

So she stood rooted to the spot, staring at the large rectangular window that matched hers, hoping to catch a glimpse of whoever was up there.

She didn’t have long to wait.

Within moments she saw Cam Pratt cross in front of the window and go to some kind of bar that seemed to be jammed into the doorway that led to what would have been the bathroom in her unit.

Because she was looking from a ground floor level through a second floor window, she could only see the top portions of the above-the-garage room and of the man who was in it. But that was enough to give her a glimpse of him from behind, reaching long, well-muscled arms upward and grasping the bar—palms towards him—in his huge hands.

As she watched, he began to use the bar to do pull-ups and with each one his full back and waist came into view.

Now that she knew she didn’t have yet another neighbor, what went on in that room shouldn’t have been of any further interest to Eden. But she couldn’t seem to tear herself away. Or so much as look at anything else. Instead, she stayed right where she was, eyes trained on that second floor window in the distance.

Cam was wearing a plain white T-shirt that clung damply to his broad shoulders and the V of his back where it narrowed to his waist. And although the shirt concealed the details of what it encased, the powerful swell of his arms from the short sleeves gave her a clue as to what was going on within the shirt, too. And it was noteworthy.

She was aware that cops were encouraged to keep in shape and apparently Cam Pratt took that seriously. Because he was in very, very good shape as he raised and lowered himself from that bar at the same rate her heart was beating. As if they were somehow in sync.

Up and down. Up and down. Her eyes lingered on that back. On those biceps flexing, bulging within glistening skin that seemed barely able to contain them. Up and down and up again…

The man had stamina, she’d give him that.

Stamina and strength and a fabulous physique that she had some kind of irrational urge to get closer to. To touch. To test for herself if those muscles were as solid and unyielding as they looked.

It doesn’t matter, she told herself firmly.

Because regardless of how he looked, he had two strikes against him and she was determined not to forget either of them. Not only had he been a bear to her that afternoon in response to a history that she would rather forget—strike one—but he was a cop. Strike two. And she didn’t want anything to do with another cop. Or with anything that put her anywhere near cops or crime or criminals.

No, doing this age progression of her long-lost grandmother was going to be her last foray into that world and then Eden was finished with it.

Absolutely finished.

But still, there Cam was, and if chin-ups were a televised sport she thought he would have been the star of the show.

Soup. Make the soup….

But did she?

No, she didn’t. Instead she went on being engrossed in the sight of Cam Pratt exercising, feeling warmer and warmer herself….

He’s a cop, you know what that means. And he’s a jerk, too….

But a jerk with a body of steel….

She’d just watch three more….

Three. Four.

Five.

Six.

Eight.

Ten…

She was still watching when he stopped. And she went on looking even when his big hands dropped from the bar. Even when he moved out of sight. And for a few minutes after that her eyes continued to be glued to that window. Waiting. Holding her breath.

Until she realized what she was doing.

She was tired, she told herself then. She hadn’t been mesmerized by watching Cam Pratt do chin-ups, she’d just hit some kind of wall of fatigue that had put her in a zombielike trance for a few minutes.

That’s all it was.

A night’s rest and she’d be impervious to that same display. She was sure of it.

She finally turned on the hot water and filled her soup cup.

Okay, so yes, when she had, she did glance out the window again. Once. Long enough to see that Cam had left the garage apartment and was on his way back to his house, dressed in faded red sweatpants and a white hooded sweatshirt now.

But the instant she saw him look in her direction she jolted backward, hoping he hadn’t caught her gawking at him through her kitchen window.

“And if he did see you, that’s what you get,” she chastised herself as she headed for the microwave.

The microwave wasn’t where she wanted it—it was just on the counter where the movers had left it. But she wasn’t going to reposition it tonight, so she merely jabbed the button to open the door.

The door didn’t respond and she stared at it, wondering if the oven had been broken in transit.

It actually took her a moment to drag her thoughts far enough away from the mental image of Cam Pratt that was still haunting her to figure out that the microwave wasn’t plugged in.

“Oh, brother, you better snap out of this,” she advised herself as she plugged in the appliance.

Then she put her soup cup inside and started the oven.

And that was when everything went dark.

With a weary sigh she returned to the window over the sink to see if more than her lights had gone out. They hadn’t, the lights in the alley behind the garage were still on so the blackout wasn’t a power outage. She’d only overloaded her own circuits.

She should have known better. Just about every light in the house had been on, her stereo had been playing, the iron was plugged in, so was her electric drill, and trying to use the microwave on top of it all must have tripped the breaker. Or blown a fuse—whichever the old house was equipped with.

Which she didn’t know. Any more than she knew where the breaker box or fuse box was located.

The only illumination in the house was coming from the alley lights and it was next to nothing. She owned a flashlight but she didn’t have a clue where it was and without it there was no way she would ever see the box in the basement or the attic or wherever it was.

She needed help. At the very least she needed someone to tell her where the main panel was. But who could she call to ask?

Her sister Eve was her first thought but she knew Eve was in Billings until the next day chauffeuring their grandfather.

Her cousins weren’t likely to know anything about a house none of them had ever lived in, and the previous owners had left the state immediately after the closing by proxy.

Maybe the Realtor would know.

Stumbling over packing containers and things she’d pulled out and left on the floor, she finally found her cell phone. But when she used it to dial the number she had programmed for the Realtor she only got a voice mail message that Betty would not be available Monday or Tuesday.

Which seemed to leave Eden with only one alternative.

Her house and the house next door were exactly alike.

Surely the breaker box or the fuse box was located in the same place.

And not only would Cam Pratt know where that was, he would probably have a flashlight she could borrow to find it.

Cam Pratt.

Again.

“This is just not my day,” Eden grumbled.

Maybe she should forget eating and go to bed, she thought, desperate for any other alternative. She could search the place in the morning, in the daylight.

But it was the dead of winter. In Montana. And already she could feel the temperature in the house cooling without any heat coming from the furnace. An entire night without heat could freeze the pipes. The pipes could burst. The place could flood.

Not a good thing.

So it was going to have to be the lesser of two evils and that was Cam Pratt.

Eden sighed and grumbled some more.

But in the end she resigned herself to having to ask for help.

From the monster she’d created.

Chapter Three

Before she could force herself to go next door and ask for Cam Pratt’s help with her electrical outage, Eden decided that if she was going to have to be seen, she had to make sure she wasn’t too unsightly.

After returning home from the police station she’d put on a pair of flannel pajama pants and a long-sleeved thermal-knit T-shirt so she’d be comfortable to work around the house. Since the clothes weren’t revealing, she decided not to change back into what she’d been wearing that afternoon.

But when it came to her face and hair? If she’d been about to meet up with anyone other than Cam Pratt she probably would have gone as she was—face scrubbed clean, hair stuck in an untidy ponytail.

Only she wasn’t meeting up with anyone else and she just couldn’t go without reapplying blush and mascara using her purse compact and the glow of the moon coming through her bedroom window.

Hating herself for her vanity, she also took her hair down from the ponytail, brushed it, and then pulled it to her crown once again, this time holding it with a clip rather than a plain rubber band.

Nothing fancy, she judged upon final inspection in the compact mirror, but passable.

Still dreading seeing Cam again today, she nevertheless resigned herself to it, slipped on a peacoat and felt her way to the front door to go out into the cold night, regretting that she’d put this off now that it occurred to her that it was after ten o’clock and he might have gone to bed.

If he had she was just going to freeze to death, she decided. Better that than waking him up.

He hadn’t gone to bed, though. Because once Eden had crossed their joined-at-the-property-line driveways and was walking in front of his house, she could see that not only were his lights still on, he was in his living room. In fact, he was in clear view through the undraped picture window as she climbed the four steps to his front porch.

He’d apparently showered in the time between her ogling him and now. He was dressed in a different pair of sweatpants—gray ones—and another white T-shirt that had long sleeves instead of short. Although the T-shirt didn’t cling to him with the dampness of perspiration, it did fit him tightly enough to prove the chin-ups had been worth it because the knit followed his shoulders, biceps and the expanse of his chest to great effect.

Really great effect…

Inside he was drying his hair with a towel in one hand while using the other to hold the TV listings he was scanning. He didn’t notice Eden’s approach and, once again, she couldn’t refrain from covertly watching him.

It would have been helpful if the good-looking teenage boy hadn’t grown up to be one of the hottest men she’d ever seen. And while it shouldn’t have had any effect on her, it did.

“I’m just tired,” she whispered to herself again.

He’d finished drying his hair and he draped the towel over one shoulder. But running his hands through that wavy hair, finger-combing it back on top, didn’t bolster her resistance because even that haphazard grooming gave him a sexiness that was so potent it came through the glass of the picture window and nearly knocked Eden’s socks off.

Before she could lapse into another transfixed state, she forced herself to march the rest of the distance to his door and ring the bell.

She also made sure to stare straight ahead so she didn’t give any indication that she even knew he was right there in his living room, and as a result she only saw him from the corner of her eye when he peered out the window to see who she was.

Her enthusiasm for being there was not boosted by the epithet she heard him say when he saw her. But she stood her ground, bracing for more of his unpleasantness when he opened the door.

“I’m sorry to bother you,” she said before he made it any more clear how he felt about her being there. “But I knocked out my power, I don’t know where the breaker box is and I can’t find my flashlight. I thought, since the houses are alike, you might—”

“Know where the box is and have a flashlight,” he finished for her. Sardonically and impatiently, of course.

This was getting old.

“Yes,” she said.

She half expected him to refuse. But after a moment of glaring at her yet again he pushed open his screen door and stepped aside, inviting her in.

“Thanks,” she muttered.

“I’ll put on some shoes and get a coat. I’ll have to show you where the box is,” he said begrudgingly, leaving her standing in the entry as he went the six feet to the hallway that led to the bedrooms in her house, too, and disappeared around the corner.

Eden didn’t make herself at home but she did peer from where she was into his living room.

Decorating was not his long suit.

The room was furnished for comfort not for style. There was a large brown leather sofa and matching armchair beside each other, both of them facing the television rather than angled to allow for conversation. In front of the sofa was a coffee table cluttered with what appeared to be the remnants of Cam’s dinner and a few meals before it. But other than a serviceable end table between the couch and chair, one lamp, and a television and stereo system all together on an elaborate entertainment center, there wasn’t a single knickknack or picture on the wall. There also wasn’t one book on the built-in bookshelves and Eden marveled at that fact, thinking that her moving expenses would have been considerably less had she not had boxes and boxes and boxes of books.

“I’d think it would occur to a brain trust like you to ask where something like the breaker box is in a house you’d just bought.”

He’s ba-ack….

Eden turned her head from the direction of the living room, glancing at him again as he rejoined her in the entry wearing running shoes and a gray hooded sweatshirt, and carrying a flashlight the size of a drainpipe.

“You just aren’t going to let up, are you?” she said, more to herself than to him.

“Let up on what?” he asked, pretending not to know what she was referring to.

And that was when Eden decided that they were never going to be able to merely go on from here. That awkward or not, she needed to address the events that had put this thorn in his side and apologize to him if she ever hoped for him to treat her civilly.

“I know I was awful to you when our mothers arranged for me to tutor you in physics—”

“Awful? You spent every session calling me stupid, calling me every other lousy name you could come up with to let me know you thought I was too ignorant to live. I’d say brutal is more what you were to me,” he said as if she’d unleashed something in him.

Eden hid her grimace by dropping her head and rubbing her forehead. “Okay, brutal,” she conceded, embarrassed and wishing he didn’t recall quite so much.

“You said you were amazed an ignoramus like me could even read,” he continued. “That I had no business in a kindergarten class, let alone a physics class. You asked me if you were going to get honorable mention at the bottom of my diploma because I wasn’t able to get it on my own. You—”

“I remember it all,” Eden said to keep him from going on, shoring up her courage to look at him again. “It’s the one thing that I’m mortified I did. I’d never treated anyone that way before and I never have since.”

“Am I supposed to feel special to have been singled out?” he asked.

“No. But it was special circumstances. And it wasn’t the real me and I’m sorry.”

“Who was it, if it wasn’t the real you?”

“It was a person who was out of her league being a sixteen-year-old senior. A person who was the target of what passed for humor with you older, cool people every day—four-eyes, pizza-face, metal-mouth, pumpkinhead, Halloween-hair, geek-bot, nerd-girl—”

“I don’t recall ever calling you any of that. Or even being aware of you until the tutoring.”

“But your friends, your crowd, did—Steve Foster, Greg Simmons, Frankie Franklin—they were the worst. They never gave it a rest. Even though I tried to keep to the shadows, I was still fair game that whole year. And then I came home from school one day—a month before I thought it was going to end—and my mother told me I had to tutor you, of all people.”

“Because I needed a little help. Kind of like you do right now. But I’ll bet you’re not thinking of yourself as dumber than dirt, are you? And I didn’t need the help because I was too dense to learn the stuff any other way,” he said defensively, as if he’d been waiting all these years to get that in. “I’ll grant you that I wasn’t an A student, but I was average. In everything but physics. Plus I hadn’t given it the time I should have when it came to studying. I thought I could take the easy way out. But did you just look at it like that? Not the almighty Eden Perry.”

“Almighty? That’s the last thing I thought I was. I didn’t have a drop of self-confidence or self-esteem and I was going to have to be alone, in a room, one-on-one with one of the popular people. I would have rather poked my own eyes out. I was so sure you were going to ridicule me, that I decided to—” She tried to think of how to temper what she was going to say. But the best she could come up with was, “I decided to cut you off at the knees before you had the chance to do it to me,” she finished quietly.

“A preemptive strike?” he said as if he wasn’t buying it.

“Yes, a preemptive strike,” Eden confirmed anyway. “So I went in and acted as if I thought you were… Well, you know how I acted.”

“I was already embarrassed that my mother was making me be tutored. By a girl. A girl who was two years younger than I was. But I didn’t go in putting you down. And I’d never called you names before, either, so I didn’t have that coming.”

“I know,” she said, a little amazed by just how furious he was.

“And once you saw that I wasn’t going to do it to you, why didn’t you quit doing it to me?”

Eden made another pained, embarrassed face but this time she didn’t hide it. “It was…I don’t know…I guess there was some payback in it for everything I went through the rest of the time even though it wasn’t you doing it. Plus once I’d started, I was afraid if I stopped I’d really be in for it—from you along with the rest of your clique. And that’s sort of how I am, I guess—once I dig in my heels it’s hard for me to change course.”

“So you kept it up until I felt as lousy as you did?”

Maybe he wasn’t only furious with her.

She’d assumed from his reaction to her since their paths had crossed again that he just didn’t like her. And with good cause. She’d never thought that what she’d done all those years ago might have had more impact than that. Somehow all this time she’d believed that that wasn’t possible. Her goads and taunts had been tossed at someone who she’d imagined couldn’t be hurt. But now she wasn’t so sure.

“I didn’t think anything I said would actually affect someone like you. I was a nothing and you were king of the high school world. I’ve hated thinking back on how I spoke to you, but was what I did even worse? Did I…scar you in some way?”

He didn’t like that question. He stood a little straighter, his chiseled chin raised a fraction of an inch before he said, “You left a mark but I wouldn’t call it a scar.”

Eden was concerned that he was lying. That he was covering up just how much she really had injured him, and that thought made what she’d done seem even worse.

“I’m so sorry,” she repeated. “I was never proud of what I did—in fact I was so ashamed of it that I’ve never told a single soul, not even my sisters. But I honestly didn’t think it would have any repercussions. I wondered if you’d even remember me today when Luke Walker said you were who I’d be working with.” She paused a moment and then in the name of honesty, added, “Or at least I was hoping you wouldn’t remember me.”

Cam didn’t say anything. He just let his deep blue eyes bore into her and she couldn’t tell what he might be thinking. But she could see now that the same way she still carried the wounds of other people’s words, he carried the wounds of hers and that prompted her to repeat a heartfelt, “I am truly sorry. If I could take it back, I would. And honestly, I knew you weren’t stupid. It was an awful…” She stumbled over the word he’d already found lacking and amended it to, “—a terrible, terrible thing to do and no one should have known that better than me because I was living it every day myself.”