Was there anything about Monica that didn’t fill him with desire? He ticked everything off on imaginary fingers. She was cool and she made him hot. She was hot and she made him hot. She was angry, happy, sad, vulnerable, clever, smarter than he’d ever imagined and it all made him hot.
He had it bad.
The more he got to know her, the more infatuated he became.
And the tears she’d let fall in front of him, the vulnerability he hadn’t expected to find, made him want to hold her for much more than just sex. He wanted to protect her.
Gabe said she didn’t cry in public, but she’d already done it with him three times. What was that about?
Holding her while she’d cried had been hard. He couldn’t walk away, either, not when she needed support. Being friends with her was tough, especially when he wanted more, and she needed only a shoulder to cry on.
He couldn’t take much more of his unrequited love without imploding.
He wandered to the far wall, where a row of bookshelves told yet another new, bold story about Monica. The books were classics, everything from Little Women to The Brothers Karamazov.
Monica? A reader?
What really snagged his attention were the rows and rows of hard-sided binders. He took one out to find it filled with magazines in protective sleeves. He checked another binder. Same thing. Binder after binder held vintage magazines dating as far back as the forties. Vogue, both American and European issues. Vanity Fair. Even, surprise surprise, The New Yorker.
He’d known that she liked fashion and was always dressed beautifully, but this collection of magazines represented something more. Nobody put together this kind of collection without having a passion for the subject.
“Noah?”
He spun around, guilty. He shouldn’t have been snooping.
He pointed to the magazines. “This is amazing.”
She approached while her light floral scent played around him like happy fingers coaxing melodies from a keyboard. “Do you like old magazines? I love them. Let me show you my favorite Vogue. And considering that I love all of them, that’s saying a lot.”
She took the binder from him and flipped through to one issue. “This is from the mid-sixties.” She thumbed through it, showing him photos of Twiggy-esque models with enormous eyes and baby eyelashes painted beneath, and wearing pastel-colored shifts with white go-go boots.
“Look at how creative the photography was.”
He didn’t go in much for fashion, but even he could appreciate the creativity in the photo spreads.
He had always thought her interest in clothes frivolous, but in her excitement he recognized a deep-seated passion.
He understood passion.
“I’ve picked up every American and French Vogue for the past twenty years. I collect as many vintage copies from the forties, fifties and sixties as I can find. The sixties were amazing.”
This animated Monica was a stranger to him. He liked her. “Mod London fashion was dynamite. Mary Quant’s miniskirts? Fantabulous. White go-go boots! And those divine models Jean Shrimpton and Veruschka. I wish I’d lived—” She caught herself and tucked the binder back onto the shelf in its proper slot. “Sorry. I shouldn’t be boring you with this.”
“I’m not bored.” He sniffed. “Cinnamon?”
She lifted the ponytail she’d pulled her hair into. He leaned forward and pressed the tip of his nose against skin still faintly humid from her shower.
He closed his eyes. “Yeah. Cinnamon.”
“Yes.” Too soon, she stepped away from him.
He headed back to the living room, because standing in her bedroom made him ache physically, but also with a bittersweet longing that would never be requited.
When she stepped into the room ready to go, he asked, “Why do the living room and the bedroom seem so different? Do you have a split personality or something?”
“No.” As he watched, she seemed to sag, sadness seeping into her. “The living room is all Billy.”
“Billy? No way.”
“I know, unexpected, right? He was such a basic, down-to-earth guy, but he had weird ideas about being married to me. Because of the Accord name and my dad’s money, he thought we should have a showcase home. We couldn’t afford a house because I wouldn’t ask my dad for the down payment, so he thought that at the very least our apartment should be magazine-worthy. He chose all this furniture.”
A casual disdainful flip of her hand clued him in to what she really thought of it. “I mean, it’s gorgeous and he showed amazing taste for a guy who grew up in a normal, relatively low-income home, but there’s no warmth. No personality.”
“I have to agree with you.”
“And this...” She walked to the mantelpiece and straightened an already perfectly aligned painting. “I hate this painting. Billy was adamant that we needed it. It cost me a fortune. I guess I’m not very smart because I don’t get modern art. I like landscapes, like the one in my bedroom.”
He hadn’t noticed a painting in her bedroom. He strode back down the hallway. On the wall opposite the bed hung a landscape, orange, red and golden fields at sunset. The warmth and beauty of the painting stunned him.
When he joined her in the living room, he said, “It’s gorgeous.”
“I put my foot down when it came to decorating the bedroom. I wasn’t having a repeat of this.” She gestured around the living room with her chin. “I wanted to express myself there.”
She sure had done that—her bedroom was an unexpected window into her soul, and different from anything he would have expected from Monica.
“Why did you let Billy have his way so much in here? Shouldn’t it have been a collaborative undertaking? I mean, come on, Monica, you have a mind of your own.”
“I’m not sure how to explain it, except that I was indulging Billy because he’d grown up with so little.”
“You felt guilty ’cause you’d had so much more compared to him?”
She nodded.
She looked tired, drained, leaving him feeling protective. He’d been feeling that way since he’d seen that woman, Monica’s sister, on the street yesterday.
“Let’s go. You need farm therapy.”
“Weeding,” she said. “Just what the doctor ordered.” At least she was trying to smile.
They headed out to the farm, Noah driving because she looked too exhausted to handle such a task.
When they arrived at the farm, he turned off the radio she’d flicked on at the beginning of the drive. Monica Accord, he had learned, did not like silence.
Before she got out of the truck, he stopped her with a hand on her arm. “Do you know what you need to do?”
“No. What?”
It had started to drizzle. The windshield wipers squeaked across the glass because there wasn’t enough rain to really lubricate them. He switched off both them and the engine. “You have to redesign your living room to reflect who you are, not who Billy needed you to be.”
She watched the rain, sad again. “Oh, Noah. That living room wasn’t about who Billy needed me to be. It was about who he needed to be.”
After dropping that insightful bombshell, she got out of the truck and headed to the back of the farmhouse for the rubber boots she kept by the back door.
The more he got to know her, the more he liked her. She was not only sensitive and generous, but also perceptive. So much to learn about this woman.
So much to learn about himself, too.
His mother liked clothes and manicures and spa days. Did he come down on her as harshly as he did Monica? No.
His sister didn’t use only organic ingredients in her bakery. He encouraged her to use as much as she could afford, but a lot of it wasn’t. Did Noah come down hard on her? No.
An in
terest in nature and the outdoors didn’t make him superior to others, not by a long shot. He knew that and yet he’d used it against Monica more than once.
God, he liked her.
So why did he have to hang on so hard to his negative opinions of her?
To protect yourself, dude. You still want her as badly today as you did twenty years ago, and the two of you live in wildly different worlds. Worse, after wanting her for so many years, how could you handle rejection if you made a move and she said no?
CHAPTER NINE
THROUGHOUT THE DAY, while he handed her a hoe and she raked fledgling weeds from between the radishes, and while they turned the compost heap—that is, Monica turned the bulk of it while he manipulated a shovel with one hand, turning only small clods at a time—and while they ate lunch, he watched her, watched the rain turn her ponytail to a thin stream down her back.
All day, precipitation fell in a steady, warm drizzle. Not once did Monica complain.
He drove her home at dinnertime.
“Noah?” she said quietly, breaking the silence that only his thumb drumming on the steering wheel had pierced to that point.
“Yeah?”
“Today was a really good idea. A chance to spend time away from my problems. I had a lot of time to think things through.”
“Good. I’m glad.”
“I know we haven’t always treated each other well, but what you did today was special. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” Her sentiment warmed him. His impulse to rise above the tension between them, and their differences, had been right. “What are you going to do tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow morning I’ll go to work. I’ll take things a day at a time. But one thing I know for sure is that I don’t hate my parents or my sister. I’m still angry, but I’m going to keep an open mind.”
“It will be hard to get through this.” He drummed his thumb harder. “I know we haven’t been friends, but promise me that if you need anything, you’ll call me anytime, day or night. Okay?”
“Okay.” She smiled and touched his arm. “I will.”
He liked how much she conveyed with the simplest of gestures.
In front of her apartment building, she got out of the truck, closed the door and leaned on the open window well. “You’re right about my living room. It’s time to make it my own, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll think about it. I don’t have the money right now, but I’ll definitely do something if circumstances change.”
She didn’t have the money? Everyone in town knew her dad would give her anything she wanted. Why not just ask him for funds?
“You were a good friend today, Noah. Thank you.”
Her statement warmed him, pure and simple, just flat-out warmed his soul that he’d been good to Monica and she’d appreciated it.
* * *
“RAG-BAG KID! RAG-BAG KID!”
Marcie ran as fast as her little legs could carry her, the flapping sole of one of her shoes slapping the ground, but she couldn’t outrun the name-calling.
She ran to a teacher supervising the schoolyard, but the woman was busy with a girl who had a badly cut knee.
The teacher told Marcie’s bullies to stop, but the second she picked up the girl and carried her into the school, they started in again on Marcie.
“Snitch.”
“You’re not supposed to tell on people.”
“Where do you get your clothes? Salvation Army?” That was followed by mean laughter.
Marcie felt her cheeks get really hot, because yeah, her mom did buy her clothes at the Sally Ann, or wherever they were cheapest. Before she started school, Marcie didn’t think there was anything wrong with that. But not now. Now she knew secondhand meant bad. And sad.
She went to the door of the school, but the teacher only peeked out, telling her to ignore those girls.
But how? They kept yelling at her. They kept making fun of her.
“Rag bag. Rag bag.”
She bit her lip. She didn’t cry anymore. The mean girls liked it too much when she cried, so she’d stopped, but it was hard. She had to hold her breath to hold back the tears...
Marcie awoke with a gasp and then cursed into the darkness. The small clock on the bedside table said ten to twelve. She’d been asleep only an hour.
Her heart pounded.
She’d been dreaming again, and holding her breath in her sleep. She hated those old dreams, hated how far they had followed her into adulthood.
They still had the power to make her feel inferior.
While there had been some good schools in her travels with Donna, there had always been awful moments.
Even if kids weren’t calling her names or bullying her, they stared. The first day in a new school could be nightmarish.
Only as an adult had she realized this was normal behavior for kids. A newcomer was a curiosity, whether or not she wore hand-me-downs.
By the time she had come to understand the dynamics, the damage had already been done. Her adult mind had it all straightened out, but her little girl’s mind still lingered in her dreams.
“It’s over,” she scolded herself. “You have a new life ahead of you.”
She snuggled into bedsheets softer than any she’d ever owned. They smelled clean instead of stale. When money was tight, laundry got done sporadically. The mattress hugged her body like a glove.
“Calm down and enjoy. You’ll never be that poor again.” Her voice echoed off lavender walls and was absorbed by a soft purple duvet. Whoever had decorated this room had done a great job. It was pretty.
She wondered whether that person might have been Monica, her sister. She didn’t yet know what to make of her, whether she liked having a sister or not.
This whole situation was too strange for words, like something out of a book instead of real life.
Did she want a relationship with Monica, a woman who appeared to be too cool and collected...and who had grown up with everything Marcie’s life had been missing? What on earth did they have in common?
For all intents and purposes, Donna was gone. Yes, by Marcie’s choice, but she couldn’t find forgiveness in her heart, not when there had been so much hardship while all of this had been waiting in Accord. And, most importantly, not while she could have had a family.
Marcie had no one else in her life now but these people. She had to make the most of it.
She lay in the guest room in her father’s house. Quite the grand house. Her dad might not be super wealthy, but he sure never had to worry about where his next meal was coming from.
Or his next drink. She sighed. He seemed to be a bit of a lush.
They’d spent the day together yesterday. She wanted answers and what she’d learned had surprised her.
He hadn’t abandoned her, as she had assumed. Donna had hidden her from him. She could have grown up in this house, with all of this beauty, in a community where she could have lived her entire life without all of the moving around she’d done with Donna.
She had the whole picture now. Donna had kept them on the go so her dad wouldn’t find her. The woman had, basically, stolen her from her father, and that pissed off Marcie.
She rolled over and curled into a ball. Donna had been the only mother Marcie had ever known. She’d treated Marcie well. She had loved her.
She knew all of that, but now she was stuck in this awful situation, in a town where people looked at her with suspicion, with a man who was crying in his Scotch because he hadn’t known her throughout her childhood, and with a woman who clearly didn’t want to have a sister.
Marcie’s self-protective instincts went into overdrive. She didn’t want to be looked down on by some rich snob. All through childhood, she’d had a bellyful o
f people who’d thought they were better than her.
Marcie hadn’t created this situation, but she would make it work. She would fight for acceptance, for what should have been hers all along. Monica would just have to get used to having a twin.
So would Marcie. Sobering thought.
If only she could have come here to find just a father waiting for her. Life would be easier.
Starting tomorrow, she would wage a campaign to be accepted, and to get her fair share of what she was owed, of all of the easy wealth she’d missed out on during her rough-and-tumble childhood.
If Monica couldn’t accept her, too bad, because Marcie would fight her tooth and nail for her future inheritance.
Tomorrow morning, she would confront the sister who hadn’t stayed around long enough yesterday to get to know her, and who had ignored her all day today.
She was taking her place in this town that should have been her home all along, with the father and sister who should have been her family.
Besides, Marcie had nowhere else to go.
* * *
AFTER BREAKFAST WITH her dad, Marcie headed to Main Street, walking over because it wasn’t that far.
Her many bracelets jangled on her wrists. Making them was her passion, but Donna had called it her hobby. Marcie wanted it to be more than that. By hook or crook, one day she would make her living creating beautiful jewelry.
Main Street sported all kinds of nice, quaint details...those old-fashioned lampposts she’d noticed the other day. Black wrought-iron benches sat on the sidewalks every thirty or so yards.
Her dad—boy it was hard to get used to that word—had told her all about Accord and the upgrades the shops had made a few years ago to bring in tourists. Apparently, it had worked. Storefronts were bright and pretty, and some were really interesting.
She wanted to check out the gallery where Monica worked. Art held an attraction for her that she couldn’t resist.
Marcie had lived in everything from large cities to small towns. She’d learned to be adaptable.
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