She thudded back to her room, shutting the door behind her. And instantly remembered the other thing that had confused her that morning.
Forgetting all she wore was the baggy T-shirt and a pair of bikini panties, Sarah yanked back the lace curtains and hung out the window.
And came within two feet of Dean’s face.
She nearly whacked the top of her head on the window sash.
“Morning, honey,” he said, clearly nonplussed at her appearance, as if seeing her eye-to-eye by her bedroom window was perfectly normal. Of course, he was on a ladder, a paintbrush in his hand, the soft rasping of which had replaced the scraping as he methodically stroked the clapboards with it.
She couldn’t speak at first. All Dean wore was an old pair of low-slung, faded cutoffs and a sheen of sweat. The mid-morning sun mingling with the perspiration made his tanned skin look like—oh, Lord—caramel ice cream topping.
He tilted his head in her direction, laughed that way he did that prickled her skin, then went back to his painting. “Trying to catch some flies there, Sarah Louise?”
She clamped shut her mouth. Then she opened it again, trying for indignant. “What are you doing?”
He winked, waving the paintbrush in answer.
“Okay, I’ll restate the question. Why are you doing this?”
“Because…it needs doing?”
If she’d been closer, she would’ve belted him. “Okay, smartass—why are you doing this?”
“Because your mother asked me if I’d mind and I said no. And because,” he added, dipping his brush in the paint bucket precariously suspended from the top of the ladder, “I had high hopes of catching a glimpse of you naked.”
The question was, was she close enough to push over the ladder without landing on her head in the azaleas? She considered, decided not.
“Well.” She puffed up, realized with a dull thud of disappointment she couldn’t think of a scathing rejoinder. “Sorry to disappoint you.”
Pausing in his work, Dean regarded her with such heat in those grassy eyes her temperature rose at least five degrees. “Not at all,” he said quietly, staring right at her chest. “You know you can see straight through that T-shirt?”
She gasped, then did bump her head in her split to pull back inside. She slammed shut the window, jerked the miniblind cord so the blinds clattered to the sill, then yanked the curtains closed as well.
The room became immediately stifling. No matter, she decided as she gathered up fresh clothes to put on after her shower. She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror as she passed, checked herself out, decided no, he really hadn’t been able to see anything after all. Not much, anyway. Her hand had just lit on the doorknob when she heard tapping on the glass.
She tramped back to the window and raised the blinds, holding the cord taut in her hand. “What?” she said through the glass.
“How ’bout a date?” Dean mouthed.
She lowered the blinds with another rattling crash and went to take her shower.
And refused to believe she’d just had more fun in the past five minutes than she’d had in the past five years of her life.
Chapter 7
Fifteen minutes and one shower later, he was still there. Only now he sat at her kitchen table, enough pancakes to feed the entire congregation of First Baptist piled in front of him. Thankfully, a Braves T-shirt now hid his torso. More or less. Or course, if she’d stopping gawking at him already, there wouldn’t be a problem. Even if the damn shirt was snug enough to fit Katey. Speaking of whom…
“Where’s the squirt?” she asked her mother, forcing her eyeballs to unhook from those delicious biceps and quadriceps and all those other ceps clinging to his skeleton. Clearly, she’d been looking at one too many cow butts in the last little while.
“Jennifer. Florist,” her mother replied, flipping the next batch of pancakes.
“Sorry I can’t stay, either,” Sarah said with a too-bright smile as she poured herself a cup of coffee. “I’m sure Doc’s expecting me—”
“At noon,” Vivian interjected. “You have plenty of time for breakfast.” She gestured toward the table with a plate of hot pancakes. “Sit.”
Subtle.
Gray eyes and brown clashed over Dean’s head from opposite sides of the kitchen. Gray won. Sarah sat. So did Vivian. Except, two seconds later, her mother got up to answer the phone in the living room, leaving Sarah to curse her mother’s stubbornness about not installing an extension in the kitchen.
“Hey, yourself,” she heard her mother say. “No, not busy at all…”
So much for a buffer, Sarah thought with a dispirited sigh, regarding the logger-size breakfast the woman had left in front of her. Actually, her stomach knew the pancakes were there and was growling for them like a starving dog. But first they had to get past her throat, and she wasn’t sure she could manage that with any degree of success. Suddenly, her eyes pricked with unforeseen tears. Of anger? Frustration? Fear?
All of the above.
Resentment churned through her at being cornered like this, at being forced to figure out what to do before she was ready, that this had been dumped in her lap when none of it had been her fault to begin with—
Her coffee nearly went flying when Dean’s hand landed on her wrist, his thumb gently stroking the top of her hand. “I tried to call you yesterday, but you were never around.”
She carefully withdrew her hand and fixed it around her coffee cup, lifting it to her lips. “I was out on farm duty all day,” she said simply, the scalding liquid etching a path down her gullet. A pause. “Why’d you call?”
“To see if you were okay. After…what happened at the Jenkinses’.”
She allowed a curt nod, curled her other palm around her cup. He was simply being kind. So why did she feel so perilously close to ripping out his entrails? Might have something to do with the fact that between then and now, she sensed that something had shifted between them, something she neither understood nor trusted. “Of course I was okay,” she replied in a level voice, refusing to let herself be lured into the depths of those damnably sweet green eyes. “It’s my job. It’s not the first time I’ve had to euthanize an animal, after all—”
“Sarah…” His voice washed over her like a gentle spring shower, twisting her gut six ways to Sunday. “You cry every time an animal dies. Always have.”
Sarah slammed her not-quite empty cup down on the table, sloshing coffee over her hand. “How the hell would you know what I do? It’s not as if you’ve been around—” She wasn’t sure she could control the tears now, and that just irked the living daylights out of her. He’d hurt her, damn it. Ripped her life to shreds. By rights, she should hate him—heck, she wasn’t sure she didn’t—yet here she was, in spite of everything, wanting him just as much as she always had.
Her own ambivalence infuriated her.
Swiping the coffee off her hand with a napkin, she bit out, “Sunday night was just particularly stressful, that’s all. And you happened to catch me when my defenses were down.”
“Baby—”
“Don’t!” She shook her head sharply, her hand knotted around the soggy napkin. “Just…don’t.”
The clatter of Dean’s fork on his empty plate made her flinch. “Don’t what, for God’s sake? All I wanted was to see how you were doing. Trying to be nice, I think it’s called. But you gotta go and blow it up out of all proportion. Why are you making this harder than it is?”
Finally, she looked at him, the heat from her eyes battling with his. “Those missing years really don’t mean anything, do they? What the hell is this, Dean? You think we can just pick up where we left off, as if nothing happened…?”
Dean pounded the table, making her jump. “Of course I don’t think that! But we had something special, once, and I just thought…” He heaved out a sigh. “I’ve admitted I screwed up, that I’ve regretted my actions every single day of those nine years you seem to think mean nothing to me. Yet no matter what
I do, you take it the wrong way.” He grabbed her wrist, his warm, callused fingers pressing into her skin. “What do you want from me?”
The one thing she couldn’t have, she realized on a jab of pain so sharp, it was a wonder she didn’t double right over.
“I want you to leave me alone,” she said quietly. Give me some time to think. She twisted her hand out from his. “An apology can’t erase a third of my life.”
“It’s a third of my life, too, dammit—”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Dean—get a damn clue!” She pushed herself up from the table, the wooden chair scraping across the plank floor. “The only reason you’re even in town, the only reason you’re sitting here at my kitchen table, is because my sister is marrying your brother. Would you have come back otherwise, Dean? If fate hadn’t thrown us together again, would it ever have occurred to you to try to fix things between us?”
He glared at her in stony silence for long seconds, then dragged his hand across his jaw. “I don’t know,” he admitted, startling her. Averting his eyes, he leaned heavily back in the chair, creaking the wood. “Hell. No matter what you do, it just comes back in your face, doesn’t it?” Once again, he lifted his eyes to hers. “I’ll admit, I haven’t exactly thought this through. I just saw an opportunity…damn, that’s not coming out right, either.” He seemed to hold his breath for a moment, then said, “Maybe I did need fate to give me a push. But what the hell difference does it make how it happens, as long as it does?”
“It just does,” she said in a small but steady voice. “To me. It makes a difference to me. And because it does, trust me, this isn’t fixable, no matter what you do or say or think.” She hauled in enough air to fill a party’s worth of balloons, let it slowly seep back out, then said, “Maybe we did have something special once, Dean. Past tense. But a lot happens in nine years, more than you have any idea. I’m not the same dewy-eyed fool who thought the world revolved around you, Dean Parrish. And I never will be again.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw her mother reenter the kitchen, then felt her hand on her arm. “Sarah Louise…”
“No, Mama.” Sarah pulled away from her mother’s touch and crossed her arms, lifting her chin a notch. Or three. “Okay, y’all, listen up— I’m an adult, even have a life of my own. So I’d really appreciate it if everyone would just let me live it, okay? No more conspiracies, no more interferences, no more ‘everybody knows better than Sarah what Sarah needs.’ Got that?”
Before they could respond, she grabbed her car keys and shoulder bag and headed out the back door, feeling a sense of triumph unlike anything she’d ever felt before. Of course, she knew no one would pay the slightest attention to her. But at least her voice hadn’t shook.
Neither Dean nor Vivian said a word until they heard the Bronco leave.
“You should’ve gone after her,” Vivian said, clearing his and Sarah’s plates from the table.
“No, I shouldn’t’ve.” Dean took a sip of his now-tepid coffee, even as Jen’s words meandered around inside his thick skull. A big part of him still wanted to back out. An even bigger part, though, just couldn’t. Not yet. “She needs to feel she won this round,” he said with a half smile.
Vivian hooted. “Hot damn! So—you are going after her!”
A wry smile tilted his lips. “Now, don’t go getting too excited, Vivian. Only thing I’m after right now is to get our friendship back on some sort of footing, okay?”
Sarah’s mother gave him a long, assessing look, then said, “Okay. I suppose that’s a start. But…you remember that time when you two were little and it’d been raining for a dog’s age, and I told you to stay inside because I’d just washed the kitchen floor? But you went outside, anyway, and tracked up the floor, then tried to clean it up using my best towels?”
“Oh, Lord,” Dean said on a chuckle. “I’d forgotten about that. Thought you were going to string us up for sure that time. What made you think about that?”
Vivian dumped the dishes in a bowl of soapy water in the sink, then pushed up the sink handle, rinsing off the plates as she continued. “Well,” she said over the running water, “I knew Sarah was the instigator. She always was. But she’d rather die than admit she’d done something wrong. And the more guilty she was, the more loudly she protested. Seems to me she screamed something awful that day, even though she was standing there with muddy shoes and a mucked-up towel in her hands.” Vivian turned off the water and faced Dean, wiping her hands on a dish towel. “She’s never changed. The closer you get to the truth, the louder she’s gonna get.”
Dean sighed. But said nothing.
“She’s close to breaking, honey,” Vivian said quietly. “Nothing in her way now except her damn pride. Hey, you’ve still got, what? Four days?”
Had making it up to Sarah become a matter of pride for him, too? A mistake was one thing; failure was something else.
Dean crossed his arms over his chest, scowling. He didn’t often fail these days. And damned if this was going to be one of those times. Still, he wished he had Vivian’s confidence in the situation.
“Hey.” Vivian poked his shoulder again with one finger, as if reading his thoughts. “If the good Lord made the entire world and everything in it in seven days, you sure oughta be able to fix things with my daughter in four.”
Yeah, well, somehow Dean figured the Lord got the better end of that deal.
Later, Dean declined Vivian’s invitation to supper, using his aunt as a convenient excuse. Actually, he thought she’d probably be having her late-day meal with a neighbor, and so wouldn’t even be at home. But, in spite of Jennifer’s injunction for him to keep a high profile with her sister, he opted out. Cussedness or no, he wasn’t out to wear her down. Exactly.
Lance wasn’t home, either, when Dean dumped his truck keys on the hall table about six-thirty. It was dead quiet save for the amazingly loud hum of the unfortunately beer-free refrigerator, from which he extracted a Dr. Pepper with a resigned sigh.
His aunt had made three concessions to modern living; a color television, a microwave and an answering machine, which she now used to ignore anybody she didn’t have a mind to speak to just then. There were five messages this evening, three from Dean’s business partner in Atlanta. A couple of years older than Dean and the father of two precocious little girls, Forrest Townsend had been the bookkeeper at that first cabinet shop where Dean had originally worked after leaving Sweetbranch. It had been Forrest who steered Dean toward a remedial program that helped him learn how to compensate for his disability; Forrest who badgered him into getting his GED; Forrest who insisted they go into business together five years ago, Forrest handling the finances, Dean the artistic and product end. No one thought it would work—a dropout from some speck of a town in Alabama and a man with more debts than sense, as Dean’s aunt saw it. No one, that is, except Forrest and Dean.
But it had. Better than any of them could have dreamed. And one of the reasons it worked so well was because Forrest was a first-class, card-carrying noodge. The last message, in fact, explained in colorful and explicit detail the fate that awaited parts of Dean’s anatomy if he didn’t return the call tonight. Dean chuckled, imagining his aunt’s expression if she’d gotten to the machine first.
He sobered right up, though, when he realized that, somewhere along the way, he’d made a decision—well, sort of one, anyway—that might not go over so well with his partner.
Dean wanted to come home. For good. It made no sense, and he wasn’t even sure he could pinpoint exactly when he’d realized it, but this is where he belonged. Always had.
And no, Sarah Whitehouse had nothing to do with his decision.
Forrest launched forth the instant he heard Dean’s voice. “Hey, man, Tidewater House has been on my case ever since you left, wanting to know exactly when they can expect first delivery.”
A frown tightened Dean’s forehead. “What are you talking about? Says right in the contract first delivery’s September 10.
This is June.”
“Yeah, well, they don’t see a factory sprouting up, so I guess they’re getting nervous. You got their money, but they don’t see anything to show for it.”
“Oh, for the love of Pete—we just got that contract two weeks ago. What’s their problem?”
“They know you’re out of town, that’s their problem.”
“I left for one week for my brother’s wedding. It’s not against the contract.”
“What can I say? I’m only the messenger, buddy.” Forrest paused, then said, “Look—you thought that space downtown might be suitable. You want me to go ahead and lease it? We’ve got the money.”
“No…not yet.” Dean rubbed the space between his eyebrows with his index finger. “Listen—off the top of your head, you see any reason why the showroom and workshop can’t stay right where they are, and the factory be moved out of town?”
“Out of town? Like where?”
“Like…here.”
“There? Podunk, Alabama?”
“Hey, hey—Sweetbranch would be a perfect place for a factory. Overhead would be a lot lower out here, for one thing….”
He heard Forrest whistle through his teeth. “I don’t know… Where’re you gonna get labor?”
“There’s quite a bit of local talent, I hear. Maybe some folk’s’d relocate. We’ve got good schools, a great university nearby, culture, sports, recreation—”
“Lord, you sound like a damn chamber of commerce. You found a building?”
“I’m…working on it.”
“Great. No labor that you know of for sure. No building. And a major client breathing down our necks… Oh, hell. It’s that woman, isn’t it?”
Dean started. “What woman?”
“The one you won’t talk about.”
“If I don’t talk about her, how do you know there’s a woman?”
“Because you haven’t dated since we started this business, I know you’re straight, and because you went practically brain-dead from the moment your brother asked you to be his best man and you knew you were going home. Oh, it’s a woman, all right.”
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