Love is Lovelier

by Donna Simonetta

  She blushed and avoided his intent gaze. “He said you would never be okay with dating me, because I grew up on a farm in Virginia.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “On account of my lofty childhood as a coal miner’s son in West Virginia?”

  She cleared her throat. “Danny seemed to think you felt like I was good enough to…y’know…”

  At first he didn’t understand where her stammering response was headed, but when realization dawned, he was so furious he was afraid he was going to pop a blood vessel. Damn Danny to hell for his big mouth and his little mind.

  “To what, Heather? To fuck? Is that what last night felt like to you, because it sure as hell didn’t feel like that to me. It felt like more…a lot more.”

  “No.” She shook her head and repeated more emphatically. “No. It didn’t feel like that’s all it was to me either.”

  “So what changed between last night and this morning? The benefit thing of Jeff’s this weekend?”

  She sighed and nodded. “Danny specifically mentioned you wouldn’t want to be seen with me at a fancy charity event. When you said you weren’t going to cancel your date with Gloria, I felt like maybe Danny was right after all; you’d sleep with me, but you’d take a socialite like Gloria out in public.”

  He mentally calculated how long it would take him to get to West Virginia to kick Danny’s interfering ass. He ran his hand over his jaw, and decided to be completely honest with Heather, since honesty seemed like the only way he might salvage the situation. “I’ve always been ashamed of the way I broke things off with you in Portland. Yeah, I was young and stupid, but I should’ve known better than to drop you with no explanation. It was a chickenshit thing to do.”

  “True. But it happened a long time ago. You’ve apologized to me, and I’m over it; I think it’s all right if you stop beating yourself up about it now. Besides, what does it have to do with our current situation?”

  “As it happens, quite a bit. After I was such a jerk to you, I promised myself I would never treat another woman the same way again. And that’s why I don’t want to cancel on Gloria. Last week she was going on about a new dress and shoes; I didn’t want to dump her with no explanation, and until I talk to your brother, I didn’t want to tell a gossip like Gloria about you and me.”

  He stood in front of her to clasp her shoulders and ducked his head to look straight into her eyes. “It was most definitely not because I think Gloria is better than you. I’d be proud to be seen with you there, to be seen with you anywhere! Hell, if I got invited to Buckingham Palace, I would be honored to have you on my arm.”

  Heather smiled a little. “Are you expecting an invitation to the palace anytime soon? Because I’d need plenty of advance notice about it, serious shopping would have to be done.”

  He brushed the lock of hair that had fallen over his eye back, and winked at her. “I don’t have any immediate plans with the Queen, or even William and Kate.”

  Heather bent her neck and lowered her eyelids to avoid his gaze. He put his finger under her chin and gently raised her head. “What’s going on in that M.I.T. worthy brain?”

  She frowned and narrowed her eyes, and Mick was pretty certain he’d managed to say the wrong thing again, but didn’t know what it was.

  “Talk about ancient history…what does my acceptance to M.I.T. have to do with anything? I didn’t go there, and I never even think about it anymore, so why are you?”

  “I just think it’s cool you’re so smart M.I. freakin’ T. offered you a scholarship.”

  “Eleven years ago!”

  “But still, it’s impressive.”

  She gestured between them. “Is my old scholarship offer what this is about? Maybe Danny wasn’t totally off base.”

  Mick’s jaw dropped. “Of course he was off base! What do you mean?”

  Her body language had relaxed some as they talked, but now she crossed her arms defensively across her chest again. “I mean, you didn’t sleep with me, or say you’d be proud to be seen with me at an event like Jeff’s this weekend, until you heard about M.I.T. It’s like you suddenly think I’m worthy of you, and that idea plain old makes me furious!”

  Mick thought she wasn’t just angry, he saw hurt in her eyes too. He had a fast car, and he could seriously be in West Virginia by the time his brother’s shift in the mine ended. And he would kill Danny. There would be plenty of time on the drive to calculate the slowest and most painful method possible.

  “One major flaw in your argument—I’ve wanted you for eleven years.”

  “Physically, yeah, and you enjoyed spending time with me alone. Even back then it was always alone; you didn’t take me out in public.”

  “Heather, you agreed at the time we should wait before we told Jeff about what was happening between us. As I recall, it was your idea to keep him in the dark, which is why we never went out in public. I was never ashamed of you. Never.”

  Something in his tone seemed to make her straighten up and peer into his eyes. She furrowed her brow over her clear, gray eyes, and he was afraid she could see straight to his dark soul.

  “I believe you, Mick.”

  “Thank God!” He heaved a sigh of relief. Maybe things were going to be okay after all, until her next words stopped him cold.

  “You aren’t ashamed of me. You’re ashamed of you!”

  Chapter 14

  “I’m very proud of what I’ve done with my life,” Mick replied in measured tones.

  Damn. There were a lot of dumb women in the world—women who didn’t look below the surface. Hell, he’d dated more than his fair share of them, so why did Heather, the one woman he really cared about, have to be so insightful? Because it was why he cared what she thought of him. She was whip-smart; it was one of the things that attracted him to her. In spite of his opinions on her fun-loving character, long before he knew about the M.I.T. scholarship offer, Heather’s quick-witted sassiness is what drew him to her like a food network host to a barbecue competition.

  She put her hands on her hips and screwed up her mouth as she stared at him. “You’ve come really far and you should be proud, but it’s not what I meant and you know it. You’re ashamed of where you come from, so you need a date like Gloria to give you social cred.”

  “I’m not ashamed of where I’m from, but people form a lot of mistaken opinions about you when they learn you’re from the mountains of West Virginia. I don’t want to behave like a stereotype and give them more fuel for their fire.”

  “Who do you think is judging you based on your hometown here in Rivers Bend? The only person I can think of who might do it is Gloria, and you’re choosing to spend time with her.”

  “In an attempt to keep my mind off of you,” he snapped. “And look how well that worked out for me. I still ended up making love to you, and now you’re angry with me.”

  “I’m not angry.”

  He raised an eyebrow.

  “Okay, I’m not angry anymore. I’m confused, and I’m trying to figure out what’s going on in here.” She stood on tiptoe and tapped his forehead with one finger. “What happened to you to make you this guarded?”

  “You mean aside from my father’s raging disapproval of me?”

  “Yes. I don’t think it’s the only reason you’re the way you are.”

  Now it was his turn to cross his arms across his chest in a defensive posture, which he did, but remained silent.

  She rolled her eyes. “Fine. Shut me out.”

  He stared at her a moment longer and then blurted out, “I’ve gotten hillbilly jokes everywhere I’ve gone since I left home: college, the other guys on the Pintos…”

  “Not Jeff and Cisco?” Heather interrupted.

  “No. Never them, but all the other guys, on the team and in the front office.”

  Light dawned in her eyes and her full lips formed an ‘O’. “The guys who were ribbing you about me the day you dropped me like a hot potato.”

  He nodded once. “Yep. About how on
ly a hillbilly like me would be going after an underage girl. You know the kind of thing: you can take the boy out of the hills…”

  “That’s just dumb! I wasn’t ten, for God’s sake! I was almost eighteen and only a few years younger than you.” She narrowed her eyes. “Not to mention quite of few of them had made a play for me too; I just wasn’t interested in any of them. The only one I wanted was the boy from West Virginia who they decided to pick on about me. Coincidence? I think not.”

  “Those miserable sons of bitches!”

  She shrugged. “Seems to me like they were trying to eliminate competition and you fell right into their trap. So, who else?”

  “People in business have made wisecracks. I have to be better than everyone else in the room all the time.”

  She smacked him on the bicep, and she packed quite a wallop. He rubbed the spot as she hollered at him, “You are better than everyone else in the room all of the time. How do you not know it?”

  “At a certain level in business, you’re running with the old-boys network, and not the good-ole boys network, so I can’t let Mickey Evans, Phil and Carol’s little boy, slip out in front of those people. They’d eat him alive. You heard that jerk I was on the phone with my first day; you know what I’m up against.”

  She shook her head, and her hair swung over her shoulders. “You’ve got it backward. People like the bozo you were talking to inherited their money, power, and position. Mickey Evans worked, struggled, and fought for everything he has. When push comes to shove, my money’s on Mickey to win out over those entitled yahoos.”

  “Thank you, but it’s not the way the real world works, Heather.”

  “Yeah, it is! Or it can be, if you’re not trying to keep up with the trust fund baby set.”

  “Those are the people I deal with at work, and I can’t let my guard down around them. In a perfect world, it wouldn’t be the case, but this is not a perfect world. Far from it.”

  She threw her hands up in the air. “I can’t make you see in yourself all the great things I see in you. The things that make you the best man in every room you walk into, you’ve got to see it for yourself. And until you do, I think we need to cool it.”

  “What? You’re dumping me?”

  She ran her hands through her hair and exhaled hard. “I guess I am. I don’t want to be with someone who doesn’t value the same things I do, which is ironic, because you have all the traits I admire—brains, initiative, you’re a hard worker, a self-made man, but you don’t admire those things. If we keep going with what we started lasted night, I’m just going to get hurt by you again, and that is not going to happen. I’m not going to let it.”

  ****

  Heather had never been so glad to go to an oil change appointment before in her life. At least it gave her a chance to leave the office for a little while. After their intense conversation, Mick retreated to his office, and she’d helped check-in a group of guests. Clearly, avoiding each other was not a viable long-term plan at work, but they both needed time to cool off and think. This is why you shouldn’t get involved with someone from work, especially your boss. Although, she wondered if their long, complicated history together made last night inevitable.

  She pulled up to the empty service bay at Miller’s Garage. Ed Miller had been running the business for as long as Heather could remember. One of her earliest memories was riding shotgun with her father when he’d bring the pickup truck here for service. Her dad always bought her candy out of the ancient vending machine as a treat, and they’d split a cola from the red cooler out front. The garage smelled like oil, and the scent always made her long for a peanut butter cup and a Coke, and it made her miss her dad like crazy. He had been a larger-than-life character—full of life, fun, and good humor. A huge hole opened in her soul when he died of a heart attack when she was still a kid. Deidre and Jeff got to spend more time with him than Jason and she had, and she used to be so jealous of them because of it.

  The grizzled mechanic waved as he walked out of the garage and up to her car. He pulled a cloth out of the pocket of his greasy coveralls and wiped his hands before opening her car door.

  “Hey, Heather! Who’ve you got in there with you?”

  “Petunia. She’s Magda’s dog, I’m going to bring her by the library to visit with Magda while I wait for my car.”

  He ran his hand over his bristly crew cut. “Might be a bit of a wait. I have some emergencies today, and no one to help me. I sure wish I had someone to work with me here, someone who could learn the business and take over when I retire.” He winked. “Don’t know a good, young mechanic by any chance, do you?”

  Heather slung her purse over her shoulder, scooped Petunia up from the passenger seat, and got out of the car. “Actually, I might know someone. I met a guy over the weekend who would love to work as a mechanic. Are you serious?”

  “I’m as serious as a heart attack. I’d love to meet this fellow; see if he’s got what it takes.”

  “I’ll feel him out for you and let you know what he says.”

  “Thanks, Heather! The day is looking up for me.”

  Glad it was for somebody. Heather’s day started out great, but it went gone downhill fast. She was in dire need of a little girl time. “I’ll be at the library or the Nosh Pit if you need me. Otherwise, I’ll be back to pick up my car later. No rush, since you’re running behind, I’ll use it as an excuse to stay in town for lunch.”

  Heather clipped the leash onto Petunia’s collar and stooped to put the dog on the pavement. She straightened and with a cheery wave to Ed, she started down Main Street toward the library. Everyone she passed knew her, and it took a while for her to make her way down the road, as she had to stop every few feet and chat.

  She waved to her sister through the plate glass window of the Nosh Pit, and then walked by it to go next door and entered the red brick library building.

  Magda sat at the circulation desk, and Petunia gave a quick yip of pleasure at the sight of her beloved mistress. A rescue dog, Petunia suffered unknown torment before Maggie took her in and filled her little doggie life with love. Kind of like her brother Jeff, when Heather stopped to think about it. He was sad and lonely until Maggie blew into town and swept her big, strong brother off his feet. Now Jeff was the happiest he’d ever been.

  Magda slid off the tall stool and came around the counter to squat down to scratch Petunia’s ears. “She’s here!” Magda yelled over her shoulder.

  “Finally!” Bethanne’s voice hollered back from the office.

  “Jeez! Didn’t they teach you two the importance of using your inside voice in library school? I never dreamed I’d be the one shushing the librarians.”

  Bethanne laughed as she came through the door marked ‘Librarian.’ She propped her hip against the end of the circulation desk, and loosely crossed her arms. “Cool your jets, Heather; we’re the only ones here.”

  “Two for the price of one, I didn’t expect both of you to be here.”

  “It’s the changing of the guard. I worked the morning shift and Bethanne’s here for the afternoon.”

  “And when I heard you’d be here around lunchtime, I came in early. I was dying to hear how your weekend with the oh-so-yummy Mick Evans was.” Bethanne waggled her eyebrows.

  Heather frowned, as she tried to think about how much she could tell her friends. Mick’s issues were private, and were his to share with others or not as he saw fit. She didn’t want to betray his confidence, but she was sad, and really needed the support of her best friends right about now.

  “The weekend was mostly good. Last night was amazing. Today totally sucks.”

  “Ookaay…” Bethanne drew out the word. “Then I vote we start with last night. I like the sound of ‘amazing.’ ”

  Magda straightened up and tried to put her arm around Heather’s shoulders, but their height difference made it a tricky maneuver, even with Heather in sneakers and Magda in high heels. “Come on into the conference room. We were hoping y
ou’d stay and have lunch with us, so we got a Margherita pizza and salad from Mancini’s. Let’s pig out, it might make today suck a little less.”

  They followed Bethanne into the library’s meeting room, and the tantalizing aroma of the hot pizza, in its box on the round conference table, made her stomach grumble. She grinned ruefully. “Sorry. With all the drama this morning, and a group checking in at the Retreat, I didn’t get a chance to eat breakfast.”

  As they ate, Heather gave them an edited version of the weekend’s events, one which gave them the flavor of what happened, without giving away Mick’s secrets. But leave it to insightful and empathetic Magda to see beyond what Heather said.

  “Wow.” Magda took a sip of her soda through the straw. “I pegged him as the kind of guy I went to prep school with; I never would’ve guessed he came from a family of coal miners. His dad sounds like a pill. Kind of like my grandmother, so insistent their way of life is the only way.”

  “Like your grandmother, but without the phenomenal wealth and power.” Bethanne crumpled her napkin and tossed it on the table.

  “How are things going with Grandmommy Dearest?” Heather asked.

  Magda smiled. “We’ve made a little progress. She still doesn’t like my choices, but at least we’re speaking again. I think her personal secretary, Ned, has something to do with it, which is nice of him. He actually seems to like my grandmother.”

  “I’m sorry, Maggie, but she hurt Sam, and I have trouble getting past it with your grandmother. I’m not sure I’ll ever like her.” Heather grimaced.

  “Trust me, if she wasn’t the only blood relative I have left, I wouldn’t have anything to do with her, but sometimes family is tough, especially when you want to follow your own path. I can relate to Mick; it’s hard to straddle two worlds.”

  Okay…Heather had definitely not told them anything about Mick’s issues with that, it was too personal, so when she spoke her voice was a little sharper than she intended, “What do you mean?”

  “You know how my dad was just a regular guy, and my mom was…”