The Homecoming Queen Gets Her Man

by Shirley Jump

  * * *

  “You have to go,” Luke said on Friday afternoon. He stood in the shaded interior of the garage while Jack finished cleaning up the work spaces. Their father had gone home early, feeling a bit taxed by his first full week back at work, and Jack had offered to lock up. A few minutes after five, Luke had shown up out of the blue to shoot the breeze and get his oil changed. Jack had put him to work sweeping the floor, but thus far Luke had done a lot of talking and not a lot of sweeping. “You are my plus one.”

  Jack scowled. The last thing he wanted to do was go to some overglorified, overdressed barbecue. “Plus ones are for a date. With a woman. An actual woman, I might add, not a department-store mannequin.”

  “That was only once. And just so I could take the high-speed highway lane. You gotta admit, it was pretty hilarious.”

  Jack arched a brow. “Not when you took my car to do it.”

  Luke just grinned. “I’m more mature now. Note I said more mature, not actually mature.”

  “Duly noted.” Jack wiped the grease off his hands, then tossed the rag onto his tool bench. He gestured toward Luke’s car, still sitting in the bay. “Oil’s changed. I topped off the fluids and changed out your air filter. You might want to think about replacing those spark plugs next time you come in.”

  “I’m smart enough to tell when you are changing the subject.” Luke fished the invitation out of his pocket and waved it at Jack. “So, how about it? You going?”

  “Why the hell would I want to go to a Prescott garden party? When have I ever gone to a Prescott garden party?”

  “When you were seventeen and trying to impress Meri. Even wore that long skinny tie that you thought was so stylish.”

  He’d felt the disapproving glare of Anna Lee Prescott the entire time. Meri had spent the whole party meeting sponsors and supporters for her pageants, leaving Jack feeling more out of place than the waitstaff. “And it was a mistake.”

  “Going to the party or wearing the tie?”

  “Both.”

  “All the more reason to rectify your fashion idiocy and come with me this time. I’ll even help you pick out your clothes.”

  “For one, I am old enough to dress myself.” Jack pulled open the tool chest drawers and started sorting the day’s tools into their proper places. “For another, why the hell would you go to this thing anyway? And why were you invited?”

  “Because of my new business venture.”

  “Business venture?” Jack finished sorting the sockets and moved on to the screwdrivers. “You mean, something other than living off the family dime?”

  His brother shot him a glare. “Remember Dexter Cornwell?”

  Jack nodded. “Spoiled kid in high school.”

  “Spoiled rich kid. He called me last week, wanting to fill some positions at his events company. He started a business a few years back planning weddings and it mushroomed into everything from bar mitzvahs to dog birthdays.”

  “You’re taking a job helping a poodle blow out its candles?”

  Luke scowled. “It’s more than that.”

  Jack laughed, then shut the last drawer on the tool chest and fished Luke’s keys out of his pocket. “Have fun at the garden party. Watch out for the Chihuahuas.” He headed toward the door connecting the garage to the office. It was getting late, and he wanted to head down to Ray’s to finish up those last few chores. And if there weren’t any chores left to do, Jack would find something to occupy the hours between now and midnight. Maybe then he could sleep and stop dreaming about Meri, ending that constant craving she had awakened in him.

  “Jack?”

  He turned back at Luke’s voice. “Yeah?”

  “I think you need to go to this thing. You need to get back out in the world.”

  “I am out in the world.”

  “Spending your days either under a Chevy or chopping wood for Ray isn’t getting out in the world. It’s been a year since you came home. When are you really going to be home?”

  Home. It had been a hell of a long time since Jack had felt anything like that. He’d tried, Lord knew he’d tried, since he’d returned to Stone Gap. But he had found nothing but an aching, painful emptiness in all the places that had once brought him joy. It was as if a black-and-white cloud had been dropped over the world he once saw in Technicolor.

  There had been moments, with Meri, when he’d glimpsed that Technicolor world again, but then he would remember and it would all disappear.

  Eli would never see, never enjoy that world again. He’d never hear the call of a bird, feel the kiss of a woman. And that, Jack knew, was why he couldn’t come all the way home. Why he could do nothing more than...exist.

  “You know what you need, Jack? To enjoy yourself for once. And stop wallowing in this pit.” Luke grabbed his shoulder and met his gaze head-on. “It’s not a crime to live, you know.”

  Jack didn’t answer his brother. He just stepped through the doorway and with a screech of metal, shut him out.

  Chapter Twelve

  Meri waited until after Grandpa Ray had eaten supper and settled down for the night in his recliner with a new episode of Ax Men on TV to watch, then headed back to her cottage, grabbed her camera and headed outside into the waning light. As she did, she noticed the label she had affixed to the camera’s body the day she got her business cards.

  Photography by Meri Prescott.

  Those words had made it real. They’d been the first step toward her thinking she could be something else, do something else. And she’d be damned if she was going to let some mugger take it from her.

  Tomorrow she had her first photography job since the attack. Okay, not really a paid job, but either way, doing her job meant getting behind the camera again.

  The sun was setting over the lake, kissing the dark water with hues of pink and purple. A loon called from somewhere in the distance, and the bullfrogs began their evening song. A pair of ducks swam a lazy path toward the small island in the center of the lake.

  She raised the viewfinder to her right eye. The edge of the camera brushed against her scar, and it seemed to sear through the skin. Meri drew in a deep breath, held it, let it go. She tried again, but when she looked through the eyepiece, she saw nothing but a blur of images. A New York City street, a graffiti display that had caught her eye, its myriad of colors twirling into a spray-painted image of a landscape, art created by a kid in the dark of night, on a giant canvas. Then a dark shadow moving in front of her lens, and Meri started to say something, asking the person to move, to wait, and then before she could say anything, the camera was yanked away and she found herself against the wall with a knife to her throat.

  She dropped the camera and let it dangle from her neck. Then she lowered to her knees and put her head in her hands. She was okay; she was in Stone Gap. She wasn’t on that street. Why had she thought she could do this?

  “You okay?”

  Jack. That was whom she’d seen through the viewfinder. Not the mugger. Meri jerked her head up. “Yeah, yeah. I’m fine. You scared me.”

  “I’m sorry. I thought you saw me.” He reached out, took her hand and tugged her to her feet. “What’s the matter?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “No, you’re not. And trust me, I’m the expert on saying you’re fine when you’re not.” He gestured toward the camera. “What are you trying to do?”

  “Get my life back,” she said softly, then she sighed and took the camera off her neck. “But it’s harder than I thought. I don’t know why I keep trying to do this. Maybe I should just give this photography thing up and go work at a fast-food place or something.”

  “Why would you give up what you love?”

  She raised her gaze to his, and thought of that day in Gator’s Garage. “Because sometimes what you love doesn’t love
you back.”

  “Then maybe you’re not trying hard enough.”

  “I’ve been trying.” She blew her hair out of her face. “Lord knows I’ve tried a hundred times since that day.”

  He let out a short sound of disbelief.

  “What?” Meri asked.

  “I have a ‘that day,’ too. And nothing’s been the same for me either.”

  She wanted to ask what had happened, what had impacted him so much, but she didn’t want to push Jack. He’d opened the door a little, and she knew it would be far better for him to welcome her in than for her to barge her way in to his world. “Then maybe we both need to try harder.”

  He reached over and lifted the camera toward her. “What better time to start than the present?”

  She caught his blue eyes and saw support in there, caring. He was right—what better time than the present to finally conquer these nightmares. She’d come out here, determined not to let that mugger get one more day’s space in her mind, and that meant she needed to keep on trying. So she raised the camera, aiming toward the moonlight cascading over the lake, and talked to Jack while she lined up the simple shot. No pressure, an easy shot, let the camera do the work.

  “Everyone told me I should have talked about what happened to me, gone to therapy, all that stuff.” She held the shot, then blinked, trying to clear her mind of the visions from before. She was at the lake, seeing the beauty of the water, the moonlight. Meri exhaled, then pressed the shutter button. Click. One shot done. “They said I should have told someone other than the cops and the doctors, but I didn’t. I kept saying I was fine, I was dealing with it, but—” she took another picture, a third, not caring about exposure or aperture or anything other than just pointing and clicking, and the little feeling of success that grew in her with each image filling her memory card “—clearly I wasn’t.”

  “You’re dealing now.”

  “One shot at a time.” She grinned, then raised the camera in his direction. “What about you?”

  “What about me?”

  “What are you doing to get over that day?” She focused the camera on Jack’s face, but he stepped out of range. “Hey!”

  He closed the distance between them, until the view through the camera showed only a blur of his face, and she gave up on trying to capture his image. “You know what the remedy is for dealing with stuff you don’t want to deal with?”

  She shook her head. He reached over her neck and lifted the camera, then put it down on the stump beside them.

  “Skinny-dipping.”

  She laughed. Her chest was light, her heart happy. It was a perfect night, the Nikon was finally edging away from enemy and back to friend again, and she was finding her steps along the right path again. “You’re crazy, Jack. There’s no such thing as skinny-dipping therapy.”

  “There’s water therapy. And that’s the same thing. Practically.”

  “Water therapy?”

  “Yup. Football players do it all the time.”

  “For injuries of their body, not their brain. And that involves ice.” She shivered. “I have no desire to sit in a tub of ice.”

  “But you do have the desire to slip into a nice cool lake on a hot early-summer night, don’t you?”

  The word desire made her go warm deep in her gut. Had her hormones screaming, yes, yes, let’s do that. She forgot all about taking pictures, all about her job. Slipping into a cool lake with Jack Barlow...yes, that was a damned good idea. “Jack, I don’t know if I should—”

  “Besides, you owe me. Remember our bet in the fishing boat? Whoever catches the most fish wins? I caught a fish and you caught how many? None.” He came closer to her, the heat of his body wafting over them and luring her into his smile. “That means you still owe me a dip in the lake. Naked.”

  “I thought that bet was called off due to inclement weather.”

  He grinned. “That was just a rain delay. And tonight—” he glanced up at the sky, the smile widening on his face and turning into a tease “—there’s not a cloud in the sky.”

  “You just want to see me naked.” She put a fist on her hip, pretending that she didn’t desperately want to see him naked, too. That night on the lake last week, when she’d run her hands over his wet, sleek body—that had been awesome. She wasn’t sure she was strong enough to stand a repeat of that event without jumping Jack’s bones.

  “For purely therapeutic reasons only.”

  She laughed. How she wanted to resist him, to forget him, but she couldn’t. All her life, it was as if Jack Barlow had had this hold on her heart, and whenever he had teased her out of a bad mood or tempted her into doing something dangerous, she became putty in his hands. “Oh, so now you’re a doctor?”

  “I am if you need a thorough internal exam.”

  Oh, she needed that. In a bad way. She’d been needing that from Jack Barlow for years. Maybe it was the fantasy of the unknown, the mystery of what could have been if they hadn’t broken up. Ever since her first date with Jack, she’d wondered what it would be like to make love with him. And now, with the carnal knowledge of an adult, her fantasies had gone further, filling her dreams with images of his naked body on top of hers, behind hers, inside hers.

  She was here to heal, to find herself again, she’d told him. Maybe part of that was finally giving herself the things she had delayed and denied for so long.

  Not things. Thing, singular. As in a hunky, six-foot-two man who was battling his own demons. A man like that wouldn’t want anything more from her—he’d made that clear a thousand times already—and that was exactly what Meri wanted, too. No strings, no attachments, nothing to bind her to this town that she both loved and despised.

  To take that risk, leap off into the unknown and, yes, skinny-dip, as scary as it sounded. Get naked, get in the water and live those parts of life she had never been able to before.

  “You know what they say about therapy,” she said to him, her gaze meeting his blue eyes, seeming almost black now in the dim light. “It’s best when it’s shared.” She tugged on the hem of her T-shirt and pulled it over her head, then tossed it on the ground.

  Jack’s gaze dropped to the lacy white bra she wore. He cleared his throat. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard that, but it sounds legit.”

  “Totally.” She grinned. “So, are you going to join me, Doctor?”

  * * *

  By the time Jack got his shorts unbuttoned, Meri was already making a dash for the water. Her round, firm ass seemed to wink at him in the moonlight, and in a splash it was gone. Well, hell, she had gone and gotten totally naked. He’d thought she would back out at the last second, but Meri had dived in—literally—the whole way. He kicked off his boxers, then took off after her.

  He’d tried avoiding her, staying as far away from Ray’s property as he could, but it hadn’t worked. Jack was drawn to Meri, over and over again, like a bee to a flower. If anything, being away from her put her in his thoughts more than ever. Maybe his brother was right. Maybe he needed to enjoy himself for once. With Meri.

  He watched Meri’s naked body sliding through the water of Stone Gap Lake, and in half a second, Jack stopped thinking about anything other than how fast he could be out there with her, too. The water hit him like an iceberg, but the warm air above took the edge off the cold. That, and the knowledge that a very naked, very slippery Meri was a few feet away. He did a quick breaststroke out farther into the lake, then treaded water in front of her. “You didn’t wait for my answer.”

  “I was pretty sure you’d follow. Naked woman in the water? That’s a no-brainer for any guy with a pulse.”

  “I wouldn’t jump in a cold lake naked for just any woman, you know,” Jack said.

  “Are you saying I’m special?” A tease lit her face, sparked in her eyes.

  “More than yo
u know,” he said quietly. Damn, where had that come from? He hadn’t meant to say it out loud—hell, hadn’t even meant for it to go past his brain. So he did what any guy afraid of commitment would do—he splashed her and passed it off as a joke. “After all, you’re still the only girl in Stone Gap to climb to the top of the Old Man.”

  “Oh, my God, I totally forgot about that. I got in so much trouble for climbing that tree. My mother grounded me for a month after she saw how skinned up my knees got.”

  “I still can’t believe you did it. What were you thinking?”

  “That I was thirteen and hopelessly infatuated with my cousin’s best friend.”

  That was news to him. Meri had been infatuated with him when she was young? “You were?”

  “Oh, come on. You had to know.” She rolled her eyes. “For Pete’s sake, half the girls in Stone Gap were infatuated with you, Jack Barlow. The other half were infatuated with your brothers. You come from some good-looking stock.”

  He swam a little closer to her, so close he could glimpse the pale lines of her limbs and the soft globes of her breasts beneath the water’s surface, and that had him imagining those legs wrapped around him, her arms sliding along his back. “You think I’m good-looking?”

  “I always thought you were good-looking. I dated you, remember?”

  “I remember, Meri. I remember very well.”

  They had only dated for a year, a relationship they had kind of fallen into. For years they’d been friends, traveling in a pack with Eli and other mutual friends. Then one day it had been just Jack and Meri, and by the end of the night he’d kissed her. That had changed everything.

  “Then you should also remember that you were the one who didn’t want me.” She gave him a little splash and backed up a few feet.

  “Who says I didn’t want you?”

  “You did. That day in your dad’s garage. When you told me that you wanted someone with more depth than a princess who trotted around on the stage in high heels.” She shook her head and turned away, then forced a smile to her face. “And then you went away, and that was all she wrote.”