“Well, I’d better take a look.” She dug deeper into her purse, came up with a wad of tissues, then rushed over to him. Stretching her arm up, she wiped away some of the blood. “Tip your head down a little, will you?”
Without waiting for him to comply, she pressed on his chin until his eyes were aimed at a pair of white sneakers with neon-yellow laces. She stood on her tiptoes, first brushing his hair away from his forehead, then dabbing at the cut.
Her fingers were warm, her touch soft as a lover’s caress. Cupping his face in her hands, she tipped his head to one side, then the other, making hmmmmlike noises as she inspected the damage.
“Typical head wound,” she finally stated, sounding somewhat exasperated by her discovery. “Plenty of blood, but when you get right down to it, minimal damage.”
He listened to her pronouncement, noticing with interest that one of her hands was now resting on his shoulder. “Are you suggesting I’m hardheaded?” he asked, his mood suddenly lighter than it had been in weeks.
She laughed. “That remains to be seen.” Taking hold of his hand, she pulled him toward the door. “Come on, we’d better get you cleaned up.”
His attention captured by the slender curve of her hips as she led him briskly down the hall, he followed without protest. One part of his mind took note of the fact that she needed two short steps to every one of his, while the other pondered her strange reaction to the start of her school day.
She’d taken it all in stride—having a rock thrown through her window, the glass littering the floor, his being hurt. He couldn’t help wondering if she’d witnessed so many violent situations, she’d gotten used to them. The way he had.
He rejected that notion immediately. In spite of the nothing-rattles-me routine, she had a freshness about her, a sparkling innocence in her clear blue eyes that led him to believe she wasn’t as tough as she sounded.
She couldn’t possibly be, he told himself, refusing for some reason to even consider that her tough-guy act was no act at all.
“Here we are,” she said, pausing in front of a door marked First Aid Room. She pulled a ring of keys out of the pocket of her pants and unlocked the door. Flipping on the light with one hand, she pointed to a bench with the other. “Sit.”
Any doubts he’d been clinging to about her being a teacher—or her ability to control a classroom full of kids—vanished. Only teachers gave orders with that kind of authority and expected them to be followed without argument.
Teachers and cops, he amended as he removed his jacket and sat down.
She walked over to the telephone on the wall by the door and dialed a two-digit number. While she waited for someone to pick up on the other end, she paced in the opposite direction as far as the spiral cord would allow.
“Helen,” she said a half minute later. “This is Becky. Someone tried to air-condition my civics classroom again this morning.… Yes, third time this month. Um-hmm, I know.” She glanced at him briefly over her shoulder, her gaze flicking to the cut on his head. “Darned dangerous. Do you think Abe will be able to get the window boarded before school starts?” She looked down at her watch, then ran her hand through her hair. The straight blond strands floated up briefly before drifting back in place around her face. “Thanks. I appreciate it.” She hung up the phone, then strode over to the cabinet above the sink.
Hoyle watched her bustle about, gathering speed as she went along like a hurricane in its prime. She opened cupboard doors and drawers, and in no time she had a full complement of first-aid supplies set out to the right of the sink in a line as straight as a row at roll call in the police academy. Her scrub routine—aided by the use of a soft-bristled brush and steaming hot water—was equally impressive.
Under normal circumstances, he would have felt foolish letting her make such a fuss over what she’d already declared to be nothing more than a simple flesh wound. But thus far, normal was the last word he would use to describe anything that had happened since the moment he’d stepped into her classroom.
Besides, he was starting to think that in spite of a brand-new sport coat that was history and a headache that was worthy of the record books, getting beaned in the noggin wasn’t so bad after all. Especially since all this quality attention seemed to be included in the deal.
After filling it with water, she set a small stainless steel bowl on the edge of the counter closest to him, then came over to where he sat. He spread his knees wide, and she stepped between his legs, all her concentration focused on the cut on his forehead.
She stood close, so close he could smell her perfume. Testing his ability to name the exact brand, he inhaled deeply. Instantly, his nostrils filled with an unusual scent, something vibrant and alive that suited her to a tee.
A picture of her—naked in a huge bathtub, up to her neck in bubbles—popped into his head. The tempting vision lingered, teasing his imagination with an endless array of erotic possibilities, until he finally, reluctantly, blinked it away.
Finding he was still unable to place the particular scent she was wearing, he concluded he must not have come in contact with it before. He definitely would have remembered it.
Because he had little choice while she tended his wound, he stared straight ahead, his attention immediately drawn to the hollow spot at the base of her throat. He was tempted to reach out and touch the shallow indentation, just to see if her skin was as smooth as it looked. He resisted, and his gaze followed a path of pale freckles downward to where the scoop neck of her T-shirt curved from one collarbone to the other.
“This should only take another minute,” she said as she applied disinfectant with a piece of cotton.
Don’t hurry on my account, he wanted to say, but wisely kept his mouth shut. He suspected she’d take offense at his smart remark, accuse him of behaving no better than the horny boys in her classes. And she’d be right.
Still, he couldn’t seem to stop his thoughts from wandering into dangerous territory, not as long as she was standing where she was. And certainly not as long as her hip brushed against him each time she twisted to the side to reach for another cotton ball.
He wondered if the kids in her classes had any idea how lucky they were to have her for a teacher. If he’d had Miss de Bieren standing in front of his class when he was in high school twenty years ago, he would have given his best shot at becoming the teacher’s pet. And probably would have spent a good deal less time in detention.
“Okay, now for a dressing,” she said cheerfully, obviously oblivious to his errant musings.
With one hand holding his hair off his forehead, she leaned closer to him and reached for a bandage, stretching toward the open box on the counter. Before he realized what was happening, she swayed too far to the side and lost her balance.
Instinctively, his hands shot up to her hips to try to prevent her fall. He wasn’t quite fast enough.
She fell against him, her right breast skimming across his mouth in deliciously slow motion.
A white-hot blade of desire pierced him, its intensity startling him. Reflexively, his fingers dug into the firm flesh of her fanny, and he sucked in a deep breath, unintentionally drawing in the material of her soft cotton T-shirt as well.
When the oxygen finally reached his brain, he was able to take note of several fascinating facts. One: This day was turning out a whole heck of a lot better than it started; two: The schoolteacher might be a tiny little thing everywhere else, but the part of her nudging his lips wasn’t small at all; and three: Her nipple had instantly beaded into a tight knot beneath her shirt, which made him wonder if she was enjoying this little mishap as much as he was.
A definite possibility, he decided, allowing several more pleasure-filled seconds to pass before he convinced himself to set her away from him and back on both feet.
It seemed like a long time before she finally tipped her head down. He looked up at the same moment and found himself staring into a pair of eyes as blue as the uniform shirt he’d worn every day
of his life for the first five years he’d been on the force.
Slowly, he lowered his gaze to her lips. They were glossy as glass and pink tinged, like the pink spreading up her neck and over her cheeks. It occurred to him that if he leaned forward and let himself sit an inch taller, his mouth would be even with hers. He’d be able to kiss her.
A voice inside his head warned him he had no business even considering such an action. But he’d spent too much time pondering the scent of her perfume, worked up too great a curiosity about the smoothness of her skin, fantasized too real a picture of her wonderfully naked in a tub full of bubbles. All he wanted was a taste, just one little taste. What could it hurt?
“Sorry,” she said. She added a half smile and a nervous giggle to her apology as she took one step back, effectively nixing his experiment. Her hand quivered as she ripped open the bandage she’d managed to snag.
“No problem,” he automatically replied, letting his hands fall to his lap as her warm fingers positioned the bandage over his wound and pressed gently against his skin.
No problem? he repeated silently. Then why are you having to use both hands to hide the physical evidence to the contrary? He was as shocked by his unexpected reaction as Miss de Bieren would be—if she discovered it.
And why the hell was he getting so turned on by a pint-size blonde with hardly enough hair to grab hold of? His taste in women usually ran toward long-legged brunettes with lush shoulder-length manes he could sink his hands into.
A one-word explanation came to mind immediately: Overtime. The string of eighteen-hour days he’d been putting in for three straight weeks might be great for his bank account, but it was murder on his social life.
Murder.
Suddenly he remembered what had brought him to Benito Juarez Middle School that morning.
“All done,” she said, her tone overly bright as she stepped out from between his legs. She scooped up the handful of soiled cotton balls and tossed them in the wastebasket, then picked up the steel bowl and carried it to the sink. “You’ll probably want to take an aspirin or two for pain,” she added, her gaze riveted to her hands as she washed and dried them. “I can get you some if you’d like. And I’m really sorry about the accident. As you might have noticed, we’ve had plenty of rocks thrown through the windows here. But no one’s ever been standing in the line of fire before.”
“I guess it was just my lucky day,” he said quietly. His left hand strayed up to test the damage done to his head, but his eyes watched every move Miss Rebekah de Bieren made.
She was doing it again, he observed, putting on the same nonchalant facade she’d worn in her classroom. Only this time she wasn’t pretending to be unaffected by a broken window or the blood streaming down his face. This time, she was trying to convince him she hadn’t noticed the sparks that had flashed back and forth between them like lightning in an electrical storm.
Or maybe, he amended, recalling the telltale trembling of her hands a minute earlier, maybe she was trying to convince herself.
Read on for an excerpt from Jean Stone’s Ivy Secrets
Chapter I
Charlie Hobart packed the suitcase, unsure whether she should feel happy or sad. Peter’s overbearing mother was dead—reason, certainly, to celebrate—but Jenny would be leaving tomorrow to visit Tess. The absence of her fourteen-year-old daughter always unsettled Charlie and evoked more than a little guilt.
She sighed and tucked a pouch of maxipads into the inside pocket. Though Jenny was mature for her age, Charlie still worried when she went off to visit Tess: Tess, after all, had no children, not even a husband. And though Charlie knew, from their years together at college, that Tess was able to take care of herself, she wondered if her long-ago friend was capable of looking after another human being. The summers Jenny spent with Tess still had not quelled Charlie’s fears, for, at thirty-seven years of age, Tess had seemingly forever dodged responsibility, sequestered in her glassblowing studio, doing God only knew what. Yet Jenny loved her “aunt” Tess, loved spending summers with her in Massachusetts. And Jenny’s absence enabled Charlie and Peter to come and go as they pleased—to the Hamptons, to Newport, to the Berkshires. So far, they had all survived the arrangement.
“Don’t you think Jenny’s old enough to do that?”
Charlie closed the lid on the suitcase. She didn’t turn toward her husband’s voice in the doorway. “I’m making sure she has everything she needs.”
“Tom Williamson is in the library. He’s here to go over Mother’s will.”
Charlie crossed her arms and looked out the window of her daughter’s bedroom, across the rolling, lush grounds of the Hudson Valley estate. Jenny, Charlie knew, would not miss Peter’s mother either. The woman had a subtle, yet distinct way of informing Jenny that she didn’t measure up to Hobart quality. Charlie knew the feeling.
“I’ll be down in a minute,” she said.
She heard Peter’s footsteps retreat and wondered what was going through his mind. Terror, probably, mixed with mounds of insecurity. Many offspring of a matriarch such as Elizabeth Hobart might feel tremendous relief at her death. They might languish in the release of such a heavy, dark burden. They might, at last, find peace.
She wondered if Peter would. Peter had been overly dependent on his mother. After his father’s death when Peter was six, he watched as his mother lorded over the family’s textile mills with the determination and fortitude of a man, in an era when only men were allowed to show such strength. He watched, and he labored to master his legacy. Yet along the way, Peter had acquiesced, becoming another of his mother’s people-possessions, to be ruled, molded, and manipulated. Charlie feared that despite Elizabeth’s death, the woman would remain in control.
In all these years, the only time Peter had wavered from his mother’s wishes was when he married Charlie—unacceptable, undeserving Charlene O’Brien, from a working-class family of eight, from Pittsburgh, of all places. But Elizabeth apparently had determined that living with Charlie’s background was preferable to living without her son, especially when Peter and Charlie arrived at the Hobart manor from college with a marriage certificate in one hand and a crying infant in the other. Elizabeth Hobart had gritted her teeth and let them in. And Charlie—and Jenny—had been paying for it ever since.
Maybe now things would change, if not for Peter, then at least for herself. And Jenny.
Charlie turned back to the suitcase and slowly closed the lid. She was, she knew, procrastinating going downstairs. Even after all these years, Charlie still wasn’t comfortable with brandy and stiff chatter and the hard Victorian settee in Elizabeth Hobart’s library. Even after all these years Charlie would have preferred jeans and sweatshirts, and curling her legs underneath herself on lumpy, overstuffed cushions. She wondered if Peter knew that, or if he had, instead, chosen to believe that Charlie enjoyed her leading role as dutiful wife, society lady, the role she had worked so hard to win, to cultivate, then play out so well.
She stooped to check her hair in the mirror of Jenny’s dressing table, to be sure that no golden-brown loose strands had escaped the big gold clip at the nape of her neck. But as she caught her reflection, Charlie ignored her newly rinsed hair and looked instead into her eyes, eyes that had once been bright blue, but now seemed to have lost their enthusiasm, their zest. Age, she suspected, had done that. Age, motherhood, and Elizabeth Hobart. A small spark of excitement tingled through her. Now that the woman was dead, maybe Charlie would begin to live. Maybe she could stop playacting at being a woman she wasn’t. Maybe she could finally become the woman she was meant to be. Whoever that was.
She glanced at the photos inside the edge of Jenny’s mirror, neatly clipped magazine photos of scary-looking rock groups with unfamiliar names, and a photo of Jenny herself—thick-dark-haired, huge-eyed Jenny—crouched beside a shaggy beige-colored dog, Tess’s dog. In the picture, Jenny was smiling. Charlie realized it had been a long time since she saw her pensive daughter smile. Perhaps
it was the company of the dog that brought out that beautiful smile; perhaps it was because the photo had been taken last summer when Jenny was with Tess.
For all her oddities, Tess was probably still the warm, comfortable woman Charlie had grown so close to in college. It was hard to know: Charlie had changed, wouldn’t Tess have, too? In the last few years, they had drifted into speaking only at Christmas and again in the spring to arrange Jenny’s schedule. Charlie touched the image of her smiling daughter in the photo and wondered if she and Tess would have bothered to stay in touch at all if it hadn’t been for Jenny. Jenny, the teenaged enigma in Charlie’s life.
Charlie knew she hadn’t spent enough time with Jenny. Years ago, she had let herself become swallowed up by a busy life of charities and gallery openings and round-robins at the tennis club—anything to pretend her life was full and happy, anything to try to gain the respect and acceptance of Elizabeth Hobart. Anything to prove to herself that she could have a better life than her own mother did. Her mother who had been tied to a drafty old house by the bondage of diapers and never-ending worries, and who, even today, clipped food coupons and bought a new dress only for special occasions.
Being awarded the scholarship to Smith College and then landing a man like Peter had been Charlie’s greatest achievements, her way out. But Elizabeth had quickly tainted the dream, and instead of enjoying her success and her well-earned comforts, Charlie had found herself struggling to keep peace, struggling to live up to Elizabeth Hobart’s demands, to become the kind of woman Elizabeth wanted for a daughter-in-law: Someone more like the woman Peter’s brother John had married. Ellen was pretty and sweet and soft-spoken, and always knew how to act, what to do. The fact that she had been brought up “well-moneyed” allowed her to glide into Hobart life with seamless ease. Ellen and John’s two children were, of course, equally flawless. So Elizabeth Hobart had coddled and spoiled them. She had not coddled Charlie. And she had not spoiled Jenny.
See How They Run Page 35
