by Lori Wilde
“It was a pretty good drawing, too, if I say so myself,” he said, bravely ignoring her near miss.
She parked the truck and looked at him, still finding it hard to believe he had been telling these tales about himself. “What happened?” she asked. “What made you change?”
His brown eyes darkened briefly, and his eyebrows returned to their almost perpetual scowl. His answer was curt.
“I grew up.”
During church services, Lanie wondered if she shouldn’t have stayed home to prepare for her guests. No, she assured herself, two hours should be plenty of time in which to make spaghetti and a salad and tidy up the place.
In her desire to serve a perfect meal to her guests, she worried about all the things that could go wrong. Lanie recalled the tuna casserole she’d made for herself last week.
It wasn’t until after she’d pulled the dish out of the oven that she had remembered the tuna. The unopened can had sat on the countertop, right where she’d left it.
Today, she promised herself, everything would be perfect for Dot and Walter. And, of course, Reece.
In the parking lot after services, Lanie managed to get a few more signatures for her petition before accepting a ride home from Dot.
She should have listened to her hunch and stayed home to make the spaghetti. As she threw together the ingredients, she realized she’d forgotten to buy a jar of sauce at the store yesterday.
Well, today she could let nothing distract her from her task. There was no time to go to the store. Lanie usually made do by dressing up prepared foods with seasonings and fresh vegetables.
Today, she would have to improvise even further. She peeled the tomatoes and nuked them in the microwave.
While they were going through the meltdown phase, Lanie tore up lettuce and chopped vegetables for a salad.
But when she combined the ground beef with the tomatoes and seasonings, it still didn’t look like sauce.
She stuck it back in the microwave and zapped the mixture for another few minutes. The schoolhouse clock on the kitchen wall seemed to tick faster.
Frantically, Lanie searched the pantry and refrigerator for something to thicken the concoction.
Ketchup!
As luck would have it, Reece chose that moment to appear at her back door. Feeling more self-conscious than usual, Lanie fluffed her hair and let him in.
Instead of his usual shorts and casual shirt, he wore a white, burgundy-striped shirt with coordinating tie and dark-blue slacks.
He carried cheesecake, artfully decorated with graham cracker crumbs and cherry topping. Seeing his creation and having him find her in the middle of her latest blunder, Lanie felt one-upped.
“My contribution,” he said. With the casualness of someone who visited often, Reece walked to the refrigerator and set the cheesecake on the bottom shelf. “Can I give you a hand?”
“Yeah, cover your eyes.”
Lanie squirted ketchup into the tomato-and-beef mixture. Then, uncapping the bottle, she poured the entire contents into it and stirred. Better. Much better.
“Do you always make spaghetti sauce this way?”
“Only when I have company coming in twenty minutes, and I don’t have a jar of the real stuff. It’s still too red, don’t you think?” Another search through the refrigerator turned up an assortment of spices and flavorings. “This should balance it out.”
“You don’t expect us to eat that, do you?”
“I told you to cover your eyes.” She continued doctoring the sauce.
“How about some barbecue sauce to go with that?”
“Don’t be gross. Why don’t you make some lemonade?”
A moment later, Lanie turned around to see a nicely shaped male backside protruding from her refrigerator. It was all she could do to keep from pinching him.
“What are you looking for?” she asked.
“Lemons. Where do you hide them?”
“You Aries always take everything so literally.” She reached into the pantry and handed him a package of lemonade mix. “You can jazz it up with a spritz of bottled lemon juice. Fools ’em every time.”
By the time Dot and Walter arrived, she had camouflaged the sauce with mushrooms, garlic, and onions. It didn’t taste half bad.
Dot oohed and aahed over the “heavenly smells” while Lanie got out the dishes.
“You’ll have to serve yourselves from the stove,” she told her guests, “because my table isn’t big enough to hold everything.”
It could barely accommodate the four of them. After everyone else was seated, Lanie squeezed into the empty chair between Walter and Reece. Her knee banged into Reece’s leg.
“Excuse me,” she said.
He’d been giving Walter the once-over, and he tossed her a questioning look. “What?”
“I kneed you,” she explained.
Dot choked on her lemonade. Walter solicitously patted her back while Reece groped for words.
“What I meant was—”
“My goodness,” Dot said to Walter after she’d caught her breath. “Didn’t I tell you they’d been making googly eyes at each other?”
“Can’t say as I blame them,” Walter responded. “Lanie’s a lovely girl, and Reece must have inherited all your good traits.” He patted Dot’s hand.
Lanie admired him for his diplomacy.
“My knee.” She persisted in trying to clear up the confusion. “What I was trying to say—”
“And she’s a good cook, too,” Dot declared. “This spaghetti is delicious.”
Walter nodded his agreement, and Lanie gave up trying to explain. “Elaine, honey, you must tell me what you use to give it this unusual flavor.”
Reece’s fork stopped midway between his plate and his mouth. It was a good thing he hadn’t taken the bite yet. From the look he threw Lanie, he might have sprayed the mouthful across the table.
Lanie kneed him again, this time on purpose. Silently, she threatened him against letting her blunder out of the bag.
It was bad enough that he was wise to her cooking shenanigans.
If Dot knew, she might laugh about it to the whole county. And Lanie certainly needed no help spreading her Zany Lanie reputation.
“Well, uh, I didn’t really measure anything.”
“I never do,” said Dot. “Sometimes my best recipes happen purely by accident.”
Reece coughed and covered a less-than-discreet smile with his napkin. Lanie cast him a warning look, but when their eyes met, her frown melted.
For a fleeting moment, they knew the pleasure of a shared secret. The knowledge isolated them from the older couple and strengthened the delicate bond that had grown between them.
“Lanie had mentioned earlier that her spaghetti sauce is a secret family recipe,” Reece told his mother.
“Oh, then I won’t pry,” Dot promised.
She smiled her thanks to Reece. He smiled back and gave her a conspiratorial half wink.
“See, they’re doing it again, Walter!”
Lanie rose abruptly from the table. “Would anyone like lemonade?” She poured herself another glass.
“Dot, you’re embarrassing the kids,” Walter chided.
“Oh, they’re not embarrassed. If they can smooch on the front porch for all the neighbors to see, then my little comments shouldn’t bother them at all. Isn’t that right, Maurice?”
Incredibly, under all that tan, Reece managed to blush. Somehow, Lanie didn’t figure him for the blushing type.
Reece loosened his tie. “Mom, there’s quite a distance— not to mention a few trees—between Lanie’s front porch and your house. Maybe you didn’t see what you thought you saw.”
“I didn’t say it was Lanie’s front porch,” she accused.
“Dot, you told me yourself that your eyesight isn’t what it used to be,” Walter interjected.
Dot daintily wiped her lips and set the napkin on the table. “A person can see more than constellations with that telescope I
borrowed from you, Walter.”
“Mom! You spied on us!”
“Yeah.” Lanie looked pointedly at Reece. “How dare she?”
Reece clammed up.
Although Lanie didn’t like being spied upon any more than he, she thoroughly enjoyed this unexpected turnabout. What was good for the goose was good for the mother.
“Not that I’m criticizing, mind you, but you really ought to be more careful,” said Dot. “The neighbors talk, you know.”
“And since you live across the road, that makes you a neighbor, doesn’t it?” Walter smiled good-naturedly and patted her hand again. “I thought the reason for this visit was so they could grill us, not the other way around.”
They took their desserts into the living room, and Walter regaled them with tales of his days as a military investigator. He was probably in his sixties but looked only fifty.
Walter and Dot made a perfect couple. Every so often, they’d exchange knowing looks or an affectionate touch. Without a doubt, Lanie knew they were in love, and she felt happy for them.
Even Reece seemed to approve. At first, he’d bristled when Walter had wrapped his arm familiarly around Dot’s waist, but soon Reece warmed to the older man’s congenial personality.
Surreptitiously, Dot continued to interrogate Lanie and Reece about how they’d spent their weekend. Then she turned her attention to Lanie.
“What are your plans for the future, Elaine? Do you want a large family?” Dot looked hopeful.
Dot had been asking Reece similar questions as well. Lanie was beginning to suspect, not for the first time, that Reece’s mother was trying her hand at matchmaking.
Obviously, the older woman was trying to make something out of that “just friends” kiss on the porch.
“Mom, I don’t think Lanie wants to discuss—”
“Nonsense. She doesn’t mind. So, how many children do you want?” she persisted.
Lanie sighed. The truthful answer was not what Dot wanted to hear. Nor was it something that Lanie wanted to address.
The sad fact was that Lanie was not cut out to be a mother. She couldn’t even keep her mind on target long enough to make a simple spaghetti dinner. How could she expect to feed a baby nutritious meals?
“I guess I’m a modern kind of woman,” she told Dot. “Children don’t seem to be in my future.”
Reece seemed intent on picking lint particles from his slacks.
Momentarily stunned, Dot sat silent. She quickly resumed stride. “You’ll change your mind. Once that biological clock starts ticking, babies will be all you can think about. Mark my words. Why, if Maurice hadn’t been such a big galoot, he would’ve had six or seven younger brothers and sisters.”
Reece quit picking lint and jerked his attention to his talkative mother. “Mom, don’t tell that story again. We just ate.”
“Oh, Maurice, you’ve been such an old fuddy-duddy ever since your father got sick. When are you going to learn to loosen up?” Then, despite her son’s scowl, she proceeded to tell the details of his difficult birth.
The next morning, Lanie and Winnie waited by the old pink truck for a ride to her car. Reece came out of the house and tossed her the keys.
“Wait a minute. I’ve already won the bet,” she declared.
“The deal was that you’d learn to drive by Monday morning. How do I know you haven’t forgotten how to shift gears since Saturday?”
“All right. I’ll show you.” She took the keys and climbed into the old truck. There was no way she’d let him weasel out of this bet—or giving her back her job.
Winnie made herself at home between them.
Reece scowled, but he didn’t object. Good, at least they wouldn’t start off with an argument.
Lanie backed the truck out of the driveway, concentrating all the while on when to apply the clutch and shift to first gear. That was when the left front fender rubbed the mailbox.
Darn! Lanie glanced at Reece, hoping against hope that he hadn’t noticed the faint scraping sound.
He had.
His dismay was immediately apparent. Lanie felt her stomach twist, both at damaging his treasured truck and at losing the bet.
Swiftly, the look on Reece’s face changed to triumph. He jumped out of the truck and went to inspect the damage.
Lanie’s heart sank to her feet. She didn’t want to look for another job or even work as a temporary secretary. She liked her job at Masardi’s and wanted to stay there.
From the gleeful expression Reece now wore, he planned on her paying up big-time.
He’d been annoyed with her on Friday after Winnie had ransacked the grain. This definitely was far worse. She had scratched the truck his father had given him. No doubt his “huge favor” would involve asking her to leave and never come back.
She got out to see for herself how bad it was. A long white line now merged with the numerous dents and rust spots. That wasn’t so bad.
To see it, a person would have to get as close as Reece, who now knelt beside the front tire to trace a finger along the telltale scratch. The revelation gave her confidence.
“That sound we heard—I think it was the tires crunching on gravel,” Lanie declared.
Reece smiled back at her and slowly shook his head.
Maybe if she was insistent enough, he’d believe it. “What makes you think I put that scratch there? It could have been there all along.” Lanie folded her arms across her chest and arrogantly looked down at him.
Reece stood up, clearly quite smug with himself. “The scratch isn’t rusted like the others.”
Lanie lifted her chin a little higher. “So?”
At that, Reece stepped beside her and slipped his arm around the small of her back. With a little pressure on her hip, just enough to send tiny tremors through her veins.
Reece guided her to the mailbox. He bent and pointed to a speck of pink paint clinging to the corner of the box.
No, she couldn’t let him win this bet. Not with the stakes she had riding on it.
“It doesn’t matter,” she argued. “The original terms were that I’d learn to drive this tub of rust by Monday—that’s today—‘without stripping the gears or wrecking it.’ Your words, not mine. I haven’t stripped the gears, have I?”
At his cynical smirk, she plowed forward. “And, technically, I haven’t wrecked it since this isn’t something you’d report to your insurance company. Therefore,” Lanie continued before she ran out of steam, “I demand that you honor your end of the bargain. You owe me one huge favor.”
There. Let him dispute that.
Suddenly aware that his hand lingered on the curve of her back, Reece stepped away.
“I guess if you want to get technical about it,” he said, “we both won this bet. What do you say we both pay up?”
He was curious as to her demands. Since he was the one who had set the terms, he’d just have to take his lumps if she insisted on doubling her salary or asking for something equally outrageous. He steeled himself, preparing for the worst.
“Deal,” she stated before he could argue otherwise. He took her proffered hand in his and marveled at its softness. “I want my job.”
What? Had he missed something? “The job is yours,” he said.
Relief washed over her features, and Reece only now noticed how tense she’d been.
“Thank you. You’ve lived up to your end of the bargain, and I’ll live up to mine. Ask away.”
11
Reece hesitated. This had been too easy. Why had she asked for something that was already hers?
His mind raced back over the events of the past few days. Had he somehow given the impression he didn’t want her working for him?
Admittedly she was slightly loony, but her work was exceptional, just as she’d promised that first day. In fact, in just two weeks, she’d proven herself to be even more organized and more productive than his own mother. And that was no simple feat.
“No funny business, Masardi. You pro
mised nothing immoral or illegal.”
He let his eyes sweep over her, taking in the way her turquoise slacks cinched tightly at the waist, the suspender straps molding over the soft curves of her bright jungle-print shirt.
She was not too lush, not too skinny. Any man would be proud to have her on his arm.
He’d probably live to regret this.
“Okay,” he said. “You’re going to the Bliss Banquet with me next month.”
Lanie studied him for a long moment before answering. True, she owed him whatever favor he asked. But she knew he didn’t want this particular “favor.” Hadn’t they both agreed it was ridiculous to consider a relationship outside of friendship?
“Look,” she said, “I know your mother put you up to this, so why don’t you ask for a favor you really want?”
Distractedly, he rumpled his hair. Lanie noticed how the dark hairs underneath contrasted sharply with the sun-bleached strands on top.
Her gaze took in the perfectly arched eyebrows that were every bit as dark as the hair untouched by the sun. She imagined herself trailing sensitive fingertips over those brows that resembled a hawk’s wings and raining light kisses on the darkly fringed lashes rimming those delicious chocolate eyes.
Ordinarily she didn’t care much for sweets, but chocolate had always been a weakness of hers.
When she realized where her thoughts were taking her, she quickly reined them in. Reminding herself that they’d wisely agreed to be just friends, she waited for him to rescind his request and think of another.
“I need a date,” he finally admitted, “and I didn’t know who else to ask.”
If she’d been insulted before, she now felt mortally wounded. To think that he’d asked her to accompany him because his mother had suggested it had been bad enough.
But to be told that he had only considered doing so after exhausting all other possibilities was humiliating, “just friends” or not.
“Oh, right,” she said, making no effort to suppress the sarcasm in her voice. “Go ahead and flatter me.”
“Lanie, that’s not what I meant.”
He reached for her, but she sidestepped him and flounced into the truck.
