by Geri Krotow
As human as me.
“I can’t get my work done.” Bitterness churned up from his belly like acid reflux. “You’ve screwed me at my busiest time of year.”
Had she ever once in her life thought of anyone other than herself?
“You’ve got big amends to make. Huge.”
Hurt lingered in her eyes and he fought the urge to soften his words because he wasn’t mad at just her. He was furious with himself because even after the nightmare of her hitting him with her car and breaking part of his body, his knee-jerk, teenaged reaction to her was to turn to jelly.
Some boys never grew up where some girls were concerned.
Those boyhood memories, those significant moments of teenage mortification, rose too close to the surface. She had never been intentionally cruel. He just hadn’t existed for her, in her world—not even on the periphery of it. What boy wants to be invisible to a beautiful girl?
Back then he’d been a tall redhead, growing like a weed. How could he possibly have been invisible to her?
That wasn’t all of the truth, though, was it? There had been that one time when she’d seen him and had been cruel. Intentionally? He didn’t know.
There’d been a gaggle of pretty girls standing in the hallway at their lockers when he had walked by. He had thought of them as worldly fourteen-year-olds to his thirteen-year-old unsophisticated self, aggressive in his opinions because without them he was just...awkward.
Monica—tall, gorgeous and perfect in every way—had been in the center of the whirling vortex of giggling femininity.
One of the girls had pointed to him and whispered something to Monica. She’d glanced his way, coolly, because that’s how she did everything—with calm self-assurance.
His ever-hopeful young self had thought, This is it. Monica Accord is finally going to acknowledge me, and talk to me!
After that one brief glance, she had turned away, dismissing him and leaving him to feel invisible again. And after a word to her friends that had set them off giggling, he became worse than invisible. He was shunned and ignored and left to feel worthless.
He didn’t know what mean or unkind remark she had said about him, but his hatred of her had started that day. Problem was, it was worse than pure hatred. It was love-hate from afar and he was a fool for still falling under her spell, especially when he clearly still meant nothing to her.
He knew he meant less than nothing to her because, since high school, she’d spent the better part of her adult life ignoring him, except for that damned polite little smile the odd time when their paths crossed. And that he could do without.
In the grand scheme of things, this was peanuts. In his work with the poor and needy, especially in New Orleans after Katrina, he had seen true hardship. He had no illusions this wasn’t on the list of the worst things that could happen to a guy, he knew that, but it had happened during those impressionable, early adolescent years, a time fraught with raging new feelings.
As it turned out, it had been a pivotal event that had shaped his life for years to come.
Her behavior on the previous weekend, drinking and driving, cemented what he had always known about her—Monica Accord was still as self-centered and self-indulgent as ever. The town might accept her goody-two-shoes image, but he knew better.
The cast on his arm and his bruised ribs told a more accurate story.
So, no, he had no use for her, but today he required her help. No choice. It put him in the impossible position of needing her, but not wanting her.
Her gaze dropped, and then shot back to his face. “You’re wearing socks...with sandals.”
“So what?”
“It’s so unfashionable.”
“Seriously?” Still an airhead, believing that fashion was more important than anything. What about poverty? Need? What about war? What about—? Ah, hell, none of it mattered to Monica.
“It’s chilly in the mornings.” That he sounded defensive further inflamed his irritation. “My toes freeze if I don’t wear socks.” Crazy woman. What the heck difference did it make? “So? How many hours did they give you for a DWAI?”
“Two hundred for a wet reckless.”
“They dropped the driving with ability impaired?” he asked, incredulous. Once again the rich got favors while the common man was screwed. “Why? Did you get a break because you’re one of the mighty Accords?”
The delicacy of her frown bothered him. Was there anything Monica did that wasn’t attractive? “Not exactly, Noah. In fact, Dad wasn’t happy when Judge Easton took his seat to preside over my sentencing. He said I was lucky he hadn’t made things worse, not better.” She fiddled with the hem of her shirt. She was nervous? Couldn’t be. Not Monica. “I don’t know why it got knocked down. You’d have to ask my lawyer how he reduced the charge. He worked it all out.”
Despite what Monica’s father had told her, he and the judge were cronies. Had to be. What else would it have been? Once again, money talked, and that made him livid. “Your lawyer? Don’t you mean your daddy’s lawyer?” He was being sarcastic and cutting, and he didn’t like that in himself, but God, he was mad. At a time when he needed to be strong in order to get massive amounts of work done, she’d turned him into half a man. Helplessness fueled his outrage.
As an awkward kid trying to come to grips with bones that were growing too quickly for his muscles to keep up, he’d been beat on by a group of nasty boys, repeatedly. Day in and day out, they would hold him down while Kenny Rickard whaled on him.
Helpless to defend himself, he’d grown to hate that feeling.
He wouldn’t complain, though. He’d never once snitched.
Over time, he had grown into his bones and his gangly limbs had filled out. These days, at six-one and two hundred pounds of lean muscle, he could fight anyone who tried to hurt him, but Monica Accord could still bring him to his knees with nothing more than a glance. Plus, she’d handicapped him physically.
Worst thing she could have done to him was to make him feel helpless.
“You broke my arm.” Lame. She already knows that, Cameron.
Her pretty lips thinned. “For God’s sake, not on purpose.” She sounded angry.
Good. Welcome to my world.
He stepped closer. “Let’s get something straight. I’m not happy about you being here, but you caused this—” he pointed to the cast “—so I’m going to work the daylights out of you. Farming is a tough, physical business, so be prepared to work like you’ve never worked before for your mandated two hundred hours.”
A woman like Monica would never have volunteered for such a job.
Disgusted, he growled, “Let’s get started. Follow me.”
He turned away, but she touched his good hand to stop him. Fireworks zinged up his arm.
“Okay, Noah, you want to clear the air? Fine.” He’d never heard her sound so hard. “I’m not any happier about this than you are. I hate that I broke your arm. I don’t like hurting people.”
She took a deep breath, to calm herself he assumed, but what the hell did she have to be angry about? She hadn’t been injured in the accident. “I’ve never driven drunk before—never—but as my lawyer said, it takes only one time for something bad to happen. I’m sorry I hit you. I will pay to replace your bicycle. I’ve already offered more than once.”
“It was vintage. It can’t be replaced.”
“Well, I’m going to try. Give me all the details you can and I’ll track one down.” She tilted her head to one side. “Or can yours be fixed?”
“It’s in bad shape. You really hit me hard. We’re both lucky all I got was a broken arm. You could have killed me.”
He wasn’t sure, but he thought she shivered.
“Maybe you have a conscience, after all,” he conceded. “In my experience, rich people rarely do.”
“Stereotype much, Noah?”
“As I said, I’ve come by it honestly. Through experience.”
One long-fingered hand rubbed her st
omach. What was that about? “I am really, truly sorry. I don’t know how many more times I can say it. Let’s move forward from here, okay? Show me what I need to do to help you.”
So, the spoiled girl knew how to be reasonable. Okay, he could be, too.
“Do you know how to farm?”
“Nope.”
“Do you keep houseplants?”
“Never.”
“Do you know anything about plants?”
“Nada.”
“Oh, crap.” Visions of how useful she would be to him evaporated like the last vestiges of morning dew dried up by the sun. He stared at Monica in her designer jeans and absolutely useless loafers.
His silly dreams of a capable helper came to a screeching halt. She was going to be useless to him—even less so than he’d imagined.
None of his friends or family had the time to help him out, and he couldn’t afford to hire employees.
Instead, he was stuck with Monica Accord.
What made it all truly rotten was that despite despising everything that Monica stood for—her princess-in-an-ivory-tower lifestyle, her frivolity, her designer clothing that embodied crass consumerism, her uselessness—Noah still felt those awful pangs, the ones he’d had in high school that had been worse than the growing pains in his long legs, worse than the way the other kids made fun of his retro clothing and taunted him his fervent fights to save the environment. He still felt those awful, unwelcome and debilitating pangs of unrequited puppy love.
For two hundred long, long hours, he would be stuck with Monica, golden goddess, former cheerleader and prettiest prom queen Accord High had ever seen.
As he led her around to the back porch of the house to hunt down a pair of rubber boots that might fit her, he said it again, with feeling. “Oh, crap.”
* * *
FOR THE FOURTH time in the two hours Monica had been weeding, Noah yelled at her.
“What are you doing?” Along with his harsh shout came a shadow that cut off light.
Behind his head, the sun created a halo around Noah’s too-long red hair. Wisps of it had escaped his ponytail and curled in the heat.
“That’s not a weed,” he cried. “It’s a radish.”
Rats. She’d screwed up again. Cramming it back into the earth, she shoved soil around the roots with shaking hands. She’d been pulling up too many plants. She just couldn’t tell them apart. She wished she could. Contrary to what Noah seemed to think, she didn’t like screwing up, especially when he’d drilled into her that she was wasting food.
“It will be okay.” She picked up the pail beside her and watered the radish. “Honest, I’ll check it again tomorrow to make sure it survived.”
He crouched down, too close. Noah had grown up well. Really well. His eyes sparkled like bright green gems. The man exuded a lot of heat. His mouth, a flat slash that divided his red mustache and beard, signaled his disapproval. Usually when she saw him around town, his lips were full and on the verge of an ever-ready smile—not that she’d noticed.
“No, Monica, it won’t recover from being yanked out of the soil when it’s still so young. Would you recover?”
Abruptly, he stood and stomped away, clearly agitated, but spun back and moved close to her again. “Every plant that dies is food that doesn’t make it to someone’s plate. Understand?”
“I know. You’ve already told me a million times since I got here.”
“You know nothing about hunger or poverty. All you’ve ever known is privilege.”
Why did he take such pleasure in making her feel ashamed of who she was? “I get it, Noah. I truly do.” Monica stood, because she didn’t like that he was taller than her at the best of times, let alone when she was kneeling in the dirt. “Whether or not you choose to believe me, I’m trying my hardest to do a good job.”
She took off her sun hat and wiped her forehead with her sleeve. It came away damp with sweat. “You have to understand how new this is to me, Noah.” She touched his arm, but he pulled away, so she dropped her hand to her side. Even before she’d hit him on Friday night, he’d always seemed to go out of his way to avoid her. Why did he dislike her so much? “I want to get this right. I really do. Okay?”
“Okay,” he muttered, but she had the sense it wasn’t, that there was something going on beneath the surface that Noah wasn’t explaining to her—something she couldn’t figure out on her own.
It messed with her nerves so she gave up trying. “I have to leave. I start work in forty-five minutes and I have to wash up first.” She took a small pink notebook and matching pen out of her back pocket and wrote down a sentence indicating she’d put in her first two hours of her sentence. She handed the book to him. “Initial here, please.”
“Aren’t you the organized little beaver?” Ignoring the pen, he fished a pencil stub out of his jeans and scrawled his initials across the page, a messy slash beside her tidy script.
She held back a knee-jerk response, totally getting that he had a right to be angry, but his sarcasm hurt. She rose above it by ignoring it. One of them had to be the adult here.
“Write down all of the details about your bike, too.”
When he’d finished and handed the notebook back to her, she said, “I’ll be back tomorrow morning at the same time.”
She trudged to her car, tired already, and she still had to put in a full day at work.
With Noah’s hot gaze burning through the shirt on her back, she started the car and drove away.
Once in town, she detoured to her apartment to shower and change for work. It wasn’t quite ten and here she was having her second shower of the day.
She threw on a bit of makeup then ran out the door.
For over a year now, Monica had been working at The Palette, the only art shop in town. She stepped through the doorway and found the gallery cool, a godsend after the past two hours spent under the hot sun.
The owner, Olivia Cameron, Noah’s mom, stood talking to one of the sculptors whose work they stocked. Gorgeous Aiden McQuorrie had his focus squarely centered on Olivia. Even though she was fifteen years his senior, she held him in sway. Monica sighed. So romantic. Everyone in town knew they were getting it on every chance they got. In the year since Olivia had started to date Aiden, after much persuasion on Aiden’s part to get her over her reluctance because of their age difference, she had blossomed.
Monica smiled. Understandably, Aiden was Olivia’s favorite sculptor.
When Aiden stepped past Monica to leave, his glance sympathetic—he knew how angry Olivia was with her—he squeezed her arm then left the gallery.
Olivia approached, every beautifully dyed strand of hair in place, her peach suit expensive and understated—her sophisticated demeanor a sharp contrast to Aiden’s rough-hewn, restless energy.
Another case of the attraction of opposites, like me and Billy.
Olivia, a former housewife, had started the art gallery years ago and, through determination and sheer grit, had nurtured it into a successful enterprise.
Oh, how Monica admired her. She would love to be a businesswoman, but had no idea what kind of business she would start.
Working on commission in an art gallery and living on a small widow’s benefit, Monica didn’t have a lot of money, wasn’t married and didn’t have children, nor did she really have a career. In short, she was floating through life, about as aimless as a leaf drifting on the surface of a stream.
She certainly wasn’t directing her life toward any place she wanted to go.
Olivia glared at Monica. It was all too much—first her son and now her. Monica’s nerves jangled like someone plucking loose guitar strings. Olivia had been cool with her since she’d run down her son last week.
It made Monica’s heart ache because she truly liked Olivia. They’d become good friends. Monica had—dare she think it?—begun to see Olivia as a mother figure.
Now the relationship suffered because of Monica’s flawed decisions on Friday night. Monica couldn’t
be more grateful to Olivia for giving her a job, for showing faith in her, but Olivia had also gifted her with friendship...only to now withdraw it.
It hurt.
Monica stifled her longing for things to be normal. She had loved spending time with Olivia on their monthly spa days. She would secretly pretend she had a mom she could hang out with.
The sadness of that loss overwhelmed her. It left a heaviness in her heart more burdensome than the guilt she felt when she was with Noah. She wanted her affectionate relationship with Olivia back. She turned away to surreptitiously wipe her damp eyes.
Struggling to make amends, she said, “I’m sorry I’m late, Olivia.”
“How did it go in court yesterday?” Olivia asked, her tone too cold for Monica’s liking. “Everything okay?”
“I have to perform two hundred hours of community service.”
Monica straightened a painting. She genuinely loved the shop and the art they sold. A little more challenge in her job wouldn’t hurt, but at least this brought in a paycheck. “My lawyer plea-bargained down from a driving with ability impaired to a wet reckless.”
Olivia’s mouth thinned. She didn’t like the break Monica’s lawyer had managed to negotiate any better than Noah had, but then she was a mother bear concerned for her cub. Monica just wished Mama Bear wasn’t also her boss.
“Community service?” Olivia asked. “There’s nothing like that available in Accord. Where do you have to go? Denver?”
“Noah’s farm. I have to grow plants.”
A mean little smile tugged at the corners of Olivia’s mouth. “You have to farm?”
Oh, dear. It looked like Olivia was going to enjoy Monica’s discomfort just as much as Noah. “I don’t know a thing about farming and now I have to help Noah grow his vegetables. Yes. I have to farm.”
Olivia’s glance took in the sleeveless sage linen dress and the rose pumps Monica had donned in a hurry a few minutes ago.
“Good luck.” The hard edge of Olivia’s voice saddened Monica even while she tried to cut Olivia some slack.
“I was already there this morning pulling up plants instead of weeds. They all look the same to me. Noah was angry.” Monica crossed her arms and grasped her elbows. She knew she sounded unhappy, but there wasn’t much she could do about it. What had the judge been thinking? She needed to talk to Daddy, to find out why he’d groaned when Judge Easton had entered the courtroom yesterday morning. Unless Monica had it wrong, there was history between the two of them—and now she was paying the price.
