By 11:20 AM, the irritated half of her brain was winning the battle. Only a third of the mothers and their children had bothered to show up, and when she’d wondered out loud where the others were, the adults in the room all looked at her in disbelief. “We figured you’d be at Grant Park,” one woman told her. “I only came because I needed to bring back a book.”
Rebecca tried to stifle the urge to throw something. “Well, I have no business at Grant Park right now, and I have a job to perform. Shall we start another story?”
Murmurs buzzed around her, and another woman, holding two small children and trying to distract a third from climbing on a table, asked innocently, “But haven’t you read the paper today?” Several newspapers, folded open to Elliot’s stupid column, were thrust into her lap and Rebecca groaned.
“I read it already, thanks.”
“Then what are you doing here?” The chorus of voices was bewildered.
Rebecca sat straighter in her chair and tried to look professional. “I have a job, and Mr. Elliot didn’t bother to see if I was available this morning,” she said shortly. “I’ll go when we’re finished here. Now, I think it’s time to move on. Would everyone come up here and get a glue stick and some googly eyes?”
Even as their small charges ran to where Rebecca was sitting their mothers rose to their feet en masse and started calling names. “Sam! Aidan! Patrick! It’s time to go!”
“No, it’s not!” Rebecca cried in disbelief as mothers took their protesting children by the hand and started dragging them toward the front door. “We haven’t finished yet!”
The young mother with three children under the age of three paused on her way out and patted Rebecca on the arm. “Honey, if that man loves you half as much as he says he does, you better get yourself to that fountain before he changes his mind.” Then, spying her oldest attempting to climb into the drop box, she ran down the hall.
Rebecca stood there for a minute, trying to figure out what had just happened. She sighed and turned around to go back and clean up when she spied all the on-duty librarians standing in a group behind her, gazing at her smugly.
“We knew it was you,” the circulation clerk whispered, folding her arms over her chest in a self-satisfied way. “We figured it all out on Monday.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Rebecca said shortly, and tried to move past them. The librarians didn’t budge.
“That columnist went to a lot of trouble to find our story lady,” the clerk, who was evidently the spokesperson, went on. “We talked amongst ourselves and put two and two together, and here we are. What are you doing here, anyway? You should be at Buckingham Fountain.”
If one more person told her that she was going to scream. “I have a job!” she yelled.
The librarians gasped and covered their mouths. Jen came up to her and led her to the door. “I think we’d all feel a lot better if you’d stop yelling and go meet Mr. Elliot at the park,” she said firmly. “I checked your schedule, and you don’t have to be anywhere until two. Now just go. We’ll pick up your mess,” she added when Rebecca looked over her shoulder toward the children’s section.
The next thing Rebecca knew she was standing in the hot Sun outside the library.
Elliot has a lot of explaining to do, she thought grimly as she stomped down the sidewalk toward Congress Parkway. Now he’d gotten her kicked out of the library by a mob of overly enthusiastic women, most of who seemed to be trailing after her. She’d have to steer them toward the non-fiction section later; it seemed they’d been spending too much time in romance. She stopped at the crosswalk and waited for the light to change. The streets seemed more crowded than usual, she noted. Was something happening downtown that she hadn’t heard about?
By the time the ‘walk’ sign appeared there were twenty people at the corner with her, most of them women. Some were carrying copies of that morning’s Tribune, and she started praying fervently that they weren’t all heading for Buckingham Fountain but knew it wasn’t any use. Elliot had said he received hundreds of emails a week in response to his columns, but surely he’d been exaggerating. Hadn’t he?
She caught snatches of different conversations as they walked down Congress, words like “romantic” and “I heard she hasn’t shown yet” winding their way to her ears. She groaned silently. What had Elliot been thinking?
She held her foot over the curb, ready to walk around the steadily growing crowd and head back to her car where she could hide in peace when a horn blared at her. She jumped back onto the sidewalk and opened her mouth to yell at the driver when the car screeched to a halt and Locke stepped out. He slammed the door behind him and, grabbing Rebecca’s arm, steered her back onto the sidewalk and into the throng making its way down the street.
“Where have you been?” he asked, not letting her go. “I’ve been trying to call you for the past half hour.”
Shooting him a withering look, Rebecca tried to pull her arm free. “I always turn my phone off when I’m in the middle of a story hour,” she said pointedly. “Let go. I need to go back to the library.”
“No, you don’t,” he told her. “Jen called me a few minutes ago and told me you had left the library under duress and were on your way to the fountain. She seemed to think you might need a little encouragement to make it all the way there, so I hopped in a cab and came to find you. Why do you look so angry?” he asked, taking a good look at her face and slowing his rapid footsteps. “You look like you want to kill someone.”
“I do,” she told him through gritted teeth. “I specifically told Elliot not to write about me, and now he’s got the greater part of the Chicago headed to see me profess my undying love and devotion to him. And if you don’t let go of my arm, I might hurt you after I finish him off.”
Locke raised his eyebrows but he let her arm drop to her side. “That’s better,” she muttered, and let the crowd push her toward Columbus Drive. Locke fell into step next to her, his hands clasped behind his back.
“So what are you going to do once we get there?” he asked, looking up at the cloudless Sky.
Rebecca’s first response was that she was going to tell Elliot never to talk to her again, but she knew that no matter how angry she was, she couldn’t go through with it. “Right now I want to break his nose,” she said after a long pause.
“If it makes you feel any better, Elliot’s been waiting by that fountain since eight this morning. He was hoping you’d read his column a little earlier. When did you finally read it?” he asked curiously.
Glancing at her watch, Rebecca said, “About an hour ago.”
“I told him he was taking a huge risk,” Locke mused, shaking his head. “But he heard us talking last night and hit ‘send’ before thinking twice, and by the time you’d left and he’d realized what he’d done, it was too late to change the column. So here he is, hoping like anything that you’ll come and save his sorry skin. I don’t think you could break his nose, even if you tried,” he added critically, looking at Rebecca’s hand. “I don’t think you’re strong enough. Or outraged enough.”
“Oh, believe me, I’m furious enough to do some damage.” Rebecca’s pace quickened when she got angry, and by this time she was almost running. “I think I might enjoy seeing his blood.”
“Rebecca!” A pair of arms was thrown enthusiastically around her neck, and Rebecca was surrounded by Cassie’s perfume. “I can’t believe I found you! Why didn’t you take a cab? It’s much faster, and you’d already be there by now.”
Rebecca tried to breathe as Cassie grip tightened. “The library’s only half a mile from Grant Park,” she pointed out, gasping for air when Cassie finally let her go. “It’s not like the park’s on the other side of the city, you know.”
“You’re probably right. Hey, Locke. Are you here to see the fun, too?”
Locke looked at Rebecca briefly before turning his attention to Cassie. “Something like that. Hold on to her, will you? She has an annoying tendency to
bolt.”
Without skipping a step, Cassie slid her arm through her sister’s and kept talking. “You’re not really going to wear that, are you?” she asked, looking over Rebecca’s outfit. “I know it’s one I picked out, but honestly. The man practically proposed to you, and you look like Marian from ‘The Music Man.’”
Rebecca tried not to roll her eyes. “She was a librarian, Cassie. I work in a library. And if you didn’t like these clothes, why did you pick them out?”
Cassie huffed. “Well, they’re not bad for work, and I figured the only people who’d see you when you wore them would be a bunch of drooling kids, not the man you’ve been obsessing over for the past three months. Why couldn’t you wear one of your dresses?”
Figuring that this comment didn’t deserve a response, Rebecca fixed her eyes on her feet. Somehow they were slowing down, and when she looked back up to see what was causing the delay, she stopped walking altogether and tried not to turn around and run for her life.
They’d reached the corner of Congress and Columbus, where Grant Park was located, and there were so many people milling around that police officers were in the middle of the street directing traffic. Rebecca spotted several news vans, and reporters were scattered throughout the park with cameras in their hands.
Without warning the urge to run disappeared, leaving only red-hot anger in its wake. Rebecca shook off Locke and Cassie’s hands and moved forward. “Thanks for getting me this far,” she said without looking back at them, and, her hands balled into fists at her side, she darted away, glad that she was small enough to flit through crowds easier than her taller friends.
She kept going, pushing her way through people craning to see over the tops of their neighbors’ heads, and nearly getting trampled when someone shouted, not far from where she stood, that the infamous Rebecca Done had finally been spotted. She froze and contemplated the need to change her name when she was done with Elliot, but when the excited noises had died down once again she pressed forward, eager to get the whole mess over and done with.
She was almost to the fountain when the crowd started chanting. “Ten, nine, eight…” She’d lost her watch somewhere between the library and the fountain, but knew why they were counting. For a split second, she considered being late on purpose, but then she looked up and saw mist floating lazily through the air. She was almost there, and as furious as she was feeling, it would be stupid to get this far only to stand there and wait, just to prove a point.
“Three, two, one.” The crowd fell silent as no one appeared, and the hourly water show started in front of her. It was easier to make her way through the last few rows of people, and when she finally emerged from the throng she looked around. Elliot was nowhere in sight. Of all the fountains in the city, she thought in irritation, Elliot had to pick the biggest one. For all she knew he was all the way at the other end. It could take her hours to get through all the people to find him, and when she did…
Then she saw Elliot walk around the corner. He stood at the edge of the fountain, his hands in his pockets as he gazed into the upturned faces around him.
It was that sight of Elliot, looking so ridiculously hopeful and anguished at the same time that made her eyes narrow. She moved one foot in front of the other. Rebecca watched him take a deep breath and turn away from her, and when he did, she ran up behind him and jabbed him on the back as hard as she could.
He barely had time to blink at her before her hand connected with his face, and his head jerked back from the force she’d put into her slap. “What the–”
She had her hand pulled back to slap him again in the off-chance that he hadn’t gotten it the first time around, but he reached out and grabbed her wrist before she could hit him again. She stood there, breathing heavily, her eyes flashing at him. In all her years of dealing with her father and her sister and all the stupid, hurtful things they’d done to her, she’d never felt this much anger toward a single person in her life.
The crowd was eerily silent as Elliot grabbed her other hand, she assumed to keep the untouched side of his face safe, and stared at her. “I take it you read my column,” he said finally, his voice pitched low enough that she had to lean toward him to hear his words over the sound of the water shooting into the air behind them.
“I can’t believe you didn’t have the guts to do this in private,” she spat. “You promised you wouldn’t write about me in the paper again.”
A guilty expression crossed Elliot’s face but he didn’t look away from her. “I did,” he said. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am that I broke that promise. But I’d sat down to rewrite the column, and then I heard you talking to Locke across the hall and the words just poured out. I meant everything I wrote, if that helps any.”
“Right now, nothing you say is going to make a difference.” Still glaring at him she pulled her wrists free and took a step back. “Don’t worry; I’m not going to hit you again.”
Elliot rubbed his reddening cheek and closed the distance she’d placed between them. His eyes were desperate. “In my column I asked you to come if you felt anything for me,” he said hesitantly. “Can I assume, from your actions just now, that it’s hopeless?”
Rebecca crossed her arms over her chest and glared at him. “That depends,” she said. “Can you repeat the words that you wrote to my face, or can we only communicate via the newspaper? Because if that’s the case then I think–”
Before she could get any more words out Elliot placed his hands on either side of her face and said in a voice loud enough to be heard over the pounding of the fountain, “Rebecca, I love you. I’ve loved you since I first laid eyes on you, even before you knew I existed. I can’t live without you. Can you feel even a little for me in return?”
Still glaring, she gazed up at him. She wasn’t quite finished yet. “Maybe. If you promise, and I mean promise, never to write about me again.”
Elliot swallowed hard and opened his mouth to respond. Then he closed it, cleared his throat, and tried again. “I swear on all I hold dear that I will never even think about you while writing another column. Or anything else.”
Grudgingly satisfied, she stopped glaring, but her hands remained on her hips. “Please, Rebecca,” Elliot begged. “Tell me you didn’t come all this way to tell me not to write about you in the paper anymore.”
“Of course not, you idiot,” she said, the fire returning to her eyes. “I came to tell you that I love you.”
The words were barely out of her mouth before his lips were on hers in the sweetest kiss they’d ever shared. Rebecca’s brain went off line, and when it did, her indignation finally dissipated. The only thing she was aware of was Elliot’s arms wrapped tightly around her and the feel of his lips as he breathed into her mouth, “I love you, too.” Only the sound of the crowd cheering and clapping their approval finally brought them to their senses, and Elliot pulled back far enough to whisper, “Never leave me again. Please. I don’t know if I could stand it a second time.”
“I promise,” she breathed before she brought his face back down to hers, sealing her words with a kiss so fervent they were both gasping when they broke apart. They turned, with slightly stunned faces, toward the crowd that was surging toward them.
The rest of the day passed in a blur. Somehow they managed to escape from the park, hopping into the first cab they saw and going back to the library. Elliot refused to let go of her, even going so far as to pull her onto his lap in the taxi, his face buried in her hair. She laughed when he followed her inside and down the hall to the back room where she’d left her lunch.
“I’m not letting you out of my sight,” was all he would say. “I’ve been waiting for this day for seven years, and I’m not giving up a second of it.”
She smiled at him and touched his face before pushing the door open. When they walked in, ten pairs of eyes looked at them expectantly. “We’ve been waiting for you,” someone called from the back. “We saw the whole thing on the twelve o’clock news.�
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Rebecca could feel herself grin foolishly at them, and Elliot wound his arms around her waist from behind. “Come on, Rebecca, kiss him!” the circulation clerk shouted.
“Yeah, Rebecca, kiss him,” Elliot murmured in her ear before he turned her around in his grasp. Blushing furiously, she stood on her tiptoes and met him halfway. She tried to pull back after a second or two but, having none of that, he pulled her even tighter to him and refused to let go. Rebecca heard several wolf whistles behind her, but for once she didn’t care. When she finally broke away, laughing and gasping for breath, he had a very self-satisfied grin on his face that faltered when he caught her thoughtful look.
“What is it?” he asked anxiously. “Please don’t tell you were wondering how long that was going to last.”
She laughed and buried her face in his toned chest. “Of course not, silly. I was wondering how I could get out of my two o’clock session without getting in trouble.”
They heard someone clear their throat, and when Rebecca looked up, she saw Sarah standing behind Elliot. “I just had the strangest phone call from the Jefferson Park branch. They told me that after seeing the news this afternoon, all the parents for your afternoon session called to cancel.” She paused and smiled. “Evidently, all the mothers said to tell you they hope you have an enjoyable weekend, and they’ll see you next Friday.”
Before she could say a word, Sarah held the door open and Elliot pulled her out and down the hall. They were laughing when they reached her car. “What should we do now?” she asked, not really caring.
“Besides get out of here, you mean? Drive me to the park again so I can get my car, and I’ll follow you to your apartment. I have a feeling if we stick around here much longer we’ll have another audience, and I really don’t feel like sharing you today.”
Ten minutes later, she was speeding down the freeway, her window open and Elliot following a safe distance behind her. When she stopped in front of her building, she stepped out and waited for him to pull something out of his trunk.
The Ex's Confession Page 36
