After Darke

by Heather MacAllister

  “Because I’m not blind to the faults of the city or the people who live in it.”

  “But what gives you the right?”

  “Anyone has the right to express an opinion. I just happen to get paid for mine.”

  “And how did that happen?”

  “A friend of my mother’s is an editor of a weekly magazine here, and she started buying blurbs I’d submit for their ‘About Town’ column.”

  “Oh, connections.”

  “That’s the way of the world.”

  “Not for everyone. Some of us make our own way.”

  Bonnie had been talking to Jaron’s profile all this time. At her last remark, he turned his head away from the city lights and fastened his gaze on her. He let the silence lengthen, and Bonnie was tempted to break it, but it became very important to her not to give in. Why, she couldn’t say. Maybe because she wanted him to realize that he was a grown man still trading on his mother’s influence. She struggled not to let her lips slide into a sneer.

  “And I understand that you’re a plumber?” he verified mildly.

  “Yes,” Bonnie replied, ready to defend her profession.

  “And your parents?”

  “They own a combination hardware store and grocery in Cooper’s Corner.”

  “A hardware store.” His expression didn’t change. “How convenient for you.”

  He didn’t have to say anything more. Bonnie felt her face heat even as she mounted an oh-so-weak protest. “It’s not the same thing.” But it was.

  “You mean no one ever buys a...a toilet thing and asks if your parents know a good plumber to install it?”

  “No.” Everyone in town already knew who she was.

  He gave her a half smile she would have found sexy on any other man. “Bonnie, Bonnie, you disappoint me. I expected better. You’ve clearly lost this point. Give up and attack me on another subject.”

  “What?”

  He gave her an impatient look. “Obviously, I’m right and you’re wrong.”

  “I don’t think it’s so obvious!” Bonnie’s voice sounded shrill to her own ears, probably because her mind was bombarding her with evidence supporting Jaron’s claim. The fact that she used her parents’ storage space and bought all her supplies through them, the fact that the desk and phone in the store’s basement constituted her office...rent free. And her mother sometimes answered the phone....

  “Oh, all right!” she snapped.

  “There’s no need to apologi—”

  “I wasn’t going to!”

  “Not to me,” he said dryly. “For using connections to establish yourself.”

  “I wasn’t going to apologize for that, either!”

  “You don’t have to. That was my point.”

  “But your points always seem so...so superior!”

  After a moment, Jaron asked in a different tone of voice, “This isn’t working, is it?”

  “Did you think it would?”

  His gaze flicked over her. To her complete disgust, she felt a warmth kindle in her stomach. Of course, that could be hunger. It better be hunger.

  “It’s just one evening, Bonnie.”

  She hated—hated—that he’d already cataloged her as a “not possible.” She hated knowing it. And she hated that she hated it. He hadn’t even given her a chance.

  But why should she care?

  “Would you like to go back to your aunt’s?” he asked.

  It was very tempting, but would result in too many questions. Or really, only a few questions asked many, many times.

  She shook her head. “I think it would be best to carry on.”

  He stared at her for a long moment. “I’m not sure it’s worth the effort.”

  If he’d slapped her, Bonnie wouldn’t have been more surprised. “What a nasty thing to say!”

  “Come on. We can’t even carry on a civil conversation.”

  A tiny inner voice started to point out her less-than-stellar behavior this evening, but since Bonnie already knew what it was going to say, she didn’t bother to listen. She couldn’t think of anything to say to Jaron, either, and just sat there and goggled at him like the hick he seemed to think she was.

  “What I hope you’ll explain before we part is why you agreed to this date if you’d already made up your mind that you didn’t like me,” Jaron said at last.

  “I agreed before...” She trailed off.

  “Before you read my columns?”

  Bonnie nodded. “But the instant you saw me, you sneered.”

  “I don’t sneer.”

  “Yes, you do. And it’s a great sneer.”

  “Is it?” He looked pleased.

  “Oh, yeah. You just barely move your lips, and your upper lip on the left side rises just the tiniest bit.” She indicated the distance with her thumb and forefinger. “An outstanding sneer. First rate. The best I’ve ever seen. You don’t even need the glasses thing to go with it.”

  “The glasses thing?”

  “Oh, you know. The whole dark glasses at night. Staring at a person, sneering, then taking off your glasses as though you’re looking at an insect. Trust me, the glasses are overkill.”

  There it was again, that flicker of amused interest in his eyes.

  And just as before, it caused an answering warmth within her.

  There was something about him that got to her and she sure wished it didn’t.

  “I’m not my columns.”

  “I guess I’ll never know.”

  He stared at her some more, his lips curving sneerlessly this time, then leaned toward the driver. “Little Italy. Mulberry Street.”

  “Changed your mind?” Bonnie asked. Stop feeling relieved.

  “You changed my mind.”

  His voice had dropped a notch, and Bonnie’s heart picked up a beat or two in response.

  Settling back against the plush seat, facing her this time, Jaron said, “And now you must tell me all about being a plumber.”

  “Why must I tell you?” She was cross because she did not want to feel attracted to Jaron Darke.

  “Because it was what intrigued me about you. I’ve never known a plumber socially, and you must admit that it’s an unusual occupation for a woman.”

  Bonnie inhaled, not ready to admit any such thing, when that little voice inside shouted—screamed, actually—and what it screamed was, “Shut up!”

  So she heeded it, something she should have done much earlier.

  She exhaled, and began to tell the story she’d told countless times before. “As you know, my parents own the town hardware store. People would buy replacement ball cocks...” Jaron’s left eyelid flinched and she smiled inwardly. A girl could have fun, couldn’t she? And that was what they were called.

  “...or faucet washers, and I’d earn a little money by installing them. Pretty soon, I learned that the more I knew how to do, the more money I would earn.”

  “Yes, but that’s true of most situations. Something had to draw you to plumbing.” His tone implied that he couldn’t imagine what.

  “I think it was that plumbing drew me away from teaching—that’s what I studied. I do like living in Cooper’s Corner and I suppose I just got caught up in the whole teaching mystique.”

  “Hmm.” Jaron looked into the distance. “I need some help visualizing this ‘teaching mystique.”’

  “Well, I didn’t, and that was the problem. First of all, you must paint a mental image of Theodore Cooper Elementary.” Bonnie used her hands to indicate an imaginary canvas. “Think little red schoolhouse surrounded by colorful fall foliage, think wood-burning stove—”

  “No—really?”

  Bonnie nodded. “But only in the foyer. The rest has been modernized, but not
too much, you know? It’s still so picturesque, it hurts. I swear, the ghost of Norman Rockwell haunts that building.”

  Jaron laughed. “That’s pretty good. I might steal that line sometime.”

  “Go ahead, I probably heard it somewhere myself.” Bonnie tried not to be pleased that she’d made him laugh. “Now imagine little girls in pigtails and crisp plaid jumpers, and little boys with slicked-back hair, new jeans and plaid shirts, all sitting eagerly at their polished oak desks, listening as I, dressed in a white blouse, pearls and a full skirt—”

  “Plaid?”

  She grinned. “Probably.”

  He grinned back. He didn’t look half-bad when he was really smiling. “So the teaching mystique is wrapped in plaid.”

  “Only in the fall. In winter, there are cute sweaters and velvet. I think I was mentally casting a long-distance telephone commercial. Anyway, the point here is that I thought teaching was all about happy little kids bringing me apples.” She was silent for a moment. “I lost a child my first day in charge of a class.”

  He grew still. “It...ended well?”

  “Eventually. The little girl just decided she’d had enough school for the day and wanted to go home. So she did. I, however, thought she was in the bathroom. The whole incident taught me that regimented bathroom breaks are not all that barbaric.”

  He laughed. Bonnie managed a halfhearted chuckle and shook her head.

  “Hey, it was a beginner’s mistake,” Jaron said when he noticed she wasn’t laughing.

  “That’s what my aunt Gina said. She’s a teacher there. Except it was a spectacularly huge mistake.”

  “It could have happened—”

  “No, it couldn’t. And I did not want to see what other spectacularly huge mistakes I could make, so I cut short my teaching career.”

  Jaron seemed at a loss for words. Bonnie suspected it didn’t happen very often, and was doing a little internal gloating when he quietly spoke and caught her off guard.

  “I’m sorry.” He looked as if he meant it.

  She didn’t want him to mean it because that would indicate he had some redeeming characteristics. If so, there was a possibility that she might actually begin to like him in addition to being attracted to him, which would be awful, because he clearly didn’t like her. So she would just continue to think of him as a pretentious urban snob.

  “Don’t be sorry,” she said. “I don’t know what I’d been thinking. And since that reality check, I’ve been called to unclog the school bathrooms about once every six weeks, which not only provides a semiregular source of income, but reinforces my decision.”

  Bonnie could see him grappling with the concept of her unclogging school toilets. She couldn’t fault him. Sometimes she had to grapple with it herself.

  “Your path from teaching to plumbing isn’t clear to me yet.”

  “I already was halfway there.” She didn’t want to talk about her occupation anymore. “I worked as an apprentice all the way through school. Emergency weekend calls paid great. So I just kept going with the training. I still am.”

  He nodded. “Okay.”

  “I’m glad my life plan meets with your approval,” Bonnie snapped before she could stop herself. Honestly, something about him just brought out the worst in her.

  “I thought we had a cease-fire,” he stated mildly. “I enjoyed hearing your teaching story. And I realize that it wasn’t funny at the time.”

  She turned her head to look out the window, wishing she hadn’t told him about the little girl. Bonnie didn’t know why she had. She hardly ever told anyone, and revealing her ineptitude to a man who didn’t think much of her to start with was just asking for it.

  The fact that Jaron hadn’t taken advantage made it worse.

  “You’re embarrassed,” he said.

  Bonnie whipped her head around. “I’m not!”

  “Yes, you are. You revealed something of yourself to me, and to balance the relationship, I must confess something of equal gravity.”

  “We don’t have a relationship.”

  He gestured with his hand. “Temporary association, then.”

  “Whatever.”

  Silence followed, which told Bonnie what she needed to know. “You’ve never done anything worse than ordering the wrong wine with a meal, right?”

  “I was endeavoring—”

  “Endeavoring. Why do you talk like a British stage actor?”

  “Why do you talk like a character in a network sitcom?” he retorted.

  “I talk like a real person!”

  “A real person with no education or class.”

  Bonnie gasped.

  Jaron looked pained. “Congratulations. You’ve made me sink to your level.”

  They glared at each other.

  He didn’t apologize, and she didn’t, either. Clearly, civility was beyond them, and the more time they spent together, the worse it would get. They rubbed each other the wrong way. That’s all there was to it.

  “Take me home.” She turned back to the window and told herself that this was the best thing that could have happened to quash any growing feelings she might have for him—other than dislike. That one could grow.

  The car kept moving. Bonnie could swear she’d seen this street before. Maybe more than once.

  She felt Jaron lean forward. “Lorenzo’s.”

  The car turned at the next corner and slid to a stop by a green scalloped awning that stretched over the sidewalk. In gold script, “Lorenzo’s” curled along the side.

  “This is the restaurant,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “I asked you to take me home.”

  “To be more accurate, you ordered me to take you home.”

  “That is because I want to go home now.” She spoke very distinctly, biting off each word.

  “And I want to have dinner now.” He was just as distinct.

  “So have dinner.”

  “I intend to.”

  The driver got out and started around the car to her door.

  Actually, Bonnie was relieved. This way, she wouldn’t have to endure an awkward ride back with Jaron. “I’m not hungry, so could you please have your driver take me home while you eat?” There. That was polite. She added a smile for good measure. It would be his last image of her and all that.

  Jaron smiled back just as politely. “No.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  “WHAT DO YOU mean ‘no’?”

  Jaron stared into the angry face of his date.

  It wasn’t a bad face, actually. Attractive in a wholesome sort of way. Not his usual style, but her lips were on the full side, and Jaron acknowledged a fondness for full lips—especially when the lower one was slightly larger, as hers was.

  Yes, he did like a full lower lip. He’d been fooled in the past when he’d mistaken a pout for a larger lower lip, but Bonnie didn’t strike him as a pouter. No, she came right out and said what she thought, which made her interesting to Jaron. Maddening, but interesting. Also irritating and annoying. It was obvious she harbored a visible contempt for him. But she wasn’t boring, and that made up for all the rest.

  Who would have thought Bonnie-the-plumber would prove intriguing?

  So, no, he wasn’t ready to give up yet. She would go home when he was ready to take her home.

  The driver opened the door, and her jaw tightened in a way that gave Jaron second thoughts.

  He might be ready very soon.

  “Jaron?”

  “I offered to take you home. You declined.”

  “I’ve changed my mind.”

  “So have I.” He gestured for her to get out.

  She glared at him.

  He desperately hoped she wasn’t the type to mak
e a scene, a possibility he should have considered earlier. “Please?”

  Something changed in her expression, and without a word, she climbed out of the car. How about that? Please really was the magic word.

  He spoke to the driver, giving him an approximate time to pick them up, and warily turned to Bonnie.

  “You really want to go through with this?” she asked, her chin tilted up belligerently.

  “I really want to go through with this.”

  “Because I’m finding it very difficult to be nice.”

  “I’ve noticed.”

  “That’s not like me.”

  “Nice is boring.”

  “Well, I can guarantee you won’t be bored.”

  Jaron gave a bark of laughter. “I’m going to hold you to that.”

  “Why did you change your mind?” she asked as they walked toward the door.

  He had no idea and would no doubt regret it. “Call it pride,” he admitted, and exhaled. “I’ve never run off a woman yet.”

  “There’s a first time for everything.”

  “And tonight’s first is going to be dinner with a plumber.” He opened the dark green door.

  Bonnie swept past him. “I’ll try not to let down the profession.”

  He grinned at that, but she didn’t see it.

  They walked into a smallish room. Three ficus trees strung with white lights stood by a podium and served as a makeshift foyer.

  He gave his name to a teenage boy in an oversize white shirt who sat on a stool behind the podium. The boy put down a schoolbook and took them past a lovely empty table by the window to one smack-dab in the middle of the room.

  Great. They’d be on display. Jaron started to ask if they could be seated by the window, but it occurred to him that if they were so visible, it might keep future disagreements from escalating. Bonnie looked like a shouter. Come to think of it, so did the burly redheaded man at one of the window tables. He and the older man seated with him were talking in low, but intense, voices. Perhaps this was the better location, after all.

  As the boy seated Bonnie, Jaron glanced at the other tables. Each had a white cloth and napkins, which was good. Jaron wasn’t into red-and-white-checked oilcloth, straw-covered Chianti bottles as candlesticks, and Italian flags stuck into cheap bud vases. There couldn’t be more than a dozen tables in the place, and only a third were occupied.