“That gorgeous man, honey, that gorgeous man,” Carol drawled. “Why are you being so stubborn? If I were in your shoes, I’d be ecstatic!”
“If I never hear from him again, it’ll suit me perfectly,” Cecilia responded grimly, turning back to the mirror and brushing a rose blush onto her pale skin. “If you had any idea the memories he brings back, you’d understand. I was a total idiot. And I don’t like having a constant reminder of my past humiliations hanging around
“There!” Carol exclaimed. “That’s exactly what I’m talking about! You can’t see the guy for what he is because you’re still too busy remembering what he was. If that hunk had been a stranger when he bailed you out of trouble with the police, you wouldn’t be having these misgivings.”
“In the first place, I wasn’t in trouble. In the second place, he didn’t bail me out. And in the third...” Cecilia leaned closer to the mirror and deftly applied a false eyelash to her right eye, then to her left. “If he had been a stranger, he never would have followed me in the first place, would he?” She blinked vampishly, considering the overall effect. A far sight different from the image of the harried woman that had confronted her only minutes before. “Hand me my dress, will you?”
Carol tossed the slithery red outfit to her. She ducked into it, and as it slid down her body, she couldn’t help wondering what if she’d been dressed like this when she’d seen Jeff? She could picture herself as he’d seen her, tattered jeans and sweatshirt. But in red silk, with her topknot of auburn curls brushing against his shoulder... She wouldn’t have encouraged him, of course. But at least she would have projected her hard-won independence, her self-confidence. Instead she had come across like a helpless idiot.
“You’re thinking about him, Cecilia. I can tell.” Carol didn’t even try to disguise her smirk. “If you’d just be sensible.”
“But you aren’t talking sense. I know you mean well, but—” Ralph went into a frenzy of barking by the front door, and Cecilia’s heart skipped a beat. “Peter must be back.”
“Maybe 'tall, dark and gorgeous’ brought him home.”
That thought had already flitted through her mind. Which had nothing to do with the fact that she was hurrying toward the front door, just in case.
But Peter entered, alone and disgruntled. “What a jerk!”
“Your coach?” Cecilia queried.
“Your old friend,” Peter sneered.
Cecila flinched. “What did he do?”
Peter shot her a dirty look, his pale brows lowered. “He dumped me and left, which is exactly what I wanted. But he’s still a jerk.” He noted her dress with a resigned expression. “You singin’ tonight?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Well, you don’t have to worry about that jerk coming around here any more.”
“Peter Evans, what have you done?” she demanded.
He spread his hands wide, the picture of innocence. “Nothing. Not a thing.”
CHAPTER FOUR
JEFF LEANED INTO his town-house door and shoved gently; it gave with little pressure and opened soundlessly. But despite his caution, his arrival didn’t go unnoticed.
“Give ’em hell,” a grating voice drawled.
“Can it, Toulouse.” He dropped his briefcase atop the walnut breakfront with a half-hearted sigh and hung his trench coat in the coat closet amidst a cacophony of screeches and squawks. He grabbed a sharp, carbon steel knife from the rack on the kitchen wall and a mango from the fruit bowl on the counter and proceeded into the living room.
“Give ’em hell, Harry!” a hoarse voice squawked.
“I’ll give you hell, you crotchety old bag of feathers,” Jeff muttered as he clicked on a lamp and confronted the raucous glee of the yellow-headed parrot in the tall wrought-iron cage. With deliberate care, he cut a small chunk of mango and flipped it through the bars into the feeding tray. Toulouse pounced on it immediately and devoured it with his sharp, hooked beak. Jeff systematically prepared the remaining fruit, tossed it, then threw in a few sunflower seeds for good measure. Then he turned on a jazz playlist and sank into his chair.
But the cool tones of Count Basie weren’t working their usual magic. Neither was the cold imported beer, or the suspense thriller in his lap. Jeff shifted in his burgundy leather recliner, seeking a position that would soothe the knots out of his system.
Such a position didn’t exist on this night. He dragged his eyes away from the blurred print in front of him and stared instead into space. Unfortunately, that space was quickly replaced by slanting green eyes and frothy auburn curls, by a fragile weight he could still feel curled in his arms.
Cecil of the brilliant hair, brilliant eyes, brilliant smile. The years had softened her edges physically, sharpened them mentally. And the results were rather intriguing.
And then there were her kids.
He braced his wide hands on the arms of the chair and pushed off, a movement almost violent in its urgency. What had gotten into him?
Why couldn’t he get her out of his head? His reaction to her wasn’t logical, and was driving him crazy. The color-coordinated wardrobe hanging in his closet was practical. Running to keep his weight down was reasonable. Everything in his life was orderly. And that was precisely the way he liked it. Cecil was none of these things. In fact, she topped the list as the most impractical, unreasonable, disorderly woman he had ever known.
She said she didn’t have room for him in her life? Well, that went double for him. Cecilia Evans in his life would be—“catastrophic” might be too mild a word. Besides, it was almost April. His work schedule was enough to drain the very life out of him, if he didn’t love it so.
But if he loved it so, why wasn’t he working on the Desmond account?
He plowed his fingers through his hair and braced himself against the terrace door, staring at the Dallas skyline, imagining the red Mobil Oil Pegasus that had been the skyline’s trademark during his youth. Instead, the green argon outline of the Bank of America skyscraper blocked his view. It bothered him that the Mobil horse no longer flew above the city; now taller, newer buildings formed walls around it. You had to enter downtown from precisely the right angle to catch a glimpse of the winged horse.
But the horse flew still, if you knew where to find it.
The red neon horse reminded him a lot of his youth. Reminders of his youth were walled away from everyday perusal, dwarfed by the importance of his present, the excitement of his future. He hadn’t bothered to attend any of his class reunions, to keep up with old classmates. Occasionally he’d see someone in a chance meeting. Their “where have you been?” would be followed by surprise that he’d been right here all along. Dallas was a big place. You could get lost in it with no problem.
Lost.
What a strange thought. He wasn’t lost. It was this night, this melancholy mood that was depressing him.
It was Cecil.
He pivoted away from the view. Seventeen years ago he’d fantasized about strangling her. Tonight his fantasies were of an entirely different nature.
Suddenly it hit him how to get her out of his head. How to replace visions of tender, vulnerable lips with those of the big-mouthed brat she once had been. His jaw set with determination, he picked up his beer bottle from the glass-topped table and headed for the spare room. Cool, stale air met him when he entered, and he set his beer on the battered old upright piano. He opened the closet, flipped on the light and squatted to sort through the boxes of paraphernalia from his past.
In the third box, beneath a yellowed baccalaureate program and purple-and-gold tassels from his graduation cap, he found what he was looking for: his high school yearbooks. A cursory glance through the index, and then he found her name. Greene, Cecilia, followed by the four page numbers where her picture would be found.
The first was a group shot of her freshman homeroom class. Nothing inspiring there, except that she was in the center of the front row, with a short skirt that exposed a pair of nicely curv
ed legs that had always been too curvey, too shapely, too perfect to belong to the likes of Cecilia Greene.
Pages 132 and 147 were more of the same—club pictures, too many people crammed into too small a space. Yet somehow his eyes went right to hers in each shot. That impish grin, pointed chin and eyes that seemed to be laughing at him still. Her vibrancy leaped right off the page. She’d always been a cute kid, hadn’t she? Funny that he’d never noticed it at the time.
His exercise in exorcism wasn’t working at all.
His fingers itched to tug one of those curls. Or maybe just to play in them, stroke them, feel them against his cheek
“Play it, Sam!” A loud squawk sounded from the other end of the apartment. “She can take it, so can I!” The bird squawked again.
He slammed the yearbook closed in disgust.
~o0o~
Cecilia yanked the deep drawer out of the rolltop desk and lugged it to the breakfast table, sweeping the sports page of the newspaper to the floor to make room. She dug through the drawer’s contents, groping for the leatherette zipper bag that held her bank statements. It would have made more sense to work at the desk, but she would have had to clean the blame thing off, which often took a couple of hours because she’d get sidetracked a half-dozen times.
It was the first Tuesday of the month. Sweet horseshoes, how she hated first Tuesdays. But putting them off had gotten her in trouble more than once, so she might as well make the best of it.
She reached in her jeans’ back pocket and pulled out her checkbook, then she switched on the heavy, old calculator.
First she entered the amount of Robert’s child support check in the checkbook. At least that was one worry she didn’t have. Robert was a firm believer in electronic banking, and like clockwork, the money was deposited in her account each month. And like clockwork, half of it immediately got mailed to the mortgage company. She recorded these figures by heart.
Then, as a morale booster and conscience nudger, she examined her savings passbook and recent interest statements. The amount of money in the account would have boggled her mind two years ago when she had first faced a month of bills without Robert. She had been shy on money but long on determination.
She still derived pleasure from remembering the expression on Robert’s face when she’d declined his assistance job hunting. She’d shunned the office jobs she was totally incapable of performing.
Actually singing for their supper made as much sense as anything else in her topsy-turvy world. Hadn’t she put Robert through his last two years of engineering school by singing with Dallas’s hottest local oldies rock band? Of course, Dallas hadn’t exactly been the center of the musical world, and the band fell apart when oldies got less popular.
But Feather and the Falcons had been in great demand for awhile, performing at local night spots. She and Robert had lived on a shoestring. He studied while she worked; she slept while he attended classes. But somehow they’d managed to fill the remaining hours with some pretty decent memories. Things had been tight, but livable.
Now she consoled herself with the same words: tight, but livable—with one important difference. The first time around she had been saving for Robert’s future, assuming she’d be part of it. This time, she was fighting for her own.
By her calculations, shaky though they might be, she figured she’d have a large enough nest egg in two more years to stop singing and enroll at the university full-time. If she worked hard, she could earn a degree in music education in three years and land a teaching job in time to help pay for Peter’s college expenses. She tamped down the guilty feeling that she ought to be trying to take a few classes already. She simply couldn’t handle any more right now.
As if to reassure her, Ralph lumbered over and dropped his big head onto her lap, sending several papers flitting to the floor. Cecilia scooped them up and was returning them to the table, when an envelope caught her eye. How had a check ended up with the bills?
She tore open the envelope. Money. The tightness in her chest eased a little. She ticked off the upcoming gigs on the calendar, the sure dates with Stan, the dates he’d given her cash in her hot, sweaty little hands. The commercial jingles were growing more frequent, but sometimes payment was slow.
But with this check for the Happy Haven Mobile Homes commercial, she’d ride easy for the month. Then her eyes lighted on the savings book. If she couldn’t start school immediately, the least she could do was add to the nest egg.
“Well, which one of you guys is gonna scream the loudest if I don’t pay you in full this month?” she asked the pile of still unopened bills.
~o0o~
Jeff tilted his leather swivel chair back and massaged the back of his neck. The sounds of movement from outside his office confirmed what his aching body was telling him. It was six o’clock. The stack of questionable tax forms McVay had left on his desk earlier that afternoon told him he was staying.
But taunting him from the corner of his polished walnut desk top was a small, scratched circle of glass. It had been there for two days, inviting him to throw it in the trash, tempting him to return it to its owner, or rather, its owner’s mother.
He fingered the watch crystal, held it up and looked through it to the abstract print on the opposite wall. The symmetrical lines of varying widths of black, gray and red appeared asymmetrical, thanks to the scratches on the crystal. With a disgusted sigh he threw it into the trash can. Typical. Anything associated with Cecilia Evans was bound to distort his vision of a perfect and orderly world.
It was a cheap watch that could be easily and inexpensively replaced, anyway.
And the kid was a real pain in the neck. He hadn’t even said thank-you. In fact, he’d told Jeff in no uncertain terms to stay away from his mother. As if Jeff needed any extra warning. Nope, Cecil brought him nothing but trouble. Always had, always would.
Trouble. In an attractive package, maybe. But trouble all the same.
Just thinking the words made him feel better. Relieved to have that nonsense out of his system, he reached for a file and pulled up a record on his computer.
He input all of two figures before he shut it off again without saving the changes, and fished the watch crystal out of the trash can.
Life had handed him an excuse to see her again, and damned if he was going to throw it away. They were brats, not monsters. He was a man, not a mouse. And she was all woman, not at all the kid she had once been.
Chinese curse or not, life was about to get interesting.
Bring it on.
~o0o~
“Line up,” Cecilia ordered.
“I can do it myself,” Peter said.
“I know you can, but you didn’t, so now I’m going to.” She stifled further protests with a soapy washcloth applied firmly to his chin, determined to remove all evidence of Magic Marker. Finally satisfied, she thumbed him toward the sink. “You’re next, Brad.”
“But I already washed,” he protested halfheartedly as the washcloth dove behind his ear. Forty-five seconds later, she aimed him toward the sink to rinse. Anne-Elizabeth, her TCU Horned Frog sweatshirt pulled up to her eyebrows, her arms locked firmly over her head, shouted a muffled “No” from behind the horned frog’s lumpy belly.
Cecilia fought the urge to yank the sweatshirt down and teach her daughter who was boss. Instead she tickled her exposed belly button with the washcloth. Immediately arms and sweatshirt dropped and somehow, amidst the ensuing squealing frenzy, Cecilia washed her daughter’s face passably clean. Next she ordered all three children into the living room and lined them up on the sofa, each on a separate cushion.
“No touching, no name-calling, no moving for the next five minutes while I get dressed, is that clear?” she directed, switching on the television for good measure.
Standing in the bathroom in her bra and half-slip, she heard the doorbell ring. “Nobody can play!” she called down the hall over the chorus of “I’ll get its” that reverberated off the walls. She list
ened long enough to hear Peter order whoever it was away, then she shut the bathroom door. Humming, she experimented with a pair of tortoiseshell combs, trying to decide whether to pull her hair to one side in an avant garde twist, or simply sweep it out of her eyes in a more traditional “motherly” style. Her hum grew in volume until her vocalizing bounced off the walls, pure tones of a more classical nature than her usual style. It was the bathroom that always did it to her—the acoustics gave her voice a richness that tempted her to attempt Puccini instead of Whitney. She broke off in mid-warble; she’d better hurry.
When she emerged from the bathroom, her hair combed, teeth brushed and lips lined, she saw Jeff standing in the front doorway, outside the screen door.
“Cecil, is that you?”
“Eeek!” She ducked back into the bathroom and plastered her body against the door, her heart thumping a wild tattoo. Just exactly how dark was the hallway? She gulped, then thrust her head out. “Yes. What do you want?”
“I have something for you... Peter wouldn’t let me in.” He sounded exasperated.
“Just a minute!” She scanned the bathroom for something to put on, then called, “Brad, will you come here a minute?” When his carrot top poked around the bathroom door, she hissed, “Bring me my dress. And my sandals, while you’re at it!”
He returned with the red silk she had worn Saturday night.
“I meant the blue one!”
“This one was on the floor. I figured you were gonna wear it again, or else you’d’ve hung it up, right?” He managed to keep such an innocent expression on his face, she could almost pretend there wasn’t a hidden barb in the eight-year-old’s remark.
Almost.
Cecilia dropped to the chaise lounge and slipped on her sandals. “The blue dress, Brad. And hurry.”
Beguiled Again: A Romantic Comedy Page 6
