All she could think about was that he had referred to her butt as little.
“Is it halftime?”
Kyle stopped pounding and glared at her. “There is no halftime in baseball.”
“So there’s no break at all? You just run to the beer stand and pray nothing exciting happens?”
He got that superior look men often wore when talking sports with the ignorant. That was sexist of her—she’d known women who were just as disdainful of those who didn’t know their way around the tennis court.
Still, no mere Junior Leaguer in a flouncy skirt and gold tennis bracelet could look as arrogant as Kyle Sanders when he tried.
“It’s the seventh inning stretch,” he conceded.
“So that’s what this is?”
“No, it’s the my-damn-batteries-gave-out stretch.”
“Oh,” she said. The day Harris had asked to speak with them, she’d noticed something about Kyle that she’d never had a chance to notice before. He was really cute when he was angry.
Good grief. What was her problem? What kind of woman preferred cranky to charming? No doubt this was a sign of all kinds of deep-seated problems she was harboring. If she could figure out why she found the glaring Kyle more attractive than the smiling one, she could probably also figure out why she stayed someplace that appreciated her talents as little as Harris Associates did, when just last week she’d gotten another recruiting call from Mallory Management, followed by an invitation to lunch with the founder, Susan Mallory.
But maybe there wasn’t anything wrong with thinking Kyle was cute when he was mad, she thought, watching as he stretched his arms to the sky. Maybe he was.
He seemed to notice her staring as he hugged his arms to his chest. “It’s getting cooler, isn’t it? Since my game’s a washout, are you ready to go back?”
“Sure,” she said. “Wait one second.” She picked a handful of flowers and stood up.
“Are we supposed to bring back specimens?” Kyle asked.
“I was going to make these into a necklace for my niece,” she said. She walked over to the rock where he was sitting. “Or try to, anyway.”
He took the flowers out of her hands, their fingers brushing as he did so. She stifled the urge to jump. He was always bumping into her at the office, but at least there she had her defenses about her. Here, he was uncomfortably close.
He started weaving the flowers together deftly. “Yoda says, ‘No try, only do.”’
He had his head down, studying the necklace, and she was glad he couldn’t see the look of surprise on her face. “Are you a closet Star Wars geek?”
He gave her a lazy smile, and she shivered. It was getting chilly out here, wasn’t it? If her ears weren’t so hot, she’d really be cold.
“I wouldn’t say I was ever exactly a geek of any kind,” he said. “Not that I look that cool making you a daisy chain.”
She sat down on the long rock, but as far to the opposite edge as possible. “How do you know how to do that? My niece keeps trying to teach me.”
“My niece did teach me,” he said. “We have to hang outside together, because if we’re inside, we fight over the remote.”
“We don’t have that problem,” Laura said primly. Because we’re both addicted to the Cartoon Network.
“You never did this when you were a kid?” he asked her.
“Well.” She leaned toward him conspiratorially, even though there wasn’t another listener in sight and it wasn’t a very dark secret. She leaned anyway. “I told my parents I would get hives if I were exposed to sunlight.”
Finished with the necklace, Kyle up at her, his expression amused. “Laura Everett lied?”
“No, of course, not,” she said. “I could make myself have hives, just by concentrating.”
Was that a look of admiration or amusement on his face? He ceremoniously placed the ring of white flowers around her neck. “You, Laura, are a trip.”
As though all her senses had suddenly been turned way up, Laura was ultraconscious of the feel of the nippy air across her face, the scratch of the stems across her collarbone, and the very close heartbeat of one Kyle Sanders.
What if I kissed him?
That hypothetical question jerked her right out of fairy-tale mode. She was supposed to be merely getting along with Kyle Sanders, not hurling herself at him atop a piece of granite. If she kissed him, and if he didn’t fend her off, they would never be able to take their actions back. Kissing a co-worker in the coat closet at an office party was one thing, or so she had heard from Brandi, but doing it cold sober was another. That was exactly the kind of thing that the Kyle Sanders she knew, the one who was already picking carpet colors for that empty space in the executive suite, would use against her. Imagine how unstable he could make her sound to Harris. She scrambled off the rock.
“You have a niece, too? How old is yours?”
He blinked, slowly and oh so sexily. She had never before understood what was meant by bedroom eyes, but the allure of his was drawing her right back to that rock. Then he shook his head and said in a normal tone, “She’s seven.”
“Mine is five,” Laura chirped. “We’ll have to get them together when we get back to Atlanta.”
He gave her a bemused look, then put his radio in his backpack. “Now that you’ve got your jewelry, let’s go. What time is it?”
She looked at her watch, a small knot of worry forming in her stomach when she realized it said eight. As in the a.m.
“I think my watch gave out a while ago,” she said, twisting the plain brown leather band on her wrist.
“Oh,” he said.
If she didn’t know better, she would have thought he was worried. “Is that a problem?”
“Well, I had just sort of counted on you wearing one.”
Like he just sort of counted on her always having an extra legal pad and an extra pen at meetings. But Kyle usually wore a watch, too, one that was expensive enough to say he could afford the best and battered enough to say he didn’t care.
“Where’s yours?” she asked, following him.
“I gave it up in a bet last night,” he said over his shoulder as they crossed out of the clearing and back onto the wooded trail.
The darkness was odd and unexpected, like piling on multiple pairs of sunglasses. There didn’t seem to be any sunlight making it through the canopy of trees. It’s okay, she told herself. As hard as it is for you to cede control to Kyle, he’s in his element here. You can trust his judgment. Even if he is obviously some sort of compulsive gambler type person.
“Do you often lose things in bets?” she asked as casually as she was able. A few days ago, that would be the sort of information she would have wanted to take to Harris, but now that they were in this all-for-one-one-for-all thing, she supposed she’d have to be the one to help him get treatment.
“I lost it to the kid next door, playing basketball. When I lose, he gets to wear my watch until the rematch. I used to have my watch all the time, but he’s been practicing.”
“Oh.” Great, she was about to rat out the poster child for Big Brothers.
“How are you doing back there?” Kyle asked.
“Super,” she said. Was nature normally this dark? She wanted to ask Kyle if she should worry, but she was afraid he would say yes. He must have sensed her nervousness, because the next time he spoke, his voice was loud and hearty. Kyle was normally rowdy, charming, fun, but not, she would say, hearty.
“So, why haven’t you gotten your watch fixed?”
Kyle was not normally a nag, either.
“It’s not really broken. Sometimes my body chemistry just screws it up.”
Before she could even finish, he said, “Urban legend.”
“It is not an urban legend,” she said. “It’s my watch. I should know.”
Kyle pressed on. “It’s just that I wouldn’t think you’d fall for something so flaky.”
Flaky? She of the cross-referenced to-do list? And since whe
n did the original Good Time Charlie turn into the guy who made the trains run on time?
“And if it does stop whenever you wear it,” he continued, clearly ignoring her silence, “Then why would you?”
“It’s—” She was about to say it was the watch that went with her blue jeans, then realized that sounded…flaky. “It’s not something that happens all the time, only when I—” Get nervous, she almost finished, like when I’m around a cute guy. Damn. That was the truth. “It’s the watch that goes with my blue jeans.”
“So you chose vanity over efficiency?”
That was rich, coming from a guy so well dressed that he knew the difference between beige and taupe.
“I thought I’d give the world a day off from my high standards,” she said. “It’s not always easy to believe that the universe will explode if you aren’t keeping it together with your own powers of concentration.”
It was the most personal thing she’d ever said to him. And he completely ignored it. There was an odd hint of worry or annoyance—she couldn’t tell which—in his tone as he said, “You know, today might not have been the best day for you to decide you weren’t holding the planet together.”
“Now you tell me. And after I let all those terrestrial fragments just spin out into the universe.”
“Not the best day for you to have unearthed a morbid sense of humor, either,” he said. “If you’d obsessed about the time like you always do and hounded me to go, we wouldn’t be stuck out here.”
She skipped the parts where he said she was humorless, shrewish, and obsessive, and focused instead on the part where he said they were stuck.
“What do you mean?” She meant to be sharp and firm, but her voice came out broken and wispy. She sounded like Lamb Chop. She cleared her throat and tried again, pitching her tone lower. “Can you say some more about being stuck?”
Now she sounded like Large Marge the Phantom Truck Driver.
“When it gets completely dark, we won’t be able to see the trail.”
“What do you mean we won’t be able to see the trail? How dark can it get?”
Suddenly it was as though a light switch had been flicked off somewhere in the heavens. Laura had never been in this kind of dark: no streetlights or house lights to break it. There wasn’t even a moon or stars. It was like being plunged to the bottom of a deep cave.
“What on earth just happened?” she asked, resisting the urge to grab Kyle’s arm.
Kyle’s voice came from somewhere near. “It’s called night.”
LAURA KICKED HIM. “Ouch. Laura, that hurt.”
“Sorry,” she said. “Too dark to see a thing.”
“That’s what I was trying to tell you. Sometimes in the mountains it gets totally dark like this. It’s hard for the moonlight to make it through the trees anyway, and now the moon’s covered with clouds.”
“Was it cloudy?” As she spoke, a thump echoed through the woods and he felt her jump next to him.
“What was that?”
“A woodpecker,” he guessed.
The relief in her voice was sweet. “Thank goodness you have experience at this.”
Experience? His experience with woodpeckers was limited to having seen the eponymous Woody on television. But he did feel a little guilty about letting the ball game make him forget the time, and if his pretending to have it all under control was going to make her feel better, plus have the added bonus of making him look good, he wasn’t going to argue.
“There wasn’t a flashlight with my stuff,” he said. “Was there one with yours?”
Her voice was small. “No.”
“That’s okay.” What kind of idiot had packed their bags? Rand Idiot, that was who. “We’re on the trail, so as long as we move slowly and don’t lose it, we’ll be fine. There were some clouds, but I don’t think they were thunderstorm clouds.”
“Oh, good.”
He was on a roll. “On the radar this morning—”
“The radar?” Sweet went south very quickly. “You mean you were watching the weather on TV?”
“Is something wrong with that?”
She sounded agitated. “Kyle, I could have done that. I thought you could step outside and smell the air or something. I thought you were an experienced outdoorsperson.”
“Outdoorsman, Laura. Since you’re talking about me specifically, you can say ‘outdoorsman’ without being sexist.”
“When was the last time you went camping?”
“It was… When do I have time to go camping? I work every weekend.” He was conscious of how loud his voice was getting in the dark stillness.
“Work? You come in and play darts and drink Cokes from Harris’s fridge.”
“You could have Cokes from there, you know.”
“That’s not—Ow, rock.”
He started to tell her to take his hand, so they wouldn’t get separated, but he didn’t want to risk her refusing. “Why don’t you hold on to my backpack?”
She did, and as he felt her near him, his mood softened a little. She was worried. She thought that because he hadn’t been in the woods in the last month or so she was going to be eaten by bears. “Laura, I went camping all the time in college. Geological time is slow. The woods haven’t changed that much.”
“Did you go with a bunch of people and drink a lot of beer and play guitars and eat junk food?”
“Yeah. Did you do that, too?” He tried to picture Laura with a bag of barbecued chips in one hand, and a drink in the other. He couldn’t.
“Of course not,” she said. He tried to decide if she sounded wistful or if the night was twisting her tone. “Are you sure you were paying attention to the woods back then?”
“Laura, this goes back to the office thing. You feel guilty if you come in on a Saturday and don’t spend every second multitasking. I think it’s okay to take a dart break every once in a while.”
She didn’t say anything and for a second he imagined that he had convinced her. Then she asked, “How is your dart game going to keep me from being eaten by bears?”
So it was the bear thing. “You don’t have to be the best at something to do it well enough. A happy kid with a B average is better than a neurotic A kid, right?”
She didn’t say anything for a while, then said, “I don’t think that’s a value that I can get behind at all.”
“Laura.”
“Well, I’m sorry, I don’t. You’re going to have to explain the advantages to me.”
They took a few more steps along the trail. She stumbled a little, and the subsequent yank on his backpack made him feel like Howdy Doody in the hands of a nervous puppetmaster. “Here, take my hand.” To his slight surprise, she did, and he felt the warmth of her hand in his. “Okay, I once knew a guitar prodigy named Stan.”
“Are you making Stan up?”
“He’s my best friend.”
“It’s just that I’ve never heard of a guitar prodigy. Piano prodigies, yes. Violin prodigies.”
“Well, there are guitar prodigies and golf scholarships. It’s a whole big world out there.”
Just then the shriek of an owl was followed by the sound of a small crash in the distance. Laura screamed and practically broke his hand squeezing it. “Did you have to remind the world how much bigger it was than us?”
“Sorry,” he said. Resist the urge to tease her about bears. Try harder at seeming like a grown-up who is not trying to scare a pretty girl with a snake. “Okay, Stan. His riffs would leave you dumbstruck. His progressions would make you cry. Women would throw themselves at him after gigs. But he couldn’t talk to them because they weren’t holding guitars.” He paused, allowing her to imagine the bleakness of Stan’s situation. “Now, there was another guy, a friend of Stan’s, a passable, okay player. He enjoyed it, but when a woman started making chitchat about his guitar, he could eventually move the conversation to other things. Take that same lesson—”
“Wait, what lesson? Did I miss a lesson?”
&nb
sp; “And apply it to the swimmer who has to get up at 3:00 a.m. to train and the guy who was also on the swim team, but who chooses to sit in the lifeguard chair getting paid to tan.”
“Remind me not to drown while you’re on duty.”
He ignored her. “Same for the pool player who becomes obsessed with the big score to the exclusion of all else, and the guy who has every girl in the bar hanging around the table while he shoots.”
He shouldn’t have said girl.
“That guy sitting around playing James Taylor covers, that was you, right?”
“That’s not relevant.”
“It seems relevant to me.”
“Let’s say he’s a composite character.”
“Okay, this composite character, coincidentally named Kyle, his point is that it’s better to give up trying to be the best at something if it’s going to get in the way of your social life.”
He started to say she’d misunderstood, his natural reflex to any argument, but then he realized that was exactly what he meant. The hell with it. He was taking a stand.
“Socialization is an important human skill.”
A hungry bear would have sounded more pleasant than the cynical laughter that followed. He tried to regroup.
“Laura, all I’m saying is that balance is a valuable thing in a person’s life.”
“I’m glad Marie Curie didn’t think that way,” she said. “Or Albert Einstein. Or Vincent Van Gogh.” She yanked her hand away. “And that’s just the famous people. Think of the ones who aren’t famous yet—the dancer in the chorus line, the aching gymnast, the artist sculpting in her studio.”
He was still walking, but he realized she wasn’t. “Laura? Keep moving. We don’t want to lose the trail.”
She acted as if she didn’t hear him. “Think of the ordinary, unsung men and women who give their all every day in emergency rooms and classrooms and factories and mediocre management consulting firms—”
Bringing Up Baby New Year & Frisky Business Page 20
