“Cad.” She shoved him lightly.
Smiling like a scoundrel, he backed against the boughs. White petals rained down upon them both.
He fumbled with something in his breeches. She had thought the past few minutes the most intense of her life, but they were nothing compared with the alarm and ashamed delight now rushing through her veins—until she realized he was only bringing out his pocket watch.
Glancing at it, he said, “You’d better go back before you’re missed.”
“All right.” She backed a pace away and observed him, calmly now that her heart had quieted. He carried the watch for timing the horses, of course, but it was easy to imagine him a gentleman, with a gentleman’s pocket watch, his clothes the fashion of a young dandy rather than the uniform of a stable hand. He could so easily have been the great catch of the neighborhood, and in that case they could have been married.
But it was not to be. She shook her head to clear it. It was one thing to arrange an assignation with the stable boy, and another thing entirely to fall in love with him.
“I had almost lost the wherewithal to ask,” she said, “but did you bring my glove after all?”
He stared at her blankly for a moment, and she thought he had not brought it, and that her grandmother would demand some fine explaining if Rebecca had the misfortune to meet her on re-entering the party.
But this was more of his usual stonewalling to frighten her. With a grin he pulled her glove, tightly rolled, from another trouser pocket.
“I suppose I can’t stroll into the party with my excuse flopping about,” she said. “That would look odd.” She fished her reticule from her own pocket and attempted to work the rolled glove through the small opening. It would not go.
“Here, let me.”
Instinctively she pulled back, not wanting him to soil her glove and her reticule with his dirty fingers.
She looked up at him in embarrassment. Of course he had washed before meeting her. His fingers were not dirty, as usual in the stable. She was horrified that she had instinctively thought such a thing, as if he were dirty permanently. From his somber expression she could tell he knew exactly what was going through her mind.
Gently he took the glove and the reticule from her. As she watched, he worked the glove through, careful not to open the reticule too far and tear it. “I saw a snake eat a rat once,” he commented, “out behind your grandmother’s north barn. Unhinged its jaws to do it.”
“That may be beyond the capacity of this snake,” she said—and just then the reticule gave, and the glove slipped inside. They both sighed their relief.
He fastened the jeweled top and handed the reticule back to her, his fingers brushing hers. “When will I see you again?”
At dawn, when you drive us in the coach back to the house, she could have said cattily. But he gazed seriously at her, and something told her the kiss they had finally shared had changed everything between them. She might not love him, but she could not disappoint him.
“My grandmother leaves for business in Frankfort tomorrow,” Rebecca said. “Let’s look for an opportunity.”
“Let’s do.” He touched the tip of her nose with one finger, then her bottom lip again. “Take care, and watch out for captains.”
She laughed and whispered, “Always.” Then she fled the bower.
She returned to the party, furtively examining the revelers as she entered. No eyes were upon her, not even those of her grandmother, across the room, or Captain Vanderslice, conversing with elderly Mrs. Woodson, boring her ever closer to death. Everybody seemed involved in their own pursuits. The mint julep was Rebecca’s friend tonight, throwing a shroud over others’ powers of observation. Nobody saw her come in or commented on her reticule, obviously full to bursting.
She would not even need to use her pin money to pay off her maid, as she had done several times in the past when David had met her in the barn. They had simply played then, not kissed. He had taught her to swing on a rope from the loft down to the hayrick below like a pirate conquering the poop deck. The issue had been that she was too old to be playing, and much too old to be playing with the stable boy.
The latter had not changed, she thought as she gazed out the doorway she had just entered. Blinded anew by the candlelight, she could not make out shapes in the darkness as she had earlier, but she did detect a flash of blond head keeping its distance across the patio. Watching her, and waiting.
I LET OUT A LONG, SATISFIED sigh. This story set up a grand adventure for Rebecca and David, with a fairy-tale ending—everything I’d longed for with my stable boy. It was perfect. The class would love it.
I only wished they would reassure me by telling me so. But they kept their heads down, focused on their own work, as if we were waiting for the subway. Maybe later in the semester we’d be comfortable enough with one another to start a group convo as we waited for the whole class to trickle in. But it was only our second meeting. Even so, normally I would have started the group convo myself. I hated silence.
Today was not normal. To get my mind off the impending judgment of my goal in life, I pulled my calculator out of my book bag. My boss had offered me a double shift at the coffee shop on Saturday. If I took it, I wouldn’t be able to go to the Broadway matinee I’d scoped out. If I didn’t take the shift and I bought the cut-rate Broadway ticket, I might have to dip into the reserves I’d saved
over the summer to make my first payment on my dorm room. My scholarship covered tuition only, and I’d been able to talk the university into a payment plan for my rent since I’d unexpectedly become destitute the night of high school graduation.
A Broadway ticket might have been a frivolous expense when I was faced with eviction. But I’d wanted to study writing in New York City as long as I could remember. Now I was afraid I wouldn’t be here long. And if I didn’t make the most of my experience, it would be like I was never here.
As I crunched numbers—God, my hourly pay was low, and tips were abysmal no matter how low I wore my necklines—I resisted looking up at the students entering the room. I especially avoided meeting the eyes of the two noisy guys who blustered in and sat directly across from me, just as they had on the first day of class. They knew each other from elsewhere, obviously, and the Indian one in particular was the cocky type who might give me a hard time about “Almost a Lady.” People had made fun of me for writing romantic stories before. I hoped he and his friend wouldn’t gang up on me.
Summer was the last one in, and I felt my shoulders relax. I’d never been one of those timid girls who couldn’t take a step without the shadow of her best friend crossing her path. But putting my story in front of these strangers was like stripping naked in a men’s prison rec room. I turned to Summer, expecting a friendly roommate-type question designed to set me at ease, such as, How did calculus go?
She looked me up and down and shrieked, “Where did you get that scarf?” drawing the boisterous guys’ attention.
Busted! I tried to mix my expensive clothes from home with the cheap replacements I could afford. I was aiming for a gradual, graceful decline into poverty. But when I’d gotten dressed that morning after Summer had left for her eight o’clock, I’d been tired. I’d thrown on a T-shirt, a scarf, and my most comfortable jeans— all of which happened to be designer. I should have been more careful. Summer did not own any designer labels, but she wanted them. And she knew them when she saw them.
I gazed at her blankly. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” I meant that I knew exactly what she was talking about, and we should discuss it later.
But we’d been friends only five days, too short a time for her to decipher my unspoken messages. She looked me up and down again. “And those jeans,” she murmured.
“I beg your damn pardon?” I asked, still telegraphing for her to shut up.
She dumped her book bag in her richly upholstered chair, grasped my wrist, and dragged me out of my own richly upholstered chair. We both tripped on the
edge of the Oriental rug as she pulled me toward the door.
Most of my classes were held in modern buildings, like you’d expect at any college. But the honors freshman creative-writing class met in a converted town house. Our classroom was a long boardroom, the dark wooden paneling hung with portraits of dead scholars staring down at us from their frames. The thick, carved table and big comfy chairs replaced student desks. The stately room made the class and our writing seem important—until Summer and I tripped over the rug, which reminded us that we were just freshmen after all, wearing shorts and hooded sweatshirts. Or, in my case, a designer scarf and—
“Designer jeans!” At least we’d reached the hallway and she’d pressed me against the wall before she hissed this at me, out of our classmates’ hearing. “I thought you said you shopped at the thrift store.”
“I do shop at the thrift store.” The only thing I had actually purchased there was an outfit for my belly-dancing class. A little flamboyant but a lot cheaper than new workout clothes would have been. And I often browsed in the thrift store, which counted as shopping.
“There is no way you got a two-hundred-dollar scarf in a thrift store,” she whispered. “And those jeans. They’re from last year. A size-four woman did not drop dead and give her almost-brand-new designer jeans to charity. I thought you didn’t have any money. You told me you were working at the coffee shop because your scholarship is tuition only. You didn’t say you have a line of credit from back home!”
“I don’t. The scarf and the jeans were gifts.” Not a lie. My grandmother had bought all my clothes for the six years I lived with her.
Summer pointed at me. “I knew all that detail in your story was a little too realistic. You’re really Rebecca, aren’t you? Just in the present day? You own a horse farm in Kentucky.”
“ What? No! Why would you think that?”
“Last weekend when Jørdis brought the Sunday Times to the dorm, you went straight to the horse section.”
“There is no horse section of the New York Times.”
She poked my breastbone. “You know what I mean. The horserace part of the sports section.”
I drew myself up to my full height and looked down at Summer, trying to impress on her the ridiculousness of her theory, which was of course pretty damn close to the truth. I said haughtily, “I certainly do not own a horse farm.” My grandmother owned it. Even when she died eventually, I would never own it. She’d made sure of that.
Summer stared stubbornly up at me. Then her eyes drifted down to boob level. “And that shirt. I should have known nobody looks that good in a regular old T-shirt, not even you. Who made it?” She grabbed my arm, whipped it behind my back, and rammed my face into the wall. Holding me there, she fumbled with my neck-line to read the label. “We’ve only known each other a few days,” she muttered, “but I always assumed I would share everything with my college roommate, and we are not getting off to a good start.”
She was a poor girl trying to look rich. I was a former rich girl suddenly poor. As a tall redhead, I could not have looked more different from Summer, tiny and African-American—but we were both Southern and struggling to fit in here in New York. I had sensed this about her immediately, and I had liked her a whole lot until she dragged me out into the hall and threatened to blow my cover. I was just about to jab my elbow into her ribs to get her off me—I had to hide that designer T-shirt label at all costs—when a voice beside us purred, “Good afternoon, ladies.”
Summer and I jumped away from each other. Gabe Murphy was our writing teacher, a stubby man with a bulbous nose and lots of snow white hair. He would have looked jolly, like Santa Claus, except he dressed in a hoodie and cargo shorts and flip-flops like most of the class. I figured he’d been a surfer in California until one day he glanced in the mirror and realized he was forty pounds overweight and nearing retirement age, and he thought he’d better come to New York to pursue the writing career he’d always thought he would have plenty of time for later.
I called him our writing teacher rather than our writing professor because I wasn’t sure he was a professor. That was a special designation the university gave to personages with fancy degrees. I doubted it applied to Gabe. I wasn’t sure whether to call him Dr. Murphy or Mr. Murphy or just plain Gabe. He hadn’t introduced himself, and the syllabus was labeled GABE MURPHY. No clue there. None of the other students had taken a stand on the issue, so I coped by calling him Excuse me, or—
“Hello,” I said noncommittally. “Summer was just straightening my shirt before class. I want to look professional when we discuss my story.”
“We’re writers,” he said. “We’re prone to eccentricity.” He tilted his head toward the classroom, indicating that we should follow him inside.
When he’d disappeared through the doorway, the grin Summer had worn for him dropped away. She pointed at me again. “I am not through with you.”
“I can tell!”
We crossed the classroom threshold and bounced into our chairs. We couldn’t slip into them because they were huge and upholstered. Pulling them out and dragging them back up to the table caused a commotion in the quiet room. Even the noisy guys across from us had hushed with the entrance of Gabe. Now they watched us reprovingly, as if we were five-year-olds playing jacks in a church pew at a funeral.
Ignoring the noise, Gabe said a few words about appreciating those of us who had been brave enough to share our stories first. As if we had volunteered for this. He shuffled through the stapled stories in front of him, making sure all three for the day were there. He had said during the first class meeting that nowadays, writing students were paranoid about sharing because they were afraid someone would nab their work and publish it on the internet. So our instructions were to place one copy of our stories on reserve in the library for the other students to read. Then we brought copies for everyone. The class made notes during the discussion and passed the copies back to the original author. I couldn’t wait to read my classmates’ glowing praise.
“These stories have a natural order and flow nicely from one to the next,” Gabe was saying, “so let’s start with—”
There was a knock on the door.
I heard my sigh again in the stillness of the regal classroom. This one was not a sigh of satisfaction but a sigh of what-species-of-tree-slime-dares-knock-on-the-door-at-a-time-like-this.
Gabe got up from his upholstered chair. This was not instantaneous because of the weight of the chair and the girth of his own belly beneath his La Jolla T-shirt. He opened the door a crack and talked in a low tone to the interloper. Summer and I were closest to the door. We couldn’t look over our shoulders and stare at Gabe without being obvious, but we could hear most of what was being said. The interloper wanted to transfer into our class. Gabe was telling him we did have space for one more, but a creative-writing class was a family unit, and before the interloper joined, the other students would need to approve. The interloper said he was sure that would not be a problem.
I recognized his voice. Or rather, I recognized the tone of his voice. The Indian dude was cocky, but the interloper’s cockiness would make the Indian dude look modest in comparison.
“Are you okay?” Summer whispered, managing to make even those breathy words sound high pitched. “Are you that worried about the class discussing your writing? You look really pale all of a sudden. I mean, you’re already pale, but it’s like your freckles have faded.”
A dry “Thanks” was all I could manage. I was not okay. I was gripping the edge of the carved table so hard, I would not have been surprised if my fingers snapped off.
The interloper was my stable boy.
And I could not let him read my story.
CONTINUE READING FOR AN EXCLUSIVE EXCERPT FROM
SUCH A RUSH
BY JENNIFER ECHOLS
JULY 2012 FROM GALLERY BOOKS
A sexy and poignant romantic tale of a young daredevil pilot caught between two brothers.
When I was
fourteen, I made a decision. If I was doomed to live in a trailer park next to an airport, I could complain about the smell of the jet fuel like my mom, I could drink myself to death over the noise like everybody else, or I could learn to fly.
Heaven Beach, South Carolina, is anything but, if you live at the low-rent end of town. All her life, Leah Jones has been the grown-up in her family, while her mother moves from boyfriend to boyfriend, letting any available money slip out of her hands. At school, they may diss Leah as trash, but she’s the one who negotiates with the landlord when the rent’s not paid. At fourteen, she’s the one who gets a job at the nearby airstrip.
But there’s one way Leah can escape reality. Saving every penny she can, she begs quiet Mr. Hall, who runs an aerial banner-advertising business at the airstrip and also offers flight lessons, to take her up just once. Leaving the trailer park far beneath her and swooping out over the sea is a rush greater than anything she’s ever experienced, and when Mr. Hall offers to give her cut-rate flight lessons, she feels ready to touch the sky.
By the time she’s a high school senior, Leah has become a good enough pilot that Mr. Hall offers her a job flying a banner plane. It seems like a dream come true . . . but turns out to be just as fleeting as any dream. Mr. Hall dies suddenly, leaving everything he owned in the hands of his teenage sons: golden boy Alec and adrenaline junkie Grayson. And they’re determined to keep the banner planes flying. Though Leah has crushed on Grayson for years, she’s leery of getting involved in what now seems like a doomed business—until Grayson betrays her by digging up her most damning secret. Holding it over her head, he forces her to fly for secret reasons of his own, reasons involving Alec. Now Leah finds herself drawn into a battle between brothers—and the consequences could be deadly.
Engrossing and intense, Such a Rush is a captivating story from an author with rising star power.
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