10. Thursday
CHAPTER 10
THURSDAY
B y the time they were hauling the last of the bags into the donations corner, Maggie felt like she’d finished some sort of deranged CrossFit workout. They’d dragged twenty-two donation trash bags in eighty-degree heat and matching humidity, first all the way from the cottage to Daniel’s truck in the Blue Harbor parking lot and then from the truck into the Hendersonville Goodwill. Maggie was in pretty good shape, but she was a runner, and this was significantly more of a workout than her biceps were accustomed to. She had no complaints, however, about the scenery. Daniel had worn another of his solid earth-tone t-shirts that looked temptingly softened by the wash and fit like it had been tailored. He seemed to have bought them in bulk, a choice Maggie approved of both for its efficiency and for…other reasons. The dusty blue fabric of the sleeves was currently stretched across his sun-kissed skin as his muscles flexed under the weight of a ten-year subscription to Garden & Gun magazine. Maggie was neither a horticulture nor a firearms enthusiast, but she sincerely appreciated the magazine’s contribution to her current ability to admire guns of a different kind.
“Alright,” Daniel said, dropping the last bag on the small hill they’d made near the back corner of the store. A teenage clerk eyed the pile of donations warily. “Done schlepping. Now for the fun part.”
“You understand that in no way does your assistance with the bags give you any say over the outfit, right?” Maggie eyed him warily, but he just smiled and addressed the clerk who was now strategizing with a grey-haired woman in a blue apron about the best way to inventory the contents of the trash bags.
“Do you happen to know if you have any Western wear around?” Daniel asked.
“Shoes over on that wall. Women’s clothes near the front. Men’s clothes here in back,” said the older woman, elbow-deep in a bag of puffer and utility vests.
The room was cavernous, packed with rows and rows of metal garment racks, and very little in the way of signage beyond the sections delineated.
“Thank you.” Becker nodded at the clerks and then gestured from Maggie toward the front of the store. “Ladies first,” he said, with what Maggie was pretty sure was intended to be a Texas twang.
Maggie wove between the racks on a mission, skimming for lightweight inoffensive plaids with minimal bedazzling. (She’d had to concede early on that some bedazzling seemed inevitable, given the selection.) She’d lost track of exactly where Becker had gone. He’d been sifting through hangers with a focus that was both concerning and, at the same time, disconcertingly endearing. Maggie, meanwhile, had three promising button-down options and one brown rodeo shirt laid over her left arm and was starting in on a row of daisy dukes when, out of nowhere, Becker slipped across an almost invisible gap between two racks and came to stand next to her.
Maggie looked up, startled, to find him smiling at her with a grin so broad it was borderline sinister. When she met his gaze, there was a definite glint in his eye that she found alarming. Becker lifted the hanger he’d been holding so that it rose into her line of sight and said, simply, “Voila.”
It was, without a doubt, the ugliest thing in the entire Goodwill. Possibly in any Goodwill. It had clearly been handmade, with care and love, and was, as a result, the best evidence Maggie had seen that demonic possession was real. The base had once been an unsuspecting white t-shirt that probably began its life in the big and tall section of a big box store. Then its owner had apparently come into a significant amount of wealth in the form of bandanas and fringe. The crew neck had been hacked into a v, and a shimmery navy fringe was hot glued along the curling edges, with matching fringe around the end of each sleeve. Five-pointed stars had been cut out of royal blue bandanas and sewn at random across the rest of the white cotton. In what had clearly been an effort to turn a long-ish shirt into a short-ish dress, strips of red and white bandana had been sewn around the bottom hem in an alternating pattern like horizontal stripes. And, naturally, the final red bandana stripe was trimmed with more of the shimmery navy fringe. The whole thing was enough to make you regret the American Revolution.
“I thought you already had an outfit,” Maggie said, attempting to match his threateningly genial tone. “Not that I object to you showing a little leg.”
“And here I thought my preferred five-inch inseam was a little risqué for the Blue Ridge Mountains.” He held the dress up against his chest and looked down the line of his body, considering. “But no, this is all yours.”
“That’s very generous, Becker, but I don’t think it’s quite ‘me.’”
“Afraid to show a little leg, McArthur?” He raised a brow.
“I believe I’ve already said I have no objection to that, in the right context. In fact, I’m in favor.” She met his gaze as she said it. “I do, however, object to daring two hundred teenagers to mock me mercilessly for an entire evening.”
“It’s really the eight- to ten-year-olds you have to watch out for,” Becker said, seriously. “Interesting that you should mention dares, though. I was thinking, what would happen…if I dare you?”
“Excuse me?” Maggie froze. “Becker, I’m not twelve.” This was both true and, regrettably, wildly irrelevant. Maggie had never been able to turn down a dare. The suggestion that she couldn’t or wouldn’t do something? Unacceptable.
“And yet, I dare you.” He said it calmly, with such confidence.
Somehow he’d found her weakness, and, worse, he knew it. Dares weren’t exactly a common tactic in corporate office politics, but she wasn’t in Kansas anymore. Her unparalleled expertise in passive aggressive email replies was no good to her here.
“I don’t even think it’ll fit,” she said, because that was the only loophole she could come up with on the spot, and loopholes were absolutely fair game on a dare.
“Excuses, excuses.”
She wanted to wipe that knowing smile right off his stupidly handsome face.
“Fine.” Maggie swiped the hanger from Daniel’s hand and squeezed past him toward the dressing rooms at the back of the store.
It did fit. Of course it did.
And she was going to wear it.
When she slipped out from behind the moth-eaten dressing room curtain, she was prepared for Becker’s smart mouth.
Or, she thought she was.
But she’d been wrong. The mouth in question was slightly open, as if Becker had gotten distracted halfway to delivering the snarky remark she’d expected. His Adam’s apple bobbed when he swallowed and then he wet his lips.
She felt her body flush in response. Damn redheaded transparency. Not that she wasn’t enjoying the open hunger on his face, but…
“Daniel Becker this is a Goodwill. You cannot look at me like you want to eat me.” Slightly startled, he shut his mouth and blushed like a cartoon character, which Maggie absolutely refused to find delightful. “There’s a time and place for that sort of thing.”
Before he could cobble together a response, the older clerk appeared with one of the black trash bags slung over her shoulder. She dropped it in front of the last of the four dressing rooms, which had been completely taken over by teetering piles of clothing. This apparently doubled as the formal sorting area. “Now isn’t that just darling on you! I almost let that accidentally walk out with me as a present for my grand baby, but I resisted temptation.”
With no discernible way out of her predicament, Maggie pulled together the rest of what could charitably be considered an outfit and what, in another country, might be considered accessories to treasonous desecration of the flag, fended off Daniel’s attempts to pay the five dollars for the dress, and headed to the register.