Chapter 7
CHAPTER
SEVEN
ALLY
A fter Clay had convinced me to spend one night this weekend camping in his backyard, I’d sent him on his way, stripped off my clothes, and spent an hour soaking in my bathtub. I had abrasions on my stomach where my shirt had slid upward, and that nasty scrape on my knee had taken a painful scrubbing with a washcloth to clean up.
Then I’d slept like the dead and hobbled out to Clay’s truck in the morning when he came to pick me up. Opening the passenger door and helping me up the step, he was freshly showered, and all too perky for seven in the morning.
“I feel bad that you had to come early. You don’t teach sunrise.”
“I’ll do a morning workout, then shower before second block.” He pointed to his track pants and fresh long-sleeved T-shirt, which hugged his chest and might have been tight enough to reveal his six-pack right through the fabric. If a person was looking.
Me. I was that person.
I ignored the abs when he handed me a hot cup of coffee. “You are speaking my love language with this,” I said.
“Wasn’t sure if you had coffee already. No pressure to drink it.” He went around to the driver’s side and slid into the seat without using the step. I took note of his sinewy forearms. I watched his right arm flex as he turned the key in the ignition.
I scolded myself for noticing how his track pants hugged the curve of his tight ass and how his muscles moved under the fabric. This was way past my usual idle appreciation of Clay as an art form. I certainly should not have been sneaking looks at how the crinkles around his eyes proved that he did indeed smile sometimes. Those times when his face broke open like clouds letting in the sun. Like he was doing right now.
Staring at me and smiling. Because I was staring at him and smiling like a loon.
“You okay there?” he asked. It’s a fair question because I was gaping at him like an art patron examining brushstrokes on an impressionist painting.
“Um, sure. Yes. Fine.”
He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel but continued staring at me. Waiting. For what?
“The coffee? Is it okay? It’s a vanilla latte. I wasn’t sure what you liked, and this is how I make mine.” Only then did I realize I hadn’t answered his question.
“Oh, yes, thank you. This is awesome. I usually drink whatever’s in the teachers’ lounge, so it’s a treat to have this on the way to work.”
He turned off the car engine and spun in his seat, looking like I’d hocked a wad of spit into his cup. “What?”
“ What what?”
“Please tell me you’re joking. You do not drink the swill at school.”
“It’s not swill, it’s coffee.”
“It’s swill.”
I laughed as he started the truck again. “You are a coffee snob. I had no idea. All this time I’ve been giving you shit about your workouts, and I could’ve been razzing you for being a coffee elitist.” It felt good to get back on our normal terms of workplace banter. I needed to stop distracting myself with how nice he was being to me because it was throwing off my mojo. And those biceps...
I reached over and yanked his sleeve down to his wrist. Eyeing me suspiciously, he pulled the other one down.
He shrugged. “I’m not apologizing for liking real coffee. You know they don’t clean the urn out before they make a new batch, right? It’s just watered-down swill on top of yesterday’s swill.”
Feeling a small surge of bile, I took another healthy sip of coffee and swallowed. It was a hundred times better than what they had at school. “This is delicious. Thank you again.”
“So that garbage you’re always heating in the microwave...” He pointed an accusing finger at me after backing out of my driveway. “Not only is it old coffee, it’s old shitty coffee.”
“It’s coffee.” Frankly, I was surprised he noticed what I was doing with the microwave. He moved in and out of the teachers’ lounge so quickly, it always seemed like he had somewhere pressing to be.
“Coffee. Snob. I like this new bit of information.” Settling back, I shimmied against my seat, satisfied. Then I scooted a little closer to the cool window because he must have turned the heat on in the truck. That was the only explanation for why I was sweating.
He turned to face me, pointing two fingers between his face and mine to indicate he’d be watching me. “Drink your coffee. If I catch you heating it up later at lunch, we’ll have words.”
“Yes, sir.”
Clay’s eyes narrowed on me, his breathing suddenly deeper, those hands clenching the steering wheel tightly. But he turned his head to glare out the windshield, muttering something under his breath before pulling out onto the main road.
The day went by as usual, only Clay didn’t come into the teachers’ lounge during lunch. I doubted that anyone noticed. Anyone but me. A lot of teachers ate in their classrooms or ran errands during the forty-five-minute break, and we hadn’t exactly said we’d meet up. Just because he mentioned checking to make sure I didn’t reheat this morning’s latte didn’t mean we had a set plan. I was being ridiculous.
So why did I keep looking up every time the door opened?
No. Reason.
I didn’t see Clay again until after school, when he was standing on the track with a whistle. His team had finished their warmup laps and were dropped down to the grass in front of him to stretch. Head bent over his clipboard, Clay didn’t see me. The last thing I planned to do was go anywhere near the runners. Or the hurdles. Or the track.
Turning toward the teachers’ parking lot, I said a silent goodbye to Clay, found my car where I’d left it the day before, and drove home. Another soak in the tub, and I felt almost human again. A microwaved plate of lasagna and a Netflix binge, and I felt a little lonely. This was the reason I’d convinced my best friend, Lucy, to meet me at Genie’s Country Western Bar, and here we were. Lost in a crowd.
A group of guys drinking beers in a corner made me think of Clay, and it bugged me. The whole point of going out was not to think. Or to think in the company of good friends.
Genie’s was packed for a weeknight, every table full and two deep at the bar. Someone had turned up the music so it could be heard over the cacophony of voices, which only made people talk louder. But Carrie Underwood was going to take a baseball bat to her ex’s car, if anyone bothered to listen.
“Why’s it so busy?” I asked Lucy, who’d been my best friend since ninth grade when we’d bonded talking about our older brothers who didn’t want us following them around to parties.
She shrugged. “Always happy hour somewhere.”
Too focused on my current dilemma to question her analysis, I dug right in. “Lu, I need some advice.”
She’d been studying the screen above the bar where a Nashville Predators hockey game had the attention of half the folks in the place. As soon as she heard my words, her eyes snapped to mine. Sweeping her dark hair over one shoulder, she scooted her chair closer in order to hear me over the voices.
“Ooh, sounds juicy. I’m here to help, you know that.” I did know. It was the best part of our friendship.
I debated how much to tell her. Word traveled faster than a boll weevil in a cotton field around here and I didn’t want anything getting back to Clay. I bit my lip and reconsidered saying anything at all.
Lucy swatted my shoulder. “Oh, spill it. I can already tell it’s about a man, so why don’t I just keep guessing and you can nod or blush or whatever until I get it right.”
“Fine, if you put it that way, I’ll just tell you.” I inhaled a cleansing breath, checked the score of the game—three to one, Predators—and took a long swig of my beer. “I have to spend not one but two weekends camping with Clay Meadows.”
She whistled. “Not exactly shooting fish in a barrel, that one. Good luck.”
“I’m not trying to shoot him. Or kiss him, to be clear.”
“Okay, good. Because I was about to talk you down.”
“I’m already down, thanks.”
I felt my face fall at her low opinion of my odds, and she immediately corrected. “Oh, honey, it’s not you. You’re the biggest catch around. Any guy in this place...” She spread her arms wide and looked around. “And I don’t mean Genie’s, I mean Green Valley. Any of these guys would be blessed by the angels to have you. But Clay? You know he’s notorious for short, meaningless relationships.”
Other than a very dedicated hermit, everyone knew.
My dating record didn’t look much better.
Just to prove my lack of prospects, I looked around Genie’s. At one table, a group of guys barely old enough to drink knocked back beers and played a drinking game with dice. One of them caught me looking his way and tipped his cowboy hat at me with a wink. His auburn beard had that patchy look of a guy just this side of puberty. I couldn’t see myself as a cougar at thirty-four.
The several other tables that were filled with couples made me sigh. I’d always imagined myself as part of a couple. Heck, I’d been part of a couple for five years. Five years ago.
I didn’t need to look at the date to know it had been nearly five years to the day that Johnny Culpepper and I parted ways. Dating Johnny had felt like a good solid plan when we met right out of college. And I was a planner.
I was also a reader of every Regency romance novel from Jane Austen right on through Tessa Dare’s latest. More than once Lucy had accused me of being lost in an earlier era, and maybe she was right.
Thanks to the dukes and the viscounts who could woo better than anyone, I had myself a model for how my love life would be—it would be swoony and romantic. Full stop.
My plan was I’d date a series of roguish bachelors in my early twenties, settle for one at twenty-five, marry at twenty-seven, have three moppets by my mid-thirties. Teaching would be the perfect job that would give me school breaks off to coincide with my kids’ schedules.
So I graduated from college and dated the roguish bachelors, most of them variations on Clay Meadows—tall, rakish, muscular men with chiseled good looks. The best of the bunch was Johnny Culpepper, the son of a Nashville seafood importer who dazzled me with his ready smile and his ability to lead on the dance floor. We met at a wedding, began dating a week later, and by the time I was twenty-four I was ready to put my plan in place.
Johnny Culpepper seemed on board with the plan. We’d talked about my romantic aspirations and my love for formal wooing. A man who liked a challenge, he jumped at the chance to woo like the best of ’em.
He brought flowers to me after my last class when I was getting my teaching credential. He held doors open for me when we entered a restaurant and remembered my mother’s birthday. He serenaded me with classical music from his phone when he told me he loved me under a moonlit sky.
So I didn’t see it coming when night turned to day and the magic wore off.
Johnny explained it in such simple terms I kicked myself for not recognizing the charade. “I got caught up in the wooing. I liked doing all the stuff. It was romantic, and I loved the chase. But I never wanted a forever relationship. I just wanted the chase.”
How had I not seen this coming?
It was a blow to the ego and an anvil on my tender heart.
He’d mastered all the trappings of courtship so well that I didn’t really notice that Johnny Culpepper was really just a greyhound. In other words, he ran as fast as he could when the starting gun went off, pulled out all his best wooing moves when the object of his affections had yet to commit. Then, once I signed on for good, he lost his motivation.
Once a greyhound wins the race, it doesn’t keep running. It stops and basks in the win.
Then it waits for the next opportunity to chase something new.
Johnny Culpepper was the first man I ever dated who was only in it for the chase, but he wasn’t the last.
I kept doing it, kept falling for guys who wooed my pants off, only to put theirs right back on after they got what they wanted. Sometimes it was after one week. Sometimes after three months.
My mother thought men were unreliable, and she’d done her best to warn me. Eventually, I started to believe she was right and decided I’d never fall for that kind of man again because it wasn’t good for me. There was no point in chasing after a greyhound and having him chase me back because we both knew that there was a finish line in sight.
That was why I could look at Clay with his sculpted arms, pretty face, and melted-chocolate eyes and feel like I knew something important about him. Clay screamed greyhound, and that simple fact made it easy to convince myself to feel nothing.
The past couple of days were a weird blip. I’d chalked it up to concussion brain and the seductive properties of good coffee. Nothing more. And certainly nothing that meant I’d mistake spending a night in his yard pitching a tent for anything more.
“I know. I’ve been immune to him for years, and then he had to go and be uncharacteristically sweet. It just...threw me off.” I explained my crash and burn on the track, and Lucy nodded sympathetically until I got to the part about spending a night faux-camping in Clay’s backyard. Then she practically knocked the drink out of my hand.
“No, that’s simply not going to work.”
“Because...?” I knew why it wasn’t going to work for me—bugs, flimsy tents, woodland creatures—but I remained confounded as to why Lucy thought it sounded so awful.
“Because it’s way too much time to spend alone with that perfectly shaped hunk of Clay. If you’re feeling things now, hoo-boy, you’re going to be feeling things after that.”
She wasn’t wrong. That was my other concern. Maybe the bigger concern.
“I don’t think I can get out of chaperoning the retreat, so I do need some help if I’m going to be at one with the woods. What do you suggest?”
Lucy tapped a finger against her pink-lipped smile, and I watched her eyes dart about as though looking for a place to land on an answer. Her mouth popped open, and she clapped her hands. “I’m cock-blocking you.” Her voice was so sugary sweet as she smiled at me in her knowing way that I felt certain I’d misheard her.
“Excuse me?”
“I’m going to make it impossible for you to notice Clay because you’ll be pining over someone else. There’s a guy.” Lucy’s eyes gleamed with a mad scientist’s glee, and I wondered what kind of Frankenstein she had in mind.
“What kind of guy?”
“Louie. He’s an architect.”
Lucy had never once brought up Louis the architect before, and I wondered why. “Does Louis actually exist, or are you making up a fictitious perfect guy to keep me in rapt anticipation through the weekend and therefore distracted from Clay’s biceps? Then you’ll tell me Louie was all a lie?”
Her eyes went wide. Then she took a sip of her beer. Then another. I felt certain I’d nailed it until she started shaking her head slowly. Very slowly.
“Nooo...” She drew the word out so long it seemed to have three syllables. “But that’s a great idea and I will be stashing it in my bag of wing-woman tricks for later. Louie is real.”
I studied Lucy. The way she met my eyes made her look serious and truthful, but there was something she wasn’t saying.
“But . . . ,” I prompted.
Lucy took two more sips from her glass before slamming it on the table so hard that the liquid sloshed over the side. She mopped the beer up with a red bar napkin and pushed the glass away. “Fine. He’s maybe a tiny bit boring. But not in a bad way.”
I couldn’t suppress a laugh. “How is boring ever good?”
“When it’s a relief, that’s when. What you see is what you get with Louie. He’s not sarcastic or jokey.”
“So, no sense of humor.”
She made a face of distaste. “He’s straightforward. Has a stable career. He’ll pay for your dinner and engage you in tasteful conversation about uncontroversial subjects.”
“How do you know this man?” I found it hard to believe he and Lucy were good friends, partly because I’d never heard of him and partly because this was Lucy, just about the farthest thing from boring I’d ever known—she’d been brave enough to leave Green Valley for a big city and become a physician’s assistant when no one we knew had heard of that job. She was ahead of her time, and she did not do boring.
“We were standing in the checkout line at the library and apparently he was a former student of my mom’s.” Lucy’s mother, Frieda, was a Green Valley institution, a grammar school teacher who remembered every former student’s name, even a dozen or more years after she had them in class.
“Say no more.”
She nodded. “He was nice enough. Gave me his card because I told him I was looking for volunteers for the church yard sale, and he said he’s free most weekends. Made a point of telling me he doesn’t have anyone in his life to take care of, definitely no animals. He emphasized that.”
“What does he have against animals?” I almost wanted to meet this Louie just to confirm that such a person actually existed.
And more than that, maybe Lucy had a point. If I kept my mind busy thinking about a future date with a kind, boring architect, then maybe it would distract me enough that I could be in close quarters with Clay and feel nothing.
“Yeah, the animal thing threw me a little bit, but he admitted he was bitten by a sheep as a kid and is scared of anything wearing a fur coat.”
A kind, boring architect who was a little bit weird. I could work with that.
“Sounds like a dream, Lu. Set me up.”