Chapter Five

She spent the rest of the evening in the kitchen, cleaning everything repeatedly until every surface was spotless.

A sour-faced Kelly emerged before bedtime, properly subdued into apologizing. With no kids of her own, Leonore guessed that “Dad says I must apologize, so…(deep sigh)…sorry” was enough, because afterward Ben beamed with fatherly pride, and Kelly looked pouty but relieved.

“Thank God that’s over.” Ben laughed as Kelly disappeared in a much quieter way than the last time, grabbing Leonore by the waist and gently nuzzling the side of her neck with his lips.

She didn’t feel a thing. Not even a spark. Or…well…there was a little spark, or maybe a rather big, shivering spark, but it had to be just a memory of what had happened earlier. Before she had learnt, as always, what a loser she was.

Noticing her lack of response, Ben let go of her, slowly.

“Leonore? Is there something wrong?”

She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

“How can you ask me if anything is wrong?” she almost sobbed, tears in her eyes. “You were there too. In the cellar. Listening to Kelly repeating your own words. And you ask me if there is something wrong?”

He took a step back, looking at her, puzzled. “Are you making fun of me, Leonore? You can’t possibly believe I would ever say anything like that about you. And in front of Kelly, too?”

“Are you saying your daughter is a liar?”

“She is a teenager!” His strained voice reeked with disbelief. “They don’t live in the same dimension as we do. Heck, they don’t even speak the same language! You think you say, ‘Go clean your room,’ or ‘Go do your homework,’ but all they hear is, ‘Go to your room and spend your time in bed watching videos of some really foul-speaking youngsters, or playing games on your cell phone.’ ”

It did make sense, what he’d said. Really, it did. She wasn’t so oblivious to the surrounding world as to not have encountered the strange human breed known as teenagers.

But then again…what Kelly had said…

Leonore had heard Paul tirelessly paint the same picture of her too many times, in too many ways. If Kelly had lied, then she’d have to be clairvoyant, at the least, because she had nailed Paul’s version of Leonore bang on.

To think that Ben thought the same of her…

Ben, who in one day had turned her whole world upside down and made her, from out of nowhere, suddenly have hope for the future.

Ben, who looked at her as if she were a newly baked apple pie, ready for him to devour, and had her willingly, mentally, bathed in vanilla sauce just to make the experience even sweeter.

Ben, who had always been there, safe and down to earth, someone both she and Granny had trusted completely, which was the one and only reason she had gone down into the cellar with him.

It hurt.

“I can’t believe this.” Ben sighed, frustrated, dragging his fingers through his hair. “I-I know we sort of just met, and that we did a hell of a lot more than I’ve ever done on a first date before, but this… H-how can you believe that I would have said those things about you? I don’t even know you. The Leonore I know is the highly beloved granddaughter of a woman who couldn’t praise you enough. But frankly, now I don’t think she knew you at all either.”

He stood there, looking just as confused and sad as she felt, and her heart cried because she didn’t dare believe him. What if Kelly had said the truth? What if the true liar in the house was the man standing in front of her, looking all honest and handsome?

She didn’t know what to say. If only she could turn back the clock so she could do what she’d instinctively wanted to do this morning—refuse to go with him. She would not have experienced the wonderful sex, the extraordinary fulfillment they had found together, but in the end that really didn’t matter to her. Because refusing him would have meant no heartache, and she would never have fooled herself into thinking herself worthy of this man.

Now she knew better. Paul had spoken the truth all along, and if she had listened more closely to him she would have remained in blissful ignorance. But instead she had followed Ben like an apathetic zombie, falling into the depths of despair, as one of her favorite heroines once had said.

In the end, she didn’t have to say anything. The storm outside ripped a huge branch from one of the trees in the yard and tossed it onto the roof of the barn, which had Ben spending the rest of the evening trying to secure the roof as well as he could until the storm died enough for him to do it thoroughly.

She stood by the kitchen window, watching him carry planks up a ladder while fighting the heavily falling snow and the taunting wind. It was a hard job for a single man, but he had refused the help she’d offered.

“What good could you do out there?” he had asked, stone-faced, before going outside, dressed in as many layers as an Inuit.

Something. Anything.

She felt insulted, brushed aside as if she were nothing more than an annoying fly. She could have carried the planks from the snowy pile, across the wind-filled yard, so he just had to climb up and down the ladder, saving him time because he wouldn’t have to do everything by himself. But no…Benjamin Emerson didn’t want help from a boring nitpicker with a fancy stick up her bony ass. He obviously would rather perish all by himself than accept the help offered.

“I can’t sleep. It sounds so weird in my room.”

With large, worried eyes and in pajamas covered in colorful horses, Kelly didn’t look like the angry teenager who had unleashed her fury over them earlier. Instead she looked like just a little girl in need of a hug.

“The storm is fading. Soon it will have passed, and everything will go back to normal,” Leonore said, matter-of-factly, forcing her arms to stay folded over her chest.

“Dad looks lonely. Why don’t we go out and help him?”

“He says no.”

“Yeah.” Kelly snorted. “I guess we would only be two more things for him to worry about outside. Now, at least, he knows where we are and that we’re safe.”

She hadn’t thought of it like that. Blindly she had jumped to the conclusion that he thought her useless, but Kelly did have a point.

“I’m sorry I lied to you. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”

“What?” Leonore lost her breath.

Kelly made a cute grimace that clearly showed the beauty she was turning into, just like her mother had once been. “What I said about you. About the boring stick and that. Dad didn’t say anything like that. He sort of likes you, you know. Just like I like…Dave… It’s just that Natalie Dawson does, too, and she is so sneaky. And pretty. Too pretty. And…I was just a little worried and sort of lost it. Sort of…”

A trembling sense of relief flooded through Leonore’s veins as she heard the confession. Was it true? Or was this just another lie? Maybe Ben had ordered Kelly to say this to Leonore, to erase the awkward situation.

She wanted to believe in him; really she did. Every last part of her desperately needed to believe in Ben and what they might have together. But Paul had meticulously destroyed her ability to trust anyone. Everyone but Granny. But Paul had left her, and so had Granny, in her own way. Left was Leonore, with no one to lean on. No one who would tell her what to do or what to think.

She spent the night on the couch in the living room, and the next morning a quiet Ben drove her back into town, not saying a word as they drove through the wintry landscape. After honking their way through town, he stopped outside her house and turned off the engine.

Meeting his unreadable eyes, she didn’t know how to handle this situation they had created. What had started as awkwardly comfortable had quickly become hot and yearning—until it had crashed into something she couldn’t describe as anything but no-man’s land.

“Thank you for cleaning the kitchen,” Ben said quietly, breaking the silence. “Pa will be very pleased when he comes home.”

“It was nothing.”

He shrugged, seemingly indifferent. “All right. If you say so.”

Again they sat silent and uncomfortable, side by side. Just as Leonore couldn’t stand it anymore and was mentally preparing to dive out of the truck, he turned slightly toward her, looking as if in pain.

“I’m sorry about yesterday, Leonore.” He sighed. “Hell… Nothing turned out the way it was supposed to. I promised your grandmother that we would be together on Valentine’s Day, and here I am, dropping you off at your home to spend the evening alone.”

“It’s not your fault…”

He laughed tiredly. “No, I blame Kelly completely. That child was put on this earth to make my life a living hell and have me begging for more.”

“She told me she lied about what you had said.”

“She did? Well, that was well done of her. Now, if she only had kept her pretty little mouth closed from the beginning, it would have been so much nicer, but I guess I’ll have to be grateful for any bread crumbs she offers.”

They shared a little smile, sprung from a joint experience with an unpredictable Kelly. His eyes turned warmer, and she felt her whole body respond to him. As if he could sense her slightly changed attitude, he leaned forward, grabbing her glove-clad hand in his.

“Leonore, come back with me. Be my Valentine…”

“I-I…” she stuttered, wanting nothing more than to shout, “Hell, yeah!” and throw herself into his waiting arms. But she was too afraid. Too scared of what he could do to her. How he could make her feel. Just hours ago, she had been hurt in a way no one ever had been able to hurt her, and she just didn’t know if she dared to open another little hole in her defenses.

But what did she have to lose? Her heart? She had already lost it to him, in one single day. Did she really want to spend the rest of her life in miserable loneliness when she had this gorgeous man wanting her to be with him? He might only ask for her company for one night, but she knew that if she said yes, she did it for life.

How hard could it be to shout, “Hell, yeah”?

Just as she opened her mouth to answer him, a knock was heard on the window beside her, and when she turned around, she looked right into Paul’s mildly irritated face.