Luke grabbed Nicki’s hand and pulled her into the library lined with books on built-in floor-to-ceiling shelves, then sank into a chair and rubbed his temples.
Nicki watched, trying to understand how she could let him affect her so much, creating a softening that was neither welcome nor wise. He was a bottom-line kind of guy. She’d returned that lovely painting, but the only thing that had caught his attention was its monetary value. Luke McCade was the last man she should find attractive—partly because of his similarity to her ex-husband, partly because of his difference from her. Luke didn’t like small towns, he wasn’t the least bit interested in art, and, despite his concern for his grandfather, he was well-known as a hardheaded businessman. She had a feeling that falling in love with an adult Luke would be much harder to survive than a girlhood crush.
Physical attraction was nice, but it was more important to respect someone and find things in common with them. She probably had no more in common with Luke than her likeness to the footballs he played with. Footballs were ugly things, too—brown and awkward and bumpy.
Of course, Luke wasn’t ugly.
Or the least bit awkward.
And his only bumps were the ones from muscles.
She bit her lip and sat in a nearby chair, wondering how in less than an hour she’d gone from disliking him to…admiring his biceps. She needed to find her willpower. Fast. The thought of being drawn into a relationship with someone like her ex-husband again made her stomach clench.
It didn’t help that Luke had actually apologized. Well, sort of apologized. She’d once thought it was an over-used cliché that men couldn’t say they were sorry, but it seemed to be a true one.
“Thanks for the help,” Luke muttered after a long minute. “We tried hiring a yard service after Grams died, only Granddad would have none of it. We manage to keep the grass mowed and things watered, but that’s all. He didn’t want strangers in her garden. Or in the house, for that matter.”
“But I’m a stranger—as much as anyone else in Divine. People know each other here, and he’d probably be acquainted with someone working for a yard service.”
Luke shook his head. “It’s different with you. I don’t know why—maybe because you were his student and he recommended you for his teaching position. We have a hard time getting a word out of him at the best of times, but he really sparked when he realized who you were.”
“That’s because we have a common point of reference.”
“I know. Art. But we’ve tried to get him reconnected to his friends and other professors at the college, and nothing has worked. There must be something different about you.”
It wasn’t just art, Nicki thought, it was a deep appreciation of love and beauty. Unless someone could connect on that level, it wouldn’t be the same. “Um…the garden seems really important to him.”
“Yes, but don’t worry about working on it.”
“What if I want to work on it?” she asked dryly. “What if keeping my word is important to me?”
“Granddad isn’t himself. He won’t even remember what happened by tomorrow—he probably doesn’t remember now.”
“I’m not so sure of that. But it doesn’t matter, because I’ll remember,” Nicki said as gently as possible. She wasn’t nearly as convinced as Luke that his grandfather would forget. Something in the old professor’s face had suggested much more awareness than his family seemed to believe.
Luke gave her an exasperated look. “And I’m telling you it’s all right.”
She tried not to get angry. Even if Luke was an insensitive jock, she should be understanding. After all, he had come back to Divine to help his grandfather. A lot of people wouldn’t have bothered, or else would have hired someone to take care of everything. “If you don’t want me around that long, then maybe you can help to get it done faster.”
“It isn’t that I don’t want you around,” he growled. “But that garden is more work than you seem to realize.”
“That doesn’t matter—I like being busy and having lots to do. My classes are over and I have plenty of free time, except Tuesdays when I deliver meals to shut-ins or when I have meetings for stuff. I also volunteer at the nursing home twice a month, but you don’t garden at night, anyhow.”
He lifted an eyebrow. “What do you do at the nursing home? Some sort of craft class, I suppose.”
Nicki’s face turned warm. Luke hadn’t needed to know about her various volunteer activities, especially since he’d probably think it was provincial to be involved in small-scale community concerns. “I…um, call the bingo games.”
Luke grinned. “You call the bingo games?”
“Well, yes. It’s better than strip poker.”
His grin broadened. “I don’t like bingo, but I wouldn’t mind a game of strip poker. We could play now if you like. Though I have to warn you, I’m damn good at filling an inside straight.”
“You’re pathetic,” she snapped, forgetting she ought to be understanding. “Go play with one of your old girlfriends.”
“They’re all married.”
“Fortunately not to you, right?”
“Yeah. Lucky escape on my part. Besides, can you see me driving a minivan and giving the dog a bath every Saturday?” He shuddered.
“Only if you develop amnesia or have a personality transplant.”
“See how life works itself out? I’ve been saved from a life of domesticity.”
Luke grinned as Nicki rolled her eyes in disgust, yet he also saw a hint of laughter in their depths. After that scene with his grandfather, he’d felt as if a truck had run him over. But Nicki was a breath of fresh air. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad having her around for a few days, and if she wanted to work on his grandmother’s garden, then fine. She’d give up soon enough—she was used to teaching, not back-breaking labor.
“So why haven’t you ever gotten married?” he asked.
“Who says I haven’t?”
The idea that Nicki might be married, or even that she’d once been married, disturbed him. “Because you’re using your maiden name and you aren’t wearing a wedding ring.”
“And you think you’re a modern guy. This is the twenty-first century. Lots of women don’t wear rings or take their husband’s name.” Nicki tossed her head, sending gold curls flying, and Luke remembered the way she used to drag her hair back from her face in a ponytail, leaving a set of crooked bangs to hide her eyes.
No one had ever gotten to look at her eyes in the old days. It was a shame, too. They were clear and blue and bright and broadcast every emotion she tried to hide. He was big on eyes. He was also big on other parts of a woman’s body, but eyes were important.
“So you’re telling me you’re married?” He kept a narrow look on her, certain the answer was no but wanting to hear it confirmed. He’d flirted with her, and flirting with married women was a taboo in his book.
“Divorced,” she said, her mouth tightening. “And before you make a dumb assumption, I’m the one who left. It turned out we weren’t compatible.”
Luke was grateful she’d volunteered the information, except now he wanted to know why they hadn’t been compatible. Did she mean they weren’t compatible in the bedroom, or some other way? Everything was in the details. He was catching small-town-itis—otherwise called being nosy—at an alarming rate, so he sat back with a half smile, hoping Nicki’s natural talkativeness would take care of answering his questions without him being tempted to actually ask them.
“I’ll have to come really early in the morning if I’m going to work on the garden,” she said to his great disappointment. She obviously didn’t want to talk about her divorce. He couldn’t blame her, he didn’t like talking about his ex-fiancée and the reason they’d broken up, either.
“Why so early?”
“I don’t like the heat.”
“You live in Illinois,” Luke reminded her. “Summers are hot here. And humid.”
“It’s late May. We’re in an unseasonably hot spell, and I can get sunburned in five minutes flat. If you want to work out there in the middle of the day, then be my guest. I’ve got better sense.”
“Nope, I have a brown thumb.”
“You mean there’s something the great and powerful Luke McCade can’t do? Or are you opposed to getting your hands dirty these days? Too busy gobbling up property and making your next million dollars, I suppose.”
He scowled, and with some teasing annoyance he said, “You should wear shorts if you dislike the heat that much.” He tried and failed to imagine Nicki in something that wasn’t four sizes too big for her. “Something with a little less…fabric.”
Though she hadn’t revealed an inch of skin that wasn’t perfectly respectable, Luke found his gaze tracing the vee at her neck.
Nicki had the softest skin he’d ever touched. He remembered the way it had felt against his callused teenage fingers, and the frustration of having her draw back like a frightened rabbit just when things were getting interesting. Apparently she was still shy about her body if her clothes were anything to judge by, yet he’d bet anything she was innately sensual. It was the way she touched things that made him think so, stroking her fingers across surfaces with unconscious pleasure.
Predictably, she went stiff and prickly and stuck her small chin in the air. “I can’t wear shorts. I don’t want to shock your grandfather.”
Luke laughed. He couldn’t help it. “Granddad isn’t a prude. I may not have paid enough attention to his art, but I know he liked nudes just fine.”
His smile turned reflective as he remembered his grandfather showing him paintings of naked women, probably guessing they might be more appealing to a teenage boy than bowls of fruit or a Madonna and child. “There was this one I remember,” he said, trying to recapture a lost moment from his boyhood, “of a woman with long hair. She was standing on a seashell.”
“Botticelli’s Birth of Venus,” Nicki said. She got up and ran her fingers across the books filling the library shelves. A moment later she tugged one out and flipped through it. “There.”
Sure enough, it was the painting he remembered. “It’s pretty.”
At his unenthusiastic tone, she grimaced. “I know, she doesn’t have big enough breasts to suit you. But most women can’t be skinny and fill out a D-cup bra at the same time—not without a plastic surgeon. Of course, then their breasts don’t look or feel natural—but I suppose you don’t care about that.”
“I’m not as obsessed with big breasts as you think,” he said in his own defense.
“Yeah, right.”
“I’m not.” He liked women’s breasts, period. It was true that he’d once obsessed over how well a girl filled out a T-shirt, but while he appreciated a lover who was well-endowed, size wasn’t everything. If a woman wasn’t responsive, the shape of her body didn’t matter.
“Okay.” Nicki crossed her arms and gave him a hard stare. “When was the last time you dated a women who didn’t look like a Playboy centerfold?”
Luke thought about it and realized that Nicki was right. He did only date women with centerfold measurements. He glared, annoyed and embarrassed at the same moment. “Did it ever occur to you that I might have grown up a little since high school?” he demanded, avoiding the question.
“Nope. Jocks never grow up.”
“Sometimes we don’t have any choice.”
Luke rubbed his knee. It still ached some of the time, when it was cold in Chicago and the wind blew off the lake. The old injuries usually didn’t bother him, but they’d ended his football career before it ever started.
“Luke—”
“I need to make a phone call,” he said, hating the look that had come into Nicki’s eyes. He hadn’t wanted sympathy then, he didn’t want it now. “But if you dislike the heat that much, you really ought to think about wearing some shorts,” he added softly.
“Yeah…Okay.”
Luke didn’t know if she was referring to the shorts, or to dropping a subject he didn’t want discussed. Nicki was more direct than when they were kids, but she read “no trespassing” signs better than anyone—not that she’d always obeyed those signs, but she had always known when they were posted.
“Grown up?” Nicki muttered to herself a few minutes later as she scanned the books lining the library shelves. “Hah.”
She spotted some well-worn books on gardening and pulled them out. How complicated could it be? You stuck something in the ground and it grew. Simple.
Like Luke.
It wasn’t that Luke was stupid, but he used his brain the way he used to play football—like a bulldog charging ahead without looking from one side to the other. There wasn’t an ounce of subtlety in his entire body—probably a trait he’d found useful as a land developer.
It didn’t follow that jocks were dumb, but they often acted that way. Nicki sighed, inevitably thinking about her ex-husband. It hadn’t mattered to her that Butch hadn’t finished college, but apparently it bothered him. Strangely, he’d seemed both proud and resentful that his wife had earned a post-graduate degree at a young age. After a while she’d hated the mocking way he called her Doctor Saunders.
“Don’t think about it,” Nicki muttered to herself.
She sank into one of the comfortable chairs and began reading. After only twenty minutes she decided gardening wasn’t as simple as she’d thought. Between the different types of soil, moisture content, how acid it might be, how much sun something got and didn’t get, and a hundred other things, it was a miracle anything grew in the first place.
Yet, when Nicki closed her eyes she could see the colors and textures of growing things, and imagine the feel of rich soil against her fingers. She got up and looked out the window, then moved from room to room, looking out their windows as well. Windows were like picture frames, and she envisioned painting a garden inside those frames—flowers and curving paths, clear running water in the fountains and ponds…a myriad of colors and shapes.
“If it takes that much effort to think, I don’t know why anyone should bother,” Luke said.
Her eyes popped open. “How did you sneak up on me like that?”
“I didn’t sneak, I walked.”
“With you it’s probably the same thing.”
“Keep that up and I won’t feed you lunch.”
Lunch?
Surprised, Nicki looked at her watch and saw it was nearly one in the afternoon. “I’ll go get something.”
“I ordered some Chinese food to be delivered.”
“Oh, that’s all right, I don’t expect you to feed me. I can get something for myself.”
Luke looked exasperated. “Of course I’m going to feed you. But you don’t need to worry—you can take your food to another room if I’m such terrible company.”
She didn’t dignify his suggestion with a response, and when the food came they all sat at the kitchen table. Professor McCade ate mechanically without looking at anything, while Nicki ate trying to look at anything but Luke.
For some reason, the big jerk was having fun at her expense, though that wasn’t anything new. He’d always joked about her clothes and hair and everything else. The corners of Nicki’s mouth drooped as she remembered she was still making it easy for Luke to laugh. Her clothes did have too much fabric…they hung on her as if she’d lost fifty pounds.
Shorts, huh?
She tried to think if she had a pair that would qualify as sexy but not so outrageous as to offend Professor McCade. Sherrie had worn shorts and a tight T-shirt the previous day…though granddaughters were probably allowed more leeway.
“You didn’t eat enough to keep a mouse alive,” Luke observed as she put the leftover cartons of food in a refrigerator filled with other leftover cartons.
She lifted her nose in the air. “I’m on a diet. This shirt used to fit me, and I’m trying to keep from growing into it again.” It was an outrageous lie, but for once she didn’t care.
“Fit you?” He gave her a startled look, then laughed. “No way. You were never big enough to fill out that shirt.”
“You never know,” she muttered.
“I know.”
Chuckling and shaking his head, Luke turned on the air-conditioning and headed back to his computer and fax machine, while Nicki returned to her inventory. She carefully documented the information the way she did all of her appraisal work and noted issues to be researched…only to find herself tapping her pencil against the paper and thinking about her wardrobe.
Did she have a decent pair of shorts?
Not the worn-out, cutoff shorts she wore when chaperoning the church youth group at a car-wash fund-raiser, but a pair that would make Luke take back every word he’d ever said about her…clothing.
Hmmm.
Nicki rested her chin on her hand. Seeing Luke again had started a chain of thoughts that wouldn’t relent, along with a seesawing chain of emotions. It seemed as if all her life she’d avoided being noticed. They’d moved around a lot, her father’s health keeping him from working regularly, finally settling in Divine when she was in eighth grade. Clothing had come mostly from secondhand shops, and she’d been humiliated when a classmate taunted her for wearing a sister’s castoffs. So to keep it from happening again, she’d picked stuff the girls her age wouldn’t be caught dead wearing.
Of course, Nicki had a feeling there was another explanation for the choices she’d made—probably one of those psychological things, like a fear of looking ridiculous if she tried to look sexy and failed.
But that wasn’t a good reason to keep dressing badly. Was it? She didn’t have to be ruled by subconscious leftovers from her childhood or marriage. She might not be the sexiest woman in the world, but she wasn’t the ugliest. It was all right to wear something pretty for her own pleasure, she finally decided.
At four o’clock Nicki admitted defeat and pushed her work to one side. There was a boutique in downtown Divine that carried some nice clothing. She’d often looked in the window and been tempted to go inside. Now might be the time. She didn’t know if she had the gumption to wear something different in front of Luke and risk him laughing at her, but she’d never know if she didn’t try.
Besides, he’d been challenging her when he had talked about her wearing shorts. He didn’t think she would do it. She could show him that he didn’t have her pegged.
She’d heard the phone ring and the sound of Luke walking through the hallway a few times, probably going down to check on his grandfather, but other than that, the house was silent.
“Uh…Luke?” she said, going down the hall herself and tapping at the door he’d come out of earlier. “I’m leaving now. I’ll be back early tomorrow. Oh, and I’m going to borrow some gardening books.”
The door opened as she was turning away.
“Any earth-shattering discoveries?” he asked. “On the art scene, that is?”
She cleared her throat and fiddled with the hem of her shirt until she noticed him watching her fingers, rather than her face. “Well, I didn’t find anything like a Picasso or Rembrandt, but there are some valuable pieces. It’s hard to believe they were stored in the attic that way.”
Luke’s face went from wickedly amused to sad. “Granddad gave up after Grams died. They lived for each other.”
“I think he could get better.”
“No. I don’t believe in the Easter Rabbit, any more than I ever believed in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy,” Luke said shortly. “Reality is reality.”
“Don’t you want him to be better?”
“Of course I do.” The words practically exploded from Luke, and he closed his eyes, trying to stay calm. After a long minute he looked at Nicki again. “The doctor says Granddad is suffering from senility, and that it’s probably been coming on for a long time. Maybe that’s it, and maybe it isn’t, but someone in the family has to be realistic and face the facts—and I seem to be the only one willing to do that.”
“Facts?”
Luke sighed. “Yes. We’ve tried medication and several forms of mental and physical therapy and none of it has helped. It’s obvious he can’t stay in the house, especially since he won’t tolerate us hiring someone to stay with him.”
“But—”
“No. Granddad sold you that painting of my great-grandmother for how much?”
“Er…five dollars.”
“And it’s worth twenty thousand. Does that sound like he can take care of himself?”
Nicki shook her head, a miserable expression on her face, and Luke ached the way he’d ached when he was told there wouldn’t be any football in his future.
Except this was infinitely worse.
They’d lost Grams, and it looked like they were losing Granddad as well. And here he was, losing control the way he hated doing, taking his anger and frustration out on Nicki, the way he’d done fourteen years ago.
Small towns were like that. Lives were intertwined with each other, and old scars got poked with the regularity of a dog chewing at a bone. Still, he remembered some good moments at the hospital alone with Nicki when she’d forgotten she hated him. Moments when he’d been able to forget the doctor’s announcement that he wouldn’t be playing pro football in the future, moments possible all because Nicki had been smart and shy and a great kisser, when she wasn’t worried about getting caught.
Luke rolled his shoulders, releasing the tension that had gripped him, and a faint smile curved his lips. “What would you do if I tried to tease a kiss out of you? For old times’ sake?”
Nicki blinked, obviously startled, then shrugged. “I’d think you were bored.”
A part of him was bored being away from his home and normal life, but it wasn’t why he had asked. Nicki disturbed him. She didn’t like him, which shouldn’t have mattered in the slightest, yet for some reason it was starting to bug him.
“I’m not bored. I’ve got too much work to do to be bored,” he said firmly. “I just wondered. You weren’t always against the idea. I’ll bet you even considered going further than just kissing and teasing.”
“Yeah, but I grew up, too. And I discovered that some men are all flash and no substance.”
“Are we talking about me, or your ex-husband?”
Anger flared in Nicki’s eyes, then all at once she smiled and patted his cheek. “What happened to you, Luke? You’ve lost your touch. You used to be much better at charming girls into kissing you.”
He shook his head. “Is that why you kissed me back then, because you were charmed?”
She shrugged. “Maybe I thought there was a nice guy beneath all that stupid macho bravado…way deep down. Sadly, I was wrong.”
At least she wasn’t pandering to his ego, Luke thought dryly.
“Believe it or not, people change. Take some time to get to know me again, and I might surprise you,” he said. He summoned his most charming smile, the one that had always worked in the past.
Her eyes narrowed and he could tell she was struggling between the instincts of tact and honesty.
“There isn’t enough time in the world,” she said, turning on her heel and walking away resolutely.
Luke laughed as she disappeared down the front staircase. Honesty had won.