THERE WAS SOMETHING FAMILIAR, she thought, about the man who walked beside her to the benches near the big fountain. Right now, that fountain was little more than a dry sculpture of a rearing Pegasus, wings outstretched, standing in the center of a frozen pool. The water was turned off for the winter. The park lay just across the street from the high school, beneath a blanket of snow, and, aside from the handful of skaters who took to the ice most weekends, it was usually abandoned this time of year.
Matthew paused near the bench, bending to brush the snow off so they could sit. “You like the outdoors, I take it.”
She nodded. “Desperately. And I like being in a place where it’s safe to be outdoors. My neighborhood just isn’t that way anymore.”
“That’s really sad,” he said. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
“It won’t be that way forever.” She could see her breath, but the sun was warm on her face and she loved it. She was smiling as she sat, and Matthew seemed to get his eyes stuck on her face for a moment. But then he turned to sit down beside her.
He unzipped the insulated lunch bag he’d been carrying, and removed a sandwich from a plastic bag. “So tell me about yourself, Melinda Terwilliger,” he said, after taking a big bite of the delicious-looking roast beef.
She had packed her usual lunch of yogurt and fruit—an apple today—but she was regretting it now. It seemed as though a tough, kick-ass chick such as she ought to be eating something a little more substantial. His question was making its way into her brain and she found herself searching longer than usual for an answer.
Eventually, he said, “Interesting.”
“What is?” she asked.
“That you’re having trouble answering. It’s a pretty straightforward question.”
“Normally, it would be. But today, telling you about myself is harder to do than you can probably imagine,” she said.
“Why’s that?”
She studied his face, searching his eyes, wondering why she wanted to talk to him about it. She ought to be cautious. She didn’t know this man, after all. Just because she was attracted to him didn’t mean he could be trusted. “I recently learned some things about my past that I had…suppressed, I guess. It seems to be changing everything about me.”
“Really? That’s fascinating.” He looked at her as if he meant it.
He thought she was fascinating. Imagine that. But he was waiting for her to elaborate and she really couldn’t. After all, it was a secret, one she needed to keep.
So she hedged. “The most I can tell you is that I’m currently in a state of flux. A transitional phase, of sorts.”
“Like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly?” he asked.
“More like a chickadee turning into a red-tailed hawk, I think.”
He lifted his brows, looking surprised, but he covered it quickly. “I guess that would explain a lot.”
“Such as?”
“Well, the way you were with Danny O’Brian this morning, for example.” He seemed to be choosing his words with care. “I had come to think of you as…timid. Quiet. But you were one hard-ass with him outside my room today.”
“I’ve been letting him walk all over me,” she said. “Been letting a lot of people do that. I’m done with that.”
“Part of your…transformation?”
“Yeah. I’m still a little nervous about trying out my newfound toughness on those who really have it coming, though.”
He frowned, tipping his head to one side. “Like who?”
She smiled. “Oh, I have a list.”
He smiled back. “Do you now?”
“Yes. There’s an ex-boyfriend who still owes me money.”
“Excellent.”
“My sister, who borrowed my car six months ago and hasn’t so much as offered to make a payment.”
“Good for you!”
“The thug who stole my purse.”
He opened his mouth, closed it again and blinked at her. “What do you intend to do to him, exactly?”
She nodded. “I don’t know. But I’m livid that I let him rob me. That I complied without even putting up a fight.”
“That’s what you’re supposed to do, isn’t it?”
Melinda shrugged. “No, I don’t think so. I mean, I don’t think it’s what I’m supposed to do.”
“Now, listen, Melinda, you know, learning to stand up for yourself, becoming strong and confident and deciding not to let yourself be taken advantage of, that’s really good. I applaud it. But strong and confident are not synonymous with reckless.”
She nodded. “It’s not reckless if there’s no risk.”
He frowned. “So this thing you’ve discovered about yourself—is it that you’re invulnerable?”
She averted her eyes from his dark, probing ones. “This mugging triggered something inside me. I think I have that thug to blame—or to thank—for these changes I’m undergoing right now. I think I’m figuring out who I am for the first time in my life.” She lowered her head, smiled self-consciously. “Listen to me going on about all this. I’m sorry.”
“No. You’re on some kind of a journey, I can see that, and I find it fascinating. You’re nothing like what I thought you were, Melinda.”
“In what way?” she asked, wondering whether her newfound inner strength made her more appealing to hunky members of the opposite sex.
“You’re deep, complex. You have layers to you that aren’t apparent at first.”
She tilted her head. She liked the way he was looking at her. But she’d given away enough about herself. She wanted him to reciprocate. “Tell me about you, Matthew,” she said, using his first name even though it seemed like a bold thing to do. It felt good when she did it. “I take it you’re new to teaching.”
“Is it that obvious?”
She shook her head. “Not at all. I just assumed when you asked for advice—”
“Oh, right. Yeah, I’m new. This is my first job, as a matter of fact.”
“So what did you do before this?”
He shrugged. “Lots of things. Nothing nearly as interesting as sitting here talking to you today.”
“Now you’re just flattering me.”
“No, I’m not. And you didn’t answer my question. What, exactly, do you intend to do to this…thug who took your purse?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. But I’m definitely going to do something.”
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?”
She lifted her brows, tipped her head and searched her heart. “It feels like a good idea. Someone’s got to stand up to jerks like him. Otherwise, they just keep doing what they’re doing. Right?”
“I guess. But shouldn’t that someone be the police?”
“Probably. Sadly, they’re not doing their jobs at all where my neighborhood is concerned. So…”
He frowned at her, but she switched her focus to her meal and the notions spinning around inside her mind. Could she really stand up to the jerk who’d mugged her? Maybe it was just a fantasy, but it sure was a pleasant one.
MATT HADN’T EXPECTED the docile, wallflower Melinda Terwilliger to be any problem at all. He’d thought he could handle her. Keep her out of the way and keep her alive. But now that he was getting to know her a bit, he realized she wasn’t going to just roll over. There was a lot more to the soft-spoken schoolteacher than met the eye.
A lot more. Enough to intrigue him. Yeah, he was dying now to know more about her. But he had to keep his focus. He couldn’t afford to lose focus right now.
How could he have known what a thorough distraction the pretty, quiet woman everyone described as a mouse would be? She was no mouse. She might just be a lioness in disguise.
MELINDA GOT OFF THE TRAIN at her usual stop, but nothing about tonight felt usual. She’d stood up to the rude little bastard on the train. She’d stood up to her colleague Mary Blesser, who had been taking advantage of her for the better part of three years now. And she had stood up to the most disruptive kid in her English class.
Amazingly, Danny O’Brian sat quietly through her class today, although the brooding and dark expression he wore told her the lull was likely only temporary. He was probably plotting ways to test her—see if she really meant what she’d said.
Oddly, she wasn’t worried about it. She was finished letting him disrupt her class. It wasn’t fair to the other students—the handful who wanted to learn.
She was feeling something else tonight, too. She was feeling…pretty. Attractive. Fascinating, even. All because of her lunch with Matthew MacGuire. His attention had been something new to her. No man had ever seemed so intrigued by her, so interested in what she had to say, so attentive. She found she liked that kind of attention. She liked it a lot.
He’d offered her a ride home again, but she’d turned him down. She wanted to test her wings a little bit more.
He would ask her again. The way he looked at her, she was certain of it. And when they walked back to the school after sharing that lunch in the snowy, pristine park, she’d felt the eyes of her colleagues on her. The women were jealous, and the men—admiring, at the least. All of them were surprised. All of them looked at Melinda with a new curiosity in their eyes, as if they had never truly seen her before.
And maybe they hadn’t, because maybe she had never seen herself before.
Walking home from the train, her mind was on Matthew, more than it was on the nerve-racking gauntlet she had to run to reach her duplex. In fact, the mugging and the thugs who hung out in packs around her neighborhood were so far from her mind that when she saw her neighbor Annabelle Johnson clinging to her big quilted handbag while an overweight jerk yanked on the other end, it took Melinda a second to realize what was happening. When she did, something rose up inside her. Something she’d never felt before—or maybe she’d felt it in that other life, the one she’d forgotten.
The fat punk yanked Annabelle’s purse free, ripping its strap and probably yanking the poor old woman’s shoulder out of its socket in the process. Then he spun around, running full bore toward Melinda.
She did not dive to the side to avoid being flattened. Her knee-jerk reaction was to find a weapon. She looked left, looked right, spotted a wastebasket on the sidewalk—a big wire mesh one, meant for the depositing of doggy droppings. There was no time to question her decision. She ran around the basket, kicked it over onto its side and then, with another well-placed push from her high-heeled boot, sent it rolling toward the man. He was running headlong, but looking over his shoulder at Annabelle, who was screaming at him to stop. Perfect. He faced front again, but couldn’t stop in time. The rolling trash can hit him in the shins and blew his legs right out from under him. He flew over the top of it and hit the sidewalk face-first. The handbag arched through the air, landing several feet ahead of him.
Melinda walked past him to the handbag and picked it up. She looked behind her at the man as he pushed himself off the sidewalk. His chin and one cheek were scraped raw—sidewalk burn. She hoped that wasn’t the only damage she’d done to the bastard.
He looked her right in the eyes. “You’re gonna pay for that, lady.”
“Oh, I paid in advance, last week, when you mugged me. Remember?” She shrugged. “I know how to kill a man with a ballpoint pen, pal. And I’m not going to let you get away with any more of your bullshit. Not in my neighborhood. It ends today. You and your friends in the drug den might as well pack up and leave. You’re finished here.”
She turned away, striding toward Annabelle, holding out the woman’s bag and trying to ignore the powerful tremors that were making their way through her body. It was like an earthquake down deep, with shock waves radiating into her limbs. She fought not to let them show, even while wondering who the hell had just said those brave words to the criminal on the sidewalk. Not her, surely. They’d come from someone else—someone inside her. Someone she didn’t even know.
Annabelle took the bag, blinking in stunned surprise. “Th-thanks, Twiggy. What the hell brought that on?”
Melinda shrugged. “I’m sick of being a victim, I guess. Are you okay?”
“Uh-huh. But you might not be.” She nodded toward something.
Melinda turned to see that the fat guy had got up, brushed himself off and was striding toward her, his fists clenched at his sides. He was humiliated, and dangerous. Melinda held up her cell phone, pushed a button, then another, then another.
“I just took your picture, pal, and then I sent it to the cops. You want to see?”
She turned the phone toward him. “Camera adds ten pounds, they say.”
“You’re going to die, you scrawny little—”
But he stopped there, because several other people were gathering now on the sidewalk behind Melinda and Annabelle. Neighborhood people. There was Mr. Peabody waving his glossy, wooden walking stick menacingly. And Olive Sparks, waddling her five-foot, two-hundred-pound way closer, a baseball bat in her hand. And several other residents of the block stood around, too. None young or buff or rugged. Most were retirement age or older. But they were all fed up.
Melinda smiled as the twenty-something fatso backed off and finally turned and ran, vanishing around a corner.
The neighbors broke into a smattering of halfhearted applause, and several clapped her on the shoulder or patted her on the head as they dispersed.
Annabelle wasn’t so cheerful. She was scowling, in fact. “Are you out of your gourd, Twiggy? Do you know what those punks are gonna do to you now?”
Melinda shrugged. “What they’ll try to do, you mean.”
“Try, my wrinkly ass! You just painted a big old bull’s-eye right on your forehead, Twiggy. Just make sure you ain’t standin’ near me when they show up.”
With that, Annabelle turned and stomped away, muttering about the torn strap on her handbag and having to sew it and hoping they didn’t firebomb the duplex or God only knew what else.
Sighing, Melinda followed, but kept her distance. She headed into her half of the two-family house, and Annabelle went into hers, slamming the door behind her. The last words Melinda heard were “Damn fool girl!”
Okay, Melinda thought as she yanked the mail from her box and entered her own living space. She tossed her bag onto the sofa and sank down beside it. Maybe Annabelle was right. Maybe she was teasing a killer dog, and setting herself up to be eaten by it.
She glanced down, wondering if she had made a terrible mistake and saw, right on top of her pile of mail, a tri-fold flyer advertising martial arts lessons at the gym right down the street.
Slowly, her lips pulled into a smile. Maybe, she thought, she ought to find some other ways to test her mettle. And to prepare, too. Just in case.