John Riley's Girl. Inglath Cooper
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for you.”
“That’s my girl,” Cleeve said, his smile back.
John shook his head and gave Cleeve a once-over. “Aren’t you lookin’ spiffy tonight? I hardly recognized you without the cow manure on your shirt.”
“Figured I might as well show some of these gals what they missed out on.”
“Since you dated half the class, I guess you better get started.”
To Cleeve, this was compliment, not insult. He laughed.
“So where’s the one you married?” John asked.
Cleeve’s smile faded. “Visiting her sister.”
At the look in his friend’s eyes, John was sorry he’d brought it up. “Then I guess you’ll have to dance with some of these other gals, huh?”
“Guess I will,” Cleeve agreed, but with less pluck than before.
“Hey, guys.” Lori Peters stepped up and gave them both a hug.
John leaned back and gave her a long look. She had on a blue cotton sundress that picked up the color of her eyes and did nice things for her fair skin. “You look great,” he said.
Cleeve gave her a low wolf-whistle. “I’ll second.”
“You two are just used to seeing me with four kids climbing all over me,” she said, glancing over her shoulder at the sign-in table where people were still filing in.
“I liked that look on you,” Cleeve said.
Lori smiled, but it was a noticeably weak attempt. “John, I need to talk to you about something.”
“You run the well dry? Somebody steal my best cow?”
“Not exactly,” she said, her teeth catching the edge of her lower lip.
Cleeve tipped his Stetson back. “Want me to va-moose?”
“You might as well hear it, too,” Lori said, throwing another uneasy glance over her shoulder. “I should have told you this earlier, this morning when I called, but I chickened out, and I know it was wrong—”
John’s gaze followed hers to the edge of the yard, and the rest of whatever Lori was saying was lost to him. The plastic cup in his hand slid from his fingers and dropped to the ground, iced tea splattering his jeans and Lori’s bare legs.
Cleeve put a hand on his shoulder. “What is it? You look like you just saw a ghost.” And then, “Holy smoke.”
John went numb. He felt like a teenage boy again, spotting for the first time the prettiest girl he’d ever laid eyes on, hit with an immediate blood-heating attraction that fills a boy with the absolute certainty that she is the one, and imbues in him the instant inability to speak in front of her.
His first uncensored thought? Cleeve was right.
She had turned out to be one beautiful woman.
Her hair was still long, shoulder-length and blond. His fingertips instantly ached with remembrance of it.
She was leaner than she’d been then, the bone structure in her face clearly defined with angles and hollows. Her lips were the same though, a shapely, full mouth that made his own throb with sudden memory.
But one difference was apparent. She no longer looked like the small-town girl he’d dated and loved. She looked, instead, like a woman who had made it in the world—clothes, posture, the whole picture.
“What is she doing here?” He tried to inject thunder in his voice and heard his own failure. He sounded like he’d just had the breath knocked out of him.
“That’s what I was trying to tell you.” Clearly, Lori had no idea how to handle this. She looked as if she thought he might strangle her. “I should have told you this morning,” she said, “but I was afraid you’d say no to letting us move the reunion out here if I did.”
“And you would have been right!” The anger hit him full blast then. There was thunder in his voice now. And plenty of it. “Damn it all to hell, Lori. She can’t stay. She cannot stay,” he said, unable to bring himself to say her name because to do so would drive a knife right through the heart of the fury that was the only thing keeping his knees from buckling. “Go tell her. Now.”
Lori shot him a look that somehow managed to convey both panic and absolute horror. “John! I can’t possibly do that. You’re blowing this out of all proportion.”
“Now wait a dadblame minute,” Cleeve began, reason in his voice. “She’s no different from anybody else here who was in our class.”
“She is different,” John said, hearing the steel in his own words. “Either tell her, now, Lori, or the whole weekend is off.”
“For Pete’s sake, John,” Cleeve said, “that was all a long time ago.”
“Not long enough.”
“You don’t have to talk to her!” Lori said, hands splayed in appeal. “I’ll make sure you’re never within fifty yards of one another. We can’t just ask her to leave.”
“Nobody’s askin’ you to throw down the welcome mat for her,” Cleeve tossed out, tipping back his hat, “but you can’t kick her out.”
They didn’t understand. They couldn’t understand. “She isn’t welcome here! And if you won’t tell her, I’ll tell her myself.”
CHAPTER FOUR
The Unwelcome Mat
THE LAST THING Olivia wanted was to be the center of attention. She wanted to blend in, just walk around and say hello to people she hadn’t seen in nearly half a lifetime. But she had only moved a few steps past the front table since she’d arrived. There were so many people she hadn’t thought about in ages, and yet remembered as if they’d seen each other only yesterday. Tommy Radcliffe, whom she’d sat beside in ninth-grade science class and shared homework notes with. Sarah Martin from eleventh-grade P.E., the only girl to consistently beat her at the six-hundred-yard dash. Noah Dumfrey who had ridden her school bus and whom she still hadn’t forgiven for putting chewing gum in her hair in eighth grade. “I can’t believe I actually did that to someone who’s now on TV every morning!” he’d said upon seeing her, reeling her in for a hug against his now well-cushioned chest.
Most people simply looked like adult versions of the children they had once been—some heavier, some thinner, some with gray hair, some with no hair at all. But they all looked at her differently now, with awe on their faces, as if they could no longer see the Olivia Ashford they’d known in the woman she was now.
And while it was good to see so many familiar faces, hear so many still-recognizable voices, her gaze kept skipping across the crowd. She glanced at her watch. Nine o’clock, and she still hadn’t caught a glimpse of John. If she could just get that part over with, she could relax. Seeing him was inevitable, and the longer the wait drew out, the heavier her dread became.
She envisioned the two of them circling the crowd, weaving in and out until they finally ran head on into one another. Olivia could not picture him as he would look now. Couldn’t imagine how time would have changed him. She found herself studying the face of every man who walked by.
How would she know him?
And then, suddenly, she didn’t have to wonder anymore.
Because there he was. Cutting a path through the crowd with long strides, his mouth set in a grim, no-nonsense line.
Olivia froze, shut down inside. And then her heart took off in an out-of-control gallop that would have made her EKG reading look like a seismograph monitoring an L.A. earthquake.
Any semblance of poise she might have gained in her years as a professional broadcaster completely deserted her. She stood in front of him as vulnerable as if she were seventeen