Almost.
“But that’s not the only reason you don’t like me, is it? You gave me the death stare well before I said a word to my mother.”
“Death stare? I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
She crossed her arms over her chest and proceeded to give him the death stare, mark II.
“My mother believes I broke your heart in high school.”
That got her attention.
“You have got to be kidding. As if I would have been interested in a—”
She caught herself just as it was about to get good. A tide of color rose up her neck and into her face.
“You were saying?”
She glanced toward the counter. “I need to get back to work. Did you want a card or was that just an excuse?”
“I want a card,” he lied.
“All right, then.” She stared pointedly at the half-filled-out form.
“Maybe if you tell me what I did wrong, I can fix it,” he said. “Whatever it was.”
He began to wonder if he should persist with this. It wasn’t as though he was ever going to see her again once his wrist was healed and he’d moved home. There was absolutely no reason for the two of them to cross paths. She could go home and stick pins in a voodoo-doll effigy of him every night if she wanted to and it wouldn’t affect him or his life.
“Don’t forget to create a password so you can manage your loans online,” she said blandly.
“Whatever I did, it’s obviously still playing on your mind. Why don’t you go ahead and get it off your chest.”
“I can assure you, Mr. Bennett, I have better things to worry about than an incident that happened eighteen years ago.”
He did some mental math. “What are we talking here, year nine?”
She rolled her eyes. “Can you please just fill out the forms and leave?”
“I’m not going anywhere until we’ve sorted this out. Tell me what I did wrong so I can fix it.”
“You can’t. So this whole conversation is pointless.”
“Tell me.”
“No.”
“Tell me, Rachel.”
She glared at him, her color high. “There’s no way I’m talking about this in public.”
“Okay.” He glanced around. “What’s through that door?” He indicated the door she’d slipped through when he first arrived.
“The storage room.”
He stood and waited expectantly. She made a frustrated sound in the back of her throat before springing out of her chair.
“This is completely pointless. Why do you care what I think of you? It’s not as though Western civilization is going to crumble or anything.”
He gestured for her to lead the way, and she made another harrumphing noise before walking behind the counter.
“I’ll just be a minute, Jill,” she said to the other librarian.
“Sure thing. I’ve got things covered out here,” Jill said, a smile tugging at her mouth as she glanced at Leo.
Rachel shut the door once he’d followed her into the small storage room. Shelves stacked with books lined one wall, while a couple of book trolleys were pushed into the far corner.
“Let’s get this over with,” she said briskly.
“This is your story.”
“Okay. Fine.” She lifted her chin and flicked her hair over her shoulder nervously. Then she smoothed her hands down the sides of her pants. “It was year nine. The school dance. I’d only been in Australia for about three months.”
He frowned, trying to remember. There had been so many school dances over the years, they’d all mushed into one memory of flashing lights and loud music and frustrated making out in dark corners.
“You and a couple of your mates went into the storage room in the gym to smoke, but I was in there already, killing time until my friends got there.”
A memory tickled at the back of his brain—Tim revealing he’d stolen an inch of alcohol from every bottle in his parents’ liquor cabinet and combined it all into one foul, deeply potent brew. Rocket fuel, they’d called it. They’d all been half cut by the time they’d made it to school and sneaked off for an illicit smoke to go with their illicit drink.
“You were talking about the girls in our year level. Sharon and Tina and some of the others. Rating them. Then you—” She broke off and swallowed noisily.
Suddenly he felt a little queasy. He realized he wasn’t going to like what he was about to hear.
“Turn around,” she said abruptly.
“What?”
“I need you to turn around. I can’t say this to your face.”
He stared at her. She raised her eyebrows. He spun so she was facing his back.
This was definitely not going to be good.
“One of the guys asked what you thought of me. You didn’t remember who I was until they told you I was the American girl. You called me ‘the plank.’ Someone said I wasn’t ‘that bad,’ and you said if you woke up next to me you’d want to chew your own arm off. Then you said you’d rather cut your you-know-what off than put it in me. That’s how bad I was.”
He closed his eyes for a long beat. Bloody hell. Worse than he’d imagined.
“Happy now?” she said.
Oh, yeah. He was real happy that he’d once been an insensitive, brash, hormone-driven little turd. And he was immensely happy that Rachel had been the victim of said turdness. And the best thing was, he had absolutely no defense for his behavior. At all.
He faced her. She’d crossed her arms over her chest again. Her cheeks were flushed. She held his eye, though, even though he could tell it cost her.
She wasn’t the one who should be embarrassed about any of this. He was the one who’d been a jerk. She’d simply been an innocent bystander.
“I guess you pretty much hated my guts all through high school after that,” he said quietly.
“For a while. But in the end I realized you were just one boy. Even if you thought you were pretty special.”
He winced. He’d had that coming. His fifteen-year-old self had, anyway.
He lowered his head for a moment, thinking of a suitable apology. There were no words that could undo what he’d done, but he had to try.
“For what it’s worth, I’m sorry. If I could go back in time and kick my own ass, I would, believe me. We were half-drunk that night and convinced we were the coolest thing in town. An obnoxious combination. Everything that came out of our mouths was about us trying to impress each other. None of it meant anything.”
“You didn’t know me.”
“I didn’t. I was apparently too busy sticking my head up my own backside to have that opportunity.”
She eyed him steadily for a beat before glancing at the door. “I should get out there again.”
She opened the door and gestured for him to precede her back into the library.
“You don’t really want a card, do you?” she said once they’d returned to the desk.
“My mother gave me hers in case I wanted to borrow anything,” he admitted.
She studied the two books he’d brought to the counter as props.
“Like A Guide to Companion Planting and Topiary Hedges Made Easy?”
“Exactly.”
“Keen gardener, are we?”
“I like to dig holes for myself. Big ones.”
She handed the two books back to him. “You can use the self-checkout service. Or Jill can help you out.”
She walked away. He watched her go, feeling like a fool and a heel.
He’d never been under the illusion that he’d been a saint in his youth, but it was pretty depressing to realize he’d been an unparalleled tool.
He reshelved the gardening books, making su
re he put them in their rightful spots, then headed for the door. This was Rachel’s turf, after all. Leaving her to it seemed like the very least he could do.
CHAPTER FOUR
RACHEL DIDN’T RELAX until Leo had exited the library. She couldn’t quite believe that she’d just laid it all out at his feet. She hadn’t meant to. But he’d insisted and she’d realized the only reason she was holding back was because she’d been embarrassed for him, because any halfway-decent person would be deeply upset to have such ugliness put at their door. Even if it was long-gone, ancient-history teenage ugliness.
She’d had to live with the hurt his words had inflicted for years. So she figured if she made Leo embarrassed, it was small potatoes compared to that.
He had been embarrassed, too. When he’d turned to face her, his cheekbones had been burnished with color. He’d appeared...appalled was the word that leaped to mind. Yes, he’d appeared gratifyingly appalled.
And yet it said something about the man he’d become that he’d looked her in the eye and apologized without hesitation or excuse.
She gave herself a mental shake. There was a queue forming at the returns desk. Time for the past to resume its rightful place in her life.
The rest of the day whizzed by, but it wasn’t lost on her that whenever someone tall and male entered the library, a part of her went on the alert until she confirmed it wasn’t Leo.
She told herself he wasn’t coming back to the library. Not after the conversation they’d had today.
But Leo proved her wrong the very next day, walking through the door in faded jeans, a black T-shirt and battle-scarred work boots. He spotted her immediately and headed her way, his step and gaze determined.
“Hi,” he said.
She nodded, since she seemed to be having trouble finding her tongue.
“I wanted to give you this.” He put a glossy gift bag on the counter between them. “It doesn’t make up for anything. But I wanted you to know that I’m sorry. Incredibly sorry.” His blue-brown eyes held hers and his voice was gravelly with sincerity.
“You didn’t need to buy me a present.” There, she’d finally found her tongue.
“I wanted to make good on my promise to go back in time and beat the snot out of myself, but they were all out of time machines at the gift shop.”
“I’m no expert, but I’m pretty sure beating your past self up might transgress the laws of time travel. So it’s probably just as well that they were out of stock.”
“Good point.”
Maybe it was her imagination, but his shoulders seemed to drop a little at her easy response. Surely he hadn’t been nervous to talk to her. Worried that she’d throw his gift back in his face, perhaps?
She glanced down at the gift bag, wondering what he’d bought her. She wasn’t about to open it in front of him, though. It seemed too...personal. “You really didn’t have to do this. But thank you.” She offered him a smile—a real one.
“I did. But I’m not going to stand here and make you play witness to my mea culpa.” He turned to go, then almost immediately turned around. “I almost forgot. My mother has ordered me to find something to read. She says I’m driving her crazy watching daytime TV.”
“Wow. You must be really desperate.”
“You could say that.” His tone was light, but there was a bleakness behind his eyes. She remembered Gabby’s tears on his behalf, and the cold harshness in his voice when he’d rejected his mother’s kindness.
Leo presented himself as tough and gruff, but she was beginning to realize there was a lot going on beneath the surface. And that most of it wasn’t happy.
“What do you enjoy reading?” She held up a hand. “Scratch that. You don’t read. But you used to, your mum said. So what did you used to read?”
He fixed his eyes on his feet, clearly trying to remember. “I thought The Hobbit was pretty much the best thing since sliced bread for a while there.”
“Fantasy. Okay, that’s a good starting point. Have you caught any of the Game of Thrones series on TV at all?”
“No. My schedule’s too irregular to follow anything on TV.”
“Let me check if we have any of the books, then.”
She moved to the computer, very aware of him watching her as she typed a request into the library’s catalogue. She fumbled the spelling twice and felt her cheeks heat. Whether she wanted to acknowledge it or not, this man affected her.
“We have the first book in the series. Let me grab it for you.”
She expected him to wait at the counter, but he surprised her by following her into the fiction section. She’d never really registered it before, but he was a good head taller than her, something she didn’t encounter very often. Also, there was something different about him today. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it...
“You’re not wearing your sling,” she said, wishing the words back the moment they were out of her mouth. Now he’d think she’d been checking him out.
“The physiotherapist wants me to start exercising my wrist more. And my shoulder seems to be in decent shape.”
“That must be a relief.”
“I’m sure it is for Mum. I’ll be heading home in the next few weeks.”
“To the city?”
“That’s right.”
She concentrated on finding the familiar blue spine of the book she was searching for. If he went back to the city, she probably wouldn’t see him again, since she hadn’t crossed paths with him in the last fifteen years.
She pulled A Game of Thrones from the shelf. “Here it is.” She handed the book over. “It’s got a little bit of everything. Sex, death, betrayal, murder, magic, prophesy, war... Something for everyone.”
He hefted the book, eyeing its many pages uncertainly. “It looks pretty heavy going.”
“You can always bring it back if you don’t like it. That’s the great thing about a library—low commitment, high return.”
“Have you read it?”
“Yes.”
“Did you enjoy it?”
“I loved it.”
“I’ll give it a shot, then.”
She checked the book out for him on his mother’s card before moving on to the next patron. She knew the exact moment he walked out the door, though. And she was also aware that almost every female in the building watched him leave.
Some things hadn’t changed since high school.
She tucked his gift bag beneath the counter and pretended to forget about it, though her mind came back to it at least half a dozen times as the day wore on. She considered opening it when she got home, but again she put it off. She wasn’t sure why.
She had dance class that night, and as usual, all her cares dropped away the moment she buckled on her dance shoes and stepped into Greg’s arms.
“How’s your week been, sweetie?” he asked as they started a warm-up dance before their teacher arrived. Five years younger than her, he was openly, proudly gay and a wonderful dance partner.
“Okay. How about yours?”
They chatted briefly, then their instructor, Jack, arrived, and it was all about focus. An hour later, Rachel was pleasantly tired and buzzed. Jack was pleased with their progress, but he constantly reminded them that they were but one of nine couples in the competition and that all of their competitors would be rehearsing just as hard. It was eating away at Rachel’s confidence.
“Ignore him,” Greg told her as he walked her out to her car. “He thinks he’s motivating us. Let’s just concentrate on being fabulous and let the rest take care of itself.”
It was an excellent life philosophy, and she happily hummed along to the radio during the drive home. But the moment she walked in the door, she saw Leo’s gift on her kitchen counter and stopped in her tracks.
Okay. It was time to open it, lest it become a thing. Which it was in danger of doing if she left it any longer.
She put it off five more minutes by having a shower, then she pulled on her pajamas and walked into the kitchen. The glossy gift bag was stuffed with tissue paper and she had to forage for the actual gift. She emerged with a beautifully wrapped parcel the size of a hardcover book.
Frowning, she ran her thumb under the tape and eased it away from the paper—she’d never been a tearer—to reveal a deep burgundy-colored box with an illustration of a beautifully curly feathered quill on the lid. When she opened the box, she discovered a sheaf of heavily textured linen paper inside, along with matching envelopes and a pen, the lot tied together with a shiny cream-colored bow.
Her breath eased out on an appreciative sigh as she handled the paper. She’d always had a thing for stationery, and she knew enough to realize this was the good stuff. She was also aware that no one in town sold anything close to this quality. Leo had to have gone into the city to buy this.
She lifted the pen, enjoying the balance of it in her hand. She hadn’t hand-written a letter to anyone for years, thanks to the advent of email, but she’d once loved the ritual of writing a letter the old-fashioned way—pondering and composing, folding it into the envelope, then, finally, fixing a stamp and slipping it into the letter box with a little prayer to the postal gods that it would find its way across the world.
She took the box into her room and propped herself against her pillows. Using a hardcover book as her writing surface, she wrote a letter each to Ella, Jo and Olivia. To Ella and Jo she talked about the quilt and her work with Gabby and asked after their own lives, but she spent some time working out how to reconnect with Olivia after several years of silence. She didn’t want to give away the secret of the quilt—not yet, anyway. Jo would be the one to do that, since the wedding was to be at Hollymeade and she would be the one to deliver the quilt to Olivia. Finally, Rachel shrugged and simply wrote what was in her heart: that it had been too long, that she had been thinking of Olivia and her other cousins lately, that she hoped Olivia was well and happy.
When she finished, she had three crisp, creamy envelopes on her bedside table. She turned out the light and lay in the dark, unable to get Leo’s gift or the fact that he’d traveled into the city to buy it for her out of her mind.
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