The Charmer in Chaps

by Julia London

  “I’m sorry—you startled me.”

  “I gathered,” he said. He’d already forgotten it, because Ella was cute. Pretty, cute, and sexy all tied up in one package. She wore her hair in two low pigtails, topped off with a newsboy hat. Her plaid skirt was ridiculously short, for which he was grateful, because her legs, for God’s sake, were the best thing happening in all of Cimarron County.

  He’d thought of her a few times in the last couple of weeks, of course he had, but was reminded now just how enticing she was. He hadn’t called her like he’d promised. In his defense, he’d been seriously out of it. Drunk with grief.

  It was unbelievable that he’d spotted her at all, really. As they’d been escorting his grandma from the premises before she made a scene about not being allowed to speak, he’d just happened to glimpse a woman with incredible legs walking out of the Expo, and there was something about her ankle boots that seemed sort of Ella-ish, and after they’d shoved his grandma into the limo, he’d gone after those legs, hoping it was Ella. He could use something else to think about instead of his dad.

  “Hey,” she said, as she slid the bowl into her bag, “I heard about your dad. I’m really sorry, Luca.”

  Every time someone said that, Luca inwardly flinched. It was like the news kept sucker-punching him over and over again. He hoped that wasn’t obvious to her. He hoped he didn’t look the mess he felt inside. “Thanks,” he said, averting his gaze. “It was quite a shock.” He glanced at the brochure he held and watched the letters dance around. He could have made it out, but it would have required concentration and a little time. “What’s this?”

  “Oh, ah . . . my accounting services,” she said, and gingerly slid the brochure from his fingers and stuffed it back into her bag. “Mariah Frame convinced me I could drum up some business by having a booth here.”

  “And?”

  “And no one wants to hire a bookkeeper or accountant at a winter carnival.” She smiled.

  “You’re an accountant?”

  “Yep, that’s me,” she said, and smiled tentatively, as if she wasn’t sure what he would think of it. “What can I say? I love numbers.”

  Luca couldn’t help a wry smile. “I didn’t know anyone loved numbers.”

  “Oh yeah,” she said, nodding. “Lots of people love numbers. They don’t lie, you know. They are very definitely black on white paper. No gray areas to mess with your mind. You may not know where the road leads, but there is a sure path for getting wherever you need to go.”

  “You’ve thought a lot about numbers,” he said. “Sometimes it’s fun not to have a path.”

  “Hmm,” she said, as if considering that. And then shook her head. “Nope. I definitely want a path.”

  He resisted the urge to touch her cheek. “Is it possible your path tonight leads to hot chocolate?”

  “Oh. I, ah . . .” She squinted toward the parking lot.

  “Let me guess,” he said, and shoved his hands into his pockets so that he wouldn’t touch her. “You’re busy.”

  She gave him a sidelong look and smiled. “Super busy. There’s a Real Housewives of Atlanta marathon happening tonight.”

  He had no idea what that was. “Then what are you even doing here?”

  “Right? Hashtag priorities is all I’m saying.”

  His priority at that moment was prolonging this encounter. “Still . . . I’m surprised you don’t want to buy me a winter carnival drink. I sort of thought you were falling for me.”

  “I was,” she said with feigned enthusiasm. “Totally! But then the housewives thing came up, and you know how it is. Plus, I have to feed a dog. And a pig. And some horses. And a cat. And some random chickens that are leaving eggs from time to time.”

  Luca glanced at his feet and tried to summon all his turbo sex appeal that Nick accused him of having. But he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t summon a playful retort or a line guaranteed to keep this going. He glanced up and said, “Look, Ella . . . I’m really sorry I didn’t call.”

  “Don’t be,” she said instantly, her smile fading. “You obviously get a pass, Luca. Don’t even mention it.”

  “Yeah, well, I appreciate that. But I really don’t want to be that guy,” he said with a slight wince.

  “What guy?”

  “You know, the guy who says he’s going to call and never does.”

  “Oh, that guy. Well, never is a long time. I hadn’t given up hope yet.”

  “But you weren’t holding your breath.”

  “With all due respect, it was a good thing I wasn’t,” she said, and smiled softly.

  He so badly wanted to touch her. Two fingers to her cheek, or her ear. “Did you get the porch fixed?”

  “I did. Fortunately, there is nothing YouTube doesn’t know how to do. Plus, I had a friend who owed me a favor.”

  “I feel bad about that. I practically made you go out and buy a hammer.”

  She shook her head. She glanced at the hot chocolate stand, then at him. Her expression was curious, and she shifted a little closer. But not too close, he noticed.

  “How are you doing, really?”

  “I’m okay,” he said instantly, because that was what he’d trained himself to say these last few weeks, but he was looking at her eyes, and suddenly he had a strange compulsion to confess everything he was feeling to her, things he had yet to feel, past sins, future sins. There was something about her that made Luca believe that he could tell her anything.

  God, he was a wreck.

  He laughed self-consciously and ran a hand over his head. “The truth? Not great. A lot of stuff came up when my dad died, and I’m . . .” He paused. He was what? Barely making it through every day? Constantly standing in the middle of an argument between his mother and his grandmother, their grief so raw he could hardly cope with it? Letting Hallie cry on his shoulder while he wondered where the hell her fiancé was? Being the ear Nick needed to bend, because Nick was the one who had to pick up the burden of a family business he did not want?

  Luca realized, standing there, that he didn’t have a release from all of the grief and agony. He had nowhere to turn. Every which way he turned there was someone needing him to be strong.

  The upshot was that Luca hadn’t quite dealt with the loss. He wanted his dad back. Even a shadow of his dad would do at this point. He didn’t want his dad to become just a memory. He didn’t want to accept that his father was never coming back.

  Never.

  Never is a long time.

  He felt something crack in him, the bitter acknowledgment that there were so many things he wished he’d said or done. He wished he’d been the good son. He wished he’d made his dad proud before he went to that big golf course in the sky. He could feel that crack widening, and it seemed to him as if all sorts of stuff was about to come flying out, like bats released from their cave.

  “Are you okay?” Ella asked, and touched his arm.

  Luca realized he was on the verge of losing it. He swallowed. He nodded. “Yeah, yeah,” he said, and shook himself back to the present. “I’ve been thinking I need to take some time off and get out of town.” The thought had just occurred to him, but it suddenly seemed imperative.

  “That’s a good idea,” she said.

  “Can we, ah . . . can we have a rain check on that call?” he asked.

  “Sure,” she said, and smiled sympathetically.

  Luca’s heart sank. He’d left her house feeling really good, and he wanted everything to go back to that afternoon. Before Nick met him on the drive.

  “You know what? I think I should buy you a hot chocolate,” she said.

  “That would be really nice,” he said, and to his horror, felt himself choking up.

  “Stay right here,” she said, and stepped up to the counter of a food trailer shaped to look like a giant coffee cup. “Two hot chocola
tes, please,” she said, and began to dig in her tote bag for a wallet.

  “Whipped cream?” the guy standing in the coffee cup asked her.

  “Dude,” Ella said with mock seriousness, “we’re not Luddites. Of course whipped cream.”

  “So I guess that means you want the sprinkles, too,” the guy said with a grin.

  “Do you even have to ask?”

  A few minutes later, Ella delivered Luca a paper cup of hot chocolate with a sturdy tower of whipped cream and rainbow sprinkles.

  He tried to sip the chocolate. Ella laughed and, with the tip of her finger, wiped whipped cream from his cheek, then licked her finger. She took a bite of her whipped cream like it was an ice cream cone.

  They began to meander along with their cups, headed in the general direction of the parking lot, their pace slow.

  “May I ask what your dad was like?” Ella said.

  “He was bigger than life,” Luca said instantly. “I know that sounds trite, but he was.” He didn’t know how to explain that the force of one man’s personality could have such an impact on those around him.

  “A good dad?” Ella asked.

  “The best,” Luca agreed. “He wasn’t a perfect man by any stretch.” He gave a strangled little laugh at that overstatement. “He definitely had his issues. But yeah, he was a good dad, and I never doubted for a moment that he loved me in spite of . . .” He paused, once again uncertain what he was going to say.

  “In spite of what?” Ella asked.

  The fact that I can’t read. That I’m not Nick. That I disappoint Mom all the time. He looked at Ella. “I meant no matter what.”

  She nodded and sipped her chocolate. “I’m sorry I never met him. He sounds like a great guy.”

  “He was,” Luca agreed.

  “I never knew my dad.”

  Luca looked up. “No?”

  She shook her head. “Don’t even know who he is.” She smiled a little, as if she found that oddly amusing. “It must really suck to lose a dad, Luca. I can’t even imagine it. But you’re lucky—at least you have a ton of memories.”

  “True,” he agreed. They had come to the split railing that separated the gravel parking lot from the Expo Center. He held up his cup and tapped it against hers. “Thanks for this.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  Luca glanced at the cars, his thoughts spinning. Why did someone like Ella have to pop up on a country road at what would become the worst time of his life? “My timing sucks,” he said.

  He didn’t have to explain—she understood. She nodded. “Life happens.”

  He looked at her again. Really looked at her. The dark lashes that framed her pretty eyes. The slight upturn of her nose. The dark plum of her lips. Yeah, his timing sucked, all right. He would have given anything to continue this thing they had growing between them, but it was impossible at present. He couldn’t get out of his own head. “I guess I’ll say good-bye.” He didn’t know what else to say. His game was so off it was in the locker room.

  He couldn’t exactly promise to call. He didn’t know where he was going or which way was up right now. So he leaned in and softly kissed her cheek. Ella stilled. Her lashes fluttered, and then she closed her eyes. He lingered there, because she was soft, and her skin was warm, and he could detect a faint scent that reminded him of roses. She was a sweet summer dream, and for a moment, he was in that dream, flying back to the space he’d been in before his dad had dropped dead on the green.

  Ella slowly leaned away and looked up at him.

  Luca smiled. He tugged on the bill of her newsboy hat. “See you, Ella.”

  “See you, Luca,” she said.

  He stepped away, walking backward, not ready to relinquish the sight of her, then finally turned and began the walk back to the Expo Center where Nick and Hallie were presumably still waiting for him.

  He thought he heard her say something, and he looked back. She was standing there, her arms crossed, the steam rising from her hot chocolate. But then she pivoted and disappeared between the cars.

  And the warmth and kindness and understanding he’d felt in her presence disappeared with her.

  Chapter Eight

  SPRING

  Due to a gig being canceled at the last minute, Stacy had a rare weekend to spend with Ella at her little house. They streamed movies and attempted to make pizza in Ella’s ancient oven, but it wasn’t heating right, and eventually, they gave up and ordered in.

  The next day, they planned to go into town. The following morning, Dog’s barking woke them. The horses had come up to the fence, annoying Dog. By the time Ella had pulled on some pants and run outside, the horses had moved away. So she sat perched on the fence, watching them from afar.

  Stacy had followed her and was sitting on a tree stump painting her toenails, because nothing screamed spring quite like bright neon green toenails. Stacy had wanted to drag the picnic table out of the garage, but Ella had forbid it. “First, I think it’s holding up a wall. Secondly, there might be snakes in there.”

  “Trust me,” Stacy said, “if there were snakes, Big Bertha over there would have eaten them for a snack.” She’d nodded in the direction of the pig, stretched out on its side, having a snooze just inside the garage.

  Ella glanced at Stacy’s toes, wincing a little at the color. “Remember the time you stole Pam’s nail polish?” she asked idly, referring to the foster mother they had shared the last three years of high school. Before they were emancipated from the system and launched into the world to sink or swim. When the state’s money stopped rolling in for their care, Pam stopped caring.

  Pam and Gary had six foster children, the other four much younger than Ella and Stacy. It was always a little terrifying to Ella that people like Pam and Gary were allowed to take children in, given the amount of drinking and fighting they did. More than once, Gary had left Pam with a black eye. More than once, she’d threatened to stab him with a knife.

  Stacy snorted. “Of course, I remember. It was one of the highlights of our time with Pam and Gary, trust me.”

  They were sixteen when Stacy swiped Pam’s nail polish. But Stacy hadn’t just painted her fingers and toes—she’d also painted some unkind things on the bathroom mirror. Ella loved Stacy like a sister, but one thing she’d never understood was why she liked to throw gasoline on established fires. What drove her? It was as if she was always looking for ways to make a bad decision, and if she made one, you could bet your last dollar she’d find a way to make it worse.

  “Gary beat the crap out of me, remember that?” Stacy added as she squinted down at her left foot. She said it casually, as if she were asking if Ella remembered Gary ordering take-out that night.

  “Oh, I remember,” Ella said. She’d tried to intervene, and Gary had knocked her across the kitchen for it. “Sometimes I don’t get you, Stacy. What did you think was going to happen when you painted those words on the bathroom mirror?”

  Stacy shrugged. “You don’t get me because you’re the exact opposite of me. You’d rather stay in the background and hope no one notices you. I make sure everyone notices me. But that’s okay—one of us needs to lay low.”

  Ella would rather lay low than intentionally make trouble. “You used to scare me to death, doing all the things that were so bad for you.”

  “Sweetie, I still do a lot of things that are bad for me,” Stacy said. “But we’re grown now, and you could stand to loosen your laces, you know? They’re tied way too tight.”

  This was an ongoing debate between Ella and Stacy. Ella was the sober one, the responsible one, who made sure Stacy didn’t spend all her money and paid her taxes. Stacy was the flighty, creative, not-so-responsible one who thought tips shouldn’t count as income and liked to spend all her money on bling.

  Secretly, Ella wished she could be more like Stacy. Secretly, Ella hoped to God she would
never be like Stacy—her poor guarded heart couldn’t take it. She did truly admire Stacy for her ambition and determination. But she did not care for the way Stacy skated on the edge of disaster all the time and seemed to get a thrill out of it.

  “I wish the horses would come here,” Stacy said, looking out past the fence. “I want to pet one. Can you pet a horse?”

  “Why not?” Ella asked. She whistled to the horses, soft and low, because she’d never figured out how to do a shrill, look-over-here whistle. One of the horses lifted its head and looked at her, then went back to grazing. The other two didn’t bother to look up.

  The same three horses came around every day about this time. If Ella was inside, they would come to the fence and eat the feed she put out. If she was outside, they’d stay away and graze until she was gone, avoiding her like she was from the glue factory. The dog didn’t like them. He barked every time they came around and raced out into the pasture. But the horses paid him no mind.

  “They won’t come anywhere near me,” Ella complained to Stacy. “I’m starting to get a complex.”

  “They don’t want to go back in a cage,” Stacy opined.

  “Do you mean a fenced pasture?” Ella asked dryly.

  “Same thing. It’s confinement. I hate confinement.”

  “Are we talking about you?”

  “Shut up,” Stacy said, and nudged Ella with her foot. She extended both legs and looked at her toes with a critical eye. “You didn’t gush about my extensions.” She pointed to the top of her head, where she had piled her glorious mane of blond hair she’d recently purchased. Stacy had called Ella at her accounting job the day she’d had them installed—in someone’s garage in San Antonio’s Southtown, by a woman without a license, but who “totally knows what she is doing” according to Stacy. “Tax deductible, right?”

  “No,” Ella had said.

  “What?” Stacy said. “They are part of my stage costume and, therefore, tax deductible.”

  She’d badgered Ella until Ella had broken down and asked the advice of Byron, the CPA for whom she worked part-time. Byron was a one-man shop in a little two-person office on Broadway in San Antonio. He was always in his office, spilling over the arms of his chair, papers stacked around him from floor to ceiling. He had no social life that Ella could detect, and yet, he had a steady stream of clients, all of whom looked a little on the shady side.