Zane opened her door and offered her a hand. She fit hers in his and with the other held down her gown as she turned to the side and stepped down onto the running board.
“If I wore glass slippers, I would feel like I’m Cinderella—” she paused for several heartbeats “—meeting the pirate of the Caribbean.”
“I guess we should have coordinated our costumes,” Zane commented to her when they entered the gym and noticed half the couples were dressed in outfits that complemented each other.
“I like Gideon’s dragon costume that goes with Kathleen’s fair damsel in distress.”
Zane bent close. “Look. The mayor and his wife are Hansel and Gretel.”
“Oh, there are my neighbors dressed as Romeo and Juliet. That’s romantic.”
“She must have picked that costume out.”
Kim chuckled. “You don’t think Bob is romantic?”
“Not the Bob I went to school with. Not one ounce.”
“You’re right. She must have.”
“Would y’all move out of the way? I’m here to look for my Rhett Butler and need to make a grand entrance.” Going straight forward, Maggie wrestled with her sweeping hoop gown and popped through the doorway. “I’m gonna end up embarrassed tonight. This is the last time I let you talk me into wearing something so ridiculous. How our ancestors put up with this is beyond me.”
Kim barely got out of the way before Maggie plowed into the gym because right behind her came Kim’s father escorting Ruth costumed as the Mad Hatter and the Queen of Hearts. “I knew Dad was going to pick up Ruth, but I didn’t know they planned to come as a couple.”
“Gideon told me your dad is really taking the job as campaign manager seriously. Remember those neighborhood sweeps? He’s scheduled them for Saturday in two weeks. They want teams of two to cover different streets. Ready to go house to house?”
“The area around the school is one of the most damaged in Hope. This will give me a chance to see my students in their homes without them thinking I’m checking up on them. There are a few I’m concerned about.”
“Who? Maybe there’s something I can do to help them.”
“There’s one family especially. The father is proud. Barely made ends meet before the hurricane and wouldn’t accept any charity. After Naomi, they lost their home. The foundation was all that was left. They lived in a shelter until they could move back to their property. They have a trailer in the driveway. That must be where they live now. I don’t know that they will be able to rebuild.”
“Where?”
She gave him the address on Decatur Street.
“With the school finished, I have a little breathing room. That’ll free up my largest team. A few of them I’m putting on your house. Do you still want us to start next week?”
“Yes. Dad is gone more and more lately.”
“Great, because my father can’t wait to get back to your house. He said the place has character, and he wants to bring it out.” Zane offered Kim his arm. “Ready to go have fun?”
“Absolutely.” As they moved farther into the gym, Kim glimpsed a big banner strung across the stage at one end of the gym/auditorium. “Look. There’s a picture of you and me up there.”
Zane slowed his step and averted his gaze. “Uh, I forgot to tell you they picked me to be king of the Mardi Gras party and asked me to pick my queen. Your name came to mind.”
“And you’re just now getting around to telling me?”
“Yeah, I told you I forgot.”
“How can you forget something like that? They must have photoshopped a crown on my head.”
“Mine, too. I don’t go around wearing one.”
“This is going to be a long evening, Zane Davidson.”
* * *
Two hours later, Kim stood up on the stage next to Zane, her cheeks burning with embarrassment as the principal set a paper crown on her head. A cheer went up as the man declared Zane and her the king and queen of the Mardi Gras party. A few wolf whistles sounded above the clapping. Her blush deepened.
Gideon cupped his mouth and shouted from the front row. “Kiss. Kiss.”
The rest of the audience took up the chant. She hadn’t thought it possible to be any more humiliated than she already was. She found out she could be.
Zane looked at her and shrugged. He slid closer to her and turned toward her. The audience roared. After cradling her head between his hands, he slipped his fingers into her curls, nudging her nearer. A hush fell over the crowd. Inch by agonizingly slow inch, he leaned down, his lips slightly parted. A hint of peppermint laced his breath.
Anticipation tingled through her. She didn’t care that hundreds of people were watching. She wanted the kiss, and yet a small part of her feared its effect on her. His mouth whispered against hers. She melted into him.
His hands glided down her back as his lips settled over hers, coaxing them apart. They melded together as one, bodies pressed against each other. Somewhere in the distance clapping began again and rose to a crescendo. Suddenly she was thrust back into the present—one where she stood in front of a crowd on the school stage.
Zane pulled back slightly and gave her a goofy grin. “First time I’ve kissed someone in front of an audience.”
“Me, too.” She scanned the sea of people and homed in on her dad at the back, turned away talking to Ruth. His body stance relaxed, he gestured with his hands, deep into the conversation.
“I think it’s time to make our exit.” With his hand at the small of her back, Zane guided her offstage and excused himself.
As he started to leave, Kim caught his arm and halted his escape. “You have some explaining to do about all of this.”
His grin grew as a mob of female students surrounded Kim. When Anna and Polly fought their way to the front of the group, Kim’s hand slipped to her side, and Zane hurried away. Some of the girls in her class bombarded her with questions about who the man was.
“He’s Mr. Davidson,” Anna answered for her before Kim could open her mouth. “He’s fixing our home. I get to help him.”
“Yeah, and he’s our youth-group leader,” Polly added.
Several of the kids nodded.
Over the heads of the children, Kim spied Zane taking off his paper crown, then his shoes before stepping up to be in the charity dunking tank. She cackled as she plotted her revenge.
* * *
Zane wondered what in the world had made him agree to take his turn being in the dunking tank. The money raised would go to the school, but he’d already done his share of helping the school. Still, he had to open his big mouth and say yes to his secretary, who coordinated the different booths. Now he saw Kim shaking herself loose from the mob of girls and stalking toward him with mischievous intent in her eyes.
Then Zane glimpsed Kathleen’s son Jared, who had declared at the last youth-group meeting that he was going to be the first one to cream Zane. Across the room, the boy zeroed in on him, too. But Kim managed to scoot into line in front of Jared by using her hoop skirt to block him.
Zane’s gut tightened. He was gonna get wet, and if Kim had a say, it was going to be by her. She took the tennis ball and tossed it in the air, a playful smile on her face. She’d probably come back more than once. But he deserved it. He should have warned her of their royal titles before she’d come to the party.
She threw the ball straight up in the air again and snatched it to her when it came down. “I used to play on a girls’ softball team,” she called out to Zane. “Did I ever tell you that?”
“No. But that was years ago. If you don’t use a skill, you lose it.” He knew better than to taunt her, but he might as well get some enjoyment out of this.
She hurled the ball toward the bull’s-eye plate that would send him plunging into the cold water, missing it by an inch. “Just so you know. I didn’t aim to hit the target—yet. I have three more balls. One of them will find its mark. That’s a promise. What I want to know is why.”
“Wh
y, what?” He knew she was wondering why he’d chosen her.
She pitched the ball toward him, this time a couple of feet off the target but inches from his body. “Wrong answer. You’re an intelligent man. You know what I mean.”
“Okay. The biggest contributor to the school fund was to be named either king or queen of the carnival. I was that person. They told me I needed a queen to go with my king.”
“Who?”
“Me, cuz.”
Kim slanted her glance toward Maggie, who had approached. “You knew about this? Of course, you did. You probably made the banner without saying a word to me.”
“I thought it would be a nice surprise. You and Zane will be featured in the newspaper tomorrow.”
“Oh, I can hardly wait.” She shifted her attention back to Zane. “Why me?”
He grinned. “Why not? I thought I would give you your fifteen minutes of fame.”
“Wrong answer.” She drilled the ball at the bull’s-eye plate, striking it dead on. The bottom fell out of the platform Zane sat on, and he dropped into water that must have been chilled with ice cubes.
As he came up out of the water, he heard Jared say behind Kim, “Ah, Mrs. Walters, I wanted to be the first one to dunk him.”
“Sorry, Jared. I couldn’t resist.” She patted the boy’s shoulder and walked away.
Chapter Ten
“You know how I feel about being in the limelight,” Kim said when Anna hopped out of the truck at their house and raced for the stairs up to the second-floor gallery.
Zane climbed out of the front seat and slid in beside Kim in the back. “I wanted to surprise you. I thought being a teacher you would have grown out of that. You have to stand up in front of your class every day.”
“They are nine-year-old kids. I think I can handle that.”
“I never understood that about you. I remember you were asked to run for student-council president, but you wouldn’t because you had to give a speech in front of the whole student body. Everyone liked you. You would have won with no problem.”
“I’m not comfortable with it. Wasn’t then. I’m not now.” Neither was she comfortable with Zane being mere inches from her in the cab. Or was she too comfortable? “You never answered me about why you picked me.”
“I can’t deny any more there’s something going on between us. This was a date—at least in my mind even if you didn’t consider it that.”
“I did.”
“You did?”
She nodded then realized he probably couldn’t see her in the dark cab. The light from the house didn’t reach the truck. “Yes.” Her voice squeaked, and she cringed, thankful he couldn’t see that.
“Then why didn’t you say it was?”
“Why didn’t you?”
His laugh echoed through the cab. “We are a pair. We don’t even know when we’re dating.”
“We did fifteen years ago.”
“Everything was simple then.”
“It was?”
“Okay, maybe not. But our perception of the past mellows some as time passes.”
Maybe it had for him but not for her. The pain she’d gone through when he’d left town without a word to her was still engraved in her memories. She didn’t want a repeat of that kind of heartache. Thoughts of the past fifteen years brought so much regret. “So that’s why you never look back.”
“What good does it do?”
“Remembering helps me not to repeat a mistake.”
“Were we a mistake?”
She sucked in a ragged breath. “That’s not an easy question to answer. What do you think?”
“I don’t regret meeting you.”
His tone indicated there was a but after that statement. “What do you regret?”
“I regret how I handled it. I regret the pain both of us suffered. How about you?”
“I regret marrying Scott on the rebound. Now that I look back at what happened after you left, I allowed myself to be talked into loving him because it was a good move for our family. Of course, now I know it wasn’t. You know what they say about hindsight being twenty-twenty.”
“I’ve heard rumors about Scott ever since I came back to Hope. But I know how gossip can be. I want to know from you what happened.”
“Scott’s family had financial problems that no one knew about. My husband took from my dad’s business to try and shore up their investment company.” Because it was dark in the truck and he couldn’t see the anguish on her face, she felt safer telling him. She didn’t share this with many people. “Dad thought Scott was the son he never had and trusted him with everything. That was a big mistake. One day Scott was here and the next gone with his secretary. What a cliché. But then worse, we found out our family’s real-estate company was nearly broke.”
“What did your father do?”
“He tried to hold the company together by selling off a lot of our land around the house. It wasn’t enough. My ex-husband had helped himself to the money but had also made some bad decisions for the business. Then Mom got sick, and the medical bills completed what Scott had started. Everything came tumbling down, including my dad’s health. It wasn’t but six months after my mother passed away that he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.” Telling him renewed the anguish those years had wrought. She’d lost so much. But strangely it felt right to tell him—to let him know why she wouldn’t commit herself again.
He covered her hand with his. “What did you do?”
“Finished my schooling and went to work while trying to raise my daughter and keep the family together as much as possible. But I don’t regret having Anna. She is my life now.”
“I remember how you wanted children.”
“Why didn’t you ever marry?” she finally asked the question that had bothered her for the past few weeks.
Rubbing his thumb across the back of her hand, he sighed. “Too busy working, learning the business.”
“Why did you come back to Hope? I would think after what happened here, you would want to stay away.”
“My dad was having problems. As much as there were times, I wanted to turn my back on him, in the long run I couldn’t. Instead I decided to come home and try to help him. He is my only family.”
She remembered the first time Maggie had told her that Zane was back in town. She’d literally panicked, and other than for work, she hadn’t left the house for a week, so afraid she would see him at any moment. “Still it had to be strange for you.”
“My experiences here made me who I am today.”
“And mine have for me.” She angled toward him, the movement causing her hoop skirt to rise. She quickly held it down before it smothered her and Zane. “It seems our fathers have greatly affected our decisions over the years. As my dad gets worse with his Parkinson’s disease, he’ll need more care. That falls on me since I’m his only child.”
“In my case, I’m glad I was the only child. I wouldn’t want a sibling to have dealt with what I did growing up.”
She and Zane had more in common than she realized. “Do you ever regret not having a family, children?”
“No, not really. Like I said, I wouldn’t have had time for them like I should. That wouldn’t have been right. I chose to go a different route. I help with the youth group. That gives me what I need.”
“What’s that?”
“The satisfaction from knowing that I’m helping the next generation, without being solely responsible for any one child. I saw what my father’s drinking did to our family. He was never around. Although working all the time is different from drinking, the end result is the same. A kid with an absent father is not good.”
“I know. I try to be both mother and father for Anna, but it’s not easy. She never says anything, but I know she wonders about her dad. He left when she was a month old.”
“I’m glad I haven’t run into Scott. His treatment of you was…” His words spluttered to a stop. “Sorry, you probably don’t need to hear that.”
>
“Actually, you would have to get behind me and Dad. Although Dad wouldn’t press charges, he has enumerated on a number of occasions what he would like to do to the man.”
“Why didn’t he press charges against Scott?”
“Mostly because we didn’t have the proof we needed to make the charges stick. And also, because Dad didn’t want the Sommerfield name dragged through the gossip mill in Hope any more than it was when Scott left. His words, not mine.”
Headlights illumined the inside of the truck as Maggie pulled up behind Zane. “That’s my cue to leave. It’s late.”
Ten seconds later, a knock on the window produced a groan from Zane.
“It’s only Maggie. Dad’s going up the stairs.”
Zane pushed open his door and climbed down to the ground, then swung around to help Kim exit as gracefully as she could in a wide skirt. Then he faced Maggie, the dim stream of light from the gallery illuminating her in the shadows.
“Uncle Keith wants to know if y’all would like to come in.”
“I have to go to Mobile tomorrow early. Long day. I’d better head home.”
As he settled himself behind the steering wheel and rolled down the window, Kim asked, “What time on Monday will y’all start?”
“Check with your dad, and let me know what works for you. My father is pretty flexible, and he’ll be doing a lot of the work.”
“I’ll see you at church on Sunday and let you know then.”
“Great. Is Anna going to stay for the youth group again?”
“Yes,” Kim said as she backed away from the truck. At the bottom of the stairs she saw Maggie waiting for her, so she waved goodbye to Zane and followed her cousin up the steps. Before entering the house, she asked Maggie, “Did Dad say anything?”
“No. He was actually preoccupied.”
“About what?”
“If I had to guess, Ruth Coleman.”
“Why? Did something happen tonight I don’t know about?”
“I’ve never seen him enjoy himself so much in months—maybe years.”
Love Runs Deep (New Beginnings Book 7) Page 12