The Homecoming Queen Gets Her Man

by Shirley Jump

  She walked out of her room and headed out into the bright sunshine. On the far side of the house, Jack and his brother Luke were working on repairing Grandpa Ray’s siding. Her grandfather napped in his Adirondack chair, under the shade of an oak tree, with a hardcover thriller open and unread on his lap.

  This was what she needed more of. This deep green, perfect...normal. Maybe enough of that and she could lift the camera to her eye again and see something other than the past through that lens.

  “Hey, Meri!” Luke raised a hand to greet her. His gaze flicked to the scar, then away. Accepting.

  She crossed the lawn to the men. The north side of the house was almost fully encased in new clapboard, giving the old cottage a refreshed, happy exterior. Jack was busy nailing siding onto the house, while Luke stood at the workstation fashioned out of two sawhorses and measured the next piece.

  She tried not to stare at Jack’s butt as he worked, but damn, he was a good-looking man. Muscular legs, strong, broad shoulders that flexed beneath the tight white cotton of his T-shirt. She cleared her throat and forced her gaze to the siding. “You guys are making good progress. You’ve almost finished the whole house.”

  “We have incentive.” Luke grinned and leaned toward her and lowered his voice. “Roast beef.”

  “Roast beef?”

  “My mother’s making dinner tonight. And the whole family is invited.” He raised his voice on the last part of the sentence, nodding in Jack’s direction. Jack just shot him a glare and went back to work. Luke chuckled and turned back to Meri. “That goes for you and your grandpa, too.”

  “Oh, I couldn’t—”

  “She’s making apple crumble, too. Fresh from the oven, with a scoop of vanilla ice cream melting on top.”

  How many times had she eaten at Jack’s house when she was younger, and seen a glorious, decadent dessert sitting on the counter? And never had a bite, not so much as a crumb of crust or a fingerful of whipped cream. At the Prescott house, there’d been none of that. Not a cookie jar or an errant chocolate. Anna Lee had run a tight ship, one where nothing fattening existed to tempt or derail Meri’s diet. Going to Jack’s or Eli’s had been like being granted early release from food prison.

  Thinking about tonight’s dessert made Meri’s mouth water. Oh, how she wanted it. Craved it.

  Okay, so maybe she was craving something besides the dessert. Like a hunk of the man she had kissed the other day. Being at Jack’s mother’s house would mean seeing more of Jack—a freshly washed, nicely shaved Jack. “Apple crumble? Oh, Lord. I dream about your mother’s desserts sometimes.”

  “Yup. Plus homemade biscuits, mashed potatoes and the green beans she canned last year, sautéed with a little bacon. It’s one giant, glorious heart attack on a plate.”

  Jack stalked over, grabbed the next piece of siding. “That’s not something Ray should be eating. Or anyone who wants to live past the age of thirty, for that matter.”

  “Anyone ever tell you that you’re a party pooper?” Luke called after his brother, but Jack ignored him. Luke shook his head, cut the next piece of siding with the circular saw, then set it to the side. “Don’t tell my father or Mr. Wonderful over there, but my mother switched out the ingredients after Dad’s cholesterol got too high. There’s turkey bacon in the green beans, and cauliflower mixed in with the potatoes. Mom pretends everything is the same as always, and my dad pretends he doesn’t taste the difference.”

  “It’s a marriage based on lies,” Jack muttered.

  “But it works.” Luke turned back to Meri. “So, you in?”

  Meri glanced over at her grandfather. It would do him good to get out of the house, to see some people. She had always enjoyed being at Jack’s house, with his warm and amiable family. Maybe it would do her some good, too. Help her shake this...cloud. “Sounds wonderful. We’ll be there.”

  Luke thumbed toward Jack. “See if you can convince His Royal Grumpiness to go, too.”

  “I heard that,” Jack said. “His Royal Grumpiness? Really?”

  “Good. You were supposed to.” Luke grinned. “Hey, I could have called you a royal something else, but I’m trying not to sin. It’s Sunday, after all.”

  Jack rolled his eyes as he took the next piece of siding and went back to work. A smile flickered on his face, though, just before he turned back to hammer the siding onto the house.

  “I think I’m winning him over,” Luke whispered to Meri.

  “Must have been the apple crumble.”

  “I think it was the guest list.” Luke gave her a smile, then bent his head and started measuring the next piece.

  “Uh, I don’t know about that.” Jack had barely looked in her direction today. One would never know they had kissed each other yesterday. Or dated in the past. It was as if she didn’t exist.

  Her hand drifted up to her cheek and traced along the scar. Was it this? Was Jack so shallow that he couldn’t see past the damage to her face?

  Either way, she didn’t care. She wasn’t here to heal a relationship years in the past. She wasn’t here to figure out a man who had become an enigma in the years since she left.

  Meri headed into the house. She busied herself making a spinach salad with candied pecans and fresh strawberries. She crumbled a little feta cheese over the greens, then whisked together a raspberry vinaigrette, storing it in a squeeze bottle to add at the last minute. She stowed the salad in the fridge for taking to the Barlow house later, then assembled some turkey sandwiches and a pitcher of lemonade. The domestic duties made her feel normal, like any other woman in the South, fixing a side dish for a dinner and making a lunch for the hardworking men in the yard. A thousand miles away from the pampered beauty queen who had been forbidden from so much as pouring herself a glass of milk.

  We have help for that, Meredith, her mother would say. A lady doesn’t worry herself with such petty things.

  If her mother could see her now, wearing an apron and carrying a tray laden with sandwiches, an icy pitcher of lemonade and a stack of glasses, Anna Lee would probably faint right there on the spot. When Meri had moved out on her own and into that cramped studio in New York City, she’d realized pretty quickly that she had almost no homemaking skills. She’d burned grilled cheese, shrunk a favorite sweater and clogged the garbage disposal—twice. Despite the bumpy path to domesticity, Meri had loved learning how to fend for herself, how to cook, how to clean. She was no Martha Stewart, but she could make a decent meal and keep a clean house.

  Doing those things filled her with an odd sense of accomplishment, as if she had mastered one of the great secrets of life. Clearly, she had been exposed to way too much hair spray as a child.

  Meri bumped open the screen door with her hip, then made her way down the stairs and over to the wooden picnic table, still sitting in the same place under the old oak tree. Spanish moss hung like a dreamy curtain and the grass beneath the table had died in a bald oval. Meri set the dishes on the table, then put two fingers in her mouth and let out a short, sharp whistle. “Lunch!”

  Grandpa Ray got to his feet, Jack and Luke put down their work, and the three men headed for the table.

  “Lunch? Awesome.” Luke clapped Meri on the shoulder. “You are an angel, Meri Prescott. Plus one hell of a whistler. Where did you learn to do that?”

  “Actually, Jack taught me.”

  At the mention of his name, Jack raised his head. His blue eyes met hers, and sent a funny little flip through her stomach. Apparently, her stomach hadn’t gotten the memo earlier that she wasn’t interested in him and didn’t care what—or if—he thought about her.

  “I remember that day,” he said. “God, that was like a million years ago.”

  “Hey, I’m not that old. I was eight. You were almost eleven.” She’d been infatuated from the minute she’d met Jack Barlow, convinced he was the handsom
est boy she’d ever seen. With a wide smile, those big blue eyes and a way of wrapping her in a cloud of his charm. He’d been Eli’s friend, and she’d been Eli’s constant companion, escaping from the suffocating house on Cherrystone Avenue as often as she could with the cousin who often disobeyed Anna Lee’s stern rules and took Meri tree climbing and frog hunting. With the boys, Meri could get muddy and scuffed and forget about things like keeping her spine straight when she walked and holding a smile until her teeth felt as though they were going to shatter. Of course, there was always hell to pay when she got home, and eventually she stopped climbing trees and playing in the mud. It was easier to be a bystander, longing for that freedom, than to face the wrath of Anna Lee later.

  “You were the annoying tagalong,” Jack said. “Always underfoot with us boys.”

  She parked a fist on her hip. “I was never annoying.”

  Jack arched a brow.

  “Okay, maybe a little annoying.” The boys had tolerated her because she came as part of the package with Eli. But Jack...Jack had been different. Maybe it was because he had a younger brother or maybe it was because he was the kind of guy who would rescue a baby bird that had tumbled from the nest. She’d found him fascinating, and everything Jack tried, she tried, too, in that backward kind of young love where imitation covered for the nerves of a blooming infatuation.

  Jack laid his hammer on the end of the table, then crossed to her. “I distinctly remember telling you to get lost. More than once.”

  “And I distinctly remember not listening to you.”

  He chuckled. “When have you ever listened to me?”

  When you told me we were over. When you told me that you wanted someone with more depth than a princess who trotted around on the stage in high heels. All over again, that moment in the garage speared her heart. She could smell the motor oil again, hear the harsh tones in Jack’s voice, see his back as he walked away.

  “Are you still trying to be a tomboy, Meri Prescott?” Jack asked, his voice low. “Because you were always a better princess.”

  She looked at his face now, the tease in his eyes, and realized he still saw her as a silly girl who had tried to hang with the boys but hadn’t been doing anything other than masquerading. He still saw the beauty queen, the dressed-up mannequin, produced and directed by Anna Lee Prescott.

  Meri broke her gaze away and waved toward the table. “I made you guys some sandwiches and lemonade.”

  “Thank God. I was about ready to drop dead of starvation working with the devil’s taskmaster here.” Luke thumbed toward Jack, who just scowled at his brother and slid into a seat at the table. Jack reached for a sandwich and Luke smacked his hand. “Ladies first, you Neanderthal.”

  “I was just treating Meri like one of the guys. Just like the old days.” He shot her a grin.

  Like one of the guys. Like the girl who pretended to be what she wasn’t. Nothing had changed in Jack’s mind, nothing at all.

  Meri backed up and shook her head. Her stomach started to rumble, and she pressed her hand flat against the noise. “That’s okay. I already ate. I...have some work to do.” Then she excused herself and headed back inside before the memories swirling in her head could gain a foothold. And before she could fall for a charming grin and a pair of sexy blue eyes that still saw her as the beauty queen she used to be—not the complicated woman she had become.

  Chapter Seven

  By the time they wrapped up for the day, Jack and Luke had knocked out the siding and finished repairing the front porch. He’d made a decent dent in the woodpile already this week. All that was left to do at Ray’s house was pull the weeds and trim the shrubs around the house. The work he’d started so zealously a year ago had nearly come to an end.

  Which left Jack at loose ends. Not a place he liked to be. Not since...

  that day.

  Hell, he could have quit last week, delayed the siding repairs until fall. Could have spent his day at the garage, finishing up the transmission work on Joey McCoy’s Chevy. He could have stayed at his own house, working his way down the endless to-do list that came attached to a fixer-upper.

  But he’d lingered at Ray’s, his attention divided, hell, almost gone, every time Meri stepped outside. To him, Meri had always been a paradox—a teenager who wore a floppy hat everywhere to protect her complexion from any hint of a tan, but also one who would sneak out of the house in the middle of the night to go look at the stars. As she got older, though, the girl who would sneak out began to disappear, replaced inch by inch by someone he didn’t recognize. Someone who worried about her makeup and her manicure, who was never seen without everything in perfect alignment. Like the Borg in Star Trek, Meri Prescott had become a walking, talking beauty queen with no patience for anything out of place.

  That was what had finally driven him away from her—the realization that they were two very, very different people, and always would be.

  Except maybe now. The years away, the new life she’d established, even the scar on her face had softened her somehow, erasing that perfect, porcelain doll she had once been. He liked that. A lot.

  Maybe too much.

  “You know, you’re not half-bad at this renovation thing,” Luke said as he loaded their tools into an empty bucket and hefted it into the storage shed. “Maybe you should make an honest man of yourself and start a business or something.”

  “I’m working for Dad right now, keeping the garage running.”

  “And he’ll be back to running the place next week, which means you’ll only be working there part-time. Besides, Dad is planning on retiring in a few years, and has made it clear that none of us has to become a second-generation garage owner. You love working outside, making things, building things. Why not do that instead?”

  “Because starting a business means crap like paperwork and taxes and—”

  “And that’s called being a grown-up, Jack. You work, give Uncle Sam his cut—”

  “Uncle Sam already took enough of me. More than enough.” Jack tossed the extra siding onto the truck and stalked over to the driver’s side. Before he could climb into the cab, Luke put a hand on his arm.

  “Listen, I know you went through a ton of crap over there. Stuff no man should go through. Stuff you’re probably going to be dealing with for years. But that doesn’t mean your life ended in Afghanistan.”

  “What the hell do you know about what I went through?”

  “I don’t know anything,” Luke said quietly. “But I know you and I know this...angry, lost man you’ve become isn’t my brother. You gotta start taking some steps forward, Jack, so you’re not stuck in Neutral forever. Start a business. Get some business cards. Get an appointment book and put something in it besides be a miserable ass today.”

  “What gives you the right to tell me how to live my life?”

  Luke flipped over his wrist and pointed to the vein running down his forearm. “It comes with the DNA. And speaking of those you are related to, those who still love you even when you’re as pissed-off as a badger caught in a bear trap, you are going home to take a shower and show up at Mama’s for dinner. Right?”

  The way Luke said the last word brooked no room for argument. It said either agree or I’ll drag you there myself, even if you’re sweaty and covered with sawdust.

  “Luke—”

  “Pot roast. Mashed potatoes. And the jerks who love you.” Luke grinned. “How can you resist that combination?”

  Jack wanted to disagree. He wanted to retreat to his cabin and sit there until the sun sank into the lake and the moon kissed the water with silver. He wanted to sit there and have a beer or two or ten and feel good and sorry for himself. He wanted to sit there until the shadows retreated from the corners of his mind, and sweet peace returned.

  Peace. It had been a long damned time since he’d had anythi
ng even close to peace in his life. And sitting on the porch, getting drunk and watching the sun go down sure as hell wasn’t going to bring it back. He’d tried that—about two hundred times since he got home from the war—and it had yet to do anything but numb the pain for a few brief hours.

  Maybe it would do him some good to try something. Something with at least a little nutritional value. And if the suffocating well-meaning attempt of his family to make him feel better got to be too much, there was always the porch and the case of Bud.

  Hell, even the thought of sitting out there tonight, as he had too many nights already, depressed him.

  “Fine, I’ll go.”

  Luke’s brows arched but he quickly covered his surprise. “Dinner’s at—”

  “Six. It’s been at six every night for the past thirty years. I’ll be there.” He waved his brother away. “You don’t have to wait on me. If I say I’ll be there, I’ll be there.”

  Jack got into his truck, put it into gear and drove the short mile from Ray’s cabin to his own. He laid out some clothes and hopped in the shower, knowing that if he stopped moving, or stopped to think, he’d change his mind. He tidied a house that didn’t need tidying, checked the mail and wasted a few minutes reading the junk mail advertising a pool service and another piece telling him now was the perfect time to buy a new sofa. Then, when he could stand the silence and wait no longer, he got in his truck again and drove across town.

  As soon as the thick trees of the lake area were in his rearview mirror, Jack began to tense. The grand mansions of the old South began to dominate the landscape, with their wide, friendly verandas and sherbet-colored siding. Once, Jack had dreamed of owning a house here. Imagined himself coming home to a wife, a couple kids, a goofy golden retriever. Then he’d gone to Afghanistan and all those dreams seemed like the stupid, silly fantasies of a kid who didn’t know anything about life.