“I worked for my father for thirteen years, after school and on Saturdays until I graduated, then twelve hours a day, six days a week until he fired me last fall. I never had a time card, never got a paycheck and never got so much as a thank you from him. That’s nothing to brag about.”
She’d said the words so dispassionately, as detached as if she were talking about a complete stranger, that Ethan knew she, in truth, felt great emotion—resentment, anger, a helpless sense of unfairness. Life should have been better for her. She had deserved better.
And she still did, but he didn’t know how to be better. All he knew how to do was try…and fail.
“Why didn’t you follow your mother’s example and leave?”
She looked like a solemn baby owl when she looked at him, her brown eyes magnified by the thick glasses. He wished she would take them off so she wouldn’t look so young and innocent. Not that it mattered. She could have a hundred years of experience behind her, could live a long and wicked life, and she would still be too young and innocent for the likes of him.
“He never would have let me go,” she said simply.
“He never would have let you spend the night with me, either—if he’d known about it. You could have run away then.”
“I wouldn’t even have known how.”
“You could have left with me the next morning.”
Her gaze as it settled on him was troubled with doubts. “You would have agreed to that?”
To more nights with pretty, sexy, red-haired Melissa? In a heartbeat. To endless miles with plain, shy Grace? “Sure,” he said. “You would have been welcome to go as far as I was going.”
She studied him a moment longer, then almost smiled. “Right. You would have taken one look at me and disappeared before I could even get the question out.”
“That’s not true,” he protested. “I would have been—”
“Disappointed.”
“Surprised by the change, but that wouldn’t have stopped me from giving you a ride.” Just from harboring any lustful thoughts about her. From sharing her bed when they stopped for the night. From wanting her with even one-hundredth of the desire he’d felt for Melissa.
“You would have been disappointed,” she insisted with the confidence of someone who was convinced she was right. “You were disappointed when you walked into the store last week. I don’t blame you. When it comes to being attractive, Melissa’s got me beat hands down.”
“That’s ridiculous. You are Melissa. You could look like that all the time if you wanted.”
She eased to her feet in that awkward, uncentered way of pregnant women, and took her glass to the sink before facing him again. “And would that make all this easier for you? If I looked like Melissa instead of me? If you knew that, once the truth comes out, people weren’t going to be saying, ‘What in hell was he doing with her?”’
“Trust me, no one in Heartbreak’s going to be saying that,” he said dryly. “It’ll be more along the lines of ‘What in hell was she doing with him?”’ He drew his fingers through his hair to calm his impatience. “Grace, you can look like anyone you damn well want. The only person you have to please is yourself. If you want to change something, change it. If you don’t want to, don’t. It’s your call.”
“Is that the way you’ve lived your life? Pleasing yourself?”
“No,” he said flatly. “I’ve never pleased anyone. Not even myself.”
Without waiting for a response from her, he walked out of the kitchen, down the dark paneled hall and stopped in the broad doorway that led into the living room. It was a dark room, too, and reminded him of his grandmother’s house. When he was a kid, Gordon had built the cabin where Ethan was now staying and moved his mother into it, but before then Estella James had lived in town, in a small drab house with faded wallpaper, worn linoleum, old furniture and too little light.
His kid deserved to live someplace brighter, sunnier, cheerier.
So did Grace.
When he heard the soft rustle of her socked feet behind him, he stepped to one side and faced her. “Do you have a room picked out for the nursery?”
Her gaze darted up the stairs before coming back to him. “I thought I’d keep her in my room, at least for a while. I never had the time to fix up the guest room. There’s a lot of stuff to move out.”
He glanced up there, too. “Maybe I can move it. Mind if I go up to look?”
She shrugged and stepped back as he started up the stairs. She didn’t take the first step up until he had reached the top. Was she uncomfortable coming upstairs with him? There was no denying that bedrooms were more intimate in nature than the living room and kitchen downstairs.
There was also no denying that nothing inappropriate was going to happen. She was seven months’ pregnant, and he was not that desperate…though he wondered, as he watched the careful way she moved, her gaze on the steps, her right palm sliding slowly over the polished banister. Her hands weren’t pampered, her skin neither soft nor silken, but he still remembered the way she’d touched him that summer night—tentatively at first, later greedily, erotically, helplessly. He still remembered the way he’d reacted to her inexperienced caresses, the way she’d made him hard with fumbling touches, the way she’d made him feel. Wanted. Needed.
Swallowing hard, he turned away. Four doors opened off the hallway. The nearest led into a bathroom, as ridiculously outdated as the rest of the house. The next went into what had surely been Jed Prescott’s room—large, plain, obviously unused.
The third opened into a small room with a twin-size bed, worn candy-striped wallpaper, a bedspread and ruffly curtains in washed-out pink and very little else. There were places on the wall showing where pictures had once hung, shelves built into the corners that were uncomfortably bare, a white dresser with nothing scattered across its top, a small desk that was empty. Grace’s room, obviously, but… “Where are your things?”
She stood in the doorway and watched as he crossed the bare wood floor to the windows, then turned back. “What things?”
“Pictures, books, souvenirs, mementoes. As much as I move, I carry more personal stuff with me than you have in this room.”
She wiped away an imagined speck of dust from the dresser, then folded her arms across her chest. “They—they’re gone.”
“Gone where?”
Looking decidedly uncomfortable, she shrugged, then freed one hand for a helpless gesture toward him. No, not him. Toward the window behind him. He pushed one pink curtain aside to look out and saw nothing of particular interest. A yellowed yard, her car, his truck, the burned section of grass…
Burning leaves? he’d asked, and she’d given a cryptic reply. Or something.
He stared at her. “Your father burned your stuff?”
The incredulity in his voice increased her discomfort level. She came farther into the room and busied herself with smoothing nonexistent wrinkles underneath the spread, then straightening it again. “In his mind they were his things. He’d brought me into this world. He had housed and fed and clothed me for twenty-five years. He had paid for everything I owned, and that made it all his to do with what he would.”
“And he burned it? Because you were pregnant?”
“Because I had disobeyed him. Because he had warned me for thirteen years about the consequences of behaving like a tramp and I had done it, anyway. Because I had thrown away my virtue, just like my mother had, and he wanted nothing to remind him of me left in his house.” Though she sounded composed, her voice trembled. Worse, her body did—not just her hands, but her shoulders, her knees, her entire body. Ethan had never seen a woman who needed holding as much as she did at that moment, and he’d never found it so impossible to offer an embrace.
She took her glasses off as if to clean them, then saw that they betrayed how shaken she was. Clumsily, she slid them back into place, drew a couple of loud breaths, then faced him. “When he realized I was pregnant, he fired me and threw me out of his hou
se. When Reese brought me here to pick up my things, they were burning in the yard. All my clothes. My books. The photographs of my mother. The toys I’d kept since childhood. Stuffed animals that I’d intended to give to my baby. My high school diploma. Everything.”
Ethan turned his back on her to hide how shaken he was. He could hardly imagine what a blow that must have been to her. She’d had so little in her life, and to be forced to watch it go up in flames, too late to save even a bit of it, all because she’d done something other young women did all the time.
Jed Prescott wasn’t just a mean son of a bitch. He was one sick bastard. Ethan was rapidly developing a new admiration for the courage it had taken for her to defy Jed at all. In comparison, he felt like a coward because both Grace and her helpless unborn baby scared the hell out of him.
After a moment, when his breathing had returned to normal, one of her remarks angled for his attention. When Reese brought me here to pick up my things… Why had the sheriff brought her home? Neither firing an employee nor kicking your adult daughter out of your home was a criminal offense. Had she merely wanted protection in case Jed’s behavior turned uglier than usual? Or had it already turned uglier?
“Why did the sheriff come with you?”
She made an obvious effort to regain control, and succeeded. Her voice low and steady again, she commented, “You ask a lot of difficult questions.”
“You have a lot of difficult answers.”
She breathed heavily, then laced her fingers together and unemotionally recited the events. “I was standing on a ladder that afternoon, getting something for Miz Walker. I’d been putting on weight and was just starting to show, and my father…saw. He stormed across the room, making accusations, calling me names, and he knocked me to the floor. Reese and some other men in the store pulled him away, and Reese took me to see Doc Hanson, to make sure everything was okay.” In direct contrast to the flatness of her voice, she laid her hands across her stomach so carefully, so tenderly. “When the doctor said the baby appeared to be fine, Reese brought me here to get some clothes, and we arrived to find the bonfire.”
He crossed the room to stand directly in front of her. “I’m sorry.”
“It wasn’t your fault.”
“If I had been here…”
“How could you have been here? I didn’t even tell you my real name.”
“But—”
“It’s not your fault. My father was a bastard before I met you. He’ll be a bastard until the day he dies.”
Which, as far as Ethan was concerned, couldn’t come a day too soon.
With a nervous wave, she gestured across the hall. “That’s the room I was talking about.”
He followed her into the last bedroom, though not very far into it. The space, not much bigger than her own room, was crammed with dark, heavy furniture, boxes and plastic bags. He would need help to move all but the smallest pieces, and she would need more than the two months remaining before the baby’s birth to sort through all the junk.
“Why don’t you move into your father’s room and let the baby have your room? Then you can take your time going through all this.”
Her nose wrinkled again, a small, fastidious movement that was either decidedly rabbitlike or charming. He couldn’t figure which. “I don’t think I could sleep in his room.”
“Remake it so you don’t recognize it as his. Get rid of the furniture and use some of this. Paint the walls. Put up new curtains.”
For one moment she looked as if she were considering it, then she regretfully shook her head. “The fumes…I can’t paint now.”
“I can,” he said quietly, then forced a smile. “Did I mention that I worked construction for a while? I’m pretty handy with a roller and a brush. You pick out the paint, and I’ll do the rest. What do you say?” Though impatience seeped through him, he held himself very still. He didn’t coax, didn’t try to sweet-talk or persuade her in any way. He simply waited, and wondered why it felt so damn important to him.
After a moment, she smiled, too, at least that was what he chose to call the faint upturn of her mouth. “All right. If you really don’t mind.”
“I really don’t.” He switched off the overhead light, then closed the door as they returned to the hallway. There, in the thin light of yet another overhead fixture, he watched her stifle a yawn. It was early, but she’d worked a long week, dealt with the unpleasant surprise of his return and was pregnant besides.
“I’d better head home. When do you want me to start?”
“Whenever you want.”
“How about tomorrow?”
After a moment’s hesitation, she nodded.
“Do you go to church?”
“Sometimes. I can skip the morning service, though.”
“Then I’ll see you about ten.” Impulsively he touched her shoulder lightly as he passed, then took the stairs two at a time. When he glanced back from the door, she was watching him from the landing, her hands resting lightly on the banister, the curve of her arms framing the swell of her belly. Beautiful, sexy Melissa had tremendous appeal, he admitted before he stepped outside into the cold.
But young and innocent was growing on him.
The house was cold when Grace awakened the next morning, but she was accustomed to it. Her father had never believed in running the heat when you could put on additional layers of clothing, had never let Grace or her mother turn on the air-conditioning until the temperature slipped over the hundred-degree mark. He was frugal, he’d claimed. Cheap, her mother had argued. Just plain mean, Grace knew.
She turned onto her side, straightened her flannel gown around her and gazed out the window. All she could see was a myopic view of blue sky and the winter-barren branches of maples and gums, along with the brown-leaved limbs of scraggly blackjack oaks. At some point in the past, she’d known the reason the blackjack kept its dead leaves until spring brought new ones, but she’d forgotten. Some things, she preferred to believe, couldn’t be explained.
Like why Ethan James, who’d never shown a day’s responsibility in his life, had decided to turn over a new leaf with her. If she examined his motives too closely, she would see pity, guilt and temporariness, and so, she decided, she wouldn’t look too closely. She would accept the help he was offering, and would be careful not to believe he would be around next month or even next week. Then when he left, when wanderlust started calling his name or his infamous irresponsibility got the better of him and he disappeared, she wouldn’t be surprised or caught in another desperate situation.
Leaning closer to the night table clock with its extra-large numbers, she saw that it was later than she’d expected. After a few restless nights in the past week, she’d slept twelve hours last night and felt relaxed. Rested. Like a whole new person.
And how much of that had to do with Ethan?
She’d found her glasses and slid them into place before her feet hit the cold floor. Pulling on her robe, she shuffled into the bathroom, turned on the space heater and turned the water in the tub to hot. While waiting for both the air and the water to warm, she brushed her teeth, then studied her face in the mirror. Every time she looked, she saw the same thing—plain, unremarkable, ordinary. Neither pretty nor interesting nor arresting. Just pale skin, brown eyes, brown hair. Straight nose, ordinary mouth, average jaw.
But once… Oh, once she’d looked and seen pretty, daring, sensual Melissa. Her pale skin, her brown eyes, her nose, mouth and jaw, transformed into a woman who could make men look twice. Who could attract Ethan James and bring him back halfway across the country. That woman was inside her. She’d come out once. With the right cosmetics and a good hair stylist, Grace could bring her out again, day after day. She could become Melissa.
Taking off her glasses and squinting, she envisioned herself going about her daily routine with the wild red hair, the tight, revealing clothes. The thought made her laugh aloud.
But the realization that there was an in-between choked out the la
ughter and made her slowly slip her glasses back on and stare. She didn’t have to be sexy Melissa…but there was no reason why she couldn’t be the new-and-improved Grace. No reason why she couldn’t enhance what God had given her with makeup, why she couldn’t get this mass of hair cut into a flattering, carefree style. There was no reason at all why she couldn’t wear a pretty dress from time to time instead of living in these hand-me-down maternity dresses the community had found for her after the bonfire.
You can look like anyone you damn well want, Ethan had told her last night. The only person you have to please is yourself.
Being a new-and-improved Grace would please her.
And maybe it would please him, too.
Vanity—another sin her father had preached against—added to her name, she thought as she stripped off her robe and gown, turned on the shower and stepped into the tub under the spray. If it was sinful to want to look better, to make the most of whatever assets she had, then go ahead and damn her, because that was exactly what she wanted. And if Grace at her best wasn’t a match for Melissa, well, she would still be better than poor Grace, the shy little mouse no one noticed.
She was dressed and finished with breakfast when she heard the unfamiliar sound of an engine outside. Cradling her juice in both hands, she watched out a window as Ethan climbed out of the truck and crossed the yard. It seemed almost sinful for him to be here, like a drug dealer in a church or a preacher in a whorehouse. He was too different from the Prescotts—too cheery, too inclined to take his fun, too optimistic by half. Callie would say that his mere presence changed the aura of the property, from bleak and smothering to full of possibilities. Grace would agree.
His knock at the door, even though expected, startled her. She took a deep breath and calmed the faint tremble in her hands before opening the door.
“Good morning,” he greeted her, smiling as if it were true. “What do you want to do first? Get the supplies from the store or start moving stuff out of the room?”
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