by Nancy Warren
“Dinner.” The word came out soft and husky.
Steve rolled his eyes. “Typical. No imagination.”
She was glad, for poor Rock’s sake, that she hadn’t mentioned the pizza versus steak house debate.
“Oh, yes,” she said, continuing to think about this supposed contest the two men were waging over her, and deciding to enjoy this extraordinary situation. “There are extra points for imagination.”
He laughed. “So now you’re doing the scoring?”
“Isn’t it usually the woman who determines the winner of these contests?” She could not believe she was coming up with this stuff. She was flirting with a very attractive man and oh, Lord, but she was enjoying it.
He rose and came around the desk toward her. As much as she liked this teasing side of her that was emerging, she wasn’t at all sure what was coming next. “The woman always determines the score,” he said softly.
He’d reached her now, and his hands settled on her shoulders, warm and confident. She wanted to close her eyes and sway into him. But, in the first place, she didn’t think work was the place for this. And in the second, it wasn’t fair. She narrowed her gaze. “Are you trying to steal a few points during Rock’s inning?”
He threw back his head and laughed. “All’s fair.”
“We are on Standard time, you know.”
His hands left her shoulders, and she wanted them back. Her skin was still warm where he’d touched her. “Right. Here are the photos from the tryouts. I thought we’d use these ones.”
HOURS WENT BY and still Harriet couldn’t stop the thrill that crept up her spine every time she thought of that first article with her name on it. She worked late and tried not to feel bad about letting Steve down for tonight. She’d bake some cookies in the morning to go with their picnic, she decided.
She barely had time to rush home and comb her hair and brush her teeth before Rock arrived, promptly at seven.
The aunts were hovering like two darling, fluttery white butterflies. Harriet was all ready to step out the door when her date rang the bell. She glared at her aunts firmly. “No funny business. You can make one remark each.”
“Come in,” she said to Rock, who looked muscular and commanding even in jeans and a sweatshirt.
He stepped inside and she introduced Lavinia and Elspeth. As they each shook his hand she thought they looked like delicate china teacups next to a lump of granite. For the first time it occurred to her how much Rock’s name suited him. He was huge and hard and his muscles certainly seemed rock-hard. He was also unlike every man she’d ever gone out with, and she could tell from her aunts’ expressions that they weren’t quite sure about him. Rock didn’t come from Pasqualie, so they didn’t know his family or his history.
She didn’t need a quiz about his likes and dislikes at school to give away the secret that Rock was no genius.
She thought again about Steve and the gleam in his eyes. Maybe he didn’t quote Shakespeare or recite the periodic tables for light conversation, but she had to wonder if he was really as thick as his reputation suggested.
However, she wasn’t going out with Steve tonight, she was going out with Rock, and her aunts were not going to spoil her date. She glared at them one at a time, hoping they’d be good.
How much trouble could they make with one line? Aunt Lavinia wouldn’t have time to grill him on his knowledge of civil war battlefields and Elspeth couldn’t express her gratitude to a man for taking Harriet out on a date, as she so often did.
But after twenty-three years of experience, Harriet still underestimated them.
“Thank you so much for inviting Harriet out today,” Elspeth said with a gracious softness, as though her niece were a shut-in going on a charity outing.
Harriet tried not to cringe. That was Elspeth’s one line down. One to go.
“Come to tea next Sunday,” said Aunt Lavinia, in her clear, crisp tone. “Three o’clock.”
Even as she glared at her other aunt for that unbelievably underhanded use of her one line, Harriet started to protest, “I’m sure Rock has—”
He flashed his chick-eating grin. “Tea, huh? Sounds great.” He’d made a common mistake. He’d fallen for their charming-eccentric-elderly female line. He couldn’t imagine how wrong he was.
Afternoon tea on Sunday with the aunts was as traditional as a church service and more formal than teatime at Buckingham Palace. An invitation was like military inspection and woe betide the young man whose boots weren’t polished to perfection, or whose knowledge of Petrarch’s sonnets was rusty.
Rock seemed almost not to recognize her at first, then, after the front door shut behind them, looked her up and down with his protuberant blue eyes and winked.
“I like that whole schoolgirl thing you’ve got going. It’s a turn-on.”
She smiled weakly. Schoolgirl thing? This was her normal wardrobe, but she didn’t know how to tell him that, so she smiled politely and said nothing.
Since Steve had asked her out, and explained about the rather flattering rivalry, she hadn’t liked to ask him for a lot of football trivia to help the conversation along on her date with Rock, so she planned to wing it. She’d seen a lot of the games, and figured she could keep asking Rock about himself. Men seemed to like that.
“Is the Texan Grill okay?” Rock drawled. “They have a thirty-six-ounce steak I like, and the place kind of reminds me of home.”
“Absolutely,” Harriet replied. She’d been there before. The decor was Texas cowboy, the portions huge and the staff mostly made up of students from Pasqualie University.
Harriet needn’t have worried about conversation lagging. She learned that he missed Texas. “Does it ever stop raining up here?” he complained.
“It’s not raining tonight,” she reminded him, although the sky had been so thick with clouds earlier that she’d tucked a folding umbrella into her bag.
“It’s going to.”
He didn’t only miss the weather in Texas, it turned out Rock missed his family and he hoped to be traded to his home team.
They talked about the Pasqualie Braves and its chances this year and Rock’s plans for the future and she decided she’d made assumptions about him, too, based purely on external cues. In fact, Rock was a nice guy as well as a studly quarterback. All wrong for her, but a nice guy all the same.
She glanced at her watch a couple of times thinking she needed to get an early night in if she wanted to bake cookies and pack a lunch before Steve came for her at nine. When she realized she was being rude enough to dream about one man while out with another, she forced her attention back to the man who treated dessert like dim sum. “I love their pecan pie,” he said to her over the dessert menu. “And I better have a little mud pie. And if there’s strawberry ice cream, I’ll have some of that. And maybe some chocolate ice cream, too. How about you?”
“I’m pretty full, but the cheesecake looks good.”
“Why don’t you have some and we’ll share?” He grinned at her and she couldn’t help but laugh.
“Um, Rock, about Sunday tea—”
“I can’t wait.”
“But my aunts are—”
“Hey, I’m great with little old ladies. We’ll have fun.”
She realized she couldn’t stop this man when he was running with the ball any more than a rookie linebacker could.
11
STEVE HAD HIT the jackpot. A trip back to Pasqualie High had unearthed a stash of pure gold. He rubbed his hands with delight trying to decide which of the “before” photos to use in his feature spread on Harriet.
He couldn’t believe how far the newest Braveheart had come from the girl in these photos. It was difficult to even recognize the Harriet he knew, with her clear skin, sexy, athletic body and inner confidence, from the dorky gal in his photos.
Even though he’d had none but the most minor role in her transformation, he was as proud of her as he would be if he’d coached her to victory. She was a beautifu
l woman who didn’t have to emphasize her looks. She was an inspiration for the girls of Pasqualie, and he wanted them all to see that.
He gazed at the array of photos in front of him, thinking maybe his Cinderella headlines were all wrong. What he had here was the duckling turning into a swan. He chuckled softly. And she’d been a particularly homely duck.
He was partial to the picture where she was grinning at the camera, proudly holding up a trophy she won during the school chess tournament. Her braces reflected the flash and you could see she had part of her lunch stuck in the silver metal.
But there was also the photo of the girls’ field hockey finals. There was Harriet, red in the face, hair sticking damply to her face, her too tight uniform lovingly outlining every roll of puppy fat.
He chuckled, deciding to use both, and to keep the backups in case he had extra space. This was going to be one of the best features he’d ever done and was about to blow the Star’s sports section out of the water in the upcoming journalism awards.
He loved coming from behind to win, whether in a battle for newspaper awards or in a contest of athletic skill.
And that’s what Harriet had done. He picked up the “after” photos: the pictures Eric, the Standard’s best staff photographer, had taken at the cheerleaders’ training practice. This Harriet was a different woman. Sexy, voluptuous and toned. What dorky and unappreciated teen wouldn’t be inspired by seeing how Harriet, the biggest nerd in high school, had fooled everyone and turned out to be a sexy, gorgeous cheerleader.
Ever since their hike last Saturday, he’d been more determined than ever to show the world what they’d overlooked. She was funny, open, sweet and made some of the best oatmeal chocolate-chip cookies it had ever been his pleasure to wolf down.
He hadn’t had to wait for her on the trail, not that he would have minded, but her strong legs ate up the ground. He would have happily ended the day in a restaurant, but sitting in the dirt, sweaty and enjoying the outdoors had been more fun for him, and he suspected for her, also.
They were already planning their next wilderness outing, and he couldn’t wait. With Harriet so busy with practices, and showing up yawning at work, he was taking things easy. As much as he wanted to move in aggressively to steal Harriet from under Rock’s nose, he also realized his heart wasn’t in the game this time. He wanted Harriet to choose him—the four-eyed, dented-skull, failed pro athlete over the twenty-twenty-visioned, lead-headed, successful pro football player.
Steve wanted it as much as he’d ever wanted anything.
He wondered how Harriet would feel when she discovered that he’d gone ahead and made her the subject of an entire two-page spread? After her squeamishness when he’d first broached the subject, he’d decided to keep the article a surprise. She was embarrassed about being in the limelight, he could tell. But these pictures would show her what little resemblance existed between the swan she was now and the gangly duckling in the “before” pictures. All she needed was the encouragement he could provide and she’d see herself as the exciting, successful woman he saw.
Grinning to himself, Steve imagined her excitement. The quiet little overlooked girl from high school was getting her moment in the sun.
The layout was a secret for now. She was still working on the second of her own first-person stories, which he’d edit and run as a sidebar.
He didn’t want this sounding like something that should be on the Feature page, though. He glanced at the field hockey photo. He’d get a quote from the coach, Margaret Gaynor, about what a great athlete the young Harriet had been.
Perfect.
But a phone call to the school yielded the unwelcome information that Harriet’s coach wasn’t in Pasqualie anymore. No, the school secretary said, she had no idea where the woman had moved to.
It was just his bad luck that while the coach had moved on, the school secretary hadn’t. He tried to charm her on the phone and didn’t get far. Usually he was good at sweet-talking women, but he had a feeling Mrs. Channing still remembered that unfortunate incident during senior year, involving Steve, a water hose and the principal’s car.
The funny thing was he and Harriet were in the same school for two years. She’d have been a sophomore the year he was a senior. He didn’t remember her at all, but then it was a pretty big school.
“Is there a phys ed teacher I could speak to who would have known the coach?”
“No. They keep changing,” the secretary said, grumbling.
“There must be someone who knows how to reach her?” Steve didn’t know why, but all of a sudden it seemed desperately important to get someone from her high school days to admit publicly that Harriet had been a hell of an athlete.
Maybe he was taking this whole thing too far, but he wanted it on the record that she could have been as terrific a cheerleader in high school as any of those bouncy blondes he remembered.
“Well, I seem to recall that the field hockey coach was pretty good friends with one of our retired teachers who still lives in Pasqualie,” Mrs. Channing said.
“Who?” Steve grabbed a pen and paper. This was more like it. Maybe Mrs. Channing didn’t remember the waterlogged car incident after all.
“Lavinia MacPherson.”
Steve gulped and felt himself pale. “Miss MacPherson? The history teacher?” His voice bounced like that of a nervous adolescent. Just the thought of Miss MacPherson was enough to make a grown man regress to sweaty palms and an unstable vocal register.
“That’s right. Would you like her phone number?” At that moment he knew Mrs. Channing hadn’t forgotten him at all and his punishment for flooding the principal’s car wasn’t over yet.
“No, thank you. I have it,” he said, with an assumption of calm. “I don’t suppose anyone else might—”
“Not a chance.”
Steve put the phone down slowly. He’d known, of course, in some vague part of his brain, that one of Harriet MacPherson’s two maiden aunts might well be the woman who’d terrorized her history students for several decades. Of course, you had to respect Miss MacPherson. He doubted there was a single graduate from her years at Pasqualie High who couldn’t recite the Gettysburg Address flawlessly and who at least understood the rudiments of the Civil War.
He found himself muttering, “Four score and seven years ago, I attended Pasqualie High,” as he dug out Harriet’s phone number.
When he was connected with Miss MacPherson he took a deep breath and prayed his voice would sound manly. “Miss MacPherson, this is Steve Ackerman at the Standard. I’m not sure if you remember me—”
“Of course I do, Steven,” she interrupted, sounding as commanding and formidable as ever. “How nice to hear from you.”
“Thank you. I’m a sports reporter at the paper.”
“Yes, I know. I see you still hide your light under a bushel.” He could have sworn he heard a note of humor in her voice. He sure didn’t remember that from high school.
Maybe being miles away, at the other end of a phone line, made him bold, for he answered, “And you’re still pretending to be a crotchety old spinster?”
There was a silence and he wanted to bang himself silly with the phone receiver. He’d killed his one chance at getting ahold of Harriet’s former coach, not to mention ever being allowed to darken Harriet’s door again. Surprisingly, the next sound he heard wasn’t the phone slamming down, but a long chesty chuckle.
“I’ve read some of your stories. Your prose is clean and elegant. I’m disappointed to see you waste your talent on the sports page.”
She’d read his stuff? The most frightening woman in Pasqualie had read his articles? He gulped with fear at the notion and contemplated the possibility he was about to experience his first case of writer’s block. “I like sports,” he said at last, feeling as though his literary efforts were perfect for lining a bird cage.
“Obviously. And what is the purpose of your call?”
Oh, right. “I’m working with your niece, Har
riet…” What was the matter with him? He was acting as though she had twelve nieces living with her and he had to help her distinguish them. He had to get a grip.
“Yes, I know.”
“Well, as part of the feature we’re writing, I’d like to interview her former field hockey coach for some quotes on what a fantastic athlete Harriet was in high school.”
“Really?” Her voice lilted with surprise. “Does Harriet know you’re hoping to interview Margaret?”
“No. That part’s kind of a surprise. I’m planning a two-page spread on Harriet’s amazing success in becoming a Braves’ cheerleader.”
“I see.”
There was another pause. Unable to see Miss MacPherson’s face, he had no idea what her pause meant.
“May I have Mrs. Gaynor’s phone number?”
“Mmm? Oh, yes, of course.” A moment later she was reading out the number.
“Thank you,” he said, delighted to have got through the ordeal so easily. But, just as in high school history classes, Miss MacPherson didn’t let him off the hook that easily.
“You’ve been a good friend to Harriet these last few weeks, and I’d be delighted to see you again. Come for afternoon tea. Sunday after next. Three o’clock.”
She might have retired, Steve thought bitterly, but she hadn’t lost her domineering ways. There was no “Would you like to come?” no “Is it convenient?” Not so much as an implied question mark. It was more like a command performance.
Afternoon tea with Miss MacPherson was a treat he’d look forward to the way he’d look forward to a lobotomy. Without anesthetic. Come to think of it, the way the woman teased and forced a person’s brain out of them was probably quite similar to the frightening procedure.
“I can’t wait,” he said, feeling as if he already had a whole scone lodged in his windpipe. He hoped Harriet would help him get through the tea. Or better still, help him get out of it.
He hung up, then had to roll his shoulders a few times and indulge in a little imaginary sparring before he was ready to pick up the phone and talk to another retired member of the Pasqualie High faculty.