It wasn’t as though she was resisting and therefore the zing was persisting. It was— For heaven’s sake, she didn’t know what it was. She only knew it was midnight and she couldn’t sleep for thinking about tomorrow night.
Just then, her phone alerted her to a new text coming in. It was probably Amanda, she thought. Rolling onto her side, she read the new message. Horror flicks or comedies?
She lay on her back again, and smiled. Reed was awake, too.
I live alone, she typed. What do you think?
I would have guessed old classics, he wrote back. See you in the lobby at the bottom of the stairs at eight.
Smiling again, she turned out the light and settled into her pillows. Maybe she should rethink her shoes. She could always run out tomorrow and buy a pair of decadent heels. Even if Reed hadn’t been several inches taller than her, it wouldn’t have mattered. Movie stars towered over their escorts all the time. Ruby had never enjoyed leaning down for a good-night kiss. Not that she would kiss Reed. After all, this wasn’t a real date. They were just two friends taking turns helping each other.
Liar.
There it was. What was bothering her. A little wish, a fleeting what-if.
What if Joey was Marsh’s?
Marsh’s, not Reed’s.
Then Reed would be free. And there would be no need to resist, no need to pretend that her heart didn’t stammer every time she saw him, no need to prepare herself for the possibility that some little blonde bombshell from his past could very well breeze back into his life any day.
She was horrible. No, she wasn’t. Okay, maybe she was a little horrible, but in her own defense, it wasn’t as if she had the power to change the ultimate outcome of that paternity test. The problem was, for all her good intentions, for all her lack of resisting, her feelings for Reed were deepening.
Whoever turned out to be Joey’s father, it would be for the best. She believed that with her whole heart, even though that belief brought a little pang.
She pictured Joey’s smile and the way his eyes had crinkled at the corners. They were like Reed’s that way. There it was, that nagging worry again.
Joey had Reed’s eyes. Reed’s, not Marsh’s.
What if Reed really was his father?
Reed Sullivan may have had a vein of the uncivilized coursing through him, but ultimately he was one of those rare individuals who did the right thing no matter what. He would be a wonderful father. Should Cookie return, the fireworks that might have produced Joey could very well be rekindled. Families had been founded on less.
And she, Ruby, would always be a friend, a good friend, but a mere friend, nonetheless.
It would have to be enough. If only it felt like enough.
Ruby had come to Orchard Hill to start over. She was an independent woman and independent women did not need a man.
She was starting to care about Reed, though. Talk about classic.
He’d somehow known her favorite movies were the classics. Lying there listening to the sounds of Division Street in the wee hours of a Saturday morning, she wondered what movie they were most like, her and Reed.
There wasn’t any her and Reed. There wasn’t, but if there were, which one would it be?
Pride and Prejudice?
That was one of her all-time favorites, but no, she thought, staring at the crack of light shining around the shade at her window. Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy were too proper.
Titanic?
She drew the sheet up to her shoulders. Gosh, no. Too tragic.
Gone With the Wind?
Too epic. She would never be able to pull off a convincing faint. And what about those corsets? Oh, no, Ruby liked to breathe when at all possible.
Casablanca?
She felt dreamy just thinking about that one. She couldn’t watch it without putting her hands over her heart. She hoped her life never mirrored it, though. If she ever had another love affair, it would have a happy ending.
She fell asleep thinking Happy Endings would be a good one-of-a-kind-drink title. And she dreamed of a long goodbye.
Chapter Nine
Long goodbyes were not the theme of the evening for the former classmates gathered in the banquet room of Gale, Michigan’s, only country club. Boisterous hellos, slaps on the back, squeals of laughter and time-enhanced stories of famed stunts, pranks and adventures abounded.
Ninety-nine young adults had walked across the stage on graduation day ten years ago. There would have been an even one hundred if Cody Holbrook hadn’t dropped out two weeks before commencement. Of those ninety-nine, an astounding seventy-one had RSVP’d that they were coming tonight.
By ten minutes before nine, thirty-six of them had asked Ruby, “Is he here yet?”
The he in question was Peter. Not Reed. He was stuck in traffic at the Pearl River Bridge, where a semi had reportedly rolled over, and besides, only Amanda, Ruby’s absolute BFF, knew about him. Maybe she should have asked him to come earlier, or with her, but it was too late for that. He was driving separately, and he would be here. If not for the traffic jam, he would have been here on time. She was just going to have to be patient a little longer. Unfortunately, patience wasn’t her strong suit.
Despite that and the fact that nearly everyone was waiting on pins and needles with bated breath for the highly anticipated promised scene, Ruby wasn’t having a horrible time. Since she and Amanda were on the planning committee and the welcoming committee, they’d arrived early with name tags for husbands, wives and/or special guests and a Welcome Back Class of 2004 banner.
Most of the football team was in attendance, which explained the state of the hors d’oeuvres table. The once-beautiful arrangement looked as if it had been attacked by pirates or piranhas or both.
Dinner had been served at eight, and now the caterers were clearing the tables and a crowd was forming around the portable bar. Sean Halstead, who’d always been a gifted music fanatic, was supplying the sound track for the evening, and Ruby’s brother, Rusty, was keeping an eye out should she decide to take him up on his offer to beat Peter up if he dared show his rakishly handsome face here tonight. Rusty had already blackened Peter’s eye after Ruby caught him in bed with someone else, but Ruby forbade a repeat performance.
Secretly, she appreciated his loyalty. Rusty’s. Not Peter’s. He didn’t have a loyal bone in his body. Obviously.
Everyone else she’d told, which was practically everybody she knew in Gale, L.A. and Chicago, agreed. It was bad enough that the other woman, a pretty sales rep from Chicago, had been married, but she’d been a redhead, too, although not a natural one. Unfortunately, the evidence of that was permanently burned into Ruby’s memory.
“Ruby!”
She recognized the stereo of voices calling her name, and was smiling when she turned around. Identical twins Lisa and Livia Holden still dressed alike. Not even Ruby, who’d been on the cheerleading squad with them freshman year, could tell them apart. And she never forgot a face.
Hands up, hair down, smiles gleaming and identical, they yelled, “Give me a V. Give me an I. Give me a C.” And so on until the victory cheer was done.
“Is he here yet?” Lisa, or maybe it was Livia, asked in a normal tone of voice when they were done.
“I wouldn’t know.” It was Ruby’s stock blasé reply. She would have used a similar bland tone if someone had asked if she happened to know who Tom Cruise was dating these days or if she believed aliens had anything to do with building the ancient pyramids. It wasn’t that she didn’t care at all. She just didn’t care very much. Luckily Father Marty was in Rome or she might have had to confess that.
Catherine Ericson, the shyest girl in the class, joined her and Amanda after the twins wandered off to cheer for someone else. “Hey, Ruby,” she said.
Ruby and Catherine had
been in the drama club together junior year. Catherine’s acne had cleared up since then and she’d taken off some weight. She looked quite pretty, but then, she’d always been pretty underneath. Evidently her painful shyness hadn’t improved, and she still blushed scarlet. Despite that, she still managed to squeak out the question on everyone’s mind.
“Is he here yet?”
Bother.
Just then, a hush fell from one end of the room to the other. It didn’t require great insight to know what it meant.
He was about to arrive. Peter. Not Reed. She hadn’t heard from him since a little after nine.
While all eyes were turned toward the door where everyone’s favorite tall, dark, handsome and so misunderstood former football star was making his grand entrance, Ruby slipped onto the patio to watch the sun set over the ninth green. Amanda, Evie Carlyle and Violet VanWagner, her closest high school friends and the best posse a girl could ask for, came, too.
It was a warm summer evening. Most of the golfers had headed to the clubhouse, but two remained on the ninth green. One of them missed an easy putt. The cumulus clouds on the horizon concealed all but the faintest shades of coral and lavender tingeing the western sky. Even with the wind whipping Ruby’s hair into her eyes, it was still better than witnessing the entire parting of the Red Sea taking place inside.
Ruby, Amanda, Evie and Violet weren’t the only ones out here. That was something at least. A small group huddled at the far end, smoking.
Two doors opened onto the broad patio overlooking the green and the Pearl River. Evie was guarding one and Violet the other. Safe for now, Ruby took a fortifying breath.
Beside her, Amanda said, “I’m proud of you for coming tonight. Peter has some nerve. Ninety percent of the people here are hoping you’ll forgive him. As if.”
“You gotta admit,” Freddie Benjamin called after passing what was surely a joint to a girl Ruby didn’t recognize. “Sending everybody that text. I still love her, man. It was borderline brilliant.”
Jason Harding, who’d had a crush on Ruby most of his life, mumbled something, and then said, “You’re lookin’ good as always, Ruby. You, too, Amanda.”
“Thanks, Jason.”
“Backatcha, Jase.” Wearing four-inch heels and a yellow sundress, Amanda rolled her eyes. In a quieter voice, she said to Ruby, “Missing Peter’s grand entrance? Stellar. But you probably aren’t going to be able to elude him all night.”
It was well after nine by now. Only Ruby knew that the members of Gale High’s graduating class of 2004 weren’t the only ones who’d received a text from Peter. Ruby’s had varied slightly from the others’. I still love you, baby. Give me a chance to prove it. Please.
She was almost afraid to check her phone again.
“He’s coming this way,” Violet called from her post at the nearest patio door.
“Come on, Ruby! The coast is clear over here,” Evie exclaimed.
Ruby’s phone vibrated in her hand. Her breath caught as she read the message. Instantly, she started for the door.
“Not this one,” Violet called as she neared. “Go through the other door. The one by Evie.”
“He’s here,” Ruby said.
“We know,” Violet, who was seven months pregnant, replied. “Peter’s heading this way. Half our class is right behind him.”
“Not Peter,” Ruby said, laying a gentle hand on Violet’s baby bump. “Reed.”
“Who?”
Leaving Amanda to explain if she so chose, Ruby darted inside on the onrushing breeze, her step light, her dress swirling around her thighs. Her hair, which she’d tamed with large hot rollers hours ago, fell in soft waves down her back.
The serene smile that tipped the corners of her mouth didn’t falter as she passed the sea of faces she’d known all her life. Peter, tall and dark and smolderingly confident, was directly ahead of her now.
She blew past him so quickly he probably felt the current of air she left in her wake. A second collective gasp spread through the room just as a Bob Marley song began to play. Once upon a time “Satisfy My Soul” had been their song. Hers and Peter’s, back when they had been a “couple.” He’d thought of everything.
Darting around the last group of spectators in her way, she burst through the door, the hardwood floor of the banquet room giving way to the soundproof carpet in the hallway. Windows lined one entire wall, flooding the area with fading natural light. The stairs were directly ahead some thirty feet away.
And there, standing at the bottom, was Reed.
Her steps slowed as she neared, stopping altogether when she was six feet away. Behind her, the doors were opening and music and people poured into the hall.
Reed smiled at her. His blond hair was neatly trimmed yet slightly disheveled, his tie in one hand, his collar open at his throat, his pale green shirt a little wrinkled as if he’d been sitting in traffic for a long while.
Ruby didn’t know how to proceed. Their “date” had come about only yesterday, and she hadn’t talked to him about this. They hadn’t rehearsed what they would say or how they would act or what they would do. They were going to have to ad-lib.
He started toward her, his stride long and effortless, and came to a stop less than an arm’s length away, close enough to touch her, which he did, his fingers brushing her long hair off her right shoulder. “Maybe later you could tell me what I just missed,” he said. “We have an audience, led by some dark-haired guy whose knuckles are dragging on the floor. So if it’s all right with you, I think I’ll kiss you.”
She imagined she must have answered, imagined she knew, somehow, that his kiss would be part of the pseudo-date performance. She imagined that the way she raised her face and the way he lowered his appeared perfectly, exquisitely natural. But the moment his lips touched hers, her mind pulled the curtain on her imagination. Now there was only touch and taste and sound.
She took a small breath and inhaled the scent of warm leather and hot breezes and soap and apples, of all things. Heat shimmered off him, his lips firm and warm on hers, his jaw smooth beneath her fingertips, which meant she must have been touching him. Oh, yes, she was touching him. His skin was taut and slightly rough despite his recent shave, the bones underneath prominent and angular and solid. This wasn’t sculpted bronze. This was living, breathing man.
He tilted his head a little, and she opened her lips slightly beneath his. Soft, muted sunset colors floated across her closed eyelids, pale yellow and sky-blue and lavender and coral, which was strange because the windows here faced east not west.
He made a sound deep in his throat. Barely audible, it was deep and dusky and sensual and furthered the sensation of floating.
She’d kissed other men. Some of them were very good at it. In a sense, she and Reed had resisted this very activity from the beginning. And yet the pressure of his lips, the way he moved his mouth against hers, his moist breath becoming hers, the taste of him, the feel of him, the fit, all of it felt as if they’d been born to experience this moment.
Her heart pounded, and the kiss changed subtly, like summer sprinkles that gradually gave way to summer rain. It was exploratory, mysterious yet achingly familiar somehow. She’d dreamed last night of a long goodbye. She’d never imagined such a perfectly beautiful long hello.
The kiss ended, stilling like a petal waiting to uncurl until the earth’s atmosphere created a drop of dew. They drew slightly apart, their eyes opened, her hand fell away from his face and his fingers uncurled from her hair.
“Wow,” she said quietly. “I wasn’t expecting that. But wow.”
He didn’t quite smile.
And a little thrill ran through her, as if she’d done something slightly illicit, or at the very least naughty, and hadn’t gotten caught. Actually, she had gotten caught, caught by half the graduating class of 2004, caught
on at least nine camera phones. More than anything, though, she’d gotten caught up in Reed’s kiss.
He took her hand with the first step, and it felt almost as intimate as that kiss. They started across the lobby, fingers twined, their strides smooth and matched. The crowd filtered back inside ahead of them, whispering, wondering what would happen next.
Peter held the door. Ruby wasn’t expecting that.
“Who do we have here?” he asked.
She made the introductions and noticed that Reed was taller. Not by much, but a little. She realized it didn’t matter. Peter was good-looking; she hadn’t been kidding about the Jude Law and George Clooney combination. That didn’t matter, either. His eyes were a brilliant blue, although, admittedly, they were tinged with green now.
She wasn’t surprised he ignored Reed. That didn’t really matter, either, because Reed didn’t have to say a word. After all, he was the one who rested his hand lightly on her lower back as they walked through the door.
Behind them Peter was seeing red.
* * *
Reed dropped his tie into the first wastebasket he passed. As far as making an impression, he didn’t believe a silk tie or anything else could top that kiss. He hadn’t planned to do that, but now he didn’t see how he could have done anything else. The memory of it had lodged in his bloodstream like a pulse. Ruby had tasted like wine, had sighed like a whisper, had felt tall and willowy and so incredibly soft. It wasn’t something a man could forget.
Gale’s banquet center was what he’d expected. It had high ceilings, fake pillars, round tables and chairs around the outer edges and a small dance floor on one end. It wasn’t a large room, but it comfortably held the hundred or so people present tonight.
The lights weren’t bright and the music was a little louder than it needed to be, which nobody seemed to mind. Everyone had to talk louder, but had gotten used to it. Most of them couldn’t keep their eyes off Ruby. Reed knew the feeling.
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