“Well...there’s something else.”
Whitney didn’t like Kendra’s tone. Having been friends far too long for women of a certain age to mention, Kendra had a scary amount of insight into Whitney’s inner workings. If she was holding something back, it could only mean she was trying to protect Whitney.
And they both knew the only thing she needed protecting from was herself.
“Spill it.” Whitney pushed her salad away. Not even the buttery croutons seemed palatable now. A few more weeks of this and she’d be withering away.
“The guy who owns the bank is someone you know. I get the feeling the reason he’s pushing this morality clause is personal.”
No way. That sort of thing didn’t happen in real life. “I swear to God, if you tell me Matt is secretly a bazillionaire holding all the strings to our financial future, I’m going to kick out our new separator wall.”
Kendra laughed and shook her head. “It’s not Matt. And you might not know him face to face—just circumstantially. Walter Horn? Ring any bells?”
Whitney mentally rifled through her little black book of the past few years for lovers scorned, but nothing seemed to connect the dots. One of her crowning triumphs in life was that she always left her lovers a little better than when she met them—happier, more confident, sated. It was a gift. “Nothing comes to mind. Should I know him?”
“I guess that depends on how much time you’ve been spending at the golf store lately.”
“That’s not funny. You know I was banned. That Natalie woman—” Natalie Horn. That was why the name sounded so familiar. “Please tell me this Walter guy is some sort of third cousin eight times removed.”
Kendra shook her head sadly. “Married eight years. Two kids. Huge house, luxury cars, the whole bit. You messed that one up big time, Whit. Between the two of us, this project is doomed.”
Whitney’s heart sank. Not because getting their funding stopped put a kink in their plans—this fight was by no means over—but because no matter how kindly Kendra might pretend her sordid affair with a chainsaw artist was the cause of their problems, this was Whitney’s doing.
Antagonize people. Overreact. Repeat.
“What if I go issue a formal apology?” she asked, the words tasting of regret. And salad. Neither one was very delicious. “I might need you to promise to funnel wine and happiness down my throat later, but I’ll do it.”
“I think it’s too late for that,” Kendra admitted. “This whole thing is snowballing way out of our control.”
“I don’t understand how we could have so grossly misjudged this town.” In all their earlier visits, the people had seemed friendly and receptive, if slightly snobbish. She refused to believe that a group of individuals this concerned about appearances had no need for a medical spa. “They need us. They want us. They just refuse to admit it.”
That sounded rather familiar, actually. The citizens of Pleasant Park. A certain young, nubile kindergarten teacher she couldn’t seem to get out of her mind.
“We’ll find a way around it.” Kendra took Whitney’s hand and gave it a squeeze. “I’ve got some ideas in the works. Just keep your head down and play nice for a while, okay?”
Whitney squeezed back. “I can do one better.”
She ignored Kendra’s look of anxiety and started plotting. No way was she going to sit back and let life happen to her. Whitney might not be the paragon of femininity that this town seemed to idealize, but she wasn’t without her strengths.
Foremost among which was her refusal to give anything up without a fight.
* * *
Matt lined his kids up in the hallway, watching tiredly as they swung lunchboxes and chattered their way into the cafeteria. This had to be the longest week of his life. Between Laura’s diagnosis and the argument with Whitney, he was running perilously near his empty gauge.
But that didn’t stop him from noticing a morose face at the end of the line.
“Cecily, no one is going to make you eat the fish sticks if you don’t want to.” He offered an encouraging smile to the little girl bringing up the rear. Since the first day of class, colorful beads had clacked at the end of her multiple braids, and he’d developed an extraordinary ability to interpret the sounds. Those were near-tears ticks. “Here. I’ll go in with you and tell Ms. Patterson you want the gluten-free option today. I hear it’s yummy. Chicken and stars.”
Click, swash. Happy nodding.
He took Cecily’s hand and followed the class into the lunchroom. Technically, teachers got lunch off to recover and refuel. Between the cafeteria workers and the playground attendants, most teachers were able to sneak in a full forty-five minutes to themselves.
More often than not, though, Matt ended up sitting with the kids at the miniature fake wood-grain tables. Six hours a day wasn’t enough time to connect with all twenty-four students, and it was amazing how much he could learn over Lunchables and juice boxes.
Cecily, for example, recently lost a grandmother and was struggling to understand the monumental finality of death—it wasn’t just the mushy, tasteless fish sticks making her cry. As Matt had been a similar age when his own mother had passed, he knew just how much that extra kindness mattered, how much the little things became everything.
He murmured a warning to Ms. Patterson—a somewhat grouchy lunch volunteer whose arms were so short in proportion to her bulk the older kids had nicknamed her T-Rex—about the need to tread lightly. In the middle of his entreaty, Matt glanced up toward the entrance of the cafeteria. He wasn’t sure what compelled him to do it, unless it was the flash of color, so out of place in the drab beige school and his own muted state of mind. Or maybe it was just that he could sense her. When Whitney approached—even from a hallway halfway across a building—he felt it. A change in the atmosphere, a tightening in his stomach. She moved the very air around her, and his body was calibrated to detect each shift.
She turned the opposite direction, though, toward the front desk. The tightening in his stomach took a turn for the worse. He’d been half afraid he wouldn’t ever see her again. Seeing her and having her walk away from him was worse. Especially since her motivations were unclear.
“I don’t want to eat that.” Cecily gripped his hand tighter.
“No, no. You’ll like it.” He squeezed back. “I promise.”
“It smells funny.”
“What if I got some too?” He looked at the plate, broiled chicken and some unpronounceable gluten-free grain that could maybe, possibly, barely be mistaken for star shapes. It did smell funny. “We could eat it together. Maybe we can even convince Ms. Patterson to throw in an extra brownie.”
“The brownies aren’t gluten-free.”
“Work with me here, Lisa,” he said. “This is a brownie emergency.”
It was also a Whitney emergency, but she’d disappeared into the maze of administrative offices. And no matter how much he might want to talk to her right now, his first loyalty was to helping Cecily tackle gluten-free stars. And Ms. Patterson’s chocolate-disapproving ways.
He managed to wrest an extra brownie out of the woman and sat down to eat with Cecily. For the next fifteen minutes, he refused to imagine Whitney waiting for him in his classroom without a shirt on, or the conversation she might be having with his coworkers about his sexual preferences.
And he did a pretty admirable job at it, if he did say so himself. He even got Cecily to laugh.
With the kids safely out to recess, Matt moved quickly through the halls. It wasn’t that he felt worried, exactly. Whitney was a competent human being who, despite outward appearances, would never do anything to cause him harm.
But unpredictability was her calling card, her trump. A large basis of his attraction hinged on her refusal to accept things at face value, in her ability to mold the world around her until she
was comfortable with the fit. He gulped. That was a large basis of his fear too.
“I understand that Mrs. Horn runs the PTA, and I respect that you feel the need to support her in this.” Whitney’s voice, as usual, carried down several doors. “But I think you’re missing out on an important opportunity here.”
An odd mixture of relief and anxiety thrummed in Matt’s heart. Relief that the conversation had nothing to do with him. Anxiety that it contained anything else.
“I looked over your list of speakers. You’ve got an incredible array of professions covered, including the medical ones, but you can’t deny they’re strongly skewed toward the male persuasion. Where are the role models for girls who want to be more than medical receptionists or dental hygienists? Why is every non-secretarial professional on here a man?”
Matt stopped, pausing just outside the principal’s doorway. That sounded an awful lot like the argument he’d made at the last staff meeting about next month’s Career Day assembly. Every year, they marched a parade of successful men and the women who supported them across the stage. And every year, he had to spend the next two days explaining to the female students in his class why that parade should in no way limit their future aspirations.
“Yes, I’m new in town, but you can call my references, check my credentials. I graduated at the top of my class and received my board certification last year. From a professional standpoint, my qualifications are impeccable.”
He couldn’t hear what Mr. Gregoire said in return, but Matt had the feeling it wasn’t what Whitney wanted to hear. Or what he wanted to hear. The kids would love Whitney. Colorful, bright, scarily accomplished, strong and unwilling to let anyone tell her no. She was exactly the kind of woman little girls could—and should—look up to.
With a soft rap of his knuckles, he announced his presence at the door.
The principal’s office was spacious but windowless, which always gave him the sensation he was entering some kind of prison. Harry Gregoire himself didn’t help matters any. A balding, humorless man, he’d had his eye on a superintendent position for years. He saw his current job as a stepping stone rather than a place of honor, and his office reflected it. No color, no artwork, no indication that kids were welcome there. There was just his tiny, reflective head and his oversized desk, which was designed to intimidate even full-grown adults who happened to find themselves seated on the other side.
Whitney had elected to stand.
God, he adored that woman.
“She’s right, you know,” he said by way of greeting. “A female surgeon is exactly what our Career Day needs. We’ve had the same tired lineup of Pleasant Park residents for years, always giving the same speeches, always opening the same doors for our kids. Isn’t it time we let them see what else is out there? Expand their horizons beyond town limits?”
“Mr. Fuller.” Harry’s slightly nasally voice twinged, clearly displeased. “I believe Miss Vidra here is a friend of yours? Surely you are aware of the things being said—”
“Dr. Vidra,” he interrupted, correcting him. He caught Whitney’s gaze. Expecting her to be full of the usual light and laughter, he was surprised to find her mouth firmed in a line, her eyes sparking with wrath. She’s barely holding on here.
He hardly blamed her. Harry was not an easy man to get along with under the best of circumstances. When he was being a condescending, misogynistic prick, all bets were off.
“And yes,” Matt continued. “I know a little something about the current popular opinion on the subject of New Leaf.”
“New Leaf?”
“The medical spa she’s opening. You know, as a board-certified plastic surgeon and female business owner? Two things you have to admit we’re sorely lacking on that list in her hands.”
Whitney’s insides twisted into a strange and new contortion as she watched Matt come to her rescue. He leaned over the desk, his hands gripping the surface, staring down the bespectacled little rat on the other side. Even though Matt wore the haggard look of a man who hadn’t slept—or shaved—in at least forty-eight hours, it was obvious he meant business.
“Come on, Harry. You know as well as I do that Natalie can’t interfere with the school’s academic program, no matter how much noise she makes. This has nothing to do with the PTA or fundraising or appeasing parent tempers. It’s about the kids.”
A staring contest commenced. Whitney, not normally one to stay silent while a pair of obstinate men debated the outcome of her life for her, found herself curious to see how things would unfold.
Considering how she and Matt had left things the other day, angry and underpinned with the devastation of Laura’s diagnosis, she’d half expected him to be on the principal’s narrow-minded, belittling side. But he’d marched right in and taken over, embracing Whitney’s fight as if it were his own, finding the good in it.
Not once did it occur to him that Whitney needed to repair her reputation with the community and had simply found an efficient way to do it. Nobility—it was so ingrained into his own character he didn’t realize how unique an attribute it was. He saw it in everything and in everyone. Even her.
How easy it would be to fall in love with a guy like that. And how dangerous.
She saw the possibility of a future with this man, and it scared the crap out of her. No matter how hard she would try to hide her true nature, no matter how much she might bend over backward to fit his ideal, he’d eventually find out that there was nothing noble about her. And then she’d be right back where she started.
Stranded in a strange town. Brokenhearted. Alone.
“You’ll vouch for her, Mr. Fuller?” The principal’s voice broke Whitney’s thoughts.
“I’ll vouch for myself,” she said firmly and extended a hand. Matt’s heroism would be well-rewarded, she’d see to that herself, but she refused to let him bear the burden of responsibility for her actions. “I’m good at what I do, Harry, and my medical spa isn’t going anywhere. Your school will be lucky to have me.”
“I have to talk it over with my staff first,” he warned, his nod effectively ending the conversation. “We don’t much care for change here at Hamilton Elementary.”
“It’s the Pleasant Park curse.” Matt placed a hand on the small of her back and led her toward the hallway. She shivered when his pinky finger slipped under the waistband of her skirt in a tiny yet defiant gesture of possession. Mine. “If there’s one thing we fear more than change, it’s a beautiful woman like you carrying it in. Take it easy on us, Whitney. We’re trying.”
She turned to face him, aware that they were talking about much more than a kids’ school assembly and a town that refused to evolve. Dimples, rumpled hair, boyish grin—even with the taut, tired expression underlying it all, he was still capable of making her heart go pitter-patter like she was twenty again.
She pushed a lock of hair out of his face. “I’m not asking you to change, Matt. I’m just asking to be accepted for who I am.”
“And who are you, Whitney Vidra?”
Good question. “I’m the rebound girl. I’m the selfish plastic surgeon who plans to use a little kids’ assembly to boost her fledgling business. I’m the crazy lady who yells at men when their ex-wives have been diagnosed with cancer.” And most important, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I can’t be more.”
The school bell rang, signaling the end of lunch and a stampede of boots and coats making their way indoors. As if carried on a rising tide, she and Matt were pulled apart.
And that was okay. For the first time in days, Whitney felt like she and Matt were in, if not a good place again, at least somewhere familiar.
Also? Kendra was going to freak when she found out Whitney had just scored a seat in an elementary school career fair.
Chapter Thirteen
Whitney’s parents visited her every year like clockwo
rk, their trip aligning, not coincidentally, with her birthday. She’d once told them it was the worst present they could possibly give her, that any other time out of the year would have been better, that she’d even take time off from her regularly scheduled activities if they would leave her alone to celebrate in peace.
Whitney loved her birthday. She also loved her parents. She just didn’t love them at the same time.
“But it’s technically my birth day too,” her mother always protested, ignoring Whitney’s pleas and blazing forward with whatever plans she’d already laid out. “I’m the one who did all the work. Thirty-six hours of back labor, Whitney. You should be buying me presents.”
Nothing Whitney did or said could stop them. Never mind that she’d rather go dancing and eat a whole cake and spend way too much money on new shoes. Never mind that she had no desire to entertain them in the middle of the personal and professional quarantine area her life had recently become. The parental units were currently making plans to visit Pleasant Park.
God help them all.
“Well, if you’re planning my surprise party, you can go ahead and cancel,” she said glumly to John, who had come over to watch the Lifetime marathon on her DVR. “Mom and Dad couldn’t be talked out of visiting again this year.”
“Poor baby.” John dropped a giant bowl of cheesy popcorn onto Whitney’s lap. It was warm and smelled of processed food heaven—Kendra would have had a fit. “I happen to love your parents. Do you remember the year they took us all to Medieval Times and your dad was so drunk he volunteered to joust that huge knight?”
“That wasn’t because he was drunk,” Whitney pointed out with a sigh. “My parents are weird, and I don’t know why they refuse to get a hotel. I think they do it on purpose to spite me.”
“I think they do it on purpose because they love you.” John shoved his hand deep in the popcorn bowl until he reached the half-popped kernels. He had the disgusting habit of sucking off all the flavor and then spitting them out. “Also because the only way they ever learn anything about your life is by going through all your stuff while you’re at work.”
The Rebound Girl (Getting Physical) Page 16