Eight
Which brought him to
the Woodbury Barnes and Noble. Of all the days to meet somebody
potentially cool and thoroughly hot.
Yeah, this day. Of all the days to think maybe picking up and
moving to a patch of the corn belt wasn’t insane. Yeah, this
day.
Now here she was, all
kinds of cute . . . and from the Cape, too!
It might be no coincidence. Perhaps fate has pushed us
together, into this modern-day watering hole. Perhaps fate is
working through a retail coffee chain to get the kind of scone
that doesn’t make this girl throw
up.
“Do you believe in
fate?” he asked her.
The hotness that was
Rachael Velvela sipped her Green Tea Frappuccino. “Next you’ll be
asking me my sign.”
He could feel his
face get warm as he flushed. “Yeah, not too lame and dated,
right?”
“It could be worse,”
she teased. “You could have asked me if I needed sexual
healing.”
Ohhhhh, I wish she hadn’t said that. Just what I need: a
five thirty P.M. boner.
He was surprised it
hadn’t happened earlier. Rachael had the most beautiful freckles he
had ever seen. Her hair was a rich dark brown. A color to make a sable tear out its own fur in
jealousy! Okay, so dark brown. Her skin was lightly tanned,
enough so it looked like she went out and about in the summertime
but didn’t obsessively lay out on beaches and frequent tanning
salons. She had over a dozen freckles sprayed across her nose and
cheeks, the kind that increased in summer and sort of hibernated
the rest of the time, and lovely dark eyes that tilted just a
little bit at the tips. Her eyes almost exactly matched her
hair.
She made her tank top
and cardigan and jeans look like wedding finery. He had lived for
several years with a woman who never bothered with makeup, and
could see Rachael didn’t, either. So it boggled the mind to wonder
how gorgeous she could be if she sat down and tried.
But! He would not be
distracted. Because a simple let’s-getacquainted question had
become much more important to him. “I’m serious: do you believe in
fate?”
“The jury’s not in
yet,” she said after a long moment. He had the impression she was
giving the question serious thought, really taking her time to come
up with the right answer, or what would be the right answer for
her. “A week ago I had no idea, none, that I’d move my entire life
to Minnesota.”
“Get out. Wow,
no idea?”
She shook her
head.
“Well, jeez, I hope
nobody got hurt or sick in your family . . . It’s none of my
business why, but—”
“No, no, that’s all
right.” Another Splenda-infused sip. “I’m sort of in the family
business. And when my cousin says go, we go . . . the whole
family’s dependant on us going to work when we’re supposed to, and
on doing a good job. So it might be inconvenient and arbitrary, but
it’s also important. After all,” she added, smiling, “I get access
to the company checking account. It wouldn’t be fair if I expected
all the perks and none of the work.”
He had bought a slice
of pound cake and a chocolate and banana smoothie (she had
insisted, nicely but firmly, on buying her own snack) but was too
excited to touch either one. “So you just picked up and relocated?
Just like that?”
“Exactly. Relocated.
Yes.”
“Have you ever been
away from your family before?”
“Not for more than a
few nights. Most of us—well, there are two kinds of families that
live on the Cape. The ones who have kids who can’t wait to leave
and never come back, and the ones who have kids who never leave.
Guess which ones we are?” She laughed and shook her head. “It’s
only now that I’m out here that I realize what a scared little
country mouse I’ve been. Complaining and wanting to scurry back to
my hole.” Rachael’s upper lip actually curled, like she was a fox
about to bite. It was cute and scary,
an interesting combo. “Pathetic. My cousin wouldn’t have believed
it to see me. But I didn’t expect . . . everything’s really
different.”
“Do you miss
them?”
“Oh . . . miss them?”
She blinked her big dark eyes at him, like a sexy Bambi. With
weirdly sharp canines—she obviously wasn’t a vamp, but she sure had
a cute overbite. “I haven’t really been gone long enough to . . .
well . . . I guess if I think about it . . . yes. I miss
them.”
Her smile widened . .
. and then she burst into the fiercest tears he’d ever
seen.