Читать книгу Somewhere Between Luck and Trust - Emilie Richards - Страница 14

Chapter Eight

GEORGIA KNEW SHE was in trouble when she spent more than five minutes trying to decide what to wear for dinner with Lucas Ramsey.

The rain was a factor, of course. With it had come a blast of Arctic cold, so she wanted to stay warm and dry. Pizza meant jeans or khakis and a sweater, but her favorite sweater needed to be washed. When she realized she was dithering, she settled on a creamy Aran knit she’d bought on a trip to Ireland and brown corduroy pants. But even while she pretended this was all about the weather, a no-nonsense voice in her head pointed out that she had nylon athletic pants and a windbreaker that would do the job perfectly.

The truth was she was hoping to make a better impression than that.

Her own tiny house was in Woodfin on the road between Asheville and Weaverville, although both towns were part of the greater metropolitan Asheville area. Woodfin was a town of about three thousand, and Weaverville was somewhat smaller and more picturesque, although she usually traveled into Asheville proper for shopping and dinner, because that was where Sam and Edna lived.

She parked on the street just down from the restaurant and grabbed her umbrella. She hadn’t eaten at Blue Mountain Pizza, but she knew the place by reputation. Usually it would be crowded, but on a Monday night in the pouring rain, she suspected they would have their pick of tables.

Lucas was waiting at a corner table and stood when she entered. The room was friendly, with lemony walls and cozy dark woodwork and bar. Although it probably wasn’t as busy as usual, it was still crowded, with the tables pushed close and people laughing. Best of all, it smelled heavenly. Garlic, oregano, freshly baked pizza crust. Fatigue melted away and anticipation ignited.

She took the chair across from Lucas and smiled, glad the place was noisy and casual. “The perfect antidote for a long day and too much rain.”

“I’m looking forward to warmer weather and outdoor seating. They have live music tonight, but we’re a little early.”

She removed her raincoat and settled in, stilling her hands when she realized they were fluttering along a coat sleeve like a girl on her first date. “I don’t live far away. I just never seem to make it up here.”

Their server, a young man in a black T-shirt sporting the restaurant logo, came to take their drink order. Lucas ordered a local beer, and Georgia asked the server to make it two. After consultation Lucas added an order of garlic knots as a starter, a delicacy for which the place was well-known.

She was glad she didn’t have to wait until the pizza arrived. She’d missed lunch entirely.

“So you’re new to the area?” she asked after the server left.

“I’ve been here about two months. I live over the hill from the Nedley farm. My house belongs to a friend, who uses it in the summers. He’s out of the country for a year, so he’s renting it to me.”

“What brought you here?”

Their beer arrived before he could answer, along with a promise that the garlic knots would be out soon. Lucas held up his mug in toast, and she tapped hers against it.

“I’m a journalist,” he said. “In Atlanta, although these days I’m just a guest columnist. Newspapers are hanging on by their fingernails.”

“So your job was...compressed?”

He smiled at her word choice. “It was compressed, but that was my choice. I’m also a novelist. I write a mystery series about an Atlanta cop. The books have done surprisingly well, and I decided that’s what I wanted to concentrate on.”

She was embarrassed. “I’m sorry, I don’t read mysteries, so your name’s not familiar.”

“What do you read?”

“Nonfiction mostly. Biography, memoir, psychology.”

“And education, I bet.”

“Guilty as charged.”

“Don’t worry. Police procedurals aren’t everybody’s cup of tea. But I started out in the Metro section and spent so much time in police stations trying to get the real scoop that finally my main character, a detective named Zenzo Brown, just came to life and started making demands.”

“That must be pretty amazing. Like having an imaginary friend. My daughter had one of those for years, until third grade. Then Marigold just up and left. I think I missed her more than Samantha did.”

“So you have kids?”

“Just one, and she’s thirty. But I have a fabulous granddaughter.”

“And no husband.”

Lucas had changed into jeans and a sage-green sweatshirt over the shirt he had worn earlier, and if anything, he looked even more attractive. They had to lean forward to be heard, and their noses almost touched. She tried to remember the last time she’d sat this close to a man who wasn’t on the BCAS faculty.

She tried to remember the last time she had wanted to.

“I had one,” she said. “He died a long time ago. In Beirut, when the marine barracks were bombed. I haven’t wanted another.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Me, too. He was a good man, and he was cheated out of watching his daughter grow up.”

“I was married, too. She didn’t want kids, but she didn’t tell me until we were a couple of years into it. I come from this strange Scots-Italian family, and all my siblings have at least three. I thought I’d have the same. The marriage dissolved somewhere between ‘I never want to have children’ and ‘I’ve met somebody who can give me a better life.’” He gave a wry smile. “I was easily fooled back then, but three years of marriage and a decade and a half in the newspaper biz took care of that.”

She supposed the intimacy that had developed so quickly between them wasn’t too surprising. It was some odd kind of shorthand, like a more mature form of speed dating. Get past the preliminaries quickly, and move on...to what?

“Why are we telling each other all this?” she asked, since the question intrigued her and all her filters seemed to have disappeared. “We’re supposed to be talking about Dawson.”

“We’ll get to him.”

The garlic knots arrived with marinara dipping sauce. They conferred for a moment and, before their server disappeared again, ordered a large Carolina Dreamin’ pizza to share.

“I need to be honest with you. I actually know more about you than I’ve let on,” Lucas said. “Before I approached you about Dawson, I wanted to know who I was dealing with. So I looked you up online. I can’t seem to help myself. It’s my journalist genes.”

She set down her mug, not all that surprised, but definitely disappointed. “Please tell me my life has nothing to do with a story you’re planning.”

He looked sympathetic. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”

She decided he was being honest and hoped her instincts were good.

“The Sweatshirt Baby,” he said.

Georgia thought of the article she’d pulled out of the envelope a little more than an hour ago. “It’s surprising how that still comes back to haunt me.”

“I imagine you got used to it somewhere along the way.”

“No, there was actually a long period of time when nobody pieced together the sad story of my birth with the one about a young widow working on her doctorate in education.”

“Then you were made the headmistress of the most exclusive private school in the Asheville area, and somebody dug a little and made the connection.”

“And it came up again when I got this new position.”

His gaze was warm and locked with hers. “I didn’t mean to invade your privacy.”

“I have no privacy. Not since the morning a woman gave birth unexpectedly and left a premature baby in a hospital sink wrapped in a University of Georgia sweatshirt. There was very little chance I’d be left alone after that.”

He didn’t offer sympathy, for which she was grateful. “It was a lot more than I expected to find. All I wanted was some hint on how to approach you. Your educational philosophy, maybe.”

That struck her as funny, and she gave a low laugh, which broke the tension. “I’m sorry my history is so overwhelming.”

“I’m sorry it is, too,” he said with feeling. “But you’re the model for every kid who’s facing his own problems and doesn’t believe he’ll ever be able to make a success out of his life.”

“I gather the ‘he’ is meant to be Dawson?”

“Don’t you have a whole school full of Dawsons?”

“Well, not all of them are quite so recalcitrant.”

He sat back, as if the hard part was over. She appreciated that he’d been honest with her, and thought how unusual that was. He could so easily have pretended not to know anything.

“The story’s pretty old,” she said. “Exactly what did you ferret out?”

“What you just said. That you were left in a sink in a sweatshirt and nearly died of exposure before somebody heard you crying and found you.”

“Forever after to be known as the Sweatshirt Baby. That’s obviously where the name Georgia comes from, too. The shirt. You got that, right?”

He smiled as if he was relieved she wasn’t angry. “I did. Someone had a sense of humor.”

“I think they just called me Georgia at first as a kind of shorthand, and the name stuck. Later somebody put it on my birth certificate. It was the only legacy my mother bequeathed me. Other than leaving me in the sink instead of on the floor of a toilet stall, and wrapping me tightly in the sweatshirt, which probably saved my life.”

“They never found her?”

“Never did. It was a cause célèbre for a long time. Newspapers, magazines, cops, psychics. Everybody looked, but nobody was successful.”

She thought about the articles on her desk and the charm bracelet. “Nobody cares anymore,” she said, without the level of certainty she would have managed before that discovery. “Now when they trot out the story, it’s to show what a person can survive if she has the fortitude.”

“What did you survive?”

“Well, first I survived being more than two months premature and abandoned. Then I survived surgery to repair a faulty valve in my heart. By then most of the offers of adoption had waned, and the one that didn’t was from a couple with no experience raising children, much less a child who’d spent the first year and a half of her life connected to monitors and machines. They returned me to the state when I turned five.”

“That’s hard to fathom.”

Georgia couldn’t imagine it, either, but her fuzzy memories of those years weren’t happy, and now she thought she’d been lucky her adoptive parents had given up trying to raise her.

“After that I went to foster care and treatment programs because nobody had done me any favors emotionally. At eleven the state placed me on a farm with an experienced foster mom with four special-needs kids. Arabella was seventy-two, if you can believe that, and still full of energy. She sat me down and told me to make a list of all the things I planned to do to make her life miserable, so she could tell me why none of them would work. Then she said the only way I’d leave that placement was if she left first in a coffin, and she wanted me to know she would be watching her back.”

“Some woman.”

“Arabella saved my life. She had a gift for giving comfort and attention when it was needed and ignoring all of us when that was needed, too. She kept me so busy that I didn’t have the energy to run away or cause trouble. Eventually, for the first time, I felt safe. No one tried to smother me with pity or love. Arabella and the other children took whatever affection I could manage, and they didn’t expect anything more. From the moment I arrived, I was treated like I belonged there. Before long I did.”

Georgia realized how much she’d just said. She also realized that Lucas had wanted to hear it all, that her life actually interested him.

He affirmed her theory. “I’m betting that Arabella was the driving force behind your desire to help children with problems. What a role model.”

“Let’s talk about you. Are you up here because Asheville’s a good place to work on another novel?”

“But my life is so boring in comparison.”

“Let me be the judge.”

He gave a slight shrug and reached for another garlic knot. “The beginnings of another novel, yes, but something more interesting, too. A cookbook.”

“You cook, too? You write, you research, you cook?”

“My cop cooks. Zenzo’s a gourmet chef. When he’s not solving unspeakable crimes, he’s in the kitchen. My publisher got so many requests for Zenzo’s recipes they asked me to produce them.”

“You must cook, too. Surely they aren’t asking somebody who can’t boil an egg to write a gourmet cookbook. They would use a ghost writer.”

“I cook. Actually I cook well. I’m looking forward to cooking for you.”

Deep inside she could feel how quickly everything was proceeding. Yet as cautious as she normally was, she had no desire to put on the brakes. She was old enough, confident enough, to take a chance now. There had been men in her life since Samuel, but the relationships had, for the most part, been superficial. One, which had lasted nearly a year, had never reached the intimacy she felt tonight with Lucas. Not only was she entranced with the way one dimple creased his cheek and the way his hair swirled back from a slight widow’s peak, she was moved by the way they had simply slid into each other’s life stories. No fuss, no bother, no tension.

“I’ll look forward to your cooking,” she said. “But I won’t return that favor unless you’re a fan of grilled cheese and tomato soup.”

“Dawson,” he said, as if he was reminding both of them. “Let’s get him out of the way right now. I know you can’t talk about how he’s doing in school, but his mother’s talked to me. He’s ripping her heart to shreds. Nothing they do at home is making a difference. The thing is, I don’t think they’re doing the right things. They just clamp down harder and harder on him. His father only cares if he gets a diploma, then he wants him to work full-time on the farm.”

“Dawson has mentioned that,” she said, carefully.

“They lost their older son in Iraq two years ago. He wanted to be a farmer. He was suited for it, and he loved the place. He and his dad had all kinds of plans for the future. Dawson is somebody else entirely, but I don’t think his father sees that. He thinks Dawson’s being willful and hard work will straighten him out.”

“If only life were that easy.”

“I think Dawson has a superior IQ. He’s interested in a million things his father thinks of as affectations. The Nedleys love that boy. No mistake about it. They just don’t understand him.”

So far there was nothing Lucas had said that Georgia could disagree with. She had picked up on the tension, although she hadn’t known about the soldier brother.

“What are you proposing?” she asked.

“I’ve befriended him. I like this kid a lot, and he’s always glad to be at my place away from his father’s constant demands. But it would help me if I knew a little more about what’s happening at school and how I could encourage him to hang in there and finish strong. Is there any way we can work that out without breaching confidentiality?”

“I’ll call his mother. I assume she’s the more flexible of the two?”

“She’s torn between Dawson and his dad. But she doesn’t want to lose another son.”

“If I get her permission—and Dawson’s, too—we’ll find a way to work together.”

“Together. I like the sound of that.” The lone dimple deepened.

Despite a lifetime of caution, she was afraid that she liked it, too.