Читать книгу Consequences - Margot Dalton - Страница 10

AS USUAL, Monday morning was filled with a myriad of chores, all the daily administrative duties associated with running a good-size school. Still, Lucia was grateful for the busywork that kept her mind off her problems.

But by eleven o’clock, she could delay no longer.

With a touch of uneasiness and some other vague, distressing emotions that she was afraid to examine too closely, Lucia picked up the telephone to dial the number on Jim Whitley’s application form.

The phone rang incessantly at the other end, and Lucia frowned and tapped her fingers on the desktop as she waited.

At last she hung up and sat gazing at a framed diploma on the opposite wall, trying to picture the guest house on the McKinney ranch property. Lucia hadn’t seen the place for years, but recalled it as a rustic, lodge-style building, a big single room with fireplace and attached bath.

The guest house was pleasant and cozy, but there wasn’t much reason for a young man to be sitting there alone on a warm autumn morning.

After a brief hesitation, she looked up another number and dialed the main house at J.T. McKinney’s ranch. This time the phone was answered promptly by a warm female voice that brimmed with laughter.

“McKinney ranch, Lettie Mae speaking.”

“Hi, Lettie Mae. It’s Lucia Osborne calling. How are you this morning?”

“Well, I’m right as rain, Miss Lucia,” the cook said. “But I sure hope I’m not fixin’ to be called down to the principal’s office.”

Lucia laughed, picturing Lettie Mae’s silver hair, her quick smile and rich brown skin.

Lettie Mae Reese was one of the most beloved people at the Double C ranch, where she had been in residence for more than forty years. She also wielded a good deal of quiet, intelligent power behind the scenes, and provided motherly warmth and guidance to all three of J.T.’s grown children—Cal, Tyler and their sister, Lynn.

“As far as I know,” Lucia said, “your behavior has been exemplary, Lettie Mae. I was just wondering if you could tell me where I might get hold of James Whitley this morning. I understand he’s staying at the ranch.”

“He sure is, and he’s right here underfoot, trying to steal the recipe for my Double C chili. Come here, Jimmy,” the cook added, her voice suddenly distant as she moved away from the telephone. “It’s for you. Now stop messing with my saucepans, you young criminal. Git out!”

Lucia heard the sound of a slap, followed by gales of laughter. It sounded like a happy time in the big ranch kitchen, and she smiled wistfully.

But when a cheerful male voice filled the telephone receiver, all her tension returned.

“Mr. Whitley?” she said.

“I thought I told you to call me Jim. How are you this beautiful morning, Lucia?”

His voice was warm and somehow intimate, as if they were longtime friends and he genuinely cared about her welfare.

“I’m well, thank you,” Lucia said, wondering how the man had such an ability to unnerve her. “I had no idea you were interested in culinary pursuits.”

“Culinary pursuits,” he echoed, his voice teasing. “Is that what I’m interested in?”

“Well, you’re apparently hanging around in the kitchen on a Monday morning, bothering the cook. I’m not sure how else to describe it.”

“Hell, I just want to get hold of that secret recipe for Lettie Mae’s chili.”

“Why?” Lucia asked.

“If I could ever steal her recipe, I’d open a trendy restaurant in Austin, live off the profits and never have to teach school again.”

“From what I know of the restaurant business,” Lucia said, “I think it might be even more stressful than teaching.”

“But much less confining. With a good staff and Lettie Mae’s chili, I’d be free to roam all over the country and go to as many rodeos as I wanted. Hey, Lettie Mae,” he called, “you want to come and manage my restaurant? We’ll both get rich.”

Lucia heard a derisive snort in the background.

“A woman would have to be crazy to get tied up with you, Jim Whitley,” she heard Lettie Mae say firmly. “For any reason.”

“Now, I’m real hurt by that.” Jim returned to the phone, his voice full of amusement. “Lucia, don’t you think she’s being pretty harsh, turning down a legitimate business offer without even thinking it over?”

“I think Lettie Mae’s a very sensible woman,” Lucia said, refusing to be drawn into the fun. “And speaking of legitimate offers, I would like to discuss your job application.”

“Okay. When do you want me to start?”

“Why do you constantly assume I’m planning to hire you?” she asked, annoyed again by his brash, irrepressible manner.

“Because you’ve taken the trouble to track me all the way to Lettie Mae’s kitchen.” He lowered his voice. “Hey, Lucia, I think she’s sneaking dill into that chili. Did you ever hear of such a thing?”

“Look, Mr. Whitley—”

“Call me Jim.”

Lucia sighed. “Regarding this job, it seems I have no option. As you pointed out, we need a teacher right away. And this is quite a large and difficult class.”

“I can handle them,” he said with that placid, masculine arrogance that set her teeth on edge. “So, do you want me to start tomorrow? June said I could move my things in today.”

Lucia felt a wave of alarm, picturing this man simultaneously invading both her school and her home.

By tomorrow night there would be no sanctuary from him, anywhere…

“Lucia?” he asked.

“All right,” she said in defeat. “The school board’s approved your application, so I suppose you can start tomorrow morning. We can also discuss the details of your salary for this month, since you’ll only be working for part of the final week.”

“Sounds good to me.”

“If you could spare some time this afternoon,” Lucia went on, “I’ve called a meeting for three o’clock. I’d like you to be there so you can meet the rest of the staff and get caught up on certain issues facing our school.”

“Three o’clock,” he said. “That sounds fine. I can haul a load of my stuff over to June’s after lunch, then stop in at the school.”

“Thank you,” Lucia said. “I’ll have a class list ready for you. Goodbye, Mr. Whitley.”

“If you don’t start calling me Jim, I’ll find a job in another school.”

“Now, Jimmy,” Lettie Mae called from the background, “you quit teasing Miss Lucia. That poor girl has to deal with impudent puppies all day long.”

Jim laughed, a warm masculine sound. “Don’t worry, Lettie Mae. I intend to be real nice to this lady,” he said with a seriousness that made Lucia’s cheeks turn warm.

“I’ll see you at three o’clock in the staff lounge,” she said, and hung up quickly before he could say anything else.

JIM ENTERED the school in the afternoon, dodging noisy swarms of children who hurried past him, clearly excited at this early release from classes.

He strolled through the hallways to the teachers’ lounge, enjoying the unique vibrancy of a school housing young adolescents.

There was something about a middle school that always made him happy. He liked the raw vigor of the artwork on the walls, the sense of optimism and innocence, the sheer joy of children.

Teachers were already gathering in the lounge, getting themselves cups of coffee and cans of soda, chatting about the day. Jim nodded at a few people he knew, then settled next to Willard Kilmer, who was seated quietly in a corner, reading a physics textbook.

“Hi, Will.” Jim extended his booted feet comfortably. “What’s new with you?”

Willard looked up, beaming with warmth behind the thick glasses. “Hello, Jim. I hear you’re planning to take on the gang of seventh-graders.”

“You bet.” Jim bared his teeth. “I’ll eat ’em for breakfast.”

“When do you start?” Willard asked.

“Tomorrow morning. No sense wasting time, right? I need the work, and Lucia needs the help, so I might as well get myself in harness.”

Jim noticed that Willard Kilmer looked a little startled at this casual reference to the school principal.

“What’s that you’re reading, Will?” he asked, nodding at the textbook.

“It’s the new physics.” Willard’s thin face lighted with enthusiasm again. “I’m studying the principles of particle analysis. Did you know that in the world of the infinitely small, our universal laws of physics no longer apply?”

Jim chuckled and patted the other man’s shoulder. “You’re a good man, Will. It’s going to be a lot of fun working with you.”

Willard flushed with pleasure and was on the verge of responding when Lucia entered the room and moved toward a desk at one end.

Even viewed casually from this distance, the woman was so beautiful that Jim could only watch her in stunned silence.

Her body was tall and graceful, with an understated grace that made the other women in the room seem clumsy and overdressed by comparison. Everything about her, from the cap of silvery blond hair to the fine leather shoes on her feet, spoke of breeding, elegance and a cool, unapproachable personality.

But again Jim sensed that breathtaking undercurrent of emotion. There was such promise in the rich curve of her mouth, a flicker of banked fires in those level blue eyes.

It would take a hell of a man to win this woman and awaken her passion, Jim thought. But if she ever trusted her lover enough to give herself fully, he suspected she could be a tiger in bed.

With shattering vividness, he had a mental image of that slim body in his arms, warm and naked, twined around him while her soft mouth devoured him, and her silvery hair fell across his skin…

All at once he was so passionately aroused that he felt weak and shaky.

Pitiful, he thought ruefully. As bad as some high-school kid, having erotic fantasies about the teacher.

She was seated now, speaking his name aloud, and he forced himself to smile and nod casually as the other teachers turned to look at him.

“As of tomorrow morning, Mr. Whitley will be taking over the vacant seventh-grade position,” Lucia said formally, shuffling papers on the desktop. “Jim, we’re very happy to have you join us at Crystal Creek Middle School.”

“Well, I’m happy to be here.” Putting aside his lustful thoughts, Jim shifted awkwardly in the chair and addressed the circle of teachers, hoping his voice wouldn’t betray him. “Howdy, folks. I already know most of you, and those who are new, I hope we’ll get to be friends soon enough.”

“You’ll be sorry, Jimmy,” an older woman said darkly. “That’s one tough class you’re taking on. Horrible little delinquents, every one of them. I wouldn’t want to tackle them.”

Jim grinned at the speaker, Betty Rickart, who’d been at this school for almost as long as Lettie Mae had cooked at the Double C.

“Come on, Betty,” he said to the assistant principal. “There’s not a kid in Texas you couldn’t handle. Back in fifth grade, you had me so scared I couldn’t talk for a year.”

This drew a general burst of laughter from the assembled staff, but Betty frowned and shook her curly gray head.

“Kids are different these days,” she said gloomily. “They used to have some respect. These kids just ignore us and do what they want.”

“Discipline is a real challenge nowadays,” Lucia said at the front of the room. “But Jim assures me he can handle our seventh-graders.”

“If he can, we’ll all bow at his feet.” This was from Jilly Phipps, an attractive young redhead who taught sixth grade. She gave Jim a meaningful smile that he returned with startled warmth.

Miss Phipps looked as if she might enjoy bowing at a man’s feet. The image was momentarily diverting. But then his mind filled with tantalizing images of Lucia’s silky fragrance. He was fascinated by her face, the pale curve of her cheek and the delicacy of those eyebrows against her fair skin.

“I’ve called this meeting,” she said quietly, “because we have a problem at our school, and I’m sure you’re all aware of it.”

“We’ve got a problem all right,” Betty said grimly. “And her name is Gloria Wall.”

“What’s going on?” Willard asked, looking bewildered. He avoided gossip, and was usually the last to know what was happening in his community.

“The school board wants to close our school and throw us all out of work,” Betty told him. “They’re taking it to plebiscite in the spring.”

Willard gaped, looking distressed. “But…I don’t know what you’re talking about. Where would the students go?”

“To Holly Grove,” one of the teachers told him. “On buses.”

“Hey, Willard, maybe you can get a job driving one of the school buses.” Jilly chuckled, then looked around to see if others appreciated the joke. Jim noted that nobody shared her amusement.

“I don’t believe it,” Willard argued with uncharacteristic stubbornness, though he still looked stricken. “It’s just crazy. Why would they do such a thing?”

“I heard it’s Gloria’s personal vendetta,” Betty said. “For some reason, she wants the whole middle school gone. And she’s the one who’s got the board all stirred up.”

“I have a cousin on the school board,” Clyde Tuttle said from the doorway, where he leaned against the wall holding a can of soda. “Sometimes she tells me a bit of what’s going on at their meetings.”

Tuttle was the gym teacher and basketball coach, dressed casually in navy blue sweatpants and a school T-shirt, with a whistle hanging around his neck. Clyde had been a few grades behind Jim when they were in school. An easygoing, good-hearted athlete with a big circle of friends.

Jim grinned at the younger man. “Hey, this is great news,” he told the assembled staff. “Clyde’s got an agent in place. A spy behind enemy lines.”

Despite the tension in the room, this drew another ripple of laughter, and an answering chuckle from the gym teacher.

“Damn right,” Clyde told his colleagues smugly. “And it’s not cheap, either. I have to buy the woman a steak dinner and at least three beers before I can get her to talk.”

“So what’s your cousin telling you, Clyde?” Jilly Phipps asked.

Clyde shrugged and toyed with the whistle on its black nylon cord. “The school board knows the whole idea won’t be an easy sell in this town, even if moving the school means lower taxes for everybody. So the board’s going to war. They’ve got themselves a plan.”

“A plan?” Lucia asked from the front of the room. “What kind of plan?”

“They’re going to start watching this school real close,” Clyde said.

“What for?” somebody asked.

Clyde shrugged and took a long gulp from the soda can. “Looking for any signs of mismanagement, wasted money, discipline problems, anything they can use to stir up public feeling against us.”

Jim was watching Lucia as Clyde spoke, and for a moment he detected a fleeting expression on her face. It was a look of stark fear.

Intrigued, he studied the beautiful blond principal more closely. She looked almost as if she had some kind of guilty secret, and the threat of this kind of close scrutiny terrified her.

But as he watched, Lucia got herself under control. When she spoke, her voice was as cool as ever, her expression remote and watchful.

“Does your cousin have anything else to say about this plan, Clyde?”

“Just that the board’s also been planning a series of surprise visits to the school,” Clyde said. “Different members will be dropping by here without warning, and strolling around to look in on our classrooms while we’re working.”

“Oh, for goodness’ sake!” Betty Rickart said indignantly. “Now, why would they want to do something like that?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” Lucia said, her cheeks coloring briefly. “They want to see if they can catch us making mistakes. You all know how gossip travels in this town. If they can convince people we’re not doing a good job, or that some of us can’t handle our students, they’ll have no problem getting enough votes against us when they hold their plebiscite.”

Jim glanced in sympathy at the circle of worried faces around the room. If Gloria Wall succeeded in her attempt to close the school, a lot of these people would be thrown out of work and forced to leave the town where some of them had lived all their lives.

“Well, folks, we have nothing to worry about,” Clyde said heartily from the doorway. “We’re all good teachers, so I reckon none of the board members will find anything wrong when they drop in on our classrooms. Will they?”

“I certainly hope they won’t,” Lucia said from her seat at the front of the room.

As she spoke, she gave Jim a glance of such pointed significance that he was startled again, and a little wary. Her words had been for everybody, but it was almost as if she’d issued a specific warning to him alone, letting him know he was on probation and she expected him to toe the line.

He met her eyes steadily. After a brief moment of tension, she was the first to look away, down at the notes on her desk. For the remainder of the meeting, she didn’t glance at him again.

IN THE EARLY EVENING, Lucia sat upstairs on the cushioned dormer seat in her living room, gazing down at the shady backyard.

June was baby-sitting for her niece, Sally Carlyle, who went bowling on Tuesday evenings. The landlady sat on a bench beside her garden, with a length of blue knitting in her lap, while Sally’s two children played on the grass nearby.

The older boy was almost three, a sturdy red-cheeked cherub who ran around shouting and chasing after a ball with Duke, June’s old spaniel. A fat baby sat on a blanket gnawing the head of a yellow rubber duck and staring at the dog with round, solemn eyes.

While Lucia watched, June leaned over casually and drew the baby onto her lap, cuddled him for a moment and reached inside his plaid overalls to check the diaper. Then she kissed him and placed him back on the blanket where he resumed his contemplation of his brother and the big dog. The much-chewed duck was still gripped in his chubby hand, but for the moment he seemed to have forgotten it.

Lucia touched the waistband of her khaki shorts and felt a warm, melting trickle of love.

“Hello,” she whispered. “Are you really in there? And are you a boy or girl?”

Outside, the setting sun glimmered through the branches of the oak tree as if it had caught and tangled among the leaves. Golden fingers of light caressed June’s hair and the bright curls of the two children.

In a stone birdbath near the lilac hedge, a robin perched at the edge of the bowl. He preened and ruffled his feathers daintily, then bent to dip a wing in the brimming water. The older boy stopped running to gaze at the bird, his thumb jammed thoughtfully in his mouth.

This was all like some kind of waking dream, Lucia thought, watching the two children.

She couldn’t possibly be having a baby. Not now, when the school board was planning to launch its scrutiny of the school, and so many people depended on her for their jobs. And all because of a fleeting encounter with a virtual stranger who meant nothing at all to her.…

Maybe the test had been wrong, and none of it would happen after all.

But in spite of the wishful thinking, Lucia knew that her pregnancy was real. This baby existed. In fact, though infinitely tiny, it was every bit as much a reality as that fat little fellow down on the blanket in his plaid overalls, gnawing on a plastic duck.

And Lucia already loved her baby more passionately than she’d ever loved another person in all her life.

“We’ll get through this,” she whispered to the unseen presence within her. “I still don’t know how it’s all going to work, darling, but somehow we’ll manage.”

Lucia glanced out the window again, stroking her abdomen gently.

“Maybe if everything else is going just perfectly, and they can’t find a single thing wrong at our school except that the principal happens to be pregnant and there’s no father in sight—”

She stopped abruptly, tensing as Jim Whitley came through the back gate with his dog, strolled up the path and paused to say something to June, who set her knitting aside to greet the new tenant.

He wore a short-sleeved cotton shirt and faded denim shorts. Even from this distance, Lucia could see how the thick dusting of hair on his powerful legs glistened warmly in the dying light. His bare arms looked brawny and muscular under the fabric of the shirt.

He’d just moved into the house, but already his presence seemed to dominate everything. Though Lucia hadn’t spoken more than a few words to the man since he’d arrived, she was painfully conscious of Jim Whitley in the rooms just below hers. Even worse, she was dismayed by a warm tingle of excitement when she pictured him listening to her footsteps, the sound of her shower, the creaking of the wooden floorboards as she got into bed.

Nothing separated them, actually, but some old timbers and a few feet of space. The man’s personality was so powerful that Lucia felt his nearness in every cell of her body.

In the yard below, he gave June a questioning glance and said something. At her reply he crossed the grass and bent to lift the baby in his arms, holding him close.

June laughed as the tall man kissed the little boy’s cheek, then held him aloft and nuzzled his fat stomach while the baby kicked and squealed with delight.

Jim walked back to the bench, still carrying the baby, and settled next to June with the child in his arms and his long tanned legs extended on the path. The two adults talked casually as Jim cuddled the little boy and watched the older child run and play with the two spaniels.

Something about the scene below brought a painful lump to Lucia’s throat.

The four of them looked so peaceful and surreal in the fading light, like a misty image from some sweet, half-forgotten dream. And Jim’s arms were strong and brown against the baby’s fragile bare shoulders. He looked powerful and protective, as if nothing bad could happen to a child as long as this man was nearby. For no reason at all, Lucia found herself crying. She wasn’t even aware of the tears until she felt them running down her cheeks.

To her alarm, she saw Jim glance up briefly at the window where she sat. There was no way he could see her behind the heavy chintz drapes, but still she drew back hastily and huddled against the wall, dashing a hand across her streaming eyes.

When she peered out again, she saw Jim as he stood up to kiss the baby again, hand him to June and come toward the back door. He paused by the rose trellis and called something to the landlady, then vanished inside the house, leaving his dog out in the yard.

Lucia turned from the window and looked around at her snug little apartment, thinking she should get up and tackle some of the paperwork in her briefcase. But she couldn’t seem to stop crying. Maybe pregnancy had this effect on a woman, unsettled her emotions for no reason.

Soon she would need to visit a doctor and make sure she was eating properly, taking vitamins and doing all the right things. But she would have to go to Austin and she’d have to find a doctor who wouldn’t ask too many questions.

Lucia rubbed at her eyes again and got up from the window seat, then stiffened in panic when she heard footsteps clattering up the last flight of steps to the third floor. Before she could do anything to prevent it, the door opened and Jim Whitley’s curly auburn head appeared.