Читать книгу Hometown Cinderella - Victoria Pade - Страница 10

“Help has arrived. Bearing coffee and doughnuts.”

Eden craned around a stack of boxes in her living room to see her sister Eve come through her front door bright and early the next morning. “I’m saved! I can’t find my coffeemaker.”

Eve went directly to the kitchen to deposit the cups and doughnut box. Once she had, she turned to Eden, who had followed her, and gave her a hug.

“I’m so glad you’re back!” Eve said just before she let go of Eden.

“Me, too. Even if these temperatures are a shock to my system after Hawaii,” Eden responded.

She took the coffee that was intended for her, curved both hands around the cup to warm them and, after a sip, sat on one of the kitchen chairs at the table.

“How was Billings?” she asked her sister as Eve sat across from her.

“It was fine. I’m sorry I couldn’t be here when you got in yesterday. I wanted to be. But the Reverend made an appointment to see his attorney and his headache doctor, and I was the only one of the grandchildren who could take him. And you know you can’t go to Billings and not have dinner with the folks and Uncle Carl and Aunt Sheila, and spend the night or everyone gets upset. So I was stuck. But I’m here now and I’m all yours for the whole day. On one condition,” Eve added.

They’d each settled on a doughnut and Eden chose to ignore the on one condition portion of what her sister had said as she took a bite of hers.

“How are the folks?” she asked after savoring the sweet fried cake.

“Same as always—good,” Eve answered. “They told me to say hi and for you to get to Billings to see them as soon as you can.”

“I will. And how is the Reverend?” They’d never called their grandfather—who had been Northbridge’s reverend until his retirement a few years earlier—anything else. He wasn’t a cuddly kind of man and had never invited anything but formality. From anyone, as far as Eden could tell.

“The Reverend’s the same, too. The man will die the way he’s lived—with a stick up his butt.”

Eden laughed at her sister’s bluntness. “Why was he seeing his lawyer and a doctor?”

“You know the Reverend—no explanations and I certainly wasn’t allowed in on either appointment. I was lucky to get a thanks for taking him everywhere he needed to go.”

“Do you think the renewed interest in the bank robbery and Celeste was why he wanted to talk to the lawyer?”

Eve shrugged elaborately as she sipped her coffee and chose a second doughnut.

“And maybe he’s stressed-out about it and that’s why he’s having his headaches again,” Eden continued to postulate.

“Hard to say. I can’t believe he isn’t stressed-out by having all this old stuff brought up again. You know that stiff-upper-lip-never-talk-about-it thing he does has to be hiding what he really feels. And having his wife run off with a bank robber? That had to have been the worst, the most humiliating thing that ever happened in his life. But of course he’s acting as if he’s above it all.” Eve took a bite of her doughnut and then said, “He says hello, too, by the way. And that he’s looking forward to seeing you again after so long.”

Eden wrinkled her nose. It wasn’t that she disliked her grandfather, but he wasn’t her favorite person, either. She certainly hadn’t been sorry that of all her family, he’d never visited her in Hawaii.

“Yeah, I think you might be in for it,” Eve said, interpreting Eden’s nose wrinkle. “The Reverend doesn’t seem particularly happy that you’ve agreed to do the age progression on Celeste. He said he doesn’t see the point in pursuing what’s long past and important to no one,” Eve finished, mimicking their grandfather’s stiff speech pattern.

“It’s important to a whole lot of authorities,” Eden said. “Important enough that if I didn’t do it they’d get someone else to.”

“I’m just warning you.” Eve brushed crumbs off her hands.

“I guess it’s good to go in knowing what I’ll have coming but it doesn’t make me want to see him more.”

Eve took a turn ignoring what Eden had said and changed the subject. “Now for my one condition as payment for my help. I want you to be my plus-one at Luke Walker’s wedding tonight.”

“Your love life is in sorry shape if I have to be your plus-one,” Eden said with a laugh.

“There’s no question that my love life is in sorry shape. But I want you to be my plus-one. I thought it would be a good opportunity for you to jump right into things again here. See some people, get reacquainted. The Walkers would have invited you themselves if they had known you would be here.”

“Why are they having a wedding on a Tuesday night?”

“The minister they wanted to perform the ceremony is an old friend of the bride and this was the only time he could get here.”

“But still, I have this whole house to put together,” Eden demurred.

“We’ll work all day and then stop, get pretty and go to the wedding. I’m not letting you hibernate. You’ve been doing that since Alika died and now you’re here and starting over and you need to do it right. Faith is coming in next week and I swear that I’m going to get you both going again if it’s the last thing I ever do.”

“Like a couple of stalled engines?” Eden asked, laughing again.

“Like a couple of cars that have been up on blocks. It was good that Faith spent all that time with you in Hawaii after her divorce but I know you both just used it to hide out from life together. Faith doesn’t know what to do with herself and you’ve thrown yourself into work since Alika died. But things have to change and now’s the time for it.”

“And you think that starts with my going to a wedding tonight.”

“It’s as good a place as any. So I RSVP’d for me and my plus-one and you’re it.”

Eve was right that Eden had thrown herself into work as a kind of protective shell to get through the last awful year and she had made up her mind to put some effort into coming out of that shell when she’d decided to move back to Northbridge. Eve was probably also right that tonight, at a wedding, was as good a place as any to start.

“Okay,” she said as if she were conceding reluctantly when, in fact, she wasn’t. “But we’d better get a whole lot of stuff done today to make up for losing tonight.”

“We will,” Eve assured. “I told you, I’m all yours.”

But neither of them was in enough of a hurry to leave the coffee they were still drinking.

Eve’s attention did seem to turn to the job at hand, though, when she glanced around at the mess. “The house is okay?” she said.

Eve had done Eden’s house hunting for her and served as her proxy at the closing.

“It’s just the way I remembered it. Unfortunately I never had occasion to find out where the circuit box is when I babysat here for the Dundees,” Eden said, going on to tell her sister about the blackout of the previous evening.

“And speaking of Cam Pratt,” Eden said when she’d finished with the entire story. “You didn’t tell me he lived next door.”

“Why? Does it matter?”

Eden couldn’t very well say it did when Eve didn’t know what had gone on with Cam years ago, so she said, “No, it just might have been nice to know. The Realtor led me to believe my neighbors would be people named Poppazitto.”

“They own the place but Cam lives there and is probably going to buy it.”

“So I’ve heard.”

Eve finished her coffee and took the cup to the trash bag in the corner. “Cam’s a good guy,” she said along the way. “He helped you last night, didn’t he?”

“Uh-huh,” Eden said noncommittally, thinking that he’d helped her out of a whole lot of rest the night before. She hadn’t been able to stop the image of him from haunting her each time she’d closed her eyes and for some reason it had made her too restless to fall asleep.

“I’ll bet he was surprised to see how you’d changed from when you used to tutor him,” Eve said, laughing at the thought.

“He didn’t seem to be.”

“How could he not have been? You’re so different you don’t look like the same person—that’s another reason I want you to go tonight, I want to be there when everyone sees you now.”

“Very few thirty-one-year-old people look exactly like they did when they were sixteen. Even Cam has changed,” Eden said, picturing him again in her mind and once more judging the changes to be improvements.

She didn’t have any idea what alerted her sister to her thoughts, but apparently something did because Eve’s eyebrows rose. “Do you have a little thing for Cam?”

“Don’t be silly. Of course I don’t,” Eden said, hoping it came out as even-toned as she’d wanted it to so she didn’t raise any more suspicions in her sister’s mind.

But whether it had or not, Eve was still not convinced. “Did you have a secret crush on him when you tutored him?” she said as if she’d just hit on a surprise of her own. “He was the big man on campus, as I recall. And you were the mousy kid who should have been a sophomore rather than a senior, who got to be all alone with him to teach him… What was it?”

“Physics,” Eden said, rolling her eyes at the fiction her sister was weaving. “And no, I absolutely didn’t have a crush on him, secret or not. I didn’t even like him.”

“Then maybe you just like him now,” Eve said, switching gears.

“Or maybe I was just saying I thought I was going to be living next door to people named Poppazitto and I’m not,” Eden said, taking her own cup to the trash.

But again Eve didn’t seem to be fooled because when Eden turned back to her, Eve was grinning. “Cam will be there tonight, you know? Luke Walker is marrying Cam’s half sister.”

“Cam has a half sister?” Eden asked, interested in this bit of news but also hoping it would distract Eve.

“That’s right, you don’t know the dirt, do you?” Eve said. “Well, Cam’s father had two daughters with the woman he left Cam’s mother for. One of them was a nightmare and she ended up dead when the meth lab she was living in exploded. But Karis—the other Pratt half sister—is nice and she came here with her sister’s baby, thinking Luke might be the baby’s father because he’d been married to her sister for a while. It turned out that he isn’t the baby’s father, but that’s how Luke and Karis got together and now Luke and Karis are adopting the baby and getting married tonight.”

If that story wasn’t a distraction, Eden didn’t know what was.

But it wasn’t distraction enough because Eve managed to go full circle and ended with, “So Cam will be there tonight and you’ll get to see him again.”

“I don’t care about seeing him,” Eden insisted, lying through her teeth when the truth was, she’d been looking out every window she passed since she got up this morning, hoping to catch sight of him. And failing. And being inexplicably disappointed each time.

“I don’t kno-oh,” Eve said, making two syllables and a song out of know. “I think there’s more going on here than you want to tell and I’ll bet it’s an old crush.”

Eden rolled her eyes again, shook her head and said, “If only you knew how wrong you are.”

At least about there being an old crush.

But a new crush?

Well, maybe not exactly a crush.

But as much as Eden hated to admit it even to herself, deep down there might be brewing the tiniest hint of something a little like that.

The wedding of Luke Walker and Karis Pratt was held at the Pratt family home. The large house had been built by the Pratt’s maternal great-grandfather, and was where the first seven Pratt siblings had all grown up.

The ceremony was short, sweet and traditional, with the bride beautiful in a white suit composed of a fitted jacket and skirt, and the groom handsome in a navy-blue suit of his own.

But not as handsome as Cam—that was what Eden thought as her gaze drifted to him from the moment he stepped up as one of the groomsmen. He and Luke’s brothers—who were also groomsmen—wore blue suits, as well. And despite the fact that the Walker men were indisputably a good-looking lot, to Eden, Cam had them all beat by a mile.

Which was not something she wanted to think.

But she just couldn’t help it. Any more than she could take her eyes off him from the wedding’s very beginning to the pronouncement of man and wife, and the kiss.

The kiss that made her recall her own thoughts about what it might have been like to kiss Cam the night before.

A recollection she shunned the minute she realized she was having it.

When the ceremony was over, congratulations were given during an informal receiving line. Then champagne began to flow, and an elaborate buffet of food and a three-tiered cake were unveiled.

After a full day of making headway putting her new house in order, Eden had showered and shampooed her hair, and slipped into a dress she’d worn to the last wedding she’d attended. It was a fairly simple, knee-length silk halter dress in an exotic print of black, brown and beige. The dress wasn’t tight but it did follow her curves nicely and bare her shoulders.

On her feet she wore her sassy and very pointy black satin mules with the jeweled flowers, golden rope cutouts and thin three-inch heels.

She’d scrunched her damp hair just enough to give it a little added fullness without frizz, added a taupe-colored eye shadow to her blush and mascara regimen, and as a finishing touch she’d slipped several hoop bracelets over one wrist.

All together she’d been pleased with how she’d looked and had left home feeling comfortable and confident.

That had been reinforced at the Pratt house where old friends and acquaintances marveled at the changes in her. But although she didn’t understand it, she discovered as the evening wore on that the approval—and maybe admiration—of only one person was what she craved. And that person didn’t come anywhere near her.

Maybe things with Cam weren’t as improved as they’d seemed the night before, she fretted as the post-receiving-line mingling got underway and Cam kept his distance. Or maybe she had read more into the night before than had actually existed. Maybe having granted her amnesty still didn’t mean that they were going to be friendly. Maybe the best that amnesty afforded her was a cease-fire and she should just be glad for that because that was really what was important in order for them to coexist in the small town.

But still, each time their glances met and he only nodded or raised a chin at her, she wished for more.

Why that should be the case, she didn’t know. And what more she wanted from him, she also didn’t know. She just wanted more.

She wanted it so much that it was alarming and it took the fun out of the occasion for her.

In fact, she was feeling so disheartened as she turned from the buffet table with a slice of wedding cake, that rather than joining any of the other guests who were chatting while they ate theirs, she went to the entryway and sat alone, one step up from the bottom.

And that was when Cam chose to seek her out. One bite into the cake and there he was, sitting next to her.

“Tired of talking?” he asked in greeting.

“No, not at all,” she answered with a tinge more eagerness than she would have liked. But she was worried that now that he’d finally approached her, he might leave her to solitude if she didn’t convince him otherwise. Then, as an excuse for exiling herself, she added, “Pointy shoes. I needed to sit for a minute.”

“Ah,” he said, in acknowledgment.

That left a lull Eden didn’t know how to fill because her mind suddenly went blank.

“So are the lights still on at your place?” he asked.

Okay, not a great conversation starter but it was more than she’d been able to come up with.

“They are, thanks,” she said. “And you’ll be happy to know that I found my flashlight today, too. Just in case.”

Ugh. She knew she wasn’t helping matters. But she just couldn’t get her brain to function.

Which was why all she could think to say next was, “Nice wedding.”

“I thought so, too.”

“Eve told me Karis is your half sister.”

“Mmm-hmm. There were two of them but the other one died.”

“That’s what Eve said. It looks as if Karis fits in, though. She seems like one of the family.”

“Yeah, we all think of her that way now. Even me,” he added in a bit of an aside that drew Eden’s glance from the bride in the distance to Cam.

“Even you?”

“I wasn’t too sure about Karis when she first showed up. Her sister had come around before that and Lea was trouble. Plus I guess I learned not to be too trusting working in Detroit. But Karis won me over.”

“Detroit?” Eden said, pleased to have something to build on. “Don’t tell me you put a branch of your family’s dry cleaning business there.”